Page 52 of Scarlet Chains
The world spins so fast that my stomach lurches. My mother is in the hospital. Has been since yesterday. While I was playing house with Osip’s baby, while I was wrestling with my own selfish drama, my mother was in crisis.
I grip the phone tighter, trying to process the information. “What happened?”
“It would be best to discuss this in person,” Dr. Patel says, and his careful professionalism terrifies me more than any dramatic diagnosis could. “How soon can you come in?”
In person.
Which means it’s serious. Which means it’s not the kind of news you deliver over the phone to someone who’s just discovered their mother has been hiding a medical crisis for months.
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” I say, already moving toward the door.
“Miss Katona,” Dr. Patel calls before I can hang up. “Please travel safely. And… it might be good to bring someone with you.”
Bring someone with you.
The euphemism for “you’re going to need support when I tell you what’s really happening” makes my blood freeze in my veins.
I’m out of the flat within seconds, leaving behind the cramped space that now feels like a crime scene. The hallway stretches endlessly as I run toward the elevator, my footsteps echoing off the walls. When the elevator takes too long, I bolt tothe stairwell, taking the stairs two at a time, my breathing ragged with panic and the physical exertion of fear.
The taxi ride to St. Paul’s Hospital feels endless, every red light an eternity, every slow-moving car adding to my mounting desperation. I stare out the window at the city passing by— people going about their normal lives, shopping for groceries, walking their dogs, completely unaware that my world is imploding with every passing minute.
The taxi driver, a middle-aged man with kind eyes and calloused hands, keeps glancing at me in the rearview mirror. “You okay, miss? You need me to drive faster?”
“Please,” I whisper, and he nods, pressing harder on the accelerator.
I try calling my mother’s phone again, knowing it’s futile but unable to stop myself. Straight to voicemail. Again. The cheerful recording of her voice—“Hi, you’ve reached Judit! Leave me a message and I’ll call you back!”— sounds like it’s coming from another lifetime, when she was healthy and hiding her illness was just another small deception rather than evidence of something devastating.
When did I become so selfish?
The thought crashes over me with devastating clarity. While I was consumed with my own problems— my infertility, my father’s death, my surprise pregnancy, my complicated relationship with Osip— my mother was fighting for her life.
Did she drive herself home after receiving test results that changed everything?
And I was too wrapped up in my own drama to notice.
The hospital looms ahead, a tower of glass and steel and institutional efficiency. I throw money at the taxi driver without counting it and run through the automatic doors into the sterile brightness of the lobby. The smell hits me immediately— thatparticular hospital cocktail of industrial cleaning products trying to mask the reality of human suffering.
The lobby is designed to be comforting— soft lighting, generic artwork on the walls, comfortable seating arranged in clusters that suggest hope rather than despair. But I can see through the facade to the harsh reality underneath: this is where people come when their bodies betray them, where families gather to say goodbye, where normal life stops and medical crisis begins.
“Judit Shiradze,” I tell the nurse at the information desk, my voice hoarse with urgency. “I’m her daughter.”
The nurse— a young woman with tired eyes and the patient demeanor of someone who delivers bad news for a living— types something into her computer and then looks at me with poorly concealed sympathy.
“Room 314,” she says gently, pointing down a corridor that stretches like a tunnel into the unknown. “Third floor, take the elevator to your right.”
The elevator ride feels like ascending into hell rather than just moving between floors. I smooth my hands over my hair, that’s turned frizzy after being caught in the rain. It feels like a lifetime ago that I left Osip in that parking lot. I feel like someone who’s about to receive news that will change everything, and maybe that’s exactly what I am.
Room 314.
The numbers are burned into my brain by the time I reach the third floor. The hallway stretches ahead of me, lined with identical doors that hide private tragedies and small miracles in equal measure. Nurses move efficiently between rooms, their soft-soled shoes making no sound on the polished linoleum. Somewhere, a machine beeps steadily— the sound of life being measured and monitored, reduced to electronic signals and digital readouts.
I hesitate outside room 314, my hand hovering over the handle. Through the narrow window in the door, I can see movement— a figure in a hospital bed, pale and small against white sheets. My mother. But not my mother. This person looks fragile in a way that my mother never has, diminished by whatever illness has been eating away at her while I was too self-absorbed to notice.
I don’t know if I’m ready to see what’s waiting for me on the other side.
But ready or not, this is my reality now. My mother is sick— seriously sick, if the medical files and hospital admission mean anything— and I’m all she has. Despite my own chaos, despite the mess I’ve made of my life, despite the secret pregnancy and dangerous relationship that have consumed my thoughts for months, she needs me.
I muster up whatever courage I can find and push the door open.
