Girlhearts Read online

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “I’m telling you, it’s there. It’s the place to go if you’ve been in service to your country. They take care of you. That’s where I pester the docs when I have trouble with my leg, this one here.”

  “What’s wrong with your leg?”

  “They don’t know. All the brains up there, and they got plenty, let me tell you, but they can’t tell Chester Jay nothing he don’t know already. It hurts; it’s painful. Sometimes it’s a good day, and sometimes it’s not so good. Nerve damage or something, they say. Souvenir from Vietnam. So who you going to see?”

  “My mom.”

  “What’s she sick with?”

  “Not sick, exactly. She had a heart attack.… Heart attack,” I repeated, and I kept wanting to say it. Heart attack … heart attack … she had a heart attack.

  “What are you, the baby of the family?” the driver asked.

  “No, I’m the only one.” I knew what he was thinking, that Mom must be old. “My mom’s twenty-nine,” I said.

  The driver whistled. “She’s practically a kid herself. And she got a heart attack? Big smoker, I bet.”

  “No, she never smoked. She’s really healthy and strong. She has a healthy life.” Before I knew it, I was telling him everything, about Mom’s not being home last night and about Cynthia’s call in the middle of the night—the whole story. I didn’t mean to do that. It wasn’t a bid for sympathy; it just came pouring out.

  Chester Jay sort of grunted and drove the rest of the way in silence. I looked out the window and tried not to feel too stupid about what Mom would call “overwagging” my tongue.

  Chester Jay drove past a big green sign that said TROWBRIDGE HOSPITAL, then through a row of flaming maples spattered with snow. I got the money ready for him, and as soon as he pulled up in front of the door, I handed it over the seat.

  “Okay,” he said after counting the bills. “You need a receipt?”

  “No, thanks.” I swung open the door.

  “How long you going to be?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Gimme a ballpark figure.”

  “Ten minutes, or maybe fifteen.” I hitched up my backpack. “Mom’s in Intensive Care; they won’t let me stay long.”

  “Come out in twenty minutes and I’ll still be here,” he said. “I’ll drive you back home.”

  I looked in the window at him. “You will?” I wanted to reach in and hug him, but I was afraid I was going to cry. “Thank you,” I managed to say. “Thank you a lot. Really—”

  “Okay, okay, okay,” he said. “Don’t get soppy. Don’t thank me. Just get going! Twenty minutes, I said. Hoof it!”

  “I’m running,” I said, and I did. I ran to the front door and walked fast to the information desk. I was directed to the fourth floor, Wing B. The walls were painted a creamy yellow, with apple green arrows pointing to the different wings. Wing B, Intensive Care, was behind a closed set of double doors that said KEEP OUT. AUTHORIZED VISITORS ONLY.

  Six rooms rayed out from a central station, like spokes on a wheel. A number of people were around and behind the station, talking, writing on clipboards, and answering phones. It was so strange, and so familiar, in a way. It was like being caught in the middle of a TV show.

  I went up to the station and waited until someone looked up and saw me. Then I asked for Ed Bowers. “Ed’s off duty,” a nurse said, adjusting her gold-framed glasses. “Can I help you?”

  “I came to see my mom, Jane Silver.”

  “You don’t need Ed for that.” She went behind the desk and picked up some papers. “Your mother can’t have visitors now,” she said crisply. “Doctor’s orders. But if you just want to look in on her—do you want to do that?”

  “Yes, please.”

  She pointed to one of the rooms, and I went over and stood in the doorway. That was Mom in the bed, a little lump under the covers, with wires and tubes going in and out of her, and monitors banked up behind her and next to her. I watched the covers, watched the rise and fall of her breathing.

  “Mom, it’s me, Sarabeth,” I said in a near whisper. I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to talk to her. “Can you hear me?” She stirred—I was sure of it—made a little movement, like a signal.

  “Do you think she knew I was there?” I asked the nurse.

  She nodded. “Oh, very likely. Hearing is the last thing to go. Even when they’re in a coma, they hear things, and your mom’s not in a coma. Just a deep sleep. You can think of it that way. She’s just having herself a good restful sleep.”

  All the way home, sitting in the stuffy backseat of Chester Jay’s taxi, I thought about how much Mom needed that good restful sleep. Maybe this was the vacation she was always wishing for and never getting.

  Just as Chester Jay made the turn onto Stonecutter Road, I heard Mom saying, “I’m okay, babykins. Listen to me. I’m okay.” It had been years since she had called me babykins, but I knew it was her voice I’d heard. And I remembered a long time ago—maybe I was four years old—the two of us in the zoo, running down a flight of shallow wooden steps, Mom losing her footing and falling, me flinging myself onto her sprawled body, screaming. And Mom saying, “I’m okay, babykins. Listen to me. I’m okay!”

  I remembered, too, how I had taken those words into my mind and held them there, like precious things, and how I had put my arm around Mom’s waist, and how she had laughed as she limped toward the car and called herself a klutz and me a big silly for worrying so much.

  And then, when Chester Jay stopped in front of our house, I remembered something else, not from long ago, but from yesterday morning. How Mom had almost had to beg me for a kiss. How I had bent over and stingily, for an instant only, let my lips touch her cheek.

  SEVEN

  “I wonder if Patty’s sick,” Asa said, meeting me in the hall between classes. “She’s absent today. Maybe she got the flu, too, like Grant.”

  “Maybe,” I said, straightening up from the water fountain.

  “You’re looking sort of pale yourself.” Asa fiddled with her braids. “Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know.” I stared down at my sneakers. Why had I put on black high-tops? I couldn’t remember doing it. “My mom’s in the hospital,” I said. “I went to see her this morning.”

  “No way! Has she got the flu, too? My mom said it can be serious for some people.”

  “Heart attack.”

  “What? What’d you say?”

  I nodded. My eyes filled.

  “Your mom had a heart attack?” Asa said. “She’s way young for that, Sarabeth. Are you sure? Did a doctor say that?”

  The bell rang then. I walked away without saying anything else. I couldn’t. Asa called after me, but I just went on up the stairs.

  Later that morning, in the middle of social studies class, a call came over the intercom. “Sarabeth Silver.” It was Mrs. Coppel. “Come to the office right away. Your mother … Sarabeth Silver, come to the office.”

  “Okay, go on,” Mr. Abdo said. “If your mother’s here, I suppose it’s more important than this.”

  Mom was here? I went fast down the hall. I ran toward the stairs. I almost jumped into the air and clicked my heels together. Only a few hours ago, Mom had been lying in a hospital bed in the ICU, but she was strong—strong and stubborn. I could see her waking up, deciding she’d spent enough time in the hospital, pulling out all the tubes and junk they’d stuck in her, and pulling on her clothes. She’d be thinking she had things to do, people counting on her. Taking the stairs two at a time, I saw it all—Mom moving through the hospital lobby, out the door, taking in a big gulp of cold air, deciding that the first thing she had to do was to see me.

  I really knew it couldn’t be so, but I wanted to believe it.

  In the office, Mrs. Coppel was at her desk behind the high counter. “Sarabeth,” she said, her voice deepening, and she half stood up. I looked around. There were two other women working behind the counter, and
both had stopped work on their computers and were watching me. The only other person there was a girl slumped on the bench near Mr. Dunsenay’s door.

  No Mom.

  Mrs. Coppel pushed her oversized red-frame glasses up on her head. “Sarabeth,” she said again. She came to the counter, carrying the phone with its long spiraled cord. “You have a phone call, dear.”

  “Is it my mother?”

  “I … don’t think so.” She patted my arm. Her hand was warm, almost hot.

  I took the phone from her. “Hello.” Then, still thinking it could be Mom, I said, “Mom, is that you? Where are—”

  “It’s me,” Cynthia interrupted. “I’m coming over to get you now, Sarabeth. I should be there in fifteen minutes. Wait outside for me.”

  “Cynthia, are you with Mom?”

  “It’s okay for you to leave school now,” she said. “I talked to someone in the office there, your principal, I think. Go outside and wait for me,” she said, and hung up.

  I hardly had to explain anything to Mrs. Coppel. I just started to say my mother was in the hospital. “Yes, I know,” she said, and she wrote out a pass for me to give to Mr. Abdo. “Good luck, dear,” she said, and gave my arm another warm pat.

  Almost the moment I walked out the front door, Cynthia pulled up to the curb in her VW Bug, the same rusting black winter rat she’d had forever. The windshield wipers were clearing out the sleety stuff that was still falling.

  Cynthia leaned over and cranked the handle on the passenger side. You couldn’t open that door from the outside anymore.

  “We’re going straight to the hospital?” I asked, sliding in. Not really a question.

  “Yeah,” Cynthia said. Then she said, in a determined way, “No, actually. No, we’re not.”

  I looked at her, unsure if she was serious or playing with me. She had been a bar singer and acted in local theater a few times, and she could be a drama queen.

  “I went to the hospital by taxi this morning,” I said. “A Suburban Safari guy took me. He was really nice. Cynthia, I didn’t have the money for going back home, but—”

  “So you did it,” she interrupted.

  I nodded. “You were right, though. All they’d let me do was stand in the doorway and look at Mom. She was flat out asleep. Is she awake now? You wouldn’t believe … I got stupid and thought she was actually discharged and coming to school for me.” I gave a weird-sounding laugh, more like a cough.

  Cynthia just sat there, gripping the steering wheel with both hands. She looked different somehow, half-asleep, or as if something had scared her, only she was never scared of anything. Maybe it was her messy hair that made her look strange, or maybe it was the yellow slicker she was wearing, probably Billy’s, and way too big for her.

  “We have to talk,” she said after a moment. “We have to talk about some, some uh, some stuff.”

  I dropped my backpack on the floor, corralled it between my feet. “Let’s go. We can talk as we drive.”

  She pulled into traffic, but then just moseyed along like an old-man driver. “Can you drive faster, please,” I said.

  “Sure,” she said, but she didn’t. “We should talk,” she said again.

  “Talk about what?” My throat was dry. “Oh, I know,” I sang out, being half cute, half serious. “Money! Money! I know! Okay, so we don’t have health insurance! So we can’t pay the bill straight off! So what? What’s the hospital going to do, make Mom wash dishes before they let her out?” My heart skittered around in my chest. I hadn’t actually thought until that moment about the hospital bill. How would we ever pay it off?

  “What, you guys don’t have health insurance?” Cynthia said.

  “I thought you knew that, Cynthia! You know all our secrets. No money, no Leo, no health insurance.”

  “You okay, Sarabeth?” Cynthia turned to look at me. “Don’t melt down on me.”

  “I’m fine.” I found a hard candy in my pocket and stuck it in my mouth. “You know what Mom always says—‘We can’t afford to get sick, so we just won’t.’” As soon as I said it, I wished I hadn’t. That was as absurd as trying to convince myself that Mom had been waiting for me in the office.

  “‘So we just won’t,’” Cynthia echoed in a little voice that was completely unlike her. She slid through a light turning red and made a bumpy left turn onto Linkline Road. Big houses, huge lawns. She was crying.

  “Cynthia?” I said.

  She pulled over to the side of the road, next to a pair of stone lions on pedestals. “Sarabeth, I don’t know how to say this.… Jane is …” She turned the ignition key off, then on again. “I can’t talk in the car,” she said.

  “I don’t want to talk now, anyway. Let’s go! I want to see Mom.” I reached over, put my foot on the gas pedal, floored it, and the car, still in gear, leaped forward.

  “Hell!” Cynthia shouted, and kicked my foot off the pedal. She pulled the keys out of the ignition and threw them on the dashboard. “They couldn’t resuscitate her,” she said, and she covered her face with both hands.

  I knew what resuscitate meant, but I couldn’t get it clearly into my mind. It was something about breathing. Breathing into another person’s mouth? For instance, if you were swimming and swallowed water, and then you were gagging and choking—no, no, gagging and choking was when they pounded you on the back. Or was it the chest? Or was that when you swallowed something and it got stuck in your throat? No again—that was when they grabbed you around the middle and squeezed. The Heimlich maneuver.

  There was something else, another procedure, if your heart stopped. That was when they pounded you on the chest. They would pound you with fists, maybe break your ribs doing it, but that didn’t matter, because if they didn’t pound you, you would die.

  All at once, the lights went on everywhere in the enormous house at the top of the enormous lawn we were parked in front of. The chattering voice in my mind commented that lights made any house, even a big one, look cozy. Maybe I should walk up the long, long driveway, knock on the big, big door, and tell the woman who answered that my mom was in the hospital, and ask if I could use her phone to call there? The woman would be sympathetic, concerned. She’d tell me to sit down. She’d bring me a glass of water with a lemon slipped over the edge. She’d punch in the number for me, get right through to Mom, and hand me the phone. She’d probably have white leather couches and big vases of fresh flowers everywhere.

  Flowers! I should have bought flowers for Mom. That’s what you did when someone was in the hospital. You took flowers to the hospital, and then got more to welcome her when she came home. Flowers were expensive, but it didn’t matter. Maybe I’d even buy roses, yellow roses, which Mom loved.

  A long time seemed to have passed since Cynthia had said the r word. But how long could it have been? Here we were, still sitting in the car, and there was Cynthia, still covering her face and making those sounds, and here I was, still thinking these useless thoughts. Cynthia raised her head. Blue eyeliner was smeared down one cheek.

  “Sarabeth …” Her voice squeaked into a sob. She reached out her arms to me. “Why do I have to tell you this? She had another heart attack this morning. Oh, Sarabeth. Oh, poor baby. Oh … Jane … she, she … she’s dead. She died.” Her lips trembled.

  “You’re crazy,” I said. I fumbled for the door handle. “You’re really crazy, and I’m not staying here with you.”

  I got out of the car and began walking. I’d go to the hospital myself.

  I’d tell Mom about Cynthia’s blurting out that she had died. Mom would get a laugh out of that, remind me that Cynthia had a tendency to jump the gun. “You think I’d drop out on you like that?” she’d say. “Can’t get rid of me that easy!

  I should have gone up to the stone-lion house. The nice woman would have driven me to the hospital in her Mercedes-Benz. She had to have a Mercedes. All rich people had a Mercedes, or maybe even two. One would be a little sports car that was just for her. We’d get in and she’d zip pa
st all the traffic. Get me to the hospital in record time. She would probably go right up to Mom’s room with me.

  The VW horn bleated behind me, seemed to bleat out the word resuscitate. Strange word. It lodged itself in my mind. That whispery sus sound and then citate, so crackly and crisp. I walked faster. Cars passed, tires crackling over the road, the sound of cornflakes. Cornflakes! I had to tell Mom that one; she’d get a laugh out of that, too.

  The VW moved slowly, half on the road, half on the shoulder. A horn blasted, and one of those big vans swung out into the passing lane, past Cynthia’s little car. The Bug pulled up next to me. Cynthia reached over and swung open the passenger door. “Sarabeth,” she called.

  I got in the car. Cynthia reached for my hand. “It was quick. She didn’t suffer, sweetie.”

  Sweetie. What Mom called me sometimes. “Don’t talk to me,” I said. “Please, just go.”

  I slumped back against the seat, my eyes closed, listening to the sound of the tires vibrating on the road.

  EIGHT

  “Do you have your keys?” Cynthia asked, pulling up in front of our house. I got out without answering.

  Inside, Tobias met us, pushing out his back legs. I knelt and looked in his face. I’d read that cats could warn people of earthquakes, that they became terribly agitated and insisted that attention be paid. But then, why not heart attacks? “Couldn’t you have warned us?” I whispered hotly at him. My neck ached, and I wanted to shake him. He blinked, then turned away from me, as if he could smell my anger.

  “You need something hot to drink,” Cynthia said. She took off the yellow slicker, hung it over the back of a chair. “I’ll make you a cup of tea; then you can get some things together.” She filled the kettle and put it on the stove. “You don’t have to take everything now, just enough for a few days.”

  I sat down and fiddled with a spoon, tapping it slowly on the table. Tap … tap … tap.… The table was still set for Mom from last night. “I told you, Cynthia, I’m not going with you.” All the way home, we’d argued about where I was going to sleep tonight. Cynthia wanted me to go to her house. I wanted to stay right here. “You’re not going to pry me out of here,” I said.