Catherine shook her head, still smiling.
“Well, that’s what you’re saying,” Joanna said. “And you’re saying a tree doesn’t make a sound if there’s no one around to hear it. And what we feel or do doesn’t matter if there’s no one around to witness it. When we’re all alone, it’s almost as if we don’t exist. We have no identity.”
Catherine nodded. “We’re all just big sponges. The only thing that matters is how other people see what we’re going through.”
Joanna shrugged. “Yeah. Maybe.”
They were silent for a while. Joanna leaned against the wall. Her throat tickled. She was suddenly horribly aware she was about to cry and ducked her head. An ambulance drifted past outside. Her mother’s monitors fluttered and squeaked. Joanna thought about what Catherine had just said about her father, how he’d abruptly left her so long ago. It could explain why Catherine developed all those medical problems. In her backward way, it was her attempt to bring his attention back to her, but it hadn’t worked. Joanna was the one who coddled her. Joanna was the one who sat and waited and worried and gave her mother what she needed. Her father was long gone.
She suddenly wondered what her father was doing in Maine, where he now lived. They’d barely spoken at her wedding. He’d shown up, walked her down the aisle, but then she’d barely seen him at the reception. He and her mother didn’t sit together, and if he’d tried to find her to say good-bye, he hadn’t succeeded. But she remembered feeling relieved that he hadn’t stayed longer—the more Catherine drank, the feistier she got, and she would have picked a fight with him, right in front of the Bates-McAllisters.
She excused a lot of her dad’s absences this way, not really examining if those were really his intentions. She couldn’t even recall the last time they’d had an actual conversation. Probably about three years ago; he’d been driving south for a business trip and stopped off to see her for lunch, picking somewhere cheap and close to the turnpike. He paid for their club sandwiches with an American Express corporate card and talked a lot about a mystery book on tape he’d been listening to during the drive.
She should have asked him why he’d been the way he’d been. Why he’d stopped accompanying Catherine to the hospital, how the responsibility had always fallen on Joanna. And why, that day of her eleventh birthday party, when Catherine declared she felt sick, her father had been so adamant about removing Joanna from the situation and taking her and her friends for pizza. “You’re doing the right thing,” he’d said to Joanna as they got out of the car at the pizza parlor. “We need to break this cycle.” Joanna tried to believe him. She wanted to think he was doing this for her because it was her birthday. But what if it was to undermine Catherine, too?
When Joanna had arrived home from the pizza parlor later that evening, her friends rushing to the Nintendo in the basement, she noticed a light in her mother’s bedroom and went upstairs. Her mother was lying facedown on her bed, curled up in a ball. Her eyes were closed, and she didn’t seem to sense Joanna was there. She didn’t look ill, just alone. As if there was no one in the world who wanted her.
It made Joanna crumple up inside. She couldn’t bear to see her mother like that, so lost and without purpose. And so she’d swallowed her frustration. It was the only thing she could do. She collected the photos of the Bates-McAllisters, turning to them for respite. They were removed from Joanna’s world, eternally as perfect as their pictures.
She thought about what she’d said to Scott a few hours ago. And how he’d stormed away, upset. It was no different than the way anyone would have reacted. Scott was the last bastion of the Bates-McAllister mystique, an impenetrable, unknowable person that she could mold to her whims and desires. But Scott was the same as she was—as anyone was—with the same emotions, secrets, and demons.
Realizing this made her feel woozy and weak-kneed. It made her feel childish, too, for being so naive as to think that Scott would be any different. And for being so blind as to assume that Charles would be exactly what she’d created in her mind. Maybe she was the one who lived in the bubble, not Charles and his family, not Catherine with her diseases and her panic. Joanna was so set on people being one way and one way only, her brain practically locked when someone did something unexpected. Of course she was disappointed—she had nowhere to go but disappointment. But it didn’t mean the disappointment was bad.
“That tree that fell over,” Catherine piped up. “It has to make a sound, doesn’t it? Everything makes a sound, whether we’re there or not.”
“I don’t know. I guess it’s up to everyone individually.”
“And this is a common question you’ve heard before?”