business class tickets to Europe… well, that wasn’t the budget I had in mind at all!”
Dan laid his hand on Kate’s arm. “Mom will understand… if you can’t come.” Neither he nor Kate had touched their pancakes—taking my warning to heart. Beanie looked up at me expectant, his “Poor me” gaze wrenching at my conscience.
I slipped Beanie a little pancake and turned to Kate. “Is this condition at your age normal? Maybe you should see another doctor,” I suggested.
“I’m on the pill. Oral contraception can sometimes be the cause.”
“Oh,” I said. “I hadn’t thought of that.” I wondered if Kate, like Dan, had a string of friends with benefits. She hadn’t mentioned anyone in particular. “You want cereal instead?” I offered. There was no way I’d fall for this moral blackmail. “Look, please understand I want to help, but there are limits.”
“It’s not a myth,” Dan said, the pupils in his eyes dilated with concern. “Do you know that more than two hundred thousand Americans suffer from pulmonary embolism every year? Over a third die. The incidents are higher than breast cancer and AIDS combined.”
I looked down at my plate. What was I meant to do? I dropped the subject.
After a rather silent breakfast (toast and cereal), Kate and Dan went to their bedrooms to get ready for work. Kate’s laptop was sitting there, the lid half-mast. I stood over it, wavering for a second, dithering with indecision but then opened it up. Thought I’d take a peep at her mum’s clinic she’d asked me to check out earlier. But it wasn’t there. So I clicked on browser history. They’d snooped around enough into my life; now it was my turn.
This is what I saw:
Italy. Rome. Florence. The statue of David. Flights between Zurich and various Italian destinations on EasyJet and Volotea airlines. Train schedules. Best pizza in Italy. Best gelato. Naples. The Cinque Terre.
It seemed to me that this trip to see their ill mother… was actually a fun little vacation opportunity, funded by yours truly. The question was: why did Jen not want to go too? Because I wasn’t buying for one second her flying phobia.
What other pretty little lies had they cooked up?
Twenty-Four
Later, when Dan and Kate were at work, and I was confident Jen was still sound asleep, I launched into some online research. First, the “sanatorium” (Jen’s word of choice) their mum was supposedly staying at near Zurich. Who even used words like that these days? It sounded like a throwback from tuberculosis times, a century ago, when people went to Switzerland to be locked up and cured, “to take the fresh air.”
There were several “Klinics,” though, in and around Zurich. One was a sort of “quack” place—not that I’m against alternative medicine—but when someone has stage four cancer, a colonic irrigation, suction massages, and injections of mistletoe (really?) are unlikely to do the trick.
I found another one, the photos showing bedrooms fit for a five-star hotel: a potted orchid in the foreground, a delicious breakfast laid on a silver tray, the interior design worthy of Philippe Starck. Beyond expensive, no doubt. This place did everything. Like when you go to a restaurant and the menu goes on for five pages. No prices. This hospital offered state-of-the-art treatments, and nursing in every single specialty imaginable. Births, oncology, venous surgery, dermatology, coloproctology… the “ology” list went on and on.
Then there was the University Hospital, the first in the world that offered TrueBeam technology to treat cancer, whatever that was. In fact, the number of places where the triplets’ mother could be undergoing treatment was longer than my arm. I began to doubt my previous suspicions. Zurich really was a center for cancer treatment.
The triplets were not fibbing. At least not about this.
I backtracked on my suspicions. They were not much older than teenagers. They were under horrible pressure. Of course they wanted to take a break from all this and whip over to Italy and eat the best gelato in the world while they had the chance. It was normal. They might not get another opportunity to visit Europe for years—maybe never. I was being jaded. Suspicious. Uncharitable. Yet, still, something niggled at me. Why didn’t they want to spend more time with their mom? Then I remembered Kate mentioning how Lee had shut Dan in the laundry room for “time-out.” And I thought of my own mother/daughter relationship. Maybe that explained it.
“What are you doing?” It was Jen.
I nearly jumped right out of my skin.
She