by Sara Shepard
Strong arms lifted me up. A man in a plain shirt and a beard pressed me against him. “It’s okay,” he said, patting my shoulder. Behind him stood the woman at the counter, her mouth a straight line, her fingers dancing nervously against the hem of her T-shirt. “It’s okay,” the man repeated. I tried to find something to stare at, to fixate on. There were cheerful posters for Pepsi, M & M’s, a promotional deal between Willie Nelson and Marlboros. As they pulled Stella out, I reached forward and touched the edge of her wig, adjusting it so that it was straight again. Her arms hung down limp, bathed in her satin gloves. From this angle, if I squinted, with the gloves and the hair and her pale profile, she looked like she could be a vamp in a big-screen musical, carried on the shoulder of an adoring male fan, ready to revive and break into her big show-stopping, tap-dancing number. Any minute now, she’d do it. Any minute now.
twenty-four
The nearest hospital was a half hour away, back in the direction from which we’d come. I rode with Stella in the ambulance, answering the ER medic’s questions about what medications Stella was taking, what treatments she’d undergone, how advanced her cancer was. After we pulled into the ER entrance, I was directed to a hospital waiting room. The walls were pale blue and there were a lot of scratchy couches, old magazines, broken kids’ toys, and a television was stuck on a channel that played Home Improvement episodes nonstop. When no one was around, which was almost all the time, I threw balled-up Kleenexes at the screen.
Stella was in and out of consciousness for most of Sunday. Late that afternoon, the doctor gave me the report of her scans and blood work. Afterward, I went down to the ground floor. A rainstorm blew through, cracking and grumbling overhead, sending sheets of water on the parking lot, the tops of the ambulances, the nearby farmland. I stood in the lobby watching and called Samantha, wondering if she was still at her conference or had driven back by now. The call went straight to her voice mail. Her message was perky yet efficient. Samantha said she could be reached at two other numbers besides her cell phone—her office and her home. “Call me anytime, really,” she assured. “I’m available day or night.”
I watched as the rain turned from deluge to drizzle to nothing. The hospital was on a hill and overlooked a cornfield-strewn valley; everything smelled fresh and wet. I looked at my phone again, not satisfied. I felt a pull to call someone else. In my pocket was Philip’s number.
I dialed it quickly, without thinking. It went to voice mail, too, and there was Philip’s voice, gravelly and deep and not quite what I remembered. I waited for the beep and blurted out, “It’s Summer Davis. I met you once years ago, and I’m in Cobalt because my great-aunt Stella has cancer, and Samantha Chisholm came into town, which is how I got your number. And anyway, I started this message without knowing what I was going to say, except that it’s funny to look down Stella’s street and see your house and think that it’s not your house anymore. And I guess you’re in New York, and I hope it’s nice there right now. It probably is…it’s always nice in the fall, except for the smell. And—”
I was cut off, abruptly, by a loud beep in my ear. I held the phone back. I hadn’t even given him my phone number or any other way to contact me. Did all phones have caller ID? Would he even want to call me back, after my message? I couldn’t even remember what I’d just said. There was no way to edit the message or record it over again.
Taking a deep breath, I redialed. It rang; Philip explained yet again that he wasn’t available. “This is my number,” I blurted out quickly. I gave it to him, then hung up fast.
I cupped my phone in my hand, suddenly feeling brave. My fingers wanted to dial the old number in Brooklyn. I typed it in and stared at it for a while. If I hit send, would he answer? Would we talk about the weather, about New York? Or would we talk about something serious, real? Maybe I could ask him something easy first, perhaps a memory from his big leather box. I could ask if he remembered the time I’d stayed home from my classes at college and he’d (obviously) stayed home from any remaining work that he was doing and we watched a videotape of Bedknobs and Broomsticks, the old Disney movie with Angela Lansbury. Maybe I could ask him if he remembered the first time we watched that movie together, when I was about six. After the movie was over, I ran to my parents’ bedroom and climbed onto the bed, touched my hands to the post at the end of the bed, and asked it to fly. It had worked for the kids in the movie.
My father had noticed what I was doing, and climbed in bed, too. “Where do you want it to go?” he said. “Spain,” I answered, just picking anywhere. And then he called for Steven to get on the bed. And then my mother stood in the doorway, asking what we were doing. “We’re going to Spain!” my father announced. I thought she might say it was just silly and demand that my father get up and do something useful. But to my surprise, she lowered her shoulders and smiled and climbed on the bed, too.
I slowly closed the phone and put it in my pocket. It felt heavy against my hip, like it was full of secrets, waterlogged with things I hadn’t said but probably should. We would never be like that again, my father and me, so we’d have to be something else. No matter how much I had done for him, I wasn’t what he needed right now. And I was angry with him for that. Really, I’d probably been angry for years, for other things, too. But as the wind shifted, I just felt tired. All I wanted was for him to put me into bed and tuck me in. Maybe even Rosemary could be there.
After a while I went back upstairs and down the hall to Stella’s room. I could see her face through the little window in the door. She was in the far bed, connected to various machines. Her head was bent off to the side, her eyes fluttering fast. At my request, the doctor and nurses had left her gloves on, rolling them down so they bunched up around her hands. There was a small smile on her face, like she was having a good dream.
Stella woke up early on Monday morning, just as the sun cracked over the horizon. I was slumped just outside her hospital room, reading a Cosmopolitan someone had left behind. There was an article inside that read, Daddy’s Girl: Is it true that we go after men who resemble our fathers?
I heard Stella cough and went into her room. For the first time, her eyes were open and she was looking around as if she understood where she was. She saw me, smiled, and then shrugged at the tubes running out of her arm and the IV bags alongside her bed.
“You weren’t feeling so great.” I sat down in the little orange chair next to her bed. “How do you feel now?”
Stella cast her eyes off to the side. “If I had a martini I’d probably be great. You think you could sneak me one?”
“I doubt it.”
“Come on.” Stella hit me weakly on my arm. “I bet you could.”
I played with the hem of my T-shirt. “I got you this.” I held out a little stuffed hedgehog I’d found in the gift shop last night. When I squeezed it, the hedgehog squeaked. It was either a dog toy or a baby toy. Stella grinned and reached for it, pressing it to her nose and then to her chest.
“They did some more scans, didn’t they?” she asked.
I nodded. “A few.”
“So is the needle not working for me? Do we need another kind of needle?” She called the IV chemo treatments the needle, as if she were a rock-and-roll heroin addict.
I looked away. It was always more chemo after her setbacks—it meant the cancer had advanced somewhere else, and they were going to try the drugs again to hold it back for as long as possible. Except this time. I wasn’t sure what would be worse—if I told Stella the truth, or if I let the doctor do it. The doctor was from Haiti—dark-skinned, with lovely eyes, thick black hair, and a funny last name that I couldn’t remember but knew it sounded like a magic word. If I left it up to the doctor to tell her, Stella might slap him and say something terrible, like that people from Haiti couldn’t be doctors because they were uncivilized voodoo worshippers. That instead of treating her with normal medicine, the Haitian doctor would probably want to sacrifice a chicken and spurt its blood over her forehead. We�
��d watched a PBS report about voodoo in Haiti the week before.
“What were you doing, going to the bathroom in a place like that?” I asked.
“I had to pee. But then I fell, I guess. I don’t know. Is that what happened?”
“Pretty much,” I said. “You shouldn’t have gone into that place, though. It was scary.”
“Oh, nonsense. It was fine. The woman behind the counter was very nice. I didn’t get a chance to ask where the jackalope was, though. Had to go so badly, I felt dizzy.”
“I thought it was scary in there,” I said.
“Oh, I’m not afraid of anything anymore.” Stella held up her thin arms, marred with needle tracks.
“You were afraid of Cheveyo,” I said quietly.
Stella eyed me. I looked back at her, then stared down at my lap. “Sorry. But I mean…” Something caught in my throat; I had to look into the rectangular overhead light and wait for it to pass. I wanted to tell her that I didn’t have an agenda, trying and trying to save her. That I wasn’t using her as an excuse. But I wasn’t sure I should lie to her, if she was right.
“I said that for your own good,” Stella said gently, understanding without me having to say a word. “I’m not angry. I’m just saying. We’d have a much better time if we just, I don’t know…smoked grass just for the hell of it, not because it might be some miracle cure.”
I balled up my fists and pressed them into my knees. “Who’s going to save you, if not me?”
“No one.”
“Well, then, I’ll save you.”
She let out a laugh. After a while, she took a deep breath. “I didn’t tell you everything about Ruth. You were right—of course I was angry at her. So angry, in fact, I told her husband what I saw.”
I widened my eyes. “What did he say?”
“He just got really quiet, nodded his head, and said, I see. I knew what I’d done. But I wanted to ruin Ruth’s life—I thought she’d ruined mine. The thing was, she hadn’t ruined mine. We got over it, Skip and me. We talked about it. Who talked back then? But we did, as best we could. But Ruth and Gerald…” She pulled at her bedsheets. “What’s done is done. You make mistakes and you learn from them. Everyone does. It’s just what happens. You probably wouldn’t be alive if you didn’t. The thing is, I have a feeling that if either of us would have just broken down and apologized, Ruth and I would’ve been okay. But it’s so hard to start, isn’t it? To say it. You carry this anger around about someone, and they carry different anger around about you, and everybody’s secretly so angry at everyone else, and we’re all hurting one another. It’s not like anyone’s innocent.”
“Maybe,” I said.
She smiled sadly. “I tried to apologize to Ruth, almost at the end. She was lying in bed, snoring, and I had come over to wash some stuff for her—it was after she was too weak to go down the stairs to the washing machine in the basement. I stood over her bed and told her that I was sorry, and that we’d been acting like assholes for years. She didn’t hear me, though.”
“But that counts, though, right?” I asked in a small voice. “Just saying it aloud?”
Stella’s dim eyes met mine. “I can see why your father depended on you. He always needed someone. The way he was with his mother…he looked to her for everything. Every decision.”
I stared at the rising and falling lines of Stella’s EKG. He doesn’t need me much anymore.
Stella ran her fingers over the folds in the bedsheets. “Ruth never cared about Gerald—before Skip, after Skip. Their marriage—well, they should’ve gotten divorced after he found out. It would’ve been so much better for both of them. He was so cold, so emotionless, even before he found out. I forgave her, in a way, for going after Skip, faced with a lifetime with that man. She needed some warmth and intimacy. But she ended up pouring that love into your father. She cared so much about him, sometimes too much. She wouldn’t let him breathe. ‘Get a girlfriend,’ I always said to your dad, always behind Ruth’s back. ‘Live a little.’ ‘I’m fine,’ he always said. I always told him there were plenty of pretty girls in Cobalt—I even tried to fix him up with some of them, girls whose hair I used to wash, that sort of thing. He never went out with any of them. Until the one. The important girl. I saw them together, once. He never knew. He always thought he was being so stealthy, but I saw them taking a walk near the train tracks, and I could just tell.”
The clock on the wall was too loud. The second hand skipped like it had tremors. “What girl?”
“And then she was in that coma,” Stella went on, as if she hadn’t heard me. “After all that time in the hospital, although everyone knew she was going to die. Even if she’d lived, her life wouldn’t have been much of anything. We talked about how tragic it was for her boyfriend, but no one talked about your father, what he was going through. No one could. Even if people knew, it was indecent to talk about it, with the boyfriend standing by her while she was kept alive by those god-awful life-support machines. Your father left Cobalt shortly after that and never came back. If people knew why, they never said anything. They pretended like it hadn’t happened.”
The weight of what she was saying began to take shape. “Wait. Stop.”
Stella hesitated.
“Wait.” My voice cracked. “You’re telling me that the girl who was in the car accident with my dad, Kay Mulvaney, she and my dad were…” I waved my hands, trying to understand. “Together?”
Stella nodded just slightly. “It destroyed him when she died. Especially because he’d been the driver.”
I sat up straighter. “He was the driver?”
She shifted in her bed. “He never told you.”
I ran my hand over the top of my head, trying to remember. He’d never said one way or another. It was always we hit a deer, we got into a crash.
“The boyfriend was dead drunk,” Stella explained. “If he’d have been the driver, he would’ve been arrested. Or they all would’ve died.”
It took me a while to catch my breath. “Why didn’t I know about this?”
“I guess it wasn’t the right time to tell you. And I don’t know what your father’s going to think, if I tell him that I’ve told you. Maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe I should just leave it up to you two to talk.”
There was a laminated sign near Stella’s door that said Pain Chart. Patients could describe their pain based on different facial expressions, numbered one through ten. I searched through them, but none of the faces rightly described what I felt. “Have you been talking to him?” I sounded out slowly.
Stella looked away. “A little, honey. Here and there.”
The fluorescent light flickered and shivered. Outside, two elderly people were walking up the sidewalk into surgery. A man in an electric wheelchair sat by the curb, waiting for a ride. I looked up, recalling what my father had told me the last time I saw him. “Kay was pregnant.”
Stella clucked her tongue. “It was a big deal for the time. Especially for Cobalt. That boyfriend of hers married her while she was in the coma. There was a ceremony and everything.”
I tried to hold on to a single thought, but my head felt like it was caught in a windstorm. Things were whirling everywhere. This was like working for sixty years on a scientific theory and discovering that the principle underlying your idea was incorrect, so your research was useless. It couldn’t be possible, any of it. My father couldn’t have been the one driving. He would’ve wrapped the car around a tree rather than hit a deer. And Kay Mulvaney was in love with Mark Jeffords. They were going to get married; my father was their friend. He met my mother in college; that was when he fell in love. That was where his story started; he escaped Cobalt because there wasn’t enough there for him. There wasn’t anything more. There couldn’t be.
I stood up, banging my knee hard against the edge of the bed. “That’s just some stupid rumor.”
Stella’s lips parted, startled.
“He would have told me. He wouldn’t have kept something like that a
secret. It’s an easy thing to speculate, anyway—girl dies in car accident, my father leaves town—let’s blame it on misguided love, on him feeling responsible, or whatever you said. Let’s blame it on loving the wrong person. They were teenagers. They couldn’t have been in love. That doesn’t come until later.”
Stella looked amused. “It doesn’t?”
Her mocking tone of voice scratched against me. I plucked the hedgehog from her chest and hurled it across the room. It hit the wall so hard that it squeaked.
“I know my father,” I said in a shaky voice. “And that never happened.” I thought of the picture I’d found all those years ago: Mark Jeffords and Kay Mulvaney, (secret!) engagement, 1970. I thought of Kay’s round, pie-like face, her button nose.
“I can understand if it’s hard to accept,” Stella said.
“There’s nothing to accept. I know my father. It didn’t happen.”
“Summer…”
“I know my father.” As I said it again, a little voice needled me. Do you? The voice sounded like Stella’s, but her face was blank, indicative of nothing.
I slumped back down in the chair and put my head in my hands. When I looked up, Stella’s eyes were closed again, but she wasn’t asleep. I moved to the other side of the room, picked up the hedgehog, and put it back on her chest. “Thank you,” she said.
I answered by letting out a little groan. I pressed my palm onto her bare leg.
“Your hands are cold,” she said, her eyes still closed.
Outside, a black van pulled up, a ramp mechanically lowered, and the man in the electric wheelchair motored inside. Far off in the distance, a dog barked. Stella smiled, hearing it, too. I was sure she missed her dogs, who were roaming around the house without us, who were swimming in the creek without an audience.
