While my grandmother lay in the ICU with a broken hip and a bleed on her brain, my mother told the night doctor not to bother talking to her because she couldn’t hear a word.

My mother, Sheila, was beside the bed, speaking across Grandma as if she weren’t there. Grandma’s eyes were open. She was looking straight at me.

Aunt Judy stood ten feet down the hallway with Grandma’s power of attorney in her purse. Mom had already told the paramedics Judy was the reason Grandma had fallen. The doctor had taken Judy into the family room because her name was on the papers. When she came back out, she looked at me.

“Go back downstairs, Kylie,” she said. “You’ve done enough.”

I’m an ER nurse on nights at the hospital in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, two floors below that ICU. I knew how serious a broken hip and a bleed on the brain could be. I also knew I was frightened, and that I had spent a year accepting Mom’s version of why Grandma never answered my calls.

Grandma Marlene half raised me while Mom worked at the plant. When I started nursing school, I promised Grandma I’d call every night at nine before my shift. I kept that promise for six years. Until August, I was a travel nurse in Pittsburgh, so those calls were most of what I had of her outside the holidays.

For the last year, she hadn’t picked up once.

“She can’t hear the phone ring anymore, honey,” Mom would tell me.

Grandma had moved in with my parents three years earlier, after Grandpa died. A year ago, Mom said, Grandma’s hearing aids went missing at church and Medicare wouldn’t pay for new ones. I offered to buy replacements out of my paycheck.

“She’ll just lose those too,” Mom said.

“I can get them myself.”

“Kylie, she won’t keep track of them.”

In May, I bought a pair at the pharmacy anyway. Two weeks later, Mom said Grandma had flushed them down the toilet. I didn’t know how to argue with that from Pittsburgh, and I didn’t ask Grandma directly. I wish I had.

Since I moved home in August, I’d seen her more often, but not really alone. On my work nights, my six-year-old daughter, Mia, slept at Mom’s. When I dropped her off, Grandma was already asleep in the back bedroom. During visits, Mom answered questions about appointments and medicines. Grandma sat nearby, smiling at the conversation she couldn’t hear.

The first week I was home, I tried to speak with her the way I do with deaf patients at work. I sat beside her with a notepad and wrote a question. She took the pen and began to write.

“Sheila took, ”

Mom slid the pad from under Grandma’s hand.

“She writes that about everything,” she told me. “Her glasses, her teeth, the remote. It’s the dementia, honey.”

I looked at Grandma. She was still holding the pen.

“Let her finish,” I said.

“She doesn’t know what she’s writing.”

Mom folded the notepad shut. I didn’t take it back from her.

That is the sentence I would be nervous to post: I let my mother take the words from Grandma, and then I went along with her explanation.

Mom said Judy had tried to move Grandma to her house in Altoona the previous spring. She told me Judy had wanted everything of Grandma’s since they were girls.

“Now she wants her money,” Mom said.

“She has power of attorney,” I said.

“Because Mama chose her. That doesn’t mean Judy’s intentions are good.”

Mom had always said Grandma called Judy her “easy one.” I heard the old hurt in that, but I treated it as proof of something about Judy instead of something about Mom. In June, I blocked Judy’s number. When she called twice from her husband’s phone, I let it ring.

I thought I was staying out of a fight between my mother and aunt. I was not staying out of it. I was helping decide whose voice I would hear.

That night Grandma fell in Mom’s kitchen and hit her head. The paramedics found her on the floor by the kitchen phone, in the dark, with the receiver hanging beside her face. They brought her through my own ER and up to the ICU while I was with another patient. By the time my charge nurse sent me upstairs, the doctors were caring for her and Mom was explaining the fall.

“Judy’s got Mama so worked up with her lawyer letters she doesn’t know day from night,” Mom said.

I didn’t know about any letters. I knew only what Mom had told me, and I had not spoken to Judy in months.

The paramedics’ account of where Grandma was found stayed with me: on the kitchen floor, beside the phone. It didn’t prove what happened. It did make me think of all those calls Grandma hadn’t answered.

My charge nurse told me to take all the time I needed. Mom had brought Mia to the hospital in her pajamas, so I stayed with them while Grandma was in the ICU. Judy had driven in from Altoona at one in the morning. After the doctor spoke with her, she came down the hall and told me to go back downstairs.

I went into the stairwell and cried. I was scared Grandma would die before I heard her voice on the phone again. I was angry with Judy for saying I had done enough, though I knew I had not been there for Grandma in the way I’d promised.

When I came back, Mom was holding Grandma’s hand through the bed rail and talking to the night doctor.

“Don’t waste your breath on Mama,” she said. “She’s deaf as a post, and half the time she doesn’t know where she is.”

The doctor paused. Grandma kept looking toward me.

“She’s awake,” I said.

Mom turned. “Kylie, she can’t hear.”

I was used to speaking up for patients. I had done it at work, with strangers, without having to decide whether I was also challenging my mother. In that room I still hesitated.

“Maybe talk to her anyway,” I said.

Mom turned back toward the doctor. He continued speaking with her about Grandma’s care. I stood beside the bed and watched Grandma’s eyes move between us.

At four, Mom and Dad went down to the cafeteria for coffee. They left me with Mia and Mom’s purse on the chair between us. Mia had been sleeping on the waiting-room chairs. She sat up, her hair falling across her face.

“Mommy, is Great-Grandma going to get her ears back now?” she asked.

“What ears, baby?”

“The little ones in Nana’s purse,” she said. “Nana says it’s our secret.”

I looked at the purse. I didn’t open it right away. I had spent months explaining away what Grandma could not hear, what she tried to write and what she didn’t say. I kept trying to fit Mia’s words into Mom’s version.

“Did Nana show you?” I asked.

Mia nodded. “She said they’re hers.”

I waited a little longer, as if Mom might come back and make the question unnecessary. Then I unzipped the inside pocket.

There was a small blue case with Grandma’s initials on the lid, the one I remembered her opening every morning when I was a child. I opened it. Grandma’s hearing aids were inside.

Tucked beside them, wrapped in pink tissue from Mom’s bathroom, was a scrap of paper. The handwriting was shaky. It said, “Sheila took.”

Those were the same unfinished words Grandma had started on my notepad. I sat with the case open and read the scrap again. It did not tell me exactly what had happened in the kitchen. It did tell me that when Grandma tried to say something about Mom taking something, Mom had stopped her.

Mia leaned against me. I folded the tissue back around the paper, not because I wanted to hide it, but because I didn’t want to lose it. I kept the hearing aids in their case.

When Mom and Dad came back, Mom saw the purse open.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Mia said Grandma’s hearing aids were in here.”

Mom’s eyes went to the case. “She shouldn’t have been going through my things.”

“I opened the pocket.”

“You don’t understand.”

“Then tell me.”

Mom looked toward Grandma’s room. “Not here.”

I was tired of hearing that there was some explanation I wasn’t allowed to hear while Grandma sat within reach, awake and unable to follow the conversation.

“She’s right there,” I said. “You keep telling people not to talk to her.”

Mom’s mouth tightened. “She can’t hear you.”

I held up the case. “These are hers.”

Dad stayed beside the cafeteria door. He didn’t step between us or tell either of us what to do. Mia watched us without speaking.

Mom didn’t explain the paper or the hearing aids. She reached toward the purse, then stopped when I closed it. I didn’t want a scene in the hallway. I also wasn’t going to put the case back and pretend I hadn’t found it.

Judy was still there. I walked down the hall to her and held out the case and the scrap. She looked at the writing, then at me.

“You found them,” she said.

“I should have listened to you.”

Judy didn’t answer right away. She took the paper, careful not to crease it.

“Grandma wrote this before?” I asked.

“She tried to tell you,” Judy said. “I tried too.”

“I know.”

“You blocked my number.”

“I know that, too.”

I wanted her to tell me it was all right, but she didn’t. She had come to the hospital in the middle of the night because Grandma was hurt, and I had made it harder for her to reach me before that. I couldn’t make an apology undo it.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Judy nodded once. “The doctor spoke with me because I’m on the papers. I’m staying with Grandma.”

That much was clear: the power of attorney was in Judy’s purse, not Mom’s, and the doctor had spoken with her. I didn’t know what would happen medically. I didn’t know what the next days would bring. I could stop repeating Mom’s account as if it were the only one.

I went back to Grandma’s room with the hearing-aid case. Mom was still there. I did not ask her permission to speak to Grandma.

“Grandma, it’s Kylie,” I said, leaning close enough for her to see my face. “I found your hearing aids. They’re here.”

Her eyes stayed on me. I didn’t put the aids in her ears; I didn’t know whether that was appropriate while she was being treated. I set the case where Judy could keep it and asked the nurse to help us communicate with Grandma in a way she could follow.

Mom began to say something, then stopped. The doctor spoke to Judy about Grandma’s care. This time, I didn’t leave the room, and I didn’t let Mom answer for Grandma before anyone had tried to reach her.

I had spent a year believing my grandmother couldn’t hear me. I had not asked why she stopped answering in a way she could answer.

The hearing aids were in the hospital with Judy. Grandma was still in the ICU, and the rest was unknown. I couldn’t repair the year I had lost. I could stop pretending I hadn’t helped lose it.