I held up both hands to the dash. “I just…You don’t understand the way that it’s hard. The test.”
She leaned back. “Oh.”
We sat without talking for maybe a minute, listening to the idling engine. Three girls walked arm-in-arm across the lawn. They were coming from the direction of the dining hall, their faces bowed against the wind. I thought I recognized one of them from my floor. I couldn’t be sure.
“I’d better go in,” I said.
“Right,” she said. “On duty.”
I opened the door, but her hand fell on the sleeve of my coat. She held tight until I turned back.
“Don’t forget your leftovers.” She nodded at the paper box of Chicken Satay. “But, honey, if you don’t have a refrigerator you can put that in, you should probably just throw it away. You don’t want to mess with food poisoning.”
“Gotcha.” I stepped out of the van with the box.
She reached for my sleeve. I turned back.
“Honey.” Her face was pale in the interior light. “I just want you to know that…” She kept her hand on the sleeve, holding me there. “I know I’m a little bit…maybe kind of a mess right now. But I still love you so much. I’m still here for you.”
For just a moment, it felt like before, when she was just my mother, her gaze so focused and full of love and worry for me. But even now that she was smiling at me and saying these nice words, I could see something wasn’t right, or at least not the same. My eyes moved over her face in a slow spiral. She’d stopped getting her hair done, getting it highlighted, whatever she used to do to it. I could see strands of gray even in the semidarkness of her car. I said nothing. I didn’t want to interrupt her. I wanted to believe what she was saying was true.
“And maybe I don’t understand the way that test will be hard, but I’m still rooting for you. I want you to do great.” She squeezed my arm and smiled. “You’ve got your whole life in front of you. I just want you to make good decisions. It’s so important for you to make good decisions right now.”
I nodded, my eyes on hers. Her eyes, at least, had not changed, and so I made certain they were the last thing I noticed before I shut the door. When I got to the dorm’s front entrance, I could still hear the idling engine of her van. Whenever she dropped me off after dark, she always waited, headlights shining, until I was safely inside.
2
I DID NOT ALWAYS want to be a doctor. I had only known, for a very long time, that I did not want to be a lawyer. Elise is six years older than I am, and so growing up, I didn’t feel competitive with her, exactly; it would be more accurate to say she overwhelmed me from the start. She overwhelmed a lot of people. When she was in high school, she won the state championship for speech and debate two years in a row. She was class president. She was valedictorian. The summer before she left for college, she went to a town hall meeting and argued with the mayor about curbside recycling, and ended up giving such a passionate speech that it made the local television news.
She didn’t overwhelm my father. But she could more than hold her own with him, which was enough to impress me. If he got loud, she didn’t care. Sometimes she got loud, too. They argued about everything—her boyfriends, Tibet, the wisdom of a property tax hike, and whether my father should keep using so much butter. They were both fast thinkers—neither required much time between hearing a point and refuting it. At the dinner table, my mother and father sat at opposite ends, with a daughter between them on either side. If we had ever changed it, and let Elise sit across from my father, my mother and I would have been like spectators at a tennis match, silently watching the volleys go back and forth.
He sometimes seemed unnerved by his inability to intimidate Elise in any way; but for the most part, he seemed very happy to have a sparring partner, and also to have helped create a younger, prettier version of himself. When Elise got into law school, he walked around the house whistling “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby” for days.