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Six hours later, as dusk starts to fall, I am out in the parking lot, fishing for my keys, ready to return home. Before Emily got sick, I was a high school English teacher. I’d returned to work when she was a year old and quit after Emily’s first seizure, when it was clear she needed full-time care.
A few weeks ago, during one of our hospital hand-offs, James suggested I return to work, at least part-time. “I know this is hard to hear, but Emily doesn’t need you the way she did before, Rachel.” She’d been in a coma for less than six weeks, not even long enough to qualify as being vegetative. I wasn’t remotely ready, and I couldn’t believe he was. Still, I tried to stay reasonable.
“Even though Emily isn’t awake the way she used to be, she still needs me,” I said. Who else was going to brush her hair, play music, talk to her—do whatever it took to remind her brain it needed to wake up? “Besides, it’s spring. Maybe I’ll talk to the school about going back in the fall.” Except I knew I wouldn’t.
James nodded his acceptance, looking weary. I knew money was tight. He paid child support and alimony, and maintaining two separate households in an expensive city wasn’t easy. When we’d sold our house, I’d moved to a duplex in Upper Falls, the cheaper end of Newton, while James had rented an apartment in one of Boston’s most expensive neighborhoods. I couldn’t help but wonder if he was reliving his bachelor days, but then he went and got married again.
Still, it felt as if he were constructing a new life for himself—the cool apartment, the beautiful wife—while I was treading water, just as Emily was. But I tried not to think that way. I didn’t want a new life. I wanted my old one back, if not with James, then with my daughter.
On the way back home I decide to stop by my mother’s house in Brookline. Since Emily’s illness started, she’s been a rock for me—bringing meals, always listening, letting me cry. My friends may have fallen away after years of unrelenting illness, but my mother hasn’t.
She visits Emily once a week, always bringing her a little present even though they just pile by her bed, unused, unseen.
As I pull into my childhood home, a brick split-level in a friendly neighbourhood, the kind with sidewalks and big front yards, a wave of nostalgia breaks over me. When I was younger, Brookline was for families like my parents—college professors, doctors, teachers, the occasional plumber or carpenter—unpretentious and solidly middle class.
Now, however, the young families have been priced out; my mother’s relatively modest four bedroom is currently worth well over a million dollars. My mom doesn’t want to sell; she still loves the neighbourhood, or at least what it used to be, and she says there are too many memories of my father there that she doesn’t want to lose, as if memories are keepsakes you can misplace. The thought is awful and terrifying. I can’t lose my memories. One day they might be all I have.
Today she meets me at the front door, beckons me back to the kitchen were the kettle is on, a batch of fresh gingerbread on the table. My mother retired from being a linguistics professor at Boston College last year, although she’s still very active in her field—going to conferences, writing scholarly articles. Still she’s always had time for me, and I don’t know what I would do without it, without her.
“How was it?” she asks gently, and I shrug.
“About what I expected.”
“Emily settled in all right?”
“Yes, I think so. I did her nails and hair.”
“Sweet.” My mother smiles as she pours the tea. “Did you take a photo?”
“Yes.” My mother always asks for photo. I swipe my phone to show her the picture of Emily with her nails and hair done, and my mother smiles at it, as if it is normal for a little girl to lie in bed like that, to stare at the ceiling, her jaw slack, her body unmoving, with pink nails and a sparkly butterfly clip.
At moments like this I don’t know whether to play along, as part of me desperately needs to, or scream. I end of up doing neither, putting my phone away and sitting down at the table.
“Anyway, it’s done,” I say, the words one of acceptance even as I rail against them. I’d briefly considered filing a lawsuit, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good. The money, and more importantly, the time, weren’t there. I need another way to help Emily. “There’s nothing I can do about it now,” I tell my mom, “but I’m still going to fight. If I can convince Dr. Brown to try some of the experimental treatments that are out there…”
Every day I read something new on the internet, the research that is being done, the progress that’s being made.
The trouble is, we’re still years away from being offered that treatment in a regular hospital, and Dr. Brown claims there aren’t any clinical trials that Emily is eligible for. But in another hospital, another country…
My mother hasn’t responded, and as she moves around the kitchen, I can tell she is a bit distracted. Her hair, usually styled in a sleek steel-gray bob, is ruffled at the back, a little bit of it sticking up in a tangle, and she keeps moving things around—a sugar bowl two inches to the left, the tea caddy an inch to the right. As if she needs to keep busy. As if she can’t look at me.
“Mom? Is everything all right?”
She looks at me quickly, too quickly, and my heart contracts. I don’t think I can take any more bad news.
“Yes, of course,” she says. “Everything’s fine. Have some gingerbread.” She pushes the plate towards me and then sits down at the table, her hands laced together in her lap.
“It’s just… you seem a little…” I’m not sure how to phrase it, or even if I can. Besides the bit of hair in the back, she looks normal. Tailored trousers, cashmere sweater, a smile. She’s my mom, the person I’ve counted on the most, especially since my dad died of a heart attack when I was only seventeen. The two of us together, for so long. I’m being paranoid, I think, because of Emily. Because of everything. “I don’t even know what,” I finish with an uncertain laugh.
My mother runs a hand over her hair, her fingers snagging in the tangle in the back and smoothing it down. “I’m fine, Rachel. Please don’t worry about me.” And even though she’s smiling, I see the shadow of concern in her eyes, the truth that she’d hiding, and I know I’m not strong enough to force the issue. Not now, not with Emily. So I swallow down the questions, and the needling concern, and sip my tea, pretending that nothing is wrong, because so much is.
6
Eva
On Monday, when James come back from work, having taken the morning off to settle Emily into the palliative unit, I ask him how it went. Of course I do, because that is the normal, expected thing for a wife to do, surely, and I do actually want to know. I want him to want to tell me.
