One Last Song

by S. K. Falls

  Feel up to Sphinx Wednesday night? Drew’s going to play.

  The doors opened, and the sunlight streaming in from the large glass doors of the entrance bathed me in its warmth.

  Absolutely, I replied. He’d already invited me.

  Great. Pick you up at 8.

  * * *

  Mum was waiting, unsuspecting, in a parking spot. I saw her swigging water from her bottle. I felt a thrill of excitement and apprehension at her upcoming reaction.

  I slid into my seat and held my hands up to the heating vents. The hot air on my frozen fingers hurt. “I need to go to Dr. Daniels.” I’d been seeing Dr. Daniels since I was about six.

  He was my dad’s friend, and my parents trusted him more than any pediatrician. He knew about my Munchausen, but since he and my dad were golf buddies, he was much more willing to look the other way and treat my symptoms rather than insist to my parents that I needed to be under the care of a psychiatrist. It was just one of the many benefits of my dad being country club friends with the richest men in the city. They operated on a quid pro quo system that had proved beneficial to all of them in the past.

  Mum had been in the process of putting the car in gear, but she looked at me sharply instead, her mouth bracketed by disapproving lines. “What is it now? Why do you need to see Dr. Daniels?”

  “The fever from before. I figured out what it was from. I have an abscess.” I unzipped my coat and hoodie so she could see.

  It was actually a cluster of three abscesses, each the size of the tip of my finger, each pregnant with pus. The wool of my hoodie kept rubbing over them, inflaming them further. It was a rich, full feeling, the kind you get after listening to rousing classical music or eating a really hot, well-seasoned meal when you’re hungry.

  She drew away from me, as if I might be contagious. “God, Saylor. What did you do?”

  “Nothing!” I tugged the zipper back up, accidentally hitting the abscess. I had to pause for a second while I waited for the pain to recede. For that second, that spot on my chest was the only real thing in my realm of existence. After the pain died down, I took a breath. “It’s an infection of some kind, Mum. I can’t exactly make my body erupt in boils.” And for all she knew, that was the truth. I turned away and put my hands back to the vents, reveling in the pinching pain. “Can we go now?”

  Sighing, she began to back out of the space, her eyes wary. She was trying to figure out how I’d done it, what new item I had in my bag of tricks that she didn’t know about. It was a game we’d played since I was little, and I knew she’d never win.

  * * *

  Mum drove quickly, the tires skidding in the ice and snow. When she tried to stop for a stop sign but only succeeded in rolling slowly past it, I turned to her. “Do you want me to drive?”

  “Why on earth would I want that?” she asked, making a sharp left turn.

  “Because you’re driving like a blind person. Are you mad?”

  “I’m not the least bit angry.” At the stoplight, she took a drink of water from her plastic bottle. “Should I be?”

  “No.” I fiddled with my zipper, hitting the abscess with the interior part of it. Pain bloomed in my chest. “I told you.”

  The thing about lying to my mother was that we both knew I was doing it, and yet, the two of us would go to any lengths to pretend we didn’t. I’d swear up and down the street, even after the results came back showing I’d taken the pills or swallowed the needle or whatever, that I had nothing to do with me being sick.

  My mother would continue to pretend to believe me. She’d ask every now and then if I had a hand in making myself sick, but as long as I vehemently denied it, she’d go back to the safe, warm lap of denial. The call from my college counselor had changed that, had forced her to look right into the face of my disease for the first time in many years. It was like returning to your normal life after a hurricane blew through your house: Things were overturned and broken, and it took a while to get everything back to its correct position.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Dr. Daniels was the iconoclastic upper-middle-class American: short, stout to the point of irony, and prone to exuberant proclamations intended to show patients how chummy he was. None of that “I’m your doctor, not your friend” bedside manner for Dr. Daniels. He was every man’s companion, every woman’s confidante.

  I distrusted him intensely.

  When Mum and I walked in to his elegant waiting room (with jazz playing from the speakers, and a Koi pond decorating the middle of the space), he was talking to a patient, guffawing loudly, probably at some joke he’d just made. When he heard us come in, he said good-bye to her and turned, his rounded cheeks pink with mirth.

  “Sarita!” he called, coming over to envelop her in a hug. His lab coat barely fit around his massive girth. “And Saylor!” He leaned forward as if to extend the warm welcome to me, but I stepped back. Dr. Daniels let his arms fall back to his sides without missing a beat. “What can I do for the two loveliest ladies in Ridgeland?”

  I resisted the urge to roll my eyes at his obvious ass-kissing while Mum, in a discreet whisper, told him that I had an “issue” we wanted him to take a look at.

  For as long as I could remember, this was the way it always went when I got sick. Mum brought me here, and in the manner of somebody saying her three-year-old had had a toilet training accident, proceeded to tell Dr. Daniels or his assistant that I needed to be checked out. I was never allowed to come by myself, presumably because I might overinflate the issue or bring shame to the family name in some way. I was guarded closely in Dr. Daniels’s office because his clientele was one that mattered to my father and his business of twisting the truth.

  The last time I’d been in to the clinic had been over six months ago, when I’d contracted bronchitis as a commuter freshman. And yes, it had been on purpose.

  My dad had come down with it first, and I made it a point to pick out his used tissues from the trash. It’s not important what I did with them. The point is I did get sick. It was really an ingenious plan because my parents couldn’t say for certain that I’d done it on purpose. After all, how often does only one person in a household ever get sick? Families usually catch everything from each other.

  I didn’t take any medication for my cough and sore throat, and eventually it got so bad that my lungs filled with fluid and my fever topped out at 104 degrees. When I came in here, I was on the verge of pneumonia. Dr. Daniels had actually been concerned—I’d seen that telltale spark in his eyes, so different from his usual wary weariness.

  I hopped up on the examination table while my mother sat in a chair and watched.

  “So let’s have a look, shall we?” Dr. Daniels said, washing his hands briskly at the sink. As he pulled on a pair of gloves, I took off my big jacket and unzipped my hoodie.

  “Oh my,” Dr. Daniels said, peering at the cluster of abscesses hanging from my skin like diseased grapes. “Those are rather inflamed. How’d this happen?”

  I looked down at his bald, shiny head, reflecting the lights from above, and shrugged. “Don’t know.”

  “Hmm.” He straightened up, his face reddened from the increased blood flow. He snapped off the gloves and heaved them into the trash with a flourish, like he was playing basketball. Pushing his glasses up on the greasy bridge of his nose, he said, “We’re going to have to do a puncture aspiration on these; basically lance and drain them. And you’ll have to take care of them at home after that, packing them with gauze and washing the site regularly.”

  I saw Mum shifting in her seat, uncomfortable with the medical talk. You’d think eighteen years with me would’ve helped her squeamishness a bit.

  Dr. Daniels turned to his tray table and began to pick out the supplies he’d need to exorcize me of my illness du jour: a pack of sterile gauze, rubbing alcohol, cotton swabs, and, ironically, a syringe much like the one I used to create the abscesses in the first place.

  “I think I’ll wait outside,” Mum said,
gathering up her coat. Her face was a shade paler than usual.

  It might’ve pleased me that she was so affected by the suggestion of my pain, but I knew from past experience that she simply had a disdain for bodily fluids of any kind.

  I was a few months shy of twelve when I started my period—long before any other girls my age I knew. I’d awoken that morning with a stomach cramp like nothing I’d ever felt before. The area right above my pubic bone felt like someone had reached in, grabbed my uterus in a viselike grip, and squeezed to see what would come out. The results were all over the crotch of my panties and in a neat little circle on my sheets.

  After panic had washed over me, I’d felt a sort of righteous joy settle in. It was poetic justice, wasn’t it, that I, Saylor Grayson, maker-upper of diseased yarns, would die of something bloody and extremely painful. Qué será, será, I thought to myself as I floated downstairs, rivulets of blood trickling slowly down my legs. Mum will cry and wish she’d been more tolerant of my predilection to getting sick, but it’ll be too late. They’ll find a tumor as big as my hand nestled behind my pubic bone.

  I tried to hide the smile on my face as I showed her the blood-soaked cotton of my panties; pointed to the stains on my inner thighs. But she didn’t break down in tears. Her expression, if anything, was what you might expect from someone who’d discovered a dead mouse under their floorboards.

  “That’s your period,” she’d said, straightening up and away. “Don’t you remember we talked about this last summer?”

  Now that she mentioned it, I did remember. I’d hung on to every detail, and had checked my underwear every day for the next week. But then other things had caught my attention. To an eleven-year-old, last summer might as well be last millennium.

  I’d trudged back upstairs and cleaned up my sheets. Washed my underwear and myself. Asked for a pad, wore it like a diaper with maximum disdain. Mum had me take each used pad outside to the garbage can instead of just wrapping and tossing it in our trash. Apparently my menstrual blood was just that disgusting. She insisted she did the same, but I didn’t believe it.

  When she was gone, Dr. Daniels chuckled. “A delicate Indian flower, your mother.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  As he picked up a packet to get a needle for his syringe, he glanced at me. “Take your hoodie and shirt off all the way, please.”

  I stared at him, but he kept his head down. The clock ticked. The packet ripped. “Can I get a gown?”

  He gestured to the shelf. “Take your pick.” Then, very deliberately, he closed the curtain between us to give me privacy, as if he was going to do that the whole time.

  When I was disrobed and had only a thin hospital gown covering my skin, I opened the curtain again. Dr. Daniels stepped toward me with a cotton ball. “I’m going to numb the area first.”

  The procedure was quick, and in spite of the anesthetic, painful. Dr. Daniels used a scalpel to make little slits in the abscesses. What drained out looked like a mixture of curdled milk and cheese. I watched in fascination as he packed the abscess cavity with gauze and applied a thick bandage over the whole thing.

  Once it was over, Dr. Daniels peeled off his gloves, his mouth hovering just shy of a smirk. “Bet you won’t be doing that again.” Did he think the pain of the procedure made any difference to people like me? But I didn’t say anything. “What’d you do, inject feces into your skin?”

  Again, I stayed silent. Since I’d hit puberty, Dr. Daniels and I had this strange thing going on. I didn’t know what it was—he’d hit on me or make some awkward motion to, I’d rebuff him, and then he’d get cold/sarcastic/try to hurt me. I’d never mentioned it to anyone because, come on. Talk about an easy way out for the shrinks.

  Oh, so that’s why Saylor’s so fucked up: sexual abuse. Of course! It all makes sense now. Let’s talk about how Dr. Daniels stunted your sexual growth by targeting your body at such a critical age. Let’s talk about how hurting yourself makes it possible for you to get attention for something besides your sexuality. Blah, blah, blah. No, thank you. Besides, the dude had never abused me. It never went past insinuations and lame-ass attempts to see me naked or topless or whatever. I preferred not to think about it.

  Once I was back in my shirt and hoodie, I drew the curtain back again so I could leave. But Dr. Daniels raised a hand to stop me.

  “Uh uh uh,” he said, his mouth spreading out in a grin. “Aren’t you forgetting something?” With a flourish, he pulled out a green sucker from his lab coat pocket and handed it to me. “For being such a good girl today.”

  I took it without a smile. “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome, sweetheart.” He patted me on the back, his hand absently rubbing the hook-and-eye closure of my bra under my hoodie.

  I twisted my shoulder a bit to get his hand off and jumped off the table. I grabbed the door handle and swung the door open.

  “Can we go now?” I said to Mum, who was right outside on a chair.

  She nodded and stood, turning to thank Dr. Daniels. I tossed the sucker in the trash and headed out toward the waiting room.

  I hung out by the Koi pond to discourage the receptionist from talking to me. The fish came up to me, their tails wiggling furiously, almost as if they were wagging them. I’d heard people say you could pet Koi, that they were actually affectionate, but all I felt was a slight revulsion as I looked at their bulging eyes and gasping lips. One of the fish hung back from the rest of his buddies, smaller and not as brightly colored. He had a small boil on his side. I wondered if he was sick.

  “Hey.”

  It was Carson, his wheelchair about two feet away. I hadn’t seen him. “Oh, hey.” My palms were sweaty; my thoughts hovering, panicked, around how I’d explain who Carson was to Mum without giving away that we’d met in a support group.

  “You okay?” Carson asked. Then he shrugged. “Well, you know, considering.”

  At first I thought he could see my anxiety, but then I realized he was asking because we were at a doctor’s office. I smiled; my skin under the bandage throbbed. “Yeah, fine. Just a routine visit. You?”

  He shrugged. “I’ll live. For now.”

  I laughed, just a little. Mum still hadn’t come out. “That’s good to know. Um, will you be at Sphinx Wednesday? To see Drew play?”

  Carson shook his head. “I’m not usually up to late nights anymore, unfortunately. Wish I didn’t have to miss it, though. I don’t know how much longer he’s going to be able to do that, you know?”

  I thought of Drew, fumbling the CD. I hadn’t added two and two, that the loss of hand coordination meant he’d have to stop playing guitar. Like every other healthy person probably did, I fumbled mentally for something positive to say, as if one positive would completely eradicate the gravity of what Carson had just said. “Well, if he can’t play the guitar, at least he’ll still be able to sing.”

  Carson looked at me for a long, silent moment. I wondered if he was thinking that I didn’t seem authentic enough for a person who’d been diagnosed with MS. I wondered if he could see straight through me, like a pane of glass, to the center of my rotten core. But then he said, “That’s the thing about FA. It takes your voice, too. Slurred speech is another side effect, like compromised balance and coordination.” He shook his head. “It’s the worst possible disease that a musician could’ve got. So fucked up.”

  The interior door opened. I saw Mum paying the receptionist in my peripheral vision, and knew I needed to bail. “Yeah,” I said, my mind distractedly playing with what Carson had just said. “I have to go, but I’ll see you later.”

  I walked out into the snow to wait for Mum.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  At six p.m. on Wednesday, I headed downstairs to check out the dinner situation. Dinner was always an exercise in nonverbal communication at our house. I called it the Dinner Code.

  Situation number one of the Dinner Code was as follows: Mum was pleased (which happened on the rare occasions that Dad de
emed it necessary to eat with us). She’d set out the nice linens and have a meal ready to go at the table a la Pollyanna. Situation number two of the Dinner Code was less idyllic. Mum was in her usual nihilistic, “my family’s the bane of my existence” mood, which meant I had to fend for myself. Situation number three of the Dinner Code was becoming more and more common. In this final situation, Mum was in her fantasy “I don’t have a family; I’m single and happy” state of denial and usually wasn’t even home around dinnertime.

  As I crossed the den, I heard my dad in the kitchen.

  “Noah Preston? What did he want?”

  “I don’t know,” Mum replied, her voice distant, as if she was turned away. She was probably working on her dollhouse as she spoke to him. Tonight was likely situation #2 in the Dinner Code. “He just said to tell you he’d been trying to get in touch with you for the past week.”

  “Christ, I know that. There’s a reason I haven’t answered his fucking calls. How the hell did Preston get our home number?”

  “I don’t know. And there’s no reason to curse, Victor.” A pause. “Have you said hello to Saylor since you got home?”

  “Give me a break. It’s only been about an hour and she’s eighteen. No eighteen-year-old waits with bated breath for her dad to come home from a business trip.”

  A brief silence.

  “You could ask her about those abscesses.”

  “If she said she had nothing to do with it, I’m inclined to believe her.”

  My mother let out a snort.

  “Do you always have to be so fucking cynical?”

  I hurried into the kitchen, making sure my slippers made all the noise in the world on the wood floors. My parents stopped talking. When I walked in, my dad was watching the doorway expectantly, a smile plastered on his face. “Hey, hon! How’s my beautiful girl?”

  “Hi, Daddy.” I walked to the fridge, opened it, and got out a bowl of premade salad. “When did you get home?”

  “Just walked in the door,” he said without skipping a beat. Mum didn’t look up from her dollhouse. “What are you up to tonight?”