Page 133 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

for a profession that lands them in a place such as this. She cannot begin to

understand it. She loathes hospitals. She hates seeing people at their worst, the
sickly smell, the squeaky gurneys, the hallways with their drab paintings, the
incessant paging overhead.
Dr. Delaunay turns out younger than Pari had expected. He has a slender
nose, a narrow mouth, and tight blond curls. He guides her out of the emergency
room, through the swinging double doors, into the main hallway.
“When your mother arrived,” he says in a confidential tone, “she was quite
inebriated … You don’t seem surprised.”
“I’m not.”

“Neither were a number of the nursing staff. They say she runs a bit of a tab
here. I am new here myself, so, of course, I’ve never had the pleasure.”
“How bad was it?”
“She was quite ornery,” he says. “And, I should say, rather theatrical.”

They share a brief grin.
“Will she be all right?”
“Yes, in the short term,” Dr. Delaunay says. “But I must recommend, and
quite emphatically, that she reduce her drinking. She was lucky this time, but
who’s to say next time …”
Pari nods. “Where is she?”

He leads her back into the emergency room and around the corner. “Bed
three. I’ll be by shortly with discharge instructions.”
Pari thanks him and makes her way to her mother’s bed.
“Salut, Maman.”

Maman smiles tiredly. Her hair is disheveled, and her socks don’t match.
They have wrapped her forehead with bandages, and a colorless fluid drips
through an intravenous linked to her left arm. She is wearing a hospital gown the
wrong way and has not tied it properly. The gown has parted slightly in the
front, and Pari can see a little of the thick, dark vertical line of her mother’s old
cesarian scar. She had asked her mother a few years earlier why she didn’t bear
the customary horizontal mark and Maman explained that the doctors had given
her some sort of technical reason at the time that she no longer remembered. The
important thing, she said, was that they got you out.
“I’ve ruined your evening,” Maman mutters.

“Accidents happen. I’ve come to take you home.”
“I could sleep a week.”
Her eyes drift shut, though she keeps talking in a sluggish, stalling manner. “I