She said: He’s at Mercy West. He asked me to make that call and I’ve been standing here since four wondering if I should have said more. She was the woman on the phone. She’d been his neighbor for six years, she’d found him on the landing at eleven that morning, and she’d ridden in the ambulance because there was nobody else in the building awake. He’d given her my name and the exact time and the exact sentence, and he’d made her repeat it back to him twice on a gurney in the hallway. That’s the part that undid me — not that he was in a hospital, but that he’d spent the worst hour of his life doing arithmetic about my Sunday afternoon.
He’d had a bleed on the brain. Arteriovenous malformation, something he’d been born with and nobody had ever seen, and it had chosen a Sunday morning in his kitchen. He’d been conscious for about forty minutes after she found him, and he’d used most of them on logistics — his landlord, his cat, his sister’s number, and a stranger with instructions about two o’clock and about not letting me call a hospital switchboard from four hours away with nobody to talk to.
Surgery ran nine hours. I sat in a waiting room with a woman I’d never met who would not go home, and around midnight she told me he shovels her walk and has never once mentioned it, and that she’d assumed for six years that he had a large and attentive family somewhere. I said he had me. She said she’d worked that out from the phone call.
He’s in rehab now, and his left hand is slow, and the speech comes back a little further every week. Last Sunday my phone rang at two. It took him about a minute to get through a sentence that used to take him four seconds, and he did it anyway, and at the end he said the thing he’s said since he was nineteen, which is okay, Ma, same time. I said same time. Then I hung up and sat in the car in the grocery store parking lot for a while, because that’s where I’d been at two, because I’d known he would call.
