The Heart of a Woman - Maya Angelou [122]
“How long will he be unconscious?”
“I can't tell you. I think he's in shock. But he may be in a coma. The picture will be back tomorrow. Come back in the morning. Maybe there'll be some news.” Two nurses met us at the door and wheeled Guy quickly down the hall. I started to follow, but Alice touched my arm.
“Let them have him. They'll make him comfortable. That's their business.”
I watched the gurney disappear, carrying away the closest person in the world to me.
I went back to Walter's house and made a pot of coffee. I drank cup after cup, cooling the boiling liquid with gin. Alice went home, Walter went to bed, but at dawn I found a phone directory and called a taxi.
In the clear day, the hospital looked like a normal hospital. I was shown to Guy's room, he recognized me and my spirits soared.
“Hi, Mom, what happened?”
His voice was faint and his skin the color of a hot-house lemon.
I told him about the accident, but before I could finish the story, he had drifted back into unconsciousness. I sat for an hour, willing him to awareness, wiping his face with the edge of his pillow case. Worrying if he was going to die, and wondering how I could go on, where I could go, what I would have to live for if he died.
A doctor met me outside the room.
“You are Mrs. Angelou?” (I had written my old name on the admission form.)
'Yes, Doctor, how is he? Will he live?”
“He has a broken arm, broken leg and possible internal injuries. But he is young. I think he will come through.”
I spent the day in Guy's room, watching him slide in and out of consciousness. When I took a taxi to Julian's house, it was because the nurses had pointedly asked me to leave. Visiting hours were posted and everyone had to observe them.
Anna Livia opened the door, and I collapsed in her arms. She had heard about the accident and when the hysteria dissipated, she said that although she was not assigned to Korle Bu Hospital, she would make a visit to Guy that evening. I should go get a night's sleep. She dropped me at Walter's house. The door leading to Guy's room looked ominous, still I knocked, hoping to hear him say, “Yes, Mom. I'm busy. I'll be out in a minute.”
I turned and sat down on my borrowed bed. The next thing I knew, Walter was shaking my shoulder. “Sister Maya. Sister. Dr. Codero is on the telephone.”
I followed him, fumbling my way down the hall. I didn't know any Dr. Codero, nor did I recognize the man who awakened me or even the house I was reeling through.
“Hello. Maya Angelou here.” That was the way Vus answered the phone, with his full name.
“Maya, it's Anna Livia. I had some new X-rays done. They've been developed. I'm at Korle Bu now. The accident was more serious than the other doctors thought. Guy's neck is broken.”
The crash, my pale son, his awful clammy skin, my love for him, all rushed into my brain at once.
“In three places. I have ordered him moved. He is going to be put in a body, arm and leg cast. Are you there, Maya?”
I was nowhere. Certainly nowhere I had ever been before. I said, “Yes, of course.”
She explained that she had contacts at a military hospital and when the plaster hardened he would be taken there. He was quite tense, so it was better that I held off my visit until he calmed down.
I said, “I'm on my way.”
She meant well, but she didn't know my son. She didn't know the cocky boy who had to live daily with his father's rejection, or the young man who had lived with the certainty of white insolence and the unsureness of moving from school to school, coast to coast, and was made to find his way through another continent and new cultures. A person whose only certitude lay in the knowledge that Mom, effective or not, was never too far away.
“I'm on my way.”
I waited in the halls and yard and canteen of the hospital