The Winter Sister(28)

“It’s none of your goddamn business, okay?”

Her eyes were cool as metal as she snapped them toward me. A couple of other patients turned their heads my way before quickly returning to their screens and magazines.

“Okay,” I said, “I’m sorry.”

But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. She’d done nothing in the last sixteen years but spend whatever money she’d had on alcohol. She shouldn’t have been able to afford the type of health insurance that would cover her treatment. I decided to let it go for the moment, though; it was clear I wasn’t going to get anywhere.

“You look nice, Mom,” I said, changing tactics. “I like that wig on you.”

She ran her hand over the unnaturally smooth hair on her head. “Jill picked it out,” she said.

“It’s nice. Do you always wear it when you leave the house?”

“Most of the time,” she said. “No need to go around looking like a bald eagle.” Her eyes were focused on her hands in her lap, her fingers rubbing at the knuckles that bulged beneath her skin. “I don’t want anyone I know to see me the way I am now.”

It was an unusually vulnerable thing for her to say, and I tried to appreciate that, but there was a nagging, bitter part of me that reacted differently. You never cared how people saw you before, it whispered. You never cared that people at school always talked about how they’d seen “Annie O’Drunkie” walking to the liquor store in her nightgown, or how you showed up to my high school graduation with your hair a total mess and your stained clothes reeking. But, I tried to remind myself, that was back then. She wasn’t a drunk anymore; she was sober, and maybe sober, she’d regained her ability to feel exposed in the world.

“Can I get you anything?” I asked. “A bottle of water?”

Mom curled up her lip. “Ugh, no. Chemo makes water taste terrible. I could throw up just thinking about it.”

“Okay,” I said, scanning the room for other things to offer her. “How about a magazine, then?”

She shook her head. “I don’t care about celebrities.”

“Do you want to watch your TV?”

“I don’t care about celebrities,” she repeated. Then, cocking her head as if she’d just thought of something, she added, “But there was a book I was reading during my last chemo—whenever I could concentrate, anyway. Jill found it for me on the bookshelf over there.”

She pointed to one of the pristine white shelves in the corner, and I stood up, eager to have a task to complete. “What book?” I asked.

“Withering Heights,” she said.

“Oh—you mean Wuthering Heights?”

“That’s what I just said.”

“Right,” I replied, smiling a little.

I walked to the bookshelf and ran a finger along the titles. There was no rhyme or reason to the way the books had been shelved; Michael Crichton was next to a Spider-Man comic, and a volume of Walt Whitman poems was stuck between Dracula and a book with a bright pink spine. Unable to find Wuthering Heights, I moved on to the other bookshelf, which mostly held old issues of Time, National Geographic, and People.

“I didn’t see it over there,” I said to Mom when I reached my seat again. “I’m sorry.”

She looked at the other patients suspiciously, as if somebody were hiding the book from her. “But no one else in here is reading it,” she whined.

“Do you want me to ask one of the nurses if they’ve seen it anywhere?” I asked, and I was surprised when she nodded her head vigorously.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

As I walked out of the treatment room and tried to orient myself in the bright, spacious lobby where the elevator had dropped us off that morning, I felt instantly more at ease. This was good, having a job to do. I could get books, I could get blankets, I could even try to find liquids that didn’t taste as terrible as water. And, for all the stops and starts we’d been having, Mom and I had actually talked to each other for a few minutes. It hadn’t been the warmest conversation in the world, but it was still something, and it was infinitely better than her being—

“Oof.”

“Oh God, I’m so sorry.”

I’d crashed right into a nurse, my forehead colliding with his chin.

“That was totally my fault,” he said. “I wasn’t watching where I was going. Are you okay?”

I kept my head down and my hand against my forehead, a wave of embarrassment flooding my cheeks.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I wasn’t watching where I was going, either. I’m sorry.”

“Here, let me just . . .” He raised his hands as if to touch my face and then lowered them. “Can I?” he asked.

I nodded, then quickly winced as his cool fingers pressed against my forehead, targeting the exact point of pain.

“Yeah, that’s gonna hurt for a bit,” he said. “But I think you’re gonna live.”

“Oh, good.”

I was about to apologize again, but suddenly, he jerked backward. That’s when I got my first clear look at him—short brown hair, dark eyes, midthirties. I saw the scar along his cheek, the way it swept across the side of his face like a large comma, and I remembered that face—I remembered it in windows, in nightmares.