Hole in the Middle

by Kendra Fortmeyer

  I stare at the scene, wondering what in the world the artist was thinking. And then feeling a stab of envy: this artist got to think. This artist got to say, I want to put gumballs on the floor at a cocktail party, and someone else did not say, That’s nice, but let’s make it blood, and let’s make it at the White House, but instead said, Yes, awesome, I love it, or I am not sure, but let’s do it anyway, because I trust your vision. Even though it’s kind of a seriously stupid vision.

  Looking around at the gallery space, I notice, for the first time, how fake the whole place feels—the faux-rural barn, the horse names over the stalls. It’s hard to believe that just a few months ago, I wanted more than anything in the world to be accepted here. That I thought this was the highest sky my star could shine in.

  I step away from the gumballs, still envious of the artist’s freedom. The envy-stab sharpens, and then becomes excruciating. Forcing myself to breathe slowly, I realize that what I feel is not envy, but pain. A voice behind me says, “Excuse me” through syrup, and my hands are grabbing at my stomach. Then my body flies apart, and I am flung into darkness.

  When I open my eyes, Dr. Takahashi is holding my hand.

  He says, “I came as soon as I could. Dr. Morse is here, too.”

  My lips are swollen and cracked. My tongue is bone dry.

  “Where—?” I ask.

  “Hospital,” he says. “You’ve been here three days.”

  I lift my head, examine my body. I’m in a strange hospital bed, covered in a thin sheet and pleasantly numbed below the chest. A rubber garden of tubes and blue wires springs up from the fertile flesh of my arms. I try to summon panic, but can foster nothing but a vague, fond interest. As in: Is that a catheter? That’s nice.

  Taka lifts a plastic cup of ice chips to my lips, and I lower my face to it, carefully tonguing one into my mouth. My parched mouth blooms with liquid.

  “Am I dying?” I ask. It is the pertinent thing to ask. I feel calm. I feel like an A student.

  “No,” Taka says.

  “Are you sure?” I ask.

  He smiles, gives my fingers a squeeze. “Of course I’m sure.”

  “But you’re not wearing gloves,” I say.

  The smile fades from his face.

  The door swings open, and Dr. Morse bursts into the room. Howie lags behind her, a pale, floppy-haired shadow. I try to catch his eye, to make him come to me, but he won’t.

  “How long has she been awake?” Dr. Morse asks Taka. Before he can answer, she thrusts a thick folder at him. Her hands tremble, the papers rattling and whispering.

  Taka’s face empties of emotion as he reads. Dr. Morse watches him with visible strain, mouth jumping from smile to frown to composed line and back again. Behind her, Howie gazes out into the hall, his bangs a drawn curtain. Why won’t he look at me?

  “Howie?” I ask. He continues to stare through the narrow window with intense absorption. I lick my paper lips, turn to the doctors. The room seems too small. I want to rip the tubes from my arms and run anywhere. Anywhere. “What’s going on?” I ask, more loudly. My voice cracks.

  Taka turns another page. Dr. Morse, who has, as always, the bedside manner of a silverback gorilla, blurts, “It’s working. The treatment is working. Morgan, your Hole is shrinking.”

  39

  For a long time, my breath feels too big for my body.

  “Are you sure?” I ask.

  Dr. Morse nods. “The interior perimeter has contracted a full quarter inch. The resulting relocation of your organs—”

  I reach down with a drug-thickened hand and peel back the sheet. Taka moves to stop me, but it’s too late.

  Puddled in my middle, where a peach-sized pit used to be, is a plum.

  It’s the same me: same stomach, pale skin, same freckles. But with the Hole smaller, the perspective seems off. I fight the sense that I should be averting my eyes from this stranger’s stomach, with its strange, small hole.

  “Is it going to keep shrinking?” I ask, aware of the cold vagueness of that word it.

  “We don’t know,” Taka says, lowering the folder at last. “We’ll continue monitoring you.”

  Dr. Morse says, “You realize we’ll want to begin a second round of testing as soon as possible.”

  Underneath her chatter is a terrible quiet. I look away from my stomach and back toward the door, where Howie is trying as hard as possible not to be.

  “What about Howie?” I ask.

  Dr. Morse falls quiet.

  Taka says, “Howie’s condition remains unchanged.”

  I say, “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” Howie says. He looks me in the face then, and I realize where I’ve seen this person before: the day I shouted at Howie on the street. Shoulders caved, eyes bruised with helplessness and hurt.

  “Howie,” I say, but he turns and walks from the room. Despite the numbness in my chest, I feel a pang.

  I turn to the doctors helplessly. “It could still work, though, right? It could just start shrinking. Mine did.”

  “Morgan, we took samples while you were unconscious,” Taka says. “The oldest cells there are several weeks old. They’ve been growing since the night you began treatment.”

  “Howie could have them, too.”

  “He doesn’t,” Taka says, gently. “We’ve tested him, too. The Lump shows no signs of reduction of any kind.”

  I look at Dr. Morse. She says, “Any number of factors could be at play. There are still more things we can try.”

  She sounds buoyant as ever, energized by the words test, samples, immune repertoire. Her mind already projecting ahead to data charts and cell slides and PCRs. But there is a heaviness to her jaw that I hadn’t seen before, unhappily anchoring her to the room.

  They keep me overnight. I stay up for hours: playing with my Jell-O, staring at the blank television, the blank ceiling. I grit my teeth through waves of misery and frustration and vow that if they ever let me out of here, I’m going to paint murals on all hospital ceilings so that patients will have something to look at and think about that isn’t their failing bodies. That isn’t Howie’s face again and again, how he looked like a puppy, kicked and left out in the cold.

  They let me go home after the anesthesia wears off the next morning. Taka’s given me muscle relaxants to prevent the spasms that accompany the Hole’s shrinking. “There’s also a stool softener,” he says, deadpan as ever. “Be careful.”

  Caro’s at work, and Mother’s in the UK, tending to the child called Career-Before-Family, so Dr. Morse takes me home. She helps me into a Volvo older than I am with a shuddering engine and a heating system that takes ages to warm up, and then blasts heat like a minor sun—a car for a person who lives just outside the realm of the body and its comforts. A steady stream of talk radio jabbers beneath audibility.

  “How are you feeling?” she asks.

  “Fine.”

  “No pain?”

  “No.”

  “You’re expected to check in hourly.”

  “I know.”

  I watch her face as she drives. She seems distracted, less than half here. Exhaustion stretches in the hammocks of skin beneath her eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” I say.

  She glances at me, forces a smile. “Nothing,” she says. And then, “I was thinking about Howie.”

  She runs a hand through her hair and sighs.

  “It is intriguing that the treatment doesn’t work on Howie. We’ll want to do some more tests, some tissue samples. There’s a lab in Toronto doing reverse osmotic sequencing; I’ll get in touch with them this evening. And there’s all the new data to review . . .”

  “It could still work,” I say. “You never know.”

  She shakes her head but says, “It’s possible.” She pulls up to the curb in front of my building to let me out. T
he parking lot is empty.

  “That’s weird,” I say, reaching for the door handle. “No camera crew.”

  “I told the media we were moving you to a secure facility,” Morse says.

  Our eyes meet. I smile, but she doesn’t.

  “Congratulations,” she says.

  “Congratulations to you,” I say. “You must be thrilled.”

  She stares at the road, the wan November light staining her eyes the unhappy color of newsprint. “I never meant for him to be alone,” she says.

  Then she turns and stares out the driver’s window as I say, “Who?” and “But he has you,” and finally, “Thank you for the ride.” When I call in an hour to report in, she asks about my bowel movements, and we say nothing more.

  By five that evening, the paparazzi has figured out Dr. Morse’s ruse and are back at our apartment building, in more of a frenzy than ever: someone’s leaked the news that the cure is working. Caro comes home from work, grumbling. “I swear I can hear them audibly sigh about the fact that I’m not you whenever I go outside,” she says, pulling a knit cap from her hair. “This is wreaking havoc on my self-esteem.”

  I take my phone into the bathroom and skim through Public Scrutiny. I’ve never seen anyone use the word weep so much. People are weeping out of joy for me, out of injustice for Howie or out of a self-pity that seems unbelievably inappropriate. I know I’m supposed to be happy for her, but I just can’t believe she would want to change, write people with names like AprilMoon and PieIsAwesome86. I just feel so betrayed!!!!

  I spend the evening and next morning calling Howie, but get no reply. I try to compose a text, but am interrupted by a call from an unidentified number and then another. After the third, I stare at the mangled message in frustration (Cn welk?) and delete it.

  The phone leaps back to life immediately, and I automatically press ignore, realizing seconds too late that the screen said mother. My thumb hovers over the send button. Where’s the emoji for too little, too late and also I need you so much right now?

  A voice mail pings through.

  “I’m on my way,” is all she says.

  Then I’m alone again with the shrilling phone, a hungry mob pressing against the outside of my building, and nothing to keep me company but the weakening of my body and the knowledge that somewhere out in the empty air is someone I betrayed without even trying.

  40

  I sleep and wake at odd hours. There’s a knock on my door at 6 a.m. one morning. I’m lying on the couch while my latest painting dries, flipping through a trashy paperback called Unchained Lust that I found under the bathroom sink. I haven’t been able to sleep, kept up by the atomic shrinking of the Hole. Taka insists that it’s impossible to feel the growth, but alone in the dark, I am unable to shake the sense that my body is a clock, and that each passing second adds another cell, and another cell and another . . .

  I’ve been painting to get away from myself. An enormous canvas, with its entwined DNA portrait of Howie and me, is turned to the wall. I’m working on a new piece: a solitary girl on a park bench, gazing up at the sky with overlays of yellow and blue blooming out around her. It’s a gift for Caro, for Christmas. I call it Joy. It dries, glistening, in the lamplight.

  I jump at the knock on the door, tucking the book beneath the couch cushion. I shuffle to the door feeling sticky and overfull, as though I’ve eaten a bag of candy in one sitting.

  “Would you wear a fragrance called Anaphora?” Mother asks when I open it. She shows no signs of the early hour, serene and makeup-free in a soft gray tailored suit. It takes me a moment to spot a single dot of color in her outfit: a tiny pearl pin in mint.

  I rub my eyes. “If I were a middle school goth,” I say. “Who stole it from my mom after my dad picked it up on sale on Christmas Eve.”

  She sighs, pulling out her BlackBerry. “I know,” she says, typing. “It just screams ‘this or a gift card.’ But Srivani won’t let it go.”

  “Mother, it’s super early,” I say.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she says lightly. “I’m still on London time. I didn’t wake you, did I?”

  We haven’t talked since she dropped the bomb about my father. She sent me a gift basket earlier this week from a spa in Bath—tea, bath salts, lavender body oils—presumably to apologize for destroying my semblance of near-adulthood, but there’s no telling. The accompanying card merely said Mother.

  “No,” I say. “I was up, working on some things.”

  She embraces me abruptly. It is crushing and formal, the dictionary definition of a hug. She steps back, holding me at arm’s length, like a garment.

  “Are you okay?” she asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you in pain?”

  “No.”

  “And the—” She makes a distasteful motion with her hand.

  “Shrinking.”

  She relaxes then, body slumping into organic lines.

  “Good,” she says. “Finally. Well, are you going to invite me in, or do you want to stand in the doorway all day like a Jehovah’s Witness?”

  She follows me into the living room and stands precariously in its center, equidistant from all of the furniture, as though she fears she will catch some sort of disease. In the east, the sun is pinking the sky. I switch off the lamp, let the infant light crawl into the room.

  “How was the UK?” I ask.

  “Damp,” she says tersely, perching on the edge of the brown sofa. “The beds were too soft, and the room service was uninspiring. Thank God Union Jacked and Ripped wrapped. Everyone was so British it made me ill.”

  She sounds so much like herself that I want to crawl into her lap, lean on her shoulder. But the time for embrace has been checked off like a formality. I didn’t even notice what she smells like today.

  I go to the kitchen, put on the kettle for tea. As the water grinds to life, I peek back into the living room. My mother is studying Caro’s painting. The blue is a little off, but the yellow is just the color of Caro’s blond hair. It wreathes the canvas, twisting and shimmering. Mother reaches out to touch the wet paint, and then sees me watching and lets her hand drop.

  “So I heard from Dad. About coming to my opening next week,” I say, placing two steaming mugs on the coffee table.

  “Mmm,” she says absently, but I see her eyes flick up to me, dark.

  I sit on the sofa, cup a mug between my cool hands. “What’s he doing here?”

  “Nothing productive, I imagine,” she says, sinking down in the chair at my side. She tugs at the tag on the tea bag. “I thought this was loose leaf. I wouldn’t have bought it if I’d known otherwise.”

  “Mother, it’s fine. Did you invite him?”

  “Not actively,” she says briskly, taking a sip. “He saw a story about you on the news. He asked how you were, and I told him that you had a show coming up. I guess he decided to get in touch.”

  “I just don’t get it. Why now?” I ask. “It’s not like he couldn’t find us before. You have a protein shake named after you.”

  “Only if you shop in the fitness aisle,” she says. “Which I’m sure he doesn’t.”

  I fiddle with my tea bag, unsure of what to do with this information. The scent curls up fragrantly into the air, all black leaves and bergamot.

  “He wants to have lunch the day before the show.”

  Her nostrils flare slightly. “On Thanksgiving?” She tilts her head back and stares at the ceiling. “Ridiculous,” she says. “Nothing will be open. That’s just like Archie.” She reaches for her phone. “I’ll get in touch with him.”

  “No,” I say, surprising myself with my vehemence. “Why?”

  “To tell him to reschedule.”

  “I can handle it.” She’s unlocking her phone, entering numbers. “Mother, stop. Let me handle this.”

  She lowers her phone
with a shade of irritation. “Fine,” she says. “I just don’t want him to interrupt our dinner.”

  “So we are having Thanksgiving dinner this year.”

  “Of course we’re having Thanksgiving dinner,” she says. “We always have Thanksgiving dinner.”

  “We didn’t last year.”

  “That’s one year.”

  “The year before that you got snowed in at JFK.”

  “Right,” she says, remembering. “That ghastly blizzard.”

  “It’s fine. I’m used to being a Thanksgiving orphan.” Before they moved to Texas, I always ate with Caro’s family, the Bells. We spent last year’s dinner furiously trying not to giggle over her littlest brother’s accidentally-but-definitely phallic corncob centerpiece.

  Mother’s knuckles are white on her mug. “Not this year,” she says.

  We sit in silence for a moment. I sploosh my tea bag up and down, up and down, staining the water bitter and dark.

  “So you have his phone number?” I ask, avoiding her gaze.

  She shakes her head. “Just an email address,” she says. “He got in touch via my management a month ago.”

  “Why?”

  She says, carelessly, “Like I said, he saw you on the news. I gave him your email.”

  I remember the footage of me screaming at Howie about freaks and cringe.

  “Did you know . . . ?” I’m not sure how to finish the question. She answers it anyway.

  “Morgan, I quit expecting things from your father long ago.”

  The early light is grainy, still ethereal. The barriers in the air between us seem imagined, as thin and filmy as curtains.

  I set down my mug. My childhood pet name for her comes creeping shyly out of its kennel, lays its head on my mother’s knee.

  “Ma,” I say, “what happened?”

  She says, “You know what happened.”

  I know the Wikipedia version. The stripped-down facts, potentially biased: the kind English teachers tell you not to base an essay on—pregnant at nineteen, married at twenty. An astoundingly successful and revolutionary series of Pregnant Power! cable access shows. A plan for a Mommy ‘N’ Muscles ‘N’ Me series, plug hastily pulled when I emerged into the world with a Hole and Mother shut the press out of her family life. I’ve seen the tapes, grainily uploaded to YouTube by some too-dedicated fan: my young, glowing mother, just a little older than I am now, sporting a baby bump and a yellow leotard, tough-loving the mommies-to-be of the early 2000s through Warrior Woman Stretches™.