The First Time (12 page)

Mattie limped toward the toilet, lowered the seat, sat down, massaged her foot. But this time the tingling didn’t stop, even after several minutes, and she was forced to crawl across the cold floor to turn off the water pouring into the tub before it overflowed. She caught sight of herself, down on her hands and knees, in a small sliver of mirror not hidden by steam, and turned away, feeling suddenly queasy. “Bad circulation, that’s all it is,” she said, lowering herself carefully into the hot water, watching her skin flush red. Red and purple and yellow and brown, Mattie thought, counting the colors, her body a canvas. She closed her eyes, rested her head against the back of the tub, the water lapping at the scratches on her chin, the way she remembered her mother’s dogs licking at her mother’s face.

It was strange in the house without Jake.

Not that she wasn’t used to his absence. Jake worked impossible hours, was never really here even when he
was sitting right beside her. Occasionally he’d gone away on business, and she’d spent the night alone in their bed. But this was different. This time, he wasn’t coming back.

When he’d first announced he was leaving, Mattie felt as if she’d been punched in the stomach by an invisible fist. It had taken all her strength, all her resolve, not to cave forward or cry out. Why? Wasn’t it a relief to finally have everything out in the open, not to spend every day waiting for the ax to fall? Yes, she’d be lonely. But the last fifteen years had taught her that there was nothing lonelier than an unhappy marriage.

The phone rang.

Mattie debated whether or not to answer it, finally giving in, grabbing a towel, and limping toward the phone, located on Jake’s side of the bed. Maybe it was Lisa, calling again to check on how she was doing. Or Kim. Or Jake, she thought, lifting the phone to her ear. “Hello?”

“Martha?” The word hacked at the air, like a knife-wielding assailant.

Mattie sank down onto the bed, wounded before the conversation had even begun. “Mother,” she said, afraid to say more.

“I won’t take up much of your time,” her mother began. Mattie quickly translated this to mean that her mother didn’t want to spend long on the phone. “I’m just calling to see how you’re doing.”

“I’m doing fine, thank you,” Mattie said over the sound of dogs barking in the background. “And you?”

“Well, you know, getting older is no picnic.”

You’re barely sixty, Mattie thought, but didn’t say. What was the point?

“I’m sorry I didn’t get to the hospital to see you. You know how I am about hospitals.”

“No apologies necessary.”

“Jake says you’re still pretty banged up.”

“When did you talk to Jake?” Mattie asked.

“He came by to take Kim out for dinner.”

“He did?”

“About an hour ago.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“Like what?”

“How’s Kim?” Mattie asked, changing the subject.

“She’s a lovely girl,” her mother said, with the kind of emotion she usually reserved for her dogs. “She was a big help to me when Lucy was having her litter.”

Mattie almost laughed. Of course there’d be a connection, she thought, rotating her right foot, the stubborn tingle refusing to go away. “Listen, Mom, you caught me in the tub. I’m standing here, dripping wet.”

“Well, then, you’d better go.” Mattie heard the relief in her mother’s voice. “I just called to see how you were.”

I was fine, Mattie thought. “I’ll be fine,” was what she said. “Good-bye, Mother. Thanks for calling.”

“Good-bye, Martha.”

Mattie hung up the phone and transferred all her weight to her errant right foot, sighing with relief at the feel of the carpet beneath her toes. “I’ll be fine,” she repeated, returning to the bathroom, climbing back into the tub, the water not as hot or soothing as before. “I’ll be fine.”

A
re you all right?” Kim cleared her throat in a vain effort to stop her voice from quavering. Why was she asking that? Wasn’t the answer obvious? Never before had she seen her mother so obviously not all right. Her skin was almost transparent beneath its palette of fading bruises. Her normally vibrant blue eyes were coated with a dull glaze of fear and pain. The ghost of former tears had left wiggly streaks through the makeup she’d so carefully applied only hours earlier. Her hands were shaking, her steps small and unsure. Kim had never seen her mother looking so helpless. It took all her strength to keep from bursting into tears. “Mom, are you okay?”

Say yes, say yes, say yes
.

“Your mother needs to rest for a few minutes,” Kim heard someone say. Only then did she notice the
burly-looking woman at her mother’s elbow. Did she have to look so healthy? Kim wondered angrily, interpreting the woman’s shiny olive skin and flashing dark eyes as something of a rebuke, as if, by being in such obvious good health, she was somehow robbing her mother of hers.

“Who are you?” Kim asked.

“Rosie Mendoza,” the woman answered, tapping the hospital identity tag hanging around her neck and leading Mattie to a chair, one of approximately a dozen that lined the wall of the fourth-floor hospital corridor. “Dr. Vance’s assistant.”

“Is my mother okay?”

“I’m fine, sweetie,” Mattie whispered, although she didn’t sound fine. She sounded weak and scared and in a great deal of pain. “I just need to sit down for a few minutes.”

“She needs to go home and crawl into bed,” Rosie Mendoza advised.

“But then she’ll be fine, right?” Kim lowered herself into the seat next to Mattie’s, clutching her mother’s hand.

“The doctor should have the test results in a day or two,” Rosie Mendoza said. “He’ll get in touch with Dr. Katzman as soon as he has anything.”

“Thank you,” Mattie said, eyes on the short brown boots peeking out from underneath her brown slacks, her body motionless.

“Did it hurt?” Kim asked her mother after Rosie Mendoza’s departure.

Say no, say no, say no
.

“Yes,” Mattie answered. “It hurt like hell.”

“Where did they put the needles?”

Don’t tell me
.

Mattie pointed gingerly to her shoulders and thighs, opened her hands, palms up. Only then did Kim notice the fresh Band-Aid stretched across the inside of her mother’s left hand. “How many?”

“Too many.”

“Does it still hurt?”

Say no, say no, say no
.

“Not too much,” Mattie said, although Kim could see she was lying.

Why was she asking her mother these questions when she didn’t want to know the answers? Wasn’t it enough to know that her mother had spent the last hour and a half undergoing some unpleasant and, her mother had assured her, completely unnecessary test, designed to show the pattern of nerve activity in her body, a test she’d only agreed to in order to get Lisa Katzman off her back? Kim felt a surge of anger charge through her body. Why had her mother’s closest friend put her through something so awful if it was so unnecessary?

“Do you want a cup of coffee or something?” Kim asked her mother, refusing to consider the possibility that Lisa might have a different opinion of the merits of the test.

Mattie shook her head no. “I’ll just sit here for a few minutes. Then we can go.”

“How are we going to get home?” Kim asked suddenly. Her mother had insisted on driving into the city, despite Lisa’s admonition that she should let someone else do the driving, that she might feel too weak and unsettled after the test, especially since she was still
recovering from her accident. But Mattie had stubbornly refused to burden any of her friends, and she wouldn’t let Kim call Grandma Viv, claiming Kim’s grandmother was useless in any kind of emergency, at least those involving human beings. As for Jake, Mattie wouldn’t even consider asking him, and Kim had agreed with her mother. They didn’t need Jake. What did they want with a man who’d made it clear he’d rather be with another woman? Mattie didn’t need her soon-to-be ex-husband’s help any more than Kim needed her soon-to-be former father.

“I’ll always be here for you,” he’d tried to tell her that awful night exactly one week ago, when he’d picked her up at her grandmother’s small house in the once run-down, now trendy area of the city known as Old Town. “I’m still your father. Nothing’s ever going to change that.”

“You’re changing it,” Kim protested.

“I’m moving out of the house,” Jake argued. “Not out of your life.”

“Out of sight,” Kim said coldly, “out of mind.”

“You understand that this has nothing to do with you.”

“It has everything to do with me,” Kim countered, deliberately misinterpreting his words.

“Sometimes things happen.”

“Oh, really? Things happen? All by themselves? They just happen?” Kim was aware she was raising her voice. She relished the sound of its outrage, the way it made the man sitting across from her in the small Italian restaurant squirm. “You’re trying to tell me this is something beyond your control?”

“I’m trying to tell you that I love you, that I’ll always be here for you.”

“Except you’ll be somewhere else.”

“I’ll be living somewhere else.”

“So you’ll be
there
for me,” Kim said, proud of her own cleverness. It made her feel powerful, kept her heart from sliding right out of her chest and crashing to the hard tile floor, shattering into thousands of tiny pieces.

“I love you, Kim,” her father said again.

“Now I’m just like everybody else,” Kim said in return.

And so when Lisa called to tell Mattie she’d been able to book the electromyogram for Thursday of the following week, Kim immediately volunteered to accompany her mother to the hospital, even though it meant missing an afternoon of school. Surprisingly, her mother agreed. “We girls have to stick together,” Kim told her, climbing into bed beside her mother later that night, as she’d been doing every night since Jake left, her arm draping protectively across Mattie’s hip, as she slowed her breathing to match her mother’s, their bodies rising and falling in unison, breathing as one.

“Are you going to be able to drive home?” Kim asked her mother now.

“Give me a few more minutes,” Mattie said.

But twenty minutes later, Mattie was still staring at her feet, afraid, or unable, to move. Her complexion remained a ghostly white beneath the mustard yellow and soiled lavender of her bruises. Her hands still trembled. “You better call your father,” Mattie said, fresh tears falling the length of her cheeks.

“We can take a cab,” Kim protested.

“Call your father,” Mattie insisted.

“But—”

“Don’t argue. Please. Call him.”

Reluctantly, Kim did as she was told. Locating a pay phone beside a busy bank of elevators at the end of the long corridor, she punched in the numbers of her father’s private line, hoping he was in court, with clients, otherwise unavailable. “I don’t understand why we just can’t take a taxi,” she muttered under her breath, watching an elderly man in a stained blue hospital gown wander toward her, dragging his IV unit alongside him. Now she understood why her grandmother had such an aversion to hospitals. They were harsh, harmful places, full of wounded bodies and lost souls. Even people who were healthy when they walked in, like her mother, limped out in pain, frail echoes of their former selves. Kim felt vaguely nauseated, wondered whether she’d picked up some deadly virus just sitting outside the doctor’s office. How many hands had fingered those same old magazines? How many germs had she been exposed to during the interminable minutes she’d waited for her mother? Kim rubbed her hands against her jeans, as if trying to rid herself of any stray bacteria. She felt dizzy and flushed, as if she might faint.

“Jake Hart,” her father suddenly announced, his voice a bucket of ice water tossed at her face.

Kim snapped to attention, her shoulders stiffening, her knees buckling. She pushed a strand of imaginary hair away from her forehead, stared at the newly stilled bank of elevator doors. What was she supposed to say?
Hi, Daddy? Hello, Father? Hi there, Jake? “It’s Kim,” she said finally, as the old man trailing his IV did an abrupt about-face and began retracing his steps along the corridor. Kim noticed flashes of bare white buttocks between the halves of his pale blue hospital gown. What horrible tests had they put him through? Kim wondered.

“Kim, sweetheart—”

“I’m at Michael Reese County General with Mom,” Kim said without further preamble.

“Has something happened?”

Kim buried her chin into the cowl neck of her dusty rose sweater, her lips folding one inside the other, an impatient sigh escaping, hurrying toward her heart. “We need your help,” she said.

Forty minutes later, Jake met his wife and daughter inside the front entrance of the downtown hospital. “I’m sorry I took so long getting here,” he apologized, as Kim glared her displeasure. “I got corraled in the hall on my way out of the office.”

“You’re a busy man,” Kim sneered.

“Thanks for coming,” Mattie told him.

“Is the car in the lot?”

Mattie handed him the keys to the rental car. Her Intrepid, all but totaled in the accident, was a write-off. “It’s a white Oldsmobile.”

“I’ll find it. Are you okay?”

“She’s fine,” Kim said, snaking her arm through her mother’s.

“How are you, sweetheart?” Jake asked his daughter, reaching out as if to stroke her hair.

“Great,” Kim replied stiffly, leaning out of his
reach, relishing the hurt look in her father’s eyes. “Could you get the car? Mom needs to be in bed.”

“I’ll be right back.”

Minutes later Kim’s father pulled the white Oldsmobile up to the curb, jumping out to help Mattie into the front seat, relegating Kim to the back.

Kim made an exaggerated show of trying to get comfortable, bouncing around in the backseat, deliberately careless with the chunky heels of her black leather boots, scraping them against the back of her father’s seat repeatedly, as she crossed, then uncrossed, her legs. Who designed these cars anyway? Did they think that all backseat passengers were under ten years of age? Didn’t they know that grown-ups needed more leg room? That they might want to sit without their knees circling their chins? She’d spent a lot of time in the backseats of cars lately, Kim realized, thinking back to last Saturday night, hearing Teddy’s whispered pleas warm against her ear.
Come on, Kim. You know you want to
.