Maybe Charlie would be glad to see her go, be happy to get back to his orderly and unadorned life: the single coffee cup, the simple dinners, the quiet. Later in the summer, when the camps were over, when Charlie’s arm was one hundred percent healed, she’d bring the girls up for a visit. They loved going out on the Joanie B, loved helping Charlie pull the traps; they howled with laughter when he told stories about their mother doing the same, day after day, summer after summer, with the atrociously smelly herring (Zoe) and the super-funny orange overalls, did you really wear those, Mom? (Evie, and yes, she did). For the girls, hauling traps was a tourist activity, a quaint, temporary glimpse into a bygone world, like riding the Viking boat in Epcot’s Norway.
She collected her cell phone chargers (two? Why had she brought two?), her multivitamins and probiotics, her toothpaste, the novel she’d made zero progress in reading, the Us Weekly with Taylor Swift on the cover that she’d had no trouble getting all the way through. But she couldn’t find the notepad on which she wrote her ever-expanding to-do list (Eliza was modern in many ways but a staunch traditionalist in the list-making department), and that was sending her into a little bit of a panic. She lived and died by her list.
She was on her hands and knees, looking under the sofa, when she heard a knock at the door, and then Val came in. “Hey,” she said. “I heard you were heading back home, Eliza.”
“Where’d you hear that?” Nothing under the sofa; Eliza stood and sighed. If Val was here the restaurant must be closed. Time was slipping away; she’d be later than she planned getting on the road.
“It’s a pretty small town,” said Val. “I hear most things. What are you looking for?” Eliza was almost always happy to see Val, but the loss of the notepad was really vexing her—she hated losing things.
“I just can’t find my notepad—I wrote down all of these things Zoe needs for science camp when I was talking to her last night. It’s driving me batty.” She felt a childish need to blame Val about the notepad even though, obviously, it was Eliza who had misplaced it. “It was weird things, like worms and snails and yogurt containers and something about a blood-testing kit…”
She moved to the kitchen; Val followed her, making clucking noises that were soothing in their own way but that didn’t make the list any more found. “Your mother was the same way, you know, about losing things. Couldn’t stand it.” Eliza’s survey of the kitchen was interrupted by a familiar sensation in her belly; this happened when somebody brought up her mother out of the blue like that, especially someone who, like Val, had known Joanie intimately. It was a feeling so strong it came with its own sound: thwomp, or fromp, a sound that reminded her even this many years later of the magnitude of her loss. She was torn between saying, Don’t talk about her, it still hurts too much and Let’s sit down right now and you tell me every single thing I might not know about her.
“I’ll run and check upstairs, maybe it’s under your bed,” offered Val.
Eliza tore open a kitchen drawer that nearly loosened itself from its runner with the force of her frustration. “It’s a notepad, not an earring back! Shouldn’t be hard to find.”
The all-American junk drawer, which in her father’s simple life was not very junky at all: Eliza could see a measuring tape, a screwdriver, a pair of ancient kitchen shears, a coil of rubber bands. And beneath those items, a sheaf of folded papers that she pulled out anyway, partly because she was a confirmed snooper and partly because she was hoping that somehow the notepad had crawled underneath the sheaf of papers, forgotten the time, and fallen asleep.
How extremely odd; her father had somebody else’s medical report in the junk drawer in his kitchen…
And then there was Val, frozen in the kitchen door, holding Eliza’s notepad. On Val’s face was an expression that reminded Eliza of her daughters when they were trying and failing to keep a secret. Both of her children were terrible liars, and for that Eliza was grateful.
“Here it is!” said Val with false brightness. “It had slid between the bed and the bedside table. And I also found a bobby pin and two sticks of gum.”
Eliza looked more carefully at the paper. It was dated April 12. Patient’s name: Charlie Sargent. But that couldn’t be right—her father would rather sleep on porcupine quills than go to the doctor; it was only at the behest of the Coast Guard that he’d agreed to get his arm and head treated the other day. They’d brought him to the ER themselves because his head had been bleeding and he’d had to get the stitches put in and the sling put on. But back in April?
“Eliza,” said Val, dropping the false brightness.
DOB: 3-30-52.
“Eliza,” more sharply.
Insurance: None.
“Eliza.” Val was panicking now. Eliza held one finger up, like she was signaling to the waiter that she needed another minute.
She turned to the next page, which was the results of a CT scan, and which contained these words, which Eliza had to read three times to make sure she’d gotten them right: Suggestive of occipital glioblastoma multiforme, left lobe.
Payment: Out of pocket, MasterCard, Valerie Beals.
Now the words were swimming in front of Eliza, the letters mixing themselves up in different order, turning on their sides and then righting themselves.
“Wait,” said Eliza. She met Val’s eyes. She’d looked into those eyes so many times over the years—it had been that voice that had told Eliza her mother was finally gone, that face, as familiar as her own, to which she’d told her terrible thing to all those years ago. But now there was something unfamiliar about Val, like invisible ropes were pulling at her, changing the contours of her face into something unrecognizable. “I don’t understand. A glioblastoma multiforme is a brain tumor.”
She looked down at the paper again. Immediate follow-up recommended.
“Listen,” said Val. “You listen to me, Eliza.”
“A glioblastoma, Val, is an incurable brain tumor.”
Already, in her mind, Eliza was maniacally googling brain cancer treatment options; she was flipping through the neurology section in one of her old medical school books. She was even singing the ridiculous song about the organs that Evie had learned in the third grade. My body is working day and night, working and working all the time…
“Eliza, honey. Your father is sick.”
My brain controls everything, everything my body does. My lungs are breathing in the air, putting oxygen in my blood…
Val sat at the table, motioned Eliza to sit across from her, and folded her hands as if in prayer. “Charlie wasn’t feeling right for a while, for a good long time, but of course you know him, he wouldn’t admit to it. Even so, he was getting so tired out in the boat, coming in earlier and earlier, catching less and less. This was right after he came back from visiting you in March—right before his birthday. Still wouldn’t take a sternman with him. Then in early April there was one time he got a little bit confused, came in off the boat, one of the guys told me he was slurring a little, it seemed for about twenty seconds he didn’t know where he was…” She paused. “So I didn’t give him any choice, I made him an appointment at Maine Coast Memorial, took him in. He had the CT scan, and they didn’t like the way that looked, so they ordered an MRI. And that confirmed the diagnosis.”