“What if you get a job over there?”
“Then you’ll just have to move to India with me.”
This seemed to appease Todd.
“What should I bring to the dinner?” Maribeth asked.
“Wine if you want,” Sunita said. “If wine goes with curry. And you can bring Stephen.”
“He’s in California, but can I bring another friend?”
“You’re working three guys?” Todd asked.
“Not exactly.”
THERE WAS A crowd. Fritz. Miles. Two other people from Thanksgiving. Sunita wore a lovely purple shalwar kameez. Todd wore a tux.
“I didn’t know it was formal,” Maribeth said.
“I just came from work,” Todd said. “So many functions around the holiday.”
“He’s just taking on the extra shifts because he’s sad Sunita is leaving,” Miles said.
“Are you jealous?” Todd asked.
“A little,” Miles said. “It’s hard to compete.”
“My husband used to say the same thing about my best friend,” Maribeth said.
“Oh, so now you’re marrying me off?” Todd asked.
“Why should I be the only one?” Sunita joked.
Janice arrived. Maribeth introduced her as a friend from the swim club. If Janice called her Maribeth, no one seemed to notice.
They drank the wine. Sunita laid out a tray of papadum, crispy lentil crackers. “I didn’t make these,” she explained. “I bought them. But everything else, I cooked.”
The entire apartment was fragrant with spices and the tang of onions. “What did you make?” Janice asked.
“Chicken jalfrezi,” she said. “It came out kind of spicy.”
“But you didn’t burn the onions this time,” Todd said. “She really has been practicing all fall.”
Sunita snapped off a piece of papadum. “I haven’t been to India in more than fifteen years,” she said. “It’s scary going back.”
THE CHICKEN WASN’T kind of spicy; it was lip-burning hot. Maribeth and Todd began to guzzle water. Janice, who had made a valiant effort before abandoning the chicken for the rice and bread, told them that water didn’t work. She emptied their wineglasses of the pinot grigio and filled them with milk.
“I feel five years old,” Maribeth said.
“Really?” Janice asked. “I drink milk all the time. To ward off osteoporosis.” She had poured herself a glass, too, and now wore a tiny milk mustache. Maribeth was beginning to suspect that she gave herself those on purpose.
AFTER THEY DID the dishes, Sunita changed into jeans and a sweater. She, Todd, and the rest of their friends were heading out to a party. As everyone said farewell, Maribeth slipped a card for them on top of the TV. Inside were two tickets for the musical production of The Wizard of Oz, which was coming to Pittsburgh in February.
She and Janice watched the young people disappear. Then they went to her apartment. They had business of their own to attend to.
70
My dearest daughter,
This is the third letter from me that you have received. Three letters doesn’t seem like much in the ten years since I sent the first one, or the nearly forty years since you were born. I thought I might take this opportunity to tell you about all the letters from me that you have not received.
I wrote you on your first birthday. It was not an actual card; I was still too sad and heartbroken at that point to commemorate your birth in such a concrete way. But I imagined a card I would send. I wrote, “I love you,” but I never signed it, because I didn’t know what to call myself.
Other birthdays I actually bought you a card. There is one from your Sweet Sixteen. It has a bunch of birthday candles, tied up like a bouquet, and it reads, “Daughter, Sixteen candles. It only gets brighter from here.”
I have bought a card or thought a card on every one of your birthdays, the consequential ones like your big 3-0, and the less ballyhooed ones, like twenty-three. Sometimes I feel foolish buying the cards. And other times, proud. Particularly if the salespeople see the card and make small talk as they sometimes do about you, and maybe their own daughters.
I also write you letters; sometimes they are real and sometimes they are imagined. A few months ago, there was a particularly lovely night sky. A big harvest moon, Venus shining brightly, and when I looked up at it, I thought about you looking up from wherever it is you are. It gave me such comfort to think of the same night sky covering us both. So I came home and wrote you about it.
It is not always happy occasions, I must confess. When my mother died—of old age, you will be relieved to know, longevity runs in the family—I thought of you, of the line of women that continues with you. I wondered if you had a daughter.
I have written to you before of the difficult circumstances that led to my decision to give you up, so by now I expect you to know, if not to fully understand, the kind of home I grew up in and why I could not raise you in that place, and why I was not remotely equipped to raise you on my own. But I have not really spoken of my own mother, who also endured that home. Maybe that was all she could do. Not fight back against my father, not protect me, but endure. In the end, she outlived him. She outlived that misery. She spent her last years in an old-age home. People think badly of those places but my mother had the best years of her life there. She got to do as she pleased. She got to swim again. She got to read a book if she felt like it. Watch whatever she wanted on the television. No one hit her. No one called her names.
And she began to speak of you, even though when you were born, she had said the most terrible things to me, and over the years acted as if you didn’t exist. But now I know that wasn’t her talking so much as what she had endured. In the end, she spoke tenderly of you, of all the milestones she’d imagined for you. She called you by the name I gave you. It made me realize that you’ve been alive in her all those years, too. It made me wonder if, in her own way, she too had been writing you letters in her head. It made me feel like a family.
I will continue to write you letters and to “write” you letters. Maybe one day you will let me share them with you. But even if you don’t, it is okay. It is the writing them that matters. And I like to believe that whether you read them or not, they are reaching you just the same.
—Janice Pickering
By the time Janice finished, they were both crying.
“Thank you,” Janice said. “Thank you for giving me the idea to write about the letters.” She gestured to the scrapbook of notes to the twins Maribeth had shown her. “Will you send those to your children?”
She picked up the scrapbook. The cover was embossed with the word MEMORIES and with all the letters she’d written, it felt heavy, substantial.
Maribeth suspected Janice was right. That it was the writing them that mattered. She liked to think she was right about the love. That it would find its way to them. And that she, too, would find her way to them.
“One day,” she said.
71
That night, she woke up suddenly. By the time she’d sat up in bed, her hand had already found its way to her heart.
Shit.
It hurt. Her chest hurt. A corrosive pain that radiated all the way up her torso and down her arm. Her left arm.
If that time at her desk had been subtle, this was as obvious as a punch to the nose.
No! She’d had the heart attack, had her heart tested and dyed and removed from her chest and stopped, operated on, and shocked back to life. She’d gone through all of that to prevent this from happening again.
“A subsequent event . . . fatal . . .” she heard Dr. Sterling say in his stupid hee-haw voice.
Get out of my head, Dr. Sterling. I fired you.
Her heart was beating wildly now, flinging around her chest like a trapped bird.
Calm down, she told herself. Calm down. Take ten deep breaths.
One, two, three.
Breathing hurt. She should go to the hospital. Call someone. Phone? Where was h
er phone?
She found it, charging next to her bed. She should call 911. But it was Jason’s number she dialed. “Hey, it’s Jase. You got the dreaded voicemail. Leave me a message.”
It was the first she’d heard his voice in months. And it was his fucking voicemail.
“You said you’d pick up on the first ring.” She sounded hysterical. “It’s me. Maribeth. I think I’m having a heart attack. Call me back. I’m scared.”
Ten deep breaths. Where was she at? Three? Four. Keep going. Call 911.
“Nine, one, one, what is your emergency?”
“I think I’m having a cardiac event.” Her voice was a whisper.
“Ma’am, can you speak up?”
“Heart attack. I’m having a heart attack. I had one before.”
“What is your location, please?”
She recited the address.
“Ma’am, I need you to stay calm. I want you to take some aspirin. Do you have any nearby?”
“Yes.”
“Keep me on the phone while you take your aspirin.”
As she fumbled for an aspirin, she started to cry.
“Ma’am, are you still with me?”
“I’m all alone,” Maribeth cried. “I know we all die alone, but I don’t want to be alone.”
“Ma’am. You’re not dying, and you’re not alone. You have me.”
“You don’t count. I don’t mean that. Everybody counts.”
“I appreciate that.”
“But I don’t want to be alone. Can I go get Todd and Sunita? They’re my neighbors.”
“Go get Todd and Sunita.”
“You’re nice. What’s your name?”
“Kirsten.”
“That’s a pretty name.”
“Keep me on the phone, and go get Todd and Sunita.”
She pounded on their door. They could still be out at their party. She had no idea what time it was.
A sleepy-eyed Sunita shuffled to the door in her Steelers night shirt. “M.B., are you okay?”
“I think I’m having a heart attack,” Maribeth said.
“What? Todd! Wake up!” she yelled but Todd was already there. “M.B.’s having another heart attack!”
“Call an ambulance,” Todd yelled.
“I already did,” Maribeth said. She could hear the siren whining in the night. “I think that’s for me.”
“I’m getting dressed,” Sunita said. “I’m coming with you.”
“Me, too,” said Todd.
Maribeth got back on the phone. “My friends Todd and Sunita are coming with me.”
“That’s good. They sound like nice friends.”
“They are.”
Todd met the medics in the hall, and by the time they were entering the apartment, he had filled them in.
“Second heart attack?” the female medic asked, putting the pulse monitor on Maribeth.
Maribeth nodded.
“First one was in October and she had bypass surgery,” Todd said.
“Any other symptoms before tonight?” the burly guy medic asked.
Todd looked at Maribeth.
“No. I just woke up with pain in my chest, and my arm. My left arm.”
“And now, chest pains, anything else? Shortness of breath? Dizziness? Nausea?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a little.”
“Okay.” She spoke into her collar. “Female, forty-four, suspected M.I., vitals good, en route to UPMC.”
She was given oxygen and put on a gurney and wheeled toward the door. The ambulance was waiting, lights flashing.
Todd and Sunita rushed after her, their faces encased in worry.
“Can we come with?” Sunita asked. “In the ambulance?”
“Your flight?” Maribeth said.
“Is tomorrow,” Sunita said. “Can we come with?”
“And you are?” the medic asked.
“We’re her—” Todd began.
“Children!” Maribeth lifted her head off the gurney. “They’re my children.”
The two medics exchanged an eye roll.
“What? He’s bio; I’m adopted,” Sunita said.
“We’re like the Jolie-Pitts,” Todd added.
Neither medic looked convinced, but they let them in the ambulance anyway.
ON THE RIDE to the hospital, Todd and Sunita held her hands.
“If I die . . .” Maribeth began.
“You’re not going to die!” Todd interrupted.
“But if I do, my name is Maribeth. Maribeth Klein. My husband is Jason Brinkley. In New York.”
“Okay, Maribeth Klein,” Todd said. “Now you can’t die because Sunita and I made a bet over what your real name was and I just won ten bucks and it would be bad taste to collect if you were dead.”
“Don’t make me laugh,” Maribeth said, clutching her chest. “It hurts.”
“Then don’t die,” Todd said.
IN THE HOSPITAL, Todd and Sunita were sent to the waiting room. Maribeth was ushered into triage. She explained her history, her recent bypass.
“Who’s your cardiologist?” the intake nurse asked.
She didn’t know what to say. Stephen was in California. Dr. Sterling was fired.
“I don’t think I have one anymore.”
SHE WAS USED to it now. EKG. Blood work. Waiting.
Todd and Sunita were not permitted in but they kept texting her from the waiting room. Are you okay?
Not dead yet, Maribeth texted back.
Still not dead.
Sunita, give Todd $10.
Not until you walk out of here, they wrote back.
“FINE, FINE, FINE, everything looks fine,” the ER cardiologist said. He was tall, tired looking, and had an excessive handlebar mustache that made Maribeth like him immediately. “Your EKG and your blood work, your pulse ox, all look completely normal.”
“But that happened last time, too,” she said. “It didn’t show up right away.”
“Which is why we’ll monitor you for a few hours. Tell me, is the pain similar to your first heart attack?”
“No. That was more gradual. This I woke up with.”
“And how would you describe it? Crushing pain?”
“No. It’s more like a burning. But I also felt it in my arm.”
“Burning. Okay. Have you eaten anything unusual in the last day or so?”
The chicken jalfrezi. “I had Indian food for dinner.”
“Spicy?”
“Very.”
“That’ll do it,” he said. “It could be reflux. I’m going to give you an antacid to take care of that. It might also be pain related to your heart healing. We’ll keep an eye on you for a while, but given you so recently had bypass, and that all your numbers look perfect, I’m not that concerned.”
“So I’m not dying of a heart attack.”
“Not presently.”
“Do you think I could see my friends?” she asked.
“Oh, you mean your ‘children’ out there?” He smiled. “They’ve been scratching at the door. Want me to let them in?”
“Please.”
“OH, MY GOD, I feel awful,” Sunita said. “My cooking gave you a gas attack!”
“Just don’t let it get around Hyderabad,” Todd said. “You’ll never find a husband. Oh, wait. Fritz can do the cooking. Mmm. Nut loaf.”
Maribeth was laughing. She hadn’t stopped laughing since they had come back to keep her company. It didn’t hurt anymore. Now that she’d taken the antacid, the pain had vanished.
Around six, Sunita started checking her phone. Her flight was at one, but she had to be at the airport by ten.
“You should get going,” Maribeth said. “You have your flight. And, Todd, you should get a few hours sleep before you leave for Altoona.”
He clutched his chest. “Altoona. You had to remind me.”
“You’ll be fine,” she told Todd. “And so will you,” she told Sunita. “And so will I. Everything is going to turn out fine.”
&nb
sp; She stopped abruptly, shocked that she’d said that. And perhaps even more shocked that she actually believed it.
72
She waited until six-thirty to call Jason. She didn’t want to wake him, but she didn’t want him to wake up to that voicemail message either. She wanted him to know she was okay, really okay.
She fished her phone out of her bag and saw that there were several missed calls from a 413 area code. Which was a Pittsburgh number, she thought, but not one she recognized. Maybe it was Stephen, though that wasn’t his cell number, or Sunita and Todd calling her from a payphone, though that didn’t make sense either because several of the calls overlapped with when they’d been with her.
She hit the call back button. When she first heard the voice on the other end, she thought maybe she had had a heart attack, after all, and was now hallucinating. Because the voice calling out—“Maribeth, is that you?”—did not belong to Todd or Sunita. It belonged to Elizabeth.
“Maribeth, where are you?” Elizabeth was asking. “Jason is going insane.”
Elizabeth had called her? Why? And why was she talking to her about Jason?
“Maribeth, say something!” Elizabeth cried.
“Elizabeth?” Maribeth asked, so confused. “Where are you?”
“Where am I? I’m in the country. Where are you? Are you okay?”
Maribeth stared at her phone. Pittsburgh’s area code was 412, not 413, which she now realized was Elizabeth’s area code in the Berkshires. That clarified where Elizabeth was, but only muddled everything else.
“Did you call me?” Maribeth asked.
“No, Jason did. He’s been trying to reach you for the last hour.”
“Jason’s there?” Maribeth asked. “With you?”
“He was. Now he’s frantically trying to get cell coverage in case you call him back on his cell. He said you had another heart attack.”
“I didn’t. They think it’s just gas. Where is he?”
“He’s headed to Lenox. Or Pittsburgh. I don’t know. He’s losing his mind, Maribeth. I’ve never seen him like this. You know how the cell coverage is up here, very dodgy. But it came on enough for him to get your voicemail. And he tried calling back and couldn’t get you. He’s taken the kids to town to call you. Or e-mail you. Or send a carrier pigeon. I told Tom we should get Wi-Fi here but you know how he likes it rustic.”