Chapter Thirty
We sit in hard plastic chairs in the cafeteria that smells like hospital.
All around us, nurses and doctors, staff and patients, line up for coffee or packaged sandwiches, tiny tins of fruit.
How anyone could ingest anything in here is beyond me.
It’s impossible to have an appetite when sour air is being pumped through the vents.
My stomach has turned outside in.
“I want to get back up there,” Marcella says.
“I don’t have it,” I say.
If she doesn’t have time, I won’t waste ours.
Marcella looks at me. Blinks slowly.
“I used it. Recently. Something happened that I needed—” I don’t want to explain myself, because I’m ashamed of what I’d have to say, the childish and embarrassing turn I took. “I used it.”
I have very rarely seen Marcella angry. Even when I was a child, she never raised her voice.
But now—
“How could you?” she says.
She doesn’t move, doesn’t stand, but it’s like her whole body begins to tower.
I see a rage in her that is entirely unfamiliar and yet intimately known, because it is the same one I have. It’s the rage that has burned in me every day since the accident, since I lost her to the idea of his safety. The rage at being second place. At being this scared, this careful.
“I’m sorry,” I say, but I’m not. I feel glad I used it, in this moment. I want to punish her. I feel selfish and wild. I want her to know that what I’ve done I’ve done for me. “It was mine, and I used it because I wanted to.” And then, as if throwing it away. “No one told me Dad needed it.”
But of course that is not true. I knew. I’ve always known.
That someday, probably, we’d end up here.
I was saving it for him, wasn’t I? If I’m honest?
I believed, all those years, that it was my duty.
When I saw him out on the deck, struggling with the board, I knew.
That he was alive because of my mom and that he’d stay alive because of me.
And then I spared my husband’s heart instead.
“I thought for sure—” my mother says. She is clenching and unclenching her fists. “I thought for sure you understood.”
“Why?” I say. “You just assumed what’s mine would be yours when you needed it again?”
I see something in my mother turn over. The anger dissolves into sadness. Right in front of me, right in the middle of this hospital cafeteria it melts, loses form. In another moment the table is dripping with it. “I hoped—”
“That I’d save Dad just like you did. That I was meant to.”
There it is, between us. The thing we’ve never said. Years of guilt and grief woven like an umbilical cord between us. The truth that we are nothing without him.
“No,” she says. “I hoped he’d never need it.”
She stands up then. Pushes in her chair. I lift my coffee to my lips. Let her go, get back upstairs. She has no more need for me, anyway.
“I’m going to stay down here,” I say. “Tell Dad. Or don’t.”
She is standing behind her chair. She looks at me, and I feel my face mirrored in hers. I never thought I looked much like my mother—no one did. I was squarely Dave Novak’s child. But sitting here now I feel her expressions running through me like marionette strings.
“I’m not going upstairs,” she says.
I cross my arms; I just keep staring at her. I feel my petulance losing its footing. A dusty hillside.
“Stand up,” she tells me. “You’re coming with me.”