“You can take either bed,” Judy said.
I want my bed, Zoe thought, tossing her bag onto the closest mattress. It was only when Judy nodded that Zoe realized she’d spoken out loud.
“Yes, there is something about your own bed, isn’t there?” Judy said thoughtfully. “And there’s definitely something about your own family. But I tell the kids who come here to think of my place not as an alternative home but an extra home. One of my boys who comes here regularly calls it ‘coming to Granny’s.’” Judy smiled. “I think it has a nice ring to it.”
Zoe looked over at the pictures on the wall. “Are those the kids you’ve looked after?”
“Yes. Some of them are grown-up now, and doing really well. Some have children of their own.”
“Why do you do it?”
Judy frowned, but in a good way, like she thought it was a very good question. “I suppose I want to do my part. There are so many people out there who are hurting. If everyone in the world did his or her part, then no one would have to be alone. We could all just be there for each other.”
For some reason this made Zoe well up with tears. Judy patted her shoulder. Zoe was worried she might try to hug her, but instead she headed for the door. Judy, Zoe realized, seemed to have a knack for knowing what she needed. “I’m going to get dinner started. You just holler if you need me, okay?”
When she was gone, Zoe sat on the bed, feeling the eyes of the children who had been here before her. Some of them were doing really well now, Judy had said. Some of them had children of their own. Zoe knew she should find this comforting, but instead she wondered about the other ones. The ones who weren’t doing so well. The ones for whom “coming to Granny’s” wasn’t enough. And she wondered, if something did happen to her mom, which one she would be.
23
As soon as Sonja opened the front door, she knew George was home. There was no evidence to this effect—she’d parked in the driveway, so she couldn’t tell if his car was in the garage or not—but Sonja just knew. After years of marriage she was so attuned to his presence that she could tell before even opening the door. Sure enough, he was at the kitchen counter on his laptop. There were fresh flowers in the vase by the window. The house was clean and polished; the rich hardwood floors gleamed up at her.
It was a far cry from the single-fronted home she’d grown up in. Sonja’s parents were working-class—a receptionist at a car dealership and a plumber—but Sonja had graduated to something bigger. A higher bracket. When she’d brought George home to meet her parents (separately, by then—they split up when she was nine) none of her family could conceal their surprise. “Good luck holding on to him,” her dad had muttered too loudly. Her sister, Agnes, seemed surprised too, but at least she kept quiet about it. At their wedding, Sonja could admit she felt a little smug. Bunch of nonbelievers, she remembered thinking, looking back at them from the altar. She knew they attributed her lack of visits to her “being too good for” them and she was happy to go along with that. It was easier than the truth. That she was embarrassed. That, perhaps, she never had any reason to be smug.
“Hello,” she said, dropping her grocery bags onto one end of the kitchen counter. She must have been on autopilot at the grocery store, because she didn’t even remember what was in them.
“How was your day?” George asked, his eyes still on the screen.
“Well … I had to place a client’s teenage daughter in foster care. That’s never fun.” She started unloading the groceries onto the counter. Eggs, marmalade, a cabbage. What on earth was she going to make with this?
“Why did you do that?” George asked.
“The girl was staying at home all alone while her mom was in the hospital,” she said. “Which might have been all right. But then her neighbor told me she never answers the door, doesn’t talk very much, and that she and her mom are very insular, they don’t go out much. She also had a bruise on her cheek and a fairly unlikely explanation for why it was there. And then she had a panic attack while I was with her.”
George shook his head. “They’re not paying you enough, Sonja.”
He looked back at the screen. Sonja noticed the glass next to his laptop, the finger of amber liquid. Silently she unloaded the rest of the groceries. Whenever George had been drinking, he had a tendency to underestimate his own strength. He also tended to become more aggressive after a few drinks; sometimes it even felt as though he intended to hurt her, as though he enjoyed it.
She’d heard all the popular sayings about marriage—how it was so much more about giving than receiving—but it was impossible to understand how much you had to give, and forgive, until you were in the situation. Sonja wanted her marriage to succeed. Then again, what did it mean to make a marriage succeed? Was it simply about staying together? Or was there something more she should be striving for?
Suddenly Sonja noticed George’s gaze lingering on her. An uneasy feeling started.
“Come here,” he said.
“George, I … I’m making dinner.”
He cocked an eyebrow and glanced at the peculiar assortment of groceries. His expression said, Really? You call this dinner?
There wasn’t a lot she could do at this point. If she’d thought ahead, she might have been able to fake an emergency at work and get out of the house. But it was too late now, George already had that look about him. His eyes were narrow and glassy, his body rigid. If there was such a thing as body language, it was saying, I’m about to take what’s mine.
“Come here,” he said again.
Sonja cringed internally. It would be worse because he’d been drinking. It was always worse. A few years back, after a half bottle of Scotch, he’d broken a bone in her wrist from holding her so tightly. It was an accident, of course. It was never intentional.
Sonja walked around the bench and stood in front of him. He grasped her waist and pulled her closer. She saw something in his eyes. A pulse of excitement.
“Lie on the bench.”
“Can’t we just wait until—”
He turned her around. Her stomach pressed painfully into the sharp edge of the countertop. Then he pushed her face down against the cold stone. The cabbage rolled onto the floor.
Marriage was all about giving, she thought. And George gave a lot. With his work, he’d changed so many lives for the better. He’d changed her life. It was only fair that he got something in return. With her hands gripping the counter, Sonja stifled a whimper. She could have stopped him if she’d wanted. She could have said no. But she didn’t.
24
When Alice woke the morning after her operation, she couldn’t find her phone. She needed to call Zoe. She was about to press her buzzer for the nurse when Dr. Brookes came in, trailed by Sonja. Today Sonja was wearing a silk shirt, tailored pants, and an immovable expression.
“Can I sit?” Dr. Brookes asked, and Alice hesitated. She’d been waiting all night for him to come in and discuss her prognosis, but suddenly she didn’t want to hear it.
He sat anyway. “You sure you don’t want anyone to be here?”
“Sonja’s here,” Alice said without looking at her.
“All right.” Dr. Brookes let out a slow breath. “I’m going to get straight down to it. The bad news is the tumor in your right ovary is extensive. We also found tumors on your left ovary and the cancer has spread to the outside lining of the bowel, which puts you at stage three. I was able to debulk some tumors, though not all.”
“Debulk?”
“Remove them.”
“Okay!” Alice said, feeling a burst of optimism. “So you removed them?”
“Some of them. It’s what we call a suboptimal debulking. Unfortunately some of the tumors were inoperable, due to their location near organs.”
“So … what happens now?”
“Now we hit hard with chemo.”
Alice’s heart sank. “Chemo?”
“Yes, I’d like to get you started as soon as possible.”
; Alice had known there was a strong likelihood she would need chemo, so she wasn’t sure why this felt like such a shock. “And … after the chemo, then what?”
“With any luck you’ll go into remission.”
Beside her, Sonja scribbled furiously on a legal pad. When Alice looked at her, she lifted her head and gave the tiniest of nods. It made Alice feel a little better. For the first time, she felt glad Sonja was there.
“And,” Alice said, “remission is—?”
“Remission is when we can’t find any evidence of cancer.”
Her mood lifted. “Okay. Good. Remission.”
The pause, though short, was a presence in the room.
“Alice,” Dr. Brookes said, “I always like to be optimistic. But you should know that only about twenty percent of women with stage-three ovarian cancer survive five years.”
A shiver went down Alice’s spine—powerful enough to make her jolt. But just as fast, something else happened. A memory. Of a bumper sticker she’d seen when Zoe was about a year old. She had been stuck in a line of cars in the supermarket parking lot while a tub of ice cream sat melting on the passenger seat. Alice looked around for another exit while simultaneously reaching back to pat Zoe’s feet while she screamed in the backseat. Finally she’d opened the tub of ice cream and, with her fingers, scooped some into Zoe’s mouth. The crying stopped immediately. That’s when she noticed the sticker, on the rear window of the car in front.
I’M A SINGLE MOTHER, WHAT’S YOUR SUPERPOWER?
Single mothers, she realized, did have superpowers. Ovarian cancer might have been the silent killer, but the silent killer hadn’t banked on the superpowers of a single mother.
“Good,” she said. “I plan to be one of those twenty percent.”
Dr. Brookes smiled. “Glad to hear it. Now, I should have the pathology back before Friday and then we can come up with a plan of attack. I want you to know I’m going to give this my all, Alice.”
“So am I,” she said.
Once he was gone, Sonja put down her notebook and came to Alice’s side. Alice was staring at her knees, tented in the bedcovers. She couldn’t be bothered with Sonja. She was thinking about cancer. About 20 percent survival rate. About her superpowers. She was thinking about how she needed to find her damn phone.
“Sonja,” she said. “Have you seen my phone? I really need to call Zoe.”
Sonja was quiet long enough for Alice to look up.
“Alice,” Sonja said, “there’s something I need to tell you.”
25
Kate stepped out of the car in the hospital parking lot and took a deep breath of secondhand cigarette smoke and damp asphalt air. Don’t look, she told herself as she walked into the foyer. Don’t look at the babies. But everywhere she turned there they were. Babies. Crying, burping, smiling. Clamped to its mother’s hip or sitting contentedly on someone’s lap. The yearning to hold a baby, to smell his or her milky breath, was so overpowering it almost doubled Kate over. Of course, babies were around the hospital every day, but this day, the day she returned to work, they seemed to be everywhere.
She caught the elevator to her floor, and as soon as the doors opened, she heard the shouting. She hurried down the corridor, following the noise. She found Alice Stanhope trying to lever herself out of bed while shouting at Sonja, who stood across the room from her.
“Alice!” Kate said. “What are you doing?”
Alice looked over at her and exhaled. “I’m discharging myself.”
“What?” Kate put down her bag on the chair and went to Alice’s side. “What’s happened?”
“She”—Alice stabbed her finger toward Sonja—“put my daughter into foster care. She spent the night there. Sonja says she’ll stay there as long as I’m in here. So I’m leaving. Right now.”
Kate looked at Sonja.
“I met Zoe yesterday,” she said, “and I had a number of concerns about her staying home by herself. I called the Children and Family Services and they agreed. Zoe couldn’t name any friends or family members she could stay with so we placed her in a lovely foster home. She can stay there for a few more nights while Alice remains in the hospital and then she’ll—”
“Zoe has never spent a full night out of her own home in her life,” Alice interrupted. “It doesn’t matter how lovely this home is, she will be traumatized. Besides, I haven’t even met this person.”
Kate wondered about this. A fifteen-year-old who had never spent a night away from home?
“She is perfectly safe at home,” Alice continued. “Do you think I would take any risks with my own daughter?”
“Alice, she didn’t have the details of any adults to call in case of an emergency. She had no idea how to escape in the event of a fire. She wasn’t answering the phone at all, and she let me inside with only the slightest prompting. Then she had a panic attack,” Sonja said.
“Because you told her I had cancer!”
Sonja blushed. “I apologize for that. Truly. I assumed Zoe knew and—”
“Why would you assume that?”
Kate listened as they argued back and forth, each exchange more heated. Both women made good points. There was no doubt that it would be traumatic for a teenage girl to be torn from her home, especially when dealing with the illness of her mother. But Zoe was clearly not fit to stay home alone. Finally when there was a lull, Kate said, “Where is Zoe now?”
“She’s at school,” Sonja said, exhaling.
“And after school?”
Sonja looked shamefaced. “Judy, her foster carer, will pick her up.”
“Actually she won’t,” Alice said. “I will. Because I’m leaving.”
“You can’t,” Kate and Sonja said at once.
“Well Zoe is not spending another night in foster care.” Alice thought for a moment. “Look … what if we put a cot next to my bed, here? Zoe can stay here with me tonight.”
Sonja was already shaking her head. There was no way the hospital would allow that. But she also saw from Alice’s expression that she was about to lose her cool.
“What if Zoe stayed with me?” Kate blurted out. “I have the space. I mean, would that be better, for Zoe, than foster care? I don’t live far away and I can bring her back here in the morning when I start my shift.”
This silenced both women for a moment.
“That’s very kind of you,” Sonja said. “But we have protocol to make sure everyone is properly vetted, trained in things such as first aid, background-checked—”
“My husband and I have both had background checks,” Kate said. They’d had to do that in order to do IVF. “Obviously I don’t need first-aid training.”
“Still,” Sonja said, looking quite uncertain now. “It would need to be family or a close friend for us to consider this.”
Alice, Kate noticed, was watching her curiously. Kate could tell she was considering her offer, even if only to spite Sonja.
After a minute Alice looked back at Sonja. “Kate’s a close friend if I say she is.”
Sonja started to speak but Alice was looking at Kate.
“One night,” she said.
“Alice,” Kate protested, “you need to stay for at least—”
“One night.”
Kate nodded. It was, she figured, the best she could do.
But Sonja was still talking. “I’ll have to speak to CFS about this,” she muttered, turning to leave.
“Give them my regards,” Alice called after her. She turned to Kate and raised an eyebrow. “And my good friend Kate’s.”
And it was the strangest thing: As Sonja walked out of the room, Kate had a surprising urge to laugh.
* * *
“David? It’s me.”
Kate was huddled in the kitchenette behind the nurses’ station, her phone pressed to her ear.
“How’s the first day back so far?” he said at the same time as she said, “Listen, I need to talk to you.”
They both laughed. But inside Kate was won
dering when they got so out of sync with each other.
“You go,” David said.
“Okay well, my day has been … interesting so far. One of my patients, Alice, is a single mother, and her teenage daughter has somehow ended up in foster care. Alice is freaking out, understandably, and threatening to check herself out of the hospital, but she just had major surgery and there’s no way she can do that. I know this sounds strange, but I … I offered to have her daughter stay with us tonight.”
“Oh,” he said, surprised.
“I know I should have checked with you first. I just wanted to help and it was the only solution I could come up with on the spur of the moment. Is it all right with you?”
“Well, I mean, sure,” he said. After the miscarriage, he was probably willing to say anything to keep her happy.
“How old is she?”
“She’s fifteen.”
“All right. Scarlett’s staying at Hilary’s tonight but Jake will be here and he’s bringing some buddies back to watch the game so there’ll be some other young people around.”
Kate paused. After what Alice had explained to her about Zoe, she got the sense that the fewer people who were at home, the better. But David had misinterpreted her pause.
“I know you’re still down about this whole baby thing,” he said. “I want to make it up to you.”
There was something about the way he said it—this whole baby thing—that irritated her. Kate wanted to tell him that actually the only thing he could do to make it up to her was give her a baby. Instead she choked it back, thanked him again, and hung up the phone.
26
In second-period English, Zoe was trying to imagine a world without her mother. She’d imagined it so many times in her strange little movie-reel fantasies that it should have been easy. But now that it was real, everything was blurry. And the questions were never-ending. Would she stay in her apartment or would she have to move? Would she keep going to school or would she need to go out and get a job? Probably a job if she wanted to stay in her apartment. But what kind of job could she even get? She wouldn’t survive two weeks even if she wanted to, which she wasn’t sure she did. What would be the point of surviving without her mother?
The Mother's Promise Page 11