The Outcast (20 page)

Ida Mae pulls up in front of the clinic and slips her truck into park. Last night, we agreed that I would go into the appointment by myself and then call her when it was over. But now, knowing that I am to face this all alone, I begin shaking so badly I cannot unhook the fastenings of Eli’s car seat.

Stretching across the seat, Ida Mae puts her sandpapered hand over mine. “Rachel-girl,” she says, her voice softer than I have ever heard it, “you go on in. I’ll call Russell and tell him to open the store; then I’ll come in to be with ya.”

I stare at my son’s legs flailing in the car seat, then nod and blink hard to keep tears from falling onto my cheeks.

In the waiting room, the receptionist with jet-black hair cropped like a boy’s and sparkly pink lipstick passes me a clipboard layered with papers that I must fill out. Sitting down, I realize that a majority of the information the papers ask for I cannot provide. Eli has no primary care physician; he has not had any of the immunizations listed. I do not have a telephone number; I do not even have Ida Mae’s address memorized. I obviously cannot write Eli’s father’s information down. In doing so, I would be wreaking havoc in more directions than I can name. As my anxiety increases, so do the jolting feelings inside my body. I look up from the papers at the jacketed children sitting on their mothers’ laps or playing with colorful plastic toys on the floor. I then notice that about
half of these mothers are observing Eli and me as though we are some strange specimens trapped in a jar.

The vibrations of fear reverberating throughout my body morph into anger. I slam the clipboard in my lap. “Don’t you know it’s considered rude to stare?”

The women who were watching us drop their eyes to their children or to their clipboards like my own. The ones who weren’t looking glance up, searching around the room for a face to match to the sound of the voice. When their flittering eyes alight on me in my conservative cape dress and black lace-up shoes, their mouths gape open like they have forgotten how to breathe. Embarrassed by my flash of temper, I draw Eli close and act like I am filling out information when I don’t know how to begin.

“Eli?” a nurse says. “Is there an Eli Stoltz—” she looks down at her clipboard—“Stoltzfoos here?”

“Yes. We’re here.” I stand and look out the window toward the parking lot, where Ida Mae’s leaning against the brick wall, talking on her phone. When she sees me, she mutters something and snaps the phone shut.

“You’ll come in with me?” I ask once she enters the clinic.

But Ida Mae is already moving past me toward the nurse. “What?” she says, looking over her shoulder. “You think I’m gonna let my young’uns go through this rigmarole alone?”

Rachel

Dr. Mandy Vaughan smiles when she comes into the antiseptic room and sees our unusual trio waiting there: Ida Mae, with her flanneled arms crossed, watching the doctor’s every move through distrustful brown eyes; Eli, happily gnawing on a wooden block carved with the letter
D
; and me, wearing a cape dress whose somber hue contrasts with the bloom of fear in my cheeks.

Taking the stool opposite us, Dr. Vaughan crosses her legs and moistens her lips. She smiles again.

Eli’s cooing and the ticking of the black-and-white clock are the only sounds in the room.

“Miss Stoltzfus . . .”

I nod to reassure Dr. Vaughan that I am listening, but it takes effort to register my own name.

“Miss Stoltzfus, your son’s blood work came back showing that his white counts are abnormally high.” She stops and clears her throat.

My eyes will her to continue, as my mouth is too stunned to work. Finally, she swallows hard and looks back at us. “Because of this and because of a small mass that showed up on the chest X-ray, Dr. Riordian and I have agreed that he should be tested further. Tomorrow, I would like to schedule an FNA—that is, a fine-needle aspiration biopsy—for the lumps in Eli’s neck and groin and a CAT scan for this Friday.”

“A cat scan?” Ida Mae’s question is distorted by the ringing in my ears. “What on earth’s that?”

“
C-
A-T
stands for computerized axial tomography. Simply put, it’s where patients’ veins are injected with a radioactive dye, and then they are sent through a tube that takes X-rays that will reveal anything foreign in the body.”

Resting my chin on Eli’s head, I rotate my jaw from side to side, trying to relieve the horrible ache from having to hold back my scream. Eli’s alphabet block drops to the examining table. Like an automaton, I reach down and pass it back. “What—what kind of foreign thing?” I stammer.

Dr. Vaughan meets my eyes. For a moment, I can peer beneath her bedside manner to the sorrow emanating from the difficult words she has been preparing herself to speak.
“I’m going to be honest with you, Miss Stoltzfus.” She breaks eye contact and looks at her hands. “I am scheduling this CAT scan so close to the fine-needle biopsy because I want . . . I want to rule out any possibilities of cancer.”

Breath empties from my lungs. My arms constrict around Eli as if they possess the power to keep the menace away, even a menace threatening to destroy my child from the inside out. “Cancer?” The word is muted into a whimper.

Still, Dr. Vaughan can read the toxic form of it in my mouth. “Yes, Miss Stoltzfus. But don’t get me wrong; I am not saying that cancer is what Eli has. It’s just that with his symptoms—” the doctor rattles them off like a grocery list, although, when added up, they lead to a diagnosis bringing with it the possibility of death—“high white counts, difficulty breathing, night sweats, fevers, weight loss, and swollen glands . . . Well, with symptoms like that, I want to rule out the worst. I’ve always believed the sooner we know what we are dealing with, the better we can deal with it. No matter
what
it is.”

I bow my head over Eli and silently bathe his downy blond hair with tears. My frantic heartbeat thuds against the upper portion of his chest where the mass must be.
Oh, Lord, please,
I beg.
Forgive me. Don’t pour your wrath out on my child because of what your wayward child’s done.

My son looks up as my sobbing chest palpitates against his own. Wiping my eyes with my fist, I breathe deep and attempt to smile at him. He smiles back, his blue eyes
trusting that I possess the ability to keep him out of harm’s way. My no-longer-restrained sobs ricochet throughout the room. Over them, I hear Ida Mae get up from the chair. The paper sheet crinkles as she sits on the examination table beside me. She wraps an arm around my quaking shoulders, buoying me up when I feel like I am drowning beneath the weight of two benign syllables that crash together to reveal a malignant word.

“I’m sorry, Miss Stoltzfus,” Dr. Vaughan says, “that I even have to mention that word in regard to your son.” When I do not reply in the pause, she adds, “I’ll see you tomorrow, then. Tomorrow at ten.”

Ida Mae, her voice thick with tears, asks, “What about insurance? I don’t know much ’bout medical things, but I know that when you start mentioning biopsies and scans, we’re talking big money. This girl don’t got insurance. She don’t even have a car.”

“I’m afraid I can’t help you there.” My eyes remain clenched, but I can tell that Dr. Vaughan has slipped into her role of the detached doctor again. “But if more testing is required, you will be assigned a social worker who will help you figure out your financial situation. Until then, go down to the billing department on the first floor. They might be able to answer your questions.”

The door clicks as Dr. Vaughan exits. Every muscle in my body spasms; my teeth chatter inside my throbbing skull. Passing Eli to Ida Mae, I turn and bury my face in the paper covering the examination table. I pull the thin
pillow up to my mouth and release the scream that has been building inside my chest since Dr. Vaughan stepped into the room wearing her white lab coat and her nervous smile.

For a long time, Ida Mae does not start the truck. She and I just sit, staring through the dirty windshield up at the multitiered hospital aglitter with mica. Eli babbles in the car seat between us, oblivious to the troubled maze of our thoughts. Ida Mae says, “A biopsy . . . I’m telling ya, that don’t mean a thing. I had one a few years back ’cause I had this lump in my breast, but here there was nothing to it. It just meant I was drinking too much coffee.”

Unforeseen terror stops up my throat. I wonder if I’ll be able to speak or fully breathe until the biopsy results are in my hands, until I know that all of this is actually nothing.

Ida Mae turns on the engine, and the radio flares to life, its jaunty tune grating against our shattered nerves. She snaps it off. “Where should I take ya? Home?” Ida Mae waits for my answer, then adds, “If ever you needed a mom and a sister, I say it’s now.”

“No.” My frustration is evident even in a fragment. “I told you. I can’t go back. Some people, they . . . they might try to stop me from getting Eli tested.”

“You mean his dad, huh?”

I look at Ida Mae sharply, but she is staring straight ahead. Her bitten fingernails gouge the steering wheel as
she drives out of the parking lot. “But mostly my
mamm
,” I say. “She doesn’t believe in modern-day medicine.”

“Your mom’s one thing,” Ida Mae says. “But don’t you think Eli’s dad has to sign some kinda permission form before the tests can even be started?”

My stomach roils at the thought of that man’s signature being required to save my son’s life. “So far Eli’s father’s only been involved the night he was conceived,” I say, the words bitter granules on my tongue. “I’m not about to take the chance that, just because Eli might be sick, he would feel guilty and want to become involved now.”

“Welp,” Ida Mae says, merging into traffic, “if you’re not gonna tell Eli’s dad or your momma, you still might want to tell your twin.”

“Please.”
I rest my temple against the window. Leftover tears smear the glass, although my hot eyes are dry. “I really don’t want to talk about this. Just take me home.”

“My home?”

I sigh. “What other home do I have?”

AMOS

On their way to the hospital the next morning, Ida Mae drives past a barbershop advertising a haircut and shave for ten dollars. “Actually—” Rachel turns and looks out the rear window—“I want to get my hair cut first.”

“Your hair cut?” Ida Mae repeats. “Like a trim?”

“No. Like a transformation. I want this—” Rachel indicates the beautiful hair coiled on the back of her head—“this whole thing gone.”

“But you’ve never had it cut.”

“I know. That’s why I want to.”

“Today?”

Flipping down the visor, Rachel uses the mirror to locate her bobby pins. “Yes. Today.” The pins begin filling Rachel’s lap, and her hair unravels like yarn. “I need to be in control of something
—anything
—and this is the only thing I can think of.”

Ida Mae bumps her truck over the yellow cement barriers slowing down traffic in front of the barbershop. “This is where guys get their hair cut. Not girls. You know that, right?”

“What’s that matter?” Rachel says. “Hair’s hair. It’s not like they can mess it up.”

Rachel is already smiling as she walks toward the glass door with its spinning candy-striped pole outside, and Ida Mae doesn’t have the heart to dissuade her.

But twenty minutes later, a mere hour before Eli’s surgery, Ida Mae wishes she had said something. Rachel is now leaning against the passenger’s side of the truck with a twenty-three-inch ponytail coiled in her lap. She doesn’t say anything, as she didn’t say anything when the man started hacking away at her virgin hair as if he were cutting wheat in a field.

“It’ll grow,” Ida Mae says, reaching over and touching the blunt strands of Rachel’s shoulder-length hair. “It’ll grow back in no time.”

Shrugging, Rachel continues to stare out the window.

Ida Mae glances over. “You all right?”

“I’m
fine
.”