by Angela Pisel
“Everybody but the young doctor.” The maid winked. “Think he’s back there with his pretty wife, by the sound of things.”
“Dr. Logan?” Sophie asked.
“I don’t know. The cute one,” the cleaning lady said while picking up a piece of lint off the floor. “The one with the dark wavy hair.”
Sophie didn’t know if she was going to throw up or pass out, but decided neither would help her find out what was going on with Thomas. Her lighted cell phone helped her find her way down the dark hallway.
The maid was mistaken, Sophie reassured herself. He’s gotten rides to the hospital with his partners before, especially if they were in the OR together. A few weeks ago, Thomas’s partner had left his car in the office lot and Thomas had driven him home. A long call night could make a short car drive home seem like an eternity.
By the time Sophie reached the end of the hallway, she had convinced herself she was being foolish and the maid was being nosy. She rubbed her hand against the wall to find a light switch.
As soon as she flipped the switch, her worst fears were confirmed. On the chair outside Thomas’s office lay Eva’s Coach purse and her red sling-back high-heeled shoes.
GRACE
Beep. Beep. Beep. Something tight was squeezing my arm. I tried to take it off, but I couldn’t reach it.
“Don’t try and move. I’ll be over there in a minute.”
I had no idea who was speaking to me or where I was, but the bright lights made my eyes sting. The side of my head felt wet and crusty at the same time. I tried to sit up, but I couldn’t because my arms and legs were in restraints. I started to gag.
A heavyset lady with a bun and a blue cardigan turned my head to the side and shoved an emesis basin under my mouth. “Hold on. Let me get the head of your bed up.”
She pushed a button and the top of my mattress started to rise. Nothing came out of my stomach, despite my repeated attempts.
“Dry heaves,” she said. “Nothing left in there.” She removed the blood-pressure cuff from my arm. The loud Velcro rip pierced my ears and I shut my eyes again. “I can give you something for nausea now that you’re awake.” She grabbed a syringe off a tray and injected something in the bottle hanging beside my bed. “Do you know where you are?”
Was it time for me to die?
“Infirmary. You fainted in the warden’s office. Smacked your head on the corner of his desk. Been out of it since last night.”
February 15. Now I remembered. Then I thought of Sophie.
“May I have something to drink?” My tongue stuck to my lips.
“I’ll get you some ice chips to start.” The soles of her shoes squished on the floor as she walked away.
“Up for a visitor?” I heard a soothing voice ask. I opened one eye to see Ms. Liz place a warm washcloth on my head. “I didn’t know if you were ever going to wake up.”
I didn’t know I had a choice.
The nurse returned and handed Ms. Liz my ice chips. She put some in a spoon and then up to my lips. Her fingers were bony and bent.
“What can I do to help you through this?” she asked after I’d had a few spoonfuls of ice. She rubbed the thick joints on her right hand.
“Turn back time,” I said. I tried to smile, but it wasn’t a happy smile.
“Any luck finding your daughter?” I knew she knew the answer before she asked.
We used to talk about Sophie all the time during our sessions, but I didn’t have any new stories to tell. So I’d stopped talking. Tomorrow is Sophie’s birthday, I wanted to tell her. She’s turning thirty.
“My lawyer said he won’t give up.” I tilted my head to the side because my eyes burned. “I’m not sure I want him to find her.”
“Oh, Grace,” Ms. Liz said. “You’re not thinking clearly. Of course you want to see her before . . .” She stopped, but I could finish her sentence.
“She’s moved forward.” It’s not about what I want, I wanted to tell her. My life will soon be over and I want Sophie’s to go on. I have caused her enough pain. What if Ben finds her—and we have to say good-bye? “I hope she has a new family that loves her now.”
“I will pray for that, too.” She bent her head down and rubbed the back of her neck. “I’ve been in this prison for a long time, and I’ve met people whose very presence made my soul take cover. Born wicked, I really believe. Then I’ve met killers who donated the money in their commissary account, all of it, to buy school supplies for another inmate’s kid. Prison makes some people worse and it makes some people better, but you . . .” She stopped. I had no idea where she was going with this. “You have stayed the same. You came in selfless and you’re leaving selfless. You haven’t changed a bit.”
I knew all of that wasn’t true. I’d not become bitter, but I wasn’t much to look at. I had a dream (or maybe a nightmare) about seeing Sophie face-to-face again, after all these years, and my sunken face was the one she didn’t recognize. I’m looking for my mom. Has anyone seen my mom?
“You have a daughter, right?” I asked Ms. Liz.
“Yes, I do. My oldest is married and has two kids. My middle daughter, Hildie, works for a lawn-and-garden store in San Diego. My baby, Olive, is still trying to figure herself out.”
“Can I ask you a question, then?”
“Sure.”
“What is one thing you’d make sure your daughters knew before you died?”
Dear Sophie,
I had an accident today, but the prison doc said I should feel fine in a couple days. Ordered me to stay off my feet for the next forty-eight hours. I could have stayed in the infirmary, but I begged them to let me go back to my cell. “What’s the worst thing that could happen?” I heard the doctor say rhetorically to the nurse.
Twenty-three stitches now extend from my eyebrow to my ear on the right side of my head. I guess I can be thankful—I won’t have to live with that scar for long.
One of the other inmates, Roni, has a scar. It’s a thick curved gash starting at the nape of her neck and winding down, tapering right before the small in her back. I saw it when she lifted up her orange shirt to be strip-searched. “Roni,” I shouted, before I could stop myself. “What in the world happened to you?”
She thrust up her chin and with an icy smile said, “Wires from my bed frame. My stepdad’s way of reminding me never to hide from him again.”
I love what my friend Kimberly had to say about scars. You remember her, right? The one who had breast cancer. She’d bring Tessa over to play with you on the Slip’N Slide when her blood counts allowed her to get out of the house. Really, she said it about bald heads, but the same applies here.
Kimberly made a whole list of things after her chemo stopped working titled “Things to Bury.” Sometimes she called it her “I don’t have to be socially acceptable because I’m dying” list. A mantra, of sorts, for those who chose to do what they wanted to do in the first place.
I can’t recall everything she had written down except for the one that impacted me the most. BURY MY INSECURITIES. She took her bandana off her head when I asked her to explain that one to me.
“I used to be afraid of the stares.”
“The stares?” I asked her, like I didn’t already know what she meant. I fiddled with a navy-blue thread dangling from a button on my blouse.
“You can stare at my bald head.” Kimberly grabbed my hand to stop my fiddling and looked me square in the eyes. “I’m okay with it now.”
She did something twirly with her eyes, which made us both laugh.
“Losing my hair made me almost as scared as my diagnosis did.” She opened the patio door to make sure you and Tessa were still sliding before she continued. “Then one night Charlie was working, and I had to run to the grocery store. I saw another person who was wearing a bandana, and we connected.”
“You connected?”
Bald heads heal bald heads, and scars heal scars.
I’m making it the goal of my scar to help Roni heal hers.
I can’t remember the rest of Kimberly’s list, but this one you might find funny: BURY MY GIRDLE. (Do women still wear those awful things?) We burned eight pairs of constricting Lycra over a lighted grill in our backyard. “Your muffin top should never ever be mistreated,” she said to you and Tessa as she poked the black body shaper with a stick.
Dying makes some people smarter and much more comfortable in their own skin, don’t you think?
SOPHIE
Sophie stood frozen in the hallway outside an empty doctor’s office. She knew her next move needed to be well planned out. Her first, second, and third reactions were to barrel through the door and dissect Eva’s cheating heart with a scalpel. Surely Thomas had one around here somewhere.
Then after a few moments of reasoning, intermixed with intense gum chewing, she realized Thomas should be the one to blame. Her anger should be directed toward him. First for his lies, then for his poor choice in women to cheat with. She could see the headlines now: “Doctor’s Wife Kills Husband’s Mistress with Own Scalpel.”
Neither option was rational or productive, since the paper would then read “Daughter Shares Cell with Mother on Death Row,” but the longer Sophie stood outside Thomas’s door, the madder she became. Hearing Eva giggle and Thomas laugh . . .
What were they doing in there? It didn’t sound like sex, but it didn’t sound work-related, either.
Sophie started to knock, to confront them both, but just the thought of seeing Eva straightening her silk blouse with that “he wants me more than you” look made her want to hit something. The safest thing for her to do was leave before someone other than her got hurt.
—
WHY WOULDN’T THOMAS CHEAT ON HER? Deep down in the places Sophie tried so hard to cover up, to reconstruct, to move past, there remained an orphan whom nobody ever wanted. No Elizabeth Arden lipstick or Chanel satin scarves would make her worthy of a life she didn’t deserve to live. She couldn’t believe it had taken Thomas this long to stray.
Sophie wasn’t going home, but she was tired of driving. So after an hour of dissecting herself and fantasizing about dismembering Eva, her car ended up in the parking lot of St. John’s Hospital.
Visiting hours for non–family members were over at eight, but Sophie hoped her status had progressed to more than that, considering she spent so much time with Max. If it hadn’t, maybe Mindy was on and could let her at least read him a story before he fell asleep.
Mindy was pushing the medicine cart when Sophie walked through the door into the pediatric wing. The first thing in her horrible day that had gone right.
“Are you okay?” Mindy asked her. “You look like hell.”
Her brutal honesty made Sophie laugh, since Mindy was normally very careful to word her comments gently.
“Tell me what you really think,” Sophie said. She caught a glimpse of her reflection in the stainless-steel linen cart in the hallway. “This mascara is supposed to be waterproof.” She scrambled through her purse for a Kleenex.
Mindy handed her a wet wipe from the top of the medicine cart. “Want to talk about it?”
“Actually, I do,” she said, before her internal guards stopped her. “But now’s not the time. You’re working, and besides, I need to see my little man.”
Mindy nodded. “You better hurry. His big eyes were drooping just a minute ago.”
Sophie stopped by the restroom before going into Max’s room. The last thing she wanted to do was scare the poor boy before he fell asleep. The black smudges underneath her swollen eyelids startled even her. Her cell phone beeped as she was wiping the black tracks from above her cheekbones.
Finding her phone buried deep in her purse took more energy than she wanted to expend, but the repeated alerts made ignoring the message impossible. When she found the phone, a message from Thomas read Leaving work now. I miss you.
Sophie thought about tossing the phone against the wall or into the toilet, but she remembered her mother’s attorney had her number. Not that she wanted to hear from him or any other man in her life, but some gnawing sense of obligation won her over.
Ignore Thomas, she told herself. Deal with him later. First of all, she didn’t know what she would say or how she would say it. If you call someone a cheater with a southern accent, does that make it sound any better?
She shut off her phone and threw it in her purse. The only person she felt sure about was waiting for her across the hall.
Max’s back was turned to Sophie when she entered his room. Buzz Lightyear and his companions all stood across from one another around the perimeter of his bed. In formation for an upcoming battle, no doubt, thwarted by a little boy’s sleepy eyes and worn-out body. His Toy Story blanket had fallen out of his crib and was lying on the floor.
Sophie bent down and picked it up. She placed the trim close to his face, just the way he liked it. Her heart weighed with the thought of it falling out and Max crying for it with no one to hear or come to pick it up. Did he cry for long? Or did he never start, knowing his tears were futile because no one was around to wipe them away?
It wasn’t that the nursing staff was inattentive—quite the opposite. Max got all his physical needs met. Vitals every four hours, a nurses’ aide to pour milk on his Cap’n Crunch, and an occupational therapist to give him wagon rides and teach him to tie his shoes. The secret trips to McDonald’s and hiding under the covers with his mommy were what he was missing.
Who comforted him when he woke up in the middle of the night scared of a bump forming in the hospital curtains or the creaking noise coming from under his bed? Who told him everything was going to be okay when his lungs filled up with fluid and his body shook from shaking chills from one more high fever? Who would be his tooth fairy when his front incisor fell out? All those milestones would go uncelebrated in the history of this little boy.
Sophie leaned over the side rail and brushed the long waves away from his face. He needed a haircut, she thought, making a mental note to ask Mindy how that worked in the hospital. Max’s arms stirred and he looked like he was about to wake up.
“Max?”
She realized waking him was selfish, but she knew he could always use some love, no matter what time of night. When he didn’t move, she bent over and kissed his plump cheek. Her lips lingered a little too long, still hoping he would wake up and show her his toothy smile. Or sit up and be so glad to see her she’d have a reason to stay. A place to stay. She could sleep right beside him in the recliner.
When he didn’t wake up, she pulled the chair by his bed and watched his tiny chest move up and down. The corners of his mouth twitched as if he was dreaming of somewhere or something sweet. For the first time, she thought about scooping him up and taking him home with her. Making all the wrongs that had been done to him all better with one gigantic act of right. She could love him and take care of him, since his mother wouldn’t. At least then he’d have a fighting chance.
Thomas had lost his right to an opinion. If she stayed with him, and that was a big if, he’d have to get over the fact that having a child, a special-needs child, would be challenging and time-consuming. She could hear his arguments now. Max needs a full-time caregiver. Are you prepared to do that?
She didn’t care what he thought. For once, she didn’t care what Thomas needed. She cared only about Max and what was best for him. It was the first definitive decision she’d made in a long time. And this decision felt right.
—
SOPHIE WOKE TO SOMEONE RUBBING her shoulder. “You going to stay here all night?” Mindy said
in a voice just above a whisper. “Thomas must be worried sick about you.”
“What time is it?” Sophie replied, trying to find her cell phone.
“Five-fifteen in the morning.”
“Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I fell asleep!” She turned on her phone and quickly became distracted by the multiple alerts: 9:17 p.m.—where r u? Call me. 9:45 p.m.—worried, call me. Five missed calls, five voicemails, all from Thomas. The last one saying if she didn’t call him soon he was calling the police.
“Better take care of this.” She showed Mindy her phone, then pushed the recliner back against the wall and kissed Max one final time before leaving. “Let’s talk soon?” she said to Mindy. “I want to know how you’re doing with Stephen being gone.”
“Anytime,” Mindy told her. Sophie held her arms out and gave Mindy a much-needed hug.
“Hey, isn’t today your birthday?” Mindy asked her, after their longer-than-ever embrace.
“Oh, I guess it is.” The large whiteboard in Max’s room displayed today’s date.
“Well, happy birthday! Call me later and we will celebrate.”
“Will do,” Sophie told her, as she left a sleeping Max and dialed her husband’s cell number.
—
THOMAS ANSWERED THE PHONE on the first ring. “Thank God. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I didn’t mean to scare you. You said you were going to be late, so I went to visit Max. I fell asleep.” There were several things she purposefully left unsaid in that sentence.
“I thought something happened to you. I called every hospital between here and Charlotte. The police were no help. They told me to call back today if you didn’t show up.” Sophie could tell he was frustrated. Relieved, but frustrated.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to worry you.” She couldn’t believe she was the one apologizing. “We need to talk. I’m walking out of the hospital. I need to go through Starbucks first and get something to drink. Want anything?” Had she really just asked him if he wanted Starbucks? She was as crazy as her mom.
