The Doctor's Daughter by Hilma Wolitzer Page B

from Riverdale grew more and more harrowing. Arthur was with me in my bed on Church Street when my father called and asked me to come home. “Daddy!” I cried. “What are you saying?”
    Arthur gave me a questioning look, and I threw myself against him. He stroked my back and kissed my hair, while I finished my sobbing conversation with my father.
    All they could offer my mother now was palliative treatment, something for the pain, something else for her spirits. It would probably be just weeks now, my father said in a weary, heartbroken voice, and she wanted to see me. Arthur offered to go, too, for the weekend, anyway, but I told him not to, that he needed to study. And I went home by myself.
    I was shocked, not just by what had happened to my mother in my absence, but that I had been absent while it happened, and by what I had been doing during that time—writing my passionate little tales, and talking and talking about fiction, that inadequate imitation of life.
    My father had referred all of his surgeries to colleagues, and he kept my mother at home, in a hospital bed in their bedroom. He hired nurses for two twelve-hour shifts each day, and he and Faye and I all took our own turns at her bedside. My mother had wanted to see me, but I wasn’t supposed to see her. Don’t look, sweetheart. Come back later, okay?
    She had never let me see her scar, either, and I’d finally resorted to searching out post-op photos in one of my father’s medical books, like a kid sneaking peeks at something pornographic behind her parents’ backs. But the photos reminded me most of mug shots—the dispassionate faces, the defeated posture.
    I wanted to ask my mother everything I had neglected to ask during those lost, languorous years.
Mother, were you happy? What did you
really want? Have I disappointed you?
But she asked all the questions and they only skimmed the surface of things, as if this were an ordinary spring-break visit and we still had plenty of time to catch up. So I babbled about Arthur and school, and even about the weather, in that weatherproof room—a failed Scheherazade who couldn’t keep anyone alive with her stories.
    When the screaming began, only my father and one of the nurses stayed with her. I’d go to my old room, preserved like a shrine to my girlhood, and shut the door. Sometimes I’d cover my ears and even hum, but I could still hear everything, even the pleading, mollifying woodwind of his voice under hers. And, as if we still shared a bloodstream, I always knew the very moment the morphine hit home, temporarily quelling the fire. I wept when I saw my father’s face after those sessions, but I had murderous feelings toward him, as well, because he had let this happen, because he’d let it go on for so long. It took almost four weeks before it was finally over.
    Arthur wasn’t at the Cedar Rapids Airport when I arrived. I hadn’t really expected him to be; although we’d spoken on the phone every day since I was gone, I’d never told him exactly when I was coming back. It was a very late flight—we were delayed by a snowstorm in Chicago—and the terminal was empty, except for a few people waiting to meet other passengers. I stood and watched as they embraced and departed. The ticket counters and the car rental places were closed, and there were no taxis on hand. By the time my suitcase came down the chute, only three or four stragglers were left, and soon they were gone, too. I wondered if I’d be able to get a taxi when I phoned, and knew belatedly that I should have asked someone for a ride before the terminal emptied.
    Then the door swung open and Everett Carroll came through, stamping snow off his boots and calling my name. He was carrying a small paper sack. I was too surprised and grateful at that moment to ask how he knew when I was arriving. Much later he admitted that he’d done a little homework, asking around and checking with the airline on a regular basis. But then he just