So this was where she was going. Joanna couldn’t breathe. The room instantly became very, very silent. She could feel Scott’s eyes on her.
Catherine turned to Scott. “She collected photos of your mom and you boys since she was about eleven years old, you see,” she said. “Saved tons of them. Loved your fairy-tale life.”
“Mom!” Joanna tried to laugh. Catherine’s voice wasn’t laced with nastiness; it didn’t seem like she had an insidious, ulterior motive for telling Scott this. Maybe Catherine just thought it was a funny story, an amusing little anecdote about Joanna as a girl. Only, it wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t.
Now Scott was staring at Joanna, a befuddled expression on his face. He turned back to Catherine. “A scrapbook, did you say?”
“Uh-huh,” Catherine said. “Loved pictures of you all going to parties and benefits. Kept every single one. It was her little dream, to be part of your family.”
Scott’s gaze swept back to Joanna. He was probably connecting what Catherine was saying with what Joanna had told him last night, her inane story about the Kimberton Fair, how she thought it would be one thing and was disappointed when it turned out to be something different. It was her fairy tale to be part of their family, but their family had let her down.
“Mom,” Joanna said weakly. She brushed her hair out of her face. “That’s not exactly how it happened, and you know it.”
Catherine gave her a patronizing look, “Of course it was! You kept a scrapbook. You idolized them. It’s okay, honey. You were young.”
Joanna pushed her tongue into the back corner of her cheek. Something deep inside her broke. This had to be corrected. “You idolized them,” she cried. “You were the one who obsessed over them. You were the one who was disappointed about absolutely everything in your life and wished you were someone else.”
Catherine blew a raspberry. “What are you talking about? I did no such thing.”
Joanna blinked at her. “Mom. You wouldn’t shut up about Sylvie Bates-McAllister, hoping that, I don’t know, you’d become more like her by osmosis.”
She snorted. “Now that’s just silly.”
Joanna couldn’t believe it. Her mother was flat-out denying everything she had been, as though Joanna had dreamed it up. “So then I suppose you were satisfied with your life? I suppose you were happy with where we lived, and belongings didn’t matter. The way people thought about you didn’t matter. Do I have that right?”
It didn’t even sound like her voice, but the voice of someone older, nastier. “And I suppose you didn’t have to go to the hospital every week, either?” she continued. “I suppose you didn’t drag me there all the time, making me sit in the little ER waiting room thinking you were dead?”
“There’s something wrong with me,” Catherine insisted.
“No, there isn’t!” Joanna moaned. “One of these days, there might be. And one of these days, it’s not going to feel so great.”
Catherine shrunk into her pillow. Scott swiveled his head back and forth, tennis match–style, watching them. Joanna pivoted away. “Just … don’t go saying the Bates-McAllisters were my little obsession,” she said. “You wanted to trade your life in, not me.”
The room was still. No one moved. Then Catherine’s blood pressure monitor made a loud, angry quack. A figure appeared in the doorway and cleared his throat. Dr. Nestor wore a surgeon’s mask around his neck. He glared at Joanna as though he’d heard every scathing thing Joanna had just said.
“Can I have a word with you?” Dr. Nestor asked Joanna.
“What is it?” Catherine struggled to sit up. “Whatever you can tell her, you can tell me.”
“Just a moment, Mrs. Farrow,” the doctor said, smiling at her. “You just rest.”
Joanna trudged into the hall, her skin cold. It felt as if everyone was staring at her. They were in a hospital, for God’s sake. Among sick people. People who needed to be uplifted, not yelled at. She kept her eyes trained on the shiny white floor, afraid to look at either the doctor or Scott, who had followed them out.
The doctor walked a few doors down and stopped near an empty wheelchair. “We had to do a special type of procedure to locate Catherine’s cyst. But we finally found it and had it surgically removed. It’s benign.”
Joanna breathed out. “Okay. Thanks.”
But then the doctor hesitated.
“When we were removing the tumor, we couldn’t help but notice how swollen her liver was.” He paused to scratch his nose. “We’ll do a scan, but we could tell by touch that it was enlarged. Do you know if your mother’s on any medication we might not have recorded in her chart?”
“My mother’s on all kinds of medication,” she answered.
The doctor’s eyebrows knitted together. “She didn’t give any prescription information when the nurse took her history.”