Page 67 of Playing for Love

Gabe

My phone vibrated in my pocket as I sat staring across the small table at her breathtaking face, the expression sad enough to match the heaviness in my heart. But as I slipped the phone from my pants, the cruel implication of what the call meant made me stand, ramrod straight and terrified.

As it put it to my ear, I was already rushing through the door and down the corridor, ready to take the stairs if the elevator doors didn’t open immediately. They didn’t. I listened to my dad’s words, broken and choppy, telling me that my mother was fading, that her heart, her big beautiful generous heart, was failing her. And somehow it felt like it was us who was failing her, for not being able to give her our strength so she could go on, to live long and see all of her grandchildren grow up, to see the bambinos yet unborn, my children who would someday come into the world and never know their grandmother.

It wasn’t until I pushed through the door on the floor where my mother struggled for life in ICU that I realized Mia had followed me, running after me, not keeping up. I didn’t wait for her, couldn’t afford to. And wasn’t that the story of how things were between us?

Turning into her room, the scene of my mother and father, sharing a kiss hit me, slammed my gut and made me groan like an animal, feeling as if the life were being sucked from me by the vacuum of loss. But my mother was still here, even if she was being attended by hyperactive nurses, hooked up to beeping monitors, stuck with needles and her face half covered by an oxygen mask. It covered her nose, but not her mouth and she spoke as I knelt at her bedside, next to where my dad sat holding her hand and stroking her forehead with a shaky hand.

“Gabriel,” she rasped.

“Don’t talk, Ma.” Afraid of her obvious weakness and labored breathing, I looked at the doctor who stood on the other side of the bed, watching the monitor and reading the chart.

“Where’s Dr. Aoki?” I asked.

“He’s on his way,” she said.

Dad’s face was a picture of misery, so I left him alone and motioned to the doctor for a talk. We stepped away from the bed and I saw Mia standing in the doorway, wide-eyed and resolute and filled with empathy, the kind that made me want to collapse into her arms. But I focused on the doctor instead.

“What’s the status?”

“Your mother is in heart failure. We’re keeping her going— “

“What’s the prognosis?” It was the hardest question I’d ever asked and I didn’t want to know the answer, but I had to know.

The doctor stared at me a few beats, looking sad under the professional veneer. “I’m sorry, Mr. Wyatt. Her heart is failing and there’s nothing we can do now. She’s not a good candidate for a heart transplant even if we could find a donor in the next few hours—which we’ve investigated.”

“Few hours?”

She nodded and put a hand on my arm. I felt Mia approach me from behind, felt her arm go around me as she came to my side. Her presence and warmth calmed me, if only for a moment before it faded to the horrible realization that I was about to lose my mother, that dad was about to lose his wife, that the heart and soul of our family was about to be gone forever.

“There must be something— “

Mia squeezed me.

“We’re trying to make her as comfortable as possible. You should call the rest of your family. Let them know.” She went back to her place by the bank of monitors and made some adjustments to the tubes and bag of fluid feeding her with drugs.

“I’m so sorry,” Mia whispered, her words barely touching me.

“I need to call Joe and Annalee. And Marie.” It was the last thing I wanted to do in the world, especially calling my older sister Marie, named for my mother. Next to my father, she was closest to Mom, bringing her two children to visit their grandma nearly every day.

“Jesus Christ.” I looked at Mia, didn’t care that my eyes probably glistened with tears pushing to escape. I held back. I had calls to make.

“Do you want me to call?” she’d read me perfectly, but I shook my head.

“No. I need to make the calls.”

I started with my brother Joe, the easiest call because he was a tough S.O.B. He was with Annalee at the house, he’d been working out of the apartment all week instead of going to his office. He insisted on telling Annalee himself, he said so she could cry in his arms before they got to the hospital. I was half relieved, half heartbroken that I couldn’t hold her myself as she broke down. Taking a deep breath, I ended the call and stared at my phone for a few seconds.

Mia still stood next to me, Dad still sat bedside, leaning close to Mom, whispering to her as if they were having a secret conference, like they used to do when they’d talk about what they’d planned to get us for Christmas when we were kids. Back then I’d try to listen in before mom would shoo me away. Now, I didn’t need to know what they said, I knew well enough what it would be all about. How my father loved my mother more than life, how he would be devastated if she left him, begging her to stay. And she would console him, even with her heart weak, barely hanging on, she would give whatever she had left, giving him strength, making him better, making us all better, stronger.

I made the call to Marie, while I watched my mother struggle, watched the soft fading smile on her face as I told my sister that our mother was dying, begged her not to drive herself to the hospital as she sobbed into the phone. Her husband came on as if he’d torn the phone from her hands and spoke to me briefly, somberly. He was a good man. Eddie. He’d take care of her, get her here. As the cocoon of his family surrounded him, even before they all arrived, his despair dissipated, leaving bearable sadness because it was shared.

Mia said, “Can I get you anything? Another coffee?” her mouth hinted at a smile, one that would have bloomed anywhere else but here, now in this hospital room where his mother was dying. Hours.

He nodded. He hadn’t wanted the coffee, not really, but he needed a minute with his Mom. Mia nodded, slid a look toward the bed and she knew. She left and I felt the cold of her absence immediately, wondering if I’d been wrong to send her away. But there was no right and wrong, no clear bright lines about what to do, how to negotiate heartbreak or love.

I went to my mother and knelt and she shifted her eyes from my father to me and he sat back in his chair, reluctantly letting go of her hand. The dizziness and a sense of unreality took me for a moment, but I grasped her cold frail hand and squeezed it in both of mine and it brought me back, gave me strength as she always did, though I had no idea where it came from because she seemed to have none left.