The Beautiful Between - Alyssa B. Sheinmel [59]
“Yes. But not like Kate’s. His prognosis was good.” This surprises me. Jeremy had said they had the same kind of cancer.
“What else was he sick with?”
She pauses, and I think she’s going to cry. “Please, Connelly, it doesn’t matter now. It’s been years.”
“It matters to me.”
“Oh God, sweetie, please.” She puts her head in her hands, presses hard on her temples.
My hands are falling asleep beneath me, but I don’t move. “Please just tell me. Just … just get it over with.” I stand up and walk close to her, and take her hand. “I’ll help—he was sick, right? He got sick after the cancer?”
“No,” she says, staring at my hand holding hers. “He had been sick before the cancer. When they began treatment—chemo—he went off his other medicine.”
“And that’s what killed him?”
“Yes,” she says, and I can tell she thinks we’re through. She drops my hand and leans down to pick her shoes up from the floor, stands to go into her bedroom. She’s going to put her shoes away, take off her funeral suit, and change her clothes, just like I will. But not until we’re done.
“What was it?”
She turns and looks at me. “Honey, it’s been a long day. For both of us.” I can hear the desperation in her voice. Her shoes are clutched in her right hand. She is, in her way, begging me to stop. “Let’s rest. I’ll get us some food and we’ll relax and tomorrow we’ll go to the Coles’. This has been a hard day for you.”
I walk to where she’s standing. “Mommy, listen to me. You have to tell me. It’s mine to know. It’s what I’m made out of.” I can’t remember the last time I called her Mommy.
“No,” she says emphatically. “It is not what you’re made out of.” She drops her shoes to the floor with a bang and takes hold of my left arm. “It is not what you’re made out of. You were too young to understand. It hasn’t left a mark on you.”
“Hasn’t left a mark on me?” I say, almost shouting. “Mom, I grew up without a dad. Of course that left a mark on me!”
“Then why does it matter how he died? All that matters is that he’s dead.”
“What did he do, Mom? There’s something you don’t want me to know, something you think you can’t tell me. But you can, and you have to. And I can take it—I promise. What I can’t take is not knowing.” I twist my arm from her grasp and hold her hand instead, gently. “Mommy, please. Please.”
“He was sick,” she whispers, not looking at me.
“How?”
“Very sick. He’d always been sick, but he managed it. When the cancer came, he couldn’t manage it anymore. He wanted to devote himself to the cancer. Or maybe the cancer made it worse. I don’t remember.”
“But what do you remember?”
She lets go of my hand, walks away from me. She sits down on the couch. I follow her and sit down next to her, close. Our sofa is nothing like the one in the Coles’ den, the leather one with buttons all over that creaked when I moved on it. Ours is plush and soft, cozy, with extra pillows bunched in the corners—a feminine couch. For the first time, I realize that ours is a house where only women have lived—that Jeremy has spent more time here than any other man, and I wonder why his maleness never felt invasive here. Just stepping inside this apartment, you’d know it was the home of a girl who didn’t have a father.
My mother continues, slowly. “He was taking so many pills. I didn’t notice, because there were so many others. He was always taking pills; I assumed he was taking all of his pills.”
“What kind of pills did he stop taking?”
“Antidepressants,” she whispers.
“He was depressed?”
“Yes, but he managed it.”
“And then he didn’t?”
“And then he didn’t. I thought he was just, well, sad because of the cancer. I thought that was normal; I thought he and his doctors were taking care of everything, managing both. And he was a doctor. I always trusted him to know what was best, because he’d always been so responsible about it in the past, so determined to be well and have this life that we were making. He even gave me some antianxiety pills because I was so tense over the cancer. I wondered, later, if he did that so I could keep calm—” She pauses, and she doesn