The Mother's Promise(4)

Harry opened his mouth to say something else, but before he could, Amber Jeffries was practically sitting in his lap. “Partner, Harry?”

She gave him the kind of slow sexy smile that was both adorable and sickeningly desperate. Harry’s gaze flickered to Amber’s. “Sure.”

As he turned back to face the front, Zoe’s heart started to beat again. Another bullet dodged. Just about another five hundred billion to go.

Until tomorrow.

*

Once, Zoe’s mom had asked her to describe what it felt like, being her. For a heartbeat, she’d considered telling her the truth.

It’s like being anchored to damp sand, she’d imagined saying. Your head is toward the ocean, your ears are wet, and you’re waiting for the next wave. You want to turn and look, to see what’s coming, but you can’t move. So you just lie there and wonder. Are the waves big today? Will they come, tease me a bit, then recede away? Or will they come at speed, dumping on me again and again, filling my nose and mouth with water until my lungs are burning and ready to explode? The awful part is, you don’t know. So you wait, helplessly, expecting the worst.

Zoe had pictured what her mom’s face would look like if she were actually to say these words. And then she’d said, “It kind of feels like being out of breath. You know, a little light-headed, a little fluttery. But it only stays for a few minutes and then it fades away.”

It was bad enough that one of them knew the truth.





4

As she hurried along the hospital corridor, Sonja caught her reflection in the window and winced. She’d overdone the Botox. She knew she’d overdone the Botox. She wasn’t sure why she’d started doing it in the first place, but once she’d started, it had become surprisingly addictive. First her forehead, then the deep lines that bracketed her mouth. Before she knew it she had become utterly expressionless. Now, no matter how she tried, she couldn’t show how she felt. Which, come to think of it, wasn’t the worst thing in the world.

By the time she found Kate’s door, she was a little breathless. “It’s me,” she said, knocking.

“Come in!” Kate smiled. It was the kind of smile that warmed you through. She gave off an almost serene aura of goodness, Sonja thought. Or perhaps it was simply youth? Kate was in her mid-thirties, at a guess. A hundred and fifty years younger than her.

“I hear you have a case for me?” Sonja said.

As a hospital social worker, Sonja had “cases” that varied widely. One day she’d be dealing with a child who’d been admitted with injuries consistent with abuse, the next with a family who’d lost their primary breadwinner in an accident. When she was dealing with a cancer patient, her role was usually more administrative—putting the person in touch with community services, providing assistance filling out forms and dealing with insurance companies. But no two days were the same. Once, it was what Sonja had loved about the job. Lately, the uncertainty of what lay ahead felt unsettling to her.

“I do,” Kate said. “Come in, sit down.”

Sonja did, eyeing the picture on Kate’s desk—of Kate and a man who must have been her husband, judging by their body language. In the picture Kate was sitting in his lap and they both laughed into the camera, heads tilted up, eyes squinting. It was the kind of photo that came with the frame—beautiful people with a perfect life. People who had a lot of mutually satisfying sex.

“I have a single mother scheduled for a salpingo-oophorectomy on Monday,” Kate started. “Alice Stanhope is her name. She has a teenage daughter and no support people.”

Sonja looked away from the photo. “How old is Alice?”

“Forty.”

“Forty?” Sonja felt her eyebrows rise. Most forty-year-olds had spouses, siblings, and friends coming out of their eyeballs. Tennis clubs and social groups providing meals on rotation every night of the week. It was rare to find a person so young without a network to rely on.

“Yes, I’m not sure exactly what’s going on,” Kate said, reading her mind. “She said she doesn’t have any family other than her daughter.”

Kate pushed a file over to Sonja. Sonja opened it and scanned the top page. “How old is her daughter?”

“Fifteen.”

“And Alice’s financial situation?”

“I’m not sure. I thought you could discuss this with her. She seemed very concerned about her daughter, so she might need some support there too.”

“Is she expecting my call?” Sonja asked. She glanced into the file to make sure all the information was there.

“Yes, but it’s hard to say how receptive she’ll be.”

Sonja nodded. Unfortunately it was often the case that the people who needed the most help were the least likely to take it.

“I’ll call her today,” she said, fully intending to stand up. And yet she remained in her chair. Some days, when she sat, she wondered if she’d ever get up again.

“How are you settling in to the area?” Kate asked, mistaking her inability to stand as a desire to chat. “You live in Atherton, right? So do I.”

Sonja nodded. “I’m missing San Francisco a bit,” she admitted. The sudden move had been George’s idea—a segue into retirement, he’d said. Sonja went along with it, but six months later she wasn’t entirely sure what they were doing there. Atherton was a desirable place to live, certainly—in fact, it had been ranked the number one most affluent zip code in the United States by Forbes a few years ago. A twenty-minute drive from Silicon Valley, it was home to Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, Hewlett Packard’s Meg Whitman, and Google’s Eric Schmidt. (Sonja had found this out when she’d Googled Atherton.) Most homes, Sonja’s included, were fenced and gated and on a minimum lot size of an acre. On the street people smiled and kept walking, minding their own business. It unnerved Sonja a little, even if it was, strangely, perfect for her. “But Atherton’s very nice. Small, but nice.”