Facets (21 page)

“Will that change, too?”

“We hope so.”

“When?”

The doctor shrugged, smiled sadly, shook her head. “We just don’t know, Pam.”

Pam hated answers like that. So had Eugene. “There has to be something we can do to help her.”

“There is. You can visit her like you have been and talk to her. Tell her about what you’ve been doing in school. Tell her that you miss her and want her home. Ask if you can bring her anything. She’ll hear you, even if she doesn’t answer.”

Trusting that to be the case, Pam did talk. She told Patricia what she’d done that day and what she was planning to do the following one. She told her that she missed her and wanted her to come home. She told her about all the things they could do together when Patricia was feeling better.

Unfortunately, she couldn’t tell her the things she really wanted to, for fear they’d only upset her more. She couldn’t tell her about the funeral and how many people had come out in Timiny Cove. She couldn’t tell her how much she missed Eugene. She couldn’t tell her that she was afraid that her whole life was changing, that she’d never get to Maine again, that she’d never have the fun she used to have. She couldn’t tell her how awful the house was, how quiet and grim, or how John seemed to go out of his way to annoy her during the rare times he was at home. He didn’t talk with her, he talked
to
her. He wasn’t interested in what she was thinking or doing. He had no patience with her fears.

But day after day Pam went to the hospital, a comfortable walk from the house, and day after day she talked until she ran out of things to say. Then she sat in a chair by her mother’s bed, doing homework sometimes, or watching television, wishing sometimes that she could curl up next to Patricia on that hard white bed and cry the way she ached to do. Most often, she simply watched Patricia, waiting for a sign that she knew she was there.

It came after a month. Patricia looked at her, gave her a small, sad smile, and Pam felt happier than she had in days and days. But the news that came at about the same time wasn’t good. The spinal damage was permanent. Patricia would never walk again.

Whether because of that news or because of the depression she’d been in since the accident, Patricia didn’t show any significant improvement after that. Pam was sure she’d given up, and nothing she said by way of encouragement had any effect. From time to time Patricia looked at her, offered a fleeting smile, but otherwise she remained in the silent shell into which she’d withdrawn following the accident.

After two months, the doctors recommended that she be moved. “Why can’t she come home?” Pam asked John, when he told her their decision. They were eating dinner, just the two of them in the large dining room where John always insisted on taking his meals. He thought it was elegant. Pam thought it was empty.

“Because she isn’t well.”

“She’s not on any machines,” Pam argued. She felt she’d seen enough in the past few months to deserve a more substantial answer. “Some patients are hooked up to so many that you can hardly see them through the wires. Not Mom. There are no machines, and she isn’t in a body cast or anything. She doesn’t even take much medicine.”

“Still, she’s not well.”

“Then let her come home and we’ll get a nurse for her here.”

“She needs more than just a nurse.”

“Then we’ll hire whoever she does need.”

“Pam,” he put down his fork to stare at her as though she were a half-wit, “this house isn’t designed for a paraplegic.”

Pam resented his tone. She resented the way he talked down to her—and she resented the way he could eat as though everything were normal, when there’d just been another turn for the worse in a tragedy that seemed to go on and on. “Don’t call her that.”

“It’s what she is. Isn’t it time you were honest with yourself? Your mother is paralyzed.”

“I know that,” Pam said, sounding as calm and grown up as she could. She was going to have to be both if she hoped to fight John. “She won’t ever walk. But that doesn’t mean she can’t learn to use a wheelchair. The doctors said it. So did the physical therapist. And just because she can’t walk doesn’t mean she can’t come home. We’re not poor. We can afford to do what has to be done here so she can get around in a wheelchair. I was sitting right there when the physical therapist told her about it.”

“And what did Patricia say?”

Pam remembered that well. She had been so sure her mother would show some sort of excitement. “She was pretty tired. They’d been working with her legs for a while.”

“Did she say anything?”

After a minute, Pam quietly conceded. “No.”

John began to eat again. “Um-hmm.”

“But she’d be better at home. I know she would, John. She should be here with us and her own things. We could turn the library into a bedroom so that she wouldn’t have to do the stairs. Most of the doorways are already wide enough for a chair to pass through. So if we put up bars in the bathroom—”

“Things aren’t that simple. There are other factors involved.”

“What factors?”

“Emotional ones.”

“Her depression? But there are ways to fight that, too. She’s been seeing a psychiatrist at the hospital. She could see one here. If she sticks with it long enough—”

“Pam, she doesn’t
want
to come home.”

Pam refused to believe that. “Of course she does.”

“Has she told you so?”

“No, but that doesn’t mean anything. She doesn’t say much at all.”

“Doesn’t that tell you something?” he asked archly.

Pam’s stomach was twisting. She had to work harder to keep her thoughts straight. “It tells me that she’s still upset about the accident, but we already know that. She’s upset about Daddy and upset about herself, and she can’t talk with me until she deals with those things.” One of the nurses had suggested that to her, and it made sense. “So she’s been seeing the psychiatrist at the hospital.”

“And what do you think she tells him?”

“I don’t know. I’m not there.”

“She tells him,” he said slowly and distinctly, “that she doesn’t want to come home. Why can’t you accept that?” He forked a large piece of tenderloin into his mouth.

“How can
you
accept it?” she cried, throwing good intent to the winds. “And how can you eat that way, John? It’s disgusting. How can you eat at all? Aren’t you the least bit upset?” Tossing her linen napkin onto the table, she stood. “You aren’t. None of this bothers you. You got over Daddy’s death the minute he was in the ground, and now you’re in a rush to put my mother away somewhere.”

“Sit down, Pam.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“You need to eat. If you don’t stay healthy, you won’t be able to visit your mother.”

As a threat, it was empty. “I won’t be able to visit her anyway. You’re sending her to some place in Wellesley. I can’t walk there.”

“Marcy can drive you there.”

“But not every day.”

“Of course not every day. You shouldn’t be visiting her every day anyway. It’s not healthy.”

“She’s my mother!”

With that, John lost his patience. Planting his forearms on the table flanking his plate, he said, “Right now she doesn’t want to be your mother. Don’t you see that? She has serious physical and mental problems, and if she’s ever going to work them out, she needs time by herself. You’ve been there every day, and it’s not helping. So give it a rest, for God’s sake. Leave her alone.”

Pam’s stomach churned harder. John always did have a way of making her sick. Lowering her head, she made for the door.

“Where are you going?” he barked.

“Upstairs. I don’t feel well.”

“You don’t feel well because your stomach’s empty.”

But she continued on, climbing the stairs to her room and curling up on her bed. She didn’t throw up. Neither, though, was she hungry when Marcy came up with a tray.

“Come on, honey, you got to eat.”

Pam stared straight ahead. “It won’t get better. This is it. It’s not going to change.”

“Sure it is.”

“No. They’re both gone now.”

“Nuh-uh. Your mama’s right down the block, and when they move her she’ll be just a short drive off.”

“She’s not interested, Marcy. She doesn’t care about being a mother anymore.”

“Sure she—”

“No. And it’s not just because of the accident. She hasn’t cared about it much for a long time. It didn’t matter when I had Daddy, but now that he’s gone it matters. She doesn’t care. How can a mother do that?”

“She’s sick, honey. She’s not feelin’—”

“She doesn’t even care about this house. She always loved this house. She loved it almost before she loved my father.”

Marcy smoothed a lock of hair back from her face. “She’s grieving, Pammy. She’s grieving for your daddy, and that’s a hard thing to do sometimes.”

Pam turned her head on the pillow and looked up. “But what about me? I’m not dead, and I need her. I keep telling her that, but she won’t listen. Doesn’t she know I miss Daddy, too? Doesn’t she know how lonely it is without either of them? The only one I have now is John, and he’s worse than ever. He likes it when I’m unhappy. I can’t believe that they left me here alone with him.”

“You’re not alone. You have me. I won’t ever leave you.”

Pam took her hand and held tight. She wanted to believe that, but so much of what she’d always believed had been torn away from her that she wasn’t sure what to trust. She knew that if Marcy had her way, she wouldn’t ever leave. But people didn’t always have their way. After all, Eugene hadn’t intended to leave either.

She took Marcy’s offer of comfort, though, because she had nowhere else to turn. Patricia was moved to the small private hospital in Wellesley the following week. Pam visited her once, but she was received with such disinterest that she didn’t go again. It hurt too much.

In time, the hurt spawned anger. Pam was angry at Patricia for rejecting her, for refusing to get well, for lying around in a semicatatonic state in a hospital when she had a daughter who needed her. She was angry at Eugene, too. He had betrayed her by driving his car into the path of a truck, then he’d compounded the betrayal by abandoning her. She was angry at John for surviving the other two.

John was, in essence, her guardian, which put her very much at his mercy. He ran not only the business but the house. He was civil to her, but she needed warmth and laughter. She needed someone to talk with, someone to hug her when she was feeling down. Marcy helped, but she wasn’t family.

John was family, and she was desperate. She felt alone and frightened. So, for a time, she tried reaching out to him. She convinced herself that if she showed a little warmth, he might, too. She was her most pleasant, waiting for him when he came home from work the way Patricia always had. She showed interest in what he’d done with his day. She talked softly. She avoided riling him.

It didn’t work. He seemed to know what she was doing and found it amusing, but when the amusement waned, he turned his back as he always had. He never asked how she was feeling or what she had done with her day, and he certainly never suggested that they spend time together.

Burned once too often, Pam pulled back, but the hurt and the anger lingered. As an escape from those, she devoted herself to school. She went out for basketball to lengthen the day, and she did more with her friends. When she was invited out for a night or a weekend, she always accepted. Thirteen was a social age, and she was a social creature. Forcing other thoughts aside, she sat with her friends in their bedrooms and, for a little while at least, laughed about silly things, poked fun at teachers, plotted ear-piercing expeditions, and dreamed about dating the cutest boys in the upper school.

The laughter died as soon as she came home. The townhouse was too big, too quiet, too empty. Seeing John was torture. He went about his business and seemed to thrive, while she was filled with a pain that swelled, then receded, only to return until she felt she’d explode from it.

By early March she was longing for Maine. It represented all that was right in the world, and although she knew that it would be different without Eugene, she needed to be with the people and things that had meant so much to them both. She hadn’t been there since the funeral. It was the longest stretch in her life that she’d been away. John went up during the week while she was in school. She had asked to go many times, but he always put her off.

“My vacation starts next Friday,” she told him one morning at breakfast. His only response was to turn a page of the
Wall Street Journal
. “I thought maybe Marcy and I could go up to Maine.” She waited through what seemed an interminable silence. “John?”

“Marcy was up there last month, and before that at Christmas.” He continued to read the paper, clearly not considering the issue of Timiny Cove or Pam’s vacation worthy of his immediate attention.

“Her mother’s having trouble, so she had to go up. But you wouldn’t let me go either time. I really want to go now, John.”

“There’s nothing to do up there.”

“There’s nothing to do down here. It’s a two-week vacation. Most of my friends are going away with their families.”