Chapter 25

I’ve already racked up almost a week in tardies and absences. But after my mother is readmitted to the hospital, school once again takes the backseat. Over the next two weeks I get up at 6:00 a.m. to drive my brother to Missoula County Hospital, return to school to attend the bare minimum of classes, then rush back to the hospital. Evenings are spent on a mountain of catch-up work. I barely see Liam. He tries to be helpful by dropping off homework assignments and texting cheerful messages, but I don’t have the energy to respond. Our days on the ward are the same as last time—bewildering, exhausting, and dull. Hours of beeping machines, fluorescent lights, and dripping fluids.

This time, though, I’m far less patient with everyone around me, especially with my mother. It’s one thing to get sick; it’s another thing to make yourself that way. Especially when you have children who depend on you, I want to say. But I’m sure my accusations will just increase her stress, so instead I sit quietly and resentfully beside her.

She seems unwilling to speak to me either, but after enduring hours of my silent vigil by her bed, she finally breaks the ice. “You’re mad at me.”

“Yeah, well, can you blame me?”

“No. But I wish you’d see things from my point of view.”

“What point of view is that? You think being sick is natural? Holistic? Just tell me so I understand.”

“I don’t want to be here any more than you do. I just needed to believe that I could fix this. On my own terms.”

“What does that mean?”

“I mean, this isn’t the first time doctors have failed me. Do you know how many physicians I went to—” She hesitates and glances uneasily at my brother. He’s engrossed in a book and doesn’t look up at her when she pauses. “How many different opinions I got? His first pediatrician told me that there wasn’t any hope. If he didn’t speak by age four, he would never speak. One doctor actually said, ‘At least you have one normal one.’”

“Mom—”

“All the therapy, all those interventions, all those tests they made him go through. For what? Eventually I decided it was enough. I didn’t want to be told how to raise my child.”

“This isn’t the same thing.”

“It is to me. They were wrong, don’t you see? They told me that I should accept his diagnosis and learn to live with it. But I refused. And, in the end, who was right?”

“Maybe you were both right,” I suggest. “You have accepted it.”

“No. I didn’t accept anything.” She sinks her voice and leans closer to me. “He’s doing better than ever. Some home tutoring and his sister. That’s all he seems to need.” She takes a deep breath and gives me a weak smile. “A few days ago he told me that Hope is his girlfriend. Can you believe it? He has a girlfriend. I wish I could find those doctors and—and rub it in their faces.” She clenches a fist and waves it in the air.

“Well, maybe you will one day,” I tell her. “But you won’t be able to if you’re constantly in the hospital.”

“You still don’t get it, Rain.”

“No, I think I do,” I tell her softly. There’s so much beneath her decision to fight her doctors, I think. I want to talk about her control issues. Her powerlessness in the face of an illness she doesn’t understand, that she doesn’t want to understand. Her belief that trusting someone other than herself will only lead to her betrayal. But I don’t say any of those things. The psychology book in my head is more useful when it’s hidden. “I miss you at home,” I tell her, taking her hand. “Please, Mom. We both miss you.”

Her large, hollow eyes fix on mine, and she opens her mouth to speak. But then her face freezes; she’s staring intently at something over my shoulder. I turn around to follow her look and rise quickly to my feet.

Standing there in the doorway, partially hidden by a balloon-and-teddy bear mountain, is my father. He looks just like he did at the diner, but rougher. His gray hair is mussed, his chin dark with stubble.

“Hi, guys,” he says.

“Hello, Dad,” Ethan replies from the corner. “Thank you for coming. I have to show you my list. I’ve collected five more points.”

“That’s great, Ethan,” he replies, smiling uncomfortably. “Let’s talk about that later, okay?”

“What are you doing here?” I ask.

He seems hurt and a bit confused. “Your brother told me that you wanted me here. So I came.” He’s very carefully avoiding my mother’s eyes.

“What’s going on?” she hisses at no one in particular.

“What’s going on is I took the red eye from DC last night because I thought my son and daughter needed me,” Dad snaps at her.

“Rain told me to call Dad,” Ethan explains. He doesn’t seem concerned about any of this. As if our family being together in the same room is something that happens every day, as opposed to the first time in ten years.

“Dad, can I talk to you outside?” I interject. I’ve been so careful about keeping stress away from my mother, and now Mr. Stress himself has waltzed into her hospital room. I have to get him out of there. “Ethan, you can stay with Mom.”

The hall is humming with nurses and half-dressed patients with IV poles, so we make our way down to the cafeteria and settle at an empty table.

“This isn’t good for her,” I begin. “Your being here might make her worse—”

“Well, I’m sorry about that,” he interrupts. “But your mother needs to take her medicine like an adult. And stop blaming everything on me.”

He’s in lawyer mode now, all final statements and confident declarations. But I’m not going to let him push me around.

“You’re the reason the two of you split up, remember?” I point out. “Ethan may not know that, but I do.”

“You’ve only heard her side of the story, Rainey. But I have my side too. Even though you’ve never bothered to listen to it.”

“I never bothered? Dad, you abandoned us!”

“No. Your mother left me. She took the two of you and just…left. And I was too ashamed to challenge her decision. Too embarrassed to fight for you.”

“You should have been. You were the one cheating!”

He sighs and rubs a hand over his bloodshot eyes. “It isn’t that simple. You can try to boil it down to infidelity and divorce if you want. But it’s way more complicated than that. When you’re young, sometimes it’s easiest to just classify people into good guys and bad guys. You were only five years old when your mom and I split. And I probably seemed like the obvious bad guy to you, so you chose her side. I get that. But, Rain, you aren’t five anymore.”

“Yeah, but I know the difference between right and wrong. And what you did was wrong.”

“I realize that. But I’ve been punished for it, haven’t I? And I’m trying to make it right by explaining.”

“Explaining what? How you cheated on Mom?”

“Rain, I met your mother in law school. We were twenty-three years old. A few dates later, a couple of drinks, and we made a bad choice one night.”

I glance down at my hands, my cheeks reddening. His story was hitting a little too close to home.

“Well, your mom got pregnant that night. When she told me, I didn’t know how to handle it. I could have faked it, I guess, pretended to be supportive and then eventually, slowly drifted out of her life. That’s what most guys do, you know. They hold the girl’s hand, sit by her side when she pushes out their child. They smile and tell her she’s better off when she drops out of school to raise the kid. But meanwhile, they’re off pursuing their own careers as if nothing’s happened. And before you know it, they’ve found a job in another city, and their role as father boils down to a weekend babysitting here and there. Well, I didn’t want to be that guy. So when she told me that she was going to keep the baby, I asked her to marry me. She was carrying twins, as it turned out. And she had all these dreams of law school. I didn’t want her to abandon her dreams.”

I glance up for the first time. “So you married her out of pity?” I ask, my voice cracking. “Did you even love her?”

“Of course I loved her. But we’d barely gotten to know each other. Oh, I told myself that we had so much in common. We both wanted to be lawyers, we liked some of the same movies—I was desperately grasping for a silver lining. But it wasn’t long before it started to come apart. Hell, we were bickering on our honeymoon.”

“But there was another woman,” I point out, maliciously. “Before your divorce.” His side, as he calls it, is sounding a bit too innocent and accidental. “You made that choice. Instead of trying to work it out.”

“Yes, I did. Rain, what can I say? I met the woman of my dreams as a married man. Ethan was throwing tantrums, biting us, hitting you—your mother was trying to study for exams and dragging him to a hundred specialists. And we were fighting every single night. Some days we were barely speaking. And then this girl I was tutoring—well, I suppose you know that part.”

“I do.” There’s no forgiveness in my tone. He doesn’t deserve it.

“Look,” he continues defensively. “It wasn’t so easy for me either. What was I supposed to do? What happens if you meet the love of your life when you’re already married? Are you supposed to just walk away?”

“Yes! Yes you are!”

“Rain—”

“You had kids who needed you, Dad. Who still need you.”

“I know. I realize that.”

“So yes. You should have just walked away.”

He nods meekly. “And been miserable?” He doesn’t sound defensive anymore. Just quiet and very tired. I feel a little sorry for him, even though I’m trying not to. It would be so much easier to just judge and dismiss him like my mother has. But I realize suddenly that he’s exhausted because he hasn’t slept since he got Ethan’s call. That he dropped everything to fly here and be with us when we needed him. I don’t know how to dismiss that. I can’t.

“You’re looking pretty tired,” I say in a softer voice.

He rubs a finger over his stubble. “Yeah, well. Deposition yesterday. Red-eye flight right after. You know.”

A shadow falls across my lap, and I look up to find Ethan standing over us. “Mom needs you,” he says.

I rise reluctantly. “We’ll talk later, okay?” I’d like to say more; I want to be warmer, less stiff and hesitant. But I haven’t decided how to act around him yet. Love for both my parents should be infinite, unbound—but it isn’t that way for us. It’s an equation, and I feel like every drop I give to him I must subtract from my mother’s due.

“I’ll be at the hotel—for as long as you two need me,” he tells me before I leave. “I’m not planning on going back until your mother’s well again.”