“Mom, you’re okay,” Joanna reassured.
“I’m not. I can feel something growing.”
Joanna bit down hard on her lip and turned, staring at a poster for how to self-administer a breast exam. When she faced her mother again, Catherine was patting Scott’s hand. “Honey,” she croaked in a faraway voice, “you’re such a sweetheart. Thank you for being here.”
Scott ducked his head. “It’s no trouble.”
She looked at Joanna. “You know, if things get messed up with Charles, just marry this one instead.”
“Mom.” Joanna felt her face flush in horror. If things get messed up with Charles. And Joanna, presumably, was the one doing the messing. She shot Scott an apologetic glance. “Sorry, she’s looped from the drugs.”
Catherine shook her head. “No I’m not. It’s obvious Scott’s in love with you. And honey, you’d still get what you wanted. He’s still a Bates-McAllister.”
Joanna bristled. He’s still a Bates-McAllister. The tips of her fingers throbbed. “What are you talking about?” she said quietly. Catherine’s face grew more lucid. She gave Joanna a clever look, then turned to Scott. “She wanted the Bates-McAllisters from the very start, and she got one. I was floored when she told me she and Charles were dating. But she got what she wanted.”
So this was where she was going. Joanna couldn’t breathe. The room instantly became very, very silent. She could feel Scott’s eyes on her. Catherine turned to Scott. “She collected photos of your mom and you boys since she was about eleven years old, you see,” she said. “Saved tons of them. Loved your fairy-tale life.”
“Mom!” Joanna tried to laugh. Catherine’s voice wasn’t laced with nastiness; it didn’t seem like she had an insidious, ulterior motive for telling Scott this. Maybe Catherine just thought it was a funny story, an amusing little anecdote about Joanna as a girl. Only, it wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t.
Now Scott was staring at Joanna, a befuddled expression on his face. He turned back to Catherine. “A scrapbook, did you say?” “Uh-huh,” Catherine said. “Loved pictures of you all going to parties and benefits. Kept every single one. It was her little dream, to be part of your family.”
Scott swept back to Joanna. He was probably connecting what Catherine was saying with what Joanna had told him last night, her inane story about the Kimberton Fair, how she thought it would be one thing and was disappointed when it turned out to be something different. It was her fairy tale to be part of their family, but their family had let her down.
“Mom,” Joanna said weakly. She brushed her hair out of her face. “That’s not exactly how it happened, and you know it.”
Catherine gave her a patronizing look, “Of course it was! You kept a scrapbook. You idolized them. It’s okay, honey. You were young.” Joanna pushed her tongue into the back corner of her cheek. Something deep inside her broke. This had to be corrected. “You idolized them,” she cried. “You were the one who obsessed over them. You were the one who was disappointed about absolutely everything in your life and wished you were someone else.”
Catherine blew a raspberry. “What are you talking about? I did no such thing.”
Joanna blinked at her. “Mom. You wouldn’t shut up about Sylvie Bates-McAllister, hoping that, I don’t know, you’d become more like her by osmosis.”
She snorted. “Now that’s just silly.”
Joanna couldn’t believe it. Her mother was flat-out denying everything she had been, as though Joanna had dreamt it up. “So then I suppose you were satisfied with your life? I suppose you were happy with where we lived, and belongings didn’t matter. The way people thought about you didn’t matter. Do I have that right?”
It didn’t even sound like her voice, but the voice of someone older,
nastier. “And I suppose you didn’t have to go to the hospital every week,
either?” she continued. “I suppose you didn’t drag me there all the time,
making me sit in the little ER waiting room thinking you were dead?” “There’s something wrong with me,” Catherine insisted. “No, there isn’t!” Joanna moaned. “One of these days, there might be. And one of these days, it’s not going to feel so great.”
Catherine shrunk into her pillow. Scott swiveled his head back and forth, tennis match-style, watching them. Joanna pivoted away. “Just … don’t go saying the Bates-McAllisters were my little obsession,” she said. “You wanted to trade your life in, not me.” The room was still. No one moved. Then Catherine’s blood pressure monitor made a loud, angry quack. A figure appeared in the doorway and cleared his throat. Dr. Nestor wore a surgeon’s mask around his neck. He glared at Joanna as though he’d heard every scathing thing Joanna had just said.
“Can I have a word with you?” Dr. Nestor asked Joanna. “What is it?” Catherine struggled to sit up. “Whatever you can tell her, you can tell me.”
“Just a moment, Mrs. Farrow,” the doctor said, smiling at her. “You just rest.”
Joanna trudged into the hall, her skin cold. It felt as if everyone was staring at her. They were in a hospital, for God’s sake. Amid sick people. People who needed to be uplifted, not yelled at. She kept her eyes trained on the shiny white floor, afraid to look at either the doctor or Scott, who had followed them out.
The doctor walked a few doors down and stopped by an empty wheelchair. “We had to do a special type of procedure to locate Catherine’s cyst. But we finally found it and had it surgically removed. It’s benign.”
Joanna breathed out. “Okay. Thanks.”
But then the doctor hesitated.
“When we were removing the tumor, we couldn’t help but notice how swollen her liver was.” He paused to scratch his nose. “We’ll do a scan, but we could tell by touch that it was enlarged. Do you know if your mother’s on any medication we might not have recorded in her chart?”
“My mother’s on all kinds of medication,” she answered. The doctor’s eyebrows knitted together. “She didn’t give any prescription information when the nurse took her history.”
Joanna swallowed hard. The doctor’s eyebrows crept even higher. “Is some of this not prescribed?”
She lowered her head, feeling backed into a corner. She wondered if she’d just stepped into something, if Dr. Nestor was secretly an undercover drug enforcement officer here to bust Catherine and her illegal prescription habit. “Yes,” she whispered.
“What does she take?”
Joanna shrugged. “I have no idea.”
“Tylenol?”
“Well, sure.”
“Vitamin supplements?”
Joanna felt her face twisting helplessly. “I mean, she takes all kinds of things. She had drawers full of … of everything.”
“Cholesterol medicine, like Lipitor? Does she take anything like Phenobarbital? Does she take a lot of antibiotics? Tetracyclines? Nitrofurantoins?”
“She takes antibiotics whenever she gets a cold,” Joanna whispered. She said the other medications he mentioned were familiar, too—she’d seen them strewn around the house. She’d seen all kinds of things lying around the house. Whenever she turned around, Catherine was popping something.
Dr. Nestor stretched out his palms, lowered his eyes, and heaved a centering, Zenlike sigh. “Okay. Let’s not panic. We’re just testing right now. But … the liver, you see, it filters the blood. It filters toxins out of the body, excesses of vitamins or high levels of medications. It processes all of that.”
“Okay.”
He scratched behind his ear, sheepish. “A damaged liver is . . . blocked. It doesn’t clean the blood as well. The more you put into your body, the more clogged it gets. You have noticed that your mother is rather yellow, right?”
Joanna stared at him.
“Her skin,” Dr. Nestor spelled out. “Her face. The whites of her eyes. You’ve noticed that, right?”
Joanna felt helpless. “She wears a lot of makeup.”
“Has she talked about any pain? Itching? Feeling bloated?” “She complains about that, sure. She complains about a lot of things.”
The doctor stared at her, pursing his lips judgmentally. Joanna’s skin prickled with shame and embarrassment. What kind of asshole marches out here and basically implies that her mother has … God knows what? Cirrhosis? Hepatitis? And what kind of doctor makes a patient’s child feel shitty and irresponsible, like she should’ve noticed her mother’s yellowness, listened more carefully to her mother’s hysterical complaints, or stopped her from popping her unlimited supply of samples? Whatever had happened was clearly all Catherine’s doing—but no, Joanna was to blame. Joanna was the criminal, the enabler.
“It’s not serious, is it?” Joanna asked. “I mean, she can be cured, can’t she?”
“We won’t know anything until we get the screens back,” the doctor answered sternly. “It could be mild damage. It could be hepatitis, or its autoimmune version, which we can control. On the other end of the spectrum, it could require a transplant.”
Joanna’s jaw locked. Scott’s phone started to ring. He quickly patted his pocket and it stopped.
“But again, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Dr. Nestor said quickly. “I’m just preparing you for everything, okay? We’re taking good care of her. Let’s just hope for the best.” He glanced over his shoulder in the direction of Catherine’s room. “I didn’t mean to overhear, but maybe you shouldn’t be fighting right now. It gets her blood pressure up, stresses her out. My apologies if I’ve overstepped my bounds, but what she needs right now is you and your husband’s support.”
A whole beat went by. Joanna and Scott looked at one another. Scott opened his mouth but didn’t respond. Joanna shook her head and said, “No, he’s not …”
But the doctor had already turned around and was walking down the hall. Joanna watched him skirt around a woman with a walker. Scott shifted his weight, and then jingled the change in his pockets. “Well,” he said.
Joanna pushed her purse strap higher on her shoulder and started down the hall. Scott followed. He didn’t ask if he should, he just lagged next to her, in step. He fiddled with the strings of his hooded sweatshirt. His shoes were untied, the laces dragging on the floor. Joanna felt that what she’d just said back in the hospital room had brought on her mother’s illness in a fast-acting karmic revenge. If there truly was someone above the clouds controlling the whole world, someone with levers and pulleys and gauges, and if he had seen Joanna behaving like this—and even more, if he’d seen that she was here with Scott—surely
he had delivered the damage into her mother’s liver, like a FedEx of disease.
She stopped at her mother’s doorway and peered through the portal. Catherine was watching the little television fixed to the end of her bed. All at once it was obvious why her mother looked unfinished: they’d taken off all her makeup, all the mascara, eye shadow, blush, lipstick, eyebrow pencil, everything. They’d scrubbed her clean before the surgery, even though they weren’t going anywhere near her face. Why did they have to do that? Why couldn’t they have left her as she was?