Reclaiming Lily (26 page)

Gloria tossed down the book, both because it grated at her and because she heard Joy clopping down the hall, returning from school. She pasted on her best effort at a real smile. Joy didn’t need phony or woe-is-me. Joy was improving. Her miscarriage could not stall Joy’s progress.

“Mom.” Joy slipped into her room, in the quiet way she’d adopted since the baby died
.
Yesterday.

Gloria’s jaw ached from smile-stretching. “How was school?”

“Fine. Dad said to tell you he’d be home as soon as he could.” Joy’s hands were behind her back, as if she were about to curtsy.

Gloria shrugged, though the submissive posture of her daughter salved pain. “Really, I don’t know why he’s taking off early. I’m fine.” She yawned, as if bored. “In fact, I was about to get up. Would you like a smoothie, dear?”

“Mom. You don’t need to get anything for me.” Joy thrust out her hands, which held a nosegay of pink and blue carnations.

Gloria’s chin quivered. Baby pink. Baby blue. “Oh, Joy.” Her insides shimmered, as they had that first time she had looked at Joy’s perfect face. Her daughter understood what this stupid book had not. Her daughter understood that she was not mourning the loss of one she had known intimately. Her daughter understood that she was grieving for the one she had not been allowed to know. Her daughter, though she was only seventeen, understood the pain of not knowing whether she’d carried a girl or a boy.

“I thought . . . you might like them.” Joy handed her the bouquet.

Gloria buried her nose and inhaled the heady, clove-like scent that she’d always preferred over pricey roses. She shoved away a bad Daddy memory, took another whiff . . . and remembered running along her grandmother’s picket-fence line. Butterflies swooped down to inspect her pink dress before fluttering away. She saw her daddy, tossing her a ball, laughing when it bounced off her knee and dribbled onto the ground. A good Daddy memory.

A warm spring welled in an exquisite, painful way. “It’s . . . perfect,” was interspersed with a cleansing cry and streams of tears.

Joy sat on the edge of the bed and patted and cooed.

Gloria sank into the scrubbed-clean smell of her daughter, whose slender arms encircled Gloria and pulled her close.

Time was reduced to the inhales, exhales, of a daughter whose tears free-flowed onto her blouse, a daughter who soothed and hugged. She’d lost a child . . . to find a child. The thought birthed more tears. It was a painful truth, an inexplicable truth. Even as she questioned, Gloria knew it was of God.

Gloria gently pulled away. “How . . . how did you know what I felt when no one else has had a clue?”

Joy gripped the sheet and twisted it into a tourniquet. “Because . . .”

Through strands of hair, Gloria glimpsed lips bowed by unspeakable loss, eyes heavy with grief. A jaw working to express the thing that no one had understood for six years. “Because, Mommy, I never got a chance to know my family either.”

A moan tore from Gloria, who flung her arms about Joy and pulled her close. Joy trembled in sync with raspy breaths, matching the tremble in Gloria’s soul.

“You must hate me for not understanding.” Gloria battled an urge to tear her hair. “Why didn’t I see it?” She paused . . . only to catch her breath. “To think I was jealous of Kai, who’ll help you reclaim what you lost. Your sisters, your parents, your first home.”

Joy wailed, as if in agreement.

“Oh, Joy, I’m sorry!” She again wound her arms about Joy and held on for dear life. Both hers and her daughter’s.

The whimpering slowed. Joy dabbed at her eyes, then pulled her legs onto the bed and sat cross-legged. “Kai told me about my family.”

My family
. Gloria had feared those words for years. How she had squandered energy, emotion, opportunity. No more.

Gloria rose from her bed, padded to the bathroom, and returned with tissues. “I want to hear about them, Joy. But first I want to make tea. Fix you a snack.”

“Are you sure, Mommy?”

Mommy
. Another name used all too rarely . . . until this past week. How she loved the sound of it!

“I’m sure.” Gloria tossed the tissue into a wastebasket and pecked her daughter’s cheek. “About everything. I wish I would’ve been surer years ago. I might have saved us . . .” Gloria writhed her hands but could not find the words.

“If I forgive you, will you forgive me?” Joy uttered a perfect new saying . . . for both of them.

Nodding, Gloria hugged her daughter, who padded after her to the kitchen. Suddenly starving for crisp spring air, Gloria raised blinds and opened a window, then set water to boil while Joy took charge of the snack, arranging cookies on a plate. It felt like a fresh start, a new season, a solace for the days of grief that would follow.
Right now, it is enough. Lord, yes, it is enough.

18

“Go in the front door, not the employee entrance. Cross the same threshold as your patients. Greet them kindly as they wait, scared, nervous, hating us for what we tell them, what we do to them.”
As Kai entered the lobby of Massachusetts Renal Associates, she adjusted the name pin on her lab-coat lapel and let words from Dr. Ward’s last lecture inspire her.
“It will ground you when unintelligible insurance forms, dollar-sign-eyes drug reps, and computer glitches snarl your day. See those in waiting-room seats, just for a moment. Then rejoice that you have a chance to help them. That you are not  ill.”

Kai nodded at a slip of a girl, sitting in the chair under the Monet print—one of David’s favorites—kneading her hands. Kai thought of Joy and tried to give a Texas smile, but she couldn’t help but wonder,
Why is she alone?

“Good morning, Doctor.” Betsy, the receptionist, slid open the glass partition. “There’s a call for you holding on line one.”

Efficiency. Kindness. What Dr. Duncan demanded at MRA. Oh, how had one of the state’s best doctors chosen her for his practice? “Thank you, Betsy.”

“Oh, Doctor? Your nine thirty canceled.”

Kai nodded, then turned and greeted poor Mr. Haynes, rifling through a
Field & Stream
, which she’d had Betsy order after he’d regaled her with fishing stories. Adventures he’d take only in his mind since dialysis chained him to machines three days a week.

An inner office door opened. Kai stepped aside for a patient exiting and entered the world of acidosis and kidney stones and Alport syndrome and PKD. Her world.

She strode the hall as if she were in the Forbidden City, every fiber twitching with the amazement that a mere village girl could work in such a place. The sight of her lit-up phone extension snapped her back to the present. She slid into her desk chair. It could be a hospitalist. The ER. A colleague.

Her eyes landed on the image of David, picture-framed and perched on her desk, his arm lounging carelessly about her shoulder. The two of them smiled for the jogger who’d broken stride long enough to grant their request to freeze-frame their love. Kai opened her file drawer and stashed the photo under her sweater. If only memories of David could be so easily hidden . . .

She jabbed at the phone button, then stared at her office wall. Though her heart begged otherwise, intuition drowned out its plea.
It will not be David
.

“Kai speaking.”

“It’s . . . it’s Joy.” Joy’s voice scratched like leaves against concrete.

“Joy? How . . . how are you?”

“I . . . Oh, Kai.” Joy began to weep. “Sorry, but I haven’t had time to call!”

A black veil shadowed Kai’s wall of accolades. “Joy? What is it?” She pressed the phone so tightly against her ear, she heard a low buzz.
Joy met with the doctor. He tested her. She has PKD.
Her composure threatened to splinter as her imagination careened out of control.

“You won’t believe what happened.”

“Yes, dear one.” Kai heard her voice, though it seemed to have separated from the rest of her. Another glance at her diplomas confirmed what she must do. Joy did not need just a sister, but a sister and a doctor. One acquainted with PKD, which Joy was about to know in a horrid and intimate new way. “Tell me, Joy, what did they find?”

“What did they find?” shrilled back at her.

“What did the doctor find?” Kai evened out her voice.

“The doctor? He released her. Tuesday night. I guess they called you earlier.”

Kai felt her eyes widen. Someone was released Tuesday? From jail? The Powells had called? It was so unlike Betsy to lose a message. Or had that answering service—

“Like, she’s gonna be fine. But Kai,” Joy wailed, “it was so awful.”

Kai cleared her throat. “Joy, I do not understand. Tell me what happened.”

“So they didn’t talk to you.”

“I just arrived at the office.”

“Mother miscarried, right in the jail! During one of my sessions!”

Kai’s mouth went dry, yet she loosened her hold on the phone. Gloria, not Joy, had suffered. “Joy. That is awful.”

“I . . . I found her in the bathroom. Found the baby too.” Joy’s voice stretched into a screech. “Kai, it was . . . so tiny! So . . . helpless!”

Kai’s stomach spasmed. “Oh, dear, dear,” she kept repeating. “You found the baby.” Her mind swelled with unwanted images.

A practicum session first introduced Kai to a fetus. Ten weeks old. Again she saw transparent fairylike arms, crossed in deep thought . . . or angry. Spindly legs were also crossed, though at the ankles, and drawn up to touch those arms. A thumb was forever frozen at a hint of a mouth; the skull, broad and disproportionately large, was filled with ideas and dreams no one would ever know. What power decided that life would end? Kai cleared her throat. This was no time to wax theological. “Oh, Joy. When did you say it happened?”

“We had a meeting with Nicole on Tuesday. Mother excused herself and was gone, like, forever. Nicole thought I should check on her. I found her on the floor . . . with the blood . . . the baby.”

Memory of Kai’s first ER call flashed in living color and throbbed blood to her pulses. “You found her first?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m sorry you—and she—went through that. Thank the heavens you were there for her.”

“I even cleaned her up. Paramedics couldn’t believe I’d saved it.”

Kai flattened her spine against her chair back. “You . . . you saved the . . .”

“The placenta was still attached.” Joy began to cry.

Kai’s arms prickled with such a strange mix of joy and pain, she battled the urge to cry herself.
Joy is a healer. I thought so at the jail. Now I know.
“Joy,” she whispered, cradling the phone lovingly, as if she were holding precious Fourth Daughter instead of a communication device, “you have shown great bravery. You have done things grown women could not do.”

“I had to. Because . . .”

“Because . . . Why, Joy? Tell me.”

“The EMTs said to leave it intact. And . . .”

“And what?”

“It . . . it could’ve been me.”

Kai’s jaw went slack. “What do you mean?”

“I thought about what Father told Mother to do with me—what Father said she had to do. Like, I needed to help. Somehow. Oh, God!” Joy screeched. “I can’t explain it.”

Kai swallowed. “Some things cannot be explained. Still, the heart feels them.”

“If . . . if you say so.” Joy spoke in a muted tone. Begging encouragement. Hope.

“Your mother needs you now.” Kai injected iron into her voice. She must finish this. For Joy’s sake. And her own. “Even more than she needed that baby.”

“You . . . really . . . think so?” Sniffles and words alternated.

As if Joy were in the room, Kai nodded. “Yes.” She picked up her pen and began to doodle. “And you need her. She is a good woman, Joy. She cares for you.”

“It’s . . . like . . . it’s strange.”

Kai cocked her head. “Strange that you connect with her in a new way? That you . . . find you love her?”

“Like . . . whatever.”

Kai winced. Did Chinese teenagers speak so flippantly about elders? From what she had heard, change was brewing in China. Old mores, discarded like used tea leaves. “No, it is not ‘like, whatever.’ Do not discount your role in Gloria’s healing.”

“My role?” Enthusiasm swelled Joy’s voice. “You’re not surprised about me helping Mom. It’s like you knew I could.”

The pen in her grip became a victim of Kai’s tension. She sketched a kite, looped it in a careening path, and let out a sigh. Her mind raced from Boston to China. She had regretted not telling Joy this part of her story earlier. Should she do it now?

Her gaze returned to her certificates and diplomas, which expanded until they blotted out every inch of taupe on the wall.
Yes! Yes!
black calligraphy insisted.
Yes! Yes! Yes!
gold seals proclaimed. It is time. She must know. Perhaps it is her destiny as well. A destiny to be protected. A destiny that must not end with a slit wrist and lifeblood streaming down a drain.

As Kai scribbled on a notepad, the story of the healing hand raced across phone lines.

Joy listened wordlessly, breath-puffs the only evidence of her on-line presence. Kai finished. Joy said, “So, like, I was meant to do this. I know it . . . deep inside.”

Sun rays dazzled the gold leaf paint Kai and Cheryl had rubbed onto Kai’s certificate frames. Though Kai then closed her eyes, savoring the moment, glorious light seeped past her eyelids and into her very soul. “Yes,” she whispered. “Yes.”

“Doctor?”

Kai opened her eyes. There stood Deborah, an MRA nurse.

Kai startled, then nodded. Was it ten? Noon? Telling the story of her calling and answering Joy’s questions had skewed her concept of time.

“Dr. Harrell’s on line three.” Deborah laid a file on her desk. “Should he call back?”

Kai shook her head. She had said what she needed to say. “Joy, something’s come up at work that I need to address.”

“Like, is it an emergency?”

This girl is what they call “something else
.” As though she were talking to a colleague rather than her sister, Kai skimmed a note clipped to the file. “I believe it is.”