When the phone call came, Rosie was in with a sixty-two-year-old patient who was complaining of knee pain. She had been complaining of knee pain since Rosie met her four years earlier. The patient was a runner. She ran fifty, sixty, seventy miles a week. She ran every day. Some days, she ran twice. Run less, said Rosie. Every other day, swim instead or do yoga or lift weights. Run half as far and make up the rest with walking or a bike ride or, hell, sitting and reading a book. But the patient only ran more. And her knees hurt worse. Rosie had the conversation down by heart and was in the middle of the part that began, “As we get older, the lining in our joints begins to break down,” when Yvonne knocked on the door.
“I’m with a patient,” Rosie said.
“It’s Poppy,” said Yvonne.
“On the phone?”
“Yeah.”
“Is it an emergency?”
“She says no”—all those children and grandchildren, not to mention thirty-four years in a doctor’s office, had precision-tuned Yvonne’s urgency barometer—“but I’m not buying it.”
When Rosie picked up the line, Poppy was silent. She could hear her breathing but that was it.
“Poppy?”
No answer.
“Poppy? Are you there?”
No answer.
“Honey, are you okay?”
Nothing.
“Sweetheart? You’re scaring me.”
And then, on the other end of Rosie’s phone, in the barest barely whisper of a breath, from a darkness that was very far away indeed, Poppy said, “Mom. They know.”
Rosie did not ask what—she knew. She did not ask how—it did not matter yet. What she asked was who. Who knows?
“Everyone,” Poppy only just managed. “Everyone knows.”
“I’ll be right there,” said Rosie.