The phone rang, and she broke away. Which was good because he needed a moment. When the old woman hung up, she turned to him and smiled. He knew that was the image of her he would carry with him into both their eternities.
“Thank you. Thank you, Calliope.”
“Make this wonderful project a journey — for you.”
Her eyes got mischievous.
“Can you dance?”
“I’ve been known.”
“But can you cut a rug? That’s what we called it when I was a girl.” She reached to touch his arm. “I seem to have opinions lately.”
“You always had opinions, girl.”
“Maybe so. But I have even more of them today. It apparently comes with the territory of being very, very old.” She took another deep breath. “I have one final piece of advice.”
He girded himself again, a protective reflex he’d acquired during a lifetime of counsel from his straight-shooting mentor — and friend.
“Fire away.”
Her eyes flared.
“I would love to see you do a turn on Dancing With the Stars. It’s my favorite show! I think it’d be marvelous preparation for your movie. The sooner you begin cutting a rug, Michael Douglas, the better!”
CLEAN [Gwen]
Falsies & False Positives
Across
town, Gwen saw her own therapist, the one she met at Our House, the grief center she’d gone to for support when her husband died. She felt blessed that Phoebe was already in her life when her daughter became ill (Gwen now choking on those words), because she really helped, & really helped Telma too.
“Have you cried yet?”
Gwen hated that question.
“No. Not really. I’m too angry.”
“It’s good that you’re angry, you should be. I’d be worried if you weren’t.”
Silence, then again:
“Gwen, have you been able to cry?”
“No!”
The repetition some sort of therapist’s ploy.
More silence.
“I’m afraid to. I’m afraid to.”
“And why is that?”
“Because if I cry”—tremulous voice—“the anger might go away, & without the anger—”
Silence.
“Without the anger…” The shrink cued her to fill in the blank. The patient remained quiet. “Without the anger, you’re afraid you’ll fall apart. That you won’t have the strength you need to see justice done.”
. .
Gwen wasn’t really sleeping; she took sleep when it came, like coins being dropped into a half-conscious beggar’s palm. Under siege, she spasmed awake with little starts & yelps, reacting to whatever movie flickered behind fitful shutlid eyes. It was one of the hellish cruelties human beings were subject to — to be unable to use sleep to escape from a waking nightmare, to find oneself in a place where nothing worked, there was no comfort, no alternatives, no let-up, like a person burned and tortured in such a way they cannot sit or stand or lie down without excruciating pain. She told her lawyers she needed time to think. Gwen couldn’t act until certain things were handled.
Until Telma had been told…
She haunted the Internet’s vast trove of horrific misdiagnoses & wanton, wrongful surgeries. A woman in the UK lost a breast by hospital blunder, something they knew right away but didn’t tell her for nine years. In a ghoulish twist, she became a counselor to those with breast cancer. Her ballroom dancing pastime was no more; the beloved strapless dresses retired to the closet, a murdered raft of pretty girls, carefully, quietly hanged. She went through menopause without hormone replacement therapy because if you’ve had breast cancer, HRT is out. Insurance paid £100,000.
There were a lot of similar cases, closer to home. An L.A. woman had a double mastectomy & reconstructive surgery as the result of a misread biopsy. She was awarded $110,000 for each shorn tit. Was that because she couldn’t afford the right lawyer? Gwen’s counsel said Gwen needn’t worry because her daughter’s case had “unique & compelling attributes,” and they believed a settlement of around $15 million was feasible. They also believed that a proviso of any settlement would be the hospital’s insistence that the records of the case be sealed forever, as St. Ambrose would have trouble surviving the primal rage that such a bogus mutilaton of a child would engender, not to mention a child as charismatic as Telma; not to mention that child having become a beacon of hope for other children thus afflicted, & for their parents too; not to mention that Telma would become a poster child — an electronic billboard! — of the hospital’s malfeasance and cynical desecration of the Hippocratic Oath. The calculus of the $15 million figure of course included restitution for the physical & emotional travails of reconstructive surgery that Telma would eventually endure in the relatively near future. If the records weren’t sealed, the original error would never fade in public consciousness, to the contrary, it would compound yearly, monthly, as the press nurtured & obsessed, the maimed darling growing up under their exploitative sponsorship into a lovely young woman that another surgical team (the reconstructivists) would pounce on in the name of closure and healing, but the people wouldn’t see it that way, the people would see it as Frankenstein redux.
It could be worse. . in erratic, restless fits, Gwen joined the accursed orgy of the Web, Single Mom Seeking Stories Worse Than Mine. She read about a woman in Brooklyn who lost her husband & two daughters in a fire. She returned to the apartment the next day to retrieve the only thing she was afraid had melted: a silver urn containing the ashes of another daughter, dead of leukemia at 15. For a day, Gwen’s mantra became she lost three daughters my baby’s alive she lost three daughters my baby’s alive the distraction made her feel better by the smallest of increments but it didn’t sit well that it was on the back of that poor woman, at her expense. The feeling never lasted anyway.
“I just feel crazy, Phoebe. Completely crazy. The not-sleeping doesn’t help.”
“Are you taking the Xanax?”
“During the day, Seroquel at night.”
“I want you to be careful with that.”
“It doesn’t work, Phoebe. It doesn’t matter how much I take.”
“I hear you, Gwen — but we need to talk about this at the end of our time today, OK? Because we really need to. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
Then:
“I’ve sent blood & tissue samples to three different labs. Telma thinks it’s for something routine.”
“Do your lawyers know you’re doing that?”
“No.”
“Didn’t you agree you wouldn’t—”
“Her name’s not anywhere on it.”
“You don’t want to do something foolish that jeopardizes your settlement.”
“It’s all going through the office of a good friend. He was my husband’s oncologist.”
“Just be careful. What are you looking for?”