I stopped before the swinging doors, startled by the woman behind the desk guarding the entrance. I realized I was breathing heavy. “I’m here to see Mrs. Berns. Room 256. I’m her granddaughter.”
“You’ll need to sign in.”
“Fine.” She handed me a clipboard with a lined sheet on it. I scribbled “Mira Berns” in blue ink on the line next to room 256, dropped the pen, and pushed my way through, counting the numbers on the wall outside of each room. Room 256 was across the hall from the ICU nurse’s station. I wondered if that was good or bad. The door was framed with pumpkins cut from orange construction paper, black lines bisecting toothy grins and triangle eyes.
Her door was cracked. I stayed in the hall another moment, my head feeling white and cottony. The sterile, sick-sweet smell of surgery began to coat the lining of my nose. I pushed against her door, acutely aware of the pinkness of my hand against the brown wood. Inside, a curtain shielded the bed from my view. On my side of the curtain, a man and a woman, both near retirement age, were arguing heatedly. The man had salt-and-pepper hair tailored in a precise crew cut and slicked up with some sort of cream, the kind of pomade that would smell like your grandpa if you got too close. His nose was sharp enough to slice paper. The woman had the same nose but her hair was a chocolate brown, the deep lines around her eyes and nose declaring it a dye. I didn’t recognize either of them, though I did know the director of the nursing home, who was standing off to the side, running his fingers through his hair and looking like he’d rather be at the proctologist.
All three of them glanced over when I walked in, but I didn’t stop to ask questions because if I stopped, I would never be able to regain the momentum to look behind the curtain. I darted around the cloth divider, and my breathing stopped. There she lay, fragile and bandaged. Every visible centimeter of her was swathed in white, some of it leaking red, some tinged with a wet-looking brownish-yellow. The only perceptible movement was a catheter bag hung off to the side, dripping slowly full, its contents cloudy. The air around the bed smelled murky.
“Mira.” The nursing home director took my arm and pulled me back. I couldn’t remember his name. I’d interviewed him once or twice in my role as part-time reporter, but as a general rule, I avoided close contact with authority figures.
“Is she okay?” Stupid question. I don’t know where it came from, who spoke it, even though my lips had moved.
“It’s not…” He paused.
“What?”
“It’s Freda Skolen.”
The greedy wash of relief left me woozy. I knew Freda. She and her sister Ida shared a room at the Senior Sunset, and they were sweet, smart ladies. But they weren’t my Mrs. Berns. “Where is she?”
“They took her to surgery over an hour ago. She’s got a broken leg, three broken ribs, and a possible skull fracture. She’s in tough shape, but it looks like she and Freda will pull through.”
I’d had enough bad news in my life that I couldn’t take his word for it. “I need to see her.”
He shot a look at the other pair in the room and then back at me. “You’re welcome to stay. The head nurse said Mrs. Berns would be out of recovery and back in her room by dinner. Actually, if you’re willing to wait for her, I can get back. A lot of people in Battle Lake want to know how these two are doing.”
“You’re lucky they’re alive,” hissed the man, who’d stopped in his argument with the woman to watch me like a pickpocket. He slid his eyes off of me and onto the director, his knife-edged nose cutting the air.
His companion grabbed his arm. She wasn’t much taller than my 5’6” but had the sturdy build of a Swedish farmwife. Her strong fingers held his arm firmly. “That’s enough, Conrad. We can decide what to do once we find out how mom is.”
Conrad Berns, Mrs. Berns’ oldest son, the one who’d committed her to the home almost ten years earlier? I held out my hand, my mind racing. “I’m Mira James. A friend of Mrs. Berns. You’re her son?”
The director chose that moment to duck out, giving my shoulder a grateful squeeze as he passed. Conrad watched him go but didn’t stop him. “I’ve heard of you. You let my mother work for you at the library.”
I bristled. “Mrs. Berns is an adult. She makes her own decisions. I don’t ‘let’ her do anything.” If only he knew how true that was.
“And you took her to the State Fair?”
Now didn’t seem to be the time to argue that in fact she had hitchhiked to the State Fair and appropriated the only bedroom in my loaner RV. I tried switching roles. “You live in Fargo?”
“Yes.”
“Retired?
“Forty years in the Navy.”
That explained the haircut. And now that you mention it, the military posture. Dang that he really did smell like my grandpa up close, though. It inclined me to warm up to him a hair, as much as I didn’t want to. “How’s Mrs., um, your mom doing?”
He seemed to sense that he’d regained the upper hand. “We’ll see shortly. You’re welcome to stay until she returns.”
I didn’t like feeling like I needed his permission but the truth was I did. Desperate to focus on something concrete, I turned to the woman who with that nose could only be his sister. She’d been watching our interaction quietly. “I’m sorry about your mom.”
She smiled, her eyes tired. “If you really are her friend, you knew it was only a matter of time. That woman is a wild thing.”
Conrad snorted. “I’m getting coffee. I’ll be back.”
Neither of us acknowledged him. “I didn’t catch your name.”
“Elizabeth.” She held out her left hand. There was no wedding ring on it, but she wore a magnificent turquoise and silver bracelet. “And don’t worry about my brother. He’s all bark and no bite. He’s just worried about mom.”
“Me too. Did you see her before she went into surgery?”
“I’m afraid not. We arrived shortly before you. Mr. Samuelson from the nursing home was already here. He gave us the same information he gave you.”
She pushed her hair back from her ears, and I noticed sea-blue, speckled earrings that matched her bracelet. The creative jewelry along with her crisp white shirt and expensive scarf marked her as Not from Around Here. “You live in Fargo, too?”
She laughed, and it sounded like dry stones tumbling down a hill, the laugh of a repentant smoker. “Not for a while. I live in Sedona, in Arizona. I own an art gallery. Don’t tell my brother, but I brought some healing crystals to put near mom’s bed.”
I shrugged. It made no difference to me. What I needed was to distract my fear until Mrs. Berns returned. “How’d you end up in Sedona from Battle Lake?”
That laugh again. “Our farm was actually north of Underwood. When I graduated high school in the fifties, there weren’t a lot of options for women. I didn’t want to get married, be a secretary, teacher, or nurse, so I moved to Minneapolis and took some art classes. Turns out I’m a mediocre artist but a great businesswoman.” Her eyes sparkled, and for the first time, I saw her resemblance to Mrs. Berns. “I used my connections from the art classes to gather the work of talented no-names, dug up some good investors, and launched a gallery in the Cities. When it was doing well enough, I moved it to Sedona, where they have no winter and lots of people who can afford art. Been there since the sixties. I only come home for emergencies.”
I smiled politely, but my brain was mathing. “But Mrs. Berns got in her accident only a couple hours ago. How did you get here so quickly?”
Her eyes arched, and her resemblance to Mrs. Berns was replaced by her resemblance to her brother. “Same person, different emergency.”
And that’s when Mrs. Berns was wheeled into the room, flat on her back, eyes closed.
11
