by Nancy Rue
“Don’t you have an R.A.?” I said.
“It’s a guy. I don’t think I can talk to him.”
I could see her point. No guy would have sat through this much without telling the kid to get a life. That, of course, wasn’t an option for me. We were supposed to “be there” for our students.
“I just thought maybe if I got it all out to somebody, I’d feel better, you know?”
“And do you?” I said hopefully.
“Kinda, yeah. I don’t know. Maybe I just wasn’t cut out for a major university. I probably should have stayed home and gone to community college.”
“No, I taught at a community college. They’re nothing but high schools with ashtrays. Look, this is a big adjustment—”
“Did you have a big adjustment when you went off to college?”
“Well, I was—”
“Where did you go?”
“Princeton.”
Her gray eyes widened. “Wow. You must have been nervous.”
“No more nervous than somebody coming here. This is a high-pressure place, too. But you’re smart—you’ll adjust.”
“You really think so? You don’t think I should just quit now and save my parents a lot of money?”
The word quit was not in my vocabulary growing up. I couldn’t help making a face.
“Quitting is not an option,” I said. “Look, the thing is that you’ve got to sort out your life.”
“What do you mean? Like into piles?”
“Yeah, piles. You’ve got your classes pile, your social pile, your whatever-else pile—”
“God pile.”
“Okay, whatever. And then you prioritize your piles and you deal with the most important things before you worry about the rest. You’re still struggling with the academic adjustment, so just don’t worry about the social thing. Trust me, it isn’t what it’s cracked up to be anyway.”
She looked at me wistfully. “I bet you have a great social life. I mean, you’re, like, so gorgeous.”
“The best relationship I have is with my laptop,” I said. “I’m focusing on getting my degree…which isn’t going to happen if I don’t get to work.”
She sagged a little, but I didn’t have time to pump her back up. I’d already spent ten minutes more than I had to spare. Besides, I’d run out of advice.
“I’m sorry,” she said, jumping up with arms askew. “I didn’t mean to take up your whole morning, but, gee, thanks, you really helped me. I feel like I could maybe get through the day without bursting out crying in the middle of a class.”
She stuck out the Kleenex package, but I shook my head.
“Keep them,” I said. If she had an attack during my class, I wanted her equipped.
I handed back first exams that day in Math 19, which meant the rest of the day was tied up with students coming in to complain, negotiate, and make appointments for help when I refused to participate in either the complaining or the negotiating.
“It’s the freshman freak-out,” Jacoboni said when one of them was barely out of earshot. “They were all valedictorians in their podunk high schools, then they come here and freak out when they find out they have to, oh, I don’t know, open a book.”
“They can’t freak out in here more than three hours a week,” I said, “because I have other things to do.”
“Like what?” Jacoboni said. He was obviously up for a protracted conversation.
I could have kissed my cell phone for ringing just then. I didn’t even mind that it was Max.
“How was Liz?” he said when we’d gotten the helios out of the way. “When you didn’t call me—”
“It was interesting.”
“Did she talk to you? Did you find out—”
“No, I’m still clueless.”
I could hear him sigh heavily into the phone. “What are we going to do, Jill? I’m out of my mind here. I lie awake all night—”
“Relax, Max,” I said. “I’m working on it.”
When I hung up, Jacoboni looked up ultracasually from his computer monitor and said, “Max, huh?”
“Yes, Jacoboni, Max. He’s my mother’s significant other, but he and I get together and make mad passionate whoopee whenever possible. Right now we’re planning a tryst in the Caribbean over Thanksgiving break. Any more questions?”
If there were, I didn’t give him a chance to ask them. I left the office in search of Nigel.
Dr. Frost wasn’t available the rest of the day, so I had a head full of stuff from other compartments when I set out on the Loop that evening. The air was nippy and the wind was stronger than usual, so I wore sweats. By the time I got up the first hill, I stopped to strip them off. The harder I thought, the harder I ran, and the perspiration was out of control.
I was trying to maneuver the ankle elastic over my Nikes when I heard somebody talking. Why couldn’t people just put on a Walkman and shut up while they were jogging? Some of us were trying to concentrate up here.
“It’s Jill, isn’t it?”
My head jerked up, and I had to hop on one foot to stay upright while I attempted to extract my foot from the other pant leg. I thrust out an arm for balance and nearly popped Sam Whatever-His-Name-Was in the jaw.
“Do I know you?” I said.
He grinned. “I can see I made a heck of an impression. Sam Bakalis. Do you need a hand?”
“No,” I said, though I now had my foot completely caught in the elastic. I gave it a yank and pitched forward, headed straight for the ground. Sam grabbed my elbow.
“That’s funny,” he said. “I could have sworn you were about to fall on your face.”
He let go of my arm immediately, before I could even have the satisfaction of glaring at him.
“Thank you,” I said and turned my attention to tying the sweats around my waist.
“So, what’s new in vector bundles?” he said.
I couldn’t help looking surprised. “You were paying attention.
“You were compelling.”
Now there was a line I hadn’t heard before.
“The vector bundles are fine,” I said.
“You aren’t going to ask me about Pascal?” he said. “I mean, since we’re making small talk.”
“Who?”
He grinned yet again. “I guess I wasn’t as compelling.”
No, pal, I wanted to say. As a matter of fact, you were downright disappointing. If I recall correctly, you were trying to convert me over the carrot cake.
“Right,” he said. “Well, nice to see you again. Have a good run.
He adjusted his glasses and deftly sprang over the fence and loped off the path, right past the sign that read Please Remain on the Paved Pathways. For a guy in his mid-thirties he still looked lanky—yet comfortable in his own body. With those narrow shoulders he was no Arnold Schwarzenegger, but he was lean, sinewy, in a John Cusack kind of way.
I nearly slapped myself. Time to slip back into the proper compartment.
Which turned out to be my mother. By the time I finished the run, I was so frustrated with thinking about her that I called her up and asked her to meet me for lunch again the next day. It was time to confront her, explosion or no explosion, so I could get on with my own problems. Remembering how late she’d been last time, I told her I’d pick her up at her office.
“You can meet me there,” she said. “But we’ll take my car. I need a chiropractor every time I get into that thing you drive.”
The one time you ever rode in it, I thought. But it felt rather good to be irritated by her instead of dumbfounded the way I’d been recently. It was a more familiar sensation.
Just as I was leaving my office the next day at 11:50, Nigel appeared.
“Do you have a moment, Jill?” he said. He was the only person I knew who talked more properly than my mother—used to.
“Sure,” I said. “I’m meeting my mother for lunch, but I can be a minute or two late.”
“No, you absolutely cannot be late for lunch
with your mother,” he said. “Just see me this afternoon.”
He turned and proceeded back down the hall, pace conspicuously unhurried amid the manic movements of the freshmen who’d just bolted from Deb Kent’s tutorial. I almost ripped through them to catch up with him and find out what was going on with my thesis. But if I didn’t get this taken care of with my mother, I was never going to be able to concentrate anyway.
I’m just going to see that she gets some professional help, I told myself as I pushed the speed limit on Campus Drive toward Stanford Hospital. Then it’s up to her what she does with it.
The corridor leading to the hematology lab was bustling with its usual atmosphere of urgency when I got there. No one wearing a white coat ever walked anywhere; these people seemed to think that if they didn’t run where they were headed, something catastrophic was going to happen. But I was oblivious to it, since I was busy considering the possibility that I was now trying to control my mother’s life the way she’d always controlled mine. But I dismissed that the minute I got to her office door. It was cracked slightly, and somebody inside was doing the controlling for me.
“Liz, you aren’t hearing me,” he was saying. It was Ted Lyons, head of hematology. “I am not going to attribute this to an oversight on the part of one of the techs. This is your signature, your recommendation.”
“Made on the basis of test results,” I heard my mother say.
She didn’t sound the least bit shaken. At the tone of Ted’s voice, even I would have been. Every word was being punched at her like she was a leather bag. I leaned against the door jamb and waited for her to throw her next punch. I’d watched her many times discover a weakness in an opponent’s case and magnify it to the point of ridicule. I glanced at my watch. I’d give it five minutes before poor Ted would be slinking out of there.
“The patient’s first test for rubella was negative,” Ted said. “So she didn’t receive the vaccine.”
“You’ve said that four times now,” Liz said.
“But a subsequent test showed her to be rubella-positive.”
“How many times are you going to go over this?”
Ted plowed on, his voice rising with each punch. “When you saw that, why didn’t it occur to you that it was going to create a cascade of concerns for the fetus? The possibility of cerebral palsy alone is—”
“The sample was repeated—on my orders. It came up positive again. That is defini—defini—”
“Definitive,” I whispered.
“It is not definitive!” Ted said. “It was completely uncharacteristic for you not to recommend a referral to the Infectious Disease people. Or at least to consider a false positive. You advised on the basis of low probability of the infection.”
“I didn’t want to put off the inevitable.”
“Inevitable? That couple had a decision to make. Only because the ID docs saw inconsistencies—inconsistencies you should have caught—did they send a sample to another lab.”
“I know. It came back negative. Bravo for the couple.”
“Why did another lab beyond Stanford have to find our mistake, Liz? It’s unconscionable. What if that couple had elected to terminate the pregnancy? They would have done it on the basis of your report. We’d be responsible for the abortion of a perfectly normal baby.”
Here we go, I thought. She’s going to get him on improper terminology or something—
I waited. It didn’t happen. There was a killing silence in the office.
“It’s not the first major mistake that has come out of this office in the last two months, Liz,” Ted said finally. “My question is this: Is it going to be the last?”
“You’ll have to answer that one,” Liz said. “I’m going to lunch.”
I didn’t even have a chance to back away from the door before she pushed it open. She didn’t look at all as if she’d just lost an argument—probably the first one in her professional life. She just appeared puzzled to see me there.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, yes. We’re having lunch.”
She headed off down the hall at a stiff march, and her petite form was immediately lost in the sea of white coats. I got to her just as she was about to step into the line in the cafeteria. I looked at the myriad of shoulders in surgical scrubs and shook my head.
“Come on—let’s get out of here,” I said. “It’s way too crowded.” And too public. What I had to say, she wasn’t going to want to hear amid her colleagues.
I had to move at a dead run to keep up with her as she turned abruptly and headed for the front entrance, lab coat flying out behind her. Was it me, I thought, or was she becoming more unkempt every time I saw her? She was wearing a pair of black slacks and the brown loafers she normally only put on to go out and get the newspaper off the front lawn.
Her Mercedes wasn’t in much better shape. It was a cream-colored ’85 she’d bought from one of the doctors when he retired. He reminded her of my grandfather or something; it was one of the few sentimental things I’d ever known her to do—that and the way she normally had the thing groomed every week. There was no evidence of that now. I had to move a pair of shoes and several empty Burger King cups before I could sit in the passenger seat.
Since when did you start drinking soda? I wanted to say. I managed to withhold comment, though. I had to stay in the right compartment—and that one was going to be hard enough. I’d be lucky if she didn’t shove me out of the car the minute I started talking about it.
I tried for about the umpteenth time since last night to get my words organized, but it was pointless. The scene I’d overheard between her and Ted Lyons had given the thing a whole new twist. Other people were noticing—people who had a real impact on her career.
“Look, Mother,” I said finally, “I heard what happened with Ted. The door was open, and, to be honest, I listened.”
She looked at me vaguely and pulled the Mercedes out of the parking lot and onto Pasteur Drive. She didn’t pick up any of the CDs in the console and stick them in the player as she was wont to do.
“And your point is?” she said.
“My point is, it sounds like things aren’t going particularly well.”
“Things are going perfectly fine. What are you talking about?”
I watched her closely. Her square face was as untroubled as ever.
“Ted doesn’t seem to think they’re ‘fine,’” I said. “From the way he sounded, you could have caused somebody a personal disaster, not to mention the hospital a lawsuit.”
“Ted Lyons has a strong sense of the—of the—the thing they do on stage, the theater—”
“The dramatic?” I said.
“He always imagines the worst possible impresario.”
She must have meant scenario, but I didn’t have the nerve to correct her. I just tried not to stare.
“Blood tests have a 99.9 percent accuracy rate,” she went on, “but some of them are so sensational—no—so—you know, they detect every little—they’re so—well, they’re that way, and they can pick up a false positive.”
She closed her mouth firmly, as if that should explain it all. I was groping.
“Yeah, but what does that prove?” I said.
She glanced at me coldly, which didn’t surprise me, but I saw that she had a white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel. Maybe I should wait until we got to the restaurant to pursue this further.
“Where are we going, anyway?” I said. “You didn’t like the food at Marie Callendar’s.”
“I liked it fine. I did a second test—”
At Marie Callendar’s? No, she was back to the lab thing.
“The first one was just a—uh—you know, a test that rules things out.”
“Screening test?”
“Screening test. The second one was to conform it.”
She cocked her head slightly to the side. She knows that wasn’t the right word, I thought. I was still considering whether to supply a quick “you mean confirm” when she continued.
“The second test was not as sensible but it was highly pacific. The first test was designated—determined—designed—whatever. It was supposed to pick up all cases but not all the people it would pick up would have the thing—the sickness—the—”
The skin between her eyebrows puckered, and she gave the steering wheel a soft pound with her fist. She had to suddenly slam on the brakes to keep from plowing into the back of the BMW in front of us. I could see the driver staring into her rearview mirror.
“It’s supposed to filter the false positives out. I guess it didn’t.”
Mother shrugged, but as we moved forward again she was still holding onto the wheel as if it were threatening to take on a life of its own.
“You guess?” I said. “I didn’t think you ever guessed.”
“When did you get your medical degree, Jill?” she said.
“Mother, come on. You have always prided yourself on—”
“Ted goes off about the consolation—no, the comput—what the devil is the word?”
I never got the chance to answer. Nor did I have the opportunity to scream, “Mom! Stop!” I just saw the stop sign she was ignoring and heard the sickening squeal of brakes and screeching tires. The blue Jeep Grand Cherokee was just beginning its plow into my mother’s side of the Mercedes as I was snapping my head toward her. The last look I saw on her face was one of complete bewilderment—before we were smashed into the street sign and came to a lurching halt.
FIVE
The next few minutes were a smear of Mrs. BMW peering into the Mercedes while chattering incoherently into her cell phone, and the driver of the Cherokee shouting over and over, “Didn’t you see the stop sign, lady? Didn’t you see it?” When the paramedics arrived, they added to it with a chain of increasingly pointless questions.
The only thing I remembered clearly—once I was piled into an ambulance I didn’t need, ensconced in a neck brace I needed even less—was that my mother hadn’t answered a single one of their queries. She’d just lain there in the front seat and then on the stretcher, blinking at them as they asked her to say her name and tell them if she knew where she was.
