September 3, 2010

4:57 P.M.

"Lady? Lady? Are you getting out?"

Dorothy came back to the present with a start. She was in the cab, parked in front of the hospital's emergency entrance. She paid the cabbie, giving much too big a tip, and then she opened the door and stepped out into the rain.

The walk to the front door unnerved her. Every footstep felt like an act of unimaginable will, and God knew her will had always had the strength of warm wax.

As she moved into the austere lobby, she felt self-conscious, a ragged old hippie in a high-tech world.

At the reception desk, she stopped, cleared her throat. "I'm Doro-Cloud Hart," she said quietly. The old name pinched like a bad bra, but it was how Tully knew her. "Tully Hart's mother."

The woman at the desk nodded, gave her the room number.

Gritting her teeth, fisting her cold hands, Dorothy headed for the elevator and rode it up to the fourth floor. There, feeling her nerves tightening with every step, she followed the whitish linoleum floor to the waiting room, which was mostly empty-mustard-colored chairs, a woman at a desk, a pair of TVs on without sound. Vanna White turned the letter R on-screen.

The smell of the place-disinfectant and cafeteria food and despair-hit her hard. She'd spent a considerable effort in her life to stay away from hospitals, although she'd awakened in them a few times.

Margie sat in the waiting room. At Dorothy's arrival, she put down her knitting and stood.

Beside her was that good-looking man who'd been Kate's husband. He saw Margie stand, followed her gaze, and frowned. Then he slowly got to his feet, too. Dorothy had seen him from a distance at the funeral; he looked grayer now. Thinner.

Margie came forward, her hands outstretched. "I'm glad you got my note. I had to have Bud pin it on the door. I didn't have time to go looking for you."

"Thank you," Dorothy said. "How is she?"

"Our girl is a fighter," Margie said.

Dorothy felt a squeeze of emotion-longing, maybe. Our girl. As if she and Margie were both mothers to Tully. Dorothy wished it were true-but only Margie could claim that connection, really. She started to say something-she had no idea what-when he approached them. At the shuttered anger in his eyes, Dorothy's voice turned to ash.

"You remember Johnny," Margie said. "Katie's husband and Tully's friend."

"We met years ago," Dorothy said quietly. It was not a good memory.

"You've never done anything but hurt her," he said in a soft voice.

"I know."

"If you hurt her now, it's me you'll be dealing with. You got that?"

Dorothy swallowed hard but didn't look away. "Thank you."

He frowned. "For what?"

"Loving her."

He looked surprised by that.

Margie took Dorothy by the arm and led her down the hallway, and into a bright ICU enclave with glass-walled rooms that fanned out behind a central nurses' station desk. There, Margie let go of her long enough to go speak to the woman at the desk.

"Okay," Margie said when she returned. "That's her room right there. You can go talk to her."

"She won't want me here."

"Just talk to her, Dorothy. The doctors think it helps."

Dorothy glanced over at the glass window; inside, a utilitarian curtain shielded the bed from view.

"Just talk to her."

Dorothy nodded. She stepped forward, shuffling like an invalid, her fear expanding with every step, filling her lungs, aching. Invalid. In valid. That was her.

Her hand was literally shaking as she opened the door.

Dorothy took a deep breath and went toward the bed.

Tully lay there, surrounded by buzzing, thumping, whooshing machines. A clear plastic tube invaded her slack mouth. Her face was misshapen and scraped and bruised. She was bald and a plastic tube went into her head. One arm was in a cast.

Dorothy pulled a chair up to the bed and sat down. She knew what Tully would want to hear. It was what her daughter had come to Snohomish for, what she'd asked for in a thousand ways over the years. The truth. Dorothy's story. Their story.

She could do this. At last. She could. This was what her daughter needed from her. She drew in a deep breath.

"When I was a kid, California was beautiful citrus groves instead of parking lots and freeways. Oil derricks pumping continually up and down on the hillsides, like giant rusty praying mantises. The first Golden Arches. I remember when they started building Disneyland and my father thought Walt was 'bat shit crazy' for pumping so much money into a kids' carnival," she said quietly, slowly, finding her way word by word.

"We were Ukrainian.

"Did you know that?

"No, of course you didn't. I never told you anything about my life or your heritage. I guess it's time now.

"You've always wanted to know my story. So here goes.

"As a girl, I ...

thought it meant "ugly"-Ukrainian-and it might as well have. It was the first of the secrets I learned to keep.

Fitting in. Not standing out. Being Americans. This is what mattered to my parents in the plastic, shiny world of the fifties.

You can't understand how this could be, I'll bet. You are a child of the seventies, wild and free. You grew up around people who wore a whole different kind of headband.

In the fifties, girls were like dolls.

Extensions of our parents. Belongings. We were expected to be perfect, with nothing on our minds except pleasing our parents, getting good grades, and marrying the right boy. It's hard to think now, in this modern world, how much it mattered that you marry well.

We were to be nice and pliable and make cocktails and babies, but neither until after marriage.