The next morning I deleted the drunken voice mails and beer-clumsy texts from Ryan, Hillary, Lauren, and Ally. Hil sounded annoyed. “So, you disappear for three days, show up at the party where you pout all night, and then you disappear again? What the hell, Mia? Is everything okay? If you’re done being no fun, come meet us at Matherson’s.” There was a message from today too: plans for a hangover lunch.
I wandered into the kitchen and found my parents sitting with coffee and chemo books—a departure from their typical newspaper routine.
“Good morning, kiddo. How are you feeling?” Dad stuck a napkin in his book to mark his page. He believed that anything worth knowing could come from a book, chart, graph, or diagram. He made sense of the world through numbers and data—which was why he’d liked gymnastics more than cheerleading. He understood gymnastics’ scoring: points added for difficulty, deductions taken for not sticking a landing. Cheerleading competitions, with their unquantifiable categories like “crowd appeal,” baffled him. He sat in the stands with his clipboard, trying to do the work of all the judges at once, until my mom lost patience with him asking, “Did that girl bobble?” “Would you say their voice quality is strong or barking?” “How would you rate their tempo?” and finally told him, “Put that away and just watch your daughter.”
Yesterday’s news had launched him into leukemia fact-finding overdrive. His fingers twitched over the book’s cover, and he looked as if waiting for this conversation to be over so he could resume his reading was causing him actual pain.
“I’m fine,” I said.
Mom swept me with a head-to-toe gaze. “What happened to your elbow? I’ll get you some cover-up.”
“It’s no big deal. I banged it.”
My dad nodded. I wondered if he was aware that he was flipping the cover of his book open and shut. “We talked to Nancy Russo this morning. It sounds like it was some party. You’re lucky she let Gyver come get you.”
“I wasn’t drinking.” I grabbed the orange juice from the fridge and expected that to be the end of the conversation.
Mom didn’t believe in discipline and Dad didn’t believe in upsetting Mom. She had been an adored only child. She now wanted to be adored by her only child. She didn’t bother with rules or punishment; she stuck with bragging about my accomplishments and making vague comments that teenagers were “so difficult.”
“Of course not,” she agreed now. “Even so, you need to be careful. But you know this. I’m sure you were being safe.”
“I’m going to meet everyone at Iggy’s,” I announced as I poured juice.
“Iggy’s? Will Ryan be there? Oh, I bet he’ll send you flowers in the hospital.” She clapped her hands together and said, “How sweet!” like it had already happened. Choosing cheerful oblivion, a Mom trademark.
“Maybe.” I kept my face blank. “I don’t know if the hospital’s really Ryan’s scene. It’s not exactly going to be fun.”
“Kitten, I know that, but I’m sure you girls will still manage to create plenty of drama.”
“The hospital isn’t summer camp.” I kept my annoyance carefully controlled. She’d been there when Dr. Kevin explained treatment: remission induction—a.k.a. a month’s stay in the hospital so they could administer chemo and do other painful, awful things. “I don’t know if I’m going to be up for girls’ nights.”
“Of course you are.” But her smile weakened. She stood and brushed some hair out of my face, a transparent attempt to feel my forehead. Maybe she understood a little.
“I haven’t even told them.”
Mom touched my hair again, then frowned at my bruised arm. Her voice was slow, thoughtful. “What if you don’t tell them just yet? Maybe you should wait and see how things go. Give it a few days—and if you feel up to visitors, then you could call them.”
“Not tell them?” I was filled with sudden shame, like cancer was my fault and something to hide. “Dad, what do you think?”
“It’s your illness, Mia. You get to decide who you want to know.” This was as close as he ever came to disagreeing with Mom.
“I already told Gyver.”
Mom fluttered her fingers in dismissal. “Gyver’s different. We told his parents this morning. But maybe hold off on your friends; you don’t know how treatment’s going to make you feel. You might want privacy.”
“But you told the Russos?” I curled my fingers over my newest bruise, hiding it from sight as I realized how my mother saw it: a blemish and a dark sign of things to come.
“It couldn’t be helped. I’ve decided to take a leave of absence from the firm until induction’s done.” She shifted her shoulders in a show of self-pride. “Vinny Russo would know something was up when all of a sudden I didn’t carpool and wasn’t at work.”
“Maybe I won’t tell the girls right now,” I said, looking from Mom’s nod of agreement to Dad. Hil would want to know everything. Everything. And I didn’t have all the answers yet. Or the energy to sit through an interrogation.