Well, she’d do whatever it took. Whatever that might be. She was capable of things people didn’t even realize. She was capable of a lot.
Sam said, “Mary?” and Mary had the feeling that Sam was going to get into things a little deeper, that she had real questions for Mary, but then Vivienne came out and said, “Hey, look who’s here!” She was wiping her hands on the apron she wore for hair coloring, and she was sucking on a mint. “Come here, baby girl. Did you finally come in to try some of that balayage?”
Mary sighed. “I don’t need balayage, Mom.”
“Then what do you need?” Vivienne peered at Mary’s face. “Brow wax? Just a little off the top of the left one—”
“No.”
Then the rage and hurt and resentment and—yes!—the fear bubbled to the surface, and while what Mary said next surprised her, it also made her feel good, and satisfied, and self-righteous. She said, “I need a mom.”
All eyes were on Vivienne and Mary: Sam’s and Megan’s and Chelsea’s.
Mary felt like something had loosened inside of her, and words came out all in a rush. “I’m all alone with this! I don’t have any help and I don’t have any money and I’m scared to death and I just want you to help me. I don’t want you to wax my eyebrows or cut my hair or my nails, I just want you to be a mom, and I just want someone to tell me everything is going to be okay even if it’s not. I need to hear everything is going to be okay. Okay? I just need a mom.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Mary, don’t be so dramatic.” Vivienne’s eyes were flashing. “You have a mom. You have a mom right here. I’m sorry if I’m a shitty mom, but I’m the one you got stuck with. And guess what? I wish I could promise you everything is going to be okay, but I can’t, because I may be a lot of things but I’m not a liar. And being a single mom is no picnic. I should know.”
Suddenly the silence in the shop was so aggressive that you could have heard a bobby pin drop.
Later that night, when Vivienne got home, long after Mary did, she knocked on Mary’s bedroom door. Mary didn’t answer, pretending to be asleep. When she opened the door—Mary would have locked it, but the lock had been broken forever and then some—Mary lay very still. She could feel Vivienne standing in the doorway for a long, long time, and then Mary heard her whisper, I’m sorry, Mare, and she stood there even after that, but Mary didn’t move, because she was sad and she was mad and she was scared and one stupid sorry wasn’t enough.
She willed Vivienne to leave, but instead Vivienne sat on the edge of the bed and she brushed Mary’s hair back from her forehead. Mary could tell Vivienne had been drinking because she could smell some kind of sweet liquor on her breath and when she started talking her words were a little slurry. She said, “I’m sorry, Mary. I’m sorry I didn’t do better. I wanted to do better. I wish I had done better. I never wanted to be all alone doing this, never. It’s hard, honey, it’s really, really hard. It’s not what I wanted for you, that’s all. It’s not what I ever wanted for you.”
Then she started to cry softly, and a tear landed right on Mary’s cheek and Mary had to try really hard not to wipe it away. She fought the urge, and she fought it some more, until finally she felt Vivienne’s weight shift off the bed and she heard the door open and then close again.
The next morning, at home, Mary lay on her bed and touched her stomach. If the baby could feel a gentle poke, then couldn’t it feel—ugh. She couldn’t let herself finish the thought. Thirteen weeks and six days, that was the deadline.
Eliza had done it, and look her now, look at her now.
She called the number in Bangor. She wrote the date and the time on the wall calendar in her room. August 3rd, ten o’clock in the morning. She’d be eighteen that day; she wouldn’t need any forms, she wouldn’t need anyone’s permission. But she’d have to get a ride. She’d have to take the day off from work.
36
LITTLE HARBOR, MAINE
Eliza
It was only once they were talking to the ER doc, a middle-aged Korean woman with long, tapered fingers and a calm, kind manner and a name tag that read DR. KWANG that Charlie mentioned the odd, not unpleasant, déjà-vu-like feeling that he’d experienced right before he’d fallen from the bed. Not quite a smell, but almost; not a memory, but sort of.
“An aura,” said Eliza and Dr. Kwang at the same time, and Dr. Kwang explained to Charlie, “An aura sometimes precedes a seizure, and seizures appear in approximately sixty percent of patients with occipital glioblastoma multiforme.” When Charlie looked at Dr. Kwang blankly Eliza said, “That’s what your tumor is called, remember, Dad?”
“Fancy name for a tumor,” said Charlie.
Dr. Kwang looked at Charlie’s chart and frowned, and then she looked at Eliza, and then Eliza asked if she could speak with her privately for a moment, and in the hallway Eliza told her everything, quickly, efficiently, the way she’d learned to speak back in med school. Dr. Kwang’s expression was inscrutable; she nodded, and they went back into the room, where Charlie was waiting.
Dr. Kwang cleared her throat and met Charlie’s eyes directly and said, “You understand, Mr. Sargent, that without treatment your condition will continue to deteriorate, most likely rapidly. I’ll write you a prescription for antiseizure medication, but that won’t have any effect on the growth of the tumor itself.”
Charlie nodded and didn’t look at Eliza. “Yes,” he said. “I do understand that.” Eliza watched again as the doctor wrote Comfort care measures only on the chart, and then she wrote out a prescription for antiseizure medication, and she handed it to Eliza with a look of genuine compassion in her eyes, and then she shook Charlie’s hand and said, “Best of luck, Mr. Sargent.”
Eliza had heard one of the nurses talking about a three-car accident on the road to Bar Harbor, and in the waiting room she’d seen one weepy child who’d sprained her ankle slipping from a rock near Otter Cliff and a man who had presented with classic food poisoning symptoms. She knew Dr. Kwang was busy and that she had to move on, but even so she wished the doctor could stay there until Eliza had the chance to pull her aside once more and say, Please. Fix him. Whatever it takes.
She led her father back to the waiting room, where Russell was sitting on a gray chair and thumbing through a People magazine, and for the first time she noticed that he was wearing very un-Russell-like clothes, a collared shirt and jeans that looked almost new.