A Ticket to Ride Read Free Page B

again? Three, two, zero?
    It was all really happening. Berna’s hand, clammy as a damp grocery bag, was real, and the wall phone with its low-swaying coil, the wheezing refrigerator, the calendar stuck on a blue lighthouse—August—though it was late October. My bent legs felt needled at, anesthetized, though they would carry me through this night, to the hulking and fluorescent hospital.There, the waiting room was the color of pistachio ice cream and hung with Halloween decorations. Fake webbing had been strung in the corners of the room and studded, here and there, with fat crepe-paper spiders. Near the nurse’s station, a real-looking skeleton wore a pirate’s eye patch and red Santa’s hat. Nelson and I sat for hours, now flipping mindlessly through stacks of old Sports Illustrated magazines, now pacing or looking out the window onto the nearly empty parking lot below, or walking to the vending machine for cans of A&W root beer. And then, near dawn, a doctor came to say that Berna had suffered a major stroke. She was conscious but still very weak. As for her prognosis, it was too soon to tell. We would simply have to wait and see.
    The next several weeks spun slowly by. After six days in intensive care, Berna was moved to a recovery ward upstairs, where she looked startlingly fragile, sagging to one side in the metal bed, favoring the arm that wasn’t working the way it should.
    “This is all temporary,” Nelson assured me on rides home to the farm. “Berna’s strong, has a lot of life in her. She’ll beat this back with a broom.”
    But would she? Berna didn’t look strong to me. She looked like a limp and empty glove. I worried that she’d never return home. What would possibly happen then, no one was talking about that.
    We visited her in the afternoons after I was let out of school, Nelson in a neatly pressed striped shirt and dress trousers. He carried his town hat, his fingertips worrying the felt brim as we waited by the lit “up” arrow by the bank of elevators. Though I’d known him for as long as I’d been conscious of memory, Nelson now looked like a stranger to me, greenish light planing his cheekbones, glinting off his scalp, which shone through the carefully combed and lacquered-down hairs.
    I had never thought hospitals were the romantic places theyseemed in soap operas, where nurses and doctors flirted over drawn masks, everything in their eyes, where children went to get their tonsils out and ice cream spooned over the wounds and women delivered babies into pink flannel blankets. But Bakersfield Memorial Hospital was even more soggy and sallow than I imagined, with gummy-looking slightly greenish walls and a cafeteria with folding chairs and what looked to be card tables. Behind a glass counter there was cottage cheese and red Jell-O in plastic-wrapped bowls. There was milk in waxed fist-sized cartons and packets of graham crackers, most of which had been crushed in the box and looked like hamster food.
    Berna’s recovery room was just off the VA wing, where it wasn’t uncommon to see men in wheelchairs cruising down the hall, easy as you please, with amputated legs jutting from the bottom of their gowns and tucked into what looked like gym socks. How could someone get used to that, to half of themselves missing? Would Berna get used to her slack left hand, the slur that made her sound like she was drunk all of the time? Would Nelson get used to carrying his wife to the toilet? Would I get used to TV dinners with Nelson—sodden fried chicken under tinfoil, triangles of applesauce cake only partly warmed through—while Walter Cronkite’s voice boomed through the living room like a burning bush?
    Berna stayed in the hospital for three weeks, and in that time it became obvious to everyone except Nelson that if Berna was going to get her strength back, it wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. She was transferred to a long-term care facility with pee-smelling hallways and pureed-squash