After Her (13 page)

“They’re more like overcompensating for something,” I say then I stuff my mouth with omelet.

Sasha picks through her breakfast, making screeching sounds with the fork prongs against the plate. She stuffs a forkful of egg into her mouth, chews and sighs, “What are you going to do?”

I laid awake all last night pondering an answer to this very question. If I were being technical, the truth would be that Vivian hasn’t ‘technically’ lied to me. Sure, she omitted the things that made
her
look bad, but never actually lied. In her defense, we’d only just met when she decided to thrust me into the saga of her dysfunctional marriage.

No one introduces themselves to strangers with the truth. If that were the case, instead of giving her my name, I’d have said:
Hi, I'm the antisocial bitch who talks shit behind all of her friends’ backs. I also secretly sometimes hate my own mother and pity my father. That poor bastard should have annulled her much sooner than he did!

So yeah, of course Vivian may have intentionally failed to mention the dirty little parts about her life. Who doesn’t? Deep down, there’s something dirty about all of us. I’m sure even the Pope fucks up every now and again.

“I promised I’d stay with her,” I say. “This is gonna sound pretty horrible, but she’ll be dead by the end of the year. I can deal with her until then.”

Sasha’s expression disapproves. When I replay the words back through my thoughts, I realize that I don’t believe any of it.

14

It’s my turn to drive Sasha and me to campus.

We leave after toasting milk over her surprisingly decent tasting omelets. She made me admit that her cooking was improving before we got in the car. I held out for a while until she gave me some pseudo cold shoulder with a babyish pout-face. Then we were on the road.

My old Honda moves chugs with a rattle, rattle sound coming from the engine. It’s always done that. One of the speakers has gone bad, distorting the radio voices so they all sound like white noise poltergeist sounds.

Sasha cracks a window to let the wind hit her face. The weather is a thick, hot day. My air conditioner coughs some sickly gag sound from the vents. We pull into the lot around nine
AM
and as Sasha preens her hair in the rearview mirror, I rummage through my backpack, checking inventory.

“British lit exam, Calculus at ten and Chemistry at noon,” I sigh. “I can remember why I thought college was a good idea.”

We gather our things. Sasha walks ahead of me. I eventually catch up. En route to the campus courtyard, we cross the parking lot. Sasha prattles about something. I half-listen. She asks for my advice about some Trigonometry problem. I turn to glance at the piece of paper in her hand and she abruptly stops walking. All the color drains from her face.

“What’s wrong?” I ask. She gestures at the familiar blue Porsche parked in front of the university lawn, against the curb, straddling a sign labeled:
Guest Parking Only.
It only takes me a second to comprehend.

“What the hell is Vivian Lynch doing at our school?” Sasha whispers.

I shake my head, responding with deadpan neutrality.

“Guess I gotta go ask her.”

“I bet she followed you,” Sasha says. “That woman would probably get a collar placed around your neck if she could.”

“Shut up,” I mutter. “Listen, just go to class. I have to see what she wants.”

“You sure about that?” she asks.

I nod, though I'm not so confident in my answer. “I can handle Vivian Lynch.”

“Alright,” Sasha replies in a wary, singsong voice before tentatively leaving.

I pace myself and take a deep breath before approaching the Porsche. Vivian exits the car the exact moment I'm heading toward it and she’s wearing the skimpiest cocktail dress I’ve ever seen on any woman. The sequined skirt reveals too much leg. The low-cut bodice exposes too much cleavage. The six-inch heels adds nothing subtle to the look and her hair is a tousled mess of auburn strands. She’s even neglected to wear a scarf. The ligament scars around her neck from last night’s “incident” are exposed.

I move faster toward her after noticing a few passing male students whispering and staring. In that dress, she’ll attract too much attention. This woman is enough of a spectacle.

The last thing she needs is more negative publicity. She acknowledges the male onlookers with a coquettish smirk, seemingly oblivious to the fact that her breasts are practically spilling out of her dress.

“Vivian, come with me now,” I order while sneering at the boys that won’t stop staring. After draping my jacket around her, I pull her aside, away from the spectators. “What are you doing here?”

She wraps her arm around my shoulders, ignoring my attempts to shrug away. 

“Today is the first day of your internship,” she says. “You’ve been ignoring my calls so I decided to retrieve you personally.”

I duck beneath her arm to free myself of her forceful embrace. “I have class in less than ten minutes.”

“Not anymore, you don’t,” she chirps ecstatically.

“What?”

“I talked to Dean Whitman,” she says. “You are free for the rest of the afternoon.”

She drops her car keys into my palm. “Get in the car. You’re driving today.”

“Vivian,” I call while following her to the Porsche. “You can’t just rearrange my schedule without asking me first.”

She spins toward me abruptly, nailing me with an apathetic glare fashioned to appear subtle, but I can distinguish this trademark expression from a plethora of others. Of the many faces of Vivian Lynch, this one scares me the most.

“Cassandra, get in the car and don’t make me say it again,” she says. Vivian claims the passenger seat, leaving me to dawdle behind like a stray kitten. After convalescing what little dignity I have, I obey her orders and climb into the driver’s seat.

Vivian gives me directions to some place I’ve never seen before. It’s a modest health clinic downtown. So low-key that I'm not sure what it is until I pull into the lot and spot the small wooden sign hanging over the glass door. It must be a private facility.

“I have an appointment,” she says. “You’ll be accompanying me. I wouldn’t ordinarily be here, but Carrick refused to prescribe me any more painkillers until I agreed to the check-up. You know how doctors are. Even if you’re already one foot in the grave, they still insist on trying to find something else wrong with you.”

“Carrick? Isn’t he the doctor that came to the house last night after…your ‘accident’?”

She nods. “Carrick is my personal physician. He’s a total godsend.”

“Well, he barely even spoke to me,” I say as I recall his cold shoulder. He’d looked at me like I was something gross stuck the bottom of his shoe.

“Nevermind him,” says Vivian. “Carrick is a bit…brusque with people he doesn’t know, but once he warms up, he’s a complete sweetheart. I'm probably one of the only patients that he’ll make house calls to for free.”

I'm not feeling his warmth through Vivian’s words. He brushed me off like I was a pesky child in the way.
Warmth?
Bullshit. That guy wanted me as far away from him as possible.

Vivian saunters ahead of me into the clinic and confers with the receptionist at the front desk. I don’t hear much of their conversation. I immediately take a seat in the waiting room and plug my ears with headphones to muffle the surround sound of the lobby muzak.

A small television hitched to a corner of the ceiling plays some rerun reality show on mute with subtitles. No one sitting in the lobby is watching aside from the only teenager in the room, a bald girl attached to a freestanding respirator. She catches my eye for some reason. Not only because of the tubes jutting out of her nostrils or because she’s bald as a newborn, but because she’s so…
young
.

“That’s Krista,” says Vivian, only now she’s sitting beside me.

“What?”

“That girl you’re staring at,” she clarifies. “Her name is Krista. Poor thing is only thirteen and she was diagnosed when she was nine. Leukemia.”

“Nine?” I glance once more across the room at the frail young girl, trying to visualize her in a younger body, a younger face. It does nothing to change my sensibility toward it all. In fact, the most it does is give me a sinking feeling in the pit of my gut. “How do you know her?”

“I met her mother, Lena, at a cancer support group meeting that I only attended once. Lena referred me to this clinic and introduced me to Krista. We’ve only spoken twice. She’s a shy child. Barely ever opens her mouth.”

“You never told me you attended a support group,” I say. “Why did you stop going?”

She shrugs. Her expression is flaccid and nonchalant.

“I’m not one for bullshit,” she replies. “Those meetings make everything about cancer sound like roses and sugar candy. It’s a poor vice if you ask me. Only children like Krista would get anything out of it. Children already see life in rainbows. I am far too old to learn how to accept death. Besides, I'm Catholic. I already know where my soul going.”

“That’s pretty morbid,” I say, but she doesn’t respond. She stands while rummaging around her purse.

“I need a cigarette,” she announces before exiting the clinic. I watch her leave and linger outside the glass door, lighting her cigarette with trembling hands. That woman can act brave all she wants. Those trembling hands say otherwise.

“Krista, honey, the doctor will see you now,” says the nurse that enters the lobby from a door behind the receptionist desk. Krista moves into an upright position, using the chair arms to prop herself up.

While lugging her respirator toward the door, the nurse meets her halfway to grab the machine and wheel it in behind Krista. That girl is a sight I’ll never be able to expunge from my memories. I try to relax, but these surroundings leave me with no comfort. I hate hospitals. It’s selfish thinking, I know.

I just can’t stand the look of these places. White walls. Spongy blue carpeting. And the stench of Lysol in the air, maybe to keep the air sanitary. The last thing a roomful of cancer patients need is polluted air to contaminate what’s left of their immune systems.

I settle in my chair, molding my butt to the flattened cushion of the seat, feeling cotton worming out through a small hole in the leather. I don’t focus on the other patients occupying the rest of the lobby chairs. Most are either bald, missing limbs or eyes. I feel disrespectful for staring too long at them.

I scan an array of neatly stacked magazines atop the table, briefly noting the front page spreads. I notice one in particular, a local publication called
The OC Express
with a picture of Vivian on the cover and a headline that reads:
Influential role model. Loving wife. Community Queen. Read her inspirational story here.
 

It makes sense that Vivian knows the Head Editor of this particular magazine. She likely paid them to do this cover story on her. A woman that organizes fundraisers for a living has to have
something
to do with her time after reading books to terminally ill children and feeding the homeless at the local soup kitchens.

Vivian only has herself to keep company. I suspect that with Adrian working all the time, she must need something to make her feel needed, wanted. All alone in that the big, empty house, I imagine she must chant the same mantra over and over again:
I am needed. I am loved. People want me around.

I think about that and feel sorry for her all over again. It’s amazing how someone like her—someone always in the spotlight and always in the tabloids—is so lonely. I fear that’s her worst fear. She’s dying, but what’s worse is that she’s dying alone. Under the scrutiny of the media. It’s like everyone is waiting for her to die so they can blog about it.

I busy myself with this magazine, flipping to the page of her story and skimming the four-page article detailing her battle with cancer, from prognosis to treatment. On one page, Vivian sits atop a barstool smiling back from a photo with a quote from her interview printed in large white letters over her head in quotations.

“At first, I wanted to fall apart,” says the quote. “Until I realized that shutting the world out wouldn’t cure me. Stepping up and rising against this was the only option I agreed with. It’s just not in my DNA to give up on anything I want.”

I believe these words the moment I read them. Only she could have said them. Vivian’s determination to obtain the things she wants is what got me into the position I'm in. What I don’t believe is the phony smile in this picture.

I don’t believe that Vivian is who she wants to be. She’s certainly not the same woman in these airbrushed photos. In actuality, she is nothing, but a caricature of someone perfect. Not a personification.

Eventually, a nurse calls Vivian’s name. We follow her to a small examination room with several medical diagrams of infected organs of all types. To my left is a giant poster of a woman with a hole in her throat urging smokers to quit. I'm sure Vivian ignores this poster every time she comes in here.

Vivian dresses in the regulatory hospital gown then sits atop the examination table. She won’t put down her cell phone and has been arguing with someone for ten minutes about decorations for the scholarship fundraiser gala she’s been planning.

She orders me to take notes and ensures that I plan to give my own suggestions for the catering. So far, being Vivian Lynch’s intern means escorting her to doctor appointments and arranging for charity parties. It’s nothing I can’t handle. Vivian is the only thing I worry about handling. Tending to her chores and cleaning up her messes are the extraneous duties. Vivian is the main course.

When she finally puts her phone away, Dr. Carrick arrives in the room. He looks only at Vivian, once more neglecting to acknowledge or even notice me. His focus belongs to her. The man even straightens his tie like some preening schoolgirl.

“So Vivian, how are you feeling today?” he asks and suddenly he’s completely different person than he was the last time I saw him. Receptive and…smiling? I didn’t think the man had it in him to even fake cordiality. I don’t get it. What changed between the last time I saw him and now? Why’s he suddenly in such a smiley mood? Vivian forces some half-assed grin, I guess to lighten the mood.

“I’m still breathing…for now,” she says. “I’d kill for another cigarette. Are you sure you don’t want to reconsider that ‘no smoking’ rule this clinic has?”

Carrick smirks. I get the feeling that she isn’t kidding and may actually want an answer to that question.

“Let me check you out,” he says then he proceeds to give her a full body check-up before revealing her X-rays on the illuminating blackboard.