Millicent Glenn's Last Wish: A Novel

by Tori Whitaker

  Jane’s head swiveled toward Kelsey in the manner of a knight drawing his sword.

  Kelsey went on anyway. “Why, you ask, didn’t Grandma tell you something so terrible she could scarcely think or speak of it? Let me ask you. Why did it take you so long to tell me about my father?”

  “Girls,” I said, “let’s—”

  Jane raised a halting hand. “Kels. I did tell you everything. I waited only until you were old enough to understand.”

  “I was twenty-effing-five.”

  “Yes. But I’d tried hard to be a good single mom and to provide—”

  “Don’t be a martyr. This isn’t about the plentiful love you gave me, nor all the inspiration,” Kelsey said. “Asking who fathered me was one. Simple. Question. And how did you respond?” She paused dramatically and leaned in. “You didn’t even know who he was.”

  That was true. I envisioned Jane’s hippie commune outside of Phoenix. Everyone going around barefoot. Eating organic greens grown in a garden. Clothes hanging on a line. Guys with thick beards and girls who didn’t shave their legs. An acoustic guitar and folk songs being sung around a fire. Years later, Jane told me she had ditched LSD, weed, all of it before she got pregnant.

  Jane said now, “How I came to conceive you, Kels, is not a book-length novel. It’s a short story.”

  We all knew that short story. Jane had been candid in telling me months after she first brought baby Kelsey home. Jane had stood right in my knotty pine kitchen and said she’d “had a thing” with two brothers—not at the same time. Communes in the seventies were tamer than The Haight of the sixties. The two encounters were spaced a couple of weeks apart. One encounter was wild, clothes half-off, half-on, up against the outside wall of the dormitory before dawn. The other went on for hours, tender, naked, and moon-soaked atop two layers of sleeping bags in a meadow. The next week both brothers left for places unknown. Jane had never learned their last name. I hadn’t been scandalized when Jane told me the truth; she’d already had the baby, so I’d felt closure more than shock. I had inwardly hoped Kelsey’s father was the brother under the light of the moon. I had hoped Jane had felt the overpowering rush of love, had experienced that pinnacle of closeness when she conceived.

  In time Jane had loved another man in Georgia. But a few years into their relationship, she’d asked him to leave. Without warning.

  Had Jane been unable to commit? Was this part of what she called the fallout from her childhood? Had she detected angst between her father and me in those early years after all? But in time Dennis and I had bonded back together in a way even I hadn’t foreseen. Had it been something else with her then? Either way, until now I hadn’t realized what a mess I’d made of what should have been the best years of her youth.

  It was deeper than that, though.

  Now Jane might have breast cancer. She might die. And I’d fretted over that with every blink and breath for days. What I hadn’t the common sense enough to see was that after I’d lost one daughter long ago, somewhere along the line I’d lost the other one, too. I’d lost Jane, by manner of speaking, years before now.

  Without meeting the eyes of my girls, I surveyed the screened-in porch. Everything was in its place: the wicker love seat in the corner, the glass-top end table beside it, the tall leafy plants by the windows that I’d soon have to move inside. Yet it felt as if a tornado had whipped through, wreaking its destruction everywhere. Our spirits had collapsed. Memories were shattered. Pieces of our hearts were strewn or missing.

  I’d kept something from Jane. She’d kept something from Kelsey. The pain had passed down along with the German blue of our eyes—and with equal permanence.

  Had I been the one, then, to set this all in motion? This friction? This act of secrets being handed down from mother to daughter?

  Yes.

  I was accountable for ruining their lives in fundamental ways. It was the worst mockery for me, because I had intended—had spent so many years and energy in good faith trying—to effect the opposite.

  Opa once told me how insignificant he felt when the brewery closed. He was “a particle of dust in a big political machine.” How was it that today I felt fully responsible and wholly insignificant at the same time?

  All the good I’d done in life “didn’t matter a rat’s ass,” as Papa Glenn might’ve termed it. In the final analysis I was a bad mother.

  They could add that to my tombstone when they carved the date I died.

  “So, Mom,” Kelsey said to Jane, less flushed than before. “You’re not so different from Grandma. There are secrets corroding us inside, truths that affect others we love but that can only come out when our hearts are ready to release them. It’s not the end of the world.”

  My granddaughter was wise beyond her age. Would Jane see it too? Time ticked by as she pondered and clouds rolled in, casting shadows through the sunporch.

  “I honestly didn’t know who your father was,” Jane said. “So I couldn’t answer the question with precision.” She waved her hand in my direction. “That’s far different from this scenario with your grandma. She knew everything.”

  I mulled over her words.

  “You’re wrong,” I said. “It’s not so different here. There were things I honestly didn’t know in my time either.”

  “But you have known those things for years now, right?” she said. She glared at me some more. Kelsey scowled at her.

  “I have.” I felt my eyebrows lift. “But there are things you still don’t know about me, Jane.”

  Her cell phone rang, and we all jumped. Jane looked at the caller ID and said, “It’s the breast center.”

  Jane lay in a hospital gown, facedown on a special table connected to a big machine. Kelsey and I sat erect in small chairs lining the wall that held prints of flower paintings that, according to her, were in the manner of Georgia O’Keeffe. The breast center had received a last-minute cancellation, and they said if Jane could arrive within forty minutes, they could perform her biopsy today. We’d all piled into Jane’s four-door and arrived within half an hour.

  My daughter had driven with the patience of Job. She was strong. But I was her mother. I knew her insides were roiling. When she’d been in seventh grade, she’d tried out for cheerleader. Her best friend made it, but she did not. I had felt her disappointment as if it were my own. When Jane graduated with her bachelor’s in sociology—she was already in her thirties, living here in an apartment, and Kelsey was young—I felt Jane’s sense of accomplishment as if I’d walked the stage wearing honor cords myself. So when we’d pulled into the crowded parking lot at the breast center, I felt in my bones her invisible fear and vulnerability as if it were alive under my own skin.

  “The weird thing about waiting,” Jane had said that first day in the doctor’s office—back when she was glad I was there—“is how every minute you think: this could be it. This could be the day, the hour, the very minute I learn I’m going to die.” Here we were again. This time she wasn’t glad I was here. But I still wished I could take her place.

  Now my daughter’s left breast was numbed and hung down through a large hole in the table, isolating it for the stereotactic biopsy. Jane had asked special permission for Kelsey and me to be present. Kelsey whispered to me, “The table is like a massage bed at a spa—only instead of a cradle for one’s face, the hole here is chest-level.” And there was no feeling relaxed. Then the table rose mechanically, as if levitating Jane in a séance, and a technician prepared to target the flesh where a special needle would make one tiny incision and remove a few samples of tissue.

  Were they hurting her? What would they find? How did she feel? What went through her mind? These questions buzzed around me like bees, and I sat still as a statue.

  Afterward as we slowly walked back to the parking lot—my cane in hand—Jane said, “That was not the most comfortable experience of my life.” She snorted. “But those people treated me so kindly.” I thanked God for that.

  “They said you
’d have some discomfort for a few days,” I said. “Be sure to follow their instructions so you don’t get infected.”

  “Mom. They gave me one stitch and a bandage.”

  “Looking on the bright side, you two,” Kelsey said, “the pathologist will assess the results, and we’ll all be out of limbo in three to five days.”

  “Three to five business days, that is,” Jane said. “How am I supposed to get through those without going crazy?” She opened the car door for me, a glint in her eyes. “I know how, Mom,” she said. “You can fill us in on whatever it is you said I still don’t know.”

  She surprised me, given the breakdown between us earlier. She wanted to hear more? Could I take her lashing back out if she didn’t like what I said? Was she already lost?

  But I’d do it. I’d try anything to save us. If there was the thinnest string connecting us, I’d take the chance. I’d give the next chapter to her.

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s what I’ll do.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  September 1951

  The shower spray hit my bare skin with a chill. I adjusted the temperature. Warmer, warmer. I let the stream massage my face. The back of my neck. My spine. Nurse Breck’s story preyed on my mind. At the end of our meeting in the park she had said, “There’s one more thing.”

  “What is it?” I’d asked. I’d felt there was more, and then knew I was right.

  “After I took my stance with the nurse supervisor,” she’d gone on, “accusing the doctor of being drunk while Nurse Tibbers denied it, my administrator said, ‘I’m afraid this means your employment is terminated.’ ‘But you can’t fire me,’ I said. ‘Because I quit.’”

  She had taken a stand. Nurse Breck had taken that stand for me.

  I lathered a cloth with a bar of soap and washed my arms and legs. I squirted shampoo into my hand and worked the creamy liquid through my hair and then rinsed. These steps came automatically to me. I didn’t think about them. My body knew what to do from habit—even to the point of avoiding the tender scar running up my belly, washing only on either side. As I climbed out of the pink-tiled shower my husband had built, I thought consciously of only one thing: I had carried a healthy baby to term. I had loved Kathleen inside of me for nine months. I had nourished her, guarded her, caressed my tummy when she kicked, and hummed lullabies to her. Into our lives, mine and Dennis’s, I had brought a second robust baby girl. My actions—my diet, my prenatal care, my work with the business and the house, my dedication to Janie and Dennis—had not rendered me the mother of a dead child. No.

  Dr. Reynolds had dropped—had killed—my child. An inferno of fiery hate swept through me, up and down like a blaze in the stairwell of a building. Hot, relentless, unyielding.

  Dr. Collins had called in a physician known among the staff to be tipsy at work. There’d later been arrogant men sitting in their walnut boardrooms, wearing their crisp white coats that their wives or maids had ironed for them—those men who hadn’t given my plight a moment’s passing thought. To these men, these administrators, my loss represented a single letter on one afternoon. A page with a word beginning with E. Signed, licked, stamped, posted. They knew nothing would come of it. Complaints were unheard of. Their official letters with their golden imprinted insignia bore the final word.

  No one could go up against them. No one had proof if they did.

  Except the nurses. And that proved futile.

  “In the medical profession, doctors are gods,” Nurse Breck had said.

  It was all the doctor’s fault.

  The following day Pauline had come for Janie in the afternoon while Dennis worked the weekend. “I have to be alone,” I’d said when I’d called. “Not for long.” My best friend didn’t ask questions.

  For an hour now I’d been sprawled on the floor of my living room, flat on my back, unable to lie still in a bed or recline in a chair. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t talk. I was stiff with rage—my limbs rigid, but my mind warped like a hunk of clay on a potter’s wheel spinning out of control.

  I’d performed my part. I’d carried her well. Kathleen had entered this world safely. Then came the hands of the man who took his role—his Godlike role in a mortal life—for granted.

  Then a new thought whirled its way through the soft matter of my mind like a worm to an apple, a thought I could not escape: I was the one who had changed doctors.

  It had been me.

  I had snubbed the doctor who’d delivered all the beautiful Glenn grandchildren and Janie. I’d done it because I wanted to show Dennis, and maybe even Abbie, who was in charge.

  I rolled on my side on the hard, carpeted floor beside Raggsie, where he slept. I convulsed with sobs and curled myself into a ball next to him.

  It was all my fault.

  I’d shown my husband whose domain this was, all right. Months had passed since I’d selected the doctor—and since our daughter died. I hadn’t let Dennis know I’d called the nurse. He’d been adamant that I shouldn’t. Did this mean I’d disobeyed him? Broken my wedding vows? My head was splitting. Wait, he hadn’t formally forbidden it. I didn’t like keeping a secret from him, yet he wouldn’t want to know, I reasoned. He didn’t want to know half of what torment plagued me. He wanted me “to be happy.” We went through the motions of every day of waking up, going to bed. Taking care of Janie in between.

  What I had learned was too much to unload on a person. Too much to unload on him.

  Anyway, he had held Kathleen in his arms and hadn’t let me know. Hearing that tidbit of news had hurt. But he hadn’t thought I was strong enough to stomach it.

  Some truths were too hard to bear before their time. Or too hard to state.

  I couldn’t abide all the things that’d gone wrong. My mind was cruel to remind me of them. I hated myself for my own part.

  I scavenged for another pill—in my pocketbook, the bathroom vanity, the bedside table drawer, the coffee cupboard. I had run out. I couldn’t get away from my own head. Couldn’t escape.

  Ah, there, the liquor cabinet. I could drown my miseries in booze. There would be gin. I dug in for a bottle. Oh, Scotch. Or Kahlúa? A fifth of vodka. Yes. I slid my palm up and down the cool glass bottle, feeling its label catch on my skin. I unscrewed the brand-new cap and took a swig. Ack, ack. Hot. Bitter. Then another. Ah, ah. I twisted my face and held my breath as if I were jumping into the river. And I slugged another gulp. Whooo. The fluid burned my tongue and burned my throat and burned all the way down to my belly. Would I guzzle the bottle’s whole contents? I turned the bottle up again and then gagged for a bit of air.

  Then a vision of Opa appeared before me. An apparition. My beloved opa was holding my hand, as when I was girl. He’d taught me about the three kinds of people: he was the good kind. Even during Prohibition, during the height of his poverty and despair, when the bootleg king George Remus offered him a sack full of cash to run his booze, my opa had declined. He’d hated the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act, but Opa would not manufacture liquor, distribute liquor, nor sell liquor. And he refused to drink it if thrust in his face. “My own grandfather,” Opa had told me, “didn’t immigrate to this country only to defile it by breaking its laws. I would not dishonor his memory.”

  Until today I used to think I was the good person, too, the kind who only sometimes did something wrong. But now, I realized, I was the bad person who sometimes got things right. Opa should never have called me Millicent the Strong. I was Millicent the Weak.

  Then another vision appeared: Dr. Reynolds with his gloved hands and masked face, his bloodshot eyes, and disheveled hair as he sliced my body open . . . and as he held my infant by her delicate newborn ankles.

  Janie cried from her bed. I jarred. No, no. She was still with Pauline.

  I poured the rest of the vodka onto our linoleum floor like an idiot—the only sane thought in my head being how I recoiled to think I was becoming a drunk like Dr. Reynolds. I recoiled to think I would dishonor my opa. The liquid gurgled
and splattered and sounded like a cow pissing on flat rocks in a field at the farm. I didn’t care. I emptied it to the last drop. I didn’t know if I could be the mother my Janie deserved anymore. I doubted I could. But liquor—the accessory to my Kathleen’s murder—would not be my downfall.

  I had avoided Dennis’s gaze for days. I didn’t even think he’d noticed. But I had. Guilt. I’d cleaned up my mess and made my excuses for the house smelling of booze, a supposed accident while cooking with wine. But the scent lingered in the membranes of my nostrils, an unwelcome reminder. Guilt.

  By the third day I could no longer pretend to Dennis that I hadn’t called Nurse Breck. I had to come clean.

  I had made bad decisions—within the realm of my home’s domain—and for these decisions I had to take responsibility. I had to let Dennis know. Every time he looked at me, I felt shame. I’d let him down. I’d deceived him. This was guilt. Yet how ironic that he’d driven me to it; he had excluded me from the business. I’d fought to reclaim my power.

  Now I had to do the right thing. I had to do what Opa would do.

  Dennis arrived home early. Rain had set construction back. I waited on pins and needles all evening—while he changed his clothes, romped with Janie in her room, ate a tomato-and-mayonnaise sandwich, and then turned on the television set. I put Janie to bed. All the while my stomach grew more ill, as if I were afraid I’d get in trouble. But I was not a child. He was not my parent.

  Dennis had the newspaper open when I came back to the living room. I sat beside him and cleared my throat. He twisted his head my way behind the paper, shot me an inquisitive smile.

  “I have something to tell you,” I said. I’d gotten more pills and had taken only one. One pill tonight, that was. One pill that morning. One at midday. The newspaper rustled as he folded it in half, folded it in half again, and laid it on the table.

  “I thought you seemed off tonight,” he said. He hadn’t questioned it up front, I surmised, because I was “off” so often these days. “Are you relying too much on medication?” he asked, and I jerked. “Maybe you should cut back.”