Rekindling the Flame (Smoky Heights #1)

Chapter 18

EIGHTEEN

AURORA

Red and white lights.

Mechanical clatter.

Wheels rolling over pavement.

Voices, questions I struggle to answer.

I’m shaking, but that’s not what’s important.

I haven’t stopped shaking since twenty minutes ago, the second worst phone call of my life. At least she has.

“911, what’s your emergency?"

“My mom, she’s …”

For someone who remains composed and able to put words together in stressful situations for a living, I’m really failing at this.

“Ma’am? What’s going on with your mom?”

A strangled cry leaves my lips, and I hold the mouthpiece of the phone away from my face so the operator doesn’t have to hear it. I take a quick inhale to compose myself, remember who I am and why I’m here.

I’m the best chance at helping my mom through this.

I’m the one who doesn’t get emotional and fuck shit up when things are on the line.

I’m the one who’s going to help her remain as comfortable as possible for the rest of her life.

That clicks my left frontal lobe out of neutral and into first gear, and I’m back.

“My mom needs an ambulance.”

At least my mom’s stopped twitching and jerking, where she lies on the gurney. It won’t stop replaying in my mind, though. I doubt it ever will.

The EMTs lead the way into their entrance at the ER, and I follow behind, numbly.

A slew of nurses, technicians, and other medical staff are waiting and join our entourage as soon as we make it through the swinging doors of the bay, which is where the pace picks up and we start to jog.

“Female, fifty-four years old. Grade four brain cancer. First seizure, according to the patient’s daughter. Fell and hit her head, in stable condition now. Heart rate still high, blood pressure one-thirty over eighty-six. Vitals are still coming back to normal. May have a brain hemorrhage, needs an MRI if the patient’s oncologist authorizes it.” I barely register the words the staff are saying, my mind preoccupied with replaying the clip of her, not even a half an hour ago.

Lexi’s squawk breaks through my haze, it reaches me before my eyeballs can even try to locate her body within the buzz of the chaos in this hallway. “MOM! Is my mom okay?” Her voice is fevered chaos, pure distress. I know because it’s exactly how I feel. I recognize it instinctually, by vibe alone.

“How did she even get back here?” one of the EMTs mutters.

One of the techs who is now trotting next to my mom’s stretcher, a guy I grew up with who hasn’t looked at me once so far, by the name of Shawn, answers them. “She’s got connections here. The local hookup. You’re still new here, but you’ll see it in action the more you’re around.

“Lex,” I call out. Not Alexis. My throat barely cooperates. Now that my mom is under medical supervision, someone else is responsible for saving her, my faculties have almost entirely abandoned me again. That brief moment where I felt the pressure of not letting her slip away, not letting her pass on my watch, it’s gone, and without that burden of responsibility, so is my ability to be the person Mom needed me to be.

Since then, a whole new level of fear has set in, facing a future without my mom. Not in some far-off, distant time, but imminently. Those remaining seven months feel a lot shorter since I watched her collapse. It all seemed so esoteric when she’s looked (and mostly acted) fairly normal up until now. A little sleepy, a little bruised, a lot more pills to take. But mostly still the mom I’ve always known.

Seeing her frail, nearly lifeless, completely helpless as to what was happening … For all the ways I thought I could do this, after today, I’m wondering if I really can. Sit by and try to remain strong and unaffected while I watch the woman who raised me—despite our estrangement, despite the space I forced between us—to have to watch her lose her capacities, her faculties, her life force? I might be strong in a lot of ways but getting a glimpse of what this will look like as she worsens has given me a lot to rethink as soon as we’re past this moment.

Lexi’s eyes fly to mine in a panic that is echoed throughout my entire being right now, but I can’t let her see it. She needs me now, more than Mom does, which brings back some of my steel determination, my need for composure.

“Rory, thank God. What the hell happened?” Lexi—still in her work uniform—grabs my arm, short nails digging into the soft flesh there like I’m her anchor, keeping her from floating into the abyss of panic, and I brace against the wince that wants to show. She needs me to be strong. I can do that for her. That’s why I’m here, after all.

My armor chinks back into place, the facade I’m so used to wearing. It’s never been this difficult to put it on before, but I do it for them. For both of them.

“Mom had a seizure. She’s fine, Alexis.”

“She’s clearly not fine , Rory, she looks half dead!” Lexi’s arm flails and points to our mother’s ashen body, rolling through the halls of the only hospital in the region, medical staff swarming her, doing their job of keeping her alive on the way to the room she was assigned en route.

“She’s not half dead, she’s just passed out from the seizure. This is what the oncologist warned us about. It’s expected with her diagnosis. She’s better off than she looks.” That last part might not be true, I can’t vouch for it, but Lexi freaking out won’t help her wake up any faster. If anything, it’ll stress her out, annoy the staff, and get us kicked out. And I’m not not staying by my mother’s side right now after what I just witnessed. The way my stomach bottomed out, dropped down to my feet and then kept going. How she fell to the floor, for the second time in recent memory, but so much worse than before.

The twitching, the jerking, the way her eyes rolled back and she lost consciousness. I thought it was the end for her. And in some ways, I think it would’ve been a kinder end than what she’s in store for. Another six-ish months of slowly escalating torture on her body, mind, and spirit. And, much less importantly, on that of those of us who love her.

But I’ve never been so thankful to see eyes just like my own staring back at me as nearly three hours after she got admitted to the ER, when she finally opens them.

“Girls,” my mother croaks out, her voice wispy and crackling in ways it didn’t used to. I pretend it’s only because she’s parched.

Both Lexi and I jump up from our chairs and are by either side of her in an instant. Since I go straight for the remote to call her nurse, Lexi takes her left hand before I get the chance to pick up her right, and she grabs it a little too forcefully. I can see Mom shrink back in pain, so I speak up on her behalf. “Don’t break her bones, Lex, they’re gonna make her stay an extra week if you do that. She’s already gonna have to be here for days as is.” Lexi scowls at me, face pinched up like she’s trying to skin me with her laser stare, but she loosens her grip and Mom’s face relaxes.

Instead of holding her hand like I want to and risk hurting her out of my own need to assure myself she’s really still here, she’s some form of okay (for now), I run the back of my fingers up and down her forearm soothingly, while grappling with the other hand for the damn remote. I press the call button as fast as I can find it and turn the entirety of my attention back on my family.

“What’s today?”

“It’s Friday, Mom.” Lexi beats me to it, again.

“Remind me what happened?”

Lexi and I trade unsure glances. Does she not remember? Or is she just foggy from the blackout? If she has a lapse in memory, is it from the fall? The seizure itself? Or the glioblastoma? I’m not ready for her condition to worsen to the point she loses her short-term memory. After that, it might be her long-term memory. If the day comes where she doesn’t recognize me? I don’t care how strong I’ve tried to be for her, that’s something I wouldn’t survive.

“We were at the rec center, Mom, do you remember that?”

“The rec center?”

“Yeah, you were giving them back the money you’d stolen,” I say gently.

Lexi’s worried gaze on mine reinforces my determination to not make this harder on either of them. After all the pain I’ve caused them, this is something I can make better. Calm, cool, no trace of panic evident. Emit the energy we need here, and they’ll match it. That’s the theory, right? I shoot for breaking the solemnity.

“You gave everyone there a good laugh with your story of how you stole it by distracting the attendant with a possum you’d snuck in the building and let loose.” Can’t tell if my attempt at jogging her memory is bringing anything back for her, but I keep trying. “When the poor woman up front screamed and ran for help, you took the only dollar they had in the collection box, grabbed the possum, and ran back out. Then you told everyone this morning how you’d tried to keep it as a pet, named it Dolly Possum, hid it under your bed for weeks, barricaded in there, until the smell got so bad your dad tore apart your room and tanned your hide so bad you couldn’t sit for days.”

She chuckles, and Lexi’s face lightens a bit, as does my heart. “You had a whole crowd enraptured this morning. And on the way out,” I remind her tenderly, “you had a seizure and fell to the concrete floor.”

“Right, right,” she says, nodding her head in tiny movements, like it’s all familiar to her, but neither of her daughters are convinced.

Selfishly, my heart drops even further at the realization the big surprise I’ve been working on isn’t going to be possible now. I don’t need someone in a white coat to tell me she’s taken a turn for the worse at this point and that she needs to take it easy.

Putting her through the physical strain my plan involved would be too chancy with how quickly she’s deteriorating. The risk would far outweigh the benefit, and accepting defeat on bringing one of her dreams to life is going to be a tough pill for me to swallow. Almost as difficult as realizing she’s slipping down this slide faster than I’m ready or able to deal with.

“Mrs. Weiss, you’re awake!” The chipper nurse assigned to Mom walks in, rubbing sanitizer on her hands, smiling brightly at my mom in the upright bed.

“It’s Laura Lee, dear,” my mom corrects her, and I bite back a smile. That sounded more like her normal self.

“Okay, Miss Laura Lee, I’ll write that on the board over here. How are you feeling?”

“Higher than I was at Woodstock.”

Something resembling a guffaw bursts out of me, and Lexi shrieks, “Mom, you didn’t go to Woodstock. You weren’t even alive then.”

“Okay, then, higher than I was when I got pregnant with Lexi.” Both Lexi and I pull faces of disgust, and our mom makes an apologetic frown. “I was trying not to paint you a word picture, but you had to call me out, so you’re getting specifics.”

The curvy nurse with the radiant smile chuckles at the three of us. “I bet you’re feeling pretty good right now, Laura Lee. The ER doctor consulted with your care team, and since pain management is the current objective of your treatment plan, they went ahead and gave you the okay for some of the good stuff so you wouldn’t feel too many effects of that little spill you took today. You’re also on something to reduce the swelling in your brain after all that, mmkay, and hopefully we can keep you from having another seizure anytime soon. For now, you’re on concussion protocol and we’re going to be keeping you under observation for a few days just to be extra safe, all right? Your oncologist wants to make sure nothing else flares up after that fall, but the doctor will come in and explain that to you and answer any questions you may have shortly, mmkay.”

Mom doesn’t show any further memory difficulties or other concerning behavior while the nurse is with us, and when the doctor comes in later to talk things over with her, discuss her results from the scans they did and explain why they want her to stay in the hospital for at least seventy-two hours for observation, possibly longer, she doesn’t even put up a fight. She just looks between Lex and me and says, “You girls better keep them chickens alive while I’m here. Between the two of you. Lexi knows what to do.”

We both just nod, our eye contact after her request surprisingly uncharged. This might be the first time she and I have agreed on anything, the afternoon spent in Mom’s hospital room the longest we’ve gone without nasty barbs at one another or trying to annoy the other. Both willing to set aside long-standing issues, petty ones, too, in the name of more important things.

The first sign of peace, perhaps?

A temporary treaty, at least.

We break that eye contact when the doctor does her best to answer our biggest question. Why did Mom have a seizure, what can we do to stop it from happening again?

“Truthfully, no one really knows why seizures are a common part of this path,” she explains. “All we can do is hypothesize as to what interrupted the electrical impulses to trigger the seizure.” Her kind brown eyes bounce from Mom to Lexi to me. “One possible explanation is that as the tumor grows, it’s compressing other areas of your brain. There is only so much room to expand, the skull is rather immovable, as you might imagine. So the soft tissue is what gives. In this case, it’s possible the neural network within the white matter was affected by the growth for some reason. I’m sure your oncologist has prepared you for what to expect as this progresses. Personally, I’d say you were lucky to go this long into your journey without suffering from them, but we’re going to do what we can while you’re here to try to keep you stabilized.”

After the ER doctor leaves with a final order for her to rest up, Mom makes Lex and me agree to go home and rest ourselves, not be (and I quote) “helicopter daughters by her side for the rest of her stay,” and as much as I want to fight her on it, to show up anyway—for my benefit, if not hers—I see the look in her eyes. The fire that is so often present in my bathroom mirror back in New York on the mornings before a particularly high-stakes contract negotiation. And I know not to push her on it. So I agree, even if it kills me to do so.

I don’t know how many days I really have left with her, and I won’t be taking any of them for granted again. I’ve got a lot of life to fit in whatever time she has left. Maybe it’s how frail she looks in this bed, the indelible change I scent in the air after this morning—like I can feel on some innate level her worsening by the hour now—but something tells me it won’t be six more months we get together.