there during those weeks in the hospital after the stem cell transplant. I was there during the long hours of her chemotherapy. I pulled the blond hairs from her brush and held her hand as the poisonous chemicals dripped, dripped, dripped into her veins. She was sick, she was dying.
But she’s not dying anymore.
I don’t know what I’m looking for until I come across it jammed toward the back of the drawer: a letter from Dr. Hawthorne dated last October, the word REMISSION jumping out at me from the middle of a string of otherwise incomprehensible numbers and medical jargon. Right behind this is a folder with the dire CT scan results that she waved in front of me that day that I picked her up from the hospital. There they are, the familiar shadows lurking in the soft tissues of her body, clinging to her spine, her neck, her brain. But now that I look at the scans more closely I can see how the dates were gently rubbed out, the year smudged and doctored with pencil until a 7 was reimagined as an 8.
She used old scans to convince me that she was still sick.
But why?
I’m still staring at the scans when I hear the sound of a key rattling in the lock, and then I’m blinking at the bright wash of light as the lamp in the front room flicks on. My mother is standing there in white pants and a batik top, a sun hat folded in one hand, frozen at the sight of me.
“Nina!” She drops the hat to the floor, and steps toward me with arms wide in order to gather me into an embrace. “Oh, my baby! But how did you manage to post bail?” I note, bitterly, the strength of her stride, the faint blush of tan on her skin, the cheeks that are once again growing plump. Now that it’s no longer concealed by a scarf, I can see her hair, and it’s blond and shiny. I take a step backward.
“Where have you been?”
She stops. She reaches up and tentatively touches her hair, as if remembering its unseemly health. I watch calculation creep across her face; and I think I might be ill. “The desert,” she says. Her voice has gone soft and fluttery again; there’s a purposeful hitch in the movement of her arm. “The doctor said it’d be good for me. The dry air.”
I feel it like a needle in my heart, then, the horrible realization: I am my mother’s mark.
“Mom. Stop it.” I hold out the CT scans. “You’re not sick.”
The soft curve of her lip sucks in and out with her quickening breath. “Oh, honey, that’s ridiculous. You know I have cancer.” But her eyes fix on the paperwork in my hand and then slowly rise to meet mine, with a timorous wobble.
“You haven’t had cancer for a year.” My voice is a cracked vase, broken and hollow. “You faked the test results and pretended you were sick again. What I don’t get is why you lied to me.”
She droops against the edge of the couch, her hand feeling around for something solid to keep her upright. She looks down at her toenails—pale pink seashells against the white of her sandals. “You were going to go back to New York. You were going to leave me alone again.” She blinks, black curls of mascara sweeping across her swimming-pool eyes. “I don’t know….”
“You don’t know what?”
“I don’t know how to take care of myself. What I’m supposed to do now.” Her voice is tiny, like a little girl’s, and I am suddenly exhausted by my mother, by all her years of excuses and apologies.
“Just tell me the truth,” I say.
* * *
—
And so she does.
* * *
—
We sit side by side on the porch, in the shadows, where we don’t have to look at each other directly. And she tells me the truth, going all the way back to the very beginning. How she first met Lachlan four years ago when she tried to steal his watch off his arm