I was drifting in and out of an uncomfortable sleep when my parents arrived at the hospital. My mother burst into the room, closely followed by my father and a harassed-looking doctor in a blue smock.
“Can I please ask you-” the doctor was saying plaintively, but my mother ignored her.
“Pia? Oh my God, Pia!” My mother was all over me like a maternal whirlwind, kissing my forehead and cheeks, touching my hair. “Are you all right, Schätzchen?”
“I’m fine,” I started to say, but it came out as a croak. Even smiling felt like too much of an effort; my mother’s anxiety was exhausting.
Abruptly she burst into tears. My father laid a tentative hand on her shoulder.
“Kate? She’s all right.”
“She’s not all right,” sobbed my mother. “Look at her. Just look what that-that-”
She let out a wail and the doctor’s hands came up in a gesture of protest; there were other patients to think of; if she would just-
I think she would have told my mother to leave, except that a bell was ringing somewhere else, and she had to leave the room herself.
Silently, my father enfolded my mother in his arms. I saw him hug her to him, rubbing her back, kissing her hair. She was letting him, I realized, and even in my exhausted state I felt the first spurt of hope.
“She’s all right, Kate, she’s all right,” my father was murmuring over and over again, and my mother was clinging to him. She cried for what seemed like a long time, until the last sob turned into a cough and she started trying to wipe her nose with her fingers. She raised her head at last, and her face was only inches from my father’s. For a moment they stared at each other.
Then my mother said, softly, “I’m sorry, Wolfgang,” and putting up her hands she very gently pushed him away.
I could hardly bear to look at my father’s face.
“Kate,” he said, and there was a question in his voice.
Slowly my mother shook her head. She stood there for a moment, not looking at him, her head turned to one side. Then she said rather too loudly, “One of us should stay here. Why don’t you get the bag from the car?” The last few words were tremulous.
My father came up to the bed and took my hand for a moment, pressing it with his strong fingers. Then he turned and went out of the room. He must have come back sometime later with my mother’s bag, but by then I was asleep.
I was in Mechernich Hospital for two days, and it would have been longer had my mother not broken me out of there. If you are admitted to a hospital in Germany you can expect to be there for a full seven days-or, at least, you could when I was a child and the health insurance was still paying for anything you cared to have. My mother, however, was having none of it. She packed up my things and buttoned me into a new fur-lined jacket. Then she dragged me downstairs to the car.
“Oma Warner’s arriving this afternoon,” she informed me as she reversed out of the parking space, so rapidly that I feared for the cars parked on the other side.
“Are we going to get her?” I asked.
“No.” My mother rammed the car into gear and gunned the engine. “She’s taking a taxi from the airport this time. I said we’d pay.”
“Oh.” I supposed this was for my benefit; the invalid had to be rushed home and kept there.
The mention of Oma Warner made me uncomfortable: there was still the matter of the telephone bill, though I hoped it might somehow have been forgotten among the recent dramas. I looked out of the window at Mechernich speeding past. It was as bad as Middlesex: gray streets and rain-slicked pavements. The weather was never so severe here as it was in Bad Münstereifel for some reason, and the snow that had fallen had quickly thawed. Brown mush clogged the gutters. I leaned my forehead on the cool glass and sighed.