Both of them were swinging their legs and wore identical expressions she’d come to recognize as the “set me free to run wild for a few minutes, or you are gonna pay for it, Mama” one. She sighed. No time for that.
She took each of their faces between her fingers and thumbs and forced them to look at her. “Ice cream after, if and only if you are the very best Love brothers in the world. I mean it. If you act up or run off or do anything bad, no Sesame Street today, and no ice cream.”
They both nodded, then jumped down and took her outstretched hands. When she reached room fifteen-ten, she hesitated outside the closed door a few moments. Antony, being Antony, knocked for her. The door opened into a private room that already smelled of death. She closed her eyes against a rush of nausea, opening them when she felt someone’s arms around her. Frank held her tight, then bent down to eye level with his somber nephews. “Hey men, how about a Coke?”
“Coke!” Antony yelled—so loudly a few people in the hallway glanced over at them. Lindsay frowned.
“Frank, the last thing these two need is a bottle full of sugar.”
“Is that you? Lindsay?” A weak, but familiar voice floated over to her. “Come over here. Let me see you.”
Keeping a grip on her sons, determined to get through this, make her goodbyes and get the hell out, she walked the few steps toward a tall bed where an emaciated version of her mother lay.
Gloria Halloran was dwarfed in the giant bed. Tubes and wires ran all over her, including one stuck in her nose. Her breathing came in shallow rasps. Her face was sallow, her eyes sunken. Lindsay sucked in a breath and squeezed the boys’ arms so hard they both hollered in protest. Her mother held up a gnarled hand which Kieran must have seen rising from the edge of the bed like a skeleton’s, because he pressed his face into her skirt and clung to her leg.
“Lindsay? Honey?”
“Yes.” Her voice broke. “Yes, Mama. It’s me.” She was shaking all over. Tears spilled down her cheeks. “Mama,” she whispered, letting go of the boys and taking the woman’s papery-thin-skinned hand. Frank and JR picked up her sons and brought them close to the bed. Lindsay could hear Kieran setting up a whine in protest.
She looked across the bed and saw her father, staring at her. He didn’t look much better than his wife.
“It’s the cancer,” Lindsay’s mother said with a wheeze. “Started in my breasts, moved to my lungs, and apparently I’m eaten up with it now.” She coughed, which triggered beeping from some of the monitors. Kieran covered his ears. Antony leaned away from JR and tried to touch one of the many flashing buttons.
Lindsay kept her mother’s ice cold hand between hers. Tears dropped onto the bed between them. “Why didn’t anyone tell me?”
Gloria Halloran closed her eyes a moment. “She wouldn’t let us,” Frank said from behind her. “But it came on awful fast, Lindsay. She was fine—what, six weeks ago? Maybe a little thin and tired …” He trailed off. Lindsay kept her gaze pinned to her mother’s slack face.
“Mama,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.” She wondered if this would be her mantra for the rest of her life.
Gloria’s eyes opened again, and she sucked in a long breath. Her now-faded blue eyes narrowed at the sound of Antony’s overly loud voice demanding to “get down!”
“Let me see them,” she said, sounding more like her old commanding self. Lindsay took Kieran from Frank to calm him, pulled his thumb out of his mouth, and turned so her mother could see his face. But he kept it pressed into her neck, shaking his head when she asked him to stop. “It’s all right,” Gloria said, patting his Sunday-church-going, short pants-covered thigh. “He seems to be a fine young man.” At those words, Kieran ventured a peek, smiling at her for a split second before hiding his face again.
JR came closer. “This one’s a handful, Mama. Reminds me of me.”
Gloria didn’t touch Antony the way she had Kieran, just studied him while he did the same to her, his dark, Love-family eyes narrowed, as if sensing her disapproval. “Well, I guess there’s no mistaking that one for his father’s son, is there?”
Antony squirmed and wiggled until JR put him down. Then he promptly dropped on all fours and crawled under the hospital bed. Kieran joined him when Lindsay let him down. Her father got on his hands and knees and gave them each something, then stood up. “No little boy can resist a Hershey’s Kiss.”
Lindsay sighed.
“Candy!” Antony blurted from under the bed.
“Sit,” her mother said. “Let me look at you a minute.”
She sat, and listened while her mother enumerated her various physical failings, all of which Lindsay was painfully aware of already—hair too long, not enough lipstick, dress wrinkly and faded, freckles, bags under her eyes. Gloria held out her hands. Lindsay put hers in them, feeling the tears again. Not necessarily tears at her mother’s condition, but definitely for the life she’d tossed away to be with the very man who’d horrify her parents the most.
As if on cue, a surge of early pregnancy nausea made her dizzy. On the heels of that, a yawning sense of regret so dark and deep it made her gasp aloud. She looked around at her father, her somber-looking brothers, the dying woman on the bed.
“Are you happy?” her mother asked.
Lindsay blinked, not sure if she had a good answer on this particular day. “Who’s ever really happy, Mama?”
“Well, I was happy once. And I want you to be, too, no matter where or how you live. It’s all I’ve ever wanted. I thought you’d be happy with Will, eventually.”
“What did he do? Will, I mean.” She had no idea, since she’d cut herself off from her former life in an attempt to integrate into the new one she’d chosen.
“Got kicked out of school again, for—” Frank stopped when their mother cut him a sharp look. “… for fighting, big surprise. I don’t know what he’s doing now.”
“Anyway, I’m sure this Tony is a fine person. As long as he’s taking good care of you and your boys.”
“He is and he does, Mama.” She wanted to let go of her mother’s hands. They felt even more like a skeleton than they appeared. But her mother tightened her grip, just as Lindsay had done with her own children, who were currently injecting sugar into their bloodstreams with her father’s help.
The adults stared at each other. The only sounds in the room were the crinkling of foil wrappers and the delighted chewing and lip-smacking under the bed.
“This next one will be the worst,” her mother said, her voice gone raspy again.
Lindsay shook her head. “Next what one?”
“Your next boy.”
Lindsay blinked. “How … I mean …” She bit her lip and tears burned again.
“Go easy on him, though. He’ll be worth the effort.” Gloria coughed, accepted water from a large cup with a straw, then flopped onto her pillow, and held out her hand. Lindsay’s father put a small jeweler’s box in it. “Take this, Lindsay. I want you to have it.”
“No, Mama. I don’t want it.” She knew what it was. She’d noted the lack of her mother’s most prized piece of jewelry on her newly thin fingers. “Let one of the boys have it to give to their fiancées someday.”
Gloria Halloran put the box in her daughter’s hand and closed her bony fingers around it. “No. It’s yours. Wear it, put it away, give to one of your sons for his wife, or to your daughter someday. But it’s yours now.” She paused, a familiar flash of defiance in her eyes for a brief moment. “Bring those young men up here again. I need to get a better look at them. Go on and fetch me a cola, honey.” She patted Lindsay’s leg. “While I visit with my grandsons.”