by Leslie Gould
Driving over to the hospital, shifting her tired old station wagon into fifth gear, Caye felt the snake of jealousy rear it’s ugly head higher. She was fascinated with Joya, but also intimidated.
Jill, always generous with her friends, was especially giving toward Joya. Caye felt that Jill babied Joya. She knew Jill’s motivation went back to their time together in Argentina, when Thomas and Joya’s little boy died. Jill had told Caye about it—Thomas and Joya had never mentioned it. She knew that Jill saw Joya as fragile and vulnerable. But Caye had never seen that side, except through the one story. To her, Joya was rigid and unsympathetic.
She pulled into the hospital parking lot. Her jealousy gave way to expectation. Finally she would see Jill.
Caye felt anxious walking into Jill’s room. She’d stopped at a florist on Barnes Road and picked up a bouquet of Japanese irises with baby calla lilies, and a chocolate truffle for good measure.
“Oh, thank you,” Jill had said in relief. “I needed flowers. And chocolate.”
Caye pulled the Mylar balloon from the ceiling. “Can you prick it,” Jill asked, “and stuff it in the garbage?”
They spent the time chatting, sharing Jill’s lunch of grilled chicken and mashed potatoes, going over the details of the morning—Liam’s injury, Stephanie at the door.
“I really was miffed,” Caye said in a joking voice, as if admitting her annoyance might normalize the day, hide how worried she was. “Not only did you leave me alone with all the kids, you arranged for someone to knock on my door while I was still in my nightshirt.”
“I am so sorry. I had no idea Joya and Thomas were coming by.”
Changing the subject, Caye asked if Rob had to go in to work, if he had a deadline. “No, I insisted he go in,” Jill said. “He needed a break from me.”
“Are you worried?” Caye asked, changing her tone to sympathy, concern.
“I really do feel better today. Better than I have in weeks, maybe months. I think I’m fine.”
“I’d be worried,” Caye said. “I am worried.”
“Well, you’re a worrier. I’m not.” Jill stretched her arms over her head. “Remember, you’re the one who thinks Nathan is dead on the freeway if he’s fifteen minutes late.”
Caye remembered a verse Jill had shared with her not long after they first met. It was from Psalms: “Wait for the LORD, be strong and take heart and wait for the LORD.”
“I don’t worry much,” Jill had said. “But when I do, I recite that verse.”
Caye looked at the clock. It was 1:30. “I’d better go. You should rest.”
“Oh, right. You need to get Andrew.” “No,” Caye laughed. “He stayed home today.”
“You’re kidding. Your morning was even worse than I thought.” Caye shrugged her shoulders. She didn’t want Jill to think it was too much to have her boys.
“Stay then. Stephanie will be okay until 3:00 or 3:30.” Caye smiled.
Jill shifted her thoughts. “Did you call my mother?” she asked, hesitantly. “Like Rob asked you to?”
Caye nodded.
“What did she say?”
“To call back when the doctor made a diagnosis. To have you call back then,” Caye answered. Jill was silent.
“I’m going to dash down to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee,” Caye said. “Want anything?” Jill shook her head.
“I’ll be right back.” Caye swung through the door.
Jill felt Marion reaching across all those miles, reaching up to pull Jill down, to choke her. She thought of their last phone conversation, week before last.
“Rob says you’re overtired,” Marion had said in her cool, detached voice. Jill was loading the dishwasher, the phone tucked under her chin. She wore navy sweatpants and a green long-sleeve Rugby shirt of Rob’s.
“Tired, yes. Overtired? No.” Jill was surprised that Rob had noticed.
“You’re not pregnant again, are you?”
“No, Mother, I’m not.” She couldn’t keep the defensive tone from her voice.
“I was hoping you could come down. Bring the kids. My treat.”
“Do you need us to come down?”
“No. Of course I don’t need you to.”
“Do you want us to come down?”
“I thought it would be nice for the kids. You could take them to that LEGO theme park.”
“Would you go with us?”
“I’d have to see.”
Jill felt the coils around her neck.
“You might as well fly up here and strangle me,” Jill said, her throat tightening. Rob, taking a Diet Coke from the refrigerator, closed the door firmly and looked at Jill in disbelief.
“What do you mean?” Marion asked.
“You won’t tell me what you need or want, but then you try to manipulate me, buy me, and I keep falling for it.”
Why do I fall for it? She considered the question through Marion’s silence. Because I’m greedy. Because for some reason I feel I deserve it—as if she owes me.
And then it came to Jill, the truth, in one sentence, in one statement. She blurted it out. “You can’t believe I want to have a relationship with you. Can you? That I would come down just because you wanted me to?”
The phone went dead.
Marion has crossed the line. Jill slammed the dishwasher door.
“You should apologize,” Rob had said the next day. He hadn’t actually said it. He’d sent her an e-mail and then left a message, while she was picking up Hudson from preschool, to tell her to check her e-mail.
It was the money—the gifts, all the extras Marion paid for. That was what Rob worried about, Jill was sure. She didn’t call. She wasn’t the one who slammed down the phone.
Caye walked into Jill’s room with a cup of coffee in her hand. A soft tap, tap drew Caye’s attention back to the door. “Come in,” Jill said.
“Excuse me.” The man standing before them wore rectangle aviator glasses; dark bushy hair fanned around his smooth, wrinkle-free face. He wore long sideburns and sported a goatee on the very tip of his chin. He was short with broad shoulders.
“I’m Dr. Scott,” he said, looking at Jill. “How are you today?” He didn’t look old enough to be a doctor. “Dr. Miles referred your case to me. I’m an oncologist. I wanted to talk with you about your tests.”
After introducing herself, Caye asked Jill if she wanted her to wait in the hall.
“No,” Jill answered in an unconvincing tone.
The doctor pulled the chair close to Jill’s bed. “Your CAT scan shows something going on inside you. To be specific, in your pancreas.”
That word.
“We can’t tell for sure, from the scan, what it is. It could be benign—or it might not be.”
“And?” Jill asked.
“And we need to do more tests tomorrow to find out exactly what it is.
“What tests?”
“An endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography—or ERCP.” The doctor chuckled as he handed Jill a fact sheet. “We’ll most likely do a biopsy at the same time.”
“A biopsy?” Jill placed the piece of paper on the bedside table.
“Yes. A biopsy. Basically, we need to do more diagnostic tests to know what we’re dealing with,” the doctor said slowly. “I’ve scheduled the ERCP for tomorrow at 8:30. You’ll be able to go home by noon.”
“When will the tests come back?”
“By Monday morning. We’ll schedule an appointment in my office.”
They were silent. Jill stared at the doctor; Caye stared at Jill.
“Do you have any other questions?” he finally asked.
“I can’t think of any,” Jill answered.
He reached into his lab coat pocket and pulled out a card. “Call me when you do.”
“Thanks.” Jill took the card. She flipped it over and over in her hand—the blank side
, the printed side, the blank side, the printed side—as the doctor left the room.
Caye sat down in the chair beside Jill’s bed.
“Don’t look so worried,” Jill said. “At least not until we know.” Jill dropped the card on the bedside table and smiled. “What did you bake for our girl’s birthday?” Jill asked.
The cake! Caye had forgotten all about the cake. Every year, Caye made the kids a cake on their birthdays—her kids and Jill’s. Winnie the Poohs, castles, soccer balls, cowboys. This year Audrey had asked for a daisy cake. Audrey’s April birthday launched the birthdays; Liam’s was in May; Simon and Hudson followed in June; and Andrew ended the season in August.
“Oh no,” Caye said, spitting the word no out in disbelief. “I was going to make her a daisy. I forgot all about it.”
At least Nathan had put together the pink bike with training wheels last weekend. It was hidden in the toolshed. All it needed was a bow.
“I’ll call the bakery,” Jill said. “I’ll tell them it’s a rush job. I’ll ask them to decorate one of their white chocolate cakes like a daisy.”
“No—it’s okay. I’ll just stop by Safeway on the way home.”
“I insist,” Jill answered.
The cake was ready when Caye stopped by the bakery. A perfect round white daisy cake with petals carved out of the thick icing and a round of yellow dots for the center. “Happy Birthday, Audrey” was written elegantly and delicately in small green cursive on one of the petals.
It was perfect.
And already paid for. “Over the phone,” the clerk said. “All taken care of.” Caye imagined Jill rattling off her MasterCard number and expiration date from memory, thinking nothing of it.
8
When Jill started the fifth grade, her favorite pastime was riding her bike until she got lost. She’d let herself in the back door of the duplex, toss her homework on the kitchen counter, and grab an apple. Steering her Popsicle-purple Stingray bike with one hand, she’d eat the apple with the other. The September heat would waft up from the concrete sidewalks, the smoggy sky closed in from above. She’d ride as fast as she could for the first few blocks, hurtling the apple core into a corner storm drain as she sped through an intersection. She’d toss her long hair behind her and feel the wind dart along the back of her neck. She’d pedal faster and harder until she’d passed beyond her neighborhood. When she was tired, she’d slow and ride no-handed—her arms stretched wide.
Marion had found the bike at a yard sale. It had a lime-green banana seat. Jill wanted a ten-speed.
When she was younger, she pretended that her bike was a horse and that she was galloping over fields, through forests, along the beach. She’d be a medieval princess one day, an aristocrat on a fox hunt the next.
As a ten-year-old, she rode for the thrill of getting lost. She’d ride, crossing commercial streets, rolling through neighborhoods. When she didn’t feel safe, she’d turn back and then take a left or a right. When she was lost, really lost, when she felt the rush of adrenaline, the panic in the back of her throat, she’d turn back, weaving left and right, making her way home. A familiar store would bring a smile. The name of a street. Finally her school, or the 7-Eleven five blocks from the duplex, would put an end to the daring adventure. Then she’d coast on home.
Marion collected duplexes. Bought them here and there all over the East L.A. area. She’d buy one. They’d move into one side of it, clean and paint the whole thing, and plant cheap shrubs in the flower beds. Then Marion would put it up for rent and look for another one to buy.
Marion worked in the afternoons. Checked on properties. Knocked on doors to collect past-due rent. Most days Jill would beat Marion home, but on the days she didn’t, Marion would ask where she’d been, what she’d been doing. “I’ve asked you to stay in the house,” Marion would say. “I’ve told you to stay in the house.”
“I was just outside,” Jill would answer, picking up her homework off the counter, heading down the hall to her bedroom.
She felt the power of her secret. She’d been miles away, alone. Away from her mother, away from the duplex. She could have secrets too.
“Turn. Over. On. Your. Side.” The words floated toward her, one at a time. She was sedated enough not to object to the thin tube down her throat, winding through her body. The radiologist was navigating the tube, the endoscope, through her esophagus, stomach, and small intestine into the pancreas. X-rays would be taken and then cell samples removed for the biopsy.
The endoscope was probably down there right now. This morning the radiologist said she might insert a catheter into the bile duct to relieve the jaundice. Rob was with her then.
“Have you read the possible complications?” the radiologist asked. Jill nodded; Rob shook his head.
“Serious pancreatitis, infections, bowel perforation, and bleeding,” the doctor recited. “They’re all uncommon.”
Jill had signed the release. Life was full of risks.
She thought of the little boy snatched off the beach at Florence last summer. They’d gone over for a weekend—Simon was a newborn. It was their first trip with all three kids. They heard about the boy at breakfast. “Watch your little ones out there today,” the waitress had said. “A sneaker wave took a boy last night. His parents were twenty yards away and off he went.”
Jill had imagined the horror. If it were Liam or Hudson, or someday Simon, would she run in after him, wrestle her child out of the sea, pull arms and legs and head out of the deep? Shout at the ocean, shout at God, until her child was returned? On sheer will alone, could she bring him back?
No, she couldn’t bear to lose a child like that.
She thought of Joya. No wonder she still stared at the floor, gone far away from the rest of them, with her poker face tightly drawn.
She thought of the date with Caye and Nathan almost two years ago. Jill had arranged it, bought the tickets, set up the baby-sitting. They’d gone to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream—not in the outdoor Elizabethan Theatre but inside, in the Bowmer. It was Jill’s favorite Shakespearean play.
Afterward, over a late dinner of Thai food, the four talked about the fairies and the forest. “Heaven is like that,” Jill said.
“Full of fairies?” Rob asked, slurping pad Thai with chopsticks, the noodles dangling from his mouth.
“They’re angels there,” Jill corrected. “It doesn’t have the bad—the foolery. It does have the goodness, truth, and beauty.”
“I think heaven is like the Internet,” Rob said. “It’s in inner space instead of outer space. All connected by electricity and sound waves. That’s how angels fly. That’s how we’ll travel—but inside space, from one dimension to another.”
“I don’t get it,” Caye said.
“Like from Web site to Web site.” Rob took a long drink of his Thai iced tea.
“So you’re saying we’ll speed along, by electricity, from site to site, from mansion to mansion to God’s throne? Does that mean the electrical currents are paved with gold?” Jill asked, pouring more green tea into her cup.
“That’s a thought,” Rob said. “Gold, pure gold, is an excellent conductor of electricity.”
“What do you think, Nathan?”
“I’ve always taken a literal view. Golden streets, many mansions, God on the throne. That whole scene.”
“Somewhere up in the sky?” Rob interjected.
Nathan nodded.
“On the heaven planet?”
Nathan shrugged. Jill hated it when Rob sounded so superior. “It’s a natural garden, a beautiful, unbelievable, gargantuan garden,” Jill said with a laugh.
“Maybe it’s whatever we want it to be,” Caye responded.
“But then how would we have a common reality?” Rob challenged. “We can’t be isolated. That’s exactly what heaven isn’t.”
The waitress came with another order of salad rolls, and the conver
sation shifted.
“Almost done,” the radiologist said. “You’re doing great. I’m going to take the tube out.”
Jill opened her eyes. Her throat was thick from the tube and numb from the medication. It hurt to swallow.
She thought of them repacking the Suburban that morning at the beach. “This is ridiculous,” Rob had said.
“I want to go home,” Jill had answered. “I don’t want them near the water.”
“Play! Sand!” Liam howled between sobs in his car seat. Hudson threw an orange plastic sandcastle form against the back window.
“Is this some postpartum paranoia?” Rob asked.
Jill climbed into the front of the SUV and thought, If you don’t take us home, you’ll see postpartum psychosis.
A day later, though, she came to her senses and agreed with Rob. They even laughed about it. She really had been ridiculous. And it was so unlike her to worry. It became the remember-when-we-didn’t-go-to-the-beach story.
“Hi, baby” Rob walked alongside the gurney. She realized she was in the hall on the way back to her room.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
All she could manage was a nod.
Okay? Am I okay?
Caye made a pledge to get Andrew to school Friday morning. And she did—just twelve minutes late. She pulled the other four kids in with her to talk to his teacher. Simon was still in his sleeper. The green goo from two days ago was back, crusted under his nose again. Had it really only been two days since Jill was hospitalized?
Caye had gone to Safeway at six o’clock to buy groceries before Nathan left for work. They were out of milk and juice; the cereal was nearly gone.
She felt near panic.
She wanted to tell Andrew’s teacher what had happened to Jill, how Caye had almost forgotten Audrey’s birthday, how hard it was to get five kids out of the house in the morning. She didn’t. “I won’t be in this afternoon to volunteer,” was what she did say. “Right now, I don’t know when I’ll be back in.”
When they returned to the house, Caye gave each of the older kids a piece of leftover cake. She dressed Simon while they ate. Only Liam finished his piece. Hudson and Audrey headed down to Andrew’s room to play with his LEGOs.
