“It could be aplastic anemia,” I said cautiously. “But it isn’t cancer, so that’s good.”
Mom swallowed. “Aunt Trudy had that.”
That was when the lump settled in my stomach. I knew there was a good chance that I was absolutely fine, that all of this was just a bad couple of months that would pass. But knowing that there was a genetic component made me all the more sure that this inability to produce red blood cells, this life of uncontrolled bleeding and extreme fatigue, was going to be placed on me.
Mom sat down on the other side of me. “Whatever it is, we’ll get through it together. It’s going to be fine.”
I knew logically that it wasn’t her fault. We hadn’t told her I was sick. She hadn’t had the opportunity to be strong yet sympathetic yet. Still, I was annoyed. We had done this part already. Sloane and Caroline had made the offers of bone-marrow and child-carrying services. We were past all that. This was the real part, the part where we had to plunge forward and know the truth.
“We’ll know tomorrow,” Caroline said. “And once we know what we’re fighting, we can win.”
That was the difference between us. As long as I didn’t know what I was fighting, I could pretend it didn’t exist. Once we named it, I had to admit that it was happening. That was the part I liked the very least. Denial had always been my best friend. Honest to God, there was a part of me that still expected my dad to show up one day. They’d never found his body or his personal effects, like so many of the victims of the 9/11 tragedies. So in my mind, that meant that maybe he wasn’t really dead. Maybe he had been in a coma for sixteen long-lost years, unidentifiable, and now he had made a miraculous recovery and would come walking through the front door one day like nothing had happened at all.
I heard a truck pulling into the gravel driveway, and Mom groaned. “What on earth are we going to do with all of Grammy’s stuff?”
Seeing the havoc that had been wreaked when her own mother had left Mom the house in Peachtree Bluff, Grammy had made precise, painstaking notes about who would be receiving each of her possessions—down to the contents of her fridge. Just as Grammy would have wanted it, the reading of her will had been an absolute riot.
We had all gone to the lawyer’s office, weepy and dejected and—around the time he said, “Contents of my bathroom medicine cabinet I bequeath to my son Scott,” and John piped up, “Are you kidding me? I wanted all those half-empty milk of magnesia bottles”—things had gotten pretty funny. I had seen the way death and dividing up possessions tore families apart. Mom and her brothers were lucky it hadn’t happened to them—at least, not yet.
Our dad had died unexpectedly, of course, and I had always wondered if his affairs were in order when he went. He had always told my sisters and me that we would be taken care of, that he was leaving us a big enough nest egg that we would never have to worry. Honestly, it was one of the things that allowed me to be so brave, to take a chance on my acting. I knew I had something to fall back on.
“I’ll go down and help unload,” I said.
Before I could stand up, Mom and Caroline both shouted, “No!”
I rolled my eyes. “I feel wonderful today. I even went for a run this morning. Quit treating me like a patient.” That wasn’t totally true. It was more like a slow walk around the block, but I had kept up the running charade so Mom wouldn’t get suspicious. Even Mark was in on it.
“You will rest and take care of yourself until tomorrow, when we know what this is,” Mom said.
“Fine,” I groaned. But I was secretly pleased. I hated manual labor, so I’d ride this illness out for another day.
Third children aren’t made to be supervisors. They are made to be told what to do by their big sisters. Or I guess big brothers, maybe, but I can’t really speak to that. So I didn’t even try to stand out in the backyard by the truck. I went out to the front porch. Alone. Where I had plenty of space and time and quiet to think about all the things I didn’t want to think about. Like the fact that I had to go to the doctor tomorrow and what that could mean. And the fact that Grammy’s stuff coming back from Florida meant that she was really gone. And that I was getting married in a matter of weeks. And that I had to make some pretty big decisions between now and then.
Before I could ruminate too much, I heard the door open and Uncle Scott’s voice saying, “I’m free!”
“Already? No way Mom let you out of her clutches that easily.”
“It’s amazing how when you aren’t doing everything exactly how she wants it, you get finished much more quickly. She got some of her guys from the store to meet her at the rental storage place.” He paused and handed me something. “Besides, I found something I thought my favorite niece would like.”
I gasped. “I knew I was your favorite!”
We both laughed as I turned over the tarnished picture frame in my hand. It was a cheap birthday gift I had given Grammy during my first year in LA, when the only things that kept me from starving were big tips and a generous sister. Inside it was a picture of me in a Jaguar convertible, which, let’s face it, was kind of an old-lady car but was perfect for feeling the LA sun on your face and letting it streak your long blond hair.
In our family, we didn’t get cars when we were sixteen. We got cars when we got accepted to college. Well, Sloane did. Caroline refused to drive, and I refused to go to college. I don’t know how I thought I was going to get to California with no car, but I trusted that the universe had laid this path out in front of me and that it would produce a way for me to get there. And produce it did.
Mom had been absolutely livid when Grammy gave me her car. That was actually the maddest I’d ever seen Mom be at Grammy—and she hadn’t let us come live with her after Dad died, so that’s really saying something. I think she honestly thought that if I couldn’t get to California, I couldn’t leave Peachtree. Then she’d have more time to talk me into the life she wanted for me.
I had overheard them arguing later about it. Mom had said, “I don’t want her there. I don’t want her jaded or corrupted or hurt. Can’t you see that?”
Grammy had simply responded, “We all get hurt, darling. May as well get it over with, if you ask me.” Then she paused. “And who knows? Maybe she’ll be a star.”
“Oh, I have no doubt she’ll be a star,” Mom had said. “That’s exactly what I’m worried about.”
She had never said anything like that to me, and although my mom never knew I’d overheard that conversation, it was actually that very statement that kept me going through many a long, painful casting call and rejection after rejection after rejection.
“She was a crazy old bird, wasn’t she?” I said now to my uncle, returning to the present.
Scott nodded. “When I remember her now, it’s always with her Virginia Slims in her two-piece, flirting with the waiters at the club pool,” Scott said. “And thank God. I was so afraid I’d only remember her dying.”
