Not Perfect: A Novel

by Elizabeth Laban

  “She didn’t want us to,” Kaye said, and there was something about the way she said us that bothered Tabitha. Like now Kaye’s family was a unit protecting Fern.

  “Well, I would have come to get her right away,” Tabitha said defensively. “I wasn’t doing anything important. I was just waiting for her to come home really.”

  “Look, we’ve known each other for a long time,” Kaye said, and her voice sounded a little warmer. Don’t be too nice, Tabitha thought, or I’ll cry. I’ll break down like I did in the stupid grocery store yesterday. Be mean, it’s easier. “And I know what a good mother you are. I mean, you really are. But lately, something hasn’t seemed right, or at least it hasn’t seemed the same. I know Stuart’s away, and I can only imagine how hard that is. I hate when Hugo goes away, even for a night or two. It’s not that, though. It’s that Fern said she’s been in pain for a long time and, well, I am just wondering why you haven’t done anything about it.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Tabitha said. She felt like a strobe light was blinking at all the ends of her body—her fingers, her toes. How did she let it get to this point? “I’ve been paying close attention to what’s going on with Fern’s knee. In fact, we have an appointment tomorrow morning.”

  “You do?” Kaye said, and Tabitha could hear the relief in her voice. Screw you! she wanted to call through the phone. I don’t need you to feel relieved that I’m taking care of my child. “Fern didn’t mention that.”

  “Well, she didn’t know, I guess,” Tabitha said. “But thanks for your concern.”

  “Sure,” Kaye said, now the flustered one. “I just want to make sure you guys are okay.”

  “We’re fine,” Tabitha said, before hanging up.

  Tabitha didn’t ask Fern about the water park or about what she told Sarina and her family. She kept things as simple as possible all day Sunday, not asking anything of the kids, basically just sitting around the apartment eating the bread, cheese, and tiny tomato. She didn’t even make them do their homework. Her main goal was to let Fern’s knee rest.

  Monday morning she woke up extra early with the intention of taking Fern to the walk-in hour at the pediatrician’s office. It wasn’t really meant for Fern’s situation—she knew that. It was meant for something that literally came up overnight. But she couldn’t stand the thought of calling the triage nurse and waiting around all morning for her to call back while Fern watched more TV. She had an urge to do something right now. So she left Levi in the apartment with the instructions to leave in ten minutes and go straight to school, something she had never done before, and she and Fern set out for the pediatrician’s office less than four blocks away.

  “Fern Brewer,” Tabitha said to the smiling receptionist.

  “Birth date?”

  “May eighth,” she said.

  “What’s the problem?” she asked.

  “Her knee is really bothering her. She’s having a hard time walking on it. Also, it’s hot and looks red in the back.”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “About two weeks, no, maybe three weeks,” Tabitha said, quickly and quietly.

  The receptionist looked up from the keyboard. Tabitha waited for her to tell them this was not what walk-in hour was intended for and that they would have to make an appointment and come back. But then the receptionist looked at Fern, and Tabitha hoped she was thinking she should give them a break. She sighed and looked back at her keyboard.

  “Any injuries?”

  “Not that we’re aware of,” Tabitha said with relief.

  “Any recent illnesses?”

  “She had a fever and a stomach bug recently, but I can’t imagine this is related to that.”

  “Okay, you have a twenty-dollar co-pay for today, and I can see you have a previous balance that hasn’t been paid yet.”

  Tabitha handed over her credit card and held her breath.

  The receptionist took it and swiped it before handing it back, then pushed a receipt toward Tabitha to sign. She had been charged sixty-eight dollars. She signed the flimsy slip of paper.

  “Okay, please take a seat,” the receptionist said, not looking up. Tabitha wanted her to look. Not only did she want to be allowed to misuse the walk-in hour but she also wanted the receptionist to not be mad at her.

  Fern hobbled over to a seat. Tabitha wondered why her knee suddenly seemed so much worse than it did before. Was it that she was being given permission to let it be bad? Or did she feel she had to prove to the receptionist that they really did have a situation? Tabitha followed her and took the seat next to her, scooping her arm around her.

  “Fern?” the nurse called.

  “That’s us,” Tabitha said, trying to smile.

  They headed back, and Fern was weighed. Tabitha thought she’d lost a few pounds, but she couldn’t remember exactly how much she weighed last time, so she tried not to worry about it. They waited about twenty minutes before the doctor came in. It wasn’t their usual person, but she was young and nice and seemed gentle.

  “So it just started hurting out of the blue?” the doctor asked Fern.

  “Pretty much,” she answered, looking the doctor in the eyes, which made Tabitha proud.

  “And it feels hot?”

  “Very.”

  “And sensitive when people touch it?”

  “Yes.”

  Tabitha wanted to give Fern a look that said, Really? Why didn’t you tell me any of that? But she didn’t. She knew this was way more on her than it was on Fern. The doctor felt around, then stopped and thought, like she was trying to get an image of the inside of a knee in her mind. She kept checking Fern’s knee and stopping and thinking.

  “Oh, and the back of her knee looked a little funny to me,” Tabitha said.

  The doctor gently turned Fern’s leg over and studied the smooth backside of her knee. It was definitely red.

  “To tell you the truth, I’m totally stumped,” the doctor said. “Some of the symptoms point to a possible torn or injured muscle, but other symptoms aren’t consistent with that. Since it’s been going on so long, and since Fern is clearly in pain, I’m going to send you for some tests.”

  “But that will take so long, and I hate to put her through that. Do you think there’s anything simple we can try? Ice or heat? Which is better in this situation? Or both?”

  “Sure, you can try heat if you want, but if there’s something going on in there, we should really find out. I’d like to begin with an X-ray, and then we’ll take it from there. I’ll write you a script, and you should have it done at CHOP.” Tabitha nodded her agreement. CHOP was the city’s children’s hospital and was highly respected throughout the region. “I’d like to have this done in the next week or so, at the latest.”

  “Okay,” she said, waiting while the doctor typed something into the computer.

  “Oh, and you can give her Advil,” the doctor said.

  “Thanks.”

  Tabitha was walking away from school after dropping Fern off when her phone rang. It was Kaye. She thought about not answering, but she had always liked Kaye.

  “Hello?”

  “Tabitha, I’m so glad to reach you. I feel just awful about yesterday. I am so sorry. Things haven’t been so easy around here lately. Hugo is working so much, and, well, he’s worried it’s all for nothing. He isn’t sure he’s going to have a job at the end of the month.” She lowered her voice when she said the last part.

  “Oh, Kaye, I’m so sorry,” Tabitha said.

  “And I was just in a really bad mood. I mean, I was worried about Fern, but I had intended to call and talk to you nicely. I don’t even know what happened.”

  “Well, we just left the doctor,” Tabitha said, glad she had that to offer. “And they have no idea what’s causing it. She has to have an X-ray.”

  “Poor girl,” Kaye said. “But at least you’ll get to the bottom of it soon.”

  “Listen, I didn’t want to ask Fern about it, but when you said she w
asn’t able to participate, did she not even go on one slide?”

  “She went on one, the one that ends and drops you, like, twenty feet into the pool. She was in so much pain after she hit that I thought I’d have to call you. But she asked me not to, really, she begged me not to. We ended up renting one of those silly cabanas, and she and Hugo sat and read most of the day—and ate.”

  “Oh,” Tabitha said.

  “But hey, that’s not why I called now, obviously,” Kaye said, clearly trying to turn the mood around. “Sarina has this crazy idea. She wants to do something nice for Fern, since she hasn’t been feeling well, and since yesterday wasn’t as much fun as she had hoped. We were thinking a pizza party—maybe even tonight? Sarina wants to invite you guys, and of course Levi can come, plus the six girls—Meghan, Lucy, Sophie, Eliana, Phoebe, and Grace. I know it is totally last minute, but I have a feeling everyone can make it if you can—and we could surprise Fern if you want to—just for fun. I’d leave that detail up to you. I know it’s a school night, but who cares, right? Hugo has to work late tonight, so I would love the company. What do you think?”

  “Fern would love that!” Tabitha said, wondering if Kaye somehow knew. Could she? “And yes, let’s surprise her. Why not? I’ll just tell her we have to stop by your place to pick up a jacket, or something like that. What can we bring? What time should we come?”

  “I was thinking around six? And let me send an email right now to the girls’ mothers. This will be fun! Maybe we can surprise everyone.”

  “I love that idea,” Tabitha said. “You didn’t say what we can bring.”

  “It’s going to be enough work to get Fern here,” she said. “Please, just bring yourselves.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The next morning, Tabitha started a new list. This one was about her mother’s last days, possibly other stuff, too, and she wrote at the top: The Worst Things.

  Number one: The Hug.

  When she had hugged her mother a few days before she died, not knowing she was going to die as soon as she did but knowing she probably wasn’t going to live too much longer, she realized she hadn’t hugged her in weeks. If she were being really honest, it had been longer than that. She added a letter A on the next line, like she was writing an outline, and added: Response. When she hugged her that day, her mother had clung to her.

  Number two: The Morphine.

  At number two she stopped. She had intended to list the doses, and the times of the doses, and try to figure out where things went wrong, if they went wrong, but she realized now that she wasn’t ready.

  Number three:—she wrote—and underlined it three times. Then she starred it. The Sidewalk Sale.

  She stopped again. When was that? About three months before her mother died? Or was it four months? They had cleaned out the apartment. Well, Tabitha had, after she had completely lost patience. For months her mother had said okay, she was finally ready to go through everything and throw things away. She was ready to “lighten her load.” But time and time again, they would spend hours going through clothes or books or jewelry—making piles to either keep, give away, or throw out. They would come to the end, and Tabitha would be ready to actually do something with the piles—throw the appropriate pile in the trash, put the “keep” pile back where it belonged, and take the third pile to give away—whatever that might mean. Each time, though, her mother had said no, let’s just put it all back where we found it and do it another time. All that work wasted, afternoons and afternoons of expending so much energy with no progress made.

  By the time Tabitha held the sidewalk sale, her mother was much easier to trick. She had always been so sharp, but that had changed over the previous few years. So she set her mother up in her bedroom watching a movie, and she slowly took all the things she could remember from the various “trash” and “give away” piles down to the sidewalk where she displayed them all neatly on a folding table and waited to sell them. Of course, she felt bad about twenty minutes into it, so she brought her mother out, expecting her to be livid and demand they bring every single item back inside. Tabitha had already sold a few things—some books, an old frame, a beautiful basket holding Mardi Gras beads. But she assumed her mother wouldn’t know what was already missing.

  Her mother approached the sale like she had no idea that these were her things on display. She walked around the table Tabitha had set up and looked at the items one by one.

  “Oh my,” she had said, holding up an elaborately decorated cigar box, full of miniature soaps collected from all over the world. “I had no idea other people did this! And look, they went to Paris and Mexico, too!”

  Tabitha had been stunned.

  “And look at this Bundt pan with the mermaids! I have one just like it upstairs. I use it to make my famous raspberry Jell-O mold every Christmas. Let’s buy it. Then I could make two at a time!”

  “Come on, Mom,” Tabitha had said. “If you have all this stuff already, you don’t need duplicates.”

  Her mother had nodded and gone back inside to finish the movie. Tabitha knew she should have just taken it all back in: most of it was still there in front of her. What would happen if her mother lived long enough to want to make that Jell-O mold again? But she was so mad! And she was so, so tired of it all. And she knew she was going to be stuck going through it, again. She thought about the soap collection. That would be easy to take back to the apartment and place under the bathroom sink where she had found it. But she didn’t. She sold a bunch of items for a dollar each, her mother’s beloved beach towels, her soup ladle, her cake plate, her Jell-O mold. When she couldn’t stand it anymore, she walked armfuls to various garbage cans in her mother’s neighborhood, telling herself hopefully that a homeless person might come across it and be able to use it. The thing was, there were very few homeless people in her mother’s neighborhood. There probably weren’t any.

  Tabitha’s phone pinged, and she was glad to be pulled away from that awful day. She looked. It was a reminder to herself that she had set so long ago that said Invitations. She was supposed to be working on the invitations for the bar mitzvah, but she hadn’t been able to come to any conclusions about where or how to do it. She couldn’t think of a single workable option. Even having it at the synagogue was expensive. She couldn’t do it at the apartment with all the burned-out light bulbs and lack of funds for food. She could invite everyone to the sports bar—it would be a game day of some sort. She let herself chuckle a little at that thought. Had she really reached this low point? But was it such a crazy idea? Levi loved sports, tons of people chose a sports theme for their bar mitzvahs. The best part, of course, would be that they could eat the food from the buffet. Tabitha wondered if anyone had ever done that.

  She spent some time following up on her last interview with the pest control people. She still hadn’t heard from them. She emailed to check in, saying she was still very interested. Then she looked on various job sites and sent her résumé with the hope of setting up two interviews—one with a medical supply company, making home visits to see what people needed and following up the visits to make sure everything was working properly, and one with a tree care company, making appointments for people to have their trees evaluated and trimmed. She added them to her job-prospect list, reaching number nine, which made her think of item number nine on her other list, the one she flushed down the toilet.

  She had spent a fair amount of time searching for Abigail on all the usual social-media sites, and she just wasn’t there. She took a breath and tried again, typing “Abigail Golding” into the browser. It took a second, and tons of Abigail Goldings came up, she knew them all now, had followed them all to dead ends, but none of them was the Abigail Golding. She kept moving, clicking on the next page, going back in time, years and years. Still, there was nothing new. She had spent hours making sure none of these were her. And then, like someone was teasing her or giving her a gift, she spotted an unfamiliar headline—the words Abigail Golding and Michigan jumped ou
t at her, and she stopped, clicked on the link, and waited. A photo came up of a woman: pretty, dark hair, smiley, standing in front of a building Tabitha recognized from Michigan—was that the student union? Tabitha wasn’t sure what it was called. The headline said, “Alumna Gives Back.” She checked the date—it was ten years old. She read on about how Abigail Golding, graduate of the University of Michigan in 1992, gave money to a literacy program at the university. It was a tiny, one-paragraph article, which Tabitha read over and over again, leaving her wanting more and also wanting less. It didn’t say anything about where she lived or if she had a family. It was basically void of all important information. Still, this was the first picture she had seen of Abigail. It was also the first evidence, beyond Stuart’s words, that she was real, that she existed in the world. Tabitha copied the link and sent herself an email, so she could have the information—not much, but something. The only other time she’d come across something worth saving was when an Abigail Golding of Michigan had come up in an old obituary, probably for a great-grandmother. No address, nothing beyond the assumption that Abigail had never been married. Tabitha had found a phone number for the address listed for the deceased. It had turned out to be a nursing home, and the people there were unwilling to answer a single question.

  Now Tabitha almost didn’t want to use this up too fast, the possibility of grabbing on to something—some thread of where Abigail might be, which would possibly then lead her to where Stuart might be. Even so, she googled the development office at the University of Michigan and called, before she could think too much about it.

  “Development office, can I help you?” a young voice said. It was probably a student, Tabitha realized.

  “Yes, please, I’m looking for an alum of yours. I’m trying to reach her to see if she wants to partner on a literacy initiative, and I came upon an old article which led me to you. Her name is Abigail Golding?”