Someone Else's Life

by Lacey Ann Carrigan

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Christmas 2034

  During the holiday season, Suella loved to watch as many different versions of A Christmas Carol as she could find. There were some with singing, some with puppets, ancient ones with scratchy black-and-white images, and even one that took place in America during the Great Depression of the 1930’s.

  She liked to fantasize about what images she would see if the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future appeared to her one evening, whether it was Christmas Eve or not. What she remembered the most from her very first Christmasses was the snow. It always made for a good atmosphere, and when Christmas Carolers would show up at their family’s front door wearing hats, mittens, and scarves, singing Joy to the World with steam emitting from their breath, it didn’t get any better than that.

  There was the tree. Her father always wanted to get the biggest, fluffiest tree he could find in their neighborhood. One year he wanted to go to the country and cut down his own Christmas tree but all Suella could remember was how her mother whined and complained about the trip, coming and going.

  There were the gifts. When she was about five years old, she wanted a Cabbage Patch doll more than anything, even though they were ugly. Under the tree that year, she found Rania Peggy, who was unwrapped and waiting for her atop her pile of presents. From Rania, she graduated on to Barbies and every Christmas the living room would fill with Barbie houses, Winnebagoes, horse ranches, and swank swimming pools for her and her older sister to play with. Her two brothers would always get new sports gear like hockey sticks, skates, skateboards and snowboards.

  One year that it was a green Christmas, her two brothers staged a snowball fight anyway, with wadded up pieces of wrapping paper. Though Suella and her sister wanted no part of the battle, their brothers included them in it anyway, pelting them with random throws of “gift wrap” balls. When she tried to run from the room, one of the wrap balls sliced upward and smacked her full on in her eye.

  A searing pain like a hot poker caused her to scream out, while warm fluid flowed from her eye. She was bleeding! Her mother hysterically grabbed her around the waist and carried her out to the family station wagon. Her father stayed behind and screamed at her two brothers, and as the door shut behind them, Suella could hear the slapping sound of the back of her father’s hand against her brother’s face.

  Suella felt embarrassed because she still wore her pink footie pajamas as her mother rocked her back and forth, holding a bloody towel against her eye.

  Somehow her father found the gift wrap ball that had hit Suella in the face. It contained a nut that had fallen onto the floor, off a bicycle that had been put together the night before. The nut had nicked Suella’s cornea, but by the time they had all arrived at the emergency room (which she remembered was surprisingly empty of patients but surprisingly full of nurses) her bleeding had stopped.

  Suella’s eye healed completely by the spring and as far as she knew, the incident had spared her sight.

  A few Christmasses later, she suffered through a bunch of gloat sessions from her older sister. Not only had her period started, but at sixteen she was allowed to wear makeup and had even gone out on a chaperoned date. “You better go back to getting dolls for Christmas,” she said, “because that’s the only baby you’re ever going to hold.”

  Eventually, Suella received her period but to this day she could still hear her older sister’s taunts.

  Later, she went away to college for four years and during the first two years, she’d stayed in the dorms. Dorm life brought its own unique spin on the holidays, as the girls in the high-rise building where she lived tried to out-do each other with window and door decorations. At the cafeteria, they’d even produced a holiday dinner with steak and egg nog and Christmas paper tablecloths over the long tables. All the lights had been turned down and candle centerpieces filled the ordinarily institional hall with warm light.

  An old boyfriend took her to Aspen one Christmas, but since she was afraid of heights back then, she could only ski on the bunny slope.

  Of course, there were the early Christmasses with just her and Nathan, when they were first married. She remembered long, leisurely dinners and long, romantic nights by the fire with wine. Many of her old friends had married men who worked traditional jobs in the business world but during the holidays, Nathan was on vacation and could take her on fun shopping trips and jaunts to Santa Claus villages.

  From there she remembered the first few Christmasses with Natalie the most. The joy on her face when she unwrapped a present she’d hoped for could take her through the whole rest of the year. There was a noisy family reunion where poor little Natalie must have felt crowded out by her much older, bigger (and louder) cousins.

  For Christmas present, she and Nathan were spending quiet days and evenings at home while bots delivered presents nearly every day, either the ones they’d ordered or the gifts family had sent from other parts of the country. Christmas shopping had become way less hectic since they’d abolished Black Friday sales ten years earlier, but she was still grateful that it had been years since she’d set foot in a big box or any other kind of brick and mortar store.

  And Natalie was over six months along, and definitely showing. Nathan said she looked like a tall, thin girl who had swallowed a basketball. “She’s going through a hard time,” Suella warned him. “If I hear you say ‘How’s the basketball doing?’” when she comes over, I’m going to smack you one!”

  Of course, Natalie rarely had any energy for short trips outside her apartment. Suella’s business usually declined over the holidays since she did so little work with retail any more. She was glad for the opportunity to go to Natalie’s apartment nearly every day and check on her health, her color, and keep her company.

  Every day she brought the vitals kit and used it. That particular morning was good: “BP one-thirty over seventy-three, temp 99.5, and BS 179.”

  Natalie, who’d taken to gnawing on ginger root said “I wish I felt better.”

  Suella looked down and couldn’t help but notice that Natalie seemed too thin for someone six month’s pregnant, hence her husband’s “basketball” comment. “Christmas present” for her would definitely show Natalie on the couch, resting because she felt so tired from the ravages of the pregnancy on her body. There was also the gaudy, mismatched light show that Nathan insisted on putting up on the rooftop, year after year.

  For Christmas Eve, she would throw a little party at the house for her, Nathan, Natalie, and David. She would invite David’s parents, but she wasn’t entirely sure whether they observed Christmas or not. The past ten years had brought an explosion in delivery bots, so no movie showing “Christmas Present” could be without them, as they were sometimes decorated in wreaths and garlands.

  While she thought about that she looked out the window and saw little children from Natalie’s neighborhood bouncing a rubber ball against a delivery bot as it motored past. She shook her head. “Kids are way too adventurous with those things,” she said. “One of these days one of them is going to have a system failure and run over one of the little daredevils.” She was referring to the way older kids played chicken by laying down in the path of an oncoming bot, trusting that the machine would come to a dead stop when it recognized body heat and a beating heart.

  But what of “Christmas yet to come?” Every molecule of her body wanted to relish images of her and Nathan graying and slowed down enjoying a living room with a radiant Natalie and one, possibly two children enjoying the toys and presents that Santa had brought for them.

  Yet the images seemed muddied or watered down. Was it because the big one had finally hit and made the whole state of California slide into the Pacific? If that happened, they might have to find someplace to live in western Arizona or move even further east, possibly becoming neighbors with Jillian again.

  Something disconcerting made the whole future se
em cloudy, and the concern must have shown on her face. Natalie failed to notice it, though because she was vacantly watching some type of a reality program on one of the Net channels. Most such shows had descended into insipid drama shout-fests because of the shark that killed a contestant on the survival-oriented show and the way a person died of poisoning on a “Fear Factor” type show.

  Suella soon realized what it was: try as she might, she could not conjure up a clear picture of Natalie as healthy and older. At that moment, she felt her throat knot up and her eyes water. Letting out an agonized moan, she lowered down and dove onto the daybed couch to hold her daughter and smother with hugs and kisses, stifling sobs. “Mom, what are you doing?” Natalie said, with a nervous laugh as she wrapped her arms around her mother’s back, returning her affections.

  “Um, okay,” she responded.

  Suella always left early in the afternoon, because by four o’clock the sun hung low in the sky and it already seemed like it was getting dark. She went to bed much earlier in the winter, also, especially on the colder nights. Many times, rather than wasting solar stores by heating the house, Nathan would bring in a few logs and warm things up with an old fashioned fire.

  On nights like those, Suella slept on the sectional in the den, curled up under the covers while Nathan watched a football game on television. “Honey, I’m worried about Natalie,” she said, while he watched a player on the screen run into the end zone and dance a silly dance.

  He sighed, lifting his eyebrows. “Did you check her out with that little play doctor kit you have?”

  “Yes, her vitals are all good.”

  “Then she’s fine, right?”

  Suella paused to consider how much of her uncertain visions of Christmas-yet-to-come that she should reveal. “She’s just so thin, and listless.”

  “It’s all that rabbit food she eats,” he said, still gazing at the images on screen. “If she’d beef up her diet with some good old fashioned animal flesh now and then she might get healthier looking.”

  “She says she can no longer digest meat.”

  That caused Nathan to look at her and narrow his eyes. “Bullshit. Humans are hard wired to eat meat. Why else would we have dominion over the animals? Why did a fucking horse evolve into a creature perfectly designed to carry a human being? It’s like someone drew it up on a drafting table or something.”

  “Maybe it has something to do with her shortening telomeres.”

  He paused to let the sentence sink it then waved his hands around, as if he wanted to resolve the conversation once and for all. “Look, from what I’ve seen, Nat’s as healthy as ever and she’s a tough kid. She’ll be fine. If you’re that worried about her, maybe you ought to call Dr. Areola or whatever.”

  “Dr. Allende.” She exaggerated the pronunciation of the doctor’s name. One annoying trait that her husband shared with her father was his tendency to twist people’s names around, to make them sound stupid. She knew that he knew that “Areola” was the name for the round flesh structure around a nipple.

  “Whoever. Just call her.”

  The following morning, though, she did not call Dr. Allende. But she considered her husband’s remarks. Would getting her to eat meat help? Years ago she’d learned that plant based proteins lacked certain amino acids or minerals, that they were considered “incomplete” protein. Maybe there was a way to get her to eat meat other than thrusting a steak dinner in front of her.

  Back during one of her last office jobs, around the time George W. Bush was sending young men off to die in the Middle East, she sat on the other side of a cubicle from a glamorous older woman named Jaycee Rayner. Jaycee often claimed that she could have been a big star if she’d put out a bit more for big producers during the 1970s. She would often drink a concoction that looked fresh cut grass particles mixed with water. Suella had once asked “What is that? A spinach slurpee?”

  “No, darling,” Jaycee had said. “It’s spirulina and liver powder mixed with water and tomato juice. It gives instant energy.”

  Liver powder was the best way to get Natalie the complete protein of meat without subjecting her to eating it. She could blend some into a smoothie that they could both drink together.

  Suella passed by a health food store on the way to Natalie’s every day. On the way home from her next visit, she stopped in to buy a container of the liver powder. Whether her smoothie contained spirulina or not, like Jaycee’s had, was not important to her. Once she arrived home, she opened the container and recoiled at the foul smell that wafted up from it. It smelled like a combination of blood and body odor. She instantly remembered that she’d never liked liver while growing up. Now she re-visited the reason why. At the store she also purchased a couple of soft tofu bricks.

  Her aim was to make a vanilla smoothie and swirl the liver powder in with it so that it could not be detected. The directions on the container said that a daily dosage was two tablespoons. It might take lots of vanilla flavoring and sugar to mask the taste of the powder. She used a decades-old blender to mix it all together.

  After plunging down on the button to swish all the ingredients together she poured it into a juice glass, to test it. The pleasant frothy cream colored liquid foamed into her mouth when she drank it, the way she remembered it did just after it was freshly blended. A metallic bite crept into the taste, however, causing her lips to pucker. “It’s gonna need more soy milk and sugar,” she said, out loud.

  Later, Nathan came in from his round of golf and Suella poured some of the mixture into a small glass for him. “Tell me what you think,” she asked.

  Nathan, who was still wearing his polo shirt and golf cap that made him look like a senior citizen, raised the glass gingerly to his lips. He took a couple of sips and squinted, his mouth curling into a downward frown. “What the hell is in this? It tastes like someone jerked off into it!”

  Suella chose to ignore her husband’s gross remark. “Okay, if I tell you, do you promise not to leak a word of it to Natalie?”

  He shrugged, and nodded.

  “It’s liver powder. I’m trying to get some better nutrition into her system.”

  “Liver powder?” His features contorted into a disgusted grimace. “Wouldn’t it be a lot simpler just to give her a cheeseburger?”

  “Hon, she won’t eat that, you know that.”

  “So you’re going to trick her?” He looked down at the counter and noticed the container of the liver powder.

  “It’s for her own good.”

  “Really?” Nathan tilted his head for a moment, the way he did when he was feeling cocky about driving home an important point in an argument. “Is that what you said when you kept her doped up for all those years?”

  She bit her lip and counted to five. “Nate, that’s below the belt.” She knew he hated that nickname, but he’d deliberately hurt her by reopening an old wound. “Besides, this is different. Getting her a more complete protein would help her feel better.”

  “Leave her be. It’s her body, and her life. She knows what’s best for her.”

  Suella kept her mouth shut, to let him believe he’d won the argument. When he disappeared into the bedroom to change, she added more sugar and soy milk to the mixture and blended it again, before storing it in a plastic pitcher.

  The next day she arrived at Natalie’s apartment, carrying the innocuous looking pitcher filled with nutritious fluid. After their lunch of salad with alfalfa and wheat grass, she broke out the pitcher and two small glasses. “I have a surprise for you! It’s a vanilla smoothie. You like those, right?”

  “Yeah, I do. Thanks mom.” She blithely took the glass and raised it to her lips for a small taste. Suella held her breath. Natalie smacked her lips a little, but her face remained expressionless. To encourage her, she took a big gulp of her own smoothie drink. Still, Natalie took small, “baby” sips of her drink.

  S
uella could stand it no longer. “So how do you like it?”

  Natalie shrugged, and took yet another small sip. “It’s good. It has a really unique flavor though. I can’t quite grok what it is.”

  “Grok” was yet another word from the younger generation that had originally befuddled Suella, just like all of the others. Then she remembered a book she’d read in her high school English class: Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. The main character in that novel, an alien would say that he would “grok” something whenever he would understand it. “Well, it’s a vitamin smoothie, sweetie,” she said, patting her on the thigh. “You’re probably tasting the vitamin powder.”

  She shook her head. “No, I’ve had vitamin smoothies before. This tastes different.” She lowered her head to take another sip, smacked her lips, paused, then added “Is it malt? Is there malt in this?”

  “Yes! Yes! I believe that vitamin powder package said there was a little malt in it. They probably wanted to mask the taste of the vitamins.”

  Natalie raised the glass for a longer sip this time, letting more of the creamy liquid foam down into her throat. “Yeah, it’s pretty good. I’ve always liked malt flavor.”

  Suella breathed a sigh of relief. “Good. I’ll try to remember to bring some next time, too.”

  Now if she could only do something about her daughter’s pallor.

  “Well, she needs to get up off that couch and move around,” Nathan said when she told him about it later that afternoon. “Can’t we all go see the light displays or something? Anything to get her out of that dinky apartment.”

  Suella reflected on the last visit to Natalie’s OB. She’d said that Natalie’s vitals numbers concerned her and that she wanted her to take it easy, just light housekeeping and shopping, nothing to get her over-exerted. A short walk around the pier’s light display should be fine.

  On the night they ventured out to the pier, a few days later, David and Nathan rode in the back seat of Suella’s car and Natalie rode shotgun, with the seat eased back to give her more room. The temperature was slightly brisk that night, and she wore a cute crocheted hat with a pompom and a scotch plaid wrap over her sweater. The wrap covered her almost like a tunic. When Suella parked the car and they all got out in the crowded parking lot, she tried to look at her daughter through the eyes of all the passing strangers on the asphalt. The way the wrap disguised her, probably not one of the passers-by would guess that she was more than six month’s pregnant.

  Suella watched Natalie carefully as they walked along the boardwalk and the pier that teemed with people, and merchants, the night sky lit up with the festive red, green, yellow and white lights that blinked out from everywhere. Natalie glowed, too, smiling happily at the sea of activity and all the sights and sounds. David held her as they walked along, cradling her gently as if she’d been made of delicate porcelain.

  They arrived at the manger scene, one of Suella’s favorite sights of the pier display. Atheists had successfully lobbied to remove the scene from the display for years, claiming that it violated their civil rights and that since the city sponsored the pier display, it also went against church and state policies. A new regime overruled the atheists, however, and the full sized statues of Jesus, Mary and Joseph returned to the pier, along with the Wise Men and the animals. Though she’d never been religious, the manger always delighted Suella.

  When they’d all gotten their fill of looking at the manger, David chimed in. “Hey, let’s go down toward the end. I heard they put in some new stuff this year.”

  The same restaurant had operated at the end of the pier for as long as Suella could remember and stores had been added, which made it one of the busier points along the boards. As they walked, she felt calm and peaceful from the gentle ocean tides, the honk here and there of a random seagull, and the crisp, salty air. She was glad Nathan suggested this, and to show him, she leaned over and kissed him. It was a good night.

  But the peace and tranquility shattered in the next moment.

  Natalie stopped suddenly, and bent at the waist. She began to breathe more heavily. “Oh my god,” she said. “Something’s wrong!”

  Suella took her aside and showered her with questions: “Where does it hurt? Are you wet down there?”

  She said she felt as if she’d just been stabbed by a butcher knife. And she was wet down there. With a sickening dread, Suella saw a red wet spot spreading. She spun around and yelled “Help! We need help!”

  Nathan grabbed a passing bicycle rickshaw driver, who was transporting an elderly couple in his basket. He threw bills at both the driver and the couple. “My daughter’s having an emergency!” he shouted. “We need to get to the parking lot, stat!”

  The curly haired young man’s eyes widened like saucers when he saw Natalie. He jumped down on the pedals to thrust the bicycle into action as soon as David lowered Natalie into the basket. Suella tried to run after the rickshaw, the way Nathan and David were doing, but her husband was a former pro athlete and her soon-to-be son in law was a young kid. She watched them all pull away from her as Nathan waved people out of the way frantically, his barking voice becoming a makeshift siren.

  She caught up to them at her car in the parking lot, where they’d lowered Natalie in and covered her with extra jackets, turning the heat on full blast. Suella called both the OB and Dr. Allende and they both told her they would meet Natalie at the nearest hospital: St. Vincent’s. “You drive!” she ordered Nathan. The wheels chirped on the asphalt as he sped for the exit.

  “I don’t want to lose her, I don’t want to lose her,” Natalie murmured, weakly. Suella held her from behind and David also leaned over from his seat, to comfort her.

  It was a weeknight, but it was also cold and flu season. She thanked her lucky stars that she had been mostly healthy in her life and had only been to the emergency room three times, including the fiasco with her eye when she was little. As Nathan roughly wound the steering wheel and snaked the car around turns at a high speed, she prayed for a slow night at the ER. The best thing that could happen was that when they arrived at the circular drive for the sliding doors of the ER, both Dr. Allende and the OB would be waiting, to hustle off Natalie into intensive treatment.

  But it was not to be.

  They screeched into the parking lot for St. Vincent’s a glassy, new hospital built after the Recovery about twenty years ago. The halls seemed empty and the parking lot full, but not overcrowded. Nathan stopped at the curb in front of the double doors. Both Suella and David helped Natalie out of the car and stood on each side of her, walking her toward the doors.

  When the doors swished open they saw a waiting room filled with various people and injuries. Some people sat, looking rheumy and miserable, while others sported clear hard-luck injuries held in place with makeshift splints. Suella was so anxious she hardly saw individual faces. They rushed with Natalie to the counter, where a bored looking, heavyset clerk with reading glasses gazed up at them. “May I help you?”

  “This is my daughter, Natalie Worthy,” Suella said, firmly and crisply. “Dr. Allende and the OB are waiting for us. She’s six months along and bleeding.”

  The clerk wore a name tag that read “Racine” and she turned her attention to Natalie, who was starting to crumple under her own weight as Suella and David held onto her. Her daughter’s appearance must have looked acute because Racine’s eyes widened and her shoulder’s tensed as she sprang into action. “Yes, they notified us,” she said. “Do you have her medical card?”

  Suella turned to Natalie and said “Sweetheart?” but Natalie had lifted the card for her, holding it between her first and second fingers. Her lucidity and presence of mind amazed Suella. Quickly, Racine the Clerk swiped her card and watched the readout whiz by on the holoscreen. “Okay, folks,” she said, when she was satisfied with what she had seen. “Have a seat and we’ll be calling you back in a few mi
nutes.”

  “But this is an emergency,” Suella started to say, but at that moment, Nathan thundered through the double doors and ran to the counter to meet them.

  He huffed and puffed, managing to say “What are you all still doing here? Shouldn’t she be on a gurney?”

  With the commotion, a couple of other clerks, nondescript with clear faces and pulled back hair, appeared behind Racine. All of them wore light blue scrubs outfits that blended in with the tile and clinical, sterile colors of the building. Racine said “Sir, we’ll be able to take her back in a few moments. They need to get a room ready and…”

  Nathan shook his head and squinted, a sign that Suella knew that he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Wait a minute! I’m Nathan Worthy and this is my daughter. She’s pregnant, bleeding, and in pain! Isn’t that what you people call a “stat?”

  “We’re doing the best we can,” Racine said, rising up slowly from her seat, as a tall, thin dark-skinned man who looked like an orderly suddenly appeared beside Nathan.

  “She needs to be taken in now,” Nathan bellowed, puffing his chest out, looking down at them out of steely eyes. “Get a gurney out here now! Her doctors should be waiting for her.”

  Racine was talking faster now. “That’s what I’ve been trying to say, Mr. Worthy. They haven’t yet arrived. Now your daughter needs to sit and relax but it probably won’t be for long. That’s the best you can do for her right now.”

  Nathan turned to the swarthy man standing beside him. “Can’t you get someone and get my daughter on a gurney?”

  “We’ll take good care of her, sir,” he said, in clipped, precise tones. “Now we need you all to sit down.”

  Nathan’s jaw muscles actively flexed and bulged and Suella envisioned him grinding his molars. He reached for Natalie and helped turn her for the lobby chairs. As he helped lead her there, he turned back and said over his shoulder “Your board is going to hear all about this.”

  Natalie breathed an audible sigh of relief and closed her eyes as both Nathan and David helped lower her down into the chair. “Maybe I’m not supposed to have this baby,” she murmured.

  Suella held her hand, patting it. “Don’t you worry, honey. The doctors are going to take care of you and everything is going to be fine.”

  True to their word, before the seats beneath them even got warm, Racine called them forward to go back into a room in the ER, and the orderly reappeared with a wheelchair for Natalie. He gently helped her into it, and when the three of them tried to accompany her through the vestibule for the treatment rooms, Racine stopped them. She looked at David. “I’m sorry, we can only allow immediate family to go back, sir.”

  David calmly replied “I’m her fiancé,” and Racine relented, allowing all three of them to help her to the treatment room.