Tears were trickling down my cheeks. “Mama,” I whispered. “I love you. I’ll always love you.”
I reached out to touch her face and then recoiled when I felt how hard and cold it was. Suddenly, I was very nauseous and began to dry-heave. Jackie whisked me around and away. The aide stepped forward.
“Let’s get her back upstairs,” Mrs. March said. “Quickly.”
I kept my eyes closed and my head back until I was upstairs and in my bed. Then I slowly looked up at the ceiling.
Jackie rubbed my arm softly. “Don’t think of her down there,” she said. “That was no longer your mother. Think of her as being in a better place now, where she is always warm and happy and safe, okay?”
“Okay,” I said in a voice so small I thought I had become three years old again. I closed my eyes and fell asleep.
Days passed. Mrs. March sent me more presents, more magazines and movies and boxes of candy. I could tell from the way other nurses looked when they gazed in at me that I was quite a curiosity. I had no visitors other than the doctors and my private nurses. I was sure that by now there were all sorts of stories about me. Despite Jackie and the gifts, I felt more and more as if I were in prison or in some cave in a human zoo.
Jackie tried to help me feel better about it. She got me into a wheelchair whenever she could and pushed me down to a small patio to get some air and sunshine. Except for a few visitors, only other hospital employees used the patio. Some ate their lunches out there. Jackie knew some people and introduced me. While I read or listened
to music on the new iPod Mrs. March had sent, Jackie would move off and tell those people all about me. By the way they looked at me afterward, I could see that she had given them all the grisly details. I knew she didn’t mean any harm, but soon, because of their looks of pity, I wasn’t so eager to go down there anymore.
One afternoon, Mrs. March returned. I was sitting up in my bed and reading with my earphones on. They were plugged into the iPod, so I didn’t see her or hear her, but out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jackie get up quickly and put her magazine down. I turned and saw Jordan March standing there. She looked as if she had just come from a fancy affair, and later she did say she had attended a charity luncheon. She wore a white wide-brim hat with a pink ribbon and a sleeveless V-neck dress, embellished with a pink scarf.
I took off my earphones.
“You can take a break now, Jackie,” Mrs. March said.
Jackie nodded, smiled at me, and walked out. Mrs. March stepped up to my bed and smiled.
“I hear good things from your doctors,” she began. “Your bruises are healing, the concussion has receded, and you do look a lot stronger. How are you feeling?”
“The cast itches,” I said. “It’s hard to get used to it.”
“Yes, I imagine so. Dr. Milan says it’s too early to know how the break will affect the growth of your leg, but it’s important to remain hopeful. He’s one of the best doctors in all of Southern California for this problem. Of course, when the cast is removed, you’ll need therapy, and I’m arranging for all of that.”
“Where will I have to go?”
“We’ll see,” she said, looking away for a few seconds. When she looked at me again, her face was full of sadness, the way it had been when we had first met and she told me about losing her younger daughter. I could see her eyes filling with tears. She took a breath. “I want you to know I’ve taken good care of your mother,” she said.
Taken good care of my mother? She said it as if she meant that Mama hadn’t died. Maybe that really wasn’t Mama I had seen in the morgue. Maybe I wasn’t lying to myself. I held my breath. I think she saw that I was misunderstanding her.
“What I mean is, I bought a plot in Greenlawn Cemetery for her. I wanted my husband to make my daughter come to the burial, but he wouldn’t do that, so I went myself and made it as dignified as I could. I’ll make sure you are taken to the grave as soon as you are able to go. I didn’t have any stone put up yet. I thought you might want to have something besides her name and dates of birth and death. You might want something like ‘Loving Mother,’ whatever. You don’t have to think about that right now.”
At least Mama wasn’t where she had feared she’d be, in that Potter’s Field, I thought.
“I had one of our attorneys research your mother’s family, and then I had any we could locate called, but no one wanted to attend the funeral. Your father was harder to find. He was in Honolulu for a while, and then he … Well, he went off with someone to Australia. He hasn’t responded to any calls or inquiries, I’m afraid. We have it from reliable sources that he has another daughter with this woman. I’m sorry to have to tell you all this, but I thought you should know. Any man who would desert a daughter like you isn’t worth spending any time on, anyway,” she added angrily.
“How old is his new daughter?”
“Not quite two.”
Did he love her, I wondered, or did he think of her the same way he thought of me, as a burden, a punishment for his past sins, as he had told Mama children were?
“He just left you two one day? He didn’t tell you he was leaving?” Mrs. March asked.
I tried to recall the exact details. That day, Mama had made a meat loaf because she said if he didn’t show for dinner, we could keep it for lunch the next day. When he didn’t return home hours after we had eaten, she had gone into their bedroom and come out with a look of shock and anger on her face. I was doing my homework in the living room.
“That bastard,” she had said. I looked up and waited for her to explain. “He took all the spare cash I thought I had hidden from him under my panties in the top drawer of my dresser. So I thought I had better check my mother’s jewelry, the ring and necklace and that cameo my mother gave me. It was worth a few thousand, at least. Guess what? That’s gone, too. He went and pawned it all, I’m sure.”
I didn’t know what to say. She wasn’t sobbing, nor were her shoulders shaking, but tears were streaming down her cheeks.
“I went into the closet and saw that he’s taken a lot of his clothes.”