I turn off the television and follow her, but by the time I get upstairs her bedroom door is closing. I think about saying something, about telling her she has to go to the doctor, and catch the door with one hand. I push it open, peer inside.
Mom hasn’t turned on any lights and is standing framed by moonlight coming in through the windows, reduced to nothing but a shadow. I push the door open more, clinging to it like a security blanket, like it will tell me how to say what I want to.
“I’m tired,” she says sharply. “I just need some sleep. That’s all.”
“Mom—”
“I’m tired,” she says again, and this time it sounds like a plea. I’ve never heard her sound like this before. I back out of the room, stand in the hall staring at the door I’ve pulled closed, at my hand resting on it. Eventually I walk to my room, get ready for bed. I don’t sleep.
In the morning I’m up extra early and wait anxiously for Mom to get up. I make coffee, and when it sits so long it gets cold, I dump it out and make more. When she finally comes downstairs she heads for the door and before I can even say a word she calls me over, tells me she’s going out, and hands me a cell, saying, “Come get me when I call you, okay?”
I know what this means. She’s picked a house, found a collection of silver she wants to hold in her hands but she can’t really be serious about this. This area is too small and we’re way too well known. I grin at her, or try to, and she just gives me a look.
She’s serious.
It hasn’t even been two weeks since I walked out of the Donaldsons’ with a bag slung over my shoulder and she greeted with me a smile, and now she’s going to try and steal silver from someone else? She’s been reckless sometimes, but she’s never been stupid. But this? This is stupid.
I can’t say that to her though. I never would, not before and not now, definitely not now, and so I just stand there looking at the cell she’s given me and listening to her breathe. She sounds normal today. Maybe that’s a sign. Maybe things will be okay.
She doesn’t say good-bye. She just leaves. After she’s gone I put on my shoes and then take them off. I put the car key in my pocket and then decide to leave it on the hook by the front door. I pick up Dennis’s card and fold it into thirds. I put it in my pocket.
I turn the television on and flip through the channels, then turn it off. I make a peanut butter sandwich and eat half of it, tearing the crusts into smaller and smaller pieces. I walk around the house. I get the car key and put it back in my pocket. I make sure the cell is on.
I take Dennis’s card out of my pocket and fold it into thirds the other way, then put it back in my pocket. I check to make sure the cell is on again.
I can’t stand this. I want to go out and find her. I want to—I don’t want to help her. I should, but I don’t. I want to leave town. I want to stop this, stop all of it.
I want to stop. I wonder what she would say if I told her that.
I shouldn’t say it.
I want to, though.
Why hasn’t she called?
I put my shoes back on. I open the window and try to listen to the ocean. I shut the window and turn the television back on. I watch and walk around and around the room, waiting. The afternoon lasts forever, four o’clock creeping to ten minutes after, crawling to fourteen minutes after. At four thirty I make another sandwich, but can only eat half of it again.
At twenty minutes after five I decide I won’t say anything. I’ll just pick her up when she calls. Things will be better after we get out of here. Everything will go back to normal. I just want to see her. At five thirty I take the phone and go outside, get in the car. I start it.
I can’t leave, can’t go looking for her. Mom’s never been much for rules, but one of the few she’s always made me swear to follow is that no matter what, I will always wait for her. I’ve done this all my life. I’ve waited and she’s always come back. Always. I go back in the house. Twenty minutes till six.
“Ring,” I tell the phone. It doesn’t. I think about saying it again but I can guess what will happen.
The phone does ring, finally, at seventeen minutes past six. I answer it before the first ring has even stopped. “Where are you?”
There’s silence for a moment, and then an unfamiliar voice says, “I’m calling from the emergency room at Provincetown Hospital.”
The voice keeps talking but there’s a roaring in my ears like the ocean but louder, a million times louder, and it’s all I can hear. The voice keeps talking and I catch a few words, feel them smash into me.
Collapsed
Difficulty breathing
Emergency procedure
I hear a strange brittle snap and realize I’m holding the phone so tight it’s cracking around the seam that holds both halves together.
“Are you there?” the voice says, and now it sounds a little unsure. “Are you a family member? It was hard to understand what she was saying when we asked who we should contact and—”
“Mom,” I manage to say. “She’s my mom.”
The voice tells me how to get to the hospital, talks about exits and the interstate. I want to ask how Mom got there but the words won’t come. I just hold the phone in my hand while I walk to the car, nodding as I listen to the directions as if the voice can see me. The voice cuts off, the phone going silent as I’m halfway down the driveway, and I have to stop at the end of it because I don’t know where to go, have forgotten where all the roads are, forgotten where each one leads.
I stare at the phone. It tells me “call ended.” I’m waiting for my mind to wake up, to remember, and then all the words I heard come back, collapsed emergency procedure difficulty breathing, and I drive.
30
Once, when I was younger, Mom sent me to the library to do research and I ended up reading a book instead. I don’t remember who wrote it but the cover had a girl on it. She was standing in the middle of a grassy field and it looked like she was staring off into the distance but I could tell she wasn’t. She had this look on her face, a look I couldn’t place but somehow knew, and so I pulled the book off the rack it was sitting on and read it.
It sucked. The girl lived in the country like a hundred years ago and spent all her time thinking about being a schoolteacher. That was it. That was the whole story. I stopped halfway through and looked at the cover again. I would have pulled it off the book and taken it with me, but there was a woman sitting across from me with a little kid in her arms, staring at me like she knew what I was thinking. I put the book back and walked away, but I never forgot that girl’s face.
It wasn’t even a real face, just some picture, but I still never forgot it. And when I walk into the hospital I realize why I didn’t. In the clear glass of the sliding doors that girl’s face looks back at me. The girl on the cover of that book was frightened. She’d seen something happen, something that had scared her, and all she could do was wait for what came next.
The doors slide open and I walk inside.
There’s fluid in Mom’s lungs. A lot of fluid. So much fluid that the emergency clinic she was first taken to had to send her here. This is all I’m told, first by a nurse and then by a doctor. The doctor asks me a bunch of questions, though. Has Mom been coughing? How long has she been coughing? Has she fainted? Had any dizzy spells? Shortness of breath? Stomach problems? Any irregular bleeding? He nods after everything I say, even when I say, “I don’t know.” The only time he doesn’t nod is when I tell him I want to see her.
That gets me an actual reply. A “No, not at this time.”
I can’t see Mom because the fluid in her lungs is being removed. The doctor doesn’t tell me this. He’s already gone. The nurse tells me. It’s this same nurse who tells me what happened, steering me toward the waiting room as she explains that my mother collapsed while walking down a street and ended up here.
I stare at the nurse. That’s not the whole story. I want to know everything. Where exactly was Mom? Did she stop and sink slowly to th
e ground? Or did it happen suddenly, her whole body giving way like something inside her was broken? Did she say anything when she was found? What does “difficulty breathing” mean? Why does she have to undergo an emergency procedure? But the nurse is already turning away.
If Mom were here she’d tell me not to call attention to myself. She’d tell me to wait, just like she did this morning.
I follow the nurse. I tell her I want to ask a few questions. She smiles at me tiredly. She says she has other patients. I say, “I’ll wait.” She says someone will be with me soon. I say, “I just want to know what happened to her.”
The nurse frowns. I don’t move. I say, “Please.” I say, “She’s my mother.” I say, “I’m scared.”
The nurse tells me everything she knows. My mother was found in Heaven, outside a house, by a boy walking his dog. She was lying on the ground. No one saw her fall. She couldn’t catch her breath, couldn’t talk to the boy, and then she couldn’t breathe. An ambulance was called. The paramedics who picked her up heard the fluid in her lungs. There was so much of it the emergency clinic sent her straight here.
“She’ll be all right,” the nurse says, and pats my arm. I think I want to hug her.
Then she makes me go to the waiting room, and I change my mind about wanting to hug her because I end up sitting next to a man holding a screaming baby. The man seems too tired or too stunned to do anything about it, just stares blankly in front of him. After an hour of this—me sitting, the man staring, and the baby screaming—the man and the baby are finally called back to see a doctor. I watch a television with no sound after that, stop looking at the clock once another hour has passed. I don’t want to think about what all this time means.
Finally I’m called back. The doctor is waiting for me. He takes me inside one of the little cubicles they use for patients and closes the green curtain partway. It rattles as it slides into place.
“We removed the fluid from your mother’s lungs,” he says. “It doesn’t look good. We’re running more tests now. Do you have insurance?”
“What doesn’t look good?”
“The fluid.”
“It was in her lungs. How could it possibly look good?”
The doctor sighs, rubs the bridge of his nose with two fingers. “Fluid in the lungs can be caused by many things. But your mother’s lungs contained the kind of fluid that we normally only see in cancer patients.”
“Cancer?”
“We won’t know anything till we run more tests. In the meantime, your mother was in no shape to fill out forms when she came in but…” The doctor trails off and gives me a look. When I don’t say anything, he nods like everything is settled, like everything is fine, and walks off.
“Cancer?” I say again, but he doesn’t hear me. I say it again, not a question this time. “Cancer.” It can’t be. It can’t.
It could be. After staring blindly at the forms I’m given when I’m taken back to the waiting room, I realize I have to do something. This isn’t a job gone bad, this isn’t us having to lay low for a while. This is different. I have to make plans. I have to take care of things. Mom isn’t going to come along and fix everything this time.
I go outside and notice it’s dark, the stars shining dimly overhead, burned out by the glow of the parking lot lights, and get the cell out of the car before I realize I don’t know who to call.
I don’t know what to do. I walk around the car on rubbery legs, thinking.
We don’t have insurance. I don’t have any money, and I doubt what Mom has in the house will cover anything.
We need money.
I shove my hands in my pockets. My hands brush against a piece of paper. A card. Dennis’s card.
I remember what the cop said about Mom and me and money. I pull out the card. I call the number on it.
I talk to what seems like four hundred people before someone, finally, takes my number and says they’ll call me right back.
Fifteen minutes, no call. I go back inside the waiting room. I wish I could rip all the NO CELL PHONES! signs off the wall. The nurse I speak to says she doesn’t know anything about Mom. I wish I could rip her head off.
I go back outside. Thirty minutes. No phone call, and there’s still no word on my mother.
Dennis calls after fifty-three minutes. He says he’s in the middle of a very important business dinner. I hear music in the background. I hear a woman laughing.
“Well?” Dennis says. He sounds annoyed. I tell him what’s happened. There is silence for a moment and then he says, “Oh no,” in a cracking voice and, “Hold on” to whomever he’s with. The next time he speaks, all I hear is his voice.
“Cancer? It could be cancer? It can’t be. Not—”
“I know,” I say, and wonder if every man Mom has met has fallen in love with her. Stupid of me to even wonder. Of course they have. “I need money to pay for everything. What do I do?”
He starts talking. I listen. I even take notes, jotting them down on the last map Mom stuck in the glove compartment. I write all over New England and am dipping down into North Carolina by the time Dennis is done. I hang up and my legs still feel rubbery and Mom—I wish they’d tell me something. I wish they’d let me see her.
But I have money now. Or will. Dennis said he’d take care of everything with the hospital and that there’d be a package waiting for me at the house when I—Dennis had paused then and hastily added, “When you both get home.”
“Right,” I said, and wondered if I sounded as fake as he did.
I go back into the hospital, stay in the waiting room staring at the silent television until a nurse comes out and tells me I should go home.
“Shower, get some sleep, eat something,” she says. “We’ll know more when you get back, I promise.”
I don’t believe her but I leave, am surprised the sun is up, that it’s day again. I drive back to the house. It still looks the same. I feel cheated by this. It should look different.
There are two things by the front door. One is a piece of paper folded in half and taped to the door. The second is an envelope, one of those thin special delivery ones. I pull the paper off the door and open it. Written on it is a phone number. Below it is a name. Greg. I stare at it for a moment and then fold it back in half.
I pick up the envelope, which is stamped RUSH and has a return address in New York. It seems too soon for it to be here, but the fact the sun is shining in my eyes tells me hours have passed since I talked to Dennis. All this time, and Mom—I lean against the door, close my burning eyes. They still hurt when I open them.
Inside the envelope is a note. Dennis’s handwriting is large, his letters all slanted sharp. He’s had Lucy take care of everything with the hospital. I wonder if I should wonder who Lucy is. I decide I just don’t care.
The only other thing in the envelope is a checkbook. The checks have my name on them. There’s other stuff too, but I can’t get past seeing that. What the cop said is true. Mom put everything in my name. I flip through the thing where you’re supposed to write your checks down. It must be called something, but I don’t know what it is. Dennis has written a figure at the very beginning, at the top of the first page. I stare at it.
I close the checkbook. I open it again. The figure doesn’t change. It can’t be right. I fumble for my phone, for Dennis’s card.
Dennis says it’s right. He says Mom is a “very shrewd investor.” He says he’s glad the package arrived. He says this in such a way I know I’m supposed to be impressed with how fast he got it here and say so. I’m silent. Dennis clears his throat and asks if I need anything else.
“No,” I say, and end the call. We never had to come here. We never had to—we could have stopped somewhere, stayed. We could have found a place and made it our home, a real home.
Mom would never want that.
No. Not would. Not in the past. Will. She will never want that.
I unlock the door and go inside. I should take a shower, eat something, do som
ething, but I don’t. I just stand there for a while, a pile of money in one hand and a cop’s phone number in the other. It should be funny, shouldn’t it? It doesn’t feel funny. I let them both go. The checkbook falls straight to the floor. The paper takes a while longer to get there, but I wait, watch it flutter down.
I take a shower and make coffee. I gag with every sip but manage to drink a cup. I pick up the checkbook. I look at the piece of paper on the floor. I pick it up too. I crumple it. It rests in my hand, ready to be thrown away.
I take it out to the car with me, shove it under the seat. At the traffic light I’m forced to sit through before I can turn in to the hospital parking lot, I pick it up and smooth it out. The light is still red. I fold it in half, carefully, and slide it into my pocket.
The light turns green.
31
I’m finally allowed to see Mom. She’s still in the emergency room and when I walk into the little green-curtained cubicle that’s hers, it’s clear what she’s expecting. She’s ready to leave, is dressed and flipping through a ratty-looking magazine with one hand, the fingers of the other tapping impatiently against her knee.
“You should go start the car,” she tells me when she hugs me, a whisper in my ear right after she says “Baby!” and pulls me into her arms. When I don’t reply, she moves away and looks at me.
“I want to talk to the doctor,” I tell her.
She sighs. “I don’t know what they told you, but it’s nothing. I’m fine now. Don’t I sound fine?”
“You sound terrible.”
“I mean aside from sounding like I had a tube shoved down my throat. Come here, listen.” I do, and she breathes slow and deep, easily. Normally. “See? I’m fine.”