“I—really?” she asked.
“Is this a decent guy, Letty? You need to tell me now, because if I stick my neck out and find out he’s a jerk to you or involved in something heavy, then I’m going to be pretty ticked off. I don’t want to regret this, and I don’t want you to, either.”
“No,” she said quickly. “Oh, Dad, I don’t know what’s happening.”
“All right, we’re going to figure it out. I already know what he told your mother. I want to hear about the two of you first. How long have you two been . . . together?”
She could tell it was hard for him to ask her like that. And it was definitely hard to answer, but if anyone could really help, he could. So she just told him the truth, and told him everything she knew about Seth’s dad having some guy move into the house and Seth leaving, and about him sleeping in his car, and at friends’, and in the house down the street.
“The gray and white house?” he asked. She nodded, and he sighed and rubbed his forehead really hard. “He do any damage in there? Vandalize anything, steal anything?”
“No! I mean—I don’t think so. It was just for a few days. Dad, he’s not a criminal, he’s not.”
“Technically he is, Letty. He broke into a house and squatted there. In our own neighborhood. That’s against the law, and that makes him a criminal. You should have told me.”
“You would have had him arrested. You wouldn’t have helped him. He didn’t have anywhere else to go, Dad. What was he supposed to do?”
“He could have stayed with friends—”
“He did, as long as he could. Parents don’t just let someone move in without trying to find out what’s going on.”
“What was going on that was so bad?” he asked. “Did his father hit him? Was there other abuse?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “He would never take me to his house. I think he was embarrassed. I mean, I know they don’t have much money, and I didn’t want to ask and, you know, make him feel bad.”
He nodded then, like he really did get it. He made another note on his note card. “Okay, now tell me everything you remember about Venice: names, addresses, anything you can think of.”
She pulled her spiral out and pushed it across the table to him, opening it up to the page she’d been making notes on.
“Good girl,” he murmured with a funny smile, ripping it out of the notebook as he studied it and sliding the spiral back across the table to her. She told him everything she could remember, and he made notes next to hers as she talked.
When she finished, he asked, “Nothing else? Nothing you’re holding back because you think you might get in trouble? It’s not a trick question, Letty. I can’t say that I won’t get upset, even angry, but listen . . .”
He scooted his chair over next to hers and leaned toward her, placing his hands on either side of her face and making sure she was looking right at him. “Letty, no matter what has happened, no matter what you’ve done, no matter what you’ll ever do, I love you more than anything else in my life, and I always will. You know that, don’t you?”
“Dad?” she asked. It looked like he might start to cry. He was scaring her. “Are you okay?”
He tilted his head and looked up at the ceiling, taking a deep breath. “I am fine, sweetie,” he said after he looked at her again. “I just want to make sure that you know that you don’t have to do everything yourself, okay? It’s all right to let me and your mom worry about things sometimes. When you have a problem, or one of your friends needs help, you can talk to us.”
“I know,” she whispered.
He scooted back and looked away, up the hall of bookshelves. He had his chin tilted up, and he looked about a million miles away. Her mom would always tease him and say he was thinking deep thoughts. Letty didn’t know what to do, so she just stayed quiet.
He started talking again, but he didn’t look at her.
“You know, I met your mother in middle school. We were in P.E. together, and we were playing softball. I pitched her an easy hit, and she plowed it right at me, and I fell in love with her. Right then, just like that. I don’t know why her hitting that ball did it. It was a long time before she loved me back.”
He looked at her then.
“So, how much does this guy mean to you, Letty?”
She wanted to be able to act like she understood what he was saying about her mom. She did think it was really cool that they met so long ago, and that they were even together back then. But then they went and got married right out of high school. Just the thought of it all as a whole freaked her out. She loved Seth, but she didn’t look at him and see marriage and babies like her mom and dad did, not even in a house with a plane next to it.
“I think I love him, Dad, I do, but . . . I don’t want to get married or anything.”
“Well, that’s good, because when all this is over, I’m going to have to think about whether you’re going to be seeing him at all.”
She began to protest, but he held his hand up.
“Look, I want a lot of things for you, Letty. I want you to be a good student, I want you to be smart and stay out of trouble, and I want you to go to college. But I want you to enjoy your life, too. I want you to love and be loved by a good person. But I don’t want you to think that because your mother and I met and married so young that you’re supposed to do that, too, and I certainly don’t want you seeing someone who’s already in this much trouble at this age.”
“Dad, he’s just . . .” She trailed off with a sigh. “He’s my first boyfriend. I mean, aren’t you supposed to move on from them anyway? They’re your ‘first love,’ right? Like, you look back on them later.”
He laughed. “Well, yeah, only I’m still with my first love. I’m just as in love with your mother as I was when I was fourteen, no matter what problems we might be having right now. She had—she’ll tell you sometime, I guess—she had other boyfriends. And, maybe I wasn’t even her first love. I don’t know.”
He stopped talking then, but not like he wanted her to say anything, more like he was just thinking, or remembering, so she stayed quiet.
“You’re a smart kid, Letty,” he finally said, slapping his hand lightly on the table and then leaning over and kissing her cheek.
“I’m going to go see what I can do about this boy, okay? If we can help him, we will.”
She didn’t know what to say. She realized that she hardly ever said thank you to her parents, because she wanted to say it now, and she knew it was what she should say, but it seemed so hard. She nodded and looked down at her ballet flats.
He waited a moment and then stood up, pulling her cell from his pocket and handing it to her.
“Keep it on. If you get in trouble with anyone, you have them call me. I’ll stop in the office before I leave to make sure they know you’re allowed to accept phone calls today. Put it on vibrate and if it goes off in class, you get up and leave right away. Don’t disrupt things.”
“Okay,” she said, turning it on and clipping it to her pocket.
He hesitated for a minute as if he wanted to say something else, but then he just patted her shoulder and turned to go. She took a deep breath.
“Dad?”
He turned around.
“Thank you.”
CORA
I woke once, twice. The third time I felt like humming. Not because I felt so wonderful, I certainly did not. But there was a buzzing in my ears, in my head, a certain tone that, for some obscure reason, I wanted to match, and I began to hum. Or I thought I was humming, but when someone said my name, I opened my mouth to respond to them and never stopped humming. Or thinking I was.
Within a few moments I recalled where I was and made an effort to focus my eyes. Two nurses were standing by the bed, both of them talking, one over the other.
“Hi, Cora, everything is okay.”
“You’re all right, Cora, everything went just fine.”
“Can you look at me, Cora?”
�
��Can you squeeze my hand?”
I did have a moment in which I was frightened. I remembered the last second of consciousness, realizing that they were shoving a tube down my throat, and then I was out, and now this. The humming faded away, and I was filled with gratefulness to these wonderful women who were standing by me, as if I were the only patient they had, reassuring me, so well, so quickly. I tried to speak, to tell them, Thank you, thank you so much, what wonderful, nurturing women you are, what angels.
The drugs were doing their job very, very well.
But of course my voice didn’t work just yet, and as I came more fully out from under the anesthesia my angels drifted away and were not at my bedside by the time I could say thank you. A different nurse smiled kindly at me and took my vital signs.
Ali was waiting in my room when they wheeled me in, and she just winked at me as they got me situated, staying well out of the way until the nurses decided everything was just right and left the room. Then she leaned over the silver railing and kissed me on the forehead with a loud smack. If I could have laughed, I would have.
“How you feeling?” she asked, pulling a chair up and holding my hand under the rail.
“All right,” I croaked. “Doesn’t hurt.”
She grinned at me, and we both said, “Yet,” at the same time.
“You want the TV on?”
“No. Drew?”
She held up her cell phone. “Called and left a message that it went fine, and I said I’d call again as soon as you were coherent. Are you coherent?”
“Not really. Give . . . a minute.”
“Okay,” she said, her voice growing softer. “Relax. You can close your eyes if you want to.”
That sounded good. So I did. Just as I shut them, the first twinges in my arm made themselves known.
When I woke again, Ali was still sitting in the chair, but her eyes were closed and she was breathing evenly enough that I didn’t think she was just resting. We both jumped when her cell phone rang, and she scrambled to get it, casting a quick glance at me and grimacing.
“Hello?”
I wasn’t particularly interested in who was on the phone. I was, however, very interested in the water on the nightstand and figured out the buttons to push to raise my bed and leaned over toward it.
Ali waved at me to stop and leaped up to help, putting her hand over the mouthpiece.
“You up to talking?” she asked. “It’s Drew.”
I held my hand out eagerly, croaking, “Hey,” into the phone, waiting to hear his voice, surprised by my need.
“How you doing?” he asked, his voice filled with worry.
“I’m okay,” I said. “A little sore.”
“Know where I’m at?”
“Where?”
“Atlanta. I’ll be there in a few hours, assuming we get out in time.”
“Really? Are you crazy?”
“Just about you,” he said.
“Goofball.”
“Should I rent a car or take a taxi?”
“Take a taxi,” I said, but Ali held her hand out for the phone, and I handed it over.
“What time are you getting in?” she asked him, writing it down on the notepad on the nightstand. “The airport’s only twenty minutes from here. I’ll have just enough time to get you before I have to pick Letty up at school.”
She handed the phone back to me just as the nurse and the vascular surgeon entered. We said our good-byes, and I suffered through an exam. The surgeon was pleased.
“You’ll be ready to go in the morning,” he assured me. “I’ll stop to check on you, but everything looks good. The things we talked about stand; no pressure on it, keep it clean, et cetera. I’ll want to see you in the office in a few days.”
I thanked him, and Ali followed them out, to talk about me in the hall, I imagined. It made me smile. How wonderful to be taken care of, how lovely to have people who cared about you so much, who hopped planes to fly across the country, who closed their business in order to attend to you.
My smile slowly faded. It was lovely, wasn’t it? It was lovely when you had the flu. Lovely when you were having a baby, though of course I wouldn’t know about that. Lovely, right this second, trying to believe that this was it, just this one little, easy surgery. It’s my arm, for heaven’s sake, just a couple little slices and a tube in my arm.
But what is this little surgery for? What does it usher in?
That wasn’t so lovely. It wasn’t so lovely to think about other people taking care of you when you weren’t going to recover. It wasn’t so lovely when you realized that those same people might be doing it for years. That this was just the beginning of a life like this. Sitting here, unable to go anywhere.
Waiting for health.
And it would never come.
12
ALI
Drew was nothing like what I’d expected, and yet he was clearly perfect for Cora. As hippie as she was, he was straitlaced, and older than I’d anticipated. He arrived in a blue oxford button-down, navy blazer, and khakis, rimless glasses resting on small ears, and closely cropped hair, silvering nicely on the sides. He could have been anyone, any trim executive on a business trip.
But there were clues to his life in academia, a looseness in the way he moved, a round metal pendant on a leather cord around his neck, and a ready smile despite the underlying reason for his trip. We held each other longer than most people who’d never met would have, two people who shared a common love and worry for another.
He grabbed his bag and squinted as we walked out to the car. I had a spare pair of Benny’s sunglasses in the car, and I handed them to him as we sped along the long curve of the airport exit.
He laughed apologetically as he took them. “Thank you,” he said, settling them over his own glasses. “So? How is she?”
“She’s good, you know, physically,” I said, turning onto the back road to I-75. “It’s all so scary.” I glanced at him quickly. “God, that sounded narcissistic, didn’t it? I imagine it’s a lot scarier for her than it is for me. I just—Cora’s never made me worry before, you know? I guess I’m not used to it.”
“I understand. She always took care of me, too,” he said. “I never realized how skewed our relationship was on that front until this. I admit it was frustrating at first.”
I laughed. “I know. Isn’t that strange? It’s like when your mother was sick when you were a kid. You just wanted her to get up and make you dinner, right? How dare she feel bad when you’re hungry?”
He laughed, too, but it was subdued. “Well, you’d think I’d have gotten on the bandwagon a little faster. I’m still ashamed of that. Not that I ignored it, but I think it was just too much to take in. It was diagnosed so quickly. She was tired; her back and her sides hurt; she was bloated. She went in because she thought maybe she was starting perimenopause. She wasn’t even going to go, but I finally convinced her that there were things that could be done, hormone replacements, supplements to make her feel better. Who knew she’d come back with this?”
His head swiveled as we passed a panther crossing sign, and he looked at me in astonishment. “Are you serious?” he asked, as if I’d personally planted the signs.
“Yep,” I said. “Although I have to admit that I’ve lived here my entire life and never caught sight of one in the wild.”
Despite that, he watched the sides of the road carefully even after we merged onto I-75.
“She tells me you want to donate,” he said, his voice barely audible over the noise of the road.
“Of course I do,” I said. “But did she tell you . . . everything else?”
I had no idea what Cora had told him. I assumed she’d been honest about Letty, I assumed she was as open about our situation as I was, but over the years I’d stopped asking when she mentioned a new boyfriend. It had started to feel uncomfortably selfish somehow, to follow every announcement of a new relationship with questions about how much she’d mentioned me and Letty.
/> He smiled at me. “I don’t know,” he said, catching me by surprise with the clear tease in his voice. “Why don’t you tell me everything, and I’ll let you know?”
I laughed. “Forget it. Some things have to stay just between friends. We keep each other’s secrets, always have.”
“Well, she told me about Letty, that she donated eggs to you and your husband so you could have her. And that she loves you all very much.”
I wanted to say that we loved her, too, so much, but I couldn’t trust myself to speak.
“And yes, she told me about it being hereditary. I understand that you can’t do it. It must have been an agonizing decision.”
“I am not positive that I can’t do it,” I said. “My husband and I have an appointment with a genetic counselor next week. We’re thinking about having Letty tested to see if she has the gene or not. If she doesn’t, I could do it, I would do it . . .”
“Ah,” he said, and I shot him another glance.
“What? I mean, I know there are considerations; we don’t even know if we’re a match, lots of stuff to think about.”
I swerved down our exit too quickly, making Drew grip the handle on the door a little more tightly.
“She said you couldn’t donate,” I said, probing cautiously.
“Well, we’re not a match. I got tested immediately. But even if we were, there would be some things to consider. I’m a hemophiliac,” he said matter-of-factly, and I immediately slowed down.
Just what I needed. A car wreck in which Drew’s kneecap split open and he bled to death. It felt as if everyone around me were fragile as sea foam, breaking apart at the slightest breeze, tatters across the sand.
Only Benny remained as solid in real life as I had always believed he was, though I was beginning to grow uneasy about the possibility of little time bombs within any of us, waiting for the moment that their ticking would grow loud enough to hear. I didn’t say a word, but at the stoplight at the base of the exit I sighed and lowered my forehead to the top of the steering wheel for a moment.
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