She turned away from the window and walked downstairs to the kitchen. Taking a long time to consider, she decided to make herself a tuna sandwich on rye bread, mixing the tuna and the mayo and putting in pieces of celery and red onion. And she put on classical music, something from her own collection, not her grandfather’s old records, and she sat down at the kitchen table and ate. She tried as hard as she could to enjoy every bite.
Chapter 20
Catherine spent the rest of the afternoon and the early evening in the hands of doctors, heavily drugged. They did an ultrasound of her liver, then a small biopsy. They were running tests for hepatitis and cancer. Joanna went from thinking this was a cruel joke to knowing it was some manifestation of karma to feeling numb all over, all in the span of three or four seconds. Finally, when she was in the waiting room, reading the same pregnancy magazine for the third time, Dr. Nestor called her aside and told Joanna the news was good—her mother had cirrhosis.
“That’s good?” Joanna exclaimed. It was good because it was manageable, he said. But she would have to quit drinking immediately. One drink, and she could be dead. She’d have to begin taking a whole host of pills, ones that were actually prescribed to her, and nothing else. But in a few days, she could actually go home.
Joanna sat in her mother’s room, waiting for her to wake up. The most entertaining things in the room were her mother’s monitors, the gentle, subtle changes of her pulse rate and blood pressure, the amount of oxygen present in her blood. Catherine’s face was still free of makeup, and she looked both younger and so much older concurrently. Then her mother opened her eyes. “Hi,” Joanna said. Catherine made little smacking noises with her lips, and tentatively touched the tube that fed oxygen into her nose. “Jesus. I must look awful.”
“You look fine.” She stared up at the ceiling, placing her hands over her sternum again. “Well,” she breathed. They looked at each other for a moment. Catherine sighed dramatically. “They’re telling me I took too many pills.”
“Yes.”
“And my liver’s shot. It’s going to kill me, I bet.”
“The doctor actually said it could be managed.”
“Mark my words. These doctors don’t know anything.” Joanna looked away. A little smile curled on Catherine’s lips. “You think I’m overreacting.”
“I don’t know.” She counted three long breaths. “I’m sorry for what I said before,” she said. “I shouldn’t have gotten you worked up.” Her mother shifted, not answering. “So, where’s Scott?” “I don’t know. I think he left.” On a trip outside, she’d noticed Scott’s
car wasn’t in the parking lot. She’d tried not to think about their conversation very much; it made her feel too gloomy and ashamed. Where had
he gone? Back to Pennsylvania? He’d seemed so changed after what she
said to him, as if she’d opened his eyes to how he truly appeared. “Did you have a fight?” Catherine asked.
“No.” Joanna let out an exclamation point of a snort. “Scott and I aren’t close enough to have a fight.”
“You seem pretty close.”
She flexed her calf muscles. She had to say something. “Contrary to how it seemed, I would not want to marry him. Any old BatesMcAllister won’t do.”
Catherine pressed her lips together sternly.
“Is that why you said that stuff about me and him? And about
the photos of his family? Making it sound like I was some kind of
crazy, obsessed teenager? Because you thought he was in love with
me?”
“I didn’t tell him you were obsessed.” Catherine crossed her arms. “I heard that very word come out of your mouth.”
Catherine weakly crossed her arms over her chest. “I didn’t mean obsessed, necessarily. Enamored. Entranced.”
“But you weren’t enamored and entranced? I just . . . dreamt all that up?”
“Well.” Catherine flicked her hair over her shoulder. “I don’t know. I mean, I was going through all kinds of things, Joanna. It was a long time ago.”
Joanna stared at the front walkway. The black plastic bag in the trash can was empty, and it flapped in the wind against the can’s mesh sides. A couple passed, their heads down, their faces somber. No one looked happy at hospitals.
She picked at a string on her sweater. “I think Charles is having an affair,” she admitted, bracing herself.
Her mother’s sheets rustled.
“With his old girlfriend. The girl he dated in high school.” “Are you sure?”
She couldn’t meet her mother’s eye. “I talked to her on the phone before I came here. She was telling me where they were going to meet. Either she’s really ballsy, or she thought I was the cleaning lady.” “It could’ve been a misunderstanding. Did you confront him about it? Ask him if that’s what he was doing? I figure he must’ve called you since you’ve been here, right?”
Joanna watched several nurses rush down the hall. “He did call. But I didn’t ask him, no.”
“Why?”
“He would’ve denied it.”
Catherine struggled to sit up. “So, what, you talked to him on the phone and pretended it hadn’t happened?”
Joanna gazed out the window. The sky was an ashy gray. A man with
a walker hobbled down the sidewalk. “She’s better for him, probably.
They come from the same background. They both went to Swithin.” “So?”
Joanna looked at her helplessly.
Catherine’s lips were tautly pressed together. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“I know, I went and ruined it. Look at all I was given, everything we ever wanted, and I’ve messed it all up.”
It was hard to contain the bitterness she felt. But Catherine was squinting at her, lost. Joanna sighed. “You said that at my wedding.” “What? I didn’t.”
“Yeah. You did.”
“Well, surely I meant—” Catherine trailed off abruptly, pressing her lips together and shifting her eyes to the right. Realization seemed to slowly trickle into her, reminding Joanna of red food-coloring dye dropped into a water glass, the molecules gradually dispersing and turning the water pink. Catherine’s throat bobbed as she swallowed. “Well,” she said, touching her neck. She looked out the window, then at her hands. “I just meant … I didn’t want you to ruin the day by dwelling on the negative. I could tell you were. I could see you looking around, scowling at something that was wrong. The apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree, I guess.”
Joanna flinched, amazed at her mother’s self-introspection. But she didn’t believe Catherine for a second. Surely this explanation was fabricated, once Catherine realized the harshness of what she’d said. “You never thought I deserved Charles. You were horrified when I told you we were dating, as if it was unnatural or something.”
Catherine sighed and shut her eyes. A nurse at the desk just outside her room let out a cawing laugh. A doctor ran past the door at a full gallop. “Look,” Catherine said. “I spent a long time around those people. I don’t know what they deserved or who deserved them. I tried so hard, but they didn’t want me. I couldn’t help but be bitter and hate them a little. Of course once I moved here, I realized it wasn’t even about them, specifically. It was just about belonging somewhere. I’ve found that here.”
Joanna sniffed. “The sail club?”
“That’s right.”
Joanna breathed out. It felt like she’d been holding something in for years. She looked around the room, from the monitors to the graygreen walls to the flecks in the linoleum to her mother’s feet, stumps beneath the blanket. “What was so wrong with your life, Mom?” Catherine thought for a while, as if no one had ever asked that question. Finally she cleared her throat. “One day, when you were about ten, your dad just wasn’t there anymore.” Catherine kept her eyes on her blankets. “For years he adored me. He defined me. Because he watched everything I did like it mattered. And then … he just … checked out. I thought you understood that. You were there. You watched it happen.”
“I was ten.”
“I thought … I don’t know. I thought you understood.” “Why would I understand that?”
Catherine sighed, shaking her head. “When you were a baby, you were very clumsy,” she said in a faraway voice. “You used to fall all the time. And then I would pick you up all worried, and you’d be crying and I’d sit you on the couch and give you a little piece of a banana and after a while you were okay. But then, this one day, you were playing outside by yourself, and you tripped over something and landed facefirst. It wasn’t a bad fall but the kind of thing you’d normally get upset about. Only this time you just looked around and then picked yourself up. You didn’t cry. The next time you fell around me, I got it. There was always this pause after you fell, where you’d look at me, waiting to see what my face would do. It didn’t mean anything if you were alone, it was how I responded to it that made you respond to it, too. It was the damnedest thing.”
More doctors hurried down the hall. Joanna crossed her arms over her chest, not knowing where this was going.
“We all just rely on everyone else’s reaction, don’t we?” Catherine said. “When I fall over, I look around to see if people are going to get all crazy. And once your dad left, maybe I looked around for you. Because if no one sees what I do, it doesn’t mean anything. It wouldn’t have been real if you hadn’t been there with me to see it.” “So it’s like that tree falls in the forest question?”
Catherine smiled questioningly.
“You know, that philosophical question: if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?”
Catherine cocked her head. “Why, I don’t know! Does it?” Her voice had a wondrous quality to it, as if this were a catchy song she was hearing for the first time. It seemed implausible—irreverent, almost—that her mother had hit upon the idea completely on her own. “Come on,” Joanna said. “You’ve heard that. Everyone has.” Catherine shook her head, still smiling.
“Well, that’s what you’re saying,” Joanna said. “And you’re saying a tree doesn’t make a sound if there’s no one around to hear it. And what we feel or do doesn’t matter if there’s no one around to witness it. When we’re all alone, it’s almost as if we don’t exist. We have no identity.”
Catherine nodded. “We’re all just big sponges. The only thing that matters is how other people see what we’re going through.” Joanna shrugged. “Yeah. Maybe.”
They were silent for a while. Joanna leaned against the wall. Her throat tickled. She was suddenly horribly aware she was about to cry and ducked her head. An ambulance drifted past outside. Her mother’s monitors fluttered and squeaked. Joanna thought about what Catherine had just said about her father, how he’d abruptly left her so long ago. It could explain why Catherine developed all those medical problems. In her backward way, it was her attempt to bring his attention back to her, but it hadn’t worked. Joanna was the one who coddled her. Joanna was the one who sat and waited and worried and gave her mother what she needed. Her father was long gone.