When Bea Whiteley speaks again, her voice sounds odd and tentative. “I was wondering… is everything else there okay, Mrs. Peterson?”
“Everything’s fine,” she says, sitting up and glancing at the button box again. “Why do you ask?”
“I feel silly saying it out loud, but… just before I called, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong… that you were in some kind of trouble.”
A shiver passes through Gwendy. “Nope, everything’s fine. I’ve just been sitting here watching television.”
“Okay… good.” She sounds genuinely relieved. “I’ll let you be now. Merry Christmas, Mrs. Peterson, and thank you again.”
“Merry Christmas, Bea. I’ll see you in a couple of weeks.”
51
GWENDY WAKES UP EARLY the next morning with what feels like a mild hangover, despite having not touched a drop of alcohol the night before. She downs a bottle of water and knocks out a hundred sit-ups and fifty push-ups on the bedroom floor, hoping to get her blood pumping and chase away the headache. She’d slept restlessly, with unremembered dreams lurking just below her consciousness—but even without the details, she senses they were unpleasant and frightening.
The snow stopped falling a short time before daylight, leaving behind four or five inches in Castle County and most of western Maine. The traffic man on Channel Five warns travelers looking for a post-Christmas getaway to adjust their schedules for delays. Gwendy calls her father and informs him that she’s coming over to shovel the driveway and sidewalk, and she’s not taking no for an answer. Surprisingly, he agrees without an argument and tells her he’ll have hot coffee and leftover sausage-and-egg casserole from yesterday’s brunch waiting for her on the table when she arrives.
Gwendy throws on warm clothes and laces up her boots, then heads downstairs to clean off her car. Once she’s finished scraping the windows and brushing off the roof, she climbs inside the Subaru and immediately turns down the heat. She’s already sweating.
On her way down the hill, she spots a group of children having a snowball fight at the Castle View Rec Park. She can hear their excited shouts and squeals of delight even with the windows up. She smiles and tries to remember how long it’s been since she’s plunked someone with a snowball. Too long, she decides.
Ten minutes later, she turns onto Carbine Street and spots the flashing red and yellow lights of an ambulance in the distance. Her first pang of concern is for Mrs. Goff—she suffers from occasional bouts of vertigo and has fallen before. Last spring, she’d spent two weeks in the hospital nursing a broken hip. As she gets closer, Gwendy realizes the ambulance is parked in her parents’ driveway and someone on a stretcher is being loaded into the back. She stomps on the brakes and fishtails to the curb.
Her father stumbles out the front door of the house, carrying Mrs. Peterson’s purse in one hand and a jacket in the other. His face is drawn and pale.
“Dad!” Gwendy shouts, jumping out of the car and meeting him on the snow-covered sidewalk. “What happened? Is Mom okay?”
They both turn and watch as the ambulance pulls away, disappearing down the street.
“I don’t know,” he says weakly. “She started having cramps shortly after I talked to you. At first, she thought it was because she ate too much last night, but then the pain got worse. She was curled up in a ball on the bed, crying. I was about to call you when she started vomiting blood. That’s when I called the ambulance. I didn’t know what else to do.”
Gwendy takes her father by the arm. “You did the right thing. Are they taking her to Castle County General?”
He nods, his eyes big and ready to fill with tears.
“Come on,” she says, guiding him toward the curb. “I’ll drive you.”
52
THERE ARE ONLY A handful of other people sitting on the bright orange, plastic-molded seats outside of the emergency room at 10:00 AM. An older bald man nursing a sore neck from a fender-bender earlier that morning, a teenage boy with a deep cut on his lip and another under his swollen and darkening right eye from a sledding mishap, and a young Asian couple holding a pair of fussing, pink-faced twins on their laps.
When Mr. Peterson sees his wife’s oncologist, Doctor Celano, emerge via the swinging doors marked NO ENTRANCE, he immediately gets to his feet and meets him in the middle of the waiting room. Gwendy scrambles to catch up.
“How is she, Doc?” he asks.
“We gave her some pain medication, so she’s resting comfortably. There’s been no more vomiting since the ambulance.”
“Do you know what’s wrong?” Gwendy asks.
“I’m afraid her tumor markers are up again,” the doctor says, a solemn expression coming over his face.
“Oh, Jesus,” Mr. Peterson says, sagging into his daughter’s shoulder.
“I know it’s difficult, but try not to get too alarmed, Mr. Peterson. Her blood tests from Wednesday’s appointment just came back this morning. I pulled them up on the computer when I heard the ambulance call, and they’re showing an uncomfortable increase—”
“An uncomfortable increase?” Mr. Peterson says. “What does that mean?”
“It means that most likely the cancer has returned. To what extent, we don’t know yet. We’re going to admit her today and run a series of tests.”
“What kind of tests?” Gwendy asks.
“We’ve already drawn more blood this morning. Once she’s settled into a room, we’ll schedule abdominal and chest scans.”
“Tonight?” Mr. Peterson asks.
He shakes his head. “Not on a Sunday, no. We’ll let her get some rest and wheel her over to Imaging in the morning.”
Mr. Peterson looks past the doctor to the swinging doors. “Can we see her?”
“Soon,” Doctor Celano says. “They’re transporting her to the second floor anytime now. Once she’s in her room, I’ll come back down and get you myself.”
“Does she know yet?” Gwendy asks.
The doctor nods. “She asked me to be honest with her. I believe her exact words were: ‘Do not blow sunshine up my rear. Give it to me straight.’ ”
Mr. Peterson shakes his head, eyes shiny with tears. “That sounds like my girl.”
“Your girl’s a fighter,” Doctor Celano says. “So try to be as strong for her as you can. She’ll need you. The both of you.”
53
GWENDY OPENS THE DOOR to the house she grew up in, the only real honest-to-God house she’s ever lived in—with an actual garage and sidewalk and yard—and walks inside. The interior is dark and silent. She immediately turns on the overhead light in the foyer. Her father’s car keys lie on the hardwood floor, dropped in panic and unnoticed. She picks them up and returns them to their spot on the foyer table. Walking into the living room, she turns on the lamps at each end of the sofa. That’s better, she decides. Everything looks to be in its proper place. You would never even know by looking around what kind of chaos the morning had brought.
She walks upstairs, running her hand along the polished wood bannister where four empty red stockings hang. Halfway down the carpeted hallway, she glances into her parents’ bedroom, and that’s when any semblance of normalcy inside the house is shattered into a million jagged pieces. The bed sheet and blankets are pushed into a heap on the floor. One of the pillows and a significant portion of the white mattress sheet are streaked with dark splashes of blood and bite-sized chunks of a half-digested meal. Her father’s pajamas lie in a pile on the floor at the entrance to the small walk-in closet. The entire room smells sour, like food that has been left in the sun too long and gone bad.