My dad shrugged. “They stop paying. You move home and start outpatient therapy at a gym.”
“Move home? Which home?”
My dad smiled. “Any home you want.”
I took all this in. I was going to be here for five and a half more weeks.
“The point is,” my dad went on, “to make the most of your time here while you have it. We’ll just see what happens when we see what happens. That’s all we can do.”
“And have the right attitude!” my mom added, like he’d forgotten the most important thing. “And believe two hundred percent that you can beat this.”
My mom had gone to my apartment and picked up my laptop, and the novel I’d been reading, and some fuzzy socks, and my pale blue chevron-print pillowcase, and some ridiculous, strappy high-heeled sandals that she thought might “cheer me up”—but, of course, did the opposite.
I didn’t want to use my laptop or read that novel or even look at the sandals. I didn’t want to see anything from before.
“Your cell phone was destroyed in the crash,” my mom said next, “along with everything—burned to a crisp—and so I stopped by the store and got you a replacement. They were really very understanding.”
She handed it to me and pulled out a charging cord for my dad to plug in. We watched my dad hunt for the plug.
“They never found the ring, either,” she added, after a bit.
“What ring?” I asked.
At that, my mother took a good look at me for the first time all day. “Your engagement ring!” she said, like, Duh! Then, “Chip gave us the good news while you were in surgery.”
The good news. I looked down at my naked hand. I’d forgotten a ring was ever there. “Oh.”
“It must have come off in the crash.”
I nodded. “It was enormous.”
“Too bad,” my mom said, bending back over her bag to root out some other things. “It was his grandmother’s. Irreplaceable.”
She pulled out some framed photos. She’d grabbed two of the three that I kept on my dressing table: one of Chip and me on a hike in the Rockies, and one of me with my parents the day we’d gone zip-lining. The third picture on my dresser was of me and my sister, Kitty, when we were little, dressed up like cowboys with hats and bandanas, back when I used to adore her. That one, my mom left behind.
My mother and my sister did not get along.
Like, really did not get along.
Like, I suspected my mom was the reason Kitty had been ignoring us all for three solid years.
In fact, my mom was the last of us to see Kit before she took off and didn’t come back. My parents were hosting a Fourth of July party three summers ago. Kitty had been drinking that night, as she often did, and she’d been loud and boisterous and causing trouble, and at one point, she accidentally-on-purpose pushed my mom into the swimming pool. Kitty laughed so hard at the sight, she collapsed onto one of the chaises and stayed there until my mother climbed up the pool steps, gushing water onto the patio, and dragged Kitty inside and upstairs to have it out.
I took up my mom’s hosting duties while they were gone, keeping an eye out for them all the while, but when my mom came back much later, fully dried off and wearing a whole new outfit, Kitty wasn’t with her.
“Where’s Kit?” I asked, but she wouldn’t tell me.
In fact, she never told me. To this day, I had no idea what they fought about that night. All I knew was, it must have been bad. Kitty sent me an email the next day, to tell me that she was moving to New York. Immediately.
I tried to get her to come home and talk to me about it, but she wouldn’t. I tried to get her to tell me where she was, but she wouldn’t. I didn’t think she’d really leave, but she did.
I didn’t think it would last, either, but it did.
She left, and she didn’t look back. She stayed away from all of us. My mom never tried to contact her, but I did, and my dad did, even though emails went unanswered and texts and phone messages were ignored.
The whole situation bewildered me at first. My mom and Kit had never really gotten along, I knew. I also knew my mom had always been harder on Kit than she was on me. But just disappearing? Ignoring everybody? No Thanksgivings, no Christmases? No birthdays? It seemed like a bit much.
After a year and a half of trying and trying and getting nowhere, I stopped trying so hard. I stopped wondering what we’d all done to push her away, and I just found myself feeling resentful of the fact that she’d gone. You can only reach out so many times before you stop trying. After a while, just the fact that somebody is mad at you can make you feel mad at them. The longer she stayed away, the more defensive I became, and without even noticing, I drifted into an alliance with my mother—steadily resenting Kitty for disappearing without ever even saying why.
At this point, my sweet dad was the only one of us still hoping she’d decide to get in touch.
“No picture of Kitty?” I asked—not because I was surprised, but as a way of calling attention to our allegiance, a way of reinforcing a little closeness when I could.
My mom gave me an eye-roll that was just as reinforcing. “Please.”
But the mention of Kitty did raise a question. “Has anybody called her about this?” I asked.
“No,” my mother said definitively, just as my father said, “Yes.”
My mother and I both looked at him. “You did?”
My dad nodded. “I sent her an email with the subject URGENT FAMILY EMERGENCY.”
My mom looked away. “I’m surprised she replied.”
“Well,” my dad said, “she did. And then she hopped on a plane and came home.”
“She’s here?” my mom asked.
My dad nodded. “She came to the ICU several times.” Then he glanced at my mom. “When you were out.”
I shook my head. “I don’t remember seeing her.”
“You were on a lot of medication.”
My mother gave my dad the look she gives him when he’s been very bad. “We didn’t pay for that plane ticket, did we?”
He ignored her. “She’d like to come see you,” he said to me, “but she doesn’t want to upset you or make any trouble. Can I tell her it’s okay?”
From his expression, he clearly expected me to say fine. But I found myself shaking my head. The idea of some big, delayed, years-too-late confrontation with her felt like way too much right now. I couldn’t face it. I had enough going on. Even just thinking about seeing her again made me exhausted.
“Okay,” my dad said, nodding. “I get it. I’ll tell her you’re not ready.”
“Just tell her to go back to New York,” I said. “I won’t be ready anytime soon.”
My mother had that look she gets when she wants to yell at my dad, but she holds it in for the sake of the children. I did not envy his car ride home.
“Thank you for going to all this trouble to grab my stuff,” I said to cheer her a bit.
“No trouble,” she said, shrugging in a way that let me know yes, it had been trouble, but that’s the kind of self-sacrificing mother she was. Also, she was going to make another trip later to bring her folding bridge chairs “so company would have a place to sit.”
“No company,” I said then. “I don’t want any visitors.”
My parents looked at each other. My estranged sister was one thing—but no visitors at all?
“A few close friends, at least?” my dad asked, in a be reasonable tone.
“No friends. No one.”
“Sweetheart,” my mother said. “The phone’s been ringing off the hook. The front hall table is covered in cards. People want to see you.”
It was my moment to reflect graciously on how kind it was of people to think of me. But I just said, “I don’t really care.”
“We can’t barricade the hospital,” my mother said.
But my dad said, “We might talk to the nurses. Say she’s not ready.”
My mom frowned. “But all the literature says not to let them get isolated.”
Oh, God. She’d been reading “the literature.” It was worse than I thought.