The ice outside First Presbyterian was the hard, blue kind that hides in the shadows of the stone steps, and when my boots went out from under me, the crack in my left hip sounded like a dry cedar branch snapping under a boot. Lying there on the frozen concrete with the parish secretary standing over me holding a wool blanket that smelled like mothballs, my one clear thought through the hot spikes of pain was that the hospital would call my son David.
Four years of silence is a long time to keep your pride, but a broken hip has a way of clearing the slate. I figured he would have to come home now.
They wheeled me into the emergency bay at Genesis with the overhead lights sliding past in a greasy blur, and a young nurse named Kevin took my insurance card and my driver’s license. I gave him David’s name and the number I still knew by heart from the old rotary wall set in the kitchen on Maple Street.
Kevin went off to punch it into the computer terminal at the nursing station, and I lay there on the crinkly paper with my leg propped on a gray foam wedge, waiting to hear the familiar ringtone in my head.
When Kevin came back, he did not look like someone who had just reached an only son. He had a printed intake sheet rolled up halfway in his hand, and his mouth was set in a tight, awkward line.
“Your emergency contact,” Kevin said, tapping the paper with the blunt nail of his thumb. “She answered on the first ring. Said her name was Diane. Told me she was your daughter and she’d handle the discharge.”
I stared at him past the IV pole. “I don’t have a daughter. My son’s name is David.”
“Well, she knew your date of birth, Mrs. Gable,” Kevin said, his voice dropping into that careful, professional register they use when they are trying not to argue with someone on heavy painkillers. “And she said she’s got your power of attorney on file. Said she’d take everything from here.”
I lay there in that bed with two cracked bones in my pelvis and I felt something colder than the ice on the church steps. I felt watched.
Let me back up. After my knee surgery back in October, I couldn’t manage the stairs or the checkbook for a few weeks, so I signed up with a local care service that advertises on the bulletin board at the pharmacy.
A woman started coming Tuesdays and Fridays. Bright, chatty, always smelled faintly of peppermint, and she brought those cheap lemon cookies from Kroger in the red plastic tray. Her name was Sherry. She helped me balance the utility bills, drove me to the pharmacy for my water pills, and sat with me while I did the crossword puzzle in the Sunday paper.
I trusted her the way you trust anybody who brings you a cup of tea when you are scared of falling again.
I found out later, from Kevin’s supervisor and a social worker named Ruth Ann who pulled up a chair by my bed an hour later, that at my last clinic visit somebody had updated my chart. The electronic record had a new name and a new cell number punched in right over David’s details, and somebody had initialed the privacy waiver in the exact spot where a patient is supposed to sign.
The room went very quiet when Ruth Ann laid the printed history on my tray table. The handwriting on that hospital intake form looked just like the grocery lists Sherry used to leave on my counter with a yellow magnet. The looped e’s, the little cross on the t’s that drifted off to the right like a falling leaf. I didn’t need a handwriting expert. I had stared at those lists for six months while I waited for her to come back with my skim milk and my stamps.
Ruth Ann asked me, her voice soft like she was talking to a child in a dentist’s chair, if I had checked my bank balance lately.
“Sherry checks the statements for me,” I said, and my own voice sounded small and thin even to my own ears. “She helps me balance the ledger every month.”
Ruth Ann just looked at me. That look told me everything I didn’t want to know.
I asked her to bring me a phone. My hands were shaking so bad she had to hold the handset while she dialed David’s number for me. It rang and rang through the empty house on Maple Street, and every ring felt like another nail being driven into something I couldn’t fix. I was already rehearsing the message in my head, trying to sound like I wasn’t crying, trying to figure out how to squeeze four years of stubbornness and stupid pride into thirty seconds of voicemail.
He picked up on the very last ring. His voice sounded raw and tired, like he had been sleeping in his clothes.
“Mom?” he said, and the word hit me right in the chest. “I’ve been trying to reach you for two weeks. Some woman keeps answering your home phone and telling me you don’t want to talk to me. Where ARE you?”
Before I could get a single word out through the tightness in my throat, Ruth Ann’s own phone buzzed on the tray table between us. She looked down at the screen, and her whole face changed from professional pity to something cold and sharp.
She held the phone out toward me, her thumb hovering over the speaker button. “It’s the fraud unit at your local bank,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “They need to speak with you right now about three thousand-dollar withdrawals made since Tuesday.”
