“Go ahead,” she says.
I take a bite. The center is still frozen. The icing is cold and sweet and hurts my teeth. The twins come over and present me with a toilet paper lei. I bend down and let them loop it around my neck. Dr. Bek stands beside me, a gloved hand on the point of my shoulder. I see a flush in the high ridges of his cheekbones.
I don’t tell anyone that my birthday is a guess made by a doctor at Brigham. The month is right, but the date could be a fiction.
Dr. Bek fails to mention the last birthday the Hospital celebrated, back in October, was for a man who became symptomatic a week later and died. Instead he leads the patients in a round of “Happy Birthday.” The nurses join in, the lyrics a rumble inside their suits, followed by the patients. I’m stuck inside the tornado of sound, trying to look happy to be alive. As the room swells with our voices, I think about how, if I’m carrying the sickness inside me, I will one day forget Dr. Bek and all these singing people. I will forget the meaning of the words “birthday” and “patient.” I will forget how to use a fork. I take another bite of the cupcake and wait for the party to end.
*
I spend the rest of the day alone in the Common Room, passing time by looking out the window. There are no pilgrims, too cold now for even the most devoted. The plains gleam with ice. I know the world around us is changing, but the view from the window is the same.
On my last birthday, I worked a double at the Stop & Shop and got a free M&M’s cookie from the bakery and stole an extra bottle of Robitussin. I drank half of it in the bathroom, which seemed like an okay thing to do because it was my birthday, and I spent the rest of my shift in Produce, standing beside a pyramid of lemons and feeling the rapid twitch of my heart.
During my first week in the Hospital, my blood pressure was jumpy and I sweated rivers under my scrubs. I kept thinking about the time Ms. Neuman found out about me stealing from a neighborhood kid, the time I took a girl’s red barrettes and lied about it and her mother called. “You can be any kind of person you want,” Ms. Neuman told me in her kitchen, kneeling in front of me, an unlit Virginia Slims behind her ear. “Why would you choose to be this?”
Which was exactly what I thought on my last birthday, standing in Produce, my skin dewy from the vegetable misters: Why did I choose to be this?
GOOD HEALTH IS CONTAGIOUS AND YOU HAVE CAUGHT IT, the Pathologist says on the speakers, his latest meditation.
I turn on the TV. A show called Mysteries of the Sea is just starting on the Discovery Channel, the twins’ favorite station. A woman stands on the deck of a white fishing boat with a navy blue hull, speaking into a walkie-talkie. I hear wind and static, a tumble of voices. The railing is dotted with orange lifesavers.
A scattering of birds in the sky. They cross over, white wings flapping, disappear from sight. The camera pulls away and for a moment the boat is just a spot on the water. A voiceover says it’s spring in Las Tumbas, Cuba.
This woman is wearing a baseball cap that says AHOY and a blue jumpsuit and black boots, the laces pulled tight. On the deck, she discusses coordinates with her chief engineer. I hear official-sounding words like “dew point” and “barometric pressure.” The captain keeps her eyes on the water, even though there is nothing around them except dark, undulating waves.
She is slim, but her sleeves are cuffed and I can see the muscle in her arms. Her hair is an inky knot at the base of her neck. She points the walkie-talkie antenna at something off in the distance. The chief engineer nods.
This captain, she is striking, serious. The more I look at her, the more I can’t stop looking.
I get on the floor, on my hands and knees. A primal feeling takes hold and I move closer to the TV on all fours. The paper lei swings from my neck. I get close to the screen, so close I can feel static on the tip of my nose.
There are things aging changes and things it preserves. It’s like looking into a mirror and having my future self projected back at me. Still, it takes me the entire episode to believe what I am seeing.
8.
In an hour of TV, here is what I learn about my mother:
Her name is Beatrice Lurry. She is an underwater archaeologist, a member of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology. A ship detective. She is the person who is called in after a ship has gone missing and the coast guard has failed in their pursuit. She has a special talent for searching.
A special talent for searching, for finding, but not for holding on. I am proof of that.
A Russian ship, named after an old film star, that vanished on its way to the Dominican Republic—recovered by my mother off the coast of Newfoundland. A cabin cruiser that disappeared in the Gulf of Mexico. That vessel had a unique gravity weight, was designed to be unsinkable, but my mother discovered that it did in fact sink, as did the yacht that went missing in the Indian Ocean, drowning its sixteen passengers.
Of course, it’s not every day a ship goes missing. When she doesn’t have a live case, she searches for the wrecks, the long lost—the cruise liner that disappeared in the Arctic Ocean a hundred years ago; the merchant vessel abandoned in the South Pacific in the fifties. The wreck that made her famous was found near the Wallabi islands: in the hold she uncovered a mass grave, the casualties of a mutiny.
She got her start on the wrecks, but it’s the live cases she loves best, the urgency of the search.
In that hour of TV, I learn about her first expedition, when she was part of a maritime team looking for a steamship that sank in Lake Michigan a century ago, during a storm. They found the ship nearly intact, thanks to the freezing lake water. She was one of the technical divers, in charge of taking photos. She dove two hundred and fifty feet below the surface.