Dirty Little Secrets (7 page)

I checked my watch. Eleven thirty on a Tuesday morning. The only people who would really be around were old Mrs. Raj next door and maybe TJ from across the street, unless his mom put him in some sort of day camp during vacation. I decided going out the front was worth the risk—mainly because I had no other choice.

As I set the box down behind the garage, I felt like I had begun to accomplish something. I was even sweating from the exertion, despite the cold weather, so I took off my jacket and hung it on the back of the front doorknob as I came back in.

I was feeling even more accomplished as I hauled the next box out the front door. I heard the skateboard wheels scraping the concrete before I saw him.

“Hey,” TJ said as he kicked the back of his skateboard so it landed in his hand. “Whatcha doin'?”

I shifted the weight of the box to my hip and turned to him. “Just some cleaning.”

“My mom always does that after Christmas so she can make room for the new stuff,” he said.

“Well, there you go.” I turned to walk away.

“Can I help?” he asked.

I sighed and stopped walking. I really liked him, but the last thing I needed was a kid hanging around asking questions. “No, TJ. Not really. I'm doing fine on my own.”

“Are you getting rid of anything good?”

“I don't know,” I said. “How about I let you know when I'm finished.”

“I can go through it with you,” he said. “Come on, I'm totally bored.”

I looked up and down the empty street. “Aren't there any other little kids around today?”

TJ tipped his helmet back on his head with one hand. “I'm not a little kid,” he said. “I'm in third grade.”

“Listen,” I said. “Anyone I babysit on a regular basis is a little kid. Go find someone else to bother. I'm really busy here.”

“Fine.” TJ's shoulders slumped as he turned to walk down my driveway. Great. Now his feelings were hurt. I really did not have time for this.

“Hey, T,” I called after him. “How about I make a pile for you to go through later? If I find any cool stuff Phil left behind I'll give you first pick.”

He shrugged without turning around, but dropped his skateboard on the sidewalk and, with a running start, rolled around the corner and out of sight. I took that as a yes.

Back inside, I felt good, like I was making progress. As I stuffed the boxes full of paper, I grabbed a bag labeled “Scrub City”—Mom's favorite clothing store. Sure enough, it was filled with colorful nursing scrubs with the tags still on, and I wondered how long ago she'd bought these. I pulled out a shirt that was covered with
Simpsons
characters all dressed for Christmas—Homer had on a Santa hat and Lisa's saxophone was covered in lights. Mom always found the most obnoxious scrubs to wear because she said it made her people feel better to look at something cheerful. She never called them her patients, always her “people.” I guess calling them patients would make it more obvious that a lot of them were never going home again. Maybe after, I could take these down to her work and let the other nurses have them. Sort of like Mom's legacy.

I'd gone down to the hospital with her for one of those “Take Your Daughter to Work” days a couple of years ago. I'd been there lots of times, usually parked at the nurses' station with a supply of pens and pads of paper with the names of pharmaceutical companies written on the top, but we never stayed more than a couple of minutes—just long enough for her to pick up her paycheck or see to one of her people quickly. I'd spent half a day there once when the daycare lady didn't show up, but I'd never seen her actually work before.

I'd expected the same cranky, irritated person I saw at home every day, but once she stepped through the sliding doors, she was different. Her face softened, and there was a slight smile on her lips as we approached the floor where she worked.

“Good morning, Mr. Evans,” she said to a tall, skinny bald man as we got off the elevator. He was wearing red plaid pajamas with a matching red plaid robe and gripped a tall pole that held an assortment of IV bags. Tubes snaked from under his robe and attached to the bags as he wheeled the contraption along beside him.

“Good morning, Joanna,” he said, his gaunt face assembling into a slight smile. He turned to me. “Do we have a new nurse on the ward?” I'd picked the least objectionable pair of scrubs in her closet, but I was still mortified to be seen with roller-skating penguins all over my shirt. Mom said if I was going to miss an entire day of school, I had to look the part.

“This is my daughter Lucy,” she said, putting her arm around me like it was the most natural thing in the world. “She's come to see what we do here all day, so you boys better behave yourselves.” She winked at him as she said it. Arm around my shoulder? Winking? It was like Mom had been taken over by some kindly nurse alien.

“Aw, come on, Jo,” he said, winking back. “That's no fun now, is it?”

“Just see what you can do for the next few hours, okay?” Mom patted his arm as he continued his slow shuffle down the hallway.

Mom turned to me. “Let's get you settled, shall we?” she said brightly, like we were going to spend the day at Disneyland instead of in a hospital cancer ward. We went to the nurses' station and put our purses in the locked filing cabinet that held her stuff. She introduced me to the other nurses on the floor, reminding me which ones I'd met over the years. She kept saying, “My youngest, Lucy,” as if she was actually proud of that fact rather than thinking I was a liability.

For the next few hours, I followed her around the floor, watching her check charts and stick needles into IV tubes. Mom chatted with the people in the beds like they were old friends—asking about their kids or their husbands, talking about the latest episode of some cop show they both watched, even while she had to pump some chemical into their bodies that was bound to make them feel even worse than they did already. She let me carry the bottles of medicine and once let me hold an IV bag, but most of the time I felt embarrassed for being upright and healthy while all these people were so sick.

Late in the afternoon, we stopped by a half-closed door to a darkened room. Mom pushed it open, but turned to me. “I'm going to take this one alone, okay? Do you mind waiting here for just a minute? I'll be right back.”

“Yeah. Okay,” I said. She sounded so calm and reasonable I almost didn't know how to react. It was like we'd spent the day reading a script of how a good mother-daughter team should communicate. I couldn't help watching through the crack in the door as she talked softly to someone I couldn't see behind a curtain. Instead of the harsh florescent lights and blaring TV in the rest of the rooms, this one was lit by a small bedside lamp and had soft classical music playing in the background. I could see Mom standing at the foot of the bed and stroking the tops of the person's feet under the blankets.

“Your mama is good at what she does,” her boss, Nadine, said, coming up behind me so softly I jumped.

“Oh, I was just, uh . . . she asked me to wait out here,” I said, looking as guilty as I felt for peeking.

“It's fine, sugar,” she said. “Mrs. Collingwood is one of your mama's special people. No family or even many friends around, so Joanna tends to spend a little extra time. Mrs. Collingwood's been in and out of here so much over the years that we told her last time we'd issue her a FastPass so she could go right to the head of the line.” She looked at my blank face. “That was a joke.”

I smiled weakly, but it seemed wrong to joke in a place that held this much pain. “I got it,” I said.

Nadine reached out to pat my shoulder. “Been a hard day for you?”

I shrugged. It had been weird to see Mom so efficient, so capable of taking care of other people when I knew deep down she was a failure at taking care of her kids. Maybe she used up all the good stuff before she got home. The person Nadine saw at work every day and the person who slept in her robe on our green recliner every night seemed like two different people.

Nadine peeked through the crack in the door. “I'd tell you it gets easier, but it doesn't, really.” She nodded toward Mom. “Joanna is one of the most caring and knowledgeable nurses I've ever worked with. Plenty of times she's caught things even the doctors have missed.” She turned to me. “Think you'll ever become a nurse? Or a doctor?”

“Oh, I don't know,” I said, but that was really just to be polite, because I did know. Nursing was one more way I wouldn't be like Mom when I got older.

I could hear Mom's shoes squeak as she turned to leave the room, so I took a couple of steps away from the door. She forced a smile as she closed the door behind her.

“She's having a tough time,” Mom said to Nadine. She looked at a chart in her hands. “I tell you what, Lucy,” she said. “School would be almost over by now, so what's say I run you home on my break and then come back here for a while?”

“Okay,” I said.

“You come back and see us anytime,” Nadine said, and gave me a quick hug.

“Thanks, I will.”

Mom drove me home, and then stayed at the hospital until way after I went to bed. As I lay there alone in the dark that night, I wondered if you had to be sick or dying to get Mom's full attention. I never asked, but I always pictured Mrs. Collingwood dying that night, with Mom sitting next to her, talking softly and rubbing her feet as she slipped away. It was an image I tried to keep with me whenever she was being particularly unreasonable or screaming her head off at how stupid I was. I would remember back to the day I was proud of her, and somehow that made it not so bad.

chapter 6

12:30 p.m.

Once the first boxes were filled and put away, I had to drag more empty ones out of the garage. I tried to look at it as though I was getting rid of two things at once, and from the looks of the garage, Mom probably had enough cardboard boxes to handle most of what was in the house. She always said she could start sorting through her things once she got enough boxes. I was guessing she finally had enough.

My stomach started rumbling as I picked my way through the piles in the front hallway, and I wished I'd gotten something to eat when I'd gone out before. As I was lifting a pile of newspapers from the far corner of the living room, I stumbled and the stack hit something that made a faint tinkling sound. I tossed some newspapers off the top and saw the familiar dark wood. Our old piano. It had been so long since I'd seen it, I'd actually forgotten we had one. Shoving years of junk off the keyboard, I hit a few notes that were wildly out of tune but left me with a strangely satisfied feeling inside.

Somewhere in a distant corner of my mind, I remembered being a really little kid and sitting with my back against the side of the piano, feeling the notes run up my spine as Mom's hands flew over the keyboard. When Daddy first left us, Mom spent all her free time playing the piano. She didn't play lullabies or pretty music, though. Her songs were loud and harsh and demanded that you pay attention. I would sit for what seemed like hours with my head just barely touching the dark wooden piano leg, watching as her feet worked the pedals furiously. I used to think that someday she would pedal that piano so hard it would start up, crash through the wall, and drive off down the street.

My fingers left prints in the dust that had settled on the faded wood. Nobody had touched the piano in years. After Mom stopped crying all the time, she didn't seem to need the music anymore. I wondered if she buried the piano to forget about it, or if once it was buried, she never thought about music at all.

Over the next hour, I filled six more boxes of various sizes and deposited them behind the garage. That space was starting to look fuller, but I wasn't seeing much difference inside the house. Plus, my arms were aching from all that lifting. I shook them out to try to get the blood flowing again.

As I looked around, I started to notice the clothes. There were clothes everywhere—some on hangers dangling off furniture and doorknobs, some in plastic bags with the tags still on them, and some draped here and there over stacks of other things, like someone had discarded a shirt or pants and was coming back to get them in a minute.

I picked up one of the black trash bags and started grabbing at the clothes that were within reach. Mom went shopping almost every day looking for deals, but we didn't go out together very often. She always said I slowed her down because I stopped to look at everything, and she had a very cutthroat method of getting through a store. It was almost as if she wasn't interested in what she bought: the real point of the trip was the discount she got. She thought thrift stores were invented just for her.

There was a large red Macy's bag underneath a pile of shirts in the living room. I stuffed the shirts into the giveaway bag and reached for the Macy's bag that was full of something, but it didn't feel like clothes. Pulling the handles apart, I spotted six or seven wallets, all the same style but in different colors. I recognized them immediately because I had a green one exactly like them in my purse.

We'd been on one of our rare mother-daughter shopping trips when I'd found the wallets on the sale rack last year. They came in a dozen colors ranging from hot pink (definitely not me) to more muted sage and cobalt blue. They were perfect because they weren't filled with spaces for photos of the friends I didn't have. Just room for money and a license if I ever got one. I was looking at the display when Mom came up behind me.

“Ooh, these are nice,” she said. She picked up a pink one and opened it to see the inside.

“Yeah, I need a new wallet,” I said warily. I never knew if Mom would be in a bad mood and accuse me of wasting money even if it was mine. “I've been using my black one for such a long time, it's falling apart. What do you think, green or blue?”