The kitchen door swung open and Mother sailed in.
“Smelled coffee and heard the ruckus! What are you old birds doing up at this hour? I have a grandson to educate, so I have to get up! Have you come to borrow a cup of coffee or to hear the latest predictions of the medical world?” Mother came to my side and kissed my cheek. “Good morning, sweetheart. Sleep well?”
“Lavinia?” Miss Sweetie said. “Why didn’t you call us? We’ve been worried sick!”
“She’s right, Lavinia, you should have called us!” Miss Nancy said.
I poured Mother a cup of coffee and a glass of juice and put them on a small tray.
“Oh, brother!” Mother said. “If there was anything to tell you, I would’ve called! But, there’s nothing to worry about!”
The English muffins popped up from the toaster and I put them on a plate with butter and jam on the side and handed it to her.
“Mother? Why don’t you take Miss Sweetie and Miss Nancy upstairs or into the dining room and then I can make breakfast for Eric. I’ll join you as soon as I’m finished.”
“C’est une excellent idée!” Miss Nancy said.
“Good one, Nancy,” Mother said, on her way out, “thank God you’re not interested in Romania!”
“That was French for ‘that’s an excellent—’” Miss Nancy said to me as she rose to follow Mother.
“She knows! For God’s sake, Nancy, she’s been living in New York!” Miss Sweetie said.
“Sorrrrrry!” Miss Nancy said. “I didn’t know they spoke French in New York!”
The door closed behind them.
The closing of one door, the opening of another—Mother’s friends here, drawn by some instinct, filled with disbelief but knowing that something was terribly wrong with their friend. And if something was that wrong with her, then maybe something was that wrong with them.
This was what real friends did for each other. They came without being called. They laughed and made light while they still could. They stood ready to shoulder part of anything that would happen. Three heads were better than one or two.
They were not going to be shut out. They would be as much a part of her death as they had been of her life. They wouldn’t let her be alone should she have the slightest need that they could fill. And if they couldn’t, they’d find someone else to fill it.
I sat at the kitchen table and sipped my coffee. It was warm and rich. I was so glad that they had come. There was never an inappropriate time for a rescue or for a shoring up. They would keep Mother on her toes, reminding her to think positively. They would reminisce and exaggerate the past.
Soon, Millie would open the back door and another day would begin. Soon, I would have to wake my little boy—my little boy so fast on the way to growing up and becoming a man. I had not told him about Mother. There was time for that—after Dr. Taylor had confirmed what he found—time to choose the words, the moment, and the manner in which I would tell him.
No, I had only told Richard. Richard had promised to help. And Josh, who was now, in my book, a major rectal opening. I no longer had a stick of guilt over anything that had happened there. Somehow Josh and I were even.
I got up and went to the back door and outside on the back porch. In the distance I could see Millie coming toward the house. I looked over to the river and it was strong, blue, and powerful as always. The sky was filled with huge clouds traveling by and the song of birds was all around me.
An outsider would never have known a thing in the world was wrong. Things looked the same as yesterday. Coming to you live from the ACE Basin of South Carolina, here we are! Nothing ever changes here! Except our hearts.
I waved at Millie and went back inside.
Miss Sweetie and Miss Nancy had arrived to prop up Mother and to be present when the sentence was read. Did I have a friend like that? I should have called Matthew. I should have told him everything. I took a shower instead.
Forty-two
Skin Deep
THE morning would have been solemn if wehadn’t had a little boy in the house to feed and get ready for his tutors. And, for some unknown reason, I felt I had the strength of a gladiator. It was probably that Miss Sweetie and Miss Nancy were upstairs with Mother, leaving me to concentrate on Eric for the moment.
Eric and I were alone in the kitchen, pulling breakfast together, talking about his homework. We had both developed a new fondness for cornflakes and sliced peaches with any number of squeezed or pressed juices. Mother may well have been the queen of kitchen gadgets. The pastel yellow KitchenAid standing mixer that sat on her counter had more attachments than I knew what to do with.
But Eric did. Probably stemming from his fascination with Transformers and LEGOs, he had figured them out, one by one. By pure hands-on trial and error, he had discovered out how to press watermelon into a juice that tasted like nectar. And, peaches, blueberries, strawberries, and combinations of berries, herbs and vegetables.
“Try this,” he said, handing me a glass filled with something almost black.
“What is it?” I said.
“It’s good for you,” he said.
Headline: CHILD BECOMES PARENT—POISONS MOTHER! I held the glass and waited for him to tell me what was in it. After my intestinal experience of his spinach and garlic cocktail, I wanted no more surprises.
“Well?” I waited.
“Okay, okay. It’s blackberries, blueberries, and apple with a little mint! I think it’s my best one yet! See?” He took my glass and drank. “Ah! Delicious! Didn’t kill me!”
It was, in fact, fabulous. “You know what, son? You should be Millie’s apprentice, not me. You’ve got a natural knack for her style of chemistry!”
“I’ll take that under advisement,” he said.
“You sound like your Uncle Trip, kiddo.”
“Aw, Mom.”
We smiled at each other and I felt compelled to say, “This is as good a way to start this day as there could be.”
“Yeah, these peaches are awesome.”
“So are you, baby, so are you.” I ruffled his hair on the way to the sink to start cleaning up a little and looked up at the wall clock. “It’s almost eight-thirty; you better go brush your teeth.”
“I brushed them yesterday,” he said, knowing my response would be Eric! Then he said quickly, sliding his glass across the table to me, “I’m going! I’m going!”
The swinging door closed behind him and I looked at the clock again. Dr. Taylor could call anytime. Maybe Richard would call too.
Millie and I had missed each other when she arrived earlier. I knew she was in Daddy’s den, paying bills. Maybe she had a plan. I went to offer her a smoothie, but her face told me she had bad news.
“Morning!” I said.
“Humph, I wish my mother were alive,” she said. She got up and picked up a stuffed brown grocery bag from the floor beside the desk. “She’d know what to do.”
It was a half-finished statement that required no finishing, but I did it anyway.
“Because you can’t do anything?” I said.
“You got coffee left?”
“Only a little, but come on. We can make another pot. Miss Sweetie and Miss Nancy are upstairs with her.”
“I knew that.”
“Psychic message?”
“No, I saw their cars out front!”
Millie smiled at me as she opened the kitchen door, but she wasn’t herself. She seemed tired, more so than usual. She dropped her bag on a chair and poured herself a mug. I handed her the container of milk from the refrigerator and took out more beans to grind. Silence. I didn’t need to wait for Jack Taylor to call and confirm what we already knew. Millie sat down at the table, blew steam from her coffee, and took a careful sip. I refilled my mug with the remains of the old pot of coffee and turned the fresh one on. I sat across from her. Silence. Then she cleared her throat.
“See, here’s the problem,” she said. “The medicine I practice and the spontaneous healing I’m abl
e to get with my herbs depends on certain things. The body’s immune system responds to lots of things—happiness, love, laughter—those are the good things. But it also acts the same way to negative feelings—sadness, worry, stress, and so on. By the time somebody’s disease has gone on like Lavinia’s, it has passed by so many safeguards in the immune system that would have turned it around. Then you can’t fix it.”
She called Mother by her name. It was the first time I had heard her do that. Maybe it was something she did unconsciously to separate herself from her relationship with Mother. I sighed, considering that. “Well, why don’t we wait until Dr. Taylor calls before we get depressed.”
Millie ignored what I said and began to babble in an agitated way. She began at normal pitch, as though she were thinking out loud, and then became excited and clipped her words.
“I went through everything! I brought everything I got that might help. When I see Miss L’s back the other day I’bout to drop. I say to myself, Millie? How you gone fight God’s plan? Then I say, this ain’t God’s hand; this is Mr. Evil who put that mark on Miss L. And, Mr. Evil stronger than this woman. Then I say, yeah, but he ain’t stronger than the Man Upstairs! So, we gone use what we got and then we gone see what we see by and by. If God already got Miss L on His list to come home to Him, we can’t do nothing. So we gone pray and we gone see.” She blew her cup again and took another sip. “We gone see. That’s all.”
She stared into space as she spoke. It frightened me and spoke volumes about Millie’s concern.
“What’s in the bag?” I said.
She finally looked up at me. “Where’s the food processor? Mine’s on the blink. Otherwise, I could have mixed this up at home.”
I opened a cabinet under the counter and lifted it up to the counter. Pale yellow again. KitchenAid again. They must’ve had a helluva sale. Millie emptied her bag, laying out little Ziploc bags all across the counter.
“First, we gone make a poultice to draw out the poison from her back. I got pine tar, olive oil, tallow, comfrey, red clover, chickweed, and a piece of poke root. Got some other stuff too.” She continued to unpack and organize her herbs.
“Where do you want this?” She shot me a look that said she didn’t care one bit. I put it on the counter next to her and plugged it in. “Which blade?”
“First, we gonna grate this root and then we gonna liquefy it all together, using olive oil to make a paste.”
“No garlic? Doesn’t that cleanse the blood?” I said.
“’Course I got garlic! Garlic goes in everything!”
She seemed irritated and militant and very unlike the Millie I adored.
“Hey, Millie. You okay?”
She looked at my face and her chin began to quiver. I had not seen Millie cry since my daddy died. She must have been terrified that she could lose Mother. Sure enough, tears began to slide down her cheeks.
“No, I am not okay one bit,” she said. “I was up all night worrying and fretting about your mother. She’s my best friend on this earth and I am so afraid right now that I can’t help her. How come God lets me help all kind of fool people with they love life and nonsense and my Lavinia is under my nose needing me and I don’t know it?”
I pulled a tissue from the box by the phone and handed it to her, resting my hand on her arm. “This is not your fault, Millie, you known that.”
Her face was a rack of stress. Little lines appeared in her forehead and around her eyes that I had never noticed before. “Millie,” I said, “look. I’ll help you. We will do everything we can. Both of us. I even called Richard to see if he knew of anything. He should be calling us back this morning. Please don’t cry.”
“That man? You call him?” She took a deep breath and blew her nose. Her eyes opened wide and she finally grinned. “You must be worried!”
“I am. Look, she’s your best friend, but she’s my mother. I’d like her to stick around long enough to be my best friend too. You know?”
Millie relaxed and shook her head, looking at the floor and then the ceiling. “I just feel like I should have known! Why didn’t I know?”
I leaned against the counter and crossed my arms over my belt. “I don’t know. Usually, you know everything. But maybe this is the good Lord reminding you that He’s in charge, not you and not me.”
This caused her to squint at me in suspicion.
“You gone back to Jesus?”
“Millie? I don’t know, Buddhism and Hinduism are one thing, but I do know that this whole New Age thing is a load of crap. I don’t believe in God because somebody told me I have to or I’ll burn in hell. I believe in God because I do. And if I can accept the whole concept of God, and I do, then why not Jesus too? I mean, we are the lousiest bunch of undedicated agnostics in this family I ever heard of. One sniff of a trauma and I go running for my Bible. Well, actually it came for me.”
“What are you saying?”
“It was there on my bedside table where it hadn’t been a few hours earlier. It just materialized.”
Millie tightened her lip to me and shot me a look. It was all right to make jokes with her, but not about God. No, sir.
“Don’t ask me! There it was! Poof! I spent the next who knows how long on my knees begging for guidance! Somebody in this family needs to take a position in times of crisis and there’s not exactly a line of volunteers outside the door, is there?”
“You are one hundred percent right. Come on. Let’s get them cleaver flowers in a pot to boil. Roots and all. Make some tea. Makes tumors shrink.”
I shot her a look, like the one she had sent me.
“What?” she said, and put her hands on her hips.
“Shrink tumors? I thought you always told me it was a diuretic.”
“Rinse the dirt off the roots. It’s a diuretic too. Good for what ails you. Can’t hurt.”
“Oh,” I said, and put the pot under the spigot, giving it an inch or so of water.
“Yanh, put this in too,” she said and tossed a handful of ivy in the pot.
“Ivy? Isn’t that poisonous?”
I knew the minute I said it, hell would reign.
“You know something, girl? You gone drive me crazy, yanh? We gone add some honey to the mix and it stops cancer from growing. Also opens the liver, gallbladder, and spleen to flush out toxins! Now, go on answer the door!”
I hadn’t even heard the knock! Millie was right. I should just leave her to her business and let her tend to Mother. By the time I reached the door, Eric was there and was welcoming in Rusty. I could almost see his heart pounding under his T-shirt and he reeked of mouthwash. Young love. Nothing like it.
“Morning, Rusty! So good to see you!” I said. “Would you like some coffee? Hot tea?”
“Oh, no, Mrs. Levine,” she said, “I brought a thermos. But thanks.”
“You go on, Mom. If she needs anything, I’ll get it for her,” Eric said, beaming at her like Alfalfa at Darla. He followed her to the living room where Millie had set up a table for them to use.
“Oooo-kay!” I said and returned to the kitchen.
The phone rang. I watched it with Millie and then picked it up on the fourth ring. It was Dr. Taylor’s office. Could I come in with my brother? She wanted to know if that afternoon was convenient.
“No, I’m sorry, it’s not. Can I just speak to Dr. Taylor?”
“He’s with patients,” she said, politely and firmly.
“I’ll wait,” I said. Okay, that was a New York City, ballsy thing to say, but I had every intention of holding until he picked up the line.
“That’s not possible,” she said, taking an Am-I-Not-Special? thrill-pill to mark her tiny and insignificant amount of power.
Yesterday, I hated doctors. Today we could add nurses to that list.
“Oh, but it is!” I said, sweetly, assuring her I’d be a gargantuan pain in her ass if she pushed me.
“Hold on, please,” she said.
I held. And held, and held, and held. Mill
ie looked at me as though I’d lost my mind.
In a moment of ingenuity, I placed her on hold and redialed Dr. Taylor’s office on another line. She answered.
I said in a very even tone, the kind I used with Eric’s old teachers when I talked to them in my bathroom mirror, “If you don’t put Dr. Taylor on this phone right now, I’m going to call you every five minutes and drive you insane.”
She put me on hold without a word and Jack Taylor picked up the line.
“Caroline?”
“Oui! C’est moi! Qué pasa?”
“God. And she’s multilingual. Listen, Caroline, I don’t like to talk about these kind of things on the phone but I understand your anxiety so I’ll come to the point and then if you want to, you can come in and we’ll discuss any questions you might have.”
“Good,” I said, “thanks.”
“It’s what I feared. The CAT scan shows enlarged liver and spleen and tumors in the bones and brain. The blood work indicates that your mother’s liver is already failing. She has fully metastasized cancer. She probably has about six to eight weeks to live before she begins to shut down. There is no course of treatment—just to keep her pain-free. I want you to stay in touch with me and call me every day if you want to. I’m sorry, Caroline. I truly am. I’ll call Jim Thompson myself. There’s no point in putting her through more tests.”
I couldn’t speak. Life drained from me, the room went black, and I sank to the floor. The next thing I remember is Millie kneeling down by my side.
“I told him we’d call him later,” she said and wiped my face with a cold cloth. “I’ve had my cry and you’ve had your swoon. Time to call Trip, put our heads together, and figure out what to do with this information.”
She pulled me to my feet. My face was locked in a scowl.
“What you thinking, girl?”
“That this is a big mistake,” I said, sticking my chin out and shaking my head back and forth, my eyes brimming with tears again, never leaving hers. “This just can’t be so.”
Plantation Page 40
