Stopping, I looked down at my feet in her sandals, almost expecting to see her pretty toes and the dark pink polish she wore on her toenails. My bare nails seemed so inadequate, so . . . hopeless. A middle-aged woman, the only other occupant of the waiting room, snored softly as her knitting slowly slid from her ample lap into a blue and green puddle like a dying sweater.
Gibbes had been called to the pediatrics floor soon after we’d arrived at the hospital. He’d wanted to stay but I’d told him to go. I wanted to be alone. I wasn’t sure why, except that since I was a little girl, being alone had always been my defense mechanism. My father had once called me an opossum, hiding from the world. It had been years before I understood the rest of what he’d meant: how closing my eyes didn’t mean the world couldn’t see me. That it still revolved despite my best intentions. But understanding and accepting were two different things.
Gibbes had driven us behind the ambulance, the car heavy with silence fueled by guilt. He’d known. Before the ambulance came, Gibbes had sent me upstairs to get one of Loralee’s medicine bottles—a bottle half-full of five-milligram tablets of morphine. Morphine. Half an hour before, I had thought Loralee simply had a delicate stomach.
Maybe, deep down, I’d known she was much sicker than she’d let on. The evidence had been right in front of me for weeks. But I was so good at hiding from any truth I couldn’t face that I’d gone along with her charade, ignoring all the obvious signs so we could both pretend that everything was all right.
I had asked Gibbes a dozen questions, each one answered with the same pat response: She’s very sick. She needs you to be strong right now. In the part of my brain that could still reason, I knew Gibbes couldn’t have shared her condition with me, couldn’t tell me what I needed to be strong for. But his words were like heavy storm clouds on the horizon, promising a rain for which I was not prepared.
Loralee was the only one who could have told me, but I couldn’t be angry with her. Because every time I thought about how sick she must be, I thought about Owen and that everything she’d done was for him. And I remembered how much I’d wanted her to go away when she first appeared on my doorstep. I wished she were with me right then to tell me something insightful that her mama used to say about regrets and looking backward. But all I could hear were the snoring of the woman in the waiting room lounge chair and the distant sound of a man’s voice on the PA system reminding me where I was.
“Mrs. Heyward?”
I looked up to where a petite black woman in khaki pants and a bright pink and yellow floral shirt stood on the threshold, a clipboard in her hands and a photo ID around her neck.
“Yes, I’m Merritt Heyward.”
Her tight smile was more efficient than warm, but I imagined working in a hospital had taught her how to do that. “I’m Carmen Tanner, with social services. The nurses here have made Mrs. Connors comfortable and she’s ready to see you. I just have a few questions for you first. Why don’t we sit down?”
I sat in the nearest seat and Ms. Tanner sat next to me. “You’re Mrs. Connors’s next of kin?”
I looked at her, startled, ready to tell her my rote response that I had no relatives. “She’s my stepmother—my father is deceased. She has a son.” I paused. “He’s only ten.”
She nodded. “You’re his legal guardian?”
“No. I mean, I don’t know. He’s my half brother.”
She jotted something down on the clipboard. “Mrs. Connors has given me permission to discuss her care with you.”
“Oh. Sure. Of course.” I was too embarrassed to tell her that all I knew for sure was that an oncologist had been called in to see Loralee and that she’d been taking a five-milligram morphine pill every four hours that had been prescribed to her before she’d even left Georgia. Before she’d shown up on my doorstep.
The social worker continued. “I’m recommending hospice care for Mrs. Connors. Before you leave today, I’ll have a folder of information for you to go through with the patient so you can make the best decision. . . .”
“Hospice? But that’s for . . .” I couldn’t force myself to say the words.
“End-stage care,” she finished for me. “To help manage the pain.”
I stared at her dumbly, waiting for my brain to process her words. “Wait,” I said, holding up my hand, as if it were big enough and strong enough to stop the oncoming clouds. “All I know is that she has cancer. I don’t even know what kind.”
“She has stage-four ovarian cancer. Unfortunately it has spread to other organs.” Ms. Tanner’s eyes were kind, but couldn’t hide the fact that she’d seen this before, had said these words before. I wanted Loralee to have been the first, the only one. As if her being singular would bring her to the attention of those who could save her.