“You aren’t most people.”
I tried to focus on putting one foot in front of the other, the sound my shoes made against the cement, the way the fall breeze kept the city air moving. “Mom, can we just not?”
“I told you I would get you a driver or a car.”
“I don’t want a driver!” I screamed and then scrunched my face to hold back my emotions. “I can’t talk. I have to go.”
I reached my apartment block and hung up the phone even though I heard her talking. The high rise boasted white-tiled floors in the lobby, as well as a doorman, and an expansive entryway. I never took the elevators, but I knew they were high-end. Just like the building and my apartment.
My mother had made sure of that. She made sure every single thing about my move was a well-laid plan. I should have thanked her. Yet, every day my resentment snowballed and my frustration built. I walked up the stairs to my apartment, each step a nail she hammered into my metaphorical coffin.
She wanted a daughter who would follow her rules, approach life with caution, look both ways and then some when crossing a street.
I wasn’t that daughter. I had been, but I couldn’t go back. Not after all we’d been through.
I set my work bag down and beelined to my cupboard. The wine I set on the counter stood next to a case of pills. The supplements were also my mother’s doing. She and my father had hired a nutritionist out of Portland, the best of the best. I remember her coming to the house, lining up all the vitamins and saying, “Now, these will help. But you have to will it, Vick. It takes the right mentality, besides diet and lifestyle.”
My mom nodded along with her. “We’re taking every precaution.”
My dad, a burly man who never said much, stared at me with pity in his eyes. He didn’t want to speak over my mother but knew the nutritionist was too much. He laid his hand on my shoulder, the best way he knew how to support me.
I stared at the supplements next to the wine bottle, then at my hands gripping the counter. My acrylic nails met the cuticle line perfectly. I’d told the manicurist to make them look natural with a light-pink hue. No one ever caught me with my real nails exposed; they reminded me of the time I’d barely had nail growth. They still grew out damaged, worn out far too early for my age.
The manicurist hadn’t asked questions and that terrible feeling of discomfort snuck up on me. When she’d started filing my nails, words bubbled out of me. “These nails have just never been pretty without a work of art from you professionals.”
She had tsk-tsked and responded, “We’ll clean them up, huh?”
I’d averted her discomfort and gained a new nail artist in a new town. Now, she talked a mile a minute at every session and never blinked twice at the wreckage she covered up.
I laid each of the pills on the counter, then swiped them all to the edge and into my other manicured hand. I poured my wine into a long stem glass and threw all five pills in my mouth. They knocked around in there before the wine washed them down in one large gulp.
My nail manicurist, along with my friends from college, didn’t know the whole story. They didn’t know that those pink nails I used to pop shut the pill case hid just one of the imperfections I’d been hiding for years.
When the leukemia snuck up on my family as I turned seventeen, I’d been a naive social butterfly, fluttering through high school like nothing could go wrong. Sure, there’d been the occasional terrible hair day and awful date, but I’d had friends every which way I looked. I’d had good grades, our volleyball team was going to state, I’d known what I was doing for college.
I gulped more red wine and pulled my laptop from my work bag.
Junior year, during a volleyball game before the state competition, I blacked out. I woke up in a hospital listening to that terrible noise.
The beeping.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
My mother delivered the news with my father standing by, holding her up. Holding my mother, the woman who could plow her way into a CEO position of a Fortune 500 company after coming from nothing, like she was barely capable of standing.
“We’ll beat it, sweetie,” she’d murmured as the shock of her words barreled through me. The beeping galloped faster and faster. Then and there, in that hospital room, I saw the first look of discomfort on my parents’ faces.
“It’ll be okay.” I nodded. “We’ll get through it.”
My mom’s hand shot out to hold mine and she squeezed it so tight I could feel her love for her only child flowing through it. I remember thinking of all the things I would have to get through. I wondered if I would lose my hair, if my friends would make me a card, if my boyfriend would break up with me.
All those things happened more quickly than I could have ever imagined.
I sat down at my kitchen table and opened my laptop, telling myself I needed to work.
I chugged more wine instead and stared at my phone. I’d hung up on her as if she could control the worry and love that consumed her heart. As if she hadn’t torn apart my history trying to find a culprit for the cancer that destroyed her perfect fairy tale. Her family. Her life.
Because cancer did that, infecting not just the patient, but the whole family.