The physiotherapist’s voice carried out to where her patient sat reading a health and fitness magazine. It was the patient’s third rehab visit after surgery for a ruptured anterior ligament following a clumsy fall while jogging. The patient hadn’t rung the bell on the reception desk when she arrived fifteen minutes early, just in case Brooke—that was the physio’s name, she was very nice, very caring and calm—was seeing another patient.
She wanted to be helpful because she knew Brooke had only just started out and didn’t have a receptionist yet.
At their first consultation, the two of them had bonded over their shared experience of debilitating migraines.
Brooke Delaney said she’d decided to become a physiotherapist after seeing one as a child. “He said he might be able to help my migraines if they were caused by upper neck tension,” she said. “My neck wasn’t the culprit, but it still felt like he was one of the few people in the medical profession who took me seriously. You know how people think you’re exaggerating your pain? Especially when you’re a little girl.”
Oh, the patient knew all about that.
She turned a page of her magazine and tried not to listen to what was clearly a private conversation.
“So that explains why Mum isn’t answering our calls.” Brooke’s voice was looser and louder and also somehow younger than the soothing, well-modulated tone she used when addressing her patients. “We just feel like this might be more serious than we first thought.”
Goodness me. The patient closed her magazine. She wished now that she had rung the bell.
“I know. Off-grid means off-grid, but it just doesn’t seem like her to leave her phone behind.”
Pause.
“Sure, but you know how you said you and Mum argued the last time you talked?”
Pause.
“Yes. Yes, I know, Dad, but I just wondered … I just wondered, was it a very bad argument?”
There was a seismic tremor of emotion on the word bad.
The patient stood. She tossed the magazine back into the basket. This was not a call that should be overheard.
Everyone had secrets. The patient had not, in fact, been jogging when she ruptured her ligament. She’d never jogged in her life. She’d fallen out of a taxi after two glasses of champagne and three espresso martinis at a fiftieth birthday lunch. She suspected that Brooke Delaney knew she hadn’t been jogging, and she appreciated the fact that she didn’t push the point.
The patient quietly got up and left the office. She would come back in fifteen minutes. She didn’t need to know her lovely physiotherapist’s possibly terrible family secrets.
Chapter 8
LAST SEPTEMBER
Brooke Delaney drove to work on Monday morning with breakfast radio on low, her sun visor tilted down. Occasionally she moaned softly, for effect. For whose effect, she didn’t know. Her own, presumably. She wore polarized sunglasses, but the morning sunlight pouring through her tinted car windows still felt hurtful, in an unspecified way, like a mild insult from a stranger.
She stopped at a pedestrian crossing to let a little schoolgirl cross. The girl waved her thanks like a grown-up and walked hurriedly, gratefully. Flat feet. She broke Brooke’s heart. You are fine, Brooke told herself as her eyes filled with tears and she put her foot on the accelerator. You feel strange and teary and fragile and surreal but you are fine.
She touched her forehead. The ache is just the memory of the pain, not the pain itself.
The migraine had attacked with a brutal blow to her right eye early Saturday morning. She was braced for it. She’d known the fucker was coming, so she’d canceled her plans in anticipation. She’d spent the weekend alone in her bedroom, the blinds down, a cold cloth on her forehead. No one but her and her migraine.
It was her first migraine since Grant had moved out six weeks ago. No one to bring her ice packs or glasses of chilled water, no one to check in or care or lay a firm hand on her forehead. But she’d got through it on her own. A migraine wasn’t childbirth. Although she’d read a survey that showed women who had experienced both rated their migraine pain as the higher of the two, which was oddly cheering to hear.
She remembered her friend Ines talking about how, after her divorce, she’d constructed a desk from an IKEA flat-pack on her own while playing “I Am Woman,” but then, after she was done, all she’d wanted to do was call her ex and tell him about it.
Brooke felt the same desire to call Grant and tell him she’d got though a migraine on her own. How pathetic. Her migraines were no longer of interest to him. Perhaps they never had been of interest to him.
“Are you postdrome, my darling?” her mother would say if she saw her this morning, because now, thanks to her podcasts, she recognized symptoms and spoke the lingo with jaunty ease.
Brooke wanted to snap: You don’t get to use the lingo, Mum, if you’ve never had a migraine.
But her mother would be so remorseful, and Brooke couldn’t stand it. She knew her mother wanted exoneration, and she didn’t think she was deliberately withholding it, but she certainly wasn’t giving Joy what she needed.
“The thing is,” Joy would say, “I was so busy that year, the year the headaches started, I mean the migraines, when your migraines started, that was a really bad year in our family, a terrible year, our ‘annus horribilis,’ as the Queen would say, I might be mispronouncing it, my grumpy old Latin teacher, Mr. O’Brien, would know how to pronounce it, he drowned, the poor man, on Avoca Beach, not swimming between the flags apparently, got caught in the rip, so no one to blame but himself, but still, anyway, that year, that bad year, there was just a lot … and we thought we might lose the business, and both your grandmothers were so sick, and I had no idea what you were going through—” And Brooke would cut her off, because she’d heard all this so many times before, right down to the drowning of the Latin teacher.