by S. J. Delos
“Actually, the word she used was freak. Wasn’t it?”
Another of those nearly imperceptible head bobs. “Hai.”
“Okay. So go home and tell your wife that her freak daughter doesn’t have anything to say to her.” I turned around and started back towards the elevator. “I don’t have anything more to say to you, either.”
“She’s not at home, Kaori. She’s at the hospital.”
Something in his voice made me stop walking and I looked back despite myself. “The hospital?”
He raised his head to look at me, tears brimming in those dark brown eyes. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen my father cry. He hadn’t shed a tear at Tomiko’s funeral. He bore that sadness with typical Japanese stoicism.
“She’s dying.”
CHAPTER 15: CLOSING OLD WOUNDS
After my father’s gut-slamming revelation that my mother was dying, we stared at each other silently for a few seconds before I forced myself to ask, “Of what?” Though I had a pretty good guess.
“Cancer,” he said softly. If this had been a normal day, with people coming in and out, Joelle doing her thing, and the usual traffic on the street outside, I’d never had heard him. “Breast cancer,” he added.
Her mother—my Grandma Jenny—had succumbed to the same illness when I was only six. Apparently, the gene responsible ran down the female side of my family, a ticking bomb that could go off at any point between puberty and menopause.
Fortunately, Martin had disarmed that particular threat the first time I’d let him mess with my DNA, removing me from the chain and promising that it was out of my lineage forever. I really hoped that was true.
“She needs you, Kaor … Karen.”
I clenched my jaw and shrugged disinterestedly as I turned around and continued my journey to the elevator. The woman, as far as I was concerned, had been dead for years. This was just a matter of her body finally catching up with my feelings. I placed my palm on the identification pad and waited for the doors to reopen.
“She’s at Queen Memorial. Room 1217.”
I didn’t turn around. “Good for her. Hope she’s got a nice view of the city.”
“Kaori, please.” The begging chilled my blood and brought the hairs on my neck to standing.
The elevator dinged and the doors slid open as I swallowed the heavy lump in my throat. “Goodbye, Father.” I said. “I’m sorry for your loss.” Then I stepped inside the car and risked a final look back before the doors closed.
He stared at me, face unreadable. I had no doubt he was judging me for my refusal to rush to his wife’s—not my mother’s—side in her hour of need. I’m sure my resentment hurt him, even though that wasn’t my intention. I didn’t fully blame him for the way things had developed between us. In reality, he’d been nothing more than an errand boy, his only crime was always giving in to Rebecca’s whims and demands.
“Please, musume. She loves y—”
The doors cut off his words and I slumped against the titanium wall of the elevator, leaving a small dent in the surface. My vision blurred and warm wetness slid over my cheeks. Repulsed at my reactions, I stood up and attempted to wipe away the tears as fast as they came. I wasn’t about to let this get to me. Rebecca Hashimoto had become persona non-grata in my mind. She meant nothing to me at all. Why should I care that she was dying?
I don’t, I told myself. That bitch made her bed, now let her rot in it. However, if I really didn’t give a crap, why did I feel like something inside of me had been scooped out and replaced with cold mud?
The elevator stopped and the doors opened quietly, but I didn’t immediately exit. I stood there, staring at the tiny foyer without really seeing anything, until the panel beeped at me in annoyance. Get off or stay on? I wiped at my eyes again and stepped out of the car. The doors closed behind me and I went on the hunt for Manpower.
I found Greg in the briefing room, thankfully alone. He glanced up as I entered and immediately rose to his feet.
“Karen, what’s wrong?” he asked. Guess my stoic mask wasn’t as good as my father’s.
“I talked to my father. Downstairs just now.” I said, my voice attempting to crack. I swallowed hard and bit down on my lower lip.
He tilted his head slightly to the side, with that look on his face guys sometimes get when they weren’t sure if they should act pleased or concerned. “Oh? Did he stop by for any particular reason?”
To try to repair a broken relationship? Or because his wife told him to and he obeyed like a good little puppy? Maybe to see firsthand if his wayward daughter had really turned her life around? All very good reasons, mind you.
“My mother is dying.” Four words. A statement that shouldn’t have meant any more to me than mentioning that dinner was in the oven. Of course, if that were true, why did my rebellious eyes release a deluge the exact moment the last syllable left my lips?
“Oh … shit. Karen, I’m sorry.” His face fell and he took a couple of steps in my direction and stopped, arms slightly apart in preparation for the hug he obviously felt I needed.
I waved him off and rubbed furiously at my dribbling eyes as I sat down hard in one of the seats, actually making the dura-steel groan. “It’s okay. We … haven’t spoken in a while. Years, actually.”
“I guess you guys had some type of falling out?”
I nodded. “Yeah. I had a little brother, Tommy. He died a few months after my Activation. After that, things between us fell apart. I’d figured I’d never see or hear from her again.” I waved my hand in the direction of the elevator. “Then my father shows up and drops this news on me.”
He sat down in the chair next to me. “Is there anything I can do? Any of us can do?” His hands rested on the table, fingers interlaced. “Do you need to go be with her?”
Did I? I wasn’t sure. “I … don’t know. Maybe.” I sighed and pinched the bridge of my nose. “I think I’d like to go check on her. At least see her.” I glanced at him, hoping he could see the need for confirmation on my face. “That’s the right thing to do, isn’t it?”
He nodded. “Yeah, probably. At the very least, you’ll be able to say to yourself that you tried to bridge the gap. Do you want me to have Darla cover your patrol?”
I shook my head and stood. “No. I think … I think I might need the distraction afterwards. Thanks, anyways.” I sighed and remained where I was for a few moments before pushing a half-smile on my face and went to get changed into my uniform. I didn’t want to have to come back here a possible crying mess to suit up afterwards.
Greg’s voice called to me down the hall. “It is the right thing, Karen. I sincerely believe that.”
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
“Excuse me,” I said to an older brunette sitting behind a semi-circular desk right outside the twelfth floor elevators. “Can you tell me where Room 1217 is?”
She gave the black and yellow uniform a suspicious look and then pointed behind her. “Down the hall, first left. Even numbered rooms are on the right.” Her eyes met mine and her mouth formed a hard line. “You aren’t here to start a fight, are you? This is the terminal patient ward.”
I shook my head and tapped the Double G on my chest. “No, ma’am. I’m one of the Good Guys. Just want to check on a patient.”
That skeptical look remained but she seemed to relax a bit and nodded. “Okay.” Then she went back to her computer screen, effectively dismissing me.
I followed the receptionist’s directions and when I turned onto the hallway to my mother’s room, I nearly collided with my father. He took a startled step backwards, confusion flitting over his face as he noticed the uniform first and the person wearing it second.
“Kaori?” He looked me over again and a tiny smile appeared. “You came.”
I nodded, crossing my arms over my chest. I still didn’t trust myself to touch him. One moment of uncontrolled anger and he’d be sharing a room with his wife. “I did.” I looked over his
shoulder at the door. “How … how is she?”
He frowned. “No better. She was in some pain, so the doctor gave her something to help.” His frown deepened and his fidgeting hands vanished into his pants pockets. “She’s asleep.”
“Oh.” I nodded and went to leave. “Guess I’ll come back later, then.”
He shook his head and one of his hands flew out of a pocket and rested on my arm. “Kaori.” When I turned back, he gestured to the room. “At least look in on her. I want to be able to tell her that you came by. Please?”
I couldn’t take any pleasure from his pleading. I’d imagined, many times, both of them groveling at my feet. Actually seeing my father like that didn’t make me feel superior. Just the opposite. I sighed and gave a single nod. “Fine. I’ll poke my head in.” I glanced at the closed door and then back to him. “Just for a minute. I’ve got a city to keep watch over.”
His head bobbed up and down a few times. “Of course. Thank you. It would mean so much to her to know that you were there.”
I pulled my arm free from his loose hold and walked over to the door. I stood outside for a few moments before screwing on my resolve face and going inside.
I closed the door behind me, leaving my father alone in the hallway. The air smelled of disinfectant and impending death. The only sounds were a steady beeping from a monitoring machine and the soft hum of the air conditioning.
I stepped further into the room, my attention moving from the flowers and the beeping machines to the bed and the figure sleeping upon it.
The woman had her eyes closed and her chest rose and fell slowly. This was not the same woman who’d birthed me, raised me for eighteen years, and then thrown me aside like yesterday’s rubbish. This woman was frail, with dark circles around her eyes, and sallow skin that looked to have the tensile strength of tissue paper.
One emaciated arm was draped over top of the blankets, and a clear tube snaked out of the back of the hand, slithering up to a hanging bag of liquid. Even from across the room, I could read the word ‘Morphine’. Another tube rested on her upper lip, connected to a large oxygen tank secured to the wall behind the bed.
I walked softly as I could across the tile floor, stopping next to the bed. I looked down at her, freezing as my hand flew up to my mouth, keeping the oncoming gasp contained in my throat. I stared at her with distraught surprise, trying to reconcile the realization that her hair, those long, crimson strands she’d passed down to me, was gone. Only little patchy tuffs of fuzz remained.
She had been so proud of that hair, constantly reminding people that color like ours “didn’t come from a bottle.” As a child, she had insisted that we both wear our hair long and styled in the same wavy pattern. My first real defiant act—undertaken at the ripe old age of twelve—had been to hack most of mine off with a pair of scissors.
I think that was the beginning of our falling out. That was when the bonds started to break. Tomiko’s death was just the final straw.
I stood beside the bed, staring down at the woman I no longer recognized. A woman nearly at the end of her life’s race. I watched her breathe for several minutes, noticing the shallowness of each expansion of her chest. I could hear the air being forced into her nose, encouraging her to continue to live. I placed my hands on the railing and leaned closer to her.
“I hate you,” I whispered to my unconscious mother. “I hate you because you gave up on me. I hate you for making me feel like something less than human. I hate you for being more concerned what my Activation would do to your social standing than to what it did to me. I hate you for making me feel like I’d done it on purpose just to upstage you.”
My hands tightened subconsciously around the titanium tube beneath them. The metal flattened in my grip. The world around me shrunk, dwindled down until it all that comprised it was me and her. Daughter and mother.
“I needed you. Couldn’t you see that? Father didn’t understand, and I expected that. But I thought at least you would.” My vision blurred and my voice felt like rough pebbles in my throat. “I should have known Tommy would follow me. I should have been careful. I should have been looking out for him.” I shook my head, squeezing the railing even more tightly. “But you shouldn’t have blamed me for what happened. I already blamed myself plenty.”
The tears that slid down my cheeks felt hot and sticky, like tacky syrup left in the sun. They gathered on my chin and dripped onto the backs of my hands. I let them come. They’d been waiting so long, there would be no stopping them.
“Every day I carry my hate and anger and it flows through me, coloring my world in red bloody swatches. I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.” Each iteration was more hushed than the one before, until my voice was a stand of broken reeds, brushing together in the breeze. “Please don’t die.”
My trembling knees finally quit and I sank down beside the bed, sobbing into the side of the mattress. Thirty minutes prior, I would have laughed at the suggestion that I would be lying on the floor bawling over my mother’s deteriorating health. Hell, I might have actually raised a glass in hopes to a speedy demise. Now, actually being here and seeing how low she’d been brought, all I could think about was the fact that she would soon be gone.
Forever.
The tears stopped flowing after a few minutes, but I remained on the floor with my head resting on the bedside. I was so caught up in my own thoughts and feelings, I didn’t know I was no longer alone until I heard a voice coming from the other side of the bed.
“Hello? Miss, are you okay?”
I jerked my head up and peered over the top of the bed to see a nurse on the other side, a clipboard in one hand and a pen in the other. She looked to be in her mid-30s and the smile on her face seemed to bring a little light into the otherwise dreary room. “What?” I asked, still recovering from the surprise. “Oh, yes.” I pulled myself to my feet and nodded. “I’m fine.”
She turned to look at the data flowing across the front of the beeping machine. She jotted the information down on the clipboard before looking back at me, smile still firmly in place. I wasn’t sure if she was taking care of her patient or sashaying down a pageant runway. “You must be Kaori. Or do you prefer Kayo?” She shrugged as she released a little laugh. “I’m never sure who’s got a secret identity and who doesn’t anymore.”
I blinked at her a few times, processing her words, and then shrugged. “I go by Karen, actually.”
She laughed again and tapped on the clipboard with the pen as she looked at me. “According to your mother, you only started calling yourself that when you were thirteen. Because of the way that nasty Summers boy down the street teased you.”
What the hell, Mother? “She’s been telling people about me?” Well, duh, of course she had. I was her superhero daughter now. That’s the kind of thing Rebecca loved to brag about.
The nurse nodded. “I think my personal favorite is the one where you were convinced you could use an umbrella as a parachute and attempted to jump off the house to prove it. I got a kick out of hearing that one.”
My face grew warm. “I was only nine,” I explained. “I still didn’t have a good grasp on the ins and outs of air resistance.”
“Regardless,” she said as she took my mother’s wrist in her fingers. “She’s very proud of you. Even when she doesn’t actually say it, and that’s rare, you can tell in the way she tells people about you.”
I wondered if any of those cute, little stories dealt with my reign of terror as Crushette. Somehow I doubted it. She was probably happy to be on her way to repairing the reputation I’d tarnished. I glanced back down to the sleeping woman, the venom in my blood simmering back into its usual boil.
The nurse released her hold on my mother and wrote on the clipboard. “You know, sometimes your mom’s stories were the only thing that helped her and the others in her chemo group get through the treatments. The day you were revealed as a member of the Good Guys, she told everyone that passed through her room. Even called up a
few of her former group members to tell them.”
I shrugged and headed for the door. I’d done enough of ‘the right thing.’ Now at least I knew that she only wanted me to come by so she could point and brag. It was like the Science Award and Honor Society crap all over again. Here, look at my super smart and perfect daughter. She’s just like me, you know. I clenched my jaw and silently prayed that I would run into some bad guy who I could slap around.
A nagging feeling at the base of my brain made me stop and look from the nurse to my mother. “How long was she in chemo?”
The pen bounced against her lips a couple of times as she looked up at the ceiling. “Let’s see. She had just finished her second cycle when I came onboard. And she had three more before the doctors felt it wasn’t doing any good and stopped it.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Almost three weeks ago.” She tapped her lips a few more times and then nodded. “Yes, three weeks ago yesterday.”
Three weeks? And she had five rounds of chemotherapy before that. I turned and walked towards the nurse. “And she’s been telling stories about me this whole time?”
Something in my voice or face must have registered an eleven on her danger meter, because she took several steps backwards, her eyes flicking from looking at me to searching for the call button next to my mother’s leg. Her head jerked up and down. “Uh, yes. They were good ones, though. Honest. The worst thing she ever said, that I know of, was that you’d made a mistake, but you’d paid more for it than you should have.”
I couldn’t speak. The nurse’s words and the implications behind them all collided in my brain, making a nightmarish traffic jam that prohibited any immediate vocal response. Instead, all I could manage was to open and close my mouth silently as my mind tried to adjust to this wholly unexpected paradigm. I felt like a fish out of water … and probably looked like one too.
The fear from seconds before morphed into occupational concern and she took a step towards me, reaching out tentatively. “Are you okay? You look like you’re either going to throw up or faint.”
