Читать книгу I'll Be Watching You - M. William Phelps - Страница 34

I

Diana Jansen was overwhelmed by what had happened to her mother. When she went back to see Mary Ellen a few days after her second surgery, there were tubes protruding from her mother’s mouth and nose, IV lines sticking out of her arms. Diana was not happy about the care her mother was receiving at the hospital. Seeing her up and walking, she thought Mary Ellen was making great progress; but walking in that second time and seeing Mary Ellen bedridden was disturbing to Diana. She put both hands over her mouth and gasped. The bruises Mary Ellen had sustained during the attack had become more pronounced. Her mother looked beat up. There was one point when Mary Ellen’s oldest daughter—Diana’s sister—was in the room and Mary Ellen began falling in and out of consciousness, moaning in pain.

“Can’t she have more medicine?” her daughter asked the nurse.

“Absolutely not,” the nurse said.

Any more sedation and Mary Ellen’s slow heart rate might stop, the nurse explained. Yet, moments later, when the nurse left, all the alarms suddenly went off. Mary Ellen stopped breathing. The code blue team pushed their way into the room with the crash cart and, after a few tries, brought her back to life.

II

Mary Ellen later explained those first hours at the hospital when she didn’t know if she was going to survive. Arriving at the hospital after the attack, on her way into surgery, she believed it was over. “Black and white,” she called that period. “Some of this is as clear as a photograph and some is as dark as night. That was me going in and out.”

“Am I going to die?” Mary Ellen asked the doctor as they prepped her for surgery.

“Can I get anyone for you?” the doctor asked. “Can we call anyone?”

Mary Ellen thought of calling her brother. Maybe he could perform last rites over the phone, just in case she didn’t make it.

Making matters worse, Mary Ellen’s family blamed her. She began to sense their reproach as the days passed. She shouldn’t have been at a singles dance. It was ungodly. A good Catholic wouldn’t be out and about, trolling the town for men. Family members routinely asked: What were you doing there? How could you be so stupid? “My father especially,” Mary Ellen said. “This is a family who thought that I should have spent time with the church, doing service, after my first divorce, which was actually an annulment. They were very angry with me for dating at all. My father would call me a couple times a week. If I wasn’t home, he wanted to know where I was.”

From the family’s pious point of view, a divorced man was not an eligible candidate for Mary Ellen. The men she dated were supposed to be widowed or bachelors. When it came to divorce, “they insisted on an annulment.”

It was three days before her parents even showed up at the hospital for a visit. Apparently, they just couldn’t deal with what had happened, or disagreed with her social behavior.

III

Mary Ellen’s liver had been lacerated. She had an incision running the entire length of her abdomen, from the upper part of her chest all the way down to her belly button. Surgeons had conducted exploratory surgery. “This man knew anatomy,” one of the doctors told Mary Ellen. “Your clothes had been ripped down to your waist. These were carefully aimed wounds. Very clean. This person knew what he was aiming for.”

Despite it all, Mary Ellen was alive. And she believed she had learned something from the attack. Until that day, she had always thought of herself as a weak person. “I had this violent husband who had terrorized me for years, and I thought I was weak because of that. But I know I fought Ned Snelgrove on that night—and, at least in part, I know that my actions saved my life.”