When my mom walks into my hospital room her clothes flow about her in fall colors—safari tans and prairie greens and creamy stripes that make me wish I had a yogurt. A Chico’s moved into the Town and Country mall near our house about a year ago and my mom started shopping there like it framed a new identity for her: “It makes me feel like I have a beach house somewhere.”
Today she wears a tight tank top and an ankle-length skirt that sits too high on her waist. Her sunglasses are huge, looking to revive the ’70s, and she does not take them off even when the doctor comes in to give her an update on how I’ve been. We do not speak to each other. No greeting. No touching. But I can tell she wants to hug me, as if throwing her arms around me would fix anything.
During all the blocking of bleeding they had to do to save me from myself, they also found yet another something on my fallopian tube. Malignant. Another abnormal growth, but this time on my ovary and separate from the one nestled in my uterus that Ray and I had mistaken for a baby. Maybe benign. They couldn’t be sure. The size of the tumor on my fallopian tube required immediate action. If they caught it now, scooped everything out, radiation might still be avoided.
During the initial diagnosis at Planned Parenthood, when I thought we were confirming a baby, they told me what I had was not a baby at all. They told me I needed to see a specialist. “It might be cancer,” the young doctor whispered. In my shocked and too-young brain, I formed a question: “So we made a tumor?”
The doc looked at me quizzically and then offered ever so kindly: “It might not be malignant.”
I looked “malignant” up just to see the cool, ink-to-paper definition. Malignant: evil in nature, influence, or effect; passionately and relentlessly malevolent: aggressively malicious; tending to produce death or deterioration; tending to infiltrate, metastasize, and terminate fatally.
Emma, accurate.
An unusual case, they assured my mom. Odd to find so big a tumor in someone so young. Both ovaries looked like possible breeding grounds for cancer, something already developing on one, the other suspiciously swollen. My mother’s mother died of ovarian cancer. The doctor said an oophorectomy should cover all the dangerous possibilities in my case, a fairly simple abdominal procedure to remove both ovaries and the fallopian tube. An oophorectomy. It sounds so clumsy, so male. Ooph. The doctor told us, “We’re lucky to have found it all.”
Lucky.
I watched the doctor make baseball-size gestures. Big as an orange. Too risky to wait. I signed the paperwork with my mom’s help. Signed away my insides. Bye-bye, Pea Baby. Good riddance to future babies. I had to sign six times to make them feel better. To ensure that a semi-healthy, eighteen-year-old woman wouldn’t later decide to sue their asses. Even as my mom signed once, then twice, then three times she was crying. Big, silent tears that made her look even prettier than she already was.
Coming out of it later, I dreamed the tumor into pulpy, fruit-slice sections. The solid skin of it split open on a surgical knife blade. The blood-fruit color and texture. The taste of it on my tongue, sour. Bitter gagging. I scraped the skin clean, swallowed my insides for safekeeping. When I woke up fully, my mom was long gone. Dr. Patel was there to describe the complications they’d encountered. They’d found another cancerous lump cuddled into the lining of my uterus. They’d had to remove more than they’d originally hoped. Hysterectomy. Just a few more organs, tissues really, here and there.
Alone and dizzy and sore. The nurses wouldn’t look at me or I wouldn’t look at them. I had three little sessions with a hospital-hired psychologist, psychiatrist, psychopath in which I said nothing. How was I feeling? It’s normal to have a sense of extreme loss. It’s normal to feel some anger. Some women experience a decrease in sexual pleasure. Good, I thought. I don’t want it anymore. You can have it along with my ovaries and uterus. You can keep my future orgasms in a jar.
One of the nurses or doctors saying, “Poor thing. She’ll never get over this. Honey, what do you need?”
“Drugs,” I answer, and she obliges. It isn’t as good as cocaine, but she gets me more than I need and then, instead of blackness or sleep, there is a constant white glare. Like staring out the window at high noon after a snowstorm, like headlights bouncing off eyeballs in the middle of the night.
Today Dr. Patel is recommending radiation after all. They already spoke to me about it, but I’ve been playing catatonic. Besides some shameful crying when I realized how much I’d lost—gagging and boogers and crunched-up red face—I’ve not said a word. The nurses hate me. The doctors talk around me. It’s amazing how quickly people make you into wallpaper.
I just bathed, wanting to feel clean and to examine my scar privately, but I heard my mother arrive while I was still undressed. I wish she’d stop visiting. She comes every day. Twice a day. We don’t even talk to each other. She just comes and sits as if something is going to get better or change. As if Ray is going to turn out to be alive and I’m going to stop wanting to be dead. Every time I look at her I want to cry, and if I start crying, I won’t stop. I hate her for this.
I rushed to put the hospital gown back on too quickly and now I feel steam trapped between my skin and the fabric. Hearing them discuss radiation treatments as if I cannot hear them, as if I am not eighteen and ready to make my own decisions, turns all that steam to liquid and it slides down toward my shoes in the form of sweat.
It’s hot outside for fall. I can tell by the perspiration on my mother’s upper lip and I stare out the window at the asphalt in the parking lot as they talk. It’s the kind of hot that makes shimmery pools of water appear and disappear in the dips and curves of the asphalt. I stare hard, unblinking, turning the puddles into dark pools with no bottom. I fill them with pale fish and gnarled mermaids, imagine translucent hands grabbing at the lips of the pools and pulling up creatures best left in the depths.
“Emma.” My mother is talking to me. Clearly she has said my name several times before I’ve heard it. Her eyes are pooled with unshed tears.
I blink my dry eyes and turn. The doctor whispers something that I don’t catch and then shudders a little. My mother does not see the shudder but the whisper makes her lips go thin.
“They want to do treatments.”
I keep my eyes on hers so she knows I hear her. She is not asking me a question. She is stating a fact.
The doctor leaves the room. Strides out quickly. Folks here are afraid of me. It occurs to me, seeing my mother, that she is afraid of me too.
“Do you want treatments?” my mother asks.
“Will they save me?” I ask. It’s my first sentence in weeks, and it comes up scratchy, possibly from disuse. They had me on a feeding tube. That was painful.
“Yes. They say that radiation should rid the rest of your body of the cells that caused the tumor. It’s the best-case scenario at this point.”
I look my mother in the eyes then and see her hurt. How deep it runs. How it has burned streaks of yellow into her irises and etched lines into her forehead. I see how easy it would be to fix her hurt. I could reach out and hug her or just relax my body so that she could wrap her arms around me. But I know that I am evil, that I invited it in a long time ago. And I wanted to hurt her.
“I don’t want to get better,” I say.
“Emma,” she says. A fat tear slides down her cheek and I want to smack it away. “I need you to try.”
They stripped my bed clean an hour ago so I’m sitting on the bare mattress. They launder the sheets, it seems, hourly, as if this will keep my filth from staining the hospital in some permanent way.
My feet don’t touch the floor; instead, they swing little-girl loose. I’m supposed to get up and walk the room five times a day to regain my strength.
“I can have you declared mentally unfit,” she says. Her voice is barely a whisper. “Considering what you did, you being eighteen now won’t matter. I can make the decisions, but I’d rather you did the right thing for yourself.”
“You’re going to put me in the loony bin?”
“No, they don’t have loony bins anymore,” she says. “That’s not a thing, but I will take over, Emma. I have power of attorney. You need help. I don’t know when things got so bad, but I can do better as your mother now. I can fix this. Are you still—”
“Still what? Suicidal?”
“I was going to say using.”
“Do you mean alcohol? Marijuana? Coke? I wasn’t planning on not doing it, but if you mean dosing up on all three to try to unsuccessfully kill myself, I guess I’ll take a break for a minute. The hospital has given me some better shit anyway.”
“Jesus, Emma. When did you get so selfish?”
“Like father like daughter, I guess.” It was a good call on her part. Selfish. I realized it in a flash right then. I’d imagined myself pathetic, unlucky, evil, but not what I really had become: Completely self-absorbed. Unsympathetic.
“You aren’t your father,” she says but I can tell she isn’t sure.
“I don’t want them to do more things to my body. They’ve done plenty and if you tell them they can now pump poison into me without my permission then…” I say, changing the subject.
“Then what, Emma? And since when do you care what you put in your body? Do you know how many drugs they found in your system?” she asks.
“Three,” we say at the same time.
“That’s right. Three different narcotics, and that’s not counting the alcohol.” The shake in her voice is gone. She looks momentarily angry but it drains out of her as quickly as it arrived. “What if I just tell them to keep at it? To save you whether you like it or not?”
“Well, Denise, I won’t ever forgive you and you can’t save someone who doesn’t want to be saved.” Ray always called my mom Denise. She hated it. She wanted to be his mother. I should give her more credit for that. I move my arms to cover my belly, which is sensitive to even the potential of pressure. The row of Frankenstein stitches is fresh.
“I had one baby, three miscarriages, and a dead husband before I turned thirty. You don’t get to quit. You have to keep trying to be happy.”
“You quit on Daddy.” I didn’t know about the miscarriages.
“That’s not fair.”
“You quit on me.”
“Emma,” she says, and her voice cracks in a way I haven’t heard before, as if I’ve reached deep down into her this time. Gotten at her in a way I never have before. “After your father’s accident, I wasn’t right. He was good to you, but he was never good to me. We weren’t good for each other, and to have him die like that before we could do right by each other, well, it was too much for me. I was too young. I should have asked for help.”
In the months after Daddy died, she’d disappear for days. Go into her bedroom and climb under the covers and slip into what could have been a coma. There were days when I thought she was dead, when I had to prove to myself by holding a mirror under her nose that she was still alive.
“You thought you were pregnant, didn’t you?” she asks, interrupting my thoughts. “That’s why you cut yourself like that? Were you trying to abort the baby or something?”
“Something like that,” I say. Explaining to her that it was the opposite, that I wanted to see the baby, hold it, prove to Ray and to myself that it was there, is impossible. The logic of it gone as soon as the drugs left my system. Before that even. When the cut started to burn, reality sliced through everything I’d ingested and shocked my system back into life. Saved my sad little life.
“If you thought you were pregnant, you must have been sexually active.”
I continue to stare at her and she can see her own stubbornness in my face.
“Come on, Emma. You can talk to me about this.”
“Fuck you.” I pull my arms tighter around my belly, thump my feet down onto the floor so that I’m standing. I feel a bit dizzy, the room spins, but I hold my ground. I’m wearing the lousy hospital nightgown they provide once they’ve got you trapped. The kind with the slit up the back and the three ties that won’t stay tied no matter how many knots you put in them. My gown is white with pale blue flowers, and my scabby, surgical wound glares right through the pilled-up cotton.
I hadn’t planned to cut into myself. Ray had gotten ahold of enough coke to either kill us or keep us happy for months. We chose the former, fronting it with weed and chasing it with alcohol. The antidepressants I was on were an added bonus, so I shared a handful of those with Ray too. Somewhere in there with my body buzzing happily along it occurred to me that the doctors were wrong. Pea Baby was real. I could hear it inside of me purring like a kitten. I tried to tell Ray but the words wouldn’t form or he wouldn’t listen, or both, so I found Ray’s pocket knife and opened myself up. The cut, gaping red and warm, weeping the loss of what was never there, woke me up.
“You were nine pounds one ounce when you were born,” my mother is saying. “So healthy. They took you away and cleaned you up. I didn’t see you for hours and when they brought you back I told them they’d brought me the wrong baby. I had a fit. You seemed too small. Too red. Your father had to calm me down.”
Silence.
“Later I was so angry at myself for not recognizing you. What kind of mother doesn’t know her own child? I couldn’t forgive myself, and now here I am again. I don’t recognize you, Emma. I haven’t in years and I don’t know what to do to get back to you. I’d wish it different for you from day one if I could. From the moment I found out you were growing inside of me, but I can’t.”
“I don’t need you,” I say, and even as I say it I can hear how absurd it sounds, and as if to make it less unbelievable, I add, “I wish you’d died and Daddy had lived.”
Her body stiffens. I see her take three deliberate breaths before speaking.
She says, “You did a lot of damage to yourself, Emma.”
“I don’t remember most of it.”
“I don’t see how that’s possible.”
“Ray was my memory.”
“Well, he’s gone now. What’s your plan?” she asks. “If it isn’t to get well or forgive me for whatever heinous acts you think I’ve done, what will you do next?”
“I’m leaving.”
“That’s it? That’s your big plan.”
“Ray and I wanted to travel. I’ll do it alone. I want to be alone.”
“You wanted to travel? Well, why didn’t you just do that? Seems to me that you wanted to ruin yourselves. Ray was, at least, successful,” she says, and then turns pale. “I didn’t mean that.”
“I’ll travel and kill myself. The radiation is supposed to ensure I live, right? Well, no radiation. Just me on the road till death do us part.”
Before I can think to stop her, she moves forward and yanks up the gown. Cold air rushes in. My wound flashes red.
“This, baby girl,” she says, and for a minute, I think she’s going to slap me with the hand that isn’t holding up the hospital gown. “This cannot be run away from or fixed. You have to start again. You have to forgive yourself and make this right.”
I smack her hand away.
All the fight in me has worked its way out through my pores to shimmer and slide like a fog around my mother and me.
“I loved him,” I say, and she studies me. I hold her gaze and I see when she gets it. Her eyes crinkle and then her face falls. I expect disgust or rage but she just looks sad.
“You mean Ray? You and Ray? That would never have worked and you know it.”
“Why couldn’t it have worked?”
“Honey.”
“You did not know him.” My throat feels tight, the burn from the harm I’ve done to myself flares up like fire.
“Frank and I knew more than he thought we did.”
“Don’t talk about him! You didn’t know him like I did. I did. I knew him.” I pound my fist to my breastbone as hard as my tired body will let me.
She sits next to me on the bed, defeated. Our arms touch.
“I need to leave, Mom. I need to get out of here. It’s not your fault or maybe it is, but it’s probably just my fault. I don’t know how to be normal or happy or sober.”
We sit quietly. She leans against me.
“Ray always wanted to see the Badlands,” I say. “I’ll stop using. I’ll go there and it will help me figure out what I need to do next.”
“I think you should stay,” my mother says. “Get help.”
“I know.”
She rises from the bed and I can tell she wants to say something else. Maybe I love you or I won’t let you go, but she says nothing.
A nurse comes in to take my mother’s place. They pass each other in the doorway as if they haven’t even seen each other.
I can feel where my mother’s arm sat in contact with mine. Her touch sits with me while the nurse takes my vitals.
“You need rest,” she says. “The wound won’t heal and you’ll have those stitches a lot longer.”
“I don’t mind,” I say, breaking my rule to never speak to any of them. I haven’t seen her before but she still looks surprised to hear my voice. Someone has told her about the crazy girl in 801 who tried to abort her own cancer as if a tumor and a fetus are the same damn thing. Didn’t her brother die too? they’d all whisper. Did she kill him? Maybe he tried to kill her? I saw them gossiping about it, whispering outside my door and shivering as if I’m not just tragic but also dangerous. A serial killer already made.
“What an odd thing to say. You don’t mind?”
I don’t answer.
Ray and I were always touching when we were alone. Our backs pressed to each other as we faced away from each other on the bed. Our arms linked as we shared headphones. We considered ourselves one body, one pile. The warmth of him near me like a child’s blanket or a teddy bear. He loved me.
“Don’t cry,” the nurse says. “Jesus. You’re crying. Stop it now.” The nurse pats me too harshly on the back, as if she’s confused about whether she is burping me or comforting me. “I’ll get you something.”
She disappears briefly and returns to press two pills into my palm. I tell myself that at least it’s not alcohol or weed or cocaine. It’s not the same using I’ve done before.
I pull it together and stop crying, mostly to make the nurse feel better.
“You want me to see if I can catch your mother for you?”
I shake my head and lie back on my pillow.
“I’ll get your bed made up again for you and I’ll get you something else to help you sleep.”
I curl up on the bare bed. I pull pieces of Ray into my mind. I’ve been practicing. Teaching myself how to bring him back.
I begin with his smell. All of it. The sweetness of him and the sweat. Then I remember how he felt against me. His hair on my neck. His hands wrapped around me to rest on my belly. He hooks one thumb into the waistline of my jeans. Then I animate him. Feel his chest rise, his breath on my neck. I scrunch my eyes tighter and feel him twine his legs through mine. I work harder still and reach back with my hand to feel the rip in his jeans. I reach through and touch his soft thigh. His body. My body. We are the same.
“I love you, Gobs.”
He lifts his head to whisper into my ear, his breath tickling like feathers. “Rest now, Emma. I’m here.”
I let myself drift.