Page 4 of Plunge

CHAPTER FOUR

Thistle

I PACE THE hallway outside my mother’s hospital room, trying to calm down. I can’t focus on the pain of what the doctor told me, how my mother’s brain lost oxygen and they just can’t be sure the extent of the damage.

I try to think about logistical stuff, like who is going to water my plants and forward my mail and…”Shit.” I have to call my assistant. Who the hell is going to take care of my life in New York while I’m here?

As I rummage in my purse to find my phone, I catch a whiff of my father’s cologne. I hear him clear his throat behind me and I turn to find him adjusting his tie. “I’m glad you could be here with your mother, Thistle. She needs you right now.”

I scoff. “Yeah, right, Dad. You mean you need me to be here right now so you don’t have to interrupt your quota.”

He inhales sharply through his nose, nostrils tightening just a bit, but he doesn’t engage in an argument with me. I scowl at him and wait for him to say something next. Maybe, I don’t know, for him to at least acknowledge that I’m dropping my entire life right now so that he doesn’t have to.

My father leads the life he does exactly because my mother has always been here behind the scenes, taking care of all the details. Giving him babies to pat on the head a few times a week. Giving him an immaculate house to relax in during his brief stints home from his work as a regional sales director for an engineering company.

We’ve always had plenty of money. What my mother didn’t have was a life outside of taking care of this family. I swore I’d never become that, never return here, to the place that cemented so clearly the life path I absolutely did not want.

But here I am, surrounded by the ghosts of my past challenges, still swirling trying to drag me down.

When my father doesn’t speak, I flare my own nostrils and say, “I’ve got two months of leave before I have to return to my career. Mom’s doctors are estimating at least six months of her being incapacitated. What’s your long-term plan?”

He looks taken aback, and I know that my fears are coming to fruition. I am the long-term plan. Me.

The assumption has been that I will just come home, drop my life. Take care of my mother. “She raised you, Thistle,” he says, adjusting his tie again, then moving his nervous hands to his cuff links. “She needs you.”

I shake my head at him. “Just go the fuck to work and leave me alone so I can take care of things like I always do.” I walk away from him before he has a chance to respond to my words.

I walk straight out the front doors of the small hospital, across the parking lot—there’s not even a gate, let alone fees to park here. The concept is so foreign to me after six years living in New York. There’s a willow tree outside with stone benches all around it, and I wander over there, still rummaging for my phone.

Larry picks up before it even rings. “Thistle, oh my god! What is going on??”

I update him on Mom’s condition—she evidently had a stroke in her sleep. She woke up and crawled to the toilet and my father heard her retching for awhile, and then heard her crumple to the floor. “She’s not paralyzed or anything, we don’t think,” I explain, “but she can’t talk. Larry, she moves her mouth around and no words come out and then she cries.”

Larry gasps and says, “Oh, lord, that sounds awful.”

I allow myself a few shaky deep breaths before I switch back into “do” mode. “So I’m going to need your help with a few things,” I say.

“Hit me!” I rattle off a list of my top concerns—mail forwarding, finding an apartment sitter, getting a phone appointment with HR, and Larry, as usual, adds a few items I hadn’t even considered. “We need to make sure your health insurance works in PA. You’re going to need benzos to get through this, boss.”

I laugh for the first time in awhile. “Thank you, Larry, I needed that. But also I don’t think I really need any meds…”

“Oh, you definitely need meds,” he says. “Also I’m going to sit the hell out of your apartment for you.”

“Wait, no, I couldn’t ask that of you!”

“Are you kidding? Do you know that I live in DUMBO? Do you know what that stands for?”

“Um, actually I’ve sort of wondered…”

“Down under the Manhattan Bridge. AKA Brooklyn. So yeah, boss. I’m going to squat in your penthouse for a bit while you’re not there. I’ll just bring your mail with me to work and have them forward it. Then there’s no paperwork to deal with on either end.”

I slump back against the bench and listen as he maps out his plans to keep my life on pause while I deal with this situation. I can do this for a few weeks.

My dad is right. My mother did raise me, and I can spare a few weeks to get her back on her feet.

Not that I don’t wish my brother felt the same impulse. We could, I don’t know, split the time. But of course he’s following my father’s footsteps in sales. He even ditched his first name—“Nobody buys multimillion dollar contracts from someone named Rowan,” insists R.J. McMurray. Because somehow RJ is more sophisticated?

“Hellooooo? Thistle?”

I shake my head. “Larry, I’m so sorry. I’m really distracted here. I haven’t even slept yet, if you can believe it.”

He shoos me off the phone and urges me to go get some rest. I check in with Mom’s team and confirm that they’ve got her on some medication that will keep her asleep for a bit anyway. I learn that ride share services have reached Oak Creek, and treat myself to a trip in some college student’s hatchback.

I watch the scenes of my childhood float past outside. The storefronts on Main Street are largely unchanged. We pass the bakery, the newspaper offices for the Oak Creek Gazette, and I see Archer Crawford do a double take as he stares at me through the window of an office labeled CRAWFORD ACCOUNTING.

God, I keep forgetting this whole place is swarming with Crawfords. I can’t think about them right now. We pull up to my parents’ house and I drop my designer bag on the carpet in my childhood room. I remember that Larry sneaked a sleeping pill into my bag as I was leaving town. “Just in case,” he’d told me with a wink. I really do need to pay him more, I decide, as I pull it out of my purse and swallow it down with a glass of metallic-tasting tap water.

And then I drift off into a dreamless sleep.

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