by Lynne Hugo
Ellie hesitates only a couple of seconds before letting loose. Lydia’s missing the whole point. “Look. In the first place, she asked me. She’s over eighteen, in case you’ve forgotten, so she doesn’t need your permission, and she’s the one who says she doesn’t want anything else from you. In the second place, I’m going to give her my kidney, and I don’t need your permission, either.” There they were again, those words, right out of her as if they have a mind of their own.
“You were serious? Have you talked to Dr. Douglas about this? You haven’t been tested, have you? She would have told me…”
A waitress approaches with menus, but backs off, seeing another family argument has recessed to her domain.
“Yes, I was serious. I am serious.” Even as she says it, prideful and defiant, Ellie can feel fear turn again in her stomach. “I’ve discussed it with Dr. Douglas, and she’s arranging the testing.” An outright lie. Ellie’d said she’d think about it.
“I…I thought you were, well, I don’t know what I thought, but not that you… Ellie, is there a chance it could work? I mean, thank you, thank you so much. I can’t believe you would do this.”
“Why not?” Something in what Lydia said is insulting.
Lydia looks down. “You’re usually afraid of blood and hospitals. But I’m really glad you’re not anymore.”
Ellie surprises herself with her answer. “Well now I have Claire to take care of.” She can see Lydia struggle with herself, wanting to fight about who is Claire’s mother, and watches herself win on her sister’s face.
The waitress sees a lull in the action and approaches again, menus in hand. Ellie notices her and reaches for a menu. “I don’t know about you,” she says, “but I’m starved.”
Of course, it had gone on some. Lydia tried to wheedle information, and Ellie kept her hand close to her chest. “Will you let me know about the testing right away? When will she check for a tissue match? Will she take it to the committee if it’s a two-point match, or only if it’s a three or four?… Probably it’d have to be three or four, from what she said.”
Ellie looked around the coffee shop, renovated by the hospital auxiliary a couple of years ago in warm yellows and greens with some nice plants hanging by macramé in brass containers, the plants silk, doubtless, but nice all the same. The seats were still sticky if you came in hot from the outdoors, but once the hospital’s well-modulated temperature cooled a body down, the vinyl was all right. She saw everything differently, because everything was different in spite of the fact that nothing had changed. Ellie had seen the paradox at once. She’d always been the one to take care of Mama and Daddy and Charles after Lydie and Maddie had made their escapes, but nobody thought that was important. Nobody gave her any respect for that. Now she had Claire to take care of, and weren’t people ever starting to sit up and take notice?
CHAPTER 37
Whatever progress I’d made has been swirled away as surely as if a giant invisible hand had pushed the flush handle. I left the hospital after Ellie ordered and ate a patty melt, fries and coleslaw, just as though nothing out of the ordinary were happening. She didn’t even bang the ketchup bottle on the table to hurry it. I tried to talk to her, but I was no more than a piece of fluff caught in her eyelash when she opened her eyes one morning, that easily brushed aside. The thought crossed my mind that she was enjoying having me like a bug in the shadow of her raised foot, but I tried to shut it out as unworthy.
I’ve been keeping myself intently distracted, building a little shelter of activity and telling myself that I needed to make a life of my own anyway. John’s been a part of many evenings but I’ve been careful, hoarding the little flame of separateness that’s been taking hold, not letting the presence of anyone get close enough to smother it. He doesn’t like this, but I say, Too bad, to myself, and go on. I’ve never been the least like this before, and it doesn’t feel natural, but I simply can’t let myself care. You’ll be all alone if you go on like this, I sometimes whisper to myself, and then I answer, You are already all alone, or have you missed that fact? It goes to show what happens when you’ve put all your eggs in the basket love recklessly dangles off its arm, even the love a mother has for her only child, love that expands your soul to the full size of joy before it crushes it in equal measure.
And I was doing it—not well, maybe, but doing it, keeping myself intact, that is. Now, though, I’ve plain lost my footing. “You don’t understand,” I said to John last night on the phone. “You have as much relationship with Claire as I do now.” I didn’t mean this as a compliment, but he still didn’t seem to get it.
“You’ve got to hang with it,” he said. “She needs you, and Ellie does, too, whether she knows it or not.”
I pondered this for a while, the thinking like a physical effort as I twisted a lock of hair between my finger and thumb. I was lying on my bed in the dark. Since she left, I’ve been sleeping in Claire’s room, redone last year from her junior-high obsession with shades of purple into the sleek neutral colors she called très chic, on the sheets she last slept in, which I’ve not changed, but last night the room itself seemed to say unwelcome, so I returned to the room I shared so many years with Wayne and tried to fight off a different ghost.
“I really don’t know about that. Ellie’s different. She’s spent years complaining that Maddie and I supposedly left her to take care of our parents and Charles, not that it’s a bit true, but here she is slamming the door in my face when I want to do the job that is mine.”
“All I’m saying is that you can’t just lay down and die. Keep trying with Claire, keep calling the doctors, keep talking to Ellie. You’ll get through.” His voice faded a little in the phone. A storm is rolling in from the west. Lightning had crackled our connection once already. I was just too tired, the air too heavy for me to carry on my body anymore.
“Okay,” I said, and hung up a minute later. That’s what I mean, that sinking abdication into a lie. I wouldn’t have done that before. I would have tried to explain myself, as long as it took for him to understand and love me still.
How insubstantial the men I’ve known are: Daddy, Wayne, John, standing on such different rungs of life’s ladder, but each of them in his own way ready to cut and run when things are bad. You can’t really count Charles, except to say that in his way, Charles is the most reliable of all of them, and I appreciate that. I know exactly what to expect and there’s ease in the knowledge. He loves me, too, loves everyone if truth be told, so I don’t see any reflection of myself in it.
Of course, John says he’s different now, and maybe he is. What he doesn’t understand is that I’m different, too.
I looked in the mirror this morning. Really looked, rather than just putting on blush and eyeliner, a dash of mascara, a slash of lipstick with the practiced, unseeing skill of a blind woman. I look different: my skin is uneven, too tightly drawn over the bones, stretched like a drum top over the hollows, yet bunched around my eyes and drooping beneath my mouth. I’m nearly transparent beneath the makeup, my eyes altered to a nondescript dullness. Telltale signs of change are everywhere. A stain on my blouse. I need a haircut; my nails are ragged. Inside and out, I’m different.
“Our house,” I correct automatically, in spite of how I’ve come to feel, as a matter of respect. “I would appreciate it if you’d meet me somewhere, then. Obviously, I’m not comfortable coming to Maddie’s.” I’d called Maddie’s looking for Wayne, and he answered the phone. Until right now, he’s been more successful at avoiding me than at anything he’s ever done. Maybe his heart has been more in it. He says right off that he doesn’t want to come to our house. “Your house,” he calls it.
A long pause, very Wayne-like. “Look, Wayne,” I say, to help him out. “Wouldn’t it be less awkward to meet here than in some restaurant? This is your house, you know. I didn’t ask you to leave it.”
“What do you want?” he asks in the voice he used to use with telephone solicitors, superficially polite with a c
urt undertone, distant, gruff.
“I’d like to talk about Claire.”
“What about Claire? She’s with Ellie.”
“She’s in the hospital. Did you think I didn’t know? Look, we need to communicate with each other, about Ellie being tested, about—”
“Ellie being tested?” There’s genuine surprise in his voice. He’d not been able to suppress it in time.
“You didn’t know? See what I mean? Please, we need to talk.” While I wait for him to drag an answer out of himself, I run a finger through the dust that’s accumulated on the kitchen windowsill. A dirty teacup and one plate are in the sink, a half-dried tea bag next to them ringed by its own brown stain. An unwashed fry pan is on the stove.
“All right,” he finally gets out.
“Will you come over tonight?”
“Tonight?”
I force my voice through the sieve of my teeth. “I don’t think we should let this go.”
“Yeah. All right.”
“Can you come now, or in a little while, then?”
“All right.”
He sits uncomfortably upright in the wingback chair, ignoring the one that faces the television with hollows the exact contour of his body. The living room holds accumulated heat of the day too great for the air-conditioning to conquer. Wayne has left his truck on the street, as if ready for a quick escape that will require no reversals, and come into the house that is his as much as mine like a stranger, gesturing to a chair wordlessly for permission to sit in it. Claire’s portrait oversees the living room where two months of a weekly magazine are stacked. It’s like the rest of my life: tidy to a quick glance, but utterly unlike me.
“I can’t see how this involves me,” he says, speaking first. It’s not like him to start any conversation. He’s not even taken off his blue baseball cap with the plant logo. In another lifetime I would have cared that he’s wearing an undershirt with yellow stains under the arms. Who’s doing his laundry? I wonder. Maddie?
“I know you better. You can’t mean that. You’re paying for the apartment. You didn’t find out anything you didn’t know for all these years. None of this was news to you.” I’m jumbling two things together the way people who have been married a long time will.
“You made her not mine.” I can’t read the look in his eyes when he says this, not hate, I think, but something close that comes and passes.
“So what…you’d have let her die so you wouldn’t be embarrassed?”
“She doesn’t care about me anymore.”
“Charles would know better than that.” It’s the ultimate insult a member of the Sams family can speak, something I get angry when I hear, but now I throw it at Wayne and serrate its edge with sarcasm. “If the way she treats you has changed, and I’d be the last to know if it has—but if it has, it’s because you changed first. Or you didn’t let her know that it didn’t make a lick of difference to you.” I have no restraint anymore. “Did you tell her it didn’t make any difference? Did you say anything? Did you even try to help her understand? Where are your priorities? Your pride is more important than her life?”
“Wasn’t my place. Didn’t do no good anyway. A dead man would’ve been more use.”
“Oh for God’s sake, Wayne. Your pride was hurt. That’s plain and simple all there is to it. You’re free to leave me, and you obviously have, but no one’s free to just break a commitment to a child. Can’t you work with me? You’ve got access to her that I don’t. And now there’s this whole new thing—about Ellie, I mean.”
I know that to get anywhere with Wayne, I have to leave him a way to save face, so I back off the mountain of anger I’ve climbed. “Ellie says she told Dr. Douglas that she’d be tested—that if she’s a match, she’ll give her a kidney.”
In spite of himself, Wayne is piqued. His hand goes up to his beard. “Do you think she’s for real?” he says.
“I didn’t take her seriously at first, but she got mad, and said yes, she meant it. Have you been to see Claire?”
“No,” he says, but some of the defiance is out of his tone, and he looks down, as though he’s not proud of it.
“I wish you would. I’m begging you, Wayne. She needs a parent, she needs one of us. She’ll accept you better right now. I’m not asking you to do this for me. You two can sit there and talk about what a shit I am if you want, just sit with her.” This gets his attention. The expression on his face says that I am someone he doesn’t know. I don’t talk that way. It just came out of my mouth like another change in the mirror.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I’ve got to be going,” he adds and stands, tall, remote, unreachable.
“I’m sorry,” I say. I could leave it at that. It even comes to me that if I go on, it will be I who effectively finishes our marriage. “I know your feelings were—are—hurt, and I know it turned out to be for nothing. And I’m so sorry. That was never what I wanted, and you didn’t deserve it. But I’d do the same thing again, Wayne. There was a chance, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”
CHAPTER 38
Against her will, Claire is at Mama’s while Ellie goes to the hospital for the first test, the basic tissue-matching process.
Claire insisted she is fine alone, and wanted to know who Ellie thought was going to babysit her when she went to college at the end of next month. Ellie, backtracking, told her then that her Maw Maw needed some company, that Maddie wasn’t helping out near as much as she should. “Let my former mother do it, then,” Claire said. My former mother?…Ellie wondered who Claire’s mother was now, and the thought bolstered her resolve about the tests.
The whole college business was another matter. Ellie doesn’t say anything as Claire goes about filling out papers from the college and reading the two books assigned to incoming freshmen for summer reading, but Claire’s certainty confounds her. Yes, they’d gotten through the last immediate crisis back to their little apartment and dialysis, and yes, Claire is meticulous about her diet—low potassium, high protein and strictly measured fluid intake—but Dr. Douglas has told Ellie that a transplant is Claire’s best option. Then, of course, there’s the possibility of rejection. Ellie turned off the volume in her head when the doctor talked about it, and skipped that section in one of the green photocopied patient information sheets about transplant procedures that Dr. Douglas has given them. A straggling pile of them curl like the dropped leaves of a flower vased too long on the coffee table. Ellie is struggling through them one at a time. Claire read them all in an afternoon, of course. Ellie marvels at how smart she is. Most of the questions that seem too difficult to figure out how to ask—why, Claire can not only tell her what she’s trying to ask, but what the answer is. The idea of rejection, though, that’s more than Ellie can bear.
Whether or not Claire can be by herself, which she insists she can, isn’t really at issue. Ellie thinks it’s possible she’ll not come back out of the hospital, and then Claire should be with someone. Mama’s not a good choice, but there isn’t anyone else. Maddie is out of the question, not that she’d do it anyway, and Wayne hesitated a couple of beats but said he had to work. And Lydia—Lydia, who would have cheerfully exchanged years of her life to be asked to stay with Claire—well, Ellie knew better than to suggest to Claire that her former mother come keep her company. Not that Ellie wanted to ask her sister, anyway. She was fussing about it all to Mama on the phone, when Mama just said right out, “Bring her over here. I’ll watch out for her.”
“But you don’t know what she needs,” Ellie protested. “Anything could—”
“I know how to dial 911,” Mama said, “and I raised you, didn’t I?” The universal argument of grandparents, unassailable no matter how absurd.
In the car, Ellie reasoned with herself: there’s no cause to think I won’t come back. This is just a test. She felt better until another thought occurred to her. If I pass out, will they just take out a knife and cut my kidney out? Dr. Douglas said “as soon as possible,” after Ellie has
a very complete physical, and that they’d begin giving Claire transfusions of Ellie’s blood in preparation right away, but Ellie doesn’t know what “as soon as possible” means. What if she dies from the operation? That thought has occurred to her, too. It’s been known to happen. Her mind muddles in heat like this, sticky and smothering. She said nothing to Claire, who lapsed into a private silence, staring out the passenger-side window at the patches of burned grass languishing beneath hardy still-green weeds. Before they left the apartment, though, Claire stood at the door blocking it when Ellie said, “Let’s go,” until Ellie repeated it and looked at Claire with a question on her face.
“Thank you, Aunt Eleanor, thank you so much,” Claire said simply, and Ellie put her arms around her niece and whispered, “My treat,” with a little laugh. That’s not something you can back down from, even if you want to. Realizing that, she patted Claire’s back as she held her, and said, “I love you,” and meant it, regardless of Lydia, Wayne or John, if that was his real name.
Ellie hasn’t been to Mama’s in nearly two weeks, by far the longest she’s ever been away in her life. She expected to find Charles slobbering over the junk food he naturally favored, a heap of unwashed laundry next to the washer, and the kitchen piled with unwashed dishes, even dirty paper plates. When she and Claire and Presley arrived, though, there were only breakfast dishes in the sink, and she’d left Claire and Mama sitting on the back porch with some iced tea Mama had Ellie get out of the refrigerator. Someone, Ellie didn’t ask who, had planted a triangle patch of red, white and blue petunias by the step, and the cement porch looked swept. When Ellie opened the door of the old Frigidaire to get the tea, it was obvious that Daddy or someone had gotten groceries, because the date on the milk was for early next week. It should have made Ellie happy.