Kaely’s War
A novel. One chapter a day.
FOUR “A hospital is an awful place for a sick person to be, Mama.”
Beverly slipped back into semi-consciousness. She had been dreaming about frosting cupcakes. The cupcakes were amazing. Moist with perfectly matched, rounded tops that rose two inches above the liner without spilling over. No one even questioned the mystery of the magic rising in the dream. The concern was over the frosting. It was the snow white kind that was stiff and sticky — something akin to taffy meets cotton candy. Every time Beverly tried to frost one of the dream cakes with the sticky goo, the amazingly statuesque cake wonder crumbled. As she circled back to a muted awareness of awakeness, Bev felt like she’d been trying to get one cupcake frosted all night long.
But she wasn’t in a kitchen with cupcakes. The beeps and swishes and smells penetrated her senses so quickly, she wondered how on earth her subconscious could have put her in a kitchen fragrant with sugar and vanilla while her reality was a hospital that smelled of Lysol and death.
It was Julie in the room with her now, Beverly thought. Maybe Didi. Her eyelids felt so heavy she puzzled over whether she might have suffered some kind of paralysis while she was sleeping. But she managed a flutter of an eye opening and caught a shadowy glimpse of her oldest daughter. Didi was stroking Beverly’s hair and humming. Maybe she should smile, but there was something in her mouth. Oh yeah, Beverly remembered, that’s keeping me alive. I think. She wanted to try to pat Didi’s hand — it was awkward, receiving motherly attention from her daughter, even though this daughter was a particularly fine stepmother to three boys she didn’t have to live with.
Bev had always wondered if those children behaved well because the mother they lived with was a good one, or because the mother they came to visit four days a month — who was the only mother Beverly ever saw them with — was a good one. Didi, of course, believed the latter. “Their mother is a permissive, over-indulgent fusspot,” she would explain when regaling the Donners with the latest divorced family life stories.
“Thank God you and Daddy were always a united front,” was sometimes tacked on as a summary.
“Your daddy just did whatever I said,” was a typical Beverly response.
Today, Bev really wanted to miraculously rally and be the good mother. She wanted to comfort and reassure her oldest daughter. That’s what moms do, she thought. The rules of motherhood in reverse just didn’t feel right. But her arms and hands and fingers were as heavy as elephant appendages. She gathered her will power and wiggled a finger. Oh well, she thought as she drifted back toward the cupcakes. At least I’ve made the dessert.
“The moon is full today, Mama.” Didi spoke in such a quiet voice, Beverly almost stayed with the baking in her dream, but came back toward Didi’s whispering long enough to wonder if there was someone in the room who shouldn’t know about the moon.
Didi had been by her mother’s side all through the night and only a moment ago had looked out the window to see a full moon setting in the morning sky. It had been a long night of touch-and-go breathing with monitors howling and medical staff hovering. Then, an hour before dawn, for reasons no one could explain and the doctor certainly did not expect, the spirit inside Beverly Donner turned away from the shadow of death. Didi smiled with a kind of winner’s pride at her 63-year old mother who was frail beyond her years, but had outrun the Grim Reaper to see yet another day. A substantial gin habit, three decades of smoking, and a two-year battle with cancer had taken its toll, but it had not yet taken Didi’s mother.
“Remember Moon Tunes?” Didi asked Beverly, still stroking her head — tenderly — as if her mother were a three year old who had just scraped her knee and needed calming. Didi thought she saw a flutter in her mother’s eyelids.
Had Didi said Moon Tunes? Oh, how Beverly wished she could smile. Moon Tunes was a game the Donner family had played on the upstairs deck on those rare occasions when all teen-aged daughters were home and happy and willing to sit on the deck with their parents. The promise of a cocktail to under-aged drinkers was usually a good lure, and grease for the pair of timid singers — Didi and Elaine — among them. The idea was to think of, and sing a stanza of a song with the word “moon” in it. The girls’ father liked to win. Of course he cheated — making up songs he claimed were before their time.
“What?” he’d declare in his taunting style of victory, “They don’t write songs with the word moon in ’em anymore?” Beverly believed one of the girls — was it Fran? — caught on eventually, and started making up her own moon tunes, proclaiming her father was just a little behind on his popular music. That required complicity on the part of the other sisters, of course. And the fact of that — her daughters protecting one another, even in a lie — always made Beverly very happy.
“Moon River, wider than a mile, I’m crossing you in style someday…”
Didi was whisper-singing now. Beverly felt so happy. Oh how she longed for just sixty seconds of energy and clarity so she could tell Didi she was happy. Sixty seconds with each daughter, that’s all she wanted. Sixty seconds of clear-eyed, strong-voiced, one-on-one conversation. Please God, Beverly thought. Please. Just four minutes before I die.
I would tell Didi to lighten up, to smile more often; I’d kick Julie’s little fanny and tell her charm wasn’t going to carry her much past her 30s; Elaine needs to know how funny it’s been to watch her try to redefine the Donner family brand; Frannie needs to stop and smell the roses. And have a baby. And — oh — the baby! Kaely…so much to say to our sweet Kaely. Okay God, maybe ten minutes…
There seemed to be another voice in the room. Frannie? Oh poor Frannie, Beverly thought. She shouldn’t be here. She’s so frantic with that business of hers. She should probably be at a meeting right now. Or on an airplane to France. Her work keeps her moving at speeds no woman in high heels should have to run…that’s exactly what she’d tell Fran with her sixty seconds. Slow down.
“What kind of night did she have?” Fran’s voice was tentative and shaky. It reminded Beverly of a glass wind chime in a very soft breeze — a flat, non-resonant clink, a bit edgy. How Bev hated hearing Frannie sound anything but confident. Confidence was her youngest daughter’s hallmark character trait — real or unreal, the confidence was nearly always there.
Fran stood next to her oldest sister, but kept her eyes on Beverly. She almost never looked at Didi unless she absolutely had to. In fact, she did all she could to avoid ever being alone with Didi. Fran did not like the various tones of indifference and disapproval that clung to every word her oldest sister ever spoke to her. She had never understood where it came from, but she gave up trying to ameliorate it years ago. Her husband, who was also her therapist, told her she suffered classic “baby sister issues” with Didi, who was eight years her senior, but Fran didn’t buy it. She chose to believe, instead, that she was her parent’s most beloved child, and that the fact of that engendered tension with all of her siblings. If Didi couldn’t make peace with the truth, as it seemed Julie and Elaine had, it was not her fault.
“She looks terrible.” Fran tilted her head Didi’s direction, in hopes of getting a response this time.
“They upped her fentanyl at about midnight because she seemed so uncomfortable. She’s been completely knocked out since then,” Didi whispered. “The rest did her some good, though, the doctor says her vitals have mysteriously jumped to the survival side of the needle.”
I was trying to ice cupcakes, Beverly thought. If you only knew how hard I’d been working all night.
“So the doctor’s been by already?” Fran sounded irked. Didi suspected it was no accident her youngest sister had arrived at the hospital so early. She never wanted to be anywhere in the game of telephone except first when it came to family news. That the doctor’s rounds had beaten her to Beverly’s bedside would be taken as a setback for Fran. Especially when she heard exactly what the doctor said.
Didi took a long breath and began stroking Beverly’s head again. When she spoke, it was the hospital whisper that emerged, but it came out of her suddenly and painfully, like the pinched squeak of a trapped animal.
“He’s sending hospice over this afternoon. He says we should take Mama home.”
All Beverly heard in that sentence was the word home. She was sure she smiled. She wanted her girls to know how much going home pleased her. She wanted to sit up and put on her make up and ask where her shoes were. Home, she sang inside her failing body. I get to go home. “Thank you Lord Jesus.” she was sure she whispered just before she went back to frosting those cupcakes.
It was in the long and painful silence between the oldest and the youngest Donner sisters that Elaine and Julie, both a little ragged from the four martini evening in Julie’s kitchen the night before, came through the hospital room door in a gush — like a water hose hitting the bottom of a deep bucket — hugging their sisters and kissing their mother on the forehead and hands. Their voices were full volume. They seemed ready for any challenge. Beverly did not stir, and they certainly did not lower their voices when Fran put her finger to her lips. “Shhhh.”
“Whatever, Frannie…relax.” It was Julie’s seemingly magic way with Fran. She was the only one of the older girls who called her Frannie, and she could get away with saying just about anything to her baby sister when she injected this grin-goading endearment. Julie also gave Frannie a squeeze around the shoulders and a kiss on the cheek, which Fran seemed to find only slightly patronizing.
“She’s had a hard night, that’s all,” Fran sulked, punctuating her personal moment of drama with a long sigh and heavy eyes that opened and closed in sync with the extended breath.
“Didn’t we all?” Julie chuckled as she patted Fran’s hand.
“Yes, we did,” Didi spoke just above a whisper, mostly because the all-nighter fatigue was settling in, which she hoped her sisters would acknowledge and thank her for. They didn’t.
“I’m just happy she’s still with us.” Elaine was standing at the end of the bed, rubbing her mother’s feet and watching the faces of all three of her sisters, who flanked the upper end of their mother. Elaine spoke, quite intentionally, in a slightly lower, more reverent tone than Julie’s, but brighter and more hopeful than Didi’s. She knew only Julie could get away with a cajoling disregard of Fran’s moments of woe and only Didi could wring personal sanctimony out of their shared concerns.
Elaine imagined she was the only one of the four of them who really understood the high stakes and paper-thin eggshells involved in this dance of the sisters around a crisis. Even for Elaine, it was a relatively new awareness. Their father had died just five years before. It had thrown the Donner women into a ditch so deep they could barely see whether the sky was blue or black most days. The death of William Braxton Donner III was not a complete surprise in the summer of 2003, but the years since his emphysemic end had been nothing but fraught with surprise.
They had thought he would live to be 70, at least. That’s what the doctors had predicted, but he was only 68 on the day he slumped to the cold, Italian marble tile on his bathroom floor and managed a feeble “Queenie?” as his family-documented last word. Then he slipped into a coma and fought for every breath over the next six days.
It had been shocking to discover the financial ruin his law practice was in.
It had been unsettling to find out he had a damaged heart valve, and that he had kept that news from his family of women for twenty years.
And then there was the 15-year dalliance with his legal secretary that no one knew about until the woman attempted to return “to Bill’s girls, whom he loved so much” the proceeds from the sale of the condominium their father had purchased for her.
“Oh my!” the false-eyelash-batting, frosted-lipstick-wearing 48-year old said to Beverly when she showed up on the family home doorstep in the Fall of 2005. “Honey, I thought for sure you knew about us.”
Beverly smiled, pulled up the biggest load of sarcasm she could manage under the circumstances, as she snarled, “Oh my! Honey, I did not know,” before she slammed the door in the woman’s face and ran to the living room to scream into a pillow.
Elaine happened to be at the house on Windy Lane that afternoon, playing an out-of-character role, helping her mother choose shoes to wear to Julie’s second wedding, which was two days away. Instead of shopping Beverly’s 200-square foot shoe closet, Elaine sat with her mother through three hours of uproarious rage and rekindled grief.
The first step to coping with the news, of course, was to ready a pitcher of gin and vermouth. Never mind the early hour of the day, under the circumstances Bev’s martinis were absolutely required medicine. Elaine had been stirring her mother’s cocktails before 5 PM for many years. It didn’t take too much of a crisis — or celebration — to call for the Kensington from the masterfully stocked home bar. Step two, three and four involved tissues, pillows and sending the housekeeper to the other end of the mansion. Beyond that, Elaine did not know.
The relationship with her mother was sometimes stiff. They did not read one another well. As the shock of the unexpected announcement quickly abated and anger appeared, Elaine felt betrayed by her father and broken-hearted for her mother. Beverly, on the other hand, seemed to be focused on something else entirely: Who else knew? And What would people say? It was a blundering and painful emotional dance.
When the liquor-dulled throb of agony quieted in the Donner mansion that afternoon, Beverly wiped away the last of her tears and said to her still-floundering third daughter, “You and I will be the only ones to know about this.” She reached for Elaine’s hand as if to make a pact. “Let’s not tell the girls.”
The compulsion to want to instantly make everything better for her mother, to put things back in the tidy places they had been just hours before, almost allowed Elaine to agree to her mother’s proposal. But El was the family weaver — one of the middle children — the one who made sure everyone felt included in every activity, every decision, every joy, and every sadness. As much as she wanted to steer completely clear of the wreckage that was her mother in this moment, she knew the day’s news was a secret that could not be kept and would only drive the family apart when it came out. This unbelievable story about the man all five of the Donner women revered as much as they did Jesus or Stanley Marcus — the man who lived on a pedestal built by his own mother, and then taken possession of gladly by his wife and daughters — this news would have to be dealt with. Sooner, Elaine thought, would be better than later.
The women sat knee to knee, Beverly at the edge of an overstuffed Hinsdale chair, Elaine on the edge of the matching ottoman. Elaine leaned in and searched her mother’s face until she was sure the time was right to take an unpopular stand on Beverly’s most recent opinion.
“I can’t keep this from my sisters for the rest of my life, Mama,” she reasoned with her mother. “We have to tell them.”
And so it was, that on the morning of Julie’s second wedding, the Donner women were plunged into a fresh emotional pool that all at once made them cling to one another more fiercely, and become annoyed with one another more quickly.
“We all handle stress differently.” Elaine was sure she said it to each sister at least a 100 times that weekend. “Let’s be kind to ourselves and to one another.”
Mostly, they kept their champagne glasses full.
And now they were here. Standing around a hospital bed, on the rocky edge of despair over what was surely the final turn in the last lap of their mother’s life. Each woman carried her own bucket of angst to this mess, Elaine thought. Didi is tired and wearing her family martyr face like a neon sign around her neck. Julie is married to a self-consumed child who doesn’t seem to care that his wife’s mother is sick or her only child is hurt somewhere in the middle of a war. Fran is — well — making her own misery because Fran believes she, and everything happening in her world, deserves the undivided attention of the entire human race. As for herself, Elaine is worried about Kaely. Concern for her mother in the midst of her panic over her niece’s phone call the night before is hard to manufacture.
Julie had been right. Kaely did not seem to have a Skype account anymore, voicemail on her satellite phone picked up before the first ring, which meant it was either turned off or the battery was dead, and Elaine’s email to Afghanistan would likely sit unanswered for several days. What the hell, Elaine mused as she studied her worried sister’s faces. What the hell now?
“I say we get breakfast before any big decisions need to be made,” she finally said with a smile and a gentle patting rub of her mother’s blanketed shin. Her sisters’ heads all turned her direction like baby birds greeting a worm-toting mother at the edge of a nest. The bubble of doom around them popped.
“Great idea!” Julie smiled. “My treat.”
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KAELY’S WAR — CHAPTER 3 (if you need to go back one)