Goldengrove (15 page)

“Thank you,” my father said meekly. Mom and I glared at Dad for that, but he pretended not to notice.

“You’re welcome, sir,” said the cop.

As we threaded the maze of white halls to the doctor’s office, all the evidence—wheelchairs, stretchers, oxygen tanks—testified to the range of disasters that strike unsuspecting people daily. Three times, my mother asked directions to Suite 14H. We could have found it ourselves.

Several doctors had their offices there, but the waiting room was empty except for a tiny boy and his mom. The boy had translucent bat-wing ears, and his skin was skim-milk blue. I didn’t know if I should say hello. I pretended to read a golf magazine. If the doctor gave us bad news, I’d be spending a lot of time sitting across from Skim Milk Boy and other kids like him. Like me.

Dr. Nevins was tall and thin, with a beaky nose, dark hair in a knot, round tortoiseshell glasses. She came out to the waiting room and briskly shook our hands. She managed to make intense eye contact without seeing us, exactly. She appeared distracted, even alarmed, but not, I hoped, about me. I did sense that she was scared of me in some puzzling way. She got flustered when all three of us crowded into her office.

Mom and Dad took the chairs, and I jammed myself into the window ledge. There would have been more room for us if not for the hundreds, maybe thousands, of knickknack owls that covered the doctor’s desk and filled their own glass case.

My father said, “I guess you like owls.”

The doctor’s twitch of a smile was pure effort, but somewhere in mid-smile she finally saw my dad, and I watched my father’s handsome face work its magic even on her. She said, “Thanks. I’ve been collecting them since I was a little girl.”

What sadistic relative first gave her one of those birds? To an owlish girl, it must have felt like being ripped by claws. I guessed she ’d gotten over it and embraced her inner owl. If we ’d been smart enough to consult her, and she ’d saved Margaret’s life, I would have found her every owl on the planet. But we hadn’t bothered, we hadn’t known enough, we hadn’t taken the trouble.

The doctor skimmed the papers my dad had filled out. She said, “I’m a little unclear . . .” Her glance kept tracking between me and my parents, lingering on me. I grinned like mad in what I hoped was a heart-healthy way.

My father said, “Our daughter had—”

“Our other daughter,” said Mom.

I’d never before seen my father shoot my mother a look like a strip of duct tape he wanted to paste across her mouth.

“Our older daughter had—” My father smoothly pronounced the name of Margaret’s condition.

“I see,” said Dr. Nevins. And then, all science, “How is that being managed?”

“Was
being managed,” said my mother.

“It wasn’t,” said my father.

“She went swimming. She drowned.”

“She died,” my mother said.

Mom, I thought. That’s what
drowned
means.

“I’m so sorry,” said the doctor.

“He told us there was nothing to worry about,” my mother said. “Nothing to worry about!” Amazing, how fast her tone of voice changed the tone of the conversation.

“Daisy, please,” said my father.

Dr. Nevins said, “I understand your concern. These things do run in families, but the incidence of that is rarer than the chance of it happening at all. Which in your daughter’s case, I know, was a hundred percent. But I’m sure Nicole’s fine.”

“Nico,” I said. “How can you be sure?” Mom said.

Dr. Nevins turned to me. “Have you been having any problems?”

The question was ludicrous, or would have been from anyone else.

I said, “My chest hurts. Every so often.”

“Since when?”

“Since my sister died.”

“O-kay,” said the doctor. “Let’s take a listen. And then just to set everyone’s mind at ease, we’ll do an echocardiogram. Painless, noninvasive. We can look at her heart on a monitor and see what’s going on with—”

“Nico,” I said. “Nico,” repeated the doctor.

“We
know
what an echocardiogram is,” my mother said. “
Now
we do.”

“—what, if anything, is going on with Nico,” said the doctor. “Would you like to step next door, Nico?” Now that she finally knew my name, she couldn’t say it often enough.

Mom and Dad jumped up. The doctor looked as if she wanted to push them back in their chairs.

“Why don’t you relax in the waiting room—”

“Relax,” said Mom. “That’s what we’ll do. Relax.”

“And we’ll come get you as soon as it’s over. It’s just a closet with a machine and enough room for me and Nico and the technician. I promise I won’t hurt her, and I’ll return her to you in one piece.”

Everyone chuckled. A doctor hurting someone? What a hilarious joke. In fact, my parents seemed relieved. They’d wanted to be there for me. But they didn’t really want to watch my heart, healthy or not, on TV.

I followed the doctor next door. The examining room was chilly and bare but for a table, computer, shelves, plastic gloves, gowns, a tangle of rubber tubing. A wastepaper basket with a red cross. The only light was the monitor’s lunar glow.

The technician had gray dreadlocks and a calming smile. She told me to take everything off on top and gave me a short white gown flecked with pink. She smeared a blue, bubble-gum-smelling gel over my chest and ribs.

“Sorry, baby,” she said. “Sorry it’s so cold. We keep it like the machines want it.”

In a few moments the doctor returned and asked how I was feeling.

“Fine!” I sang out, terrified and angry at myself for the wimpy hypochondria that had brought me to the point of lying half naked on a table in this icy spaceship capsule. Was it too late to call it off? I’d rather live in happy ignorance and die in the middle of life, like my sister.

The doctor listened to my heart with a metal stethoscope. The stethoscope was a formality. Her machine would tell us what we needed to know.

“This won’t hurt,” the doctor promised.

I jumped when she pressed the cold mouse to my chest.

“Hold still, dear,” she said. She massaged it in tickly circles, concentrating on the screen. I studied her face for the wrinkle that would mean I was doomed, and when she returned to the same place twice, I knew my doom was certain. She asked me to lie on my side and ran the mouse over my ribs. I told myself to relax and enjoy my last few minutes of health.

This part lasted so long that I started shaking. I closed my eyes and asked Margaret to help me. She’d let me down about the haircut, but that hadn’t counted, not compared to this.

After an eternity, the doctor said, “Looks shipshape to me.” Shipshape? Was that a scientific term? It was her smile that convinced me. A weight seemed to have been lifted from her, and I understood that she
had
been frightened of having to give me bad news. I liked her when I realized that my danger had been hers, too. Suddenly she looked almost pretty to me, still owlish, but a pretty owl.

Thank you, I thought.

“Thank you,” I said.

“I can’t take credit,” she said.

“It’s a relief, is all.” It was the first true thing I’d said since I got to the office.

“Were you worried?” the doctor said. “The odds were on your side.”

“I knew that.” I was lying again. “I wasn’t worried. Not really. You know what? Science is my best subject. I’ve been thinking I might want to be a scientist some day. I love knowing why things happen and the scientific names and—” The staircase spirit said,
Maybe your heart’s shipshape, but now she’s going to make you see a shrink.

“Oh, do you?” Dr. Nevins had started tidying up.

“Can I look?” I asked. She nodded. I got up on my elbow so I could watch the monitor as she pulled the mouse over my heart. A dark blob pulsed in a sea of black, contracting and expanding in shuddery sea-creature ripples. I thought about Margaret’s heart. I wondered if it had slowed down or stopped suddenly, all at once.
Thump thump. Thump thump.
Nothing.

“That’s the left ventricle,” the doctor said. “And see that, that’s the aorta.”

“And that?”

“A vein,” she said. “The vena cava, to be exact.”

Already it seemed less like my heart than like somebody’s science project. It was oddly pleasant, lying in the cool, dark room with the doctor giving each part of my heart a purpose and name.

I said, “
Could
you have saved my sister?”

“Maybe,” she said. “Who knows?” I could tell she thought she could have, though maybe I was wrong. She pretended not to notice that I’d started to cry. She said, “I’m sorry about your sister.”

“Thank you,” I tried to say. I sat up. The doctor put down the mouse, the screen went blank. All black sea, no island. After a while she said, “If you really like science, Nico, don’t let anybody stop you. If that’s what you want to do—” Like the bookstore customers, she was talking about herself.

“Actually,” I said, “I was thinking that if I didn’t become a scientist, I might want to be a jazz singer.”

“A jazz singer?” she murmured. “Interesting.” She was stripping off her gloves. Each finger came off with a pop. With one glove still dangling from her hand, she paused and said, “If you want to talk to someone, I can give your parents a referral.”

“About?” For a minute, I thought she meant my future in science.

“About your . . . feelings. About your sister.”

I told you so, said the staircase spirit.

“That’s okay,” I said.

“Your parents can always call,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll tell them.”

My parents took one look at me and lit up as if I’d been dying and the doctor had cured me. As if I’d been dead and she’d resurrected me. For maximum embarrassment, they slapped each other a modified high five. The doctor squinted into this beacon of family bliss. She was glad to send us on our way with a positive outcome and no reason for a follow-up appointment.

The corridors and the hospital parking lot looked different than they had on our way in. My reprieve had changed them back into places where bad things happened to other people. The three of us walked to the Jeep with the duckling bounce of schoolkids who’ve been ordered not to run in the halls. How warm and gentle the sunshine was, how artfully the trees had been sponge-painted onto the cloudless suburban sky. I wanted to eat the air. I was overcome by a giddy lightness—weightlessness, really.

We went into the city for lunch, to an Italian place where my parents used to go when they first moved to Emersonville, before Margaret and I were born. We sat at a table with a red-and-white checked cloth, lit by a candle in a wine bottle wound with straw.

My mother said, “It’s
exactly
the same.”

“Time travel,” said my father.

“Don’t mind me,” I said.

“That never happens,” my mother said. “Nothing’s ever the same.”

“As if . . . ,” my father said.

I said, “Can you pour me some water?”

The Indian waiter wasn’t remotely interested in hearing how many years had passed since my mother last tasted their fabulous ravioli.

I said, “Let’s order.”

“Good idea,” said Dad. “Our sensible Nico.” I knew he was trying to be nice, but I wished he hadn’t said that.

My mother ordered a glass of Chianti. My father shot her a warning look, then said he’d have some, too.

“You’re driving,” she said. “Understood,” said Dad.

My mother said, “It’s the same menu!”

As I watched them trying to recapture that long-ago time, I gradually lost my urge to yank them back to the present. I tried to be invisible, so as not to make them wonder how they could be newlyweds with a thirteen-year-old daughter. I liked being left alone to enjoy the sense of well-being that came not so much from my clean bill of health as from the conviction that Margaret had engineered it. It was her choice that my heart had been fine, just as it would have been her decision if the doctor had told me I was dying.

For the first time since Margaret’s death, I remembered what hunger felt like. I ordered linguine with clams. First I spooned up the buttery sauce, a slippery twirl of pasta, and after that I amused myself by teasing the meat from the shells. My parents’ conversation was like elevator music.

Mom and Dad ordered espresso. When they asked if I wanted one, they seemed reckless, slightly wicked, as if they were inviting me to get drunk or high. The coffee shot to my fingertips. It was light-years faster than Elaine’s and what they served at the Nibble Corner. When I touched the silverware, I felt as if I was discharging a mild electric shock.

My parents’ good mood lasted almost all the way home. My mother reached back between the seats and squeezed my knee and said, “Thank God, honey. I mean it. If only we could all feel like this forever.”

“I’ll take one day of it,” said my father.

“An hour,” my mother said.

The hour ended when we got near town. The mood in the car took a dive. We were afraid to go home without an escape plan in place. That was when my parents got the idea of our going somewhere —Boston!—for the Fourth of July weekend. Maybe they hoped that our high spirits would burble up even higher in a bigger city.

I wanted to go to Boston with them, but not for the Fourth of July. Aaron and I had been talking about spending the Fourth together.

A few days before my doctor’s appointment, we’d driven to Miller’s Point. Aaron tried to make it seem spontaneous. When we parked at the lookout, he said—as if it had just popped into his mind—how awesome it would be if he and I could watch the fireworks from there.

Awesome
hardly described it. I had never wanted anything so much. But I couldn’t imagine getting my parents to agree. It had crossed my mind that if the doctor said I was dying, my parents would probably let me do anything I wanted. I’d knocked on wood, like Mom did. Be careful what you wish for.

Only now, a plan suggested itself, unlikely but not impossible. What if I talked them into going to Boston and letting me stay home? I would have to be cunning and patient and wait for the perfect moment.

We’d reached the outskirts of Emersonville. I pressed my nose to the window as if I was overjoyed to see each stupefying landmark. Oh, look! The post office, the out-of-business realtor, the women’s cardio-fitness gym where the pharmacy used to be!