by Sarah S.
“What does she take?”
Joanna shrugged. “I have no idea.”
“Tylenol?”
“Well, sure.”
“Vitamin supplements?”
Joanna felt her face twisting helplessly. “I mean, she takes all kinds
of things. She had drawers full of … of everything.”
“Cholesterol medicine, like Lipitor? Does she take anything like
Phenobarbital? Does she take a lot of antibiotics? Tetracyclines? Nitrofurantoins?”
“She takes antibiotics whenever she gets a cold,” Joanna whispered. She said the other medications he mentioned were familiar,
too—she’d seen them strewn around the house. She’d seen all kinds
of things lying around the house. Whenever she turned around, Catherine was popping something.
Dr. Nestor stretched out his palms, lowered his eyes, and heaved
a centering, Zenlike sigh. “Okay. Let’s not panic. We’re just testing
right now. But … the liver, you see, it filters the blood. It filters toxins
out of the body, excesses of vitamins or high levels of medications. It
processes all of that.”
“Okay.”
He scratched behind his ear, sheepish. “A damaged liver is . . .
blocked. It doesn’t clean the blood as well. The more you put into your body, the more clogged it gets. You have noticed that your mother is
rather yellow, right?”
Joanna stared at him.
“Her skin,” Dr. Nestor spelled out. “Her face. The whites of her
eyes. You’ve noticed that, right?”
Joanna felt helpless. “She wears a lot of makeup.”
“Has she talked about any pain? Itching? Feeling bloated?” “She complains about that, sure. She complains about a lot of
things.”
The doctor stared at her, pursing his lips judgmentally. Joanna’s
skin prickled with shame and embarrassment. What kind of asshole
marches out here and basically implies that her mother has … God
knows what? Cirrhosis? Hepatitis? And what kind of doctor makes a
patient’s child feel shitty and irresponsible, like she should’ve noticed
her mother’s yellowness, listened more carefully to her mother’s hysterical complaints, or stopped her from popping her unlimited supply of samples? Whatever had happened was clearly all Catherine’s
doing—but no, Joanna was to blame. Joanna was the criminal, the
enabler.
“It’s not serious, is it?” Joanna asked. “I mean, she can be cured,
can’t she?”
“We won’t know anything until we get the screens back,” the doctor answered sternly. “It could be mild damage. It could be hepatitis,
or its autoimmune version, which we can control. On the other end of
the spectrum, it could require a transplant.”
Joanna’s jaw locked. Scott’s phone started to ring. He quickly patted his pocket and it stopped.
“But again, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Dr. Nestor said quickly.
“I’m just preparing you for everything, okay? We’re taking good care of her. Let’s just hope for the best.” He glanced over his shoulder in the direction of Catherine’s room. “I didn’t mean to overhear, but maybe you shouldn’t be fighting right now. It gets her blood pressure up, stresses her out. My apologies if I’ve overstepped my bounds, but what
she needs right now is you and your husband’s support.”
A whole beat went by. Joanna and Scott looked at one another.
Scott opened his mouth but didn’t respond. Joanna shook her head
and said, “No, he’s not …”
But the doctor had already turned around and was walking down
the hall. Joanna watched him skirt around a woman with a walker.
Scott shifted his weight, and then jingled the change in his pockets. “Well,” he said.
Joanna pushed her purse strap higher on her shoulder and started
down the hall. Scott followed. He didn’t ask if he should, he just lagged
next to her, in step. He fiddled with the strings of his hooded sweatshirt. His shoes were untied, the laces dragging on the floor. Joanna
felt that what she’d just said back in the hospital room had brought on
her mother’s illness in a fast-acting karmic revenge. If there truly was
someone above the clouds controlling the whole world, someone with
levers and pulleys and gauges, and if he had seen Joanna behaving like
this—and even more, if he’d seen that she was here with Scott—surely
he had delivered the damage into her mother’s liver, like a FedEx of
disease.
She stopped at her mother’s doorway and peered through the portal. Catherine was watching the little television fixed to the end of her
bed. All at once it was obvious why her mother looked unfinished:
they’d taken off all her makeup, all the mascara, eye shadow, blush,
lipstick, eyebrow pencil, everything. They’d scrubbed her clean before
the surgery, even though they weren’t going anywhere near her face. Why did they have to do that? Why couldn’t they have left her as she
was?
The most shocking thing of all was that Catherine did indeed look
a little yellow. Certainly not sunburst or raincoat or daffodil yellow,
but not quite skin-colored, either.
“Goddamn it,” Joanna said through her teeth. All the times she’d
accompanied her mom to the ER, all the times the doctors had come
out and said it was nothing and her mother had protested later that the
doctor was a quack. She felt like something was wrong, and so reached
into her purse and took God-knows-what blue or pink, white or neon
green pill, Joanna had wanted to grab Catherine by the shoulders and
say would you just stop this? Can’t you just be happy?
So now Catherine was right? Well, great. She was right. She got
her wish.
Joanna turned from the door and walked back down the hall to the
waiting room, past the fake fig tree and the ugly triage nurses. Scott
followed. “You don’t want to go back in?” he asked.
“No.” Joanna marched past the vending machines, the check-in
desk, and finally out into the cold air.
She turned her cell phone back on and looked at the screen. She
had six new messages. They could have been from Charles, but she
didn’t feel like listening to them. She dropped the phone back in her
pocket.
Scott sat down on a wet bench and lit a cigarette. He took off his
jacket and arranged it on the seat. She plopped down on it reluctantly,
keeping her elbows close to her sides. He offered her his cigarette, but
she waved it away.
“You can go if you want,” she said stiffly. “I don’t want to burden
you with this anymore.”
“Go where?”
“Back to her house. I have the keys. Or drive back to your house in
Pennsylvania.”
“What about you? How would you get back?”
“I could take a cab to the train station in Aberdeen.”
Scott took a long drag. “Do you want me to go back?” Pressure was building at her temples. She had no idea what she
wanted. The wind picked up, running right through her. She shivered. “Are you cold?” Scott asked. He cycled his shoulders, starting to
shrug off his sweatshirt, too. “I can …”
“No,” Joanna snapped, waving him off. “I’m fine.”
“It’s not a big deal.” He flicked his cigarette and threw the butt into
the street.
; “I don’t want your sweatshirt, okay?”
Scott stopped. “All right, all right.” He bent his knees, turning toward her a little. “I’m sorry, Joanna. About this.”
She gave him a warning look.
“You don’t think this is your fault, do you? Because of what you
said to her in there?”
She dug her nails into her palm.
“She practically forced you to say that. She wouldn’t have stopped
until you did. She probably wanted you to say it.”
“Just stop it okay?” she burst out, not able to contain it anymore. He sat back. “What?”
“Stop being so nice to me,” Joanna said.
Scott blinked. “What do you want me to do, laugh?”
“Yes,” Joanna said.
“Jesus Christ.” Scott crossed his arms over his chest. “What the
hell is wrong with you?”
She let her hair fall around her face. He was still watching her,
waiting for an answer, maybe even for her to apologize. She looked up,
her body trembling. Then she grabbed the sides of his face and pressed
her lips to his. His skin was cold. At first his lips were taut, but then
he softened and let her in.
It lasted maybe three seconds before he broke away. “Joanna …”
he said. Something passed over his face. It was this … look. A sort of
empathetic, understanding, pitying look, as if something in his head
had said, Yes, you know why she’s doing this, try not to take it too seriously.
He was so fucking wise, all of a sudden.
She jumped up, shaking her head madly back and forth. “I swear
to God, just stop it.”
He blinked. “Stop what?”
“Stop acting so innocent and concerned. Charles isn’t on a trip,
Scott. You knew that. And yet you came anyway. Why do you hang
out with me, Scott, if you’re not trying to undermine me and Charles
in some way? I know you two don’t get along. I see how you seek me
out, preferring to talk to me over your family. You don’t think I see
that?”
“What are you—”
“And actually,” she interrupted, “maybe your instincts are right.
Charles is cheating on me right this very second. Guess who with?”
She waited a moment and then spread out her arms. “Bronwyn!” “Bronwyn?” He cocked his head.
She lowered her shoulders. “Jesus! How many Bronwyns do you
know? His old girlfriend!”
Scott’s mouth drooped. He placed a finger on his bottom lip. There
was a thought in front of him, practically in a cartoonlike fluffy balloon. “So … I’m not here because you asked me to come,” he sounded out. “And I don’t hang out with you because … I like you. Because I think you’re cool. No, it’s because of some … power play to break up you and Charles. To piss off my family. That’s the kind of person you
think I am.”
Joanna laughed. “Well … yes! I do think you’re that kind of person! It’s the impression you give everyone! Your mother, your brother,
all your friends … even this thing with this boy. I mean, you haven’t
called your mom to tell her what happened in that meeting yesterday.
She’s called you and called you, I’ve seen her name come up on your
cell phone, and you haven’t even bothered to answer. Did you even go?
Did it even matter? What am I supposed to think about you, Scott,
given what you portray to the world? Yes, you are exactly the type of
person who would come here to fuck with your brother. That’s what
you show the world!”
But as soon as the words fell out of Joanna’s mouth, she wasn’t sure
if she could stand behind them. Scott stood up and shoved his hands
in his pockets. His lip trembled. “I guess you got me,” he said quietly.
He jingled his car keys. “I guess you have it all figured out.” An ambulance screamed up the drive, its lights flashing blue and
red. It soared past them to the ER entrance. Joanna shivered. Her lips
tasted like his, cigarettes and coffee.
He took a few steps, and then whipped back around. He stared at
her, his eyes ablaze. “That kid never wanted to wrestle,” he said. “But
you know what they do with those scholarship kids? They make them
do a sport. They make them get a certain GPA and do a certain sport
every season. Not every kid wants to do a sport, you know.” Joanna blinked, not daring to move.
“He was coughing,” Scott said. “This one day I made him work out
until he sat down and started crying. The fucking kid started crying.” Joanna widened her eyes. “So … there was hazing?”
Scott raised his arms. “Would it really matter what answer I gave
you? Do you really think anyone gives a shit what I say? You said it
yourself—people have already made up their minds. People have already decided.”
“Maybe I’m wrong.”
Scott sniffed and gave her a weary look. “The kid was coughing that
last day. It was the kind of cough that didn’t even sound real. Should
I have taken it seriously? Should I have said something to someone
about it, ‘Gee, this kid sounds like he’s got fucking pneumonia? Gee,
do you think maybe we should take this kid to a doctor?’ Yeah, maybe
I should have. But how would that have made the kid’s father look?
Some shitty father who doesn’t even care that his kid’s lungs are failing? It was easier to let someone else deal with it. It was easier to just
keep my mouth shut and hope this pansy-ass kid who dresses like a
fucking hobbit, who yes, got picked on, got picked on plenty, is just
doing it for attention.” He wiped hair out of his face. “I kept my mouth
shut about it. I’ve kept my mouth shut about a lot of things, Joanna.
Most of it hasn’t come to much good. And apparently, most of it makes
me look like an asshole.”
Joanna shifted from foot to foot, stunned. Scott’s eyes were wild.
His mouth was craggy and crooked, almost like he was about to cry.
He didn’t look like himself anymore: tough and impenetrable and
mysterious. He looked like a little boy.
She swallowed hard. Everything around her had shifted. “Maybe
it’s easier to be an asshole, though. Same as it is to … to dress up like a
hobbit instead of like a normal person. It’s a way to hide. People don’t
expect as much from you. You don’t have to try. There’s less chance of
you disappointing anyone.”
He snorted. “So you’re making excuses for me now? That’s a pretty
big reversal, Joanna. Maybe I’m an asshole, the whole way down to my
core. Just as you originally thought.”
“But maybe I don’t think that,” she said quietly.
He pushed the toe of his shoe into a dirty crack in the sidewalk.
“By the way, I swiped a bottle of your mom’s pills. Pain meds. She had
so many, I figured she wouldn’t miss one.”
She blinked. There was a stony, unreadable look on his face. She
thought of what Charles had said last week—all sneaker shops were
fronts for meth labs. “You did?”
He put his hands on his hips. “No. But you thought I did. At least
for a second? You could see me doing it.”
A dry, croaking sound emerged from Joanna’s lips. “I …” Scott turned back. “I guess everyone does form impressions,” he
said over his shoulder. “Maybe it’s,
like, biological or some shit. Maybe
people can’t help it.”
And then he broke away and started across a patch of grass toward
the ER entrance. She remained where she was, bewildered as to what
had just happened, simply watching him go.
………………………………………………………… seventeen
When Sylvie woke up, the roads looked icy. But once she was out of the shower, the thermometer James had hung up outside the kitchen window said it had warmed to
almost 30 degrees Fahrenheit. After a while, the sun came out and the ice began to melt. Sylvie poured the remains of her coffee down the drain and looked out the window.
Scott’s car still wasn’t there. She hadn’t heard from him yesterday or today, and he hadn’t slept at home. She still had no idea what he’d said in the meeting with the teachers or even if he’d gone. Perhaps he was making himself scarce because he was avoiding the conversation. Perhaps he really did have something to feel guilty about. There were bruises on the boy’s body, Tayson had said. Scott was running from this as he avoided everything. Though now it kind of was beside the point.
At 7:30, she knew what she wanted to do. By 7:31, she’d changed her mind. People were talking, yes. Parents were worried, yes. This thing was beginning to break out of its hermetic seal. If Christian’s father could somehow be kept at bay, it would just … fade away. Unless, of course, you find a way to resolve this yourself, Michael Tayson had told her.
And there it was. Without saying it outright, he had given Sylvie her orders. This is your mess, so clean it up. You know how. It’s in your genes, after all.
It was the way things had always worked, she just now realized. Only up until this point, she’d remained outside of all that. She’d left someone else to take care of those types of problems, the few that had come along. While she pretended that they didn’t exist.
If she didn’t do anything about this, if she stolidly insisted that the hazing was all a ridiculous rumor and that Scott was blameless, Sylvie risked more and more parents coming to Michael Tayson. She risked more kids talking. And worst, she risked the father taking action, the newspapers being called, court cases starting, the school’s name being tarnished, admissions dropping for the next year, and who knew what else.
Doing nothing could cause a domino effect.
