Joanna swallowed hard. The doctor’s eyebrows crept even higher. “Is some of this not prescribed?”
She lowered her head, feeling backed into a corner. She wondered if she’d just stepped into something, if Dr. Nestor was secretly an undercover drug enforcement officer here to bust Catherine and her illegal prescription habit. “Yes,” she whispered.
“What does she take?”
Joanna shrugged. “I have no idea.”
“Tylenol?”
“Well, sure.”
“Vitamin supplements?”
Joanna felt her face twisting helplessly. “I mean, she takes all kinds of things. She had drawers full of … of everything.”
“Cholesterol medicine, like Lipitor? Does she take anything like Phenobarbital? Does she take a lot of antibiotics? Tetracyclines? Nitrofurantoins?”
“She takes antibiotics whenever she gets a cold,” Joanna whispered. She said the other medications he mentioned were familiar, too—she’d seen them strewn around the house. She’d seen all kinds of things lying around the house. Whenever she turned around, Catherine was popping something.
Dr. Nestor stretched out his palms, lowered his eyes, and heaved a centering, Zenlike sigh. “Okay. Let’s not panic. We’re just testing right now. But … the liver, you see, it filters the blood. It filters toxins out of the body, excesses of vitamins or high levels of medications. It processes all of that.”
“Okay.”
He scratched behind his ear, sheepish. “A damaged liver is … blocked. It doesn’t clean the blood as well. The more you put into your body, the more clogged it gets. You have noticed that your mother is rather yellow, right?”
Joanna stared at him.
“Her skin,” Dr. Nestor spelled out. “Her face. The whites of her eyes. You’ve noticed that, right?”
Joanna felt helpless. “She wears a lot of makeup.”
“Has she talked about any pain? Itching? Feeling bloated?”
“She complains about that, sure. She complains about a lot of things.”
The doctor stared at her, pursing his lips judgmentally. Joanna’s skin prickled with shame and embarrassment. What kind of asshole marches out here and basically implies that her mother has … God knows what? Cirrhosis? Hepatitis? And what kind of doctor makes a patient’s child feel shitty and irresponsible, as if she should’ve noticed her mother’s yellowness, listened more carefully to her mother’s hysterical complaints, or stopped her from popping her unlimited supply of samples? Whatever had happened was clearly all Catherine’s doing—but no, Joanna was to blame. Joanna was the criminal, the enabler.
“It’s not serious, is it?” Joanna asked. “I mean, she can be cured, can’t she?”
“We won’t know anything until we get the screens back,” the doctor answered sternly. “It could be mild damage. It could be hepatitis or its autoimmune version, which we can control. On the other end of the spectrum, it could require a transplant.”
Joanna’s jaw locked. Scott’s phone started to ring. He quickly patted his pocket and it stopped.
“But again, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Dr. Nestor said quickly. “I’m just preparing you for everything, okay? We’re taking good care of her. Let’s just hope for the best.” He glanced over his shoulder in the direction of Catherine’s room. “I didn’t mean to overhear, but maybe you shouldn’t be fighting right now. It gets her blood pressure up, stresses her out. My apologies if I’ve overstepped my bounds, but what she needs right now is you and your husband’s support.”
A whole beat went by. Joanna and Scott looked at one another. Scott opened his mouth but didn’t respond. Joanna shook her head and said, “No, he’s not …”
But the doctor had already turned around and was walking down the hall. Joanna watched him skirt around a woman with a walker. Scott shifted his weight, and then jingled the change in his pockets.
“Well,” he said.
Joanna pushed her purse strap higher on her shoulder and started down the hall. Scott followed. He didn’t ask if he should, he just lagged next to her, in step. He fiddled with the strings of his hooded sweatshirt. His shoes were untied, the laces dragging on the floor. Joanna felt that what she’d just said back in the hospital room had brought on her mother’s illness in a fast-acting karmic revenge. If there truly was someone above the clouds controlling the whole world, someone with levers and pulleys and gauges, and if he had seen Joanna behaving like this—and even more, if he’d seen that she was here with Scott—surely he had delivered the damage into her mother’s liver, like a FedEx of disease.