The Queen of Hearts(52)
Charlotte isn’t New York, but it’s glamorous enough. Every time I drove home from work, there was still enough of the rube in me to marvel at the life I had somehow landed. I pictured my childhood self, a blond, skinny, shy waif, sitting on the cinder-block steps of our three-room home drawing shapes in the dust, and I knew how she would gape if she could see through her future eyes. She’d glance down and note the luxury car logo emblazoned on the steering wheel, and although she might not give it conscious thought, the sound quality of the music coming through the top-notch speakers and the softness of the leather seats would register. She’d recognize the white coat she wore, and then she’d run her hands along the fine fabrics of her clothing: the slippery silk, the kitteny cashmere, the fine, soft flare of breathable cotton.
And outside her car windows: Oh! Skyscrapers, silver sculptures the size of houses, streets like living creatures, awash with women in suits pulling wheeled cases and trim bankers waiting for the light-rail. A hospital complex so large it qualified as its own city. An alien world.
Even Zadie, the child of vaguely hippieish college professors, had a childhood exponentially more cultured than mine. She might not have been rich, but her family prized literacy and craft, two qualities not exactly abundant in my upbringing. If you took a bird’s-eye view of the home where Zadie was raised—lofting yourself high above the line-drying quilts and the neat rows of butter beans and tomatoes—and you flew due east into the Appalachians, you’d eventually come to a county near the West Virginia border with only one stoplight. One stoplight and a scant row of crumbling two-story 1940s-era buildings lining the main drag, giving way within a few hundred yards to the likes of concrete-block gas stations and one-room churches. When some urban decadent from New York or LA needed a smug reference to a provincial glob of ignorance, this was the Kentucky they invoked (assuming for some reason Mississippi was unavailable, of course). From every vantage point, you could see the mountains: looming, dark monsters blocking the light, forcing the road to curve back on itself like a snake trying to eat its tail. The mountains of my childhood had once possessed a wild kind of beauty, but by the time I was born, this was gone. Now they resembled cancer survivors, their tops hacked off, trailing grime and silt, denuded of trees.
If you followed the road from the town for a mile or two, you’d come to the entrance of the coal mines. In my granddaddy’s day, they mined underground in shafts and tunnels, and while the company made it terrible for the men, it left the mountaintops intact. If you mined in those days, the company owned you: the only homes you could live in were rented out by the company, and the only food you could buy came from the company store, which gave you “credit” against a payday that never quite arrived. My granddaddy worked all his life to pay back the company for the cost of living.
My dad was a miner too, but by the 1970s, the company had figured out it was cheaper and easier to blow the tops off the mountains rather than tunnel through them. Nobody made them replant the trees back then: they just disintegrated all the green and moved on when the only thing remaining was a sky-sized heap of dirt. My dad moved on too, in a manner of speaking: he died from lung cancer when I was five. We lived two hours from the nearest hospital.
Logically, I should not be ashamed that once I was poor. I knew this, and I detested myself for my own snobbery toward the naive little ghost-girl of my past. She could not help it if she’d grown up without an indoor bathroom, but I resented her for embodying this ridiculous cliché of the Appalachians. She could not help it if it had been difficult to be clean. She could not help it if her mother had accepted government assistance in a town virtually without well-paying jobs.
It left me so vulnerable, this perception of myself as an impostor. I was brittle and rude sometimes, trying to overcome the ache of pretending. The only people who knew were Wyatt, who had his own hard-earned knowledge of the need to blend, and Zadie, the only friend who had visited my childhood home.
As if on cue, the door to my call room banged open and Zadie burst in. She’d always been prone to noisy entrances, but I could tell she’d been running hard: her cheeks glowed and her breath sounded like it was coming from a small steam engine. I blinked at the vitality of her movements as she crossed the small room in one bound, landing on the bed next to me.
“Em, what’s wrong?” she wailed. “Are you okay?”
“All I said was I needed to see you.”
“Which you would never say in the middle of a workday. Is— Do you have cancer?”
“No!”
“Does Wyatt? Oh!” She sucked in her breath. “Is it Henry?”
“My family is okay, Zadie. I’m okay. I’m not sick. But.” I stopped, unable to find words. Or—that’s inaccurate—I knew the words. I could hear them pulsing in my mind, but I could not say them out loud.
Zadie nodded, recognizing the problem. She cocked her head, thinking, and then nodded again. “You lost a patient, and it was bad,” she said.
I nodded back, staring at the rough weave of the white blanket on the bed.
All her vitality suddenly dimmed down. “Is— Was it Eleanor?” she asked.
“Yes,” I croaked. A bubble rose in my chest.
“Oh, Em,” said Zadie. To my surprise, she didn’t start crying. “I am so, so sorry. I know you must have fought like crazy to save her. You can’t blame yourself—you know that.”