“Mrs. Whitaker! Mrs. Whitaker, can you hear me?”
Her eyes opened. Just a little. They were cloudy and confused. Her lips moved.
“Carly,” she whispered. “It’s Thursday.”
“Yes. Yes, it’s Thursday. I’m here. I’ve got you.”
“I’ve been waiting,” she said. “I knew you’d come on Thursday.”
I called 911 with my hands shaking so badly I dropped the phone twice. I got a towel from the rack, one of the plain gray ones, the ones for her, and I folded it under her head. I got the
blanket from her bed and covered her with it. Her hands were ice cold. I held them between mine and rubbed them and talked to her the whole time, about anything, about the weather, about Willa, about the bird’s nest in the attic window, just so she would keep her eyes open.
The paramedics came in eleven minutes. It felt like eleven hours.
She had fallen getting out of the bath on Tuesday night. She had broken her hip. She couldn’t get up. She couldn’t reach the phone, which was on the nightstand in the bedroom. She had been lying
on that cold tile floor for almost thirty-six hours.
“Another day,” the paramedic told me quietly as they carried her down the stairs on a stretcher, “and I don’t think she’d have made it. Dehydration. Hypothermia. At her age.” He shook his head.
“You found her just in time.”
I rode with her in the ambulance. Nobody told me I could. Nobody told me I couldn’t. I just climbed in, and the paramedic looked at me, and he didn’t say anything.
At the hospital, they asked me if I was family.
“No,” I said. “I’m her cleaner.”
The nurse gave me a strange look. “Is there family we should call?”
I called Susan in Oregon. I had her number because it was on a list taped inside the cabinet by the phone, in Mrs. Whitaker’s perfect cursive. In case of emergency.
Susan cried on the phone. She said she was getting on the first flight she could. She asked me to
please stay with her mother until she got there.
So I stayed. I called my other client for the afternoon and canceled. I called my neighbor to get Willa off the bus. I sat in the hospital waiting room while they did surgery on Mrs. Whitaker’s hip,
