Tell Me Something Real (15 page)

I nearly knock the phone off the table.

“Caleb?”

“No,” Dad says. “It's me, honey. I'll be home in an hour.”

“Is everything okay?” I ask, panting. “How's Mom?”

Dad takes a breath, pausing a moment too long.

“She's not coming home, Vanessa. She's never coming home.” His voice is low and thick, almost slurred. He isn't drunk—he's crying.

If I had food in my stomach, I would throw it up.

My eyes sweep the room, pausing at her cherished things: a giant conch shell from their trip to Bermuda, honeymoon souvenirs like the Venetian glass vase and a framed photograph of Venice, things she would save in a fire. I see her in everything—not sick, but healthy, the mother I knew for most of my life.

I feel her with me, a quiet presence, a phantom limb.

Dad isn't home, not yesterday, not the day after, and not today. Seventy-two hours since he returned from the clinic without her. Three full days.

He spends his time with Mom and doctors. He spares us details, even when we beg for information. No matter how horrible, we want a picture of the hospice, of how she is hour by hour, a terrible sense of her actively dying. It is the only way to be with her, tethered in some way, since kids aren't allowed to visit.

Marie joins Adrienne and me in our nest. Triplets.

We ask each other hypothetical questions, the same ones we desperately ask Dad. We guess how much longer she'll be alive. The first day of school, a reckoning day, approaches at the speed of light. Just two more weeks of summer. We use that as a marker, wondering if she'll be gone by then. A merciless guessing game. We'll never see her again, that much we know, but she is out there, lying in a hospital bed, barely alive.

I want to sit next to her, even for a minute, just to say good-bye.

I think of the last day of school, our afternoon at the theater and pier. I keep remembering Mom's pleading face and her words:
Wait for me
.

Then I replay the morning at the clinic when she ascended the stairs alone, insisting I go play outside. I wish I could go back to that moment, to when Mom said she could do the infusion alone. I should have taken her to Lupe, walked next to her, said something meaningful—something enduring.

Her last word to me was “scoot.”

I wait for Caleb.

Sleep is an impossibility. Without him, my small bed feels vast, endless, larger than the Pacific.

Adrienne has a full-size bed, something she lords over me, given that she and Zach have been having sex for more than a year. She keeps the details vague. I pitched a fit when Mom and Dad bestowed her hand-me-down twin as a gift. Brand-new lavender bedding with violet flowers blooming across the quilt. I was supposed to feel grateful. Adrienne calls it her lucky bed, the deflowering bed. When they moved it into my room, I looked at the mattress with disgust, storming out, slamming the door behind me, leaving my parents hurt and confused.

But all summer long, I cherished that bed, the way it held Caleb and me so snugly, containing us within its petite
dimensions. I was too self-conscious to christen the bed, to continue its lucky streak. We were rarely alone, and when we were, there always was the threat of someone walking in. Plus, I was too nervous about my body and doubtful of its abilities. Too naive to understand that our time was limited from the start. Too stupid to know that I'd lose him sooner or later.

And now he is gone.

I wander around the house searching for relief, but there isn't an antidote to grief.

Caleb is more than a buffer, more than a human painkiller. He helps me walk into the pain—not around it.

The phone doesn't ring.

His silence hurts. Not just the rejection, but the way he'd told me that something was wrong with Mom and then just vanished.

I wish it made me want him less.

So I do the only thing I know how to do—I grope my way toward the piano, where I work through all the questions. I rely on the physical aspect of playing, sitting on the bench and pounding the keys, wishing for his hands on my shoulders.

I blow through piece after piece.

Mrs. Albright will be proud.

I think I hear her laugh.

Then I open my eyes.

Of course. A dream.

I stumble into her empty room, frantic to feel something tangible. I spray myself with her perfume, choking on the earthy scent of cypress and rose.

Dad hasn't made the bed. I pull up the sheets and smooth the quilt. I place my palm on Mom's pillow, shocked to feel a few strands of hair. I hold them to the light, that deep shade of blond, that golden hue.

It is the last part of her I'll ever touch.

Five days.

She's been away for one hundred and twenty hours.

If I can't see her, if I can't hold her hand, maybe I can talk to her. Just one more time.

Craning to reach, I pull the phonebook off the shelf, flipping through the pages until I find the shattering word: “Hospice.” Only two listed.

Mission Bay Hospice. I pick up the kitchen phone and dial the number. They answer on the first ring.

“I need to speak to a patient. Iris Babcock.”

“I'm sorry,” the receptionist says, a compassionate female voice. “Our patients aren't able to receive calls.”

“She's my mother. It's urgent. An emergency.”

“I'm sorry, but it isn't possible. Take care.”

The phone goes dead.

Seaside Hospice. Maybe I sound too young. I'll speak with authority. I'll mimic Adrienne, but will refrain from anger and profanity.

A similar voice answers the phone, with the same
compassion as the other hospice receptionist, but older and male. I'm determined to be more assertive. To at least confirm whether or not Mom is there.

I make the same introduction, “I need to speak to a patient. Iris Babcock.”

The receptionist repeats the same policy, explaining, “Our patients aren't able to receive calls.”

“Why?” I ask.

“They're too ill,” the man explains.

“But I'm immediate family and this is an emergency. It's urgent and I
must
speak with her.”

“I'm sorry, but that's the policy.”

“Wait, don't you have visiting hours?”

“What's the patient's name again?”

“Iris Babcock.”

The silence lasts for a moment before the man returns. “We don't have a patient by that name.”

“Thank you,” I say. “Very much.”

I return the phone to its cradle and rush to Dad's study, opening the top drawer and counting out four twenty-dollar bills. That will be more than enough.

Mission Bay Hospice is somewhere unfamiliar, past Sea World and near the port.

Half an hour later, the taxi cab deposits me in front of an institutional green building surrounded by shady pepper trees. I ask the driver to wait, certain I can't find my way back home on my own.

I climb the steps and try to push open the door, but it's locked. I buzz and hear the crackle of the intercom, static and a voice competing through the system. “Patient visit,” is all I say. The door buzzes open.

A woman sits behind the desk, probably the same one who answered the phone. She is pretty in a bookish way. I smile and walked forward, doing my best impersonation of a charming Adrienne.

“Hello,” I say. “I'm here to see Iris Babcock. My father arranged my visit with her doctor.”

The receptionist, probably in her thirties, looks me up and down, frowning while doing so. “I'm sorry, but minors must be accompanied by an adult.”

I prepared for this. I offer her a patient smile. “I'm a freshman at the University of San Diego. I'm eighteen.”

She looks at me again, and I can't tell if I'm being successful or foolish. She raises a single eyebrow. “What's your major?”

“Music. Piano. You should come to my recital next month. The orchestra is playing at the Shiley Theatre in Camino Hall.” This is true, an annual event.

Skeptically, she pulls a file from her desk, opens it, and asks, “You said Babcock?”

“Yes.” Until now, I hadn't considered if Mom could even carry on a conversation. I just need to see her, be in the same room, tell her I love her.

She gives me a puzzled look. “I don't have a patient with that name. Are you sure she's here?”

I feel every part of my body deflate. I shift my weight from one foot to the other just to feel solid ground beneath me. I meet the receptionist's eyes, kind and bewildered, and ask, “Do you know if she died here? Is that in your book?”

She looks at me with such tenderness. She must see through my lie. Clearly I'm too young, too lost. “She didn't die here. She was never here. She must be at another facility or a hospital. Why don't you have a seat? Can I call anyone for you?”

The taxi idles outside. I shake my head, grateful for her offer.

“I don't have anyone to call.”

“Where the hell have you been?”

Adrienne doesn't look mad, and with an impressive hickey tingeing her neck, she is hardly in a position to judge.

“Hey, Zach,” I say.

He fills the couch, tall and lanky, his longish hair an indistinguishable shade between blond and brown. Zach tends to start a sentence several times before settling on a course, which I find oddly adorable. He does so now, saying first my name and then forming a question, “Are you . . . ?” “You hanging in . . . ?” “How are you?”

I regard him as the gentlest boy on the planet, not that anyone else would ever describe him—the hot surfer dude—that way.

“I'm okay. Thanks.”

I brush past Adrienne, not wanting to say anything with Zach there. Someone left an orange juice carton on the counter and I drain it, crumple it up, and toss it in the bulging trash. My movements are quick and decisive—the exact opposite of how I feel.

No one kisses as loud as Adrienne and Zach. I practically cover my ears. A few seconds later, she walks into the kitchen flushed and smiling.