Chapter Twenty
When I opened my eyes the next morning, I was covered in pieces of paper, and Alice was sitting in a chair next to my bed.
“What are you doing?” I croaked. Even my voice sounded hospitalized.
“Working,” said Alice. “Stop wiggling. I finally got my deposition notes in the right order.”
“I am not a desk.”
“Well, there isn’t one in here. There’s this tiny rolling over-bed table, but my laptop takes up all of it.”
“Apologies, I misspoke.” There was never any need to ask what Alice was doing because what Alice was doing was always working. “What I meant was what are you doing here. There’s a desk at your office.”
She finally looked away from her computer to me.
She did not say she was here because she was worried about me.
She did not say she was here because I was injured and overwhelmed and afraid and shouldn’t have to be those things alone.
She did not say she was here because I was more important than her job.
But what she did say meant all of the above. “We can still go.”
I paused a moment to let all of the above sink in. “To New York?”
“Yes.”
My brain had put it together sometime in the restless night.
Dr. Blankman had not predicted the press would find out.
He’d ensured it. He must have been Elsa Aliaga’s source.
But that answer only led to more questions because I wasn’t sure which was scarier, prophesies that came to fruition or threats on which he was willing to make good.
“How?” I said to Alice.
“I don’t know yet. There’s a throng of press out front.
My inbox is too full to get through. My assistant says my office line hasn’t stopped ringing.
I’ve scheduled a closed-door in-person with all the senior partners this afternoon.
But we’ve definitely lost the advantage of secrecy at this point. ”
“Then how can we still go?”
“We have to,” she said, as if that answered the question. “We’ll figure out another way.”
“What other way?” I tried to lie still so at least I didn’t mess up her filing system. “You said no one could know. You said if anyone found out it would destroy your practice and ruin your career and all our lives. Completely buried in shit, you said.”
She nodded; then she shook her head. “I’d been thinking lately …” She pulled her lips inside her mouth and let her eyes drift away, her thinking-lately face since age two or so. “But no. It was stupid.”
“No to what?”
“The Texas House of Representatives.” She shook her head some more and wouldn’t look at me. “There’s going to be an open seat in our district next year. I’ve been contemplating whether … but seriously, it was a bad idea anyway.” Nearly a question, as close to vulnerable as you got from Alice.
It was good that my leaping-out-of-bed days were behind me because I wanted to jump up and cheer, and that would have spooked her. Instead I said calmly, “I think it’s a wonderful idea. You’d be terrific.”
“It would just make life harder. The firm would self-destruct without my undivided attention.”
“Other people at work could work besides you.”
“I already need a dozen babysitters. I already miss too much with O foreseeing a thwarted political career was another.
This raised a third possibility—that Dr. Blankman was neither prescient nor malicious but simply correct, maybe about everything.
Still, I might have dismissed his augury as partisan manipulation. I might have downplayed Moth’s concerns as overprotection learned the hardest of ways. I might even have written off Alice’s allegiance to New York as the tabling of not-even-underway-yet dreams.
Except for one thing.
I wasn’t falsely buoying my daughter out of motherly duty, or naively encouraging her out of motherly pride, or betraying motherly bias in my assessment of her virtues.
Alice would be a tremendous public servant.
Given half a chance, Alice could save the world, at least make a sizable dent, and the world, you’ll have noticed, is crying out.
I would never stand in the way of that. In fact, I would go to lengths to make it happen.
Alice in office is exactly what the world needs now.
“I think we have to cancel,” I said. “New York.” As if I could have meant anything else.
She nodded. She knew what I meant. “But what’s the alternative.” It wasn’t a question. “You can’t have a baby, Mom.”
My turn to nod because I didn’t trust my voice and of course I agreed with her, but another thing was true too. “I have done this before, you know,” I said when I could.
“You’re a good mom, Mom.” Alice squeezed my hand. “I’m just not sure experience is what a kid needs.”
I shrugged. “Who knows what a kid needs?” Emphasis on the article. If you’re lucky, sometimes you can figure out what any particular child requires at any particular moment, but a kid, a not-yet-kid, a maybe-never kid? Those needs are unknowable.
“It takes so much energy just to keep up,” Alice groaned.
“O however—”
“But there are more ways to be a mother, even a good one.”
She folded her lips into her teeth again, maybe less to think and more to hold back all she wanted to say.
Then she let them out again to say some of it anyway.
“What are you telling me, Mom? You’ve changed your mind?
You’ve decided against an abortion? You’ve decided seventy-seven isn’t too late to become a mother again after all? ”
“I haven’t decided anything.” I sat up from the pillows and half her papers tumbled to the floor.
She didn’t notice. “I didn’t decide to get impossibly pregnant.
I didn’t decide to make abortion illegal in this state.
I didn’t leak my private medical information to the press.
I didn’t doctor photos of myself and put them online.
And for that matter, I didn’t decide to move to Vista View.
I didn’t decide to give up my license and my home.
Frankly, it’s been a long time since I’ve been allowed to decide anything. ”
Alice looked at her hands clasped in her lap. “That’s different, Mom.”
“Yes, but also the same.”
“It’s not the same. Not deciding those things doesn’t result in your endeavoring to carry a child to term in your late seventies. Whereas not deciding to go to New York and get an abortion does.”
I was not being ornery. I was not being stubborn or stupid or reckless.
I was not confused or, evidently, concussed.
I was not unafraid—I could not unheed Dr. Blankman’s strident warnings nor Moth’s dire fears—but that wasn’t why either, not entirely.
It was that this was a thing I could decide: to protect Alice, to protect my family, to weigh myself against as much of the rest of the world as I could and tare the balance.
“Maybe it will still go on its own,” I said.
“Maybe. Or maybe not. Waiting and hoping and doing nothing is also a decision.”
“It is,” I agreed, glad she had noticed.
Alice didn’t want to be agreed with, though.
Alice wanted to argue some more. But before she could, a nurse arrived with discharge instructions and a wheelchair I had to use if I wanted to leave.
That was the rule for my health and well-being.
I could think of a number of things the hospital would have provided if they truly valued my health and well-being, but a wheelchair was low on the list.
When I saw what awaited me outside, though, it was a good thing I was sitting down. The hospital doors slid open, and the nurse wheeled me out into the drizzle, and Alice followed behind talking on her phone, and then one hundred thousand gaping maws opened wide and took my picture.
It might not have been one hundred thousand.
It might have been more. They closed around me like a summer storm, thick and loud and heavy so they drowned out the rest of the world.
I couldn’t see through the throng or hear anything but the shutters in torrents like rain.
You could nearly believe everything there ever was was gone, replaced by a downpour of cameras clicking into infinity and the deluge of open mouths ceaselessly calling my name.
I shut my eyes and tried to hide my face.
They’d have knocked me over if I hadn’t been sitting in that chair—and think how that would have looked—but if I’d been on my own two feet, I could have turned around and gone back inside.
I knew I couldn’t outrun this (or really any) horde, but surely the hospital had security who could keep a swarm at bay.
On the other hand, it’s not like I could live in the hospital—or would even if I could.
I’d have to leave eventually, and these mouths did not look like they would be dissuaded by time.
The nurse was yelling and Alice was yelling and some security guards materialized and were yelling, and a car pulled up and it was Darcy’s, and the nurse steered me through the throng, and I was grateful at least not to need help getting out of the wheelchair.
A door opened then shut, and somehow I found myself on the safe and quiet side of it.
But not for long.