Without her.
The start of doing everything without her.
“Mom! How did this never come up?”
“Well, the boy seemed a little lost, to be honest. I thought maybe I could help.”
Caroline clenched her fists. “Lost about what?”
“It’s a lot of pressure, navigating a crossroads like that, even when you don’t have anyone but yourself to consider. But when you do…”
“It’s supposed to be a good thing, not having to take a leap of faith alone.”
“Yes and no. He seemed very concerned about leading you in a direction that might not be right for you. About you having regrets later.”
“Keaton was the direction I wanted. The rest would have worked itself out.”
“Look. All I did was try to reassure him. But I wasn’t a hundred percent convinced you following him to Brevard was your best move. Women in your generation have so many more options, and—” She caught herself. “Anyway, I didn’t sugarcoat things. When he left here, I thought he was reconsidering the move, maybe thinking about rescinding the job and finding something else where you both had opportunities. I never imagined he’d do—what he did.”
Caroline could scarcely breathe, so tightly was the betrayal squeezing at her lungs. Since when was Mom an outspoken or even self-aware feminist? “You expect me to believe the fact that you weren’t ‘convinced’ had nothing to do with Rebecca being there, on the same campus?”
“On the…” Was she surprised by this detail or only that Caroline knew it? She recovered quickly. “Again, I only meant for Keaton to reconsider the job, the town. Never to reconsider you. And I don’t know that I had anything to do with that! But I do wish I’d never invited him in.”
Caroline’s mouth dropped open, but nothing came out. The pain in her lungs grew tighter. She wanted to ask whom Hannah had been more afraid of her meeting—Rebecca or Sela? But she was starting to think Dad was right that it was better to stick to questions she was sure she wanted answers to.
“And when he did reconsider me? Did you do anything to stop it?”
“What could I do? I guess I’d underestimated how strongly he felt about that particular next step. I thought Brevard was one of many places the two of you would be willing to try on for size. Not the place he’d already decided was a perfect fit.”
“He wasn’t the only one who thought it was perfect.” Caroline couldn’t restrain the emotion from her voice. There was more to this, surely—her own pride or Keaton’s youth getting in their own way. But that Mom had played any role …
“All I can say is I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry now? What about then, when I was lying upstairs in my old room with my heart in pieces? It never occurred to you to tell me what happened? Even if you didn’t think you could fix it, maybe I could have!”
“What’s left to fix? You can be unhappy with me, but surely not with how things turned out. Probably I shouldn’t have said what I did. But everyone makes mistakes, and sometimes, they’re a blessing in disguise. You have no idea how relieved I am that’s the case here.”
“So because Walt is great, I’m not supposed to be upset that this pivotal moment of my life hinged on a lie? That I lost a year—more—grieving a relationship that didn’t need to die the way it did? I made big life decisions out of that terrible place. This isn’t just about losing Keaton.”
“I think we’ve had enough for one week.” Another heavy sigh: You promised this wasn’t a fight. “Let’s not blow this out of proportion. It’s not as if it changes anything.”
She was finally right, Caroline had to admit, about something. It didn’t change anything, not if you stepped back and looked at things objectively.
It changed everything.
8
Sela
“What if you didn’t tell me the numbers anymore?”
The words rushed out of Sela, and the nurse appraised her for a minute before resting her clipboard on the table between them. Her name, according to her name tag as well as the many, many voice mails she’d left Sela over the years, was Marie. But though Marie handled most of her monthly blood and urine draws and relayed the results, and though she was the go-between for any questions for the nephrologist—who might as well have been the Wizard of Oz, given how little Sela saw of him versus how much time she spent in his office—Sela did not wish to be on a first-name basis.
She’d seen the other patients, the ones the nurses liked, coming and going with the kind of bright familiarity that put all parties at ease—asking if the receptionist’s daughter was over that nasty cold, complimenting the tech’s haircut, deflecting teasing about slipups over sweets or wine or whatever other vice. Sela did not wish to be one of them. In fact, she actively wished not to be.
Because coming and going anonymously? Well, that was an anonymous level of sick. Which couldn’t be too bad. At least, not yet.
“I understand that sometimes they’re difficult to hear?” Marie had a way of phrasing everything as a question—unless it actually was one. What time would you like to come in. The reverse inflections came across as condescending enough to justify keeping Marie at arm’s length. “Or they can be confusing? But you do need—”
“I need to know when I’m looking at the next stage,” Sela cut in. She was well aware that other factors mattered, that most people with kidney disease ultimately died not of kidney failure but of some other problem caused by an underperforming bodily filtration system: haywire blood pressure, heart disease, stroke. Surely her preventative medications could be adjusted, though, without discussion. “What if you just tell me when that signpost appears? I’m not sure I want to know about every single point I pass in the meantime.”
She was sure: She did not want to know. Her correspondence with Caroline was off to a cautiously optimistic start—she’d written back, and Caroline had reciprocated—each exchange a nudge less stiff, more personal. Sela had learned that her father’s only sibling died a career bachelor, that his parents were gone, too, that there was no further extended family dangling on the other end of this teetering balance scale. More important, she’d learned that this tenuous relationship with her half sister would require time and space to develop. The last thing she needed was her kidneys’ cries for help drowning out her thoughts.
Caroline’s day-to-day life seemed, in a word, full. So much so that Sela couldn’t see how she would possibly fit. Sela spent hours obsessing over what to say—not too little, not too much. Even a basic outline of her life circumstances felt like oversharing. This was her opportunity to endear herself, and she had to get it right. To find some way to win her over that would not seem insincere later.
Even if this did, now that she’d begun, seem impossible.
Marie looked skeptical, so Caroline kept talking. “I’m doing everything I can to take care of myself. Following your instructions to the letter, and then some.”
This was worth noting, because plenty of people did not. Sela saw them every time she came—smoking outside the clinic, their cars littered with fast-food wrappers and empty slushy cups, brazen evidence of depression or denial or some self-destructive impulse. Part of her hoped they’d get away with it, triumph with their sugar and sodium raised as a stiff middle finger to the disease—but it didn’t seem fair that so many of them coasted with a shrug, faring no better but no worse, while she did everything right and still saw her numbers decline at a haphazard rate.
“Let’s just say,” she continued, “that getting regular updates on what little impact my efforts are making is not boosting my morale.”
Would a little self-delusion be that bad? Healthy people engaged in it every day. If Doug ordered a salad with his pizza, somehow that justified polishing off a whole medium. If Leigh enjoyed a glass of wine in her third trimester, it paled in comparison with what older generations had done. And if this very nurse sneaked one of those Camels showing through her pocket on her break, her lungs would recover when she got around to quitting
. Any day now.
“You want to be informed about your care?” Marie persisted. “You want to be—”
What she wanted was for people to stop telling her what she wanted. What she should be thinking or feeling or doing, or—more often—refraining from thinking or feeling or doing. Even the so-called support forums populated by fellow patients exhausted her, with their claims of magic fixes in keto diets and pharma-driven conspiracies to keep patients sick, with their simultaneous distrust in and reliance upon doctors.
“I don’t see how stressing over things I can’t control will make anything but a negative impact.”
This was not a stretch, either. No one had ever said the stress of her illness might have helped to kill her mother, but no one had said it hadn’t. Marie looked Sela over as if she might be called upon to deliver some assessment—physical? psychological?—to support this request. “Which numbers are we talking about. The GFR, creatinine, functionality…”
A valid question, posed as a statement. Now they were getting somewhere.
“All of them.”
“I see? And do you imagine wanting to know when the next stage is around the corner, or when it’s here.”
If she were imagining, there’d be no stage at all. But this was real, and she’d have preparations to make. Filling in Caroline, for instance, if she hadn’t managed to do it by then.
What was the deadline, the sweet spot between coming on too strong and holding out deceptively long? And when that moment came to share not only what had happened to Sela but the position it left her—and, by extension, Caroline—in, would she find the courage to seize it? As of now, any point at which she could fathom the reality of coming clean seemed miles away.
Three hundred and eighty-eight of them, to be geographically precise.
“When it’s right around the corner.”
Marie’s eyes flicked down to the numbers on the chart, then back at Sela’s. “Okay?” She scribbled a notation on the top sheet of paper, the only indication that this was not actually a question. “You ever change your mind and want to know, ask.”
“I won’t. But I will.”
The nurse smiled ruefully. “Numbers aside, how are you feeling?”
Sela had never figured out how to assess the degree of her symptoms—like those pain scales of one to ten—without feeling an unspoken pressure to buck up and assume her discomfort would hardly faze other people. Stronger people.
“About the same, I guess.”
“Swelling still bothering you?”
“Some.” When she gave specifics, she often lived to regret it—being admitted for observation or earning a nasty new addition to her daily meds cocktail. Spending seventy-two hours collecting her urine in what looked like a gasoline can had been especially fun.
“Now that you have me looking at this again … any chance you might have been a little dehydrated at your last visit?”
The corners of Sela’s mouth twitched, struggling to maintain their upward position. This one had implications. The need to explain away something.
“There’s always a chance, isn’t there?” Given that she’d describe her normal state as chronically thirsty, she had no idea how she’d ever tell. “But I follow the limits exactly.”
“You’re not undershooting it?”
Who in their right mind would drink less than they were allowed? Before this started, Sela had been one of those people who carried a refillable water bottle everywhere. She still did—but rarely got to refill it. Thanks to her body’s stubborn new affinity for fluid retention, fifty ounces a day was the max. Whether this was truly uncomfortably little or her ensuing misery was due to that mean mind trick of wanting what she’d been forbidden, it was real all the same. For someone who slept so little—six hours on her best night, never in a row—her daily allotment worked out to 2.8 ounces every waking hour. Sips. If Sela awoke dry-mouthed and greedily gulped a glass of water, she could have only two more before the same time the next morning. If she wanted to throw it back every time the clock chimed, she could use a standard shot glass, but not a double.
Tracking ounces away from home was tricky. At the pizza place she and Doug used to visit weekly, servers plunked straws into clear plastic cups of twenty-four. At the Chinese Buffet, the clay teapot on every table held sixteen and the tiny no-handle teacups three. There was no subtle way to measure—or bring her own beverages—without turning heads. She stayed home more and more.
She knew of dialysis patients who were limited to thirty-two ounces, and tried to be glad she wasn’t there yet—but feared the day she would be. It became an obsession, rationing water like an ill-prepared tourist on a desert hike, sucking ice to make it last longer, always trying to anticipate how this moment’s thirst compared to her baseline compared to where she’d be an hour from now.
She tried to laugh. “I’m disciplined, not sadistic.”
“Good. Even so, I should’ve … Let’s retest in a week or two? To be sure I’m looking at an anomaly.” Oh, you are, Sela wanted to tell her. I’m nothing if not an anomaly.
Outside, she was heading to her car when she heard her name and turned to find Doug rushing toward her, buttoned up in his work clothes but without his jacket, a striped scarf billowing around him.
“Doug? What are you…?”
He stopped, trying to catch his breath. “I thought I’d keep you company at your appointment today. But an accident held up the interstate. I’m sorry.”
He always apologized for the wrong thing. For finally leaving rather than for wanting to. For continuing to want the things from life that she could no longer have rather than for refusing to compromise. For being late rather than for presuming she wanted him here.
“I appreciate the gesture, but I’m fine on my own.” She turned and resumed walking, not caring that it was rude.
Undeterred, Doug fell into step beside her. “How’d it go?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
All he ever did these days was follow one question with another. She never had answers to appease him, and he’d grow so frustrated he seemed to forget she had the same questions, too.
They used to pass hours in companionable silence. In a hammock stretched in the shade of their backyard, she’d sketch while he’d read or throw a ball for Oscar. But he’d lost the ability to be in her presence without needing to know something, ask something, fix something.
“Look, Doug, for all intents and purposes, we’re not married anymore.”
“We’re still on the same health care plan.”
It was such a fine-print reduction of everything they’d meant to each other, she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She closed her eyes and saw Doug standing next to Brody’s tiny, wire-strewn body in the neonatal intensive care unit, his unshaven face lost in a sea of beeping monitors while she clung to Brody’s fingers through the opening in the Plexiglas. Given the chance, she’d never have traded places with her husband then, stoic as he stood while she withered and wept. Not if it meant letting go of that impossibly small hand.
So he’d drifted further away, she’d let him, and now, they were—
Well, they were on the same health care plan.
“A generous act on your part. But not one that gives you license to insert yourself in my treatment. If I need something from you—if I want to be checked on—I’ll let you know. Okay?”
“Not okay.” He grabbed at her arm, trying to slow her, but she shook him off. “Sela—”
“These appointments are routine. Don’t make it a thing.”
“Yeah, well. If anyone knows there’s no such thing as routine, I think it’s us.”
He could have been referring to any number of things. The standard prenatal screenings that led to her diagnosis. The “nothing to worry about” cramps that turned out to be preterm labor. Their uncommonly amicable shared custody agreement.
But he was overlooking the most impo
rtant one. Again.
“There is no us,” she reminded him. Her car came into view. If she could just duck in before he asked about Caroline. She’d come to this appointment determined to ease the pressure on the tenuous exchanges with her sister. She would not now have that progress undone by Doug wanting to know how that was going and if she’d told her yet and what her plan was. More answers she couldn’t give even if she wanted to.
She’d come here to draw lines today. And since he’d taken it upon himself to show up, he was going to get one, too.
“Look, I appreciate where you’re coming from. But none of this is helping. I need space to deal with this, and I’m not just talking about my appointments.” She pressed the remote to unlock her car door and opened it, turning to say good-bye. The look he gave held so much pity she had to look away. She was glad she’d dropped Brody at Leigh’s rather than dragging him along; if he were here, Doug wouldn’t be dissuaded from wanting to stick by them, get lunch together.
“I don’t like the idea of you trying to handle so much on your own.”
“I’m not on my own.” As if on cue, the phone in her pocket started to ring, and she held it up to show him Leigh’s image on the screen. His face softened, and she knew he’d back down for now.
If only he’d back down for good.
9
Caroline
“You’re not avoiding me, are you?” Walt’s tone was playful, but the question was not. Still, Caroline had to laugh. Some inexplicable impulse—guilt in one of its many maternal forms—had compelled her to agree to “just one quick Nerf battle” before she left to meet Maureen for drinks. So she and Walt found themselves crouched behind opposite ends of the couch, youth-sized safety goggles squished onto their faces, awaiting attack.
Funnily enough, Maureen had accused her of the same thing.
“Of course not. I haven’t seen Mo in weeks, is all.”
“And the suspense is killing her.”
Well, yeah. Maureen knew only that a mysterious half sister had surfaced and chaos had ensued. Caroline had promised details as soon as she had them, then promptly commenced stalling. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to talk to Mo about this—in some ways, Maureen, who’d known her family the longest, would understand her position the best. But Maureen also had a way of making every shared experience feel like an inside joke—from the server-in-training who never brought their food to the shockingly bright DIY paint job that made their short-lived apartment’s kitchen look like a Dr. Seuss book. Though she loved her friend’s easy intimacy, Caroline would sometimes later wish she’d stopped short of poking fun at the server’s shoes or even at her own misguided paint swatch choices. And she didn’t want to feel that way about what was happening with her family. Even if they did have it coming.
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