Mike never swore at the kids, but Middie didn’t seem to notice.
“I’ll listen,” she said, grimacing at her algebra book. It broke Mike’s heart how readily she agreed to help him.
Shayla found Mike’s house easily. Why this should surprise her, she didn’t know.
She parked in the street and walked quickly to the front door. Ding dong. A deep chime, like a church organ, seemed to shake the house, and only then did she remember how late it was. Shayla’s whole body itched — especially her neck, which, though bare, felt as if she were wearing a turtleneck made of steel wool.
Middie opened the door. “Hello?”
More poised than Shayla expected for thirteen, but freckled and long-limbed like the picture.
“Is your dad home?” Nervous, she continued in her Midwestern up-talk. “I’m Dr. Clayton, from the hospital? He was looking at my mother’s brain scan and I said I wanted to come take a peek?”
“He went to the store. You want to come in?”
This was as far as Middie’s manners had been trained. Once they were in the foyer she didn’t seem to know what to do.
“How about I just wait for him in there?” Shayla pointed into the adjacent room. Through an open door she could see a bookcase full of radiology journals, an enormous computer monitor, and a view box for hanging film, which he probably never used now that everything had gone digital.
Middie drifted off and Shayla sat on the edge of Mike’s desk chair, looking at the family pictures scattered on the bookcase. The most recent one, judging from the kids’ ages and taken before Fawn’s stroke, showed the five of them in front of the Eiffel Tower. Freckled Middie seemed to come from somewhere else. Rebecca favored olive-complexioned Mike and… Oh God, she’d forgotten the youngest one’s name. Emma? Emily? She favored Fawn.
Shayla studied the shape of her lips and teeth, just like her mother’s. Abby. That was it. The youngest’s name was Abby.
Relieved, she decided to wait five minutes, then make an excuse and get the hell out, but the minutes ticked too slowly. After three, she ventured back into the foyer. The living room was empty. Just leave? That would be too weird. She followed her instincts to the kitchen. No one. Coming back she heard crying and a mumbled voice. Shayla froze. Suddenly it felt as if she’d broken into the house. Switching to tiptoe, she was making her way through the hall toward the front door when Fawn turned out of a room and stopped. She wore a long Chicago Bulls T-shirt and slipper socks. Tears streaming down her face, she looked beseechingly at Shayla. “Do you know where Mike is?”
“He went to the store.”
“Oh. Oh.” She seemed to gather herself.
“I’m one of his colleagues, from the hospital. He said I could stop by and look at a brain scan. Your daughter let me in.”
“You are a doctor?”
“Yes. Dr. Clayton.”
“Did Mike send you to sit with me?” She spoke in staccato, each word with its own fervent stress.
“Yes,” Shayla said. “He told me to keep you company.”
“Good.” Fawn seemed to be waiting for her to say something else.
“Where do you want to sit?”
“The living room. I like the couch in the living room.”
With a walker, Fawn made her way across the carpet slowly. Shayla moved the coffee table out of her way.
“You can sit next to me,” Fawn said. “I don’t bite.” She patted the sofa’s cushion.
Shayla sat down.
“What is your name? I forgot your name.”
“Shayla Clayton.”
“Oh, oh.” Fawn seemed to remember something. “You are the doctor whose mom is going to die.”
Startled, Shayla nodded.
“Mike said she is old.”
“She’s not that old.”
“Mike said she is old,” Fawn insisted.
“She’s sixty-two. I don’t consider that old enough to die.” Shayla had to get out of here. She was arguing with a stroke patient.
“I’m…” Fawn paused. “Do you know how old I am?”
Shayla didn’t know exactly, but she was about to take a guess just to keep the conversation going when she felt someone behind her.
“Hello?”
She jumped up and held out a hand to Rebecca. “I’m Dr. Clayton. Your dad said I could come over and look at my mother’s brain scan.”
Rebecca looked at her suspiciously.
“Middie let me in. I guess your dad went to the store.” A mistake. How did she know Middie’s name?
“Rebecca, I want a Pepsi,” Fawn said. “Your father was supposed to bring me a Pepsi.”
“I’ll get it.”
Rebecca came back with a root beer. “I couldn’t find any Pepsi. Is this okay?”
Fawn frowned. “I do not want ice. I want it in the can. I like the can.”
Rebecca was already heading back to the kitchen. Shayla heard the fridge open and close, then Rebecca returned holding the root beer can, the soda apparently poured back in. One bead trickled down the side.
“I couldn’t find any Pepsi.”
“You didn’t look hard enough. You never look hard enough.”
“I looked, Mom.”
“Did you move things? I bet you didn’t move anything.”
“I’ll look again.”
Shayla and her mother used to have spats like this. Norma called her snobby when she was shy. She called her lazy when she was tired. Norma also cooked Shayla’s favorite dinner every Thursday, came to all her volleyball games and helped her pick out her first bra, turning away so Shayla wouldn’t be embarrassed.
While Rebecca clinked around in the kitchen, Shayla plied Fawn with simple questions. How old were the girls? What school did they go to? What were their favorite subjects? Fawn answered slowly and earnestly, as if after careful reflection.
Rebecca returned without a Pepsi and Shayla tried to calm Fawn down. “Maybe Mike is getting it. Middie said he went to the store.”
Rebecca leveled a cold look at her. “We know. You said that already.”
For a disturbingly long moment the sight of Shayla’s car outside his house sent a bolt of pleasure through Mike. For a disturbingly long moment he forgot she shouldn’t be here and didn’t even consider why, most likely, she’d come.
Inside, Shayla sat on the couch beside Fawn, who slept peacefully with her head lolling against the sofa’s back, a glisten of drool like a tear on her chin. Shayla held up a palm in greeting, the unmistakable look of regret on her face, then rose by inches, watching Fawn to be sure she didn’t wake.
Mike followed through the foyer, out the door into utter darkness.
“She wanted Pepsi.”
“I got some.”
The wind flattened their coats, too light for the weather, against their bones. At the curb next to Shayla’s car, Mike looked up at the bedroom windows on the second floor. The blinds were all pulled. No faces, no shadows.
He took her hand. “I’m sorry about your mother.”
“I told your girls I came to see her scan.”
Mike nodded. “Good.”
Shayla took her hand back. “Fawn told me you love her too much.” She had dissolved into tears when a Pepsi couldn’t be produced, and that had led to the confession that Fawn wanted to die. “She said you won’t let her.”
Mike cupped Shayla’s elbow. “I’ll bring us Indian next week. You like that place by the mall, with the spicy chicken.”
“You hate Indian.”
“I’ll have rice, and that flat bread.”
“You can’t live on bread, Mike.”
He grinned. “Sure I can. Prisoners do.”
Shayla wanted to lean against him one last time, tell him the failure was hers. Someone else could string a life together from moments like this.
A car turned the corner, catching them in its headlights. Mike dropped Shayla’s elbow and looked over his shoulder. Quickly, she slipped in the car. Tomorrow, or maybe that weekend, she would move in with her mother. Take charge of medication schedules and doctors’ appointments. Do the shopping and cleaning. Smooth the edges of Norma’s last few months. It was a job Shayla could do well, she knew, only because its time was short.