The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [54]
Cordy shrugged, bored now. “I don’t think there was one. I think it was a bunch of unemployed actors who think they’re deep or whatever. Depressing.” She folded her hands back in her lap as though at prayer.
Our mother looked up from her book. “It’s the next exit,” she said, and the car became strangely still. Cordy opened her book and started to read.
Another family might have made preparations. Another mother might have cooked casseroles in Corningware and frozen them, labeled with instructions. Another trio of daughters might have embroidered a hospital gown, written a song in her honor, brought along massage oils and aromatherapy candles to ease her transition. For all Rose’s talk, we brought only us. Unsure of what to ask, uncomfortable with the illness of a woman who had nursed us through all of ours, armed with only the books we were reading, and not entirely undamaged and unbruised ourselves. Our mother was inches away from us, but we hardly knew how she was feeling—scared? Sad? Resigned?
At the hospital they wouldn’t let us go any farther than the front lobby, so we kissed her goodbye there. Rose hugged her awkwardly, patting her back as though she were a casual acquaintance. Bean kissed her cheek and then squeezed her upper arms. “I love you, Mom,” she said. Cordy was the only one who gave herself fully into it, hurling herself into our mother’s arms and pressing her tightly. When she finally pulled away, our mother was crying, but only lightly, and Cordy looked weepy and a little dazed. “I love you,” we all called as she and our father walked away. He wore, as he always did, a short-sleeved dress shirt and brown pants, which were too short, and revealed a splash of his black nylon socks as he and our mother disappeared down the antiseptic hallway.
“Tragic,” Bean said, shaking her head as they turned the corner. Our mother held her purse in her arms like a child, and our father’s hand rested on her back.
“It’s terrible,” Cordy agreed, still sniffling. Rose plucked a tissue from her heavy leather purse and handed it to our sister.
“I mean his fashion sense,” Bean said.
“Jesus, Bean. Have some compassion. She’s going into surgery,” Rose said, shocked. Cordy started crying again.
“It doesn’t mean what he’s wearing isn’t tragic,” Bean said, but the fight wasn’t in her.
“Excuse me.” A voice came behind us, and we turned to see an employee standing behind us with a large wheeled cart, laden with supplies, linens.
“Sorry,” we said, and darted out of the way. Rose led us to the lobby, where the sun had only just begun to burn in through the atrium, the glass panels divided by heavy wood. Cordy fingered one of the plants, unable to tell whether it was plastic or real. Unyielding chairs in varying shades of blue clustered together in tiny squares. Bean and Cordy sprawled out on two rows, feet toward each other, and Rose sat primly on a single cushion. Upstairs as they prepared our mother for surgery, we imagined our parents praying, bending their foreheads together and whispering in an intimate expression of their love and their faith. We could summon neither.
Cordy and Bean pulled out their books and opened them, disappearing behind the pages. Rose sat for a long time, staring at nothing in particular, and then opened her book as well. That was it, apparently. We weren’t going to talk about it, we weren’t going to share any feelings or discuss any arrangements, not going to bond in any kind of movie montage moment where emotional music swelled as we hugged and wept for our mother’s loss and our own fear. Instead, we were going to wrap ourselves in cloaks woven from self-pity and victimhood, refusing to admit that we might be able to help each other if we’d only open up. Instead, we’d do what we always did, the only thing we’d ever been dependably stellar at: we’d read.
Our father came to get us just before five, the air in the lobby grown stiff and warm with the glare of the afternoon sun. Bean and Rose were asleep, laid out uncomfortably, and Cordy had turned upside down, her head hanging off