PRAISE FOR DIGGING IN
“Endearingly quirky . . . Emotional yet funny . . . Confronting grief, change, and a new way of being, Nyhan’s lovely story captures the rejuvenating power of hard work that can start right in the backyard.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Charming . . . Nyhan has fun with a bubbly satire of business culture.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“On the surface, this is a sweet novel about aging, grief, and redemption. But Nyhan (All the Good Parts, 2016), who has experienced loss herself, shares very insightful observations. She reminds readers that comfort and hope can come in the most unexpected encounters if the heart is open.”
—Booklist
“For the two years since her husband’s death, Paige has been concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other . . . Nyhan uses details from her own personal tragedy to harness the pain, tenderness, and empowerment of Paige’s transformation in Digging In.”
—Associated Press
“This is a vision of love, hope, and pressing onward even when it doesn’t seem possible . . . Highly recommended.”
—USA Today’s Happy Ever After
PRAISE FOR ALL THE GOOD PARTS
“Quirky and laugh-out-loud funny, we loved All the Good Parts! Nyhan had us at page 1 with this unique yet relatable story of the deep bonds between sisters and family and the yearning for motherhood. Readers who want to be swept up and taken on an emotional roller coaster will love All the Good Parts!”
—Liz Fenton and Lisa Steinke, authors of The Year We Turned Forty and The Status of All Things
“All the Good Parts is wildly original and features a mixture of heartfelt and laugh-out-loud moments. The main character’s quest for motherhood is poignant and relatable . . . [but] it’s the ensuing complexities that arise as the main character tries to find a suitable daddy donor from a varied potential list that make this story hard to put down.”
—RT Book Reviews (4 stars)
“[Nyhan] creates an original and endearing contemporary heroine in Leona Accorsi . . . [Her] novel tells a surprising, sweet, and unconventional story about family and friendship.”
—Booklist
ALSO BY LORETTA NYHAN
Digging In
All the Good Parts
Empire Girls
Home Front Girls
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2020 by Loretta Nyhan
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542006439
ISBN-10: 1542006430
Cover design and illustration by David Drummond
To all those fighting an autoimmune battle, especially my favorite warriors, Hannah, Alex, and Andrew—three of the bravest kids I know.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHAPTER 1
Which type of person are you?
Personality Test results for ALLY!
ALLY, you are 97% FRUSTRATED EXPLORER!
Feeling lost? Directionless? Like your ship has no captain? ALLY, you are a FRUSTRATED EXPLORER, Personality Type 6! You take action but get no results. You find yourself rushing headlong into life’s dead ends. You often feel as though you are running down a dark, endless tunnel with no light to guide your way. But don’t worry! Click the link below to receive a detailed Type 6 report, which lists five easy ways you can take charge of your life and make impactful change!
I clicked the link. Cost of the report? Twenty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents. Starbucks equivalent? Four to five drinks, depending on how fancy I was feeling. Hmmm . . .
ALLY, would you like to share your results with your friends?
Okay, that was a hard no. I would not like my 337 Facebook friends to know that I am personality type six, the woman without a GPS system for living. But apparently, I didn’t mind sharing this vital information with my daughter. She sat in the passenger seat of my parked VW bug, staring at her own phone.
“Get this,” I said, dangling my results in front of her face before tossing my phone in my bag. “Ugh. Why do these things matter?”
“Because they’re always a little true,” Kylie said, sounding much older than her ten and a half years. She returned her gaze to a YouTube celebrity sticking slime up her nose. “Take the test again. You might get something better.”
“Or something worse,” I said before realizing I shouldn’t be spewing negativity. Especially not now. “But you might be right. Maybe next time I’ll get fearless warrior.”
“Maybe,” Kylie said, but she sounded unconvinced.
“So . . . are you ready to go in?”
“Nope.”
We’d parked directly in front of the Integrative Spiritual, Health, and Wellness Center of Chicago. Housed in a stately greystone, it proved my theory that the most successful doctors were the ones who understood that elegant, expensive surroundings could have a definite placebo effect.
“I guess we can stay here for a while,” I said. “Spend a few minutes enjoying our rock star parking spot.” I reached over and unclicked her seatbelt. Then I caught her stricken expression. “That’s just to make you comfortable, sweetie. We can even go home, if you want.” I turned the car back on to show her I meant it.
“Waste of gas,” Kylie muttered.
“It’s only ten thirty. I can get you back to school for lunch period.”
She shrugged. “It’s Fifth Grade Fun Lunch today. That means pizza. I can’t eat it, so why bother?”
“We can pick up something on the way.”
“Really not a big deal, Mom.”
White coat syndrome was a big deal, though. And my daughter, after being dragged to medical professional after medical professional, had a clear case of it.
I turned off the car and stared out the window, hoping the late-September morning—clear and bright and sunny—would offer some answers. After a moment, it did. “Want to do some yoga breathing? The oooh-jai thing?”
Kylie laughed. “It’s called ujjayi.”
“I think that’s Sanskrit for ‘Darth Vader breath.’ At least that’s what it sounds like.”
“Okay,” Kylie said, “let’s make it loud.” She exaggerated her inhale and exhale. “We’re supposed to sound fierce, like warriors.”
“See, maybe I can learn to be a warrior instead of a wanderer!”
“You have to practice a l
ot. Like, a lot.”
“Well, then I’d better get started.”
We spent a moment trying to breathe directly into the back of our throats without hocking up something vile, and a longer moment giggling at how ridiculous we sounded.
“Want to go in, little warrior?” I said softly when we wound down. “Up to you.”
She went silent. I knew why. I wasn’t just asking her to go inside. I was asking her to risk, to hope, to open herself to the scrutiny of strangers, however well meaning.
Kylie sighed. “Do you think they’ll have bubbly water? I kind of want some.”
“If the inside of this place looks anything like the outside, then yeah. Pretty fancy-pants. I bet they’ll have water brought over in glass goblets from the French Alps.”
Kylie opened her door. “That’s good enough for me,” she said. “Fun Lunch is totally overrated anyway.”
I signed us in at the glossy front desk, and an intimidatingly beautiful woman in a well-cut black suit asked us to follow her down a maze of a hallway. We passed tastefully decorated office after tastefully decorated office, all curiously empty. When we reached the end of the hallway, the receptionist opened a door to a not-so-elegant exterior wooden staircase, Chicago tenement–style.
“Up one level,” she said. “The door sticks, so you might have to kick it.”
I couldn’t tell if she was joking. “Really?”
“Really. The doctor’s waiting for you.” She turned on one perilously high heel and was gone.
“This is weird,” Kylie whispered.
“It’s an adventure.”
“Uh-huh.”
When we got to the top of the stairs, the door did stick, and I had to kick it twice before it opened.
We stood in another hallway, but this one smelled like fried onions and burnt coffee.
“Go in and have a seat,” ordered a modulated, professorial voice. We craned our necks, wondering where it was coming from, but couldn’t spot a single human being. Shrugging, Kylie and I stepped into the only open door we saw.
It was obviously the “spiritual” office of the wellness center, more suitable to an ashram in California than a tony practice just off the Magnificent Mile.
I chose to sit in a leather chair worn smooth by countless enlightened butts, immediately regretting it because the spider plant dangling above my head tickled my forehead. Patchouli essential oil wafted noiselessly from a phallic-shaped diffuser. Though the scent was not entirely unpleasant, I could feel it nestling into my pores, certain it would sweat out on the long drive home. Kylie perched next to me on a Turkish-style ottoman, trying not to crinkle her nose. She laced her fingers together, probably to keep from scratching the rash that had appeared on her inner arm after breakfast.
Kylie, at ten years and eight months, was sweet as the local honey displayed on the office desk, but sick. Sometimes very, very sick. Her immune system was acting like a mean girl, poking at her weak spots, taunting her cells, inflaming the whole of her. Doctors didn’t quite know how to put a stop to this bullying. We’d heard a lot of maybe it’s this and possibly it’s that, which meant no one really knew how to treat her. I’d known for years that my little girl was severely allergic to peanuts and a host of other things, but these new developments, mysterious and threatening, had us running through an HMO-approved maze of doctors and specialists and hospitals all over Chicagoland.
We’d come through the maze, weary and disoriented and still seeking answers. Desperate, I shifted our focus to the surprisingly expensive practitioners of alternative medicine. They had inconsistent Yelp reviews and strange addresses, and we couldn’t afford any of them. I’d borrowed the fee for today’s visit from my mother, a retiree on social security. “Kylie needs it,” Mom said. “Don’t think twice.”
Which brought us here, to be . . . ignored? I debated taking Kylie’s hand and making a run for it. Maybe she could squeeze a little bit of fun out of Fifth Grade Fun Lunch. She definitely deserved a little fun.
Before I could make up my mind, a woman entered the room. She wore a green and mustard-yellow striped maxi dress and a gold nameplate bearing her eye-roller of an alliterative hippie moniker, Dr. Indigo, integrative allergist and immunotherapist.
Dr. Lucinda Indigo had a Yelp average of two and a half stars and thirteen reviews. Weird. Condescending. Expensive. Hippie Bullshit.
And then, the one word that had me on the phone making an appointment: Effective.
Only a few people had heard of her on the Facebook group for allergy families. The ones I could find who’d actually sought her treatment were happy with their outcomes but vague about the process. She’s a character! one said when I’d private-messaged her. I hoped that meant Dr. Indigo actually had character.
The doctor smiled tightly in our general direction. “Kylie?” she said, searching for something on her overcluttered desk. “How are you today?”
“Fine,” Kylie muttered.
Dr. Indigo gave Kylie her full attention. Her eyes were so dark I couldn’t see her pupils. “Are you?”
“Fine” was how the chronically ill answered when they were too tired, too scared, or too hopeless to answer with the truth. I hated “fine.” But Kylie needed it—“fine” was one of her few defenses. The problem was, we had to come in to any new doctor completely defenseless if we wanted her to truly help us.
“It’s okay, baby,” I said. “Tell her about this morning.”
Kylie glanced at me and said, “After I ate a banana this morning, I got a rash.” She stuck out her skinny arm. “Like, inside my elbow. It itches. I get them a lot. My throat doesn’t hurt today, though, and I don’t have a fever. At least I don’t think so.”
“Hmmm,” Dr. Indigo said. She snatched a green file from a haphazard pile and started flipping through some papers. I’d dutifully filled out a mountain of forms and questionnaires in preparation for this meeting and sent them in weeks ago. Had she even glanced at them?
“Hmmm,” the doctor said again.
I knew that probably meant she had no clue where to start, but still I looked at her as I’d looked at all the others—potential holders of the magic key to healing. I carried hope around with me for the same reason I kept my passport in my purse—it hadn’t done anything for me in years, but I knew that someday it could take us to someplace completely new. In the beginning, each doctor we’d visited held the stamp that could set us off on a journey toward normal. I longed for normal. I worried that Kylie had forgotten what it felt like.
The doctor was frowning, her unadorned-by-lipstick mouth turning down, down, down. Well, okay then. I took a deep patchouli-tainted breath. Maybe she didn’t hold any healing keys right now, but . . . after some research? Some tests?
Dr. Indigo fiddled with my daughter’s file.
Oh, please, my heart begged. Please.
She sighed.
A bad feeling settled in my gut—the fear that this woman wouldn’t be the last doctor who failed to explain why my girl suffered. Which meant my sweet girl was going to continue suffering.
“Your daughter is allergic to peanuts?”
“Yes. She’s had two severe reactions, one in which her throat started to close up. We’re really careful about reading labels, and she always brings her own food to events. We wash our hands a lot and carry an EpiPen everywhere we go. Our house is nut-free.”
She glanced at the file again. “Her peanut numbers are high.”
“But not almonds,” I said defensively. “And hazelnuts aren’t bad.”
Dr. Indigo accepted that information without a flicker of emotion. I wasn’t expecting an impromptu parade, but surely she had learned in doctor school to accentuate the positive?
“So,” she continued, “have you truly gone gluten-free as well? Dairy-free? Sugar-free?”
“Yes, yes, and yes,” I responded. I couldn’t keep the attitude from my voice. Our life was free of everything and nothing at all. “We’ve green-juiced and probioticked, tried all k
inds of herbs, Chinese and—er—American, and I’ve been super strict with the elimination diet. At this point, I don’t think she could recognize a slice of bread if she was in a bakery.”
“And the headaches remain unchanged?”
“She gets them frequently. And the hives. Dry mouth and eyes. Random low-grade fevers. Swollen joints. The symptom list keeps growing.”
What I didn’t mention was the psychological toll. The quiet. Kylie turned inward to deal with pain. She’d become a Zen master, going into an altered, meditative state. I detested what this illness had done to my daughter, but I so admired her reaction to it. She was strong. She was resilient. I lifted a hand and patted her soft brown hair. “Will you do blood work?”
“I’d like to,” the doc said. She glanced at Kylie. “That’s okay with you, right, sweetie?”
“It’s okay,” Kylie said automatically. They all wanted blood. I was amazed she wasn’t anemic on top of everything else.
“Is there anything I can do now that I’m not already doing?” I pointed to the file that listed so many failed attempts. “There’s got to be something, right?”
If I wasn’t so worried about Kylie, I would have enjoyed watching the doctor wrack her brain to come up with something substantive to say. “In addition to her allergies, there is a slight possibility that Kylie is suffering from a hereditary illness. You detailed your husband’s family’s health history, and I see you suffer from some food sensitivities, but you left your family history section blank. Why is that?”
“I was adopted.” I hated the way my voice sounded vaguely apologetic, like I was admitting to some past criminal behavior.
Dr. Indigo tapped her bottom lip with her index finger. “Oh. I . . . see.”
My defenses rose up faster than Kylie’s hives. “A lot of people are, you know.”
She caught herself, and nodded. “Of course! I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. It just makes sussing things out more difficult.”
“Uh-huh,” Kylie said.
“Do you know anything about your family history?” the doc asked, slightly hopeful.
“No,” I said. “Nothing at all.” I hoped she didn’t press the issue. My reasons for never searching out my biological history were a little fuzzy, even to me, so not something I was ready to explain.
The Other Family Page 1