Bastard, she fumed.
Yeah, okay, she did feel guilty about his wife. Of course she did. She always would. More than he could ever know, for reasons he could never fathom. But, to hell with him: What the hell did he know about being a surgeon? About what that meant? About complications, and living with the ghosts of patients who’d died under your care? Each day, she made countless decisions that altered people’s lives. Operate, or don’t operate? Big incision, or little one? Cut out more of an organ—a colon, perhaps, or a liver—and risk serious complications, or cut out less and not cure the disease? And always, always, there were consequences.
“What do you know about anything?” Rita mumbled.
“A lot, actually. Take your sister. Darcy Rose Wu, aged twenty-two. Mother, Rose Wu, died shortly after birth, from unexpected complications of delivery. Correct? Raised by your father, Kevin Wu—”
“Don’t you say my father’s name,” she hissed. An orthopedic surgeon she recognized but had never spoken with, seated on a nearby bench, paused her texting to eye her curiously. Rita turned the other way and placed a hand over her mouth. “Don’t you dare say either of my parents’ names. Ever.”
“—and, after his death, by your grandmother, Peggy. And yourself. It must have been hard to be orphaned, at such a young age. I imagine it’s one of the reasons why all of those bad things happened to your sister when she was at Brown.”
Rita pursed her lips and tried to take some comfort in knowing he didn’t have the story quite straight. Because the bad things with Darcy had started long before Brown, when she was in high school: after their grandmother had died, and Rita, in her late twenties, scarcely more than a teenager herself, had become Darcy’s guardian. They’d been little things, at first. Typical teenage things. No big deal. Open the teenager textbook, flip to the moodiness chapter, and there they were. Shouting matches. Slammed doors. Sullen looks. Missed curfews. Provocative clothes.
Then the escalation when Darcy was sixteen: sneaking out for a secret night of clubbing in Tijuana with girlfriends. An awful early-morning phone call; Rita signing out her duties and leaving her shift early to drive thirty miles to the U.S. Border Patrol office in San Ysidro, its front windows glazed brown with the grimy sediment accumulated from the exhaust of millions of idling cars waiting their turn to cross into the U.S.
The humiliation. Picking up Darcy—dazed, reeking of booze and puke—from a meaty, uniformed female agent with judgmental eyes and stringy hair the same dirty shade of brown as the front windows of the office, who pushed forms at Rita across a pitted Formica counter. Sign here, please. And here. And here.
Furious, she’d let Darcy sleep Tijuana off for most of the next day, then let her have it over dinner. Really got into it with her: like what the hell had she been thinking; and didn’t she know how lucky she was that she hadn’t landed in a Mexican jail, for God’s sake; and what would Mom and Dad have thought.
Darcy, her face blotchy and pitted and pathetic, had cried: chunky tears of guilt, or anger, or both, and then fled to her room, where she’d remained most of the next week.
Looking back, Rita knew that was when she should have made herself more involved with Darcy. Active intervention then might have prevented what came later. But Rita’s insane work schedule had left her no time to be a single mom to a teenage sister.
No. That wasn’t completely true.
She could have devoted more time to Darcy. By then Rita was a doctor—not yet a fully trained one, but she had her MD, which made her employable. She could have opted out of the punishing schedule of a surgeon and found a well-paying job with normal hours in a research lab.
But she loved surgery too much, couldn’t imagine life without it. She hadn’t been willing to choose between surgery and Darcy. And after Tijuana, Rita had fooled herself into believing Darcy would figure things out on her own. Why? Because Darcy was bright and talented and sweet. Because she was a gifted writer and a beautiful singer; because she was active in the drama and glee clubs, had plenty of (normal-seeming) friends, and her grades were superb. Junior year, she’d placed second in a statewide playwriting competition for high-school kids. Second! In a state of 40 million people. How could a kid like that not figure things out on her own?