While My Sister Sleeps

The eyes behind the glasses didn’t blink. ‘Yes, I do. It’s hard not to know when you live around here. Her name is in the local papers so often.’

‘Not only the local papers. That’s why she has to recover from this. She works all over the country with budding track stars. We’re talking teenage girls. They can’t see this. They can’t begin to think that the reward for training hard and aiming high is…is this. Okay, you may not have had a case like this before, but if that’s so, just say it and we’ll have her transferred.’

She searched family faces for agreement, but Charlie seemed stricken, Chris was frozen, and Molly simply looked pleadingly from her father to her brother and back.

Useless. All three.

So Kathryn told the doctor, ‘This isn’t a personal indictment. I’m just wondering whether doctors in Boston or New York would have more experience with injuries like these.’

Molly touched her elbow then. Kathryn looked at her youngest in time to hear her murmur, ‘She needs to be in intensive care.’

‘Correct. I just don’t know where.’

‘Here. Let her stay here. She’s alive, Mom. They got her heart going, and it’s still beating. They’re doing all they can.’

Kathryn arched a brow. ‘Do you know that for fact? Where were you, Molly? If you’d been with her, this wouldn’t have happened.’

Molly paled, but she didn’t retreat. ‘I couldn’t have prevented a heart attack.’

‘You could have gotten her help sooner. You have issues, Molly. You’ve always had issues with Robin.’

‘But look,’ the girl urged, glancing at the medical personnel hovering at the door. ‘They’re waiting to take her upstairs, and we’re slowing them down. Once she’s there, we can talk about specialists, even about moving her; but right now, shouldn’t we be giving her every possible chance?’

Molly followed the others to the ICU and watched the team get Robin settled. At one point she counted five doctors and three nurses in the room, as frightening as it was reassuring. Monitors were adjusted and vital signs checked, while the respirator breathed in and out. Every minute or two someone spoke loudly to Robin, but she didn’t respond.

Kathryn left the bedside only when a doctor or nurse needed access. The rest of the time, she held Robin’s hand, stroked her face, urged her to blink or moan.

As Molly watched from the wall, she was haunted by the knowledge that her mother was right. If Robin had started breathing sooner, there would be no brain damage. If Molly had been with her, Robin would have started breathing sooner.

But she wasn’t the only one who had let Robin down. She couldn’t blame her mother for being frantic back in the ER, but where was her father? He was supposed to be the calm one. What had he been thinking letting Kathryn go on like that? Even Chris could have spoken up.

They didn’t have the guts, Molly decided, and then modified the thought. They knew better.

You have issues. You’ve always had issues with Robin. She knew her mother was upset, but Molly was feeling guilty enough to be flayed by the words. As the minutes passed and the machines beeped, she remembered occasionally deleting a phone message, buying the wrong energy bar, misplacing a favorite running hat. Each offense could be balanced with something good Molly had done, but the good was lost in the guilt.

Chris left at midnight, her father at one. Charlie had tried to get Kathryn to leave with him, to no avail. Molly suspected that her mother feared something awful would happen if she wasn’t there to stand guard. Kathryn had always been protective of Robin.

Hoping her own presence might go a little way toward making up to Kathryn for what she had not done earlier that day, Molly stayed longer. By two, though, she was falling asleep in her chair. ‘Are you sure I can’t drive you home?’ she asked her mother.

Kathryn barely looked up. ‘I can’t leave,’ she said and added, ‘Why weren’t you with her, Molly?’ with a speed suggesting she was brooding about just that.

‘I was at Snow Hill,’ Molly tried to explain. ‘The management meeting, remember? I didn’t know how long it would run. How could I commit to Robin?’ There was also the issue of the cat. But putting a cat before her sister was pathetic.

Kathryn didn’t ask how long the meeting had run. She didn’t even ask how it had gone. If she was brooding, it was about Molly’s negligence toward Robin, not about Snow Hill.

And Molly was guilty. That thought beat her down, before she finally broke the silence by asking, ‘Can I get you something, Mom? Coffee, maybe?’

‘No. But you can cover for me at work.’

Startled, Molly blew out a little breath. ‘I can’t go to work with Robin like this.’

‘You have to. I need you there.’

‘Can’t I do something here?’

‘There’s nothing to do here. There’s plenty to do at Snow Hill.’

‘What about Dad? Or Chris?’

‘No. You.’

She doesn’t want me around, Molly realized, her feeling of devastation growing. But she was too tired to beg for mercy, too wiped out even for tears. After asking Kathryn to call her if there was any change, she slipped out the door.

3 (#ub02bbdb4-800c-53f7-9f2e-2b2079b3618a)

Molly’s cottage faced south, bringing year-round sun to the loft, while the forest behind the backyard shaded the bedrooms and scented the air with pine. Molly had learned of it by accident when its owner, who was leaving New Hampshire for Florida, came to the nursery looking for a home for dozens of plants. Now the owner wanted to renovate and sell, so Molly and Robin were being kicked out.

Molly thought the vintage kitchen was just fine. She loved the weathered feel of the wide-planked floors and casement windows. Although Robin complained that the place was drafty and the rooms dark, she didn’t really care where she lived. She was gone half the time–to Denver, Atlanta, London, L.A. If she wasn’t running a marathon, half marathon, or 10 K, she was leading a clinic or appearing at a charity event. Most of the boxes in the living room were Molly’s. Her sister didn’t have many things to pack.

Robin was happy to move. Molly was not, but she would go along, just to have Robin be her old self again.

Waiting for her mother’s call, Molly slept with the phone in her hand, far from soundly. She kept jolting awake with the hollow feeling of knowing something was wrong and not remembering what it was. Too soon she’d recall, then lie awake, frightened. Without Robin getting up to ice one body part or another, the house was eerily quiet.

At six a.m., needing companionship, Molly looked for the cat. It had eaten and used the litter. But the creature was nowhere to be found, though Molly searched even harder than she had the night before. She had been wasting time then, wanting Robin to wait for her for a change. How petty that had been. Brain damage was light years worse than a torn-up ankle or knee.

Of course, Robin may have woken up by now. But who to call? Molly couldn’t risk dialing her mother, didn’t want to waken her father, and Chris was no use. The station at the ICU would give only an official status report. Critical condition? She didn’t want to hear that.

So she watered and pruned the philodendron in the loft, picked hopeless leaves off an ill ficus, misted a recovering fern–all the while whispering sweet nothings to the plant until she ran out of sweet nothings to say, at which point she put on jeans and drove to the hospital. Preoccupied, she went straight to intensive care, hoping against hope that Robin’s eyes would be open. When they weren’t, her heart sank. The respirator was soughing, the machines blinking. Little had changed since she’d left the night before.

Kathryn was asleep in a chair by the bed, her head touching Robin’s hand. She stirred at Molly’s approach and, groggy, looked at her watch. Tiredly, she said, ‘I thought you’d be at the nursery by now.’

Molly’s eyes were on her sister. ‘How is she?’

‘The same.’

‘Has she woken up at all?’

‘No, but I’ve been talking to her,’ Kathryn said. ‘I know she hears. She isn’t moving, because she’s still traumatized. But we’re working on that, aren’t we, Robin?’ She stroked Robin’s face with the back of her hand. ‘We just need a little more time.’

Molly remembered what the doctor had said about the lack of response. It wasn’t a good sign. ‘Have they done the MRI?’

‘No. The neurologist won’t be here for another hour.’

Grateful that her mother wasn’t yelling about the wait, Molly gripped the handrail. Wake up, Robin, she urged and searched for movement under Robin’s eyelids. Dreaming would be a good sign.

But her lids remained smooth. Either she was deeply asleep or truly comatose. Come on, Robin, she cried with greater force.

‘Her run was going well until she fell,’ Kathryn remarked and brought Robin’s hand to her chin. ‘You’ll get back there, sweetie.’ She caught a quick breath.