Saving Meghan(11)

Carl had even changed the name of his business from Gerard Construction to C. G. Home Remodeling to make it more difficult to track them down. Some friends of Carl’s remained in the picture, but for Becky, being a transplant from California had made it easy to create an entirely new life for herself.

The years had gone by in a blur, the small colonial regularly upgraded to bigger, better homes as fortunes improved, but time and distance could not erase the dark and painful memory.

Becky had her therapist and her Xanax, but mostly she had her quiet desperation, a gnawing fear that any day could be the day tragedy visited her again. Becky had tried to continue her real estate venture after Meghan was born, but separation anxiety made it impossible to do the job. She felt silent judgment from other stay-at-home moms who had more kids to juggle, but chances were they’d never set foot inside an eerily quiet nursery or experienced that dreadful knowing.

Becky heard a knock at the door. She spun around in her chair to see Holly in the doorway, a thick file folder of papers in her hand. Holly was petite and fit with straight, dark hair like her twin girls, Addy and Danielle. Becky had never been particularly close to Holly until they’d found common ground in the world of difficult-to-diagnose disease. She’d often complained how it had taken more than a year for doctors to figure out that Addy had Lyme, but at least she got a diagnosis.

“Carl saw me coming up the driveway,” Holly said, “so he let me in. I only have a minute, but I wanted to drop off the folder in person.”

The two women exchanged a quick hug before Becky took Holly’s research on Lyme. She thumbed through the contents cursorily.

“Thank you so much,” Becky said. “I’ll go through this more carefully later.”

Pressed up against a wall near Becky’s desk stood two large metal file cabinets filled with research on various diseases. Eventually, Holly’s folder would find a home in one of those drawers.

“Do you want some wine?” Becky asked.

She probably should have been embarrassed that the bottle was in her office and not the kitchen, but she’d long moved past the give-a-crap stage.

“No, thank you,” Holly said. “I can’t stay. I’ve got to take Sarah to soccer.”

Sarah was Holly’s eldest of her three. She and Meghan used to be good friends as well, but less so since Meghan got sick.

“Any chance Meghan will play next season?” Holly said pleadingly. “The team just isn’t the same without her. They only won a handful of games.”

“No. Definitely no more soccer, at least not until we figure out what’s going on with her,” Becky said a bit more forcefully than intended. “We can’t risk it.”

“Have the doctors come up with anything?” Holly sounded exasperated for her.

“We still don’t know,” Becky said with a sigh.

Becky was grateful for Holly’s help, but now that she had the file folder, there was not much more to say. She had little in common with friends in town anymore—the women with whom she’d once shared chaperone duties, planned birthday parties, attended soccer games, jewelry parties, movie nights, and a host of other experiences that had bound her to them. Their kids were healthy; even Addy had been cured of Lyme. Those kids still played soccer, or did whatever, and Becky often felt the only thing she had in common with her former cohorts was a zip code.

Meghan’s illness had dramatically altered the current of their lives. She could no longer care about who made what team, who got how much playing time, what teacher was being unfair, which kid was smoking weed, who was dating whom, or what colleges were on someone’s radar.

None of that mattered to Becky anymore. As she had drifted away from those concerns, her local friends had drifted away from her. It had been different in year one of Meghan’s still-undetermined illness. Back then, there’d been a flurry of activity surrounding Becky when her daughter became strangely fatigued, started missing school, showed signs of declining skills on the soccer field. The symptoms were insidious and pervasive: muscle weakness followed by an inexplicable decline in motor skills, persistent headaches, exhaustion that weighed her down like an anchor, transforming Meghan from a vibrant kid into one with hardly any vitality at all.

Becky had gone into power mode at home, researching cures for various diseases from mainstream approaches to alternative medicine with a frenzy. Meanwhile, in Becky’s eyes, Meghan’s symptoms had worsened, shape-shifted, but stayed vague enough to make it impossible for doctors to pin down. She reached out to friends as each new crisis arose, and they responded with care and concern, along with meals, but the illness dragged on. There comes a time when a person can no longer devote such energy to another’s plight. Like her mother’s longtime battle with cancer, there comes a time when you just want the pain to be over and done with.

At first, Becky was hurt when the phone calls, pop-over visits, thoughtful notes, and check-ins slowed down before stopping almost entirely. But that resentment did not consume her. Becky could not climb aboard the self-pity train when she had so much to do for Meghan.

Becky’s cell phone rang. She glanced at the number and grimaced. It was her sister, Sabrina, calling from California, probably with news of their mother. Becky wondered if her mother had died, if the cancer had at long last run its full course.

She wondered how much she’d care if it had.