Amy Gustine - You Should Pity Us Instead

He stepped quietly through the foyer and down the hall to the master bedroom, listening at the door. Silence. Back in his study, he picked up the phone. He’d given patients bad news many times, their families even more often. This time, though, he felt strangely angry at Shayla, as if the situation were her fault.

“Hi, it’s Mike, calling back about your mother.”

He would have said the same thing to any colleague, except that usually he added his last name and he couldn’t shake the fear that Rebecca could hear him, would notice his omission even with the 4/4 drum beat of her music vibrating the heat duct.

On the other end of the phone Shayla waited silently. “It’s not good,” Mike said.

She knew what that meant. There was little more to say. A few questions about location and size, then she said, “Thanks. I appreciate it,” in the same tone she would have used if this were a patient, and he replied with similar dispassion, “Sure, of course. Anytime,” and they hung up.

Anytime? How many mothers with brain cancer was she going to have?

Shayla thought about this for several seconds until she realized she should be thinking about Norma. Who was going to die. Who would be gone this time next year. Everything from here on out would be their last. Last Thanksgiving, last Christmas, last birthday. Just the thought of all those lasts exhausted Shayla. That’s when it dawned on her that a good daughter would have had Norma come home with her tonight.

She called Mike back.

“Didn’t you say you had a friend at Anderson?”

Mike’s roommate from medical school was an oncologist at MD Anderson Cancer Center. “Honestly, I don’t think he could add much.”

“It never hurts to ask, right?” Beneath her jeans, Shayla’s calves prickled. She rubbed one against the other, waiting for Mike to respond. At the end of a long pause a girl’s voice, higher than the girl she’d talked to on the phone earlier, shouted, “Dad, I’m lost! Algebra makes no sense.”

Middie. The one with the math problems. Mike had mentioned it before they started sleeping together. Shayla realized now that afterward he’d stopped mentioning the girls as well as Fawn. But it was too late. Shayla already knew from the pictures in Mike’s office what Middie looked like. The willowy, heavily-freckled middle daughter, her nickname a play on that position and not, as everyone assumed, an echo of her given name, Miranda. Shayla imagined her coming downstairs, plopping on the bottom step, the book’s tattered pages splayed across her knees. The scene played out in Shayla’s own childhood house, not Mike’s, because she had no idea what Mike’s house looked like. A decent mistress would have driven by, caught a glimpse of the foyer or kitchen through glowing windows.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” Mike said.

“I can have her there tomorrow. I could book a flight tonight.”

A blurring of the background noise alerted Shayla to Mike’s hand over the phone’s mouthpiece. He said something to Middie and Shayla raised her voice, interrupting, “Why don’t you give me the name of your friend at Anderson and I’ll try to reach him? I don’t want to wait. The gears grind slowly enough as it is…Mike? You there? Mike?”

Even with the phone several inches from his ear, Shayla’s voice jumped from its holes, beseeching. Pressing the earpiece against his chest, Mike motioned for Middie to go away. She was scowling as if she’d recognized something in Shayla’s tone.

“I said go in the kitchen and I’ll be there to help you in a minute.”

Ignoring him, Middie threw herself on the stairs, limbs splayed like one of the victims in Fawn’s shows. “Ugh! I hate math so, so much!”

“Mike? Mike?”

He put the phone back to his ear. “We should go over the films and I’ll show you what I’m looking at.”

“I can come over now.”

“No!”

Startled, Middie sat up and cocked her head. He made a motion with his hand to indicate everything was all right.

“Mike, this is my mother,” Shayla said. “My mother.”

“Come by the office first thing.”

“Maybe the guys at Anderson have some new therapies. We could buy some time.”

“There’s no point.” Shocked by his own insensitivity, Mike considered apologizing, but it would be impossible to find the right tone with Middie planted on the stairs, listening to every word until he hung up and helped her figure out the value of x .

“Okay, then,” he said, breaking into a silence he could no longer interpret. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

Mike knew the answer but Middie wouldn’t listen.

“That’s not how Mrs. Reid does it.”

He wanted to ask, who gives a fuck how you do it, as long as you get the right answer? He didn’t, though. Parenting rule #382: don’t undermine the teacher. Fawn had taught him that.

Abby came into the kitchen.

“What are you still doing up?”

“I’m thirsty.”

Mike eyed her tangled hair. The girls used to bathe every other night, which proved impossible for him to keep track of after Fawn’s stroke, so he’d established a Monday, Wednesday, Friday routine. Mike opened his mouth to tell Abby to get in the shower, but like Fawn without her meds, nothing came out. His youngest had blue eyes. Pale-eyed children were more sensitive to light and chemicals. She claimed that just plain water, even lukewarm, burned. Every shower turned into a battle of wills.

Mike turned back to Middie. “I have to go to the store. We’re out of Pepsi.”

He got his keys and wallet. “Tell Rebecca to turn that damn music off and listen for Mom in case she gets up.”

Mike never swore at the kids, but Middie didn’t seem to notice.

“I’ll listen,” she said, grimacing at her algebra book. It broke Mike’s heart how readily she agreed to help him.

Shayla found Mike’s house easily. Why this should surprise her, she didn’t know.

She parked in the street and walked quickly to the front door. Ding dong. A deep chime, like a church organ, seemed to shake the house, and only then did she remember how late it was. Shayla’s whole body itched — especially her neck, which, though bare, felt as if she were wearing a turtleneck made of steel wool.

Middie opened the door. “Hello?”

More poised than Shayla expected for thirteen, but freckled and long-limbed like the picture.

“Is your dad home?” Nervous, she continued in her Midwestern up-talk. “I’m Dr. Clayton, from the hospital? He was looking at my mother’s brain scan and I said I wanted to come take a peek?”

“He went to the store. You want to come in?”

This was as far as Middie’s manners had been trained. Once they were in the foyer she didn’t seem to know what to do.

“How about I just wait for him in there?” Shayla pointed into the adjacent room. Through an open door she could see a bookcase full of radiology journals, an enormous computer monitor, and a view box for hanging film, which he probably never used now that everything had gone digital.

Middie drifted off and Shayla sat on the edge of Mike’s desk chair, looking at the family pictures scattered on the bookcase. The most recent one, judging from the kids’ ages and taken before Fawn’s stroke, showed the five of them in front of the Eiffel Tower. Freckled Middie seemed to come from somewhere else. Rebecca favored olive-complexioned Mike and… Oh God, she’d forgotten the youngest one’s name. Emma? Emily? She favored Fawn.

Shayla studied the shape of her lips and teeth, just like her mother’s. Abby. That was it. The youngest’s name was Abby.

Relieved, she decided to wait five minutes, then make an excuse and get the hell out, but the minutes ticked too slowly. After three, she ventured back into the foyer. The living room was empty. Just leave? That would be too weird. She followed her instincts to the kitchen. No one. Coming back she heard crying and a mumbled voice. Shayla froze. Suddenly it felt as if she’d broken into the house. Switching to tiptoe, she was making her way through the hall toward the front door when Fawn turned out of a room and stopped. She wore a long Chicago Bulls T-shirt and slipper socks. Tears streaming down her face, she looked beseechingly at Shayla. “Do you know where Mike is?”