American Girls(47)

Only most of the time, the news wasn’t bad. I kept getting calls from my mom about how great her life was going. She’d found a circle of moms who would donate their breast milk to Birch (I cannot even get into how hard I almost threw up). She was meditating and imagining me with a circle of light all around me. Like a bull’s-eye, I said, and she didn’t even pretend to laugh. But she never apologized, never even admitted that she’d said the horrible things that she’d said. Oh, Anna, you hear things that aren’t there. I don’t remember saying anything like that. In fact, I would never say anything like that. The whole thing was making me crazy. When I wasn’t worried sick that she was dying, I was ready to quit talking to her forever.

It would be wrong to say that I had a genuine premonition when Delia’s number flashed while I was tucked in my usual corner on the Chips Ahoy! set, but at the same time I had this crazy sense that something wasn’t right. Everyone had just finished the table-reading when my sister called, her voice cloudy, telling me to get to the hospital. It took me a minute to realize that she wasn’t talking about Mom, she was talking about herself. She sounded foggy.

“Anna,” she said. “Just get someone to drive you. Do not, I repeat, do not let Dex know. Just make something up.”

“Are you okay?”

She started to cry. “No, I’m not okay. My nose is broken.”

“Your nose is broken?”

“Don’t say that, okay? Don’t say anything. Just get here and take me home. I don’t have money for a cab. I was mugged. Someone stole my wallet.”

“Oh no!”

“Please,” she said. “Just hurry.”

I must have looked as worried as I felt, because Jeremy stopped milling around the food table and asked what was wrong.

“My sister,” I said. “She got mugged. She’s in the hospital, and she needs a ride back to her place.”

“I’ll get Dex. I just saw him.”

“No,” I said, and hated that this was going to make me sound like an even bigger sketchball, a sketchball-ette from a family of the same. “She doesn’t want him to know. I think she’s really medicated. She said her nose is broken.”

“I can drive you,” Jeremy said.

“Really? That would be amazing.”

“Sure,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said. “I just realized, I don’t even know what hospital she’s at.”

“What part of town was she in?”

“Downtown. She’s shooting an indie film.” And I even had the sense not to say “with her ex-boyfriend.”

“I think I know.”

Jeremy was a slow driver, which I guess I had noticed before, but it hadn’t bothered me. I foolishly chalked it up to his wanting to show me the wonders of Los Angeles at a speed that I could appreciate. Now, when I needed to be at the hospital ten minutes ago, the fact that he was a terrible driver was becoming clearer with each stop on yellow and long pause as he rounded a corner. He was cautious. And by cautious, I do not merely mean “safe driver,” but scared old man going ten miles an hour down the road. For the first few minutes I looked at the faces of the angry motorists as they passed, throwing us shade for slowing them down. How had I missed this?

“Do you need to call your mom?” Jeremy asked.

“I can’t,” I said. And then before he could ask why not: “I can’t because she’s sick herself. She won’t know what to do. No one ever knows what to do in my family.”

He pumped his brakes as we came to a four-way stop. Then he waited well past when my sister or Olivia would have turned, meandering through the intersection. He was going to get me killed. Then my whole family would be in the hospital.

“I’m sorry about your mom,” he said. “What does she have?”

“Cancer,” I said, and I realized I hadn’t said the word out loud since that first night. It sounded ugly and heavy.

“Anna,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me? I’m really sorry.”

“Remember how you told me that once you say something, it kind of goes away? It’s not like that with my mom. It’s more like if I don’t talk about it, it won’t be real. Like saying she’s sick really makes her sick. That probably sounds crazy. Plus, my sister hates talking about it. My whole family is insane, you realize that, right?”

My mom’s surgery was scheduled for tomorrow. Lynette had called yesterday to tell us that while they were optimistic, they wouldn’t really know anything until they were inside her. She’d decided not to have both her breasts removed, just the one, and to have chemo and reconstructive surgery. Lynette said that she was depressed. Birch was fussy, and every time she nursed him she became inconsolable. I think she’d really appreciate a call, some flowers, as much goodwill as you can send. Her mental state has me worried. I gave her a call later and she told me how much she loved me and missed me and couldn’t wait until I got home. How I was her baby, that she wanted her babies around her. But I didn’t want to be there the way I had when I first heard the news.

“It’s the kind where she’ll get better. Only she doesn’t sound so good. I think she’s getting really depressed. The more she tells me that she’s trying to visualize her body becoming this healing space, the more I think she’s worse off than she’s letting me know. She was breastfeeding my brother, and she had to stop, and she thinks that my running out to LA just made it worse, so that sucks too. It all sucks. It’s a big fat pit of suck.”