After dinner, nobody felt like doing anything except watching TV. That suited Hopie. She found a rerun of “Love Boat,” curled up in my lap, stuck her thumb in her mouth, and was as happy as a clam.
The minutes dragged by. Seven o’clock, seven-fifteen, seven-thirty … eight-fifteen.
It had been two and a half hours since Mom called. What were Mom and Dad doing at the doctor’s at 8:15 P.M.? Doctors’ offices weren’t even open at 8:15.
It was eight-thirty when we heard a car pull into the garage.
Brent and I looked at each other. Then we all looked at the back door, waiting for someone to come in.
As soon as the door opened, Hopie hurtled herself across the room and into Mom’s arms.
“Mommy! We made snowmen! We made our own play dough! We went to the park!” She paused. She watched Mom close the door behind her. “Where’s Daddy?” she asked.
“Just a second, Hopie,” said Mom. “Let me hang my coat up. Carrie, will you please turn off the television? I want to talk to the four of you.”
Something like an ice cube settled into the pit of my stomach.
“Come here, Sissy,” I said.
Hope crawled back in my lap. Suddenly she knew something was wrong, too. She put her thumb in her mouth and sucked away furiously.
Brent sat down on one side of me, Carrie on the other. We were lined up on the couch as if we were waiting for a firing squad. Mom took up a position in an armchair across from us.
I giggled nervously.
Mom didn’t mince any words. That wasn’t her style.
“Well,” she began, looking at her hands, which were in her lap, “as I’m sure you’ve guessed, I have some bad news. Your father is in the hospital.”
“The hospital!” I cried.
Brent silenced me with a touch on my arm.
But I couldn’t help crying out. I was just so surprised. How could Dad suddenly be that sick? I’d seen him when he left for work in the morning. He’d looked all right.
“The doctor thinks your father has heart disease,” said Mom.
“How serious is it?” asked Brent.
“They’re not sure right now,” replied Mom. “Dr. Seitz called in a specialist tonight, a cardiologist. He’s running tests. We’ll have the results of some of them tomorrow. That’s mostly why Dad is in the hospital now—for tests.”
“How does he feel?” I asked.
“Not bad,” said Mom. “Just tired, out of breath. You know how run-down he’s been lately. And his legs are bothering him. They’re swollen again.”
I nodded.
“I’m going to pack a bag for your father and go back to the hospital. I don’t know what time I’ll be home tonight. Brent, you’re in charge while I’m gone.”
“Okay,” said Brent.
“And I don’t want anyone giving Brent any trouble. Here are your bedtimes, so there will be nothing to argue about: Hope, as soon as you’re ready; Carrie, nine-thirty; Liza, ten o’clock; Brent, by eleven o’clock. Got that, everybody?”
We nodded grimly.
Mom went upstairs to get Dad’s overnight bag.
I glanced at Brent and Carrie on either side of me.
“Well?” I said.
“You know, they’re making great strides in medicine and cardiology,” said Brent. “We’re learning about it in that special pre-med class I’m taking this year.”
Brent is really smart. He’s always being chosen to participate in new programs and accelerated classes.
“You wouldn’t believe it,” he went on. “Doctors can do all kinds of surgery these days. Coronary bypass operations are practically routine, and more and more people are surviving heart transplants. Dad could even be the next guy to get an artificial heart.”
“Oh, great,” I said. “The new William Schroeder. That means Dad has just days and days ahead of him. Terrific.”
We fell silent. Nobody moved from the couch. Hope lay back against me, sucking her thumb and twisting her hair. The only sound in the room was Hopie slurping away.
Suddenly Carrie turned to her viciously. “Would you cut that out?” She yanked Hope’s thumb out of her mouth. “What a baby.”
Hope made a feeble attempt to slap Carrie’s hand. Then she burst into tears.
I turned on Carrie and gave her a look that could have killed a snake. Carrie folded her arms and slumped so far down that she almost slid off the couch.
I got to my feet and picked Hopie up. She laid her head on my shoulder, crying silently. “Okay, Sissy. I’ll take you upstairs to bed. It’s been a long day,” I said.
I left Brent and Carrie sitting at opposite ends of the couch. Just sitting. Neither one moved. Neither one said good night to Hopie.
I carried Hope through the living room and started up the stairs. She was as limp and as heavy as a sack of potatoes. She must have been dead tired.
I met my mother on her way downstairs with Dad’s bag. Mom stopped to kiss Hopie and to brush away her tears, but she didn’t ask why she was crying.
“Try to get some sleep tonight, Liza,” Mom told me. “And thanks for helping out.” She kissed me on the forehead and went on downstairs.
“Good night, Mom,” I said. “Tell Dad good night, too. And tell him … that I love him.”
Chapter Three
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, AT exactly the same time as the day before, I turned onto Bayberry and walked by all those familiar houses. They were houses I had seen every single day of my life, but that day they looked subtly different. Bleak, somehow. Perhaps it was the gray day and the fine flakes of snow that were beginning to fall. More likely, it was my mood.
I crossed the street to our house, noticing that a light was on in the living room and that the paper had been taken in. I checked the mailbox. Empty. Someone was home. Carrie? Brent? … Dad?
I raced up the walk and burst through the front door.
“Hello?” I called.
“Hi, sweetheart.” Mom was sitting in the living room reading The Story About Ping to Hopie.
“Mom!” I cried. “You’re home! Why are you home? You picked Sissy up early.”
Hope gazed at me solemnly.
“I left school at noon to go to the hospital and decided to come home early. I got Hope on the way.”
“Oh,” I said. I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad.
“Listen,” said Mom. “What time will Brent and Carrie be home? I can’t keep everybody’s schedules straight.”
“They should both be home soon. Brent doesn’t have any after-school activities today.”
“Good,” replied Mom. “I want to talk to all of you again.”
I started to ask Mom a question, but she silenced me with her eyes and went back to Ping.
Hope, I noticed, was strangely quiet. She’d been quiet at breakfast, too.
I fixed myself a snack and waited.
Brent and Carrie arrived home within ten minutes, and Mom called them into the living room before they even had a chance to eat anything.
The four of us kids sat down rather stiffly and waited while Mom paced back and forth. At last she stopped.
“Well,” she said, “Dr. Keene, the cardiologist, spent some more time with your father this morning. And he has the results of several of the tests they took yesterday.” Mom pressed her hands together. She paused.
“And?” prompted Brent.
“And he thinks your father has something called cardiomyopathy. That’s just a long word meaning that his heart isn’t functioning well anymore. … The prognosis isn’t very good.”
“What’s ‘prognosis’?” asked Carrie.
“The … outcome,” replied Mom. “The prediction for the course the disease will take, the way things will turn out.”
“What do you mean?” I whispered.
“Dad’s heart is growing weaker every day. It’s already far weaker than a normal heart. That’s why he feels so tired and gets so short of breath. His heart has to work twice as hard as usua
l in order for him to climb stairs, to walk, to do just about anything. And no heart can stand the strain that’s being put on your father’s heart.”
“But what exactly are you saying?” I persisted. “Is Dad going to die?”
“We’re all going to die,” snapped Carrie.
“Jerk! You know what I mean.”
“Liza, Carrie, that’s enough. No fighting now. I mean it.” Mom’s voice rose, and then dropped to a whisper. “We need each other too much.”
I lowered my eyes.
“To answer your question, Liza,” Mom said, and now her voice was quavering slightly, “he probably won’t live much longer. Dr. Keene said anywhere from six months to a year.”
I glanced quickly at Hopie. She was leafing through the pages of Ping. Brent and Carrie remained silent, staring at Mom. I stared, too. I couldn’t believe it. We’d just been given the worst news of our lives, and we weren’t falling apart. The O’Haras are from pretty strong stock.
“So what I think we have to do,” Mom went on, “is make these last months the best ever.”
That was followed by the loudest silence you can imagine.
I’m sure we were all thinking the same thing: was Mom crazy? These were going to be terrible months. Our father was dying. And Mom thought we could be happy? But before any of us said a word, we realized what Mom really meant: that, of course, we had to make the last months as good as we could—for Dad’s sake.
“I get it,” said Carrie. “We’ll do this for Dad.”
“And for us,” Mom said. “So that later we can look back to this time and find nice memories.”
Silence again.
“When’s Dad coming home from the hospital?” Brent asked finally.
“In about a week,” said Mom. “Dr. Keene isn’t quite finished with the tests, and he wants to try your father on several medications that will help him out during the next few months.”
I glanced at Hopie again. She was still looking through Ping, her thumb in her mouth. I wondered just how much of this she understood. She’d been right here with the rest of us and had heard everything Mom had said. And yet she’d barely moved except to turn the pages in the book. She hadn’t even looked up when Carrie and I had snapped at each other. But Hopie is smart. I knew she probably understood plenty.
“Well,” said Mom briskly. “You guys are off dinner duty tonight. I’m not going back to the hospital until the evening, so—for today—you’re off the hook. I’m cooking.”
“Okay,” said Carrie uncertainly. She got slowly to her feet, looking numb. I knew she wanted to be by herself.
“All right,” said Brent. “I’m going … out.”
“Play school with me, Liza,” begged Hopie. She tossed aside The Story About Ping and ran to me. “Please? You can be the teacher.”
“Not now, Sissy,” I said picking her up, “but how about if you play school with your dolls? Then you can be the teacher.”
Hopie looked disappointed, but left anyway.
I looked at Brent shrugging into his down jacket and Hopie and Carrie going upstairs. I listened to the sounds of Mom in the kitchen, opening and closing the refrigerator door, pouring out dog kibbles for Fifi, opening something with the electric can opener.
I decided to go over to Denise’s, so I stuck my head into the kitchen to tell Mom. And I saw something that made me freeze. My mother was sitting at the kitchen table sobbing, the box of kibbles beside her. Her face was in her hands and her shoulders were shaking.
I backed away. I couldn’t go to her. What would I say? I just left quietly for Denise’s, feeling shattered. I had never, ever seen my mother fall apart like that.
Denise Petersen and her family moved to Bayberry seven years ago, just before Denise and I entered kindergarten. We didn’t become friends right away, though, not even after we wound up in the same kindergarten class. We had to work up to it, skirting warily around each other for weeks. Then one day I spilled poster paint while I was at one of the easles, and Randy Norton, whom Denise and I hated, called me a “stupid, clumsy cow.” So Denise ran up to him and kicked him in the shins. Our friendship was sealed.
I stood at the Petersens’ front door, waiting for someone to answer the bell, and thinking about Denise and how she always roots for the underdog. She has a heart of gold—and a fiery temper. Denise is a great person to have on your side, but she can be a rotten enemy.
Right now I was trying to decide whether to tell her about my father. I knew she would be sympathetic, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk about it yet. Besides, Denise would be more than sympathetic—she’d be crushed. Denise loved Dad, partly because Dad was so terrific and partly because Denise’s own father had died several years ago. After that, she had kind of counted on my father for certain things, things her mother and younger sister, Maggie, couldn’t help her with, like fixing the chain on her bike and showing her how to build a cage for her guinea pigs.
I had just resolved not to say anything to Denise—yet—when she answered the door, her face cloudy, and greeted me with, “How come you didn’t tell me your father was in the hospital?”
She held the door open and I went inside, unzipping my jacket.
“How did you find out?” I asked.
“Cathryn Lynn’s mother was working at the hospital this morning and saw him there. She told Cathryn Lynn after school and Cathryn Lynn told me. What is it? Some kind of secret?”
“No,” I said. “I just don’t feel like talking about it. Besides, it’s no big deal, just one of those embarrassing little things.” I couldn’t believe I’d just lied to Denise.
Denise giggled. We have this joke about hemorrhoids, and I’m sure she thought that was what was wrong with Dad. “Okay,” she said. “I’m sorry I was mad. It’s just that we don’t usually keep things from each other.”
That was the truth. I told Denise everything. She knew things my mother didn’t know and Carrie didn’t know. She knew what had really happened to the brand-new sweater I told Mom was stolen at school. She knew about the time Brent and I experimented with the stuff in Mom and Dad’s liquor cabinet until I started throwing up. (Mom thought I had a virus.) And she knew that, more than anything else in the world, I wanted to have a boyfriend.
How could I not tell Denise about Dad? But I couldn’t. Not yet.
“Hey,” I said, to get her mind off the subject, “did you get that new eye stuff?”
“Oh, yeah!” cried Denise. “Blushing Plum. It’s great. Come on upstairs.”
In Denise’s room, we tried on her new makeup. Then we talked about cute boys. I thought Marc Radlay was the cutest boy in the whole seventh grade.
“Do you want to get married someday?” Denise asked me a little later. She was lying on her stomach on the floor, leafing through the pages of Mademoiselle. I was sacked out on her bed, thinking.
“Of course,” I answered. “Don’t you?”
“I don’t know. …”
I looked at Denise. She is absolutely beautiful. She has soft, straight blond hair and big blue eyes with impossibly long dark lashes. She could have stepped right out of Mademoiselle. And she could have had tons of boyfriends if she’d wanted. But she was very cautious.
“You don’t want to get married?” I asked. “Don’t you want kids?”
“Oh, you can have kids without getting married. People do it all the time.”
“Yeah … but come on. Really. Why don’t you want to get married?”
Denise sighed. She rolled over on her back and stared up at the ceiling. “You know what Mom said the day after Dad died?”
“No,” I said, propping myself up on my elbows, suddenly very curious. I rolled over and looked at her. “What did she say?”
“She said, and these are her exact words, this is a direct quote: ‘I won’t get remarried, baby. It hurts too much to lose someone. I couldn’t go through this again.’ When she first said that, I was relieved because, you know, I’d heard all those stories about stepparents,
and the last thing I wanted was a new father. But then I thought about it some more and I decided that if losing your husband really hurts that much, maybe it isn’t worth it. I mean, maybe getting married isn’t worth it.”
“Denise,” I ventured, “how did you feel when your father died?”
Denise thought for a while. “Well,” she said at last, “you know how you feel when you fall down really hard or when you get punched in the stomach—like you’ve had the wind knocked out of you?”
I nodded, even though I’ve never been punched in the stomach.
“That’s how I felt. Surprised. And shocked. But mostly very scared, like when you panic because you think you’re not going to get your breath back. I guess that’s because it was so sudden.”
Denise’s father had died of something called an aneurysm. He was only thirty-six years old.
“How long did you feel that way?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember. A few weeks? It just sort of wore off gradually. But I felt sad for a long, long time. For months, I guess. Sometimes I still feel sad. See, the thing is, there are other people who love me—Mom and Maggie and Gramma and your family—but there’s nobody who will ever love me the way Dad did, because he was my father. You can’t … replace that, you know?”
Denise took her gaze away from the ceiling and turned to look at me. I was crying. I couldn’t help it.
“Liza!” Denise sounded shocked. I didn’t blame her. “What’s wrong?”
“Dad’s not in the hospital having hemorrhoids fixed,” I sobbed. I’m sure Denise could barely understand me. I was crying so hard all the words were rushing together. “He has this heart thing.” I tried to remember the name Mom had given it.
“He has what?” Denise got up and sat beside me on the bed. She took one of my hands in hers.
“This … heart thing. I can’t remember … But he’s going to die, Denise. The doctor says he won’t live more than a year.”
Denise put her arms around me and began to cry, too. “I’m sorry,” she kept saying. “I’m sorry.” I knew she felt as though she were losing her father all over again.