What She Inherits

by Diane V. Mulligan

  For the past few days, Nicole had been trying to get her to “do something,” which meant anything but hang around the house. But it felt so wrong to go out and do anything fun. Her mother was dead! She was in mourning. But, she had to admit, mourning was boring. And she felt bad that her friends had come all the way from New Hampshire and had done little but sit around the house. October was so beautiful in the Low Country. They could have had fun on St. Nabor Island or done something touristy in Savannah if this trip hadn’t been for such screwed-up circumstances. All they’d done was take some walks on the beach near the house. Not exactly exciting. But now there was no time. In fact, if they didn’t leave right away, her friends were likely to miss their plane. Angela had to face her new life alone sometime, and now was as good a time as any.

  Chapter 8

  Devil’s Back Island, Maine

  After two days of relentless rain, Casey feared she’d lose her mind if she spent another day alone in the café. In the winter, she expected and even anticipated solitude, but it wasn’t winter yet, not even close, and now she had way too much on her mind to be left to her leisure. She flipped the sign on the café to “closed,” locked the door, and, raincoat zipped to her chin, made a run for it along the path to the inn.

  In the parlor, a few guests who hadn’t canceled despite the miserable forecast sat near the fireplace playing cards. Casey took off her dripping coat and draped it over the back of a chair near the fire and then went in search of her great-aunt.

  Now that Rosetta thought Casey had only been avoiding her because of Jason, she didn’t need to avoid her at all, which was good, because even a loner like Casey could find the island lonely on weeks like this, and without Rosetta, she had no one to call on.

  She found Rosetta in her office. Her desk was a sea of papers, and she was studying receipts and punching numbers into a big old adding machine when Casey knocked on the door.

  “Can it wait a few minutes, Lou—” Rosetta started, mistaking Casey for Louise, who worked at the reception desk. But then she saw Casey in the doorway and hastily shoved a stack of papers into a file folder and set them to the side.

  Why her aunt would seem so flustered and guilty to see her, Casey could not imagine. Rosetta’s desk was normally neat and tidy, and taking in the disarray there, Casey wondered if Rosetta’s mind was going. She was seventy-eight years old, after all.

  “Everything okay?” Casey asked, sitting in the chair opposite Rosetta’s desk and tucking her feet under Bentley’s stomach where he lounged on the floor.

  “Meeting with the accountant coming up, that’s all. Quarterly taxes, you know,” Rosetta said, but Casey thought she detected a blush of color on Rosetta’s cheeks. Guilt? Annoyance?

  “Anything I can help with?”

  Rosetta guffawed and moved around a few more piles of paper, tucking everything into folders so that Casey couldn’t see what any of it was.

  “Shouldn’t you be working?” Rosetta asked, taking off her reading glasses and studying Casey.

  “I’ve done inventory, cleaned out the fridge, deep cleaned the espresso machine and the display cases. I’m at my wit’s end. Until I have customers, I’ve got nothing but time.”

  “We should all be so lucky.”

  “I can go if you’re that busy. I thought you might be in the same boat.”

  Rosetta waved her off. “I can’t look at these stupid things again,” she said. Then she stood and picked up the stack of folders. “Cup of tea?”

  Casey nodded.

  Rosetta took her paperwork and disappeared down the hall, and Bentley, ever faithful, jumped up and followed her, leaving Casey alone in the office. Casey glanced at the computer on the far side of the desk. This was what she was really after. She refused to own her own computer or to have an email account or any other kind of account, but she did occasionally have a use for the convenience of the Internet.

  She slipped around the desk, tapped the mouse, and the screen sprang to life. She opened the Internet browser and, after stopping for a moment to peer down the hall to make sure Rosetta wasn’t out there, she typed, “Genetic Testing Ovarian Cancer.”

  According to the search engine, there were over a million hits. Casey let out a low whistle. This was yet another reason she didn’t use the Internet. All over the world, at that very moment, people were sitting at computers like this one, searching for information about all manner of sickness, writing blog posts about crazy naturopathic cures, chatting on forums about their symptoms and how hard it was to get a straight answer from a medical professional. Casey wanted no part in it.

  She clicked on one of the top links, a government site with a fact sheet about BRCA1 and BRCA2 testing. The page was arranged as a list of clickable questions. Her question was near the top: “How much does having a BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene mutation increase a woman’s risk of breast and ovarian cancer?”

  Heart pounding, another glance out at the hallway, and then Casey clicked on the question. She scanned the answer and found the info she sought immediately. According to the website, “39 percent of women who inherit a harmful BRCA1 mutation and 11 to 17 percent of women who inherit a harmful BRCA2 mutation will develop ovarian cancer by age 70 years.”

  She grabbed a scrap of paper and jotted down “39% - BRCA 1, 17% - BRCA2.” Then she closed the browser, stuffed the paper in her pocket, and resumed her seat on the other side of the desk, just in time.

  A moment later, Rosetta returned with a tea tray, Bentley wagging his tail as he followed on her heels, eager for a nibble of whatever Rosetta was about to be eating. She spoiled that dog rotten. It was amazing he didn’t have diabetes. Dogs are not supposed to eat shortbread cookies.

  As Rosetta set down the tray, Casey felt a small pang of guilt for not helping her aunt. She should have been the one to fetch the tea things. But then how would she have managed to use the computer without asking Rosetta’s permission? She didn’t need her aunt thinking her stance on all things twenty-first century was softening. She liked living like it was 1992. It suited her fine. If time had stopped twenty years ago, she would not have minded one bit. Most of the time she felt like she was still seventeen, whatever the calendar said.

  That night, Casey took the scrap of paper and her mother’s letter from her pocket and studied them both. Her mother wrote that she had the BRCA1 mutation, and she urged Casey to get genetic testing to learn if she was at risk as well. That, in fact, was the purpose of her letter. It wasn’t a deathbed apology. It was a deathbed confession that she may have given Casey bad genes.

  Her mother’s history gave her a fifty-fifty shot of having the mutation. Without knowing her father’s medical history, she could only assume her actual risk could be higher. He had abandoned her and her mother when she was only three and had never even attempted to contact her since. As far as she knew, anyway. She thought that if he had reached out to her when she was growing up, her mother would have told her, if for no other reason than because he owed her thousands upon thousands of dollars in child support, so she would have encouraged Casey to reunite with him. It was possible that he’d looked for her in the years since her mother kicked her out, but she doubted it. Her mother would have told Rosetta.

  She had never been great at math, and probability was definitely not her forte, but even she could figure out what this meant. She had somewhere between a 50 and 100 percent chance of having inherited the BRCA1 mutation. If she had the mutation, she had slightly better than a 50-50 chance of living with it without developing cancer.

  It helped her to put it in concrete terms. For every one hundred women with the BRCA1 mutation, 39 would get ovarian cancer and 61 would not. The numbers for breast cancer were higher, but she hadn’t paid as much attention to those because her mother had had ovarian cancer. She had no idea if the mutation could cause either cancer, willy-nilly, as it wished, but she had decided to believe that she was only prone to what her mother had suffered.

  The question, as she understood it
from these numbers, was this: How unlucky was she? Was she unlucky enough to have the mutation? Or had she hit the jackpot—the mutation and its ill effects?

  The further question was this: If she got tested and learned she had the BRCA1 mutation, what good would that do her? The test couldn’t tell her for sure if she was in the 39 percent or the 61 percent. It could only tell her if she was a mutant or not.

  No, there was no point in getting the test. Predicting whether or not she’d get cancer was like guessing if a coin would land heads or tails, highly imprecise. Oh, sure, the people guessing would be doctors, with training, who saw lots of patients, and so on, but in the end, they’d still only be guessing.

  Casey didn’t plan to live in fear due to a guess, educated or otherwise. The hubris of geneticists was, in Casey’s admittedly uninformed opinion, likely to be the downfall of civilization. She was willing to be a mutant by nature, but she had no intention of having her ovaries or breasts removed because of a coin-toss’s chance that she’d one day develop cancer. Everyone was going to die sometime.

  She took her mother’s letter and the scrap of paper over to the sink and rummaged in the junk drawer for a book of matches. Time to burn the letter and be done with it. But before she could, she heard the unmistakable thud of Jason coming up the back stairs and tucked the papers back into her pocket. Tomorrow. She’d get rid of the letter tomorrow.

  Chapter 9

  St. Nabor Island, South Carolina

  On the third day after Molly and Nicole had gone, Angela accepted the fact that she could not spend another night alone in the house. She really would lose her mind if she didn’t get some sleep. Maybe they had been right—maybe she had already lost her mind and the sounds she heard in the night were products of grief and anxiety and an overactive imagination. She could no longer trust her senses.

  Midmorning, she called Grace and asked if her offer was still good, and Grace assured her it was. Angela told her she’d be over around four. She could have called someone she knew better, but the idea of being around a relative stranger comforted her. In front of Grace, Angela could be whatever she wanted, could deal with her mother’s death however she wanted, and could pass her days in the company of whomever she chose, because, despite the fifteen years Grace had worked with Angela’s mother, Angela hardly knew Grace at all. Grace had no idea what Angela’s life was like before her mother’s death, no way of knowing if her actions were or were not in keeping with the person she’d been until two weeks ago.

  Angela packed some things and went around the house making sure all the lights were off and the windows were locked. She paused in her mother’s study. She still had not found the key to the desk. She’d have to get a locksmith in to open the damned thing. What the hell did her mother have in there to warrant hiding the key?

  Angela tossed her suitcase in the back of her mother’s Subaru. It was only half-past noon. Plenty of time. She steered through the picturesque development where she had spent her childhood, along the winding two-lane road through Ocean Pines Plantation and out to the main highway toward the mainland. Instead of taking I-95, though, she took a rural route, through peach orchards and fields of Vidalia onions, under massive trees draped in Spanish moss. After nearly an hour, she had reached a one-stoplight town where the businesses of the main street were a general store, a diner, a pharmacy, and two grungy bars.

  She kept on past the traffic light, through the center of town, and soon turned off the main road into a dirt street marked with a hand-painted, wooden sign that said “Bobcat Lane.” The tires churned up a cloud of dust as she passed between farm fields. At last old Spanish moss draped trees sprang up beside the lane, and then, at a sharp right-hand turn, a rusty, leaning iron gate, and the road ended at a dilapidated Georgian house with peeling paint, a sagging porch, and a crumbling chimney. There was a sign in the window to the right of the door that simply said, “Open.”

  Angela turned off the car, took a deep breath, and then crossed the packed-dirt yard to the house. When she reached the door, it swung open before she could knock, and three dirty young children regarded her from the hallway.

  “Mom!” one of them shouted without taking his eyes off of her.

  “Hi,” one of the other kids said. Then she stuck her thumb in her mouth and stared at Angela.

  Angela wondered why the kids weren’t in school.

  “We heard your car,” the one who had shouted for his mother said. The one who had not yet spoken nodded solemnly.

  “I told y’all to stay in the playroom,” a woman’s raspy voice shouted from somewhere in the house.

  At the sound, the children took off, leaving Angela standing on the porch, unsure what to do. She’d been here once before, senior year of high school, with her friend Suzanne and Suzanne’s older, world-wise sister Deirdre, when Suzanne couldn’t decide what college to choose of the three where she’d been accepted. Deirdre, then twenty-five and the girls’ role model of sophistication and cool, said she knew what to do and drove them out here to Lisette LaRoche for a psychic reading.

  Deirdre had assured them that Lisette was the best. Deirdre had gone first, and Lisette had greeted her like a long-lost friend. She had returned holding two special candles she was to burn when they got home. Suzanne took her turn next, emerging about twenty minutes later with a small bag that contained a hunk of Himalayan salt, a quartz crystal, and an herbal tonic. Angela had declined to have her fortune told.

  She was thinking she might once again leave without the consultation she’d come for when a woman in a pink sweatsuit appeared on the stairs, making her plodding way down. She had dyed-black hair, wore thick eye makeup, and despite her grubby, stained sweats, wore an array of large rings on the fingers of both hands.

  “Sorry about the kids,” she said, arriving at last at the door. “These damn teacher in-service things. Really wrecks a mother’s day.” She stood aside and gestured for Angela to enter.

  This was not Lisette. Lisette had been small and gray-haired, with a breathy voice and hippie-meets-gypsy clothing.

  “I was hoping to see Lisette,” Angela said, standing in the entry hall and taking note of the dust motes heavy in the air.

  “I’m her daughter. She doesn’t work Wednesdays.”

  “The sign says—”

  “Yeah, I can do a reading for you.” Without waiting for Angela’s reply, the woman turned and walked toward the back of the house. Hesitantly, Angela followed.

  “I’m Belle,” the woman said, sitting at the round kitchen table in the big, dusty kitchen. Everything in the room had a worn, gray, faded look, from the 70s-style linoleum floor to the wallpaper with its pattern of folksy drawings of children playing. Angela wouldn’t care to eat any food prepared on those scummy looking counters.

  “So palm reading or tarot?” Belle asked, tapping a cigarette from a pack on the table.

  “I don’t know. What’s the difference?”

  “Thirty dollars,” Belle said, lighting the cigarette. She leaned back and blew smoke rings into the air. Then she sat up and considered Angela. “You came a long way. Might as well make it worth your while.”

  Without waiting for Angela’s reply, she picked up a deck of tarot cards from the far side of the table and placed them squarely between herself and Angela. Angela watched her light a candle and wondered how Belle had known she’d traveled a distance to be here. What clues had she seen in Angela that she was using now to fake psychic powers?

  “How do I know you won’t make stuff up?” Angela asked. After all, she’d come to see Lisette. She’d never heard of this Belle person before.

  Belle shuffled the tarot cards, took another drag of her cigarette, and squinted at Angela through the smoke. “You grew up out on the coast, lived there most of your life, but your family’s not from the South, which explains why you don’t have much accent. Maybe they’re from Maine or—I’m getting an ‘M’—so Michigan or Minnesota.”

  This was pretty much true, but it di
dn’t prove Belle was the real deal. The first part was a good guess, and lots of people asked where she was from because she spoke with only a twinge of Southern drawl, not enough to be a true Southerner—a result of growing up with parents from Massachusetts, an “M” state Belle hadn’t thought of.

  “You’re not sure what to do about your boyfriend,” Belle said, and Angela nearly laughed out loud. Love troubles were probably what motivated most of the unmarried women who came here. That guess on Belle’s part was the safest one she could have made.

  “And,” Belle added, seeing her skepticism, “you’ve got some questions about your momma.” She cut the deck, crossed her arms and said, “Pick a card.”

  Angela reached out her hand and then thought better of it. She sat back and mimicked Belle’s pose. She said, “The thing is, my mother is dead, and I don’t have questions about her, I have questions for her.”

  “Your mother is dead?” Belle asked, tilting her head and dropping her bored act for a moment.

  “She died a week ago, but I think—” Angela paused, knowing how foolish she was about to sound, “I think she’s trying to communicate with me.”

  Belle stood up and walked to the fridge where she got a liter bottle of Coke, and then she came back to the table. She took a sip straight from the bottle and frowned. “I’m sorry, but I was getting so clearly that you were estranged from your mother. You weren’t adopted, were you?”

  Angela let out a little snort of a laugh, and then she took out her phone and pulled up a picture of herself and her mother from the summer. A blind person could see the resemblance between them.

  Belle shook her head and then shrugged. “I’m not a medium. I’m a clairvoyant.”

  Angela stuck her phone back in her purse and pushed her chair back from the table.