In A Country Of Mothers

by A M Homes

  “She’s my patient too,” Claire said. She almost said, She was my patient first. But that sounded too possessive.

  “I want you to tell me what the situation is,” Claire said in a firm voice. “Is it something serious?”

  “Could be a virus that’ll resolve itself in a few days. Could escalate into something new at any time. I don’t know. She just came in today.”

  “Are you running tests?”

  “White count is down,” Dr. Brandt said flatly. “Liver’s off a little. Blood culture’s negative at twelve hours.”

  “What are you giving her?”

  “Are you a psychiatrist or just a psychologist?”

  “What’s she getting?”

  “Tylenol by mouth.”

  “That’s it?” Claire said, horrified.

  “IV to keep her from dehydrating. Someone from infectious diseases is taking a look in the morning. Hey, she could be out of here by afternoon — all kinds of viruses do things like this. Most likely it’s nothing.”

  “You have my number,” Claire said. “If anything comes up, I want to know. I can be out there by tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Yeah, all right.”

  “Thanks.” Claire slammed the phone down. “Fucking assholes,” she said loudly, looking at the empty suitcase and trying to figure what to do with it. She couldn’t just jump up, pack her bag, and say goodbye — that would be asking for trouble. Just as Sam came into the room she jammed the suitcase back into the closet and then pretended to be rearranging their clothing.

  “Jake woke up. The phone, I guess,” Sam said. “He’s in the kitchen, microwaving hot chocolate.”

  At the beach they’d been drinking gallons of hot chocolate. Claire made it the real way — in a pot on the stove, with milk and deep brown cocoa from a heavy tin can, with heaping spoons of sugar stirred in and two fat marshmallows floating on the top. She didn’t use beige powder dumped from a premeasured package into a cup of water and rotated around for a minute and a half in a portable x-ray machine. She slaved over a hot stove for at least ten or twelve minutes.

  Claire pushed past Sam and went down the hall into the kitchen.

  “Get back to bed,” she told Jake.

  “I’m making hot chocolate.”

  “No you’re not.”

  The mug was already turning in a circle in the microwave. The packet of cocoa mix lay empty on the counter, grains of cocoa dust trailing from the microwave to a spoon on the counter.

  “Go back to bed.”

  “Mom,” Jake whined.

  “Forget it. You’re not drinking that shit at midnight. Have a glass of water if you’re thirsty.”

  The bell on the microwave went off. If she’d been normal, she would’ve just let him have it. She would’ve said, Okay, fine, just don’t do it again. But instead, in a flash of anger and in front of both Jake and Sam, who’d come to defend Jake, she took out the cup of cocoa and poured it down the drain. It was all she could do to keep from throwing the mug into the sink. She would have loved to smash something.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” Sam said.

  She looked at Jake, standing there staring at her. He was starting to get tall. In a year or two he’d be at eye level. After that everything would be history; he’d be gone.

  “I hate you,” Jake said, walking away.

  “Feeling’s mutual,” Claire mumbled.

  Sam raised his finger and shook it in her face, lawyerlike. “He woke up because the phone rang. It’s your problem, so don’t take it out on him.”

  “He wanted a sugar fix,” Claire said, focusing on the pool of spilled cocoa in the sink. The mug was lying on its side. She still wanted to smash it.

  “Big fucking deal,” Sam said.

  “Big fucking deal,” Claire snapped back.

  From above she could hear the upstairs neighbor dropping one shoe at a time onto the floor and then the creak and crunch of his Murphy bed coming down. Adam’s new stuffed elephant was lying on the floor under the kitchen table, collecting dust and crumbs. Claire picked it up and shook it vigorously, then propped it against his empty chair. It was midnight.

  Claire spent the night making deals in a strange half-sleep. If Jody was allowed to get well, Claire would be a better person. She’d do more for others, work harder at being a good therapist, a good wife, a good mother to Jake, Adam, and Jody. She’d give herself to Jody in a way that she’d never done before with anyone. She’d make up for everything and then some. If Jody was allowed to live …

  At nine a.m. she was in her office, sitting at her desk and ready to transcribe last night’s messages from the answering machine.

  “Hi, Claire, this is Janet Fishman, your real estate agent in Stamford. I know we were supposed to look at houses tomorrow, but it’s not going to happen, not this week — my life is a disaster. You understand. Call me, we’ll reschedule.”

  “It’s Randy Hill. I have to be out of town on business. See you next week.”

  “She’s driving me crazy. I sent her back to the apartment. I didn’t want to be here by myself, but I couldn’t take it anymore. She scares me.” Jody’s voice sounded far off, full of fever. “I feel so strange. It’s the middle of the night. My mother’s driving me nuts. My room’s orange—not a Sunkist, get-well-soon orange, but a rusty, rot-in-hell kind of color.” Jody paused, swallowed. “Isn’t orange the color of insanity? Didn’t I read that somewhere? There’s a speaker in the wall. Sometimes it talks to me, just blurts out things. A minute ago it said, ‘Maria, Maria, where are you, Maria?’ and I thought I was in West Side Story.” Jody paused again. “Sorry to clog up your machine.”

  Claire called the hospital. It was barely six a.m. in California. The floor nurse was nice — almost too nice. “It’s been a quiet night, no problems. She didn’t sleep much, and she’s still running a fever, but the rash seems better.”

  What rash? No one had said anything about a rash.

  All day, whenever Claire’s buzzer went off, she opened her office door and her patients came in, sat down, and picked up where they’d left off. At the end of their hour, when the buzzer went off again, Claire led them back to the door without the vaguest hint of what had transpired. In a sense she had vanished. Overnight, the gap between Claire and the rest of the world had grown into a crevasse so deep, so wide, that it could not possibly be spanned.

  At two, during the half-hour she’d allotted for lunch and returning calls, the phone rang.

  “Hello. You don’t know me,” a woman’s voice said, “but I’m calling about Jody Goodman. I’m her mother.”

  “I’m Claire Roth,” Claire said.

  “Jody keeps asking me to call you, I’m not sure why. And she won’t dial your number herself.”

  Claire smiled. Jody’s refusal to call was sweet. She wondered how she’d managed last night — asked the nurse, or another patient?

  “I don’t know what to do,” the mother said.

  “About what?”

  “Jody seems so upset. She wants me to get a plane and fly her home.”

  “Is that possible?” Claire asked.

  “Possible? I just flew out here. They only do things like that for people who need transplants, who have to fly halfway across the country to meet their kidneys. Jody has such an imagination. When she gets better, we’ll fly home together.”

  Claire struggled to write down everything the woman said. Her hands were shaking. Claire was talking to the mother, the mother she’d only imagined, the woman who’d stolen her child, the madonna she’d conjured in her mind’s eye for twenty-four years. Claire pictured the woman as squat, low to the ground, earth-motherish. She saw her out there in Los Angeles, alone, afraid of losing this second child, this second chance. Claire had to make this woman trust her while at the same time being careful not to seem as though she was overstepping the bounds. She had to protect herself, protect Jody, and make a good impression. “Is there anything I can do to help you?” Claire asked.

&n
bsp; “For me?” the woman said. “No.”

  “Well, if anything comes up or you just need to talk, feel free to call me back. And let me give you my number at home.”

  “I haven’t got a pen,” the mother said. “But thank you. I appreciate the offer.”

  Claire hung up wanting more.

  25

  “Remember the yellow dot?” Jody said the next time she spoke to Claire. “It’s gone. Evaporated.”

  The missing dot, however odd a concept, was the clue that something was really wrong, maybe irrevocably so. Jody hadn’t been able to protect that most fragile part of herself, and it had disappeared. Without someone on guard duty, the real Jody had no capacity to survive. Just as her biological mother had no way of caring for an infant, and her adoptive mother was unable to nurse a sick child, Jody could not take care of herself. They were all useless to each other. It was the truth of her childhood, her life; the unspoken truth she’d lived in fear of. She had always known this would happen; it made perfect sense. She wondered only why it had taken this long.

  “I want to go home,” Jody told the infectious diseases specialist.

  He stood over her, a mask covering his face, a paper gown over his white coat, booties over his shoes, thin latex gloves pulled tight over his hands. Through the gloves Jody could see the hair on his knuckles, matted down.

  “Do you want to get well,” the doctor asked, “or do you want to go home?”

  “I didn’t realize they were mutually exclusive,” Jody said. No one seemed to hear her.

  A case of water from Gary Marc’s private Swiss spring arrived with a note from Gary warning that under no circumstances should Jody drink from her plastic bedside pitcher, potentially a source of deadly bacteria.

  Ellen sent an FTD “pick-me-up bouquet”—seven brightly dyed carnations in a cracked mug — with “Get Well Soon” printed on the card in a stranger’s bad handwriting.

  “I don’t want to die in Los Angeles,” Jody told her mother.

  Ilene, Bob, and a pack of UCLA film students showed up and took over Jody’s room, crowding onto the bed with her. Jody’s mother sat in the corner by the window, working a crossword puzzle. Jody had never noticed it before, but there was something untouchable about her mother. Seeing it now, she realized that her mother’s heart had always been kept sealed away in a clear but impenetrable Lucite box.

  “Are you researching Terms of Endearment Part II?” one of her friends asked, playing with her IV line.

  “We had a choice between The Glass Menagerie and you,” Ilene said. “We figured they were both the same — depressing, boring, classic.”

  “You look like shit,” another girl said.

  “Thanks,” Jody said.

  “No — I mean last week you looked fine.”

  “It’s the lighting,” Jody said.

  They all looked up at the fluorescent overhead fixture and nodded.

  A nurse finally came in and shooed everyone out. “Are you trying to visit your friend or suffocate her?” she asked, hurrying them up off the bed. “Go on now, leave her alone.”

  “It’s true,” her mother said, once they left. “They didn’t have to stay so long.”

  “Then why didn’t you say something?” Jody said.

  “I was leaving it up to you. They’re your friends.” Her mother paused, rinsed out a washcloth, and rubbed it over her own face and neck. “You always say that I don’t accept your friends. I didn’t want to interfere.”

  “Mom, I’m in the hospital, I feel like shit. Interfere already.”

  “You know,” her mother said, pouring herself a glass of Gary Marc water, “I didn’t plan on coming out here twice this year. Daddy needs me at home. He’s not used to being alone.” She paused. “He gets lonely.”

  “I can’t believe you.”

  “I’m here, aren’t I? I wouldn’t have come if I didn’t think it was important. All day I sit in this chair and worry.”

  “What are you worried about, Mom, me or you?”

  “You’re just upset because you’re not feeling well,” her mother said, refilling her glass.

  “Leave,” Jody said. “Get out. I don’t feel good enough to fight with you.”

  Her mother sat back down in her chair and picked up the crossword puzzle again, occasionally asking Jody questions like “Who’s an actress Somers?”

  Jody drifted back in time. She remembered raising her hand in the third grade, telling her teacher that she felt sick. She sat on the blue-and-green plaid sofa in the school office while the secretary took her temperature and called her mother. “She says she’s feeling nauseated,” the secretary told her mother, “but her temp’s below normal at 97.8…. Well, yes, I can have her rest here for a little while and see how she feels.” Ten minutes later, Jody vomited all over everything, and there was no answer when the secretary tried to call her mother back. Finally a neighbor, a volunteer in the art room, took Jody home to her house, and Jody spent the afternoon lying there feeling like she was two million miles from home, even though it was less than a hundred yards away and clearly visible from the neighbor’s bedroom window.

  During the night, someone in Jody’s unit died. She heard Code Blue paged, the rush of metal wheels and crepe soles down the hall. She was on a floor with a lot of AIDS patients. She knew because she saw them go past her door, because her mother walked the halls and reported back.

  “It’s so sad,” she said to Jody.

  Jody didn’t answer. She didn’t want to know about it. She was on the wrong side of the bed. She closed her eyes and imagined dying without ever knowing who she was or where she’d come from. She thought it was a strange time to realize how important her history was to her.

  When the fever broke, Jody felt worse, even more tired and damaged. Her voice sounded not like a voice but like a piece of fine-grain sandpaper being swept gently across a surface. While her mother watched, the nurse helped her to stand and led her to the bathroom. She leaned against the sink and in the mirror saw herself for the first time — a thin, green stranger. The nurse helped her back to bed. She slept.

  Late that night, the intern who’d slipped her blood in his pocket sneaked into the room, squeezed her hand, and said “Negative.” Jody stared at him, blinked. She wasn’t sure she was awake. She wasn’t sure that she wasn’t imagining him standing there. “Negative,” he said again, squeezing her hand so tight it hurt. “Just a plain, nasty virus.” In the morning she almost told her mother, but then stopped herself. There was no point.

  Two days later, one of the doctors came in, looked her over, and said, “It’s over. You’re free, I’m releasing you. Fly away home.” He flapped his arms up and down.

  “Excuse me, but I can’t walk. I can barely talk. I don’t remember anything. I still feel like I’m dying.”

  “A virus,” the doctor said. “These things happen. Make an appointment in the clinic next week or with your family doctor. We’ll run fresh bloods and monitor a few things.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Far as I can tell.”

  Her mother packed her things into a plastic trash bag, and Jody shuffled down the hall toward the Exit sign.

  “They seem to know what they’re doing,” her mother said. “You have to trust somebody.”

  “No you don’t.”

  From her bed in her apartment, Jody made plane reservations while her mother cleaned the kitchen, defrosted the refrigerator, and complained. Jody arranged for one of her UCLA friends to baby-sit her car and the apartment until she got back. She arranged for her mail to be forwarded, the newspaper stopped, and her teachers notified. She felt worse every hour.

  “You have more energy,” her mother said, bringing her a glass of juice.

  “It’s not energy,” Jody answered. “It’s hysteria.”

  What Jody had was the sensation that she should hurry home, that this window of opportunity was a momentary thing, a last chance. She was determined to at least get out alive.
r />   “The plane’s not going to crash, is it?” she asked Claire.

  “You’re too sick for the plane to crash,” Claire said, which somehow seemed comforting.

  A wheelchair and an attendant met Jody at the curb of Los Angeles International Airport. The redcap propelled Jody toward the gate, handling the chair as though it were a snowplow. Her mother trailed behind, acting unrelated. At the departure gate Jody transferred herself to a narrower chair, more like a personal luggage cart, and was pushed up the ramp by two men in American Airlines coveralls; she felt like a steamer trunk full of china. At the top of the stairs, she stepped into the plane and gently walked down the aisle to her seat. Even though it was a warm day, she was wearing a turtleneck, sweatshirt, wool socks, a down jacket, and a wool hat, and still she was shivering. Her mother sat across the aisle from her and pulled out the in-flight magazine. When Jody asked her to get a blanket from the stewardess, she just looked at her blankly. Jody hated her. She hated her mother for revealing herself to be incompetent, unable or unwilling to do anything to help.

  26

  “Do you have plans for Thanksgiving?” Claire asked during a quick call between patients and between expeditions to Balducci’s, Dean & DeLuca, and the Food Emporium, hunting and gathering her way across Manhattan Island.

  “Well,” Jody said, “I was thinking of rolling over onto my left side, but it turns out I can’t. Every time I move my head, the room starts to spin.”

  For almost three weeks Jody had been held captive in her parents’ house, in the narrow bed of her youth. “I hate it here,” she said.

  “On Friday, when you go to the doctor, I want you to tell him that I’m going to call. I need to talk to him.”

  What Claire couldn’t understand was why no one was doing anything. Why wasn’t Jody getting some treatment? “You have my number on Long Island. I’ll be out there all weekend.”

  “Great,” Jody said. “Have fun.”

  “I’ll call sometime tomorrow — I don’t know when.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I know what I have to do,” Claire said.