Her mother had been worried about the surgery all week, and Anna kept reassuring her that it was a simple procedure and she’d be all right, it was routine. “People have their hernias repaired at lunch,” Anna had said, “then they go back to work.” But by Wednesday night, the night before the morning of the surgery, her mother was in such a frenzy that she was having chest pains. Anna made her chamomile tea—something she always did when her mother was crazy—and reminded her of the correct way to breathe. “Breathe in through your nose for eight,” she said. “Let your belly rise. Then breathe out through your mouth for eight like you’re blowing out a candle.”
The chest pain did not subside.
At the hospital that night, the doctor did an X-ray and found out she had an aneurism in her heart. This was something Anna had never heard of: an aneurism in the heart. She thought she knew of everything that could happen to the human heart, it seemed most of it had happened already to her mother. She’d suffered a heart attack and had an angioplasty, had a stent put in, and when that didn’t work, a year later, she had bypass surgery. After that, there was the atrial fibrillation and the pacemaker. This is to say nothing of the congestive heart failure.
Her mother was not taking this news well. She was prone to hysteria, and Anna was trained—raised, really—to handle this. But now she was calm, subdued.
“I’m going to die,” her mother said.
“You’re not going to die.”
“I’m going to die,” she said again. “When you know, you know.”
“They’ll fix it. Look at you. Look at all you’ve been through. Just try to stay calm. We’ll get through this, too.”
But she was calm. It was Anna who was panicked, and tired. It was exhausting to always have to talk someone off a ledge.
The heart surgeon on call said that based on the size of the aneurism, they would need to operate right away; there was no time to wait. But this was the hospital in Utica where she’d had her angioplasty five years back. They’d almost killed her—had left her arteries in such a shattered state that she could find almost no one else to do the bypass surgery.
Anna knew she had to get her mother to Albany. They had the best cardiac surgeons in Upstate New York, it would be her best chance. The nurse helped her arrange for an ambulance to take them right away. The on-call doctor signed off, looking relieved. They said the team at Albany would be expecting them in just under two hours.
The ambulance driver was in his twenties, a few years older than Anna. He made her sit in front with him since they’d be taking the highway. He put the lights on but not the sirens. All along the Thruway the snow banks glowed red and white.
Anna could feel the driver’s eyes on her from time to time.
“So,” he said, finally. “Are you from around here?”
Anna cringed. “Utica,” she said.
“I’m from Clarks Mills,” he said. He moved his head to the barely audible sound of the Lionel Richie song coming from the speakers.
“Are you, like, in college?” His voice was deep. The voice of a giant.
“Just finished up.”
“Cool,” he said. “From?”
“NYU.”
“Wow. New York? Great city. Well, I’ve never been there. But, you know,” he said. He was silent for a moment, then he said, “That’s great for you, though. Getting out of here.”
People always said that. “Is this as fast as you can go?” Anna said. It was snowing hard and the salt trucks had not been out yet. She turned and saw her mother lying in the back. She might have been sleeping. It was hard to tell with the oxygen mask.
“Sorry,” the driver said. “Black ice tonight,” he said.
A minute later, he said, “So where do you hang out?”
“I still live in New York,” she said. “I’m just here this week.”
“Gotcha.”
A half hour later, he took exit twenty-three and Anna saw the sign for Albany Medical Center. “Sit tight,” he said. “This is the best place she can be.”
Anna looked over at him when he said this, and she was surprised to see that he was handsome. Dark hair and deep set eyes. “Everything’s going to be okay,” he said with a gentle smile. “You’ll see,” he said. He came around and opened her door.
Anna imagined herself collapsing into him. He was a tall man, strong; he was built for this. Sometimes she wished she’d stayed. Wished she’d married a man like him right out of high school, had his babies. If there had been a point to the rest of it—to leaving, to getting out—she could not remember what that was now.
In the hospital room, her mother said, “I knew it. All week I had this feeling something was very wrong. I thought it was the hernia surgery, but now I see—it was this.”
“Mom,” Anna said. “Get a hold of yourself. It’s going to be all right.” Her mother always had a bad feeling. When she and her sister were little, she would barely let them leave the house. “I should call Jane, let her know what’s going on,” Anna said.
“Why bother her in sunny California.”
“She’d want to know.”
“There’s nothing she can do,” her mother said. “It’s not like she can get on a plane and fly here in time for the surgery.”
They filed in one by one just like they did before all of her surgeries. First the nurses, then the anesthesiologists, then the surgeons. One of the nurses, a blonde woman in a braid, was familiar. Maybe she’d been there for the bypass surgery. They looked at the X-ray on the bright screen. Anna could make out the aneurism herself and it did, in fact, look like a balloon.
“Goodbye, my darling,” her mother said as they wheeled her away, her eyes as desperate as an infant’s.
“I’ll see you in a little while,” Anna said. She wanted to say more. She thought about the things that made her mother’s heart weaken so much that parts of it had thinned and swelled like a balloon. The doctors knew the short history—knew about the heart attacks, the bypass, the atrial fibrillation, the congestive heart failure. But there was a longer and slightly more complicated history of her heart that they didn’t know.
Her husband had other women, other kids. Then he died.
Then her mother died.
Her sister.
And her daughters grew up and moved away.
Life turned out to be a string of small disasters twisted together with a bunch of thankless work. So many things. It was hard to even catch your breath.
The doctor came into the room and sat down next to Anna.
“I have some bad news,” he said. “I’m very sorry to have to tell you this,” he said, looking Anna in the eye. A surge of adrenalin made her heart pound. This is where it happens, here in this waiting room. He said they were preparing to do the surgery, that they’d put her under anesthesia already, but the aneurism burst, and now there was too much damage to repair her heart.
She was in recovery.
“She’s going to wake up?” Anna asked, terrified. Her mother would want to know how it went. She’d ask if she was going to be okay.
“She might,” he said. “If she does, I’m sorry, but it’s just going to be a matter of minutes at this point.”
He walked Anna to the recovery room, and she sat in a chair next to her mother’s bed. What do you say to your mother when you know you’ll never get to talk to her again, when you know it’s the last time you’ll hear her voice? She thought of telling her how she’d been a good mother. She thought of thanking her for never leaving them when she could have, thanking her for staying. That was what it came down to in the end: those who stay, and those who don’t.
Her mother opened her eyes and looked around. “I’m alive,” she said. “Oh, Praise you, God,” she said. “Thank you, Jesus.” She was smiling.
Anna could see the relief on her face. Her mother wanted to live. She was still not ready to leave. In spite of all of it, she was still not ready to depart this world. This damaged and broken and fucked up world where all that you love eventually bursts into pieces.
“Yes, Mom,” Anna said. “You did great,” she said, smiling. She took her mother’s hand. “Your heart is perfect,” she said. “You’re going to be okay.”
Mary Jones is the author of the short story collection THE GOODBYE PROCESS (forthcoming from Zibby Books). Her writing has appeared in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, EPOCH, Alaska Quarterly Review, Columbia Journal, Southwest Review, Gay Mag, Epiphany, Brevity, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Bennington College and lives in Los Angeles.
Photo by Karolina Grabowska