While My Sister Sleeps

‘These are friends, Kath. They want to talk to you. They want to help.’

But Kathryn didn’t want sympathy. She wasn’t the type to talk for the sake of talking; she couldn’t bear the thought of giving progress reports to friend after friend, especially when there was no progress to report. And what were friends supposed to do?

No. No calls. Kathryn didn’t want people saying things that she wasn’t ready to hear. ‘I can’t talk with them yet. I just can’t. Handle this for me, Charlie?’

Molly struggled at the hospital. Showing no improvement at all, Robin lay pale and still, a cruel parody of the active person she had been, and Kathryn was appalled at mention of an enlarged heart. ‘Absolutely untrue,’ she declared. ‘Robin would have told me if she had a serious problem.’

Molly kept her voice low. She had never thought of her brother as being particularly insightful when it came to human nature, but she wasn’t doing real well herself. What better time to test his theory than with something as difficult as this? ‘You might have stopped her from running. What if she didn’t want that?’

‘Robin may be daring, but she isn’t stupid, and she certainly isn’t self-destructive. Why in the world would you believe a stranger over your sister?’

‘Because I can’t ask my sister,’ Molly said softly still. ‘I’m just trying to make sense of this, Mom. Did the doctors mention an enlarged heart?’

Confused, Kathryn looked at Charlie, who said, ‘Yes. We assumed it was something new.’

‘Did anyone in your family have an enlarged heart?’

Charlie shook his head and deferred to Kathryn, who said, ‘I have no idea. I never heard of anything, but doctors didn’t know as much in my parents’ or grandparents’ day. Besides, it’s the kind of thing a person wouldn’t know unless he had symptoms.’

‘Did Robin have symptoms?’

‘Molly. You’re assuming it’s true. Please. And why does it even matter? This is water over the dam. Robin had a heart attack. It’s a fait accompli.’

‘For her maybe, but what about for Chris and me? Shouldn’t we know whether we’re at risk?’ Realizing how selfish that sounded, she added, ‘If Robin knew she was at risk, she never should have run so hard. She never should have run alone.’

‘She always ran alone.’

‘Most runners train in groups. If she had a heart condition, shouldn’t she have made sure there were other people around just in case?’

‘You were supposed to be around.’

Molly might have argued, but her mother was right. Somberly, she said, ‘Yes. I’ll have to live with that. Always.’

Kathryn seemed taken aback by the admission, but only briefly. ‘Besides, there was someone else there.’ The Good Samaritan.

‘He didn’t have to come see us, Mom,’ Molly said, still cringing at her mother’s outburst. ‘That took courage.’

‘It was guilt. He wants to be absolved.’

‘He was concerned,’ Molly argued, deciding that Chris’s theory wasn’t worth beans. Loud voice, soft voice–she just couldn’t get through. ‘He wasn’t the one who put her here. If we’re talking cause and effect, what doctor would have let Robin run marathons if he knew she had this condition?’

‘Like a doctor could control what she did? Please, Molly. You were the first one defending doctors last night. Why the change?’

‘I don’t want my sister to die!’ Molly cried, eyes filling with tears because Robin was lying there, totally unresponsive. ‘When we were kids,’ she said brokenly, focusing on her sister, ‘I’d be on her bed, moving closer and closer, imagining that I would wake her up with just the power of my eyes, and she’d lie perfectly still until I got really close. Then she’d bolt up and scare me to death.’ She took a shaky breath and looked at her mother. ‘I’m sorry. I feel helpless. I want to know why this happened.’

‘Anger doesn’t help,’ Kathryn said quietly.

Neither does denial, Molly thought. ‘Can’t we do the EEG?’ she asked. ‘Just to know?’

But Kathryn was still hung up on the enlarged heart issue. ‘Robin wouldn’t lie to me about something as important as a heart condition. She shared everything with me.’

Let it pass, Molly told herself, but the remark was just too outrageous. ‘Did she tell you she got drunk with her friends the night after she ran Duluth?’

Kathryn stared. ‘Robin doesn’t drink.’

‘Robin does. I’ve driven her home afterward.’

‘And you let her drink?’ Kathryn asked, shifting the blame. ‘And why didn’t she tell me about Duluth?’

‘Because you’re her mother, and you hate drinking.’ Molly took pity because Kathryn looked truly distraught. ‘Oh Mom, I wouldn’t have said anything if you hadn’t been so adamant that Robin wouldn’t lie. Duluth was a blip. No harm came of it. I’m sure that if you’d asked her outright whether she’d ever been drunk, she’d have told you. But she didn’t want to disappoint you. She swore me to secrecy.’

‘You should have honored that.’

Molly hung her head. She couldn’t win. Discouraged, she looked at Kathryn again. ‘All I’m saying is that Robin didn’t tell you everything. She was human, like the rest of us.’

‘Was human? Past tense?’

Charlie held up a hand. At the same time, from the door came a gentle, ‘Excuse me?’ It was the nurse. ‘We have people gathering in the lounge down the hall. They say they’re Robin’s friends.’

Kathryn’s eyes went wide. ‘How do they know she’s here?’

‘I told Jenny Fiske,’ Molly said. Her mother was already angry; a little more couldn’t make it worse.

Kathryn sagged. ‘Oh, Molly.’

‘It’s okay,’ Charlie said. ‘Jenny’s a friend. Molly did what she felt was best.’

‘Robin would want Jenny to know,’ Molly tried. She was actually sure about this. ‘She’s always been right out there with her friends. I think she’d want Jenny here. And she’d want that EEG, too. She liked knowing the score–likes knowing the score, likes knowing what she’s up against. I mean, think of the way she studies the competition before every major race. She wants to psych it all out–who’ll run how on a given course, whether they’ll break early, how they’ll take hills, when they’ll fade. She’s a strategizer. But she can’t strategize for this race unless she knows what’s going on.’

When Kathryn continued to stare at her, Molly figured she had pushed as far as she could. And Jenny was in the lounge. The last thing Molly wanted was to have to be the one to talk with her. Plus she was worried about the nurse’s reference to friends, plural.

Feeling responsible, she set off to do damage control.

Kathryn wondered if Molly was right. Robin might want to know what she faced. The problem was that Kathryn didn’t. She wanted to see improvement first, which was why Molly’s spreading the word wasn’t good. ‘Why did she have to tell Jenny?’

Charlie drew up a chair. ‘Because we put her in an untenable position. How can she talk with a friend of Robin’s and not tell her Robin is sick? Really, Kath, there’s nothing wrong with what she’s done. What happened to Robin isn’t a disgrace. It’s a medical crisis. We could use people’s prayers.’

This time, Kathryn didn’t argue about prayers. She had begun saying a few herself. Doctors had been in and out all morning examining Robin, and they never actually denied Kathryn hope, simply gave her little to hold onto. Same with the respiratory therapist, who checked by every hour and refused to say whether he saw any change in Robin’s breathing. And the nurses? As compassionate as they were, repeatedly testing Robin’s responsiveness, they were cautious in answering Kathryn’s questions. Once too often she had been told that patients didn’t come back from the kind of brain damage Robin had suffered.

Charlie took her hand. ‘Molly’s right, y’know. Not knowing is the worst.’

Kathryn knew where he was headed. ‘You want the EEG.’

‘I don’t want any of this,’ he said in a burst so rare that it carried more weight. ‘But we can’t go back,’ he added sadly. ‘The Robin we knew is gone.’

Kathryn’s eyes teared as she looked at her daughter again. Robin had been an active infant, an energetic toddler, an irrepressible child. ‘I can’t accept that,’ she whispered.

‘You may have to. Think of Robin. How can we know what to do for her if we don’t know the extent of the damage?’