The Mother's Promise(3)

“Lunch?”

Kate looked up from her desk. Dr. Brookes—Chris—stood in her doorway. He was so tall his head almost brushed the top of the doorframe. His top button was undone and his skin had a bluish tinge.

“Lunch?” Kate glanced at her watch. “It’s not even eleven A.M.”

“When you are called into surgery at three A.M., lunchtime is whenever you have a break,” he said. “Oh, I managed to get Alice Stanhope’s surgery scheduled for Monday.”

“Perfect.” Kate reached for a pen. “What time?”

“First up. Eight A.M.”

Kate wrote the details on her desk calendar.

Alice Stanhope: Bilateral Salpingo-Oophorectomy.

The one thing Kate couldn’t get used to was that you couldn’t see the cancer. Alice, in particular, looked well. Blondish and slim with short tousled hair, she was the picture of Meg Ryan, back in her heyday. The image of health. It was always a shock to learn that someone like that had cancer.

Chris leaned against the doorframe. “What do you think was up with Alice’s daughter? What did she say … that she isn’t like a normal teenager?”

“I wondered that myself,” Kate said. “Who knows? Some kind of special needs, maybe?’”

“Geez, I hope not,” he said, and they both drifted into silence for a moment. Eventually Chris shook his head. “Well, we’ll just have to take extra-good care of her mother, won’t we?”

Sometimes Kate loved Chris Brookes.

“All right,” he said, “I guess I’ll get one of those plastic salads from the cafeteria. Those salads are probably causing the cancer that we treat here, you know. We’re probably keeping ourselves in business.”

When he had drifted off down the corridor, Kate listened to her voice mail. She had two messages: the first from an anxious middle-aged woman wanting information about her newly diagnosed breast cancer, the second from David, who had seen cheap fares to Cancún and thought it was high time for a second honeymoon. “Or, what do they call them nowadays,” he’d added, “a babymoon?”

Kate’s eyes drifted back to her desk calendar, specifically to the Post-it on the bottom of tomorrow’s date. Twelve weeks. She’d written it eleven weeks and two days earlier when she’d seen the two pink lines appear on the pregnancy test she’d promised her fertility doctor she wouldn’t take. Twice before she’d written this note on a Post-it—but those had ended up in the trash at seven and nine weeks respectively. This time, she’d made it to twelve weeks. Almost.

It was the final piece of her puzzle, growing inside her, ready to make them whole. All Kate needed to do was hold on to it.





3

In third-period science, Zoe was trying to follow the rules. Not the class rules, her own. And her own rules were far more extensive.

??Never place both feet on the ground while sitting.

??Never touch the sides of the chair.

??Never be the first or last person to take their seat.

??It’s okay to look around the classroom, but never out the window.

??Don’t let anything weird pop into your head.

??If forced to answer a question never start your response with “Um” or “I think.”

Two seats to her left, Cameron Freeman was folding up scraps of paper and attempting to throw them at the back of Billy Dyer’s head (yeah, real cool, Cameron, picking on a kid because he’s deaf), but the paper was falling well short of its target. Zoe wanted to tell Cameron to cut it out, but Zoe didn’t do things like that. It wasn’t that she cared about what Cameron Freeman thought about her—she didn’t—it was merely the fact that if she stood up to him people would notice she was alive, and that was something Zoe tried to avoid at all costs.

“Okay, class,” Mr. Bahr said. “Everyone find a partner.”

Zoe’s stomach plunged. There were few things more heinous than having to find a partner in class. The looking around, the making eye contact, the inevitable rejection. All around her people paired up with the ease of magnet and metal. Even now Zoe couldn’t help but marvel. How did they do it? Were they really as carefree as they looked? Usually, when the class was asked to partner up, Zoe lunged for Emily, her one and only friend. When Emily wasn’t in her class—like third-period science—she simply kept her eyes down and tried to be invisible. Eventually the teacher would pair her up with whoever was left, usually Billy or Jessie Lee Simons, the emo with the turquoise hair and the piercings. But today, as she pondered her defect, her inability to be normal, she found herself staring straight ahead, and that’s when she noticed Harry Lynch, bent around in his chair with one elbow draped on the front of her desk.

“What?” she whispered, when he didn’t look away.

“You just said my name.”

Was he crazy? Why on earth would she say his name? “No I didn’t.”

“You did. First and last.” Harry spoke matter-of-factly rather than with ridicule. “Why else would I be looking at you?”

Zoe felt her cheeks pool with hot, shameful color. It was a good question, which made it all the more humiliating. Someone like Harry would never look at Zoe spontaneously. Harry wasn’t good-looking exactly, but he managed to hide it well by being big and looking more or less like all the other guys who played football. Maybe she had said his name out loud? She did do weird things like that sometimes. Once, in gym class, she’d accidentally started singing out loud (she needed to sing internally to get through the horror of exercising and wearing gym shorts in public). Maybe she was actually as crazy as she thought she was?