Page 98 of Here We Go Again
The hospital is larger than it looks from the outside, the halls all designed in an undulating blue meant to mimic ocean waves. It’s probably supposed to be comforting and calming, but it reminds Logan of sirens. Drowning. It reminds her of the sea Joe wants to be beside when he dies, and the fact that they brought him to the wrong one.
Rosemary sits in the waiting room with perfect posture in the cacti shirt and sweatpants, and Logan feels an overwhelming urge to be hugged and held by her. She needs Rosemary’s voice telling her it will be okay. She needs to crawl into Rosemary’s lap and cry, and she needs to be the baby spoon, and she needs Rosemary to stroke her hair and rub her back.
It’s all going to be okay.
Rosemary is busy providing a list of all of Joe’s medications to one nurse, his complete medical history to another. Somehow, amid all the chaos, Rosemary remembered to grab her binder, the one she didn’t actually throw into the Grand Canyon. She really did come prepared with everything.
Logan and her neediness sit on a plastic chair across the room.
Remy is gaunt and silent beside her as the hours pass. Every time a doctor or nurse appears, they go straight to Rosemary. Logan catches snippets of the updates through the brain fog.
“Breathing, but oxygen levels are low….”
“Calcium deposits on his lungs…”
“Moving him out of the ER…”
“… on fentanyl now…”
“… oxygen levels increasing, but there’s fluid in his lungs… waiting for the oncologist to make her rounds before we move forward with treatment, but… DNR… power of attorney… the beginning of the end…”
In-between updates, Rosemary sits down in her chair a million miles away.
“He can’t die here,” Logan says into the silence.
She can’t see Rosemary’s expression behind her medical mask, but she can see her eyes. Immovable. Unnerving.
“Odie isn’t here. And he doesn’t have his blanket, or his record player… He can’t die without those things. We promised.”
Sometime around noon, the oncologist enters the waiting room. She’s a tall, broad-shouldered Black woman with box braids and a statement necklace that reminds Logan of fireworks. “Joseph is stable,” she tells them. Unlike all the other harried doctors and nurses, she sounds genuinely relieved. “We got his oxygen levels back up, but he’s still having some trouble breathing, so we’re going to keep him on a BiPap machine for twenty-four hours and monitor his progress. There is a procedure we can do to remove some of the fluid from his lungs that might prolong his life, but we don’t have to talk about that right now. Y’all probably want to see him. He’s asleep, but sometimes, it helps patients to have their loved ones near, even if they aren’t aware of it.”
Logan takes a true deep breath for the first time all morning. Not dead. He’s not dead. Not yet.
But he could have been, and Logan is suddenly haunted by the ghosts of all her reckless decisions. Allowing Joe to eat fried chicken and shrimp po’boys. Smoking weed with Joe on their hotel balcony during their rest day at the Grand Canyon, getting drunk with him in Cortez. The detours and the days in the sun, pushing Joe to his physical limits. She got bored and took him to a drag show, and now he’s in the hospital and it’s her fault.My fault.
It feels like the walls of the waiting room are closing in on her, like she’s the one gasping for breath.
Rosemary pivots in her white sneakers to face Logan. Her glacial eyes have melted into two pools of relief. Logan wants to run to her. She wants to run away from her. They should have stuck to her binder, her itinerary, her careful planning.My fault. My fault.
“Will you go see him with me?” Rosemary asks in a timorous voice that makes Logan’s heart crack down the middle. Logan will hurt Rosemary, like she hurt Joe. She’ll ruin everything.
She’s going to lose Joe. Lose Rosemary. Lose everything. And she doesn’t know how not to care.
My fault my fault my fault.
She wants to walk down the hospital hallway with Rosemary, but she finds herself walking back toward the exit instead. Leaving first, before she can be left.
Logan is dry heaving into a parking lot trash can when Remy finds her. He puts a hand on her back, but she can barely feel it, barely register the sensation through the tingling numbness that’s overtaken her body.
She keeps trying to expel the contents of her stomach, but nothing comes up. Remy rubs circles on her back.
“Do you know what I need right now?” he says in a gentle, soothing voice.
Logan moves away from the trash can. “What?”
“Whataburger.”
She thinks about walking away from Joe when he’s hooked up on those machines, inches away from death. She thinks about walking away from Rosemary when her unguarded heart must be breaking. She’s selfish and self-sabotaging. Unfeeling and unloving. An apathetic asshole. Like her mom.
