SUMMER INTERNSHIP POSITIONS/DEPARTMENT 27 page

"I can't believe Tully would do that," Mom said. "She must have thought—"

"Don't," Kate said sharply, wiping her eyes. "I don't care what she thought or wanted or believed. Not anymore."

Tully ran out into the hallway, but Kate was gone.

She stood there too long, then turned and went back onstage, where she stared at a sea of unfamiliar faces. She tried to smile, she really did, but for once her cast-iron will failed her. She heard the quiet murmuring of the crowd; it was the sound of sympathy. Behind her, Dr. Tillman was talking, filling the void with words she could neither follow nor understand. She realized that he was keeping the show going since they were live.

"I just wanted to help her," she said to the audience, interrupting him. She sat down on the edge of the stage. "Did I do something wrong?"

Their applause was loud and went on and on, their approval as unconditional as their presence. It should have filled up the empty places in her, that had always been their role, but now the applause didn't help.

Somehow she made it through the rest of the broadcast.

Finally, though, she was as alone onstage as she felt. The audience had filed out and her employees had all left. None had had the courage to even speak to her on the way out. She knew they were angry at her for ambushing Johnny, too.

As if from a great distance, she heard footsteps. Someone was coming toward her.

Dully, she looked up.

Johnny stood there. "How could you do that to her? She trusted you. We trusted you."

"I was just trying to help her. You told me she was falling apart. Dr. Tillman told me that drastic situations call for drastic measures. He said suicide was—"

"I quit," he said.

"But . . . tell her to call me. I'll explain."

"I wouldn't count on hearing from her."

"What do you mean? We've been friends for thirty years."

Johnny gave her a look so cold she began to shake. "I think that ended today."

Pale morning light came through the windows, brightening the white-painted sills. Outside, seagulls cawed and dove through the air; the sound, combined with the waves slapping against the shore, meant that the ferry was chugging past their house.

Ordinarily, Kate loved these morning noises. Even though she'd lived on this beach for years now, she still loved to watch the ferries pass by, especially at night when they were lit like floating jewel boxes.

Today, though, she didn't even smile. She sat in bed, with a book open in her lap so that her husband would leave her alone. As she stared at the pages, the type blurred and danced like black dots on the creamy paper. Yesterday's fiasco kept playing in her mind, over and over. She saw it from a dozen angles. The title: Overprotective mothers and the teenage daughters who hate them.

Hate them.

Crushing your daughter's tender spirit . . .

And Dr. Tillman, coming toward her, saying she was a terrible parent; her mother in the front row, starting to cry; Johnny jumping from his seat, shouting something to a cameraman that Kate couldn't hear.

She still felt shell-shocked by all of it, numb. Beneath the numbness, though, was a raw and terrible anger that was unlike anything she'd felt before. She had so little experience with genuine anger that it scared her. She actually worried that if she started screaming, she'd never stop. So she kept the lid on her emotions and sat quietly.

She kept glancing at the phone, expecting Tully to call.

"I'll hang up," she said. And she would. She was actually looking forward to it. For all the years of the friendship, Tully had pulled shit like this (well, nothing really like this), and it had fallen to Kate to apologize, whether it was her fault or not. Tully never said she was sorry; she just waited for Kate to smooth things over.

Not this time.

This time Kate was so hurt and angry, she didn't care if they stayed friends or not. If they were to get back together, Tully was going to have to work for it.

I'll hang up a lot of times.

She sighed, wishing the thought made her feel better, but it didn't. She felt . . . broken by yesterday.

There was a knock at her door. It could be any member of her family. Last night they'd circled the wagons around her, treating her like a breakable princess, protecting her. Mom and Dad had spent the night; Kate thought her mom was on suicide watch, that was how overbearing she was. Dad kept patting her shoulder and saying how pretty she was, and the boys, who didn't know exactly what was wrong but sensed that it was big, hung on her constantly. Only Marah stood back from the drama, watching it all from a distance.

"Come in," Kate said, sitting up taller, trying to look more durable than she felt.

Marah walked into the room. Dressed for school in low-rise jeans, pink UGG boots, and a gray hoodie sweatshirt, she tried to smile, but it was a failure. "Grandma said I had to talk to you."

Kate was relieved beyond measure simply by her daughter's presence. She moved to the middle of her bed and patted the empty place beside her.

Marah sat opposite her instead, leaning back against the silk-upholstered footboard, with her legs drawn up. Ragged holes in her favorite jeans showed the knobby curl of her knees.

Kate couldn't help longing for the time when she could have scooped her daughter into her arms and held her. She needed that now. "You knew about the show, didn't you?"

"Tully and I talked about it. She said it would help us."

"And?"

Marah shrugged. "I just wanted to go to the concert."

The concert. It hurt Kate deeply, that simple, selfish answer. She'd forgotten about the concert and Marah's running away. The trip to Kauai had cleared her mind of all of that.

No doubt as Tully had intended. It had also gotten Johnny out of the way so he couldn't stop the plan.

"Say something," Marah said.

But Kate didn't quite know what to say, how to handle this. She wanted Marah to understand how selfish she'd been and how deeply that selfishness had hurt Kate, but she didn't want to load guilt on her. The weight of this debacle fell on Tully. "Did it occur to you when you and Tully were hatching this plan that I might be hurt and embarrassed by it?"

"Did you think that I'd be hurt or embarrassed by not getting to go to the concert? Or rockin' midnight bowling? Or to—"

Kate held up a hand. "So it's still about you," she said tiredly. "If this is all you have to say, you can leave. I don't have the strength to fight with you now. You were selfish and you hurt my feelings, and if you can't see that and take responsibility for it, I feel sorry for you. Get out. Go."

"Whatever." Marah got off the bed, but she moved slowly. At the door, she paused and turned around. "When Tully comes over—"

"Tully won't be coming over."

"What do you mean?"

"Your idol owes me an apology. That's not something she's good at. I'd say it's something else you two have in common."

For the first time, Marah looked scared. And it was at the prospect of losing Tully.

"You better think about how you're treating me, Marah." Kate's voice broke on that; she struggled to sound in control. "I love you more than the world and you're hurting me on purpose."

"It's not my fault."

Kate sighed. "How could it be, Marah? Nothing ever is."

It was exactly the wrong thing to say. Kate knew it the second she said it, but she couldn't take it back.

Marah yanked open the door and slammed it shut behind her.

Quiet came instantly. Somewhere outside a rooster crowed and a pair of dogs barked at each other. She heard people walking around downstairs. The floorboards of this old house creaked with the movement.

Kate looked at the phone, waiting for it to ring.

"I think it was Mother Teresa who said that loneliness is the worst kind of poverty," Tully said, sipping her dirty martini.

The man to whom she spoke looked startled for a moment, as if he were driving on some dark, empty stretch of road and a deer had suddenly bounded into his path. Then he laughed, and there was so much in the sound, a shared camaraderie, a hint of superiority, an undercurrent of privilege. No doubt he'd learned to laugh like that in the hallowed halls of Harvard or Stanford. "What do people like us know about poverty or loneliness? There must be one hundred people here, at your birthday party, and God knows the champagne and caviar didn't come cheap."

Tully stood there, trying—and failing—to remember his name. He was her guest; she ought to know who in the hell he was.

And why had she made such a ridiculously transparent remark to a stranger?

Disgusted with herself, she finished the martini—her second—and walked over to the makeshift bar that had been set up in the corner of her penthouse. Behind the tuxedoed bartender, the glittering starburst of the Seattle skyline was a magical combination of bright lights and black sky.

She waited impatiently for her third martini, making small talk with the bartender. The minute the drink was ready, she set a course for the terrace, sailing past the table overflowing with foil- and ribbon-wrapped gifts. She knew without opening a single package the kind of gifts she'd received: champagne glasses from Waterford or Baccarat; silver bracelets and frames from Tiffany; Montblanc pens; perhaps a cashmere throw or a pair of blown-glass candlesticks. The kind of expensive presents that strangers and co-workers gave each other when they'd reached a certain economic status.

There wouldn't be anything personal in any of those beautifully wrapped packages.

She took another sip of her martini and went out onto the deck. From the railing, she saw the barest outline of Bainbridge Island. Moonlight painted the forested hills silver. She wanted to look away but couldn't. It had been three weeks since the broadcast. Twenty-one days. Her heart still felt cracked beyond repair. The things Kate had said to her kept running on an endless loop through her mind. And when she managed to forget, she saw them in print, in People magazine or on the Internet. Her own mother didn't even love her . . . there's your icon: a woman so warm and caring, she's probably never said I love you to another human being . . .

How could Kate have said that? And then not called to apologize . . . or to say hello . . . or even to wish her a happy birthday?

She finished the drink and set the empty glass on the table beside her, still staring out across the black expanse of water. Behind her, she heard the phone ring. She knew it! She ran back into the condo, pushed through the people crowded in her living room, and went into her bedroom, slamming the door shut behind her.

"Hello," she said, a little out of breath.

"Hey, Tully, happy birthday."

"Hey, Mrs. M. I knew you'd call. I could come down and see you and Mr. M. right now. We could—"

"You have to make things right with Katie."

She sat down on the end of her bed. "I was only trying to help."

"But you didn't help. Surely you see that?"

"Did you hear the things she said to me on TV? I was trying to help her and she told all of America . . ." She couldn't even say it. That was how much it still hurt. "She owes me an apology."

There was a long pause on the other end, then a tired sigh. "Oh, Tully."

She heard the disappointment in Mrs. M.'s voice, and she felt like a kid again in the police station. No words came to her, for once.

"I love you like a daughter," Mrs. M. finally said. "You know that, but . . ."

Like a daughter. There was a whole sea in that single word, an ocean of distance.

"You have to see how you hurt her."

"What about how she hurt me?"

"What your mother did to you is a crime, Tully." Mrs. M. made a sad sound, then said, "Bud is calling me. I better go. I'm sorry for the way things are, but I need to go now."

Tully didn't even say goodbye. She just quietly hung up the phone. The truth she'd been trying to outrun landed on her chest, so heavy she could hardly breathe.

Everyone she loved was a member of Kate's family, not her own, and when the chips were down, they took sides.

And where was she left, then?

As the old song said, alone again. Naturally.

She got up slowly, and returned to her party, surprised that she'd been so blind. If there was one central lesson of her life, it was this: people leave. Parents. Lovers.

Friends.

In the room full of acquaintances and colleagues, she smiled brightly, made small talk, and went straight to the bar.

It wasn't so hard to act normal, to pretend she was happy. It was what she'd done for so much of her life. Acted.

Only with Katie had she ever really been herself.

By the following autumn, Kate had stopped waiting for Tully to call. In the long months of their estrangement, she'd settled—albeit uncomfortably—into a rarefied and contained world, a kind of snow globe of her own creation. At first, of course, she'd cried about their lost friendship, ached for what had been, but in time, she accepted that there would be no apology from Tully, that if one were to be offered it would have to—as always—come from her.

The story of their lives.

Kate's ego, usually such a fluid and convenient thing, became solid on this point. For once, she would not yield.

And so the time passed, and the curved glass walls of the snow globe hardened. Less and less often she thought of Tully, and when she did, she learned to stop crying about it and go on.

But it exhausted her, drained her. As the weather had begun to turn cold again, it took all her effort to get up in the morning and take a shower. By November, washing her hair had been such a daunting prospect that she'd avoided it altogether. Cooking dinner and doing the dishes sapped so much energy that halfway through she had to sit down.

That all would have been okay, and by that she meant acceptable levels of depression, if only it had ended there. Last week, unfortunately, she'd been too tired to brush her teeth in the morning, and she'd driven the kids to school in her pajamas.

"I don't know why that's such a big deal," she'd said to her husband that night when he asked her about it. He'd taken a job at his old station, and the lessened responsibilities gave him too much time to notice Kate's flaws. "It's just a slip in personal hygiene. It's not like I went postal."

"You're depressed," he'd said, pulling her against him on the sofa. "And frankly, Kate, you don't look good."

That had hurt, although, to be honest, not as much as it should have. "So make me an appointment with a plastic surgeon. I hardly need a physical exam. I see my doctors regularly. You know that."

"Better safe than sorry," was his answer, and so now, here she was on the ferry, going in to the city. The truth was—although she wouldn't have admitted it to her husband—she was glad to be going in. She was tired of being depressed, tired of feeling worn out. Maybe a prescription of some kind would help; a pill to forget a thirty-year friendship that had ended badly.

When the ferry docked, she drove off the bumpy ramp and merged into the early morning traffic. It was a gray dismal day that matched her mood. She drove through downtown and negotiated the hill up to the hospital, where she found a parking spot in the garage, then walked across the street and into the lobby. After a quick check-in, she headed for the elevator.

Forty minutes later, after she'd read every article in the newest edition of Parents magazine, she was led back to an examination room, where a nurse took all the usual stats and information.

When she was left alone again, Kate picked up the new People and flipped it open.

There was a picture of Tully, mugging for the camera, tilting up an empty champagne glass. She looked gorgeous in a black Chanel dress and glittery, beaded shrug. Below the photograph, it read: Tallulah Hart at a gala charity event at the Chateau Marmont, with her date, media tycoon Thomas Morgan.

The door opened. Dr. Marcia Silver stepped into the room. "Hey, there, Kate. It's good to see you again." Sitting down on her wheeled stool, she glided forward, reading Kate's chart. "So, is there anything you want to tell me?"

"My husband thinks I'm depressed."

"Are you?"

Kate shrugged. "A little blue maybe."

Marcia made a note in the chart. "It's been almost exactly twelve months since your last appointment. Way to go."

"You know us Catholic girls. Rule-followers."

Marcia smiled and closed the chart, reaching for her gloves. "Okay, Kate, we'll start with the pap smear. Slide on down to the end here . . ."

For the next few minutes Kate gave herself over to the little indignities that came with female health care: the speculum, the probing, the sampling. All the while she and Dr. Silver made stilted, impersonal conversation. They talked about the weather, the latest show at the 5th Avenue Theater, and the approaching holidays.

It wasn't until nearly thirty minutes later, when the exam had moved to her breasts, that Marcia actually stopped making chitchat. "How long have you had this discoloration on your breast?"

Kate glanced down at the quarter-sized red patch beneath her right nipple. The skin was slightly puckered like an orange peel. "Nine months or so. Maybe a year, come to think of it. It started as a bug bite. My family doctor thought it was an infection and put me on antibiotics. It went away for a while and then came back. Sometimes it feels hot—that's how I know it's an infection."

Marcia stared down at Kate's breast, frowning. Kate added: "I had my mammogram on time. Everything was clean."

"I see that." Marcia went to the wall phone, punched in a number, and said, "I want to get Kate in for a breast ultrasound. Now. Tell them to fit her in. Thanks." She hung up and turned around.

Kate sat up. "You're scaring me, Marcia."

"I hope it's nothing, Kate, but I want to be sure, okay?"

"But what—"

"Let's talk when we know what's going on. Janis will take you down to radiology. Okay? Is your husband here?"

"Should he be?"

"No. I'm sure it's fine. Oh, here's Janis."

Kate's mind was a whirl. Before she knew it, she was dressed again and being shepherded up three floors and down the hall. There, after an interminable wait, she endured another breast exam, more clucking and frowning, and an ultrasound.

"I always do my self-exams," she said. "I haven't felt a lump."

Above her, as she lay in the dark room, the nurse and radiologist exchanged a look.

"What?" Kate said, hearing fear in her voice now.

When the ultrasound was over, she was again shuffled out of the exam room and deposited back in the waiting room. Like all the other women in the small room, she read magazines, trying to concentrate on random sentences and Bundt cake recipes; anything except the results of the ultrasound.

It'll be fine, she told herself whenever the worry crept through. Nothing to worry about. Cancer wasn't something that crept up on you; certainly not breast cancer. There were warning signs and she watched for them religiously. It had already struck her family once with Aunt Georgia, so they were vigilant. One by one, the other women left; still Kate waited.

Finally, a plump, doe-eyed nurse came for her. "Kathleen Ryan?"

She stood up. "Yes?"

"I'm going to take you across the hall. Dr. Krantz is waiting to do a biopsy on you."

"Biopsy?"

"Just to be sure. Come on."

Kate couldn't seem to move; she could barely nod. Clutching her purse, she stumbled along behind the nurse. "My last mammogram was clear, you know. I do regular self-exams, too."

She wished suddenly that Johnny were here, holding her hand, telling her everything was going to be fine.

Or Tully.

She took a deep breath and tried to control her fear. Once, several years ago, she'd had a bad pap smear and needed a biopsy. It had ruined a weekend, waiting for results, but in the end she'd been fine. Remembering that, clinging to it like a life ring in cold, turbulent water, she followed the silent nurse to the office down the hall. The sign by the door read: THE GOODNO FOUNDATION CANCER CARE CENTER.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Tully was awakened by the phone ringing. She came awake hard, looked around. It was 2:01 in the morning. She reached over and answered. "Hello?"

"Is this Tallulah Hart?"

She rubbed her eyes. "Yes. Who is this?"

"My name is Lori Witherspoon. I'm a nurse at Harborview Hospital. We have your mother here. Dorothy Hart."

"What happened?"

"We're not sure. It looks like a drug overdose, but she was pretty badly beaten up, too. The police are waiting to question her."

"Did she ask for me?"

"She's unconscious. We found your name and number in her things."

"I'll be right there."

Tully got dressed in record time and was on the road by 2:20. She pulled into the parking lot at the hospital and went to the desk.

"Hello. I'm here to see my mother, Cl—uh, Dorothy Hart."

"Sixth floor, Ms. Hart. Go to the nurses' desk."

"Thanks." Tully went upstairs and was directed to her mother's room by a tiny woman in a pale orange nurse's uniform.

Inside the shadowy room there were two beds. The one nearest the door was empty.

She shut the door behind her, surprised to find that she was frightened. For the whole of her life, she'd been wounded by her mother. She'd loved her as a child, inexplicably; hated her as a teenager; and ignored her as a woman. Cloud had broken her heart more times than she could count, and let her down on every possible occasion, and yet, even after all of that, Tully couldn't help feeling something for her.

Cloud was asleep. Bruises covered her face, blackened one eye; her lip was split open and seeped blood. Short gray hair, apparently cut with a dull knife, was matted to her head.

She didn't look anything like herself; rather, she looked like a frail old woman who'd been beaten by more than someone's fists—by life itself.

"Hey, Cloud," Tully said, surprised to find that her throat was tight. She gently stroked her mother's temple, the only place on her face that wasn't bloodied or bruised. As she felt the velvety soft skin, she realized that the last time she'd touched her mother had been in 1970, when they'd held hands on that crowded Seattle street.

She wished she knew what to say to this woman, with whom she had a history but no present. So she just talked. She told her about the show and her life and how successful she'd become. When that started to sound hollow and desperate, she talked about Kate and their fight and how it had left her feeling so alone. As the words formed themselves and spilled out, Tully heard the truth in them. Losing the Ryans and Mularkeys had left her devastatingly alone. Cloud was all she had left. How pathetic was that?

"We're all alone in this world, haven't you figured that out by now?"

Tully hadn't noticed her mother wake up, and yet she was conscious now, and looking at Tully through tired eyes. "Hey," she said, smiling, wiping her eyes. "What happened to you?"

"I got beat up."

"I wasn't asking what put you in the hospital. I was asking what happened to you."

Cloud flinched and turned away. "Oh. That. I guess your precious grandmother never told you, huh?" She sighed. "It doesn't matter now."

Tully drew in a sharp breath. This was the most meaningful conversation they'd ever had; she felt poised on the edge of some essential discovery that had eluded her for all her years. "I think it does."

"Go away, Tully." Cloud turned her face into the pillow.

"Not until you tell me why." Her voice trembled on that question; of course it did. "Why didn't you ever love me?"

"Forget about me."

"Honestly, I wish I could. But you're my mother."

Cloud turned back and stared at her, and for a moment, no longer than it took to blink, Tully saw sadness in her mother's eyes. "You break my heart," she said quietly.

"You break mine, too."

Cloud smiled for a second. "I wish . . ."

"What?"

"I could be what you need, but I can't. You need to let me go."

"I don't know how to do that. After everything, you're still my mother."

"I was never your mother. We both know that."

"I'll always keep coming back," Tully said, realizing just then that it was true. They might be damaged, she and her mother, but they were connected, too, in a strange and profound way. This dance of theirs, as painful as it had always been, wasn't quite over. "Someday you'll be ready for me."

"How do you keep hold of a dream like that?"

"With both hands." She would have added, no matter what, but the promise reminded her of Kate and hurt too much to utter aloud.

Her mother sighed and closed her eyes. "Go away."

Tully stood there a long time, her hands curled around the metal bed rails. She knew her mother was pretending sleep; she also knew when it became real. When intermittent snores filled the silence, she went to the small closet in the room, found a folded-up blanket, and grabbed it. That was when she noticed the small pile of clothes folded neatly in the corner on the closet's bottom self. Beside it was a brown paper grocery bag, rolled closed at the top.

She covered her mother with the blanket, tucked it up beneath her chin, and returned to the closet.

She wasn't sure why she went through her mother's things, what she was looking for. At first, it was the stuff she'd expected: dirty, worn clothes, shoes with holes along the soles, a makeshift toiletry set in a plastic baggie, cigarettes and a lighter.

Then she saw it, coiled neatly at the bottom of the sack—a frayed piece of string, knotted into a circle, with two pieces of dried macaroni and a single blue bead strung on it.

The necklace Tully had made in her Bible study class and given to her mother on that day, so many years ago, when they'd left Gran's house in the VW bus. Her mother had kept it, all this time.

Tully didn't touch it. She was afraid somehow that she'd find it existed only in her mind. She turned to her mother, went to the bed. "You kept it," she said, feeling something brand-new open up inside her. A kind of hope—not the spit-shined little-girl variety, but something tarnished and worn; more reflective of who they were and where they'd been. Still, it was there, under all the rust and discoloration: hope. "You know how to hold on to a dream, too, don't you, Cloud?"

She sat down on the molded plastic chair by the bed. Now she had a genuine question for her mother, and she intended to get an answer.

Sometime around four o'clock, she slumped in her chair and fell asleep.

The trilling of her cell phone wakened her. She unfolded slowly, painfully, rubbing the crick in her neck. It took her a moment to realize where she was.

The hospital.

Harborview.

She stood up. Her mother's bed was empty. She wrenched open the closet doors.

Empty. The bag was crumpled into a ball and left behind.

"Shit."

Her cell phone rang again. She glanced at the incoming number. "Hey, Edna," she said, sinking back into the chair.

"You sound awful."

"Bad night." She wished she'd touched the necklace now; already it was taking on the blurry edges of a dream. "What time is it?"

"Six, your time. Are you sitting down?"

"Coincidentally, I am."

"Do you still take off part of November and all of December?"

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 596