I do not have a sister. I have never had one. My mother had me late, at thirty nine, and she used to say that I was enough for any family. I told the nurse so, and watched her face change. “Mrs. Whitaker,” she said, “I want you to stay very calm. Andre is going to call the charge nurse and the hospital police. Nobody is coming into this room except the staff.” The wires on my chest tugged at me as I breathed. A strange, wet cold ran down my arms. “Who was she?” I whispered. “What did she look like?”
Andre, who had returned from the phone, answered in his quiet bass. “Blonde. Forties. Pink blouse. She had a shopping bag. She asked, very politely, what time they would take you to the OR and whether the family could wait in the pre op area.” He paused. “She also asked whether it was true that, if a patient did not wake up, her spouse could sign the papers. The desk clerk thought it was an odd question. She came and told me.” I closed my eyes.
I knew the perfume. Sweet and cheap and sticky, such as one finds in a drugstore at the bottom of a bin. I had smelled it on the collar of my husband for a year.
Her name, the police discovered within the hour, was Tammy Brisco. She was forty four years old, the bookkeeper at the trucking company, and she had been the mistress of Dennis for fourteen months. At a quarter to one that morning she had been caught on the lobby camera, signing in under a false name, with a large pink purse and a thick manila folder. She was found in the cafeteria by hospital security, drinking a coffee, with the folder open on the table. Inside were three documents. A power of attorney for a woman named Joyce Whitaker. A medical proxy. And a handwritten letter, in a hand I knew very well, in the voice of Dennis.
A name signed at a front desk revealed the plan of a husband who had counted on his wife not waking up.
The letter, which the police read aloud to me the next afternoon, was a list of instructions. Dennis had written them in a hurry, in the notebook of his office. He had planned for me to fail. He had gone to the lawyer, and the lawyer had told him that a divorce would take a year. But a widow, he had learned, would be immediate. If I did not wake from the surgery, the proxy would be useless, and the house and the accounts would pass to him with no questions asked. If I woke, and the papers were signed, he would walk out the door with half. Either way, he would win. That was the sentence. Either way, I win.
Dennis was arrested at one in the morning, in the parking garage, sitting in the front seat of his truck with a cigarette, waiting for Tammy. He did not run. He was charged with assault, interference with medical care, and conspiracy to commit fraud against a vulnerable adult. Tammy was charged with the same, and in the interview room she wept and said she had only wanted to be loved. The detective, a patient man with reading glasses on a cord, did not argue. He wrote it down. Then he asked her to explain, one by one, what was in the folder, and she did, in a small, frightened voice, until the sun came up.
At six o clock in the morning, as scheduled, they came for me. Two men with a gurney, a surgeon in a blue cap, and Andre, walking beside me with his hand on the rail. I was terrified, and I said so. Andre nodded. “That is how you know you are alive,” he said. At the doors of the operating room, the surgeon leaned over and said, in a voice like warm bread, “Mrs. Whitaker, I do this every day. I am very good at it. You are going to be fine.” I looked at the light. It was so bright. I counted backward from ten. I do not remember seven.
The surgery took five hours. When I woke, I was in the recovery room, with a tube in my throat and a hand on my forehead, and a green line on the monitor that went up and down like a hill, steady and strong. The hand belonged to my daughter, Beth, who had flown in from Denver in the night and was still wearing the same blue jacket. “Mom,” she said. “You did it.” Her face was swollen from crying. Beside her, on a chair, sat my grandson, seven years old, in a Tulsa Drillers cap, looking at me with enormous eyes.
He climbed up beside me when the nurse permitted it. “Grandma,” he said, very softly, as though the monitor might wake, “I put a note in your purse weeks ago, because you looked sad. Did you find it?” I laughed, and it hurt, and I laughed some more. I told him that I had found it, and that I had read it every hour, in the dark, with the oxygen hissing, and that it had held on to me better than any wire. He nodded gravely, as a man does who has done an important job. Then he laid his head against my arm, and we both watched the green line climb.
Dennis pleaded guilty in the spring and received eight years. The divorce was granted without a hearing. The judge awarded me the house, the accounts, and half the trucking company, which I sold within the year, to a young couple who actually drive the trucks. In June, I walked into the garden, in the sun, and planted a row of marigolds along the porch rail, with my grandson beside me with a trowel. We water them every morning. The note, the crooked one, with the wrong spelling, hangs in a frame beside the kitchen window. Best grandma in the hole world. I take it exactly as it is written.
