No Wrong Time

I’ve always known deep down that Ma was right.

And I’ve only just understood what she meant all along.

You see, once, the days slipped through my fingers thick and fast. The mornings were dark, the coffee darker. I used to wash the bitterness away with sterile scents from the operating theatre. The surgical mask was reassuring; not just comfortable but warm, as if it were made for me. And I would never glance backwards to see who was slotting the tools so neatly into my grasp.

I went home whenever I could, though Ma never asked about my surgeries. I don’t think she understood what a Fellowship was. I’d tell her anyway, of course, and she would listen as she always did, with her head cocked slightly to the side. But afterwards she’d raise her eyebrows at me, in the way she’d done when I was a gangly child with grass-stains on my knees, and pierce through it all.

“Yes, but were you kind, honey?”

And I’d say: “Yes, Ma, I was kind. I’m a doctor. Doctors are kind.”

She’d smile at first, but it always disappeared when she thought I wasn’t looking.

She never stopped working, my Ma. Back then, I’d send her money every week — more than she ever needed — but she insisted on pushing that cleaning trolley around the hotel until her ginger curls had long since faded to grey. She’d joke that when she eventually found my father, no one would solve his murder - the crime scene would be too clean. That was her kind of humour, my Ma.

Once, she’d scrimped and saved and sacrificed towards owning her own little slice of the Earth. “I don’t need no white picket fence,” she said, her eyes floating on clouds. “Just a little place, a small place, for you and me, the way it’s always been.” Then she’d poke a bony elbow into my ribs. “With an extra room for my grandkids!”

I still don’t remember the surgeons who removed my appendix. Beforehand was a blur of pain, Ma’s steady hand on my arm, and sleep in fitful starts. But I awoke the next morning cured. I saw them briefly: a tight-knit formation of white coats, furrowed brows, businesslike demeanours. And then they were gone, taking Ma’s dream with a practised, elegant sweep of the hospital curtain.

“I want to be like them, Ma,” I said. “I want to be a doctor.”

She’d put down the hospital bill, crumpling it in her hands, taken a long, deep breath with her eyes closed, then smiled at me.

“Go for it, honey.” Slow, fat tears rolled out of the clouds. “But be kind to your patients. Always be kind.”

And I was, in my way.

One of the youngest trainees in years. Lowest post-op complication rate, at my level, in the state. I’d been offered my pick of Vascular, Urology, Cardiothoracics, Plastics. I told myself: what was kindness if not a successful operation? My patients always left satisfied.

Not Ma, though.

“Do you talk to them?” she said once.

“Of course. I always explain the procedure beforehand. And afterwards, they get better.”

“But did you ask how they felt?”

“Yes, Ma, I did.” Under her green gaze, I was a stuttering teenager again. “They’re always fine. Hardly any pain, moving their bowels, passing urine, walking around.”

“I mean how did they feel, dear?”

“I don’t know. There’s no time to ask that. And I’m not a psychiatrist!”

All I’d gotten back was silence and a frown.

I wished I’d asked more often how she felt. I knew she got really down sometimes. Back then, it felt like hers was the only diagnosis I wasn’t able to cure.

She’d smoked all her life, my Ma did. I never counted her pack-years because I knew the answer would trouble me too much. Once, she let me drag her to the family doctor, and he held up a chart with three lines. The green one was her life if she’d never smoked. The red one was her at that moment, dwindling away to nothing at the bottom. And the blue one followed the red for some time, but then it paused, looked upward, and started following the green. That one was if she stopped smoking that very day.

She wouldn’t, though. Not my Ma.

“It’s been this long, what’s a little longer gonna do?”

“You saw the chart. Be kind, Ma,” I replied in desperation. “Be kind to yourself.”

Her eyes had flashed then. “You can’t say that, honey.”

On a day when the chemo laid her especially low, Ma told me she wanted to die. All of her hair, all of those curls she used to pride herself on, that she was so proud she’d passed down to me - they were gone. They’d abandoned her like the rest.

Once, I did the unthinkable, and I left one of my patients on the operating table. Another surgeon could have finished that surgery, but there was no-one else to hold Ma’s hand when she was wheeled into the ER.

Once, and only once, I cried at the bedside.

It wasn’t cancer that took her, in the end.

So now, much later, rain on the highway batters me every day. My knuckles are white on the steering wheel, and teardrops smear into broad, arcing strokes on the windshield. The wipers squeak with exhaustion. I’m sweating, despite the damp; it creeps through the window, seeping under my collar and into my nostrils, smelling of the laundry Ma once scolded me for leaving out in the rain.

Today finds me deep in the grey, when the commute home stretches itself out to be almost unbearable. Peering through the deluge, I see a car stranded on the side of the highway, its lights dimmed, and a forlorn figure stands hunched beside it.

I never stop for them. In fact I don’t usually notice them at all. I always seem to have more important things on my mind. But maybe Ma’s spirit is with me today, urging me to do something, to help, to make her proud.

To be kind.

I pull up behind him and get out gingerly; my suit is drenched in seconds.

“You alright?”

The kid looks barely out of his teens and has a car to match. He looks up uncertainly.

“Yep.”

“Can I help? What’s wrong?”

He shrugs.

Let him go, a voice mutters in the back of my head. He doesn’t want to be helped.

Be kind, another voice whispers.

I point at my car. “Come in out of the rain, kid.”

He straightens up and lets me direct him into my passenger seat. His mop of dirty blond hair sends droplets scattering everywhere as he twists his head up and around, left and right.

“Nice ride,” he says, eyes averted.

“You called a mechanic yet?”

He shakes his head, wetting my leather even further.

“Alright then,” I say, “let me call someone.”

“No, don’t,” he says to the carpet. He hesitates. “Take me to the exit on 52nd. My friend’s a mechanic. His garage’s near there.”

Deciding not to push it, I pull back into traffic, surgery filling my mind again. This kid looks like a hundred others I’ve taken appendixes out of. Heck, he isn’t much older than I was when I got appendicitis.

“Where were you going?”

“Uh, nowhere.”

“Nowhere?” I’ve heard that before. “Alright. Look, if your car’s broken down, someone will have to pay to tow it away. Do you have a phone? Do you want to tell your parents what happened?”

“No, don’t call anyone,” he says, twisting to scowl at me. “Can you just drop me where I said?”

I frown, choosing not to reply, and silence stretches for a time. I glance over, and he’s looking out into the driving rain. Everything is awash, tears swelling across my windows and onto the road and over the city ahead. My car hums softly, but I recall how Ma’s old Corolla used to grunt with the rhythm of the wipers as she changed gears. Stubborn as ever, she drove a stick shift right until she passed.

“Why’d you stop for me?” he says finally, still looking out the window.

“Well,” I say, swallowing the lump in my throat, “it’s something my ma used to say all the time. That there’s no wrong time to be kind.”

“Used to? She stopped saying it?”

“No. She died.”

“Oh, that sucks. Sounds like she was a good person.”

“The best.”

“How did she…?” He looks at me quickly and away again.

I take a deep breath. “She killed herself.”

My eyes are on the road ahead, but everything is grey now. “Listen, kid. You need to call your family — mum, dad, sister, aunt, grandma, whoever — and tell them what happened. It’s getting late, it’s pouring down outside. They’ll be worried.”

“They won’t. They don’t care. You don’t know my family.”

“And you don’t know life. The good thing is, you have lots of time to learn. I didn’t call my ma enough, and Lord knows I’m paying for it now. The least you can do is ask them for help when you need it. Go on, kid. Do it. You might be surprised.”

He’s still looking out the window as we pull into the exit on 52nd. It’s not an area I’m familiar with. Grey stretches endlessly onward, and the rain falls away on either side. Nothing moves. Nothing breathes. Far below us, lights trail into the distance.

I pull over and kill the engine, but he doesn’t move. His fingers tremble on the armrest.

“Hey. Are you absolutely sure about this?”

He turns away from the window, lips pressed firmly together, and rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands. He shakes his head. He stops to think. He shakes his head again.

“Your phone, then,” I urge him, and he passes it over. “Who should I call?”

Before I lost my Ma, I’d seen her constant talk of kindness as a form of weakness, of humbling myself to others. And after her death, being alone in the grey, I thought I’d lost my chance forever. But today, soaked and scowling and scared, the kid helps me realise what I’ve been missing all along; what I’ve failed to do.

There’s no wrong time.

I just have to reach out.