The nurses at St. Christopher’s were very good with Mama. I guess because Mama had been a nurse too, after all. They sat with her on their breaks and brought her cups of burned coffee from the cafeteria and boxes of saltwater taffy they’d been given by grateful patients.
Sometimes Dr. Callahan visited to check over Rhona’s charts and consult with Dr. Porter, who was Rhona’s main doctor at St. Christopher’s. I was so happy to see Dr. Callahan in the ward, it surprised even me.
“Bridget, you look sensational. Italy’s agreeing with you?”
I nodded gratefully. A grubby, lumpy bit of me wanted my normality to be appreciated. As if I could easily be as sick as Rhona if I tried, but instead I was carrying on. I wanted attention for not drawing attention to myself.
When Dr. Callahan came in to talk to the other doctors about Rhona, everyone treated him as if he was a celebrity. It surprised me, because the nurses hadn’t made a fuss over Dr. Callahan the last time Rhona was in the hospital. No one had stopped to whisper with him behind the vending machines or trailed him around as he checked Rhona’s chart. But then I understood. Rhona was the celebrity. The cardiac ward didn’t normally have young women like Rhona there; the other five beds were occupied by overweight older men.
Rhona slept a lot, or else she pretended to sleep. Lying down so much was rough on her skin, and sometimes when she was awake, Mama would roll her onto her side and rub lotion on her hips and back. It was my job to support Rhona from the other side. Mama showed me how to prop her against a rolled-up towel to help her balance. Lying on her side like that was hard on her lungs, making her breath shallow. I pulled my sleeves over my knuckles so her cold fingers didn’t touch mine. As Rhona coughed, her eyes watering, I looked up, away. I stared at the grooves in the vent in the corner of the room. I tried to conjure promises to make her, enticements, like I had done with Isabella. But I had nothing to offer.
On Friday morning, I couldn’t bear being witness to another lotioning. When Mama began to turn Rhona, I made an excuse and went to the restroom, even though I didn’t need to go. I perched on the lid of the seat and covered my face with my hands, waves of tiredness rolling over me. I flushed the toilet anyway, and washed my hands carefully three times. The mere scent of hospital air gave me a creepy-crawling feeling over my skin, as if I would never scrub it all away. My scalp was raw because I religiously shampooed whenever I came home from visiting Rhona.
I went down to the lobby, where there was a small store. It sold cans of root beer and magazines and sparkly balloons and teddy bears. And also “With Sympathy” cards, which, superstitiously, I tried not to look at. I bought myself a box of Junior Mints, one of the few things I had truly missed in Italy. As I stood by the register I picked up two packets of wintergreen gum for Rhona. Rhona went through gum at a ridiculous rate. I always brought a couple of packs home for her when I went out. Mama and Dad didn’t like her to have it because they assumed she chewed it to curb her appetite. But I knew Rhona was self-conscious about her breath, which was sweet and acidic—like pear juice. I’ll leave the gum by her bedside, I thought. It was the closest I could come to coaxing her recovery.
I stood for the elevator behind two medical students. One was blond, with hair that had gone too long without a cut. The other was a redhead with a pug nose and ginger eyelashes. They filed into the back of the elevator and I stood in front of them, absently reading the tattered poster about early polio detection that I had already read a hundred times.
“What’ve you got this week?” the redhead said.
The blond one yawned. “Nothing good. Case of the clap.”
“Shh,” the redhead said, giggling. I heard the rustle of fabric as they jostled each other, and the back of my neck tingled; I knew they had been pointing to me.
“Guess what I have.”
“What?”
“Nervosa.”
My body tensed.
“No? The cardiac case?”
“Yup. Come up tomorrow before rounds, have a look.”
When the door opened I walked straight ahead, although it was the wrong direction. I didn’t want to turn my face toward them in case they saw my expression. I felt singed, like they would be able to see through the top layer of my skin.
* * *
On Monday, Granny and I drove to the hospital to wait for Dad to arrive. We decided we were going to take Mama to the movies that night. Her misty preoccupation with Rhona made her unusually compliant, so she silently went along with whatever schemes Granny and I cooked up during the day to try to distract her.
When we arrived, Mama was strangely agitated. She gripped Granny’s wrist and handed her a sheaf of papers Dr. Porter had given her to sign. Dr. Porter had asked her for permission to write about Rhona’s case for a journal. Mama said in a moony voice that Dr. Porter suggested Rhona might have inherited a genetic disorder because of her mixed blood.
“What did you say?” Granny’s voice sharpened as she turned the papers over in her hands, scanning the words.
“I told him I would consult with Roger,” Mama said.
Something about the way Mama said “Roger” made me feel floaty and incorporeal, like she hadn’t noticed me standing there. She hardly ever used Dad’s first name, instead saying “your father” or, sometimes, “Daddy-O” if she was teasing him. Clearly, the conversation was far too adult for me, and one of them should have recognized and dismissed me so I wouldn’t be exposed to any horrible details. My body was rigid and I tried to hold the strangeness of it away from me so I wouldn’t be tainted by it.
“You didn’t sign anything, did you?” I had never heard Granny use such a harsh tone with Mama.
Mama shook her head.
“Good girl,” Granny said. She took a deep sigh and caught my eye. The look of adult collusion implied in that glance made my insides squirm. I felt hot and itchy and I wanted to cry.
Granny asked Mama to go out to the diner three streets down and pick us up a sandwich. It was clearly a ruse, since she hadn’t asked Mama to do a single thing since Rhona went back into the hospital.
But Mama trotted off anyway, saying, “Ham, Budgie?” with a genuine expression of panic on her face. Her anxiety over my sandwich, even a decoy sandwich, was too much to bear, and I nodded and swallowed against the pain in my throat.
Granny and I sat in the greasy chairs in the lobby. She put her glasses on and read through the pages, handing them to me one by one as she finished. I didn’t want to read them. I thought, She can’t make me read them. So I held them in front of my face for what seemed like an appropriate amount of time, then put them down in my lap. When Granny had finished the last page, she handed it to me and I could feel her watching me. I let my eyes trail over the paper, but I wouldn’t read a word.