Heroine(22)

I pick it up to find a nice, neat stack of fresh bills, so new they look fake. I peel two off, having to rub them against each other to separate them. I head down the stairs with Devra’s bag over my shoulder, face flush with shame. And while I’m not proud of myself, there’s a louder, bigger thought in there.

Forty is nowhere near enough.

Mom’s waiting for me in the car, reapplying mascara. She’s never been in Dad’s new place, and I don’t know if she needs makeup because she took a few minutes to have a good cry, or if she’s just trying to freshen up as we head back to the hospital.

“You okay, Mom?” I ask.

“Yeah, honey,” she says. “I’m fine.”

I’ve said it enough to know how it sounds when it’s a lie, and when it’s the truth. Somehow, miraculously, Mom really is okay.

“Is it hard?”

“It’s not easy,” she admits. “Want some coffee?” I adamantly nod yes and she pulls into a drive-through.

“It’s not easy . . .” I nudge her to continue.

“Well . . . it’s . . .” Mom sighs, resting her head against the driver’s window as we wait. “It’s like this: When I found out your dad was having an affair, I was pissed. But when I found out how much younger she was than him, it was almost laughable. Like he was this big joke, an old guy chasing the young girls, right?”

“Yeah, I get it,” I tell her.

“But then she gets pregnant,” Mom goes on. “And I’ve got to rethink this whole thing. She’s not some little home-wrecker anymore. She’s a woman building her own family. And now—”

She cuts herself off, orders our coffees, and rolls the window back up against the cold. “This is strictly between you and me,” she says.

“Okay.”

“Now I find out she’s refusing pain meds after a terribly invasive procedure, because she’s a recovering addict. She wants to be able to breastfeed her child, and be a good mother to it beyond that, into the future. Devra won’t take anything beyond aspirin, afraid it will make her relapse.”

“She told me,” I say.

“Yeah, well . . .” Mom pauses, rolling down the window and getting our drinks. “Now I’m right back to being pissed off again.”

“Because she was an addict?”

“No,” Mom says, popping her coffee open. “Because now I respect her, dammit.”

The hospital is different during the day. There are more people, more crying, more hugs being passed around. There’s a lot of naked emotion that I’m uncomfortable with, especially when Mom picks up Dad’s new baby and her face shows pure bliss. She never held me like that, never smiled down with wonder on me. I came to her already formed, for better or for worse.

I make an excuse and leave the room, leaning a little less on the crutches than I was yesterday, pushing the edges of what Jolene said I was allowed to do. I still need sleep—and a shower, if I’m being honest—but I’m not going to tear Mom away from the baby yet. I go for an awkward, lurching walk, swinging the crutches out in front of me, my body the pendulum that keeps going forward, never back.

I may have missed school and the weight room, but if I keep moving on the crutches I can get a decent workout on my arms. So I keep going, past open doors and closed ones, down hallways I recognize from my own visits and then through some I don’t. I end up in the cancer ward, slightly out of breath, heart pumping harder than it should be if I want to be ready for spring training. I find an empty pair of chairs in the hall and settle into one, resting my crutches next to me.

A woman about Mom’s age comes out of a patient room, phone in one hand, her purse in another.

“No,” she says into the phone. “They don’t want him to have meds from home . . . I don’t know. No, I . . . something about they can only give him meds from the pharmacy here. . . . Yeah, and bill the insurance three times what they cost, I’m sure,” she snorts. “I didn’t know what he needed so I just grabbed everything . . . there were half-full bottles just lying around . . .”

She’s quiet for a second, listening to the response. “Well, you know how he is, never finishes anything.

“I don’t know, honey,” she says, her voice dropping lower. “He’s in a lot of pain.” She disappears around the corner just as my phone goes off with a text from Mom.

Where are you? Ready to go?

I tell her yes, and that I’ll be right there. I get my crutches under me and am heading back the way I came when I see the lady I accidentally eavesdropped on still talking into the phone, and as she heads into a bathroom I follow, telling myself that I have to pee, or take a thirteen, as the scanner on Edith’s counter would say.

I don’t pee.

What I do is this. I wait for her to come out of a stall, to wash her hands, and to turn her back on her purse as she dries them. It’s an old-lady purse almost as big as my gym bag, mouth gaping open to reveal a gallon Ziploc bag with four orange prescription bottles inside. I grab it and duck into a stall, lowering myself onto a toilet as I listen to her gather her things and leave.

In my hands I hold Ronald Wagner’s pills, a man I don’t know, but I can guess by the dosage and amount of Oxy here that he’s got cancer. And I just stole from him. I wait for the shame that filled me when I took money from Devra, but it doesn’t come.