Save Me - Lisa Scottoline [20]
“I bet.” Rose felt lucky that Melly had found a fellow Harry Potter fanatic in the gifted teacher. “Maybe we should get some sleep, honey.”
“I’m not tired.”
“Okay, we’ll just rest.” Rose held her closer, feeling her body grow heavier. In the next few minutes, Melly fell quiet, her breathing grew regular, and she fell asleep.
Rose lay awake in the dark, and found herself wishing that Melly had never had the birthmark. It wasn’t the first time she’d fantasized about how their life would be different, without. The birthmark had come to define Melly and their family, and they all revolved around the red circle as if it were the sun itself, setting them all in mad, dizzying orbit.
Rose let her thoughts run free, knowing it was forbidden, like a family dog running through an electric fence. It was the birthmark that had started the sequence of awful events today, whether Leo would say that was a but for cause or not. Funny, Rose hadn’t even seen the birthmark when Melly was first put on her chest, as a newborn. In her first instant as a mother, Rose felt suffused with such wonder and happiness that she saw only a beautiful baby. The nurses all cooed happily, but Bernardo had asked the doctor, in disgust:
What the hell is that red thing on her face?
His awful words had a hang time in the cold delivery room, chilling Rose to the marrow. The doctor had replied that it was a nevus even before he’d announced that the baby was a girl, and the nurses had receded, their tones newly subdued and their smiles stiffening at Bernardo’s reaction. Rose had gotten what she’d always wanted, a baby girl looking at the world with eyes the hue of heaven itself.
I love you, Rose had told the baby then, and when she saw the stain on her cheek, she’d added silently, I love all of you.
Rose’s parents were both gone by the time Melly was born, but her in-laws had flown in to see the baby, bringing their She’ll grow out of it, don’t worry. But the baby didn’t grow out of it, and Bernardo obsessed more and more on the birthmark, as if it marked him. He was a photographer, but rarely took pictures of Melly, and then only from her right side. Toddlers would stare at baby Melly in her stroller, and he would pull down the Perego’s top, hiding her in their walks through the West Village. Children would ask questions, and Bernardo would ignore them, leaving Rose to answer with the medical facts, much as Melly would later, fielding questions like the most patient of family doctors.
The teasing had started in pre-school, and Rose had watched as Melly’s grin disintegrated, bit by bit. She became withdrawn and quiet, wanting to stay home and avoid strangers, begging to quit Mommy & Me and Gymboree. Meanwhile, Bernardo scheduled her with Manhattan’s best dermatologists, who judged the birthmark too big for surgery, then he dragged them all over the city for more opinions and different treatments, shooting the birthmark with pulse-dye lasers, treating it with bipolar radio-frequencies, and even covering it with custom-made foundation, to no avail.
It was a thicker nevus than most, and all the time, Rose had hated the message they were sending Melly. Their marriage cracked under it and other strains, mainly Bernardo’s partying, and they divorced when Melly was three years old. Bernardo was killed the very next year, crashing his Porsche, and around that time, Rose and Melly met Leo on the train. They’d fallen in love and married the next year, and she’d left the city to move to southeastern Pennsylvania, near where Leo had grown up in Worhawk. On her own, she felt free to help Melly accept herself, even after her fifth Halloween, when she wouldn’t take off her Dora the Explorer mask.
Mommy, I hate being me.
Rose stared at the ceiling, then closed her eyes, and her thoughts returned to the room above. She wondered if Eileen was holding Amanda right now, or if that wasn’t permissible in Intensive Care. She tried to put it out of her mind, but gave up. She eased Melly