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  After a relaxing afternoon at the beach, we returned to my mother’s house so I could pack. At four o’clock, I came downstairs with my suitcase and suggested to her that I should take a taxi to the airport, instead of letting her chauffeur me as she usually did. I was surprised when she didn’t object.

  “Our excursion must have tired me out more than I realized,” she said. “Ordinarily, I’d love to have the extra hour with my little girl before she flies away again.”

  I felt a lump in my throat suddenly. There was something in her tone that sounded so poignant, so wistful. “I’ll be back,” I assured her. “You know that, Mom.”

  When the taxi arrived, we said a tearful goodbye. I promised to call as soon as my plane touched down at LaGuardia, to let her know I had made the trip safely—a ritual in our family. Then off I went, home to the land of Monday meetings.

  Chapter Five

  While Woody had held his Monday meetings in his apartment, the “Gruesome Threesome,” as Helen had dubbed our new head writers, conducted theirs in a suite at the fabulously expensive Four Seasons Hotel on East 57th Street. So much for the budget cuts they kept shoving down our throats.

  The day of this particular Monday meeting also happened to be “Take Your Daughter to Work” day, where career mommies give their nannies a few hours off and actually bring their little girls to the workplace in order to boost their self-esteem.

  Please.

  None of us breakdown writers brought our children to the meeting, either because, like me, we had no children, or because, like most sensible adults, we understood that when children are present, no work gets done.

  The Gruesome Threesome, on the other hand, did bring their daughters to the meeting, some of whom were terrible twos. They wheeled these little cherubs into the hotel suite in their strollers, unfastened them, and turned them loose—for the next eight hours. Trust me, it was a nightmare.

  “I wonder how Philip puts up with that one,” said Helen, nodding at the child who belonged to the former Harlequin editor, the single mother he was dating. The kid was crayoning on the walls—in red.

  “You know Philip,” I said with a shrug. “Anything for his career, including little miss Picasso.”

  It wasn’t just the children that got on my nerves that day, or even Helen’s relentless gossiping. It was the distance I felt from my job, the utter detachment. I really was out of the loop now, disenfranchised. The network had hired the Gruesome Threesome because they wanted us to abandon the audience we’d spent years cultivating for younger, hipper viewers. But it was I who was made to feel un-young and unhip. I mean, had I ever heard of Daft Punk? Well, my bosses had. “They’re our favorite rock group,” one of them explained, while her daughter was severing the head of her Barbie. “But we like Rusted Root and Nine Inch Nails too.”

  Daft Punk. Rusted Root. Nine Inch Nails. I ask you: How was I supposed to contribute to that conversation? By holding fast to my affection for James Taylor? I could no more relate to my bosses than I could to the teenagers we were trying to lure to the show.

  Move to Florida, I told myself as the three women chatted about an alternative band called the Foo Fighters. You’ll feel young there, surrounded by all those seniors. When they rave about Julio Iglesias, at least you’ll know who they’re talking about.

  I hadn’t gotten around to replacing the computer that had been ripped off from my apartment, so I spent the week commuting to and from the production office, where I wrote my breakdown on the machine there. When Saturday rolled around and I finally had a minute to breathe, I intended to go out and shop for a new computer, a TV, a VCR, and the other gadgets that had been stolen, but something stopped me. And it wasn’t the words of the cop who had warned me that as soon as I replaced all this stuff, they’d be back to clean me out again. No, it was the sense that I wouldn’t be in town much longer, so why bother? It was the notion that I was definitely getting out, moving on, packing up. I had made a decision, I realized that Saturday: I was heading South. My lease on the apartment was about to expire. My contract with the show was up for renewal. I had nothing and nobody tying me to New York. I was free. The time was right. It was only the circumstances that were wrong, as it turned out.

  I was fast asleep on Saturday night, absolutely conked out, when the phone rang. It took me a couple of seconds to come to, and after I did, I turned on the light and checked the clock on the night table: 3:00 A.M.

  I wondered who in the world would have the nerve to call me at such an ungodly hour.

  “It’s Sharon,” said my sister.

  I bolted up in bed. “What’s wrong?” Something had to be for her to pick up the phone and dial my number.

  “Mom’s had a heart attack,” she said.

  “She what?” My own heart stopped.

  “She had a heart attack, but she’s stable,” said Sharon, who blew her nose, then took a few seconds to collect herself. “I just talked to the cardiologist. We had her moved to the intensive care unit about a half hour ago.”

  “You’re at the hospital now?”

  “Mom had them call me right after she got to the emergency room. I jumped into the car and drove like a madwoman.”

  I nodded silently as I sat there in my dimly lit bedroom, stunned, numb, barely able to process what Sharon was telling me. My father had always been my hero, but my mother had always been my rock. For the first time in my life, I was forced to confront her mortality.

  Sharon went on to explain that my mother had been having chest pains for months but didn’t tell anybody; that she’d been watching TV in bed that night when she began to feel really awful; and that when she didn’t feel better after twenty minutes, she called 911.

  “Once she got to Martin Memorial, they paged the cardiologist on call,” said Sharon, “a doctor named Jeffrey Hirshon. He has a practice in Stuart and lives in Sewall’s Point, around the corner from Mom.”

  “Is he supposed to be any good?” I asked, my eyes flooding with tears.

  “Good? He’s terrific. He saved Mom’s life,” Sharon replied. “He took one look at her cardiogram, started her on tPA, this drug that dissolves blood clots, and an hour later she was asking when she could go home. Of course, she’s not out of the woods yet. Dr. Hirshon said she has to be watched carefully. He’s keeping her in the hospital for at least four or five days.”

  I started to cry in earnest and blotted my eyes with the sleeve of my nightgown.

  “A heart attack.” I sobbed. “I can’t believe it. She seemed fine when I saw her last weekend.”

  “Well, you know Mom,” said Sharon. “She’s not a kvetch.”

  “Still, she should have—”

  “Look, Deborah,” Sharon cut me off. “I’ve got to run back to the ICU to check on things. Why don’t you roll over and try to get some sleep. It’s not as if there’s anything you can do from up there.”

  I bristled at her remark but willed myself to remain civil to her. “Is Dr. Hirshon with Mom now?”

  “Yes, and he’ll be monitoring her throughout the night. I’m staying too, naturally.”

  “Naturally, but you must be exhausted after all the worrying and waiting around.”

  “I am exhausted, but someone from the family has to be here for Mom. Her other daughter is too busy in New York to—”

  “Stuff it up your ass!” I exploded. So much for civility. “Just tell Mom that I love her, that I’m catching a flight out tomorrow, and that I’m taking the job with the Historical Society.”

  “Job? What job?”

  “None of your business. Give Mom my message, can you manage that, Sharon? Can you?”

  She sighed. “I’m the one who manages everything, Deborah. What else is new?”

  On Sunday morning I telephoned one of my three bosses (not the one who was seeing Philip; God forbid he should answer the phone) and informed her that I wouldn’t be renewing my contract with the show because I was moving to Florida. Then I called the Salvation Army and arranged fo
r them to haul away my beat-up furniture and everything else in my apartment that wouldn’t fit into the two suitcases and carry-on bag I was taking with me. I also buzzed the super in the building and asked him to forward my mail to my mother’s house until I had a more permanent address.

  “You were real pesty, calling me all the time to fix things, but I’ll miss you,” he said.

  “You were real surly, complaining all the time about having to fix things, but I’ll miss you too,” I told him.

  I secured the last seat on an afternoon flight out of LaGuardia and I was outtathere.

  Upon my arrival at Palm Beach International Airport at three-thirty, I collected my suitcases, hopped into a taxi, and gave the driver my mother’s address. I still had the extra key to the house she’d made for me the previous week (did she have a premonition that I’d need it?), so when I got to the house, I let myself in, ran upstairs to the guestroom, and shed the heavy clothes I’d worn on the plane, depositing them on the floor along with my luggage. As I was tearing back downstairs, I noticed that the other guestroom was also occupied. Neatly. Three Louis Vuitton bags were stacked in perfect alignment in the corner of the room; a comb, hairbrush, and makeup case were laid out on top of the dresser; and a pale pink nightgown and matching peignoir were draped across the foot of the bed, a pair of gold satin slippers resting on the floor below.

  Great. Sharon and I will be roomies, I thought, picturing the two of us cooking breakfast together. I’d compliment her on her fluffy poached eggs and she’d say my sausage patties looked like roadkill.

  I quickly reminded myself that my sister was not my immediate concern and headed straight for the garage, to the Delta 88, the keys to which my mother always left in the ignition. I started up the old boat and chugged out of Sewall’s Point. As I crossed the bridge onto East Ocean Boulevard, I realized with a shudder that the ambulance transporting my mother had followed the same route only hours before.

  Please let her be all right, I prayed. Please let this Dr. Hirshon be everything Sharon says he is.

  Martin Memorial Medical Center, the second-largest employer in Martin County, is a community-owned, not-for-profit hospital with a professional, albeit “just-us-folks,” atmosphere. Like most small-town facilities, its staff and patients tend to know each other, live near each other, play golf or go fishing with each other. Unlike most small-town hospitals, it sits along the St. Lucie River, affording many of its patients a sensational water view.

  Of course, my mother, a patient in what they call the Medical Intensive Care Unit (MICU), wasn’t one of them; the window in her little cubicle on the first floor overlooked the roof. Still, she was lucky to even get a bed. February is high season in Florida, not just for hotels and restaurants but for hospitals too.

  One of the MICU nurses—her name was Vicky—escorted me down the corridor, where we passed a half dozen “rooms” that were open to the nurses’ station yet separated from each other by a curtain. I had expected there to be a sort of hush over the place, given the seriousness of the patients’ illnesses, but between the televisions blaring, the electronic monitoring devises beeping, and the visitors visiting, there was more of a nonspecific hum than a hush.

  “Here’s our Mrs. Peltz.” Vicky smiled, stopping when we arrived at the room at the end of the hall.

  My mother didn’t hear us at first; she appeared to be napping. Sharon was sitting in a chair to the right of the bed, flipping through an issue of Modern Bride. She looked up at me and faked a smile, one of those square, clenched-teeth jobs that are meant to make the other person feel like, well, detritus. I ignored her and focused on my mother, her body hooked up to a half dozen contraptions, her complexion frighteningly pale.

  I had prepared myself for this moment. During the entire two-and-a-half-hour flight to Florida, I had coached myself. Don’t fall apart when you see her. Don’t say anything to upset her. Be cheerful. But when I actually came face to face with my poor little mommy in that big hospital bed, I totally lost it.

  “Mom!” I blubbered, rushing to her side, arms flailing in the air, tears pouring down my cheeks. “Oh, Mom!”

  I woke her up, obviously, but she didn’t seem to mind.

  “Deborah,” she said, patting my head as I bent down to kiss her. “You didn’t have to come, dear. It must have been a lot of trouble for you.”

  “I wouldn’t be anywhere else, Mom,” I said. “How are you feeling? Any more chest pains?”

  “No,” she said tentatively, as if not to trust her luck. “Dr. Hirshon is taking good care of me. He has a very good reputation, I hear.”

  “Sharon told me,” I said. “I’m looking forward to meeting him.”

  “He’s stopping by tonight,” said Sharon, perking up considerably. “Within the hour, I think.”

  “I’ll be here,” I said, eager to shake the hand of the man who had saved my mother’s life.

  I sat in the visitor’s chair on the other side of the bed and asked my mother about her condition—what medications she was taking, what dietary restrictions she’d been given, what sort of tests she would have to undergo over the next few days, whether she was scared.

  “A little scared,” she admitted. “Even if I survive this heart attack, there’s always a chance I’ll have another. Uncle Bernie had a triple bypass, remember, dear? There’s a history of heart problems in our family. I feel as if I’m doomed.”

  “You’re going to be just fine,” I insisted, startled by my mother’s pessimism. Lenore Peltz had never been one to complain or give up or lose hope, never one to let life’s vicissitudes get her down, not even after my father died. But now she sounded down, sounded as if the heart attack had knocked the fight out of her. “The only thing is, I wish you’d told me about the chest pains when we were together last weekend. Maybe I could have done something.”

  “Like what?” Sharon challenged.

  “Like taken Mom to the doctor,” I said. “Like helped her.”

  “Helped her?” she scoffed. “The way you helped her by charging into her hospital room and boo-hoo-ing?”

  “I wasn’t boo-hoo-ing. I was showing my emotions,” I said defensively.

  “You were hysterical,” said Sharon.

  “I was human,“ I said. “Do you know what it means to be human? To have feelings?”

  “Oh, I have plenty of feelings. You just don’t want to hear what they are.”

  “You can say that again. The last thing I—”

  “Shut up already! Both of you!”

  Sharon and I froze.

  “I’ve had enough of your nonsense! Ee-nuff!”

  We turned to look at our mother, to calm her down, make sure she was all right, apologize, but before we knew it, Vicky, the nurse, had bounded into the room.

  “Out! Out! Out!” she said, shooing us into the corridor. “You’re upsetting my patient and I won’t have it. Go cool off in the visitors’ lounge and I’ll come and get you when your mother’s feeling better.”

  Reluctantly, we left Mom in Vicky’s hands and walked wordlessly across the hall, to the extremely crowded visitors’ lounge. As we stood in the doorway, we saw that there were two empty chairs but that they were not together.

  “Here. Take mine,” said a man seated next to one of the unoccupied chairs.

  Thinking he was doing us a favor, he started to get up, so Sharon and I could sit side by side in our time of need.

  “No! Don’t!” we responded simultaneously, wanting to be as far away from each other as the size of the room would permit.

  The man shrugged and sat back down. Sharon took the seat next to him. I sat on the other side of the room, next to a woman whose husband had been stabbed in the stomach during an argument with his mistress.

  “You must love him very much to stand by him like this,” I told her. “Some women aren’t so forgiving.”

  “What’s to forgive?” she said. “It’s not as if he slept with my sister or anything. I don’t even know the girl.”
r />   I nodded, wondering if we had reached a new low in the tolerance department in our country. According to this woman, it was fine for a married man to have a mistress as long as the mistress wasn’t his sister-in-law. I mean, really.

  I laughed to myself. And then I tried to imagine how I would feel if I had a husband and he slept with his sister-in-law, who, of course, would be Sharon. I stopped laughing.

  About fifteen minutes after Vicky had thrown us out of intensive care, she stuck her head in the lounge and motioned for us to come back.

  “Your mother’s blood pressure went sky-high,” she scolded us. “She’s all right now, but she won’t be if you keep this up. Your bickering is very disturbing to her.”

  “But she’s never spoken to us about it before,” said Sharon.

  “She’s always pretended we’re the Bobbsey Twins,” I explained.

  “Your mother has had a life-threatening event,” said Vicky. “That can change a person profoundly. She may not be concerned about pleasing everybody the way she used to be. She may be focusing more on herself, on her own welfare. I’d be prepared for some straight talk from her if I were you two.”

  Sharon and I thanked Vicky for being so candid with us, and, chastened, hurried back into our mother’s room.

  We took our seats on either side of her bed.

  “We were horribly insensitive, Mom,” said Sharon.

  “We’re sorry for arguing in front of you like that,” I agreed.

  “Good,” said my mother. “Then you can just sit there, keep your traps shut, and listen for a change.”

  Yikes. The New Lenore Peltz wasn’t especially subtle.

  “I want my girls to patch things up,” she announced. “Once and for all. If you don’t, I’ll have another heart attack and die, and my last memory will be of you two insulting each other. Is that what you want for me? Is it?”

  “Of course it isn’t,” Sharon and I said in unison.

  “Fine,” said my mother. “Then put aside your differences and behave like sisters. For my sake. For my health.”