Running From Love (12 page)

“I …” Across the room her ring tone shattered the silence, her fear, and the unknown.

Trevor stood and walked toward the table beside the couch where she’d left her phone. He handed it to her.

“Hi, Mimi,” Poppy said. She listened to her sister and mentally said good-bye to a simple luxurious Trevor-filled day.

“I’m sorry. I know you’re out and … you’re trying to work through this thing and I didn’t want to interrupt but—”

“No, it’s fine.” Poppy glanced toward Trevor. She now leaned against the kitchen island while he loaded the dishwasher. “Did you want to go to the hospital? I can probably be back in like an hour.”

With the silence from Mimi, Poppy’s heart twisted. Her gut tightened. “Mimi?”

“Pop, it’s worse than that … Mom is—”

“Is she dead?” The air burst from Poppy’s chest. Poppy spun away from Trevor, who had now turned toward her.

“No”—Mimi sighed—“but she’s taken a turn and they don’t think it’ll be long. They’re giving her some strong drugs. And well, Daniel gets back from Vancouver around two and he’ll be with the kids. I phoned Brian and he’s taking an earlier flight. Should get in late today.”

Poppy’s fingers tingled. Her legs were numb; she couldn’t even feel her feet. She slowly sat on a chair. “I …” She closed her eyes. A noise roared in her head. What to do? Mimi had said she’d need to make peace with Therese dying, that it was only a matter of time, but Poppy had thought, believed, hoped that she’d have months, at the very least weeks, to come to some sort of internal terms with the idea of losing Therese, the woman who had borne her.

“Poppy, I respect how you feel about Therese, but I thought you might want to come by the hospital. I can pick you up or you could meet me there. I just … I don’t know, Poppy. I just think you’re really going to regret not saying good-bye when you’re older, or if you ever choose to have your own children. It’s different once you have them … I swear to you, it is.”

Poppy fought the unkind words that she longed to say. She wanted to lash out at Mimi, who’d had the luxury of a mother until her adolescence.

“I’ll meet you there,” Poppy said. She glanced across the room. The clock over the sink indicated that it was already after noon now. By the time she showered and changed … did Trevor have something she could wear? “Around three.” Could he drive her to UCLA?

He wiped the counter and didn’t even pretend that he wasn’t hearing what she was talking about with Mimi. She respected him for that. They’d fibbed to each other long enough. Now it was time to be truthful and see if their feelings could withstand the onslaught of a reality that wasn’t Mesquale.

“See you then.”

Poppy tapped the off button and placed the phone on the kitchen island. She was losing Therese, most likely today. She knew she’d already really lost her mother, the woman she had loved and had clung to the day Therese left their family. A woman who hadn’t looked back once, even when her five-year-old daughter stood on the front steps and called for Mommy. Mimi had come after Poppy, grabbed her, and scooped her up into her arms. Always Mimi holding and taking care of Poppy. Mimi was right. Even if Poppy couldn’t make peace with Therese, she did need to say good-bye to her.

“It’s your mom?”

Poppy looked at Trevor and nodded. “She isn’t doing well. They don’t think she’s going to live much longer.”

Trevor scrubbed his hand through his hair. “I can take you. When should we go?  You should shower and there are clothes in the guest room. I’m sure you can find a shirt that’ll work. If not we can stop at your sister’s, or a mall.”

“Okay.”

Trevor had snapped into hyperaware overdrive. Suddenly making a mental list so that Poppy didn’t need to.

“I’ll go with you,” he said. He grasped both her hands and pulled her close.

“I’d rather go alone,” she said.

His body stiffened for an instant.

“I …” Poppy looked into his eyes. “I just need to do this alone. I need to say good-bye to her and I haven’t seen her in over two decades … I’m sorry if that hurts you, but I need to close this chapter by myself.”

Trevor nodded. He tilted his head and confusion raced through his eyes, but he did a great job of pretending he understood her decision to say good-bye to Therese alone.

“Go get ready.” He lifted her hand to his cheek. “We’ll leave whenever you want.”

“Thank you.” Poppy stepped forward and lifted herself onto her tippy-toes to plant a kiss on his lips. He might not like her decision, but a look of patient acceptance clung to his features.

Poppy walked toward the stairs and turned back. Trevor stood in front of the giant windows, his back to Poppy, hands on his hips. He stared toward the oncoming storm. She wondered, what thoughts flew through his mind?

Poppy hated hospitals, but really, aside from doctors and nurses, did anyone like the hospital? There were very few times in any person’s life where being at the hospital indicated impending joy. The elevator doors opened and a wave of that horrible hospital smell hit her nose. What was that? Antiseptic mixed with fear? Panic? Anxiety? Every hospital anywhere in the world that she’d entered had the same scent. Poppy turned and walked down the hall, scanning the numbers on the wall. The woman at the front desk on the first floor had said Therese was in room 1145.

Mimi, in a flowing shirt and a long skirt that stopped at her ankles, stood in the hallway speaking to a white-coated woman with long blonde hair. Poppy stopped at Mimi’s side and the doctor turned toward her.

“My sister,” Mimi said. “Poppy.”

“Ah, yes, Poppy. Your mother speaks of you often. I’m Dr. Ziddle.” The blonde woman held out her hand. She didn’t exactly smile, but her demeanor wasn’t somber. More like a practiced seriousness. “I was telling your sister that with the growth of the tumor, your mother will be in and out of consciousness. We’re looking at palliative care. After the complications of last night, I’m not certain that hospice is advisable.”

A careening sensation, as though the entire building had tilted to the side and she clung from one of the window ledges, rocketed through Poppy’s body. She nodded and did all the normal things that people do when discussing life and death and illness, but her insides were hollow and a thrumming roared in her ears. The words Dr. Ziddle and Mimi spoke … she wasn’t exactly hearing or understanding. She nodded as though everything the doctor said made complete sense, but she understood nothing.

“I’ll check back later today. I have a few other patients to see. It should be around six, if you’re both still here.” Dr. Ziddle turned and nodded to Poppy.

The soft touch of Mimi’s fingertips grazed Poppy’s arm. “Are you okay?”

“Of course I’m okay.” Poppy shrugged. She was trying hard to remind herself that the only reason she’d come to the hospital was to satisfy Mimi’s desire that she find closure. “I’m here for you, not me.” Poppy hitched her purse strap up higher on her shoulder and crossed her arms over her chest.

A cold fury replaced her original shock over the doctor’s words. Mimi had no idea what it meant to be a motherless child. Therese had wanted a relationship with Mimi, and even sought out her eldest daughter once Mimi had her own children. Therese never tried to contact Poppy. She’d never called or emailed or texted or asked to meet with her youngest daughter. 

“She’s sleeping. I was in her room before Dr. Ziddle got here. “

“When does Brian get in?”

“This evening. He’s planning on coming straight to the hospital.”

“Great. And Daniel is back from Vancouver?”

Mimi nodded and walked into the room. Poppy’s feet wouldn’t move. Numb from the waist down with a sick feeling churning in her belly, Poppy felt like her feet were stuck to the floor. From where she stood, just inside the doorway, Poppy couldn’t see Therese. The foot of Therese’s hospital bed was visible, but not the top.

“She’s still asleep,” Mimi whispered from the far side of the room.

Poppy willed her feet to move and her legs to go forward and walk into the room. Once inside, she stopped, took a long breath, and turned. Her gaze roamed up over the white hospital blanket to the tiny person in the bed.

This wasn’t the woman Poppy remembered. The beautiful laughing woman with lush black hair and big brown eyes, with a giant forever smile that decorated her few early childhood memories.

No, the tiny creature in the bed could not be described as vibrant or larger than life. Instead she was a misshapen elf, shriveled and old, worn from life and this disease. Her long waterfall of hair was gone. Instead wisps of grey decorated her scalp. A giant scar sliced along her head, where they’d operated once to cut the tumor from Therese’s brain. A success, Mimi had said, until the horrible beast had come back, angrier and more powerful and hidden in recesses of Therese’s brain that were impossible to reach.

Her coloring was no longer the luxurious black that spoke to a mixed island heritage and radiated the warmth of sun and sand and water. Her skin could only be described as grey, much like the clouds that had hung over the Pacific this morning.

“She …” Poppy touched her fingertips to her lips. Fluids in big bags dripped down plastic tubing to the needle that was taped to her parchment-thin skin. A tube ran into her mouth, a machine pushing air in and out of her lungs. “She doesn’t look the same.” Poppy swallowed back the lump that threatened to choke her.

“No.” Mimi walked to the top of the bed and ran her hand across Therese’s forehead. “She doesn’t look the same at all. Not like I remember her.” Mimi’s gaze left Therese and she looked at Poppy. “Do you remember her? I mean, before she left? Before …”

Her words drifted to an end. There was much about that time Poppy didn’t remember, but she did have some memories that she cradled in her recollection as though holding an easily broken crystal in the palm of her hand. A few pictures in her mind that she wasn’t sure were real, or were a collection of photos she had imagined herself into, put together in a quilt-like childhood fantasy.

“I remember her laugh,” Poppy said. Therese had had a brilliant laugh that made Poppy twirl with delight. “I remember her nearly always having a vodka tonic in the evening. I remember her and Daddy sitting on the back porch and watching us in the yard.”

Mimi nodded. “It was good until it wasn’t.” She removed her hand from Therese’s forehead and walked to the sink. She took a washcloth, wetted it, and wrung out the extra water. She pressed the cloth to Therese’s forehead and gently stroked it across her skin.

“Does she even know we’re here?”

“Dr. Ziddle thinks she knows. Those drugs”—Mimi nodded to the bag of fluids that dripped into Therese—“would put a Clydesdale to sleep. We were talking about cutting them back when Brian got here. Taking her off the ventilator. Thinking maybe she’d want a little bit of lucidity to say good-bye. But she’d be in pain.” Mimi took the washcloth and held it close. Her eyes searched Poppy’s. “She’s in a lot of pain and that isn’t going to change. They thought she was going to die last night, but for whatever reason she pulled through.”

Poppy crossed her arms. So much anger, even with the sadness that whispered around the lump of rage in her belly.

“She didn’t call you because she knew you didn’t want to hear from her.”

Poppy’s gaze whipped away from the shriveled woman in the bed and focused on Mimi. “That’s a coward’s excuse.”

Mimi took a long deep breath. “Right.” She shook her head and rolled her eyes toward the ceiling.

“What? You seriously think that I should just forgive her? Just ignore the twenty-plus years that she wasn’t a part of my life? That’s what you think I should do?”

“No, Poppy, but I do think you should consider that maybe she did want a relationship with you. Yes, of course her leaving when you were five was abandonment, but did you ever wonder why she left?”

“Because she was selfish and didn’t want to be a mother.”

Mimi opened her mouth to respond, but then her phone rang. She pulled it from her bag and looked at the screen. “Sorry, it’s Daniel.  I have to take it.” She walked around Poppy and out into the hall.

Alone with Therese. Poppy’s life could have been so different. What kind of relationship could they have had? What was it like to have a mother who loved you? Those questions had always roamed through Poppy’s mind when her friends discussed the fun things they did with their mothers. Even when her friends complained about their mothers, Poppy had known their complaints were a luxury that she would never have. 

What was closure? What exactly did Mimi think Poppy would gain by being here and seeing this misshapen person? Mimi had had at least a few years with Therese to work through her own issues, but Poppy? She hadn’t had had the luxury of a wealth of childhood memories nor time as an adult to repair her relationship with Therese.

“Brian did get an earlier flight.” Mimi now stood beside Poppy. She dropped her arm onto Poppy’s shoulders and tilted her head.

“How long do we need to stay?” Poppy asked.

Mimi’s eyes saddened.

“Look, Mimi, I don’t know what you expect, but Therese gave birth to me, hung around for five years, and then disappeared. I never heard from her again. I know your experience with her was a whole lot different. You got her for twelve years and then you got her again when you had Laura. She’s been your mother and a grandmother to the girls … but to me?” Poppy put her hand to her chest. She fought the tears that formed in her eyes. “She was a five-year caretaker. That’s it. No cards, no Christmases, no birthdays … nothing. So whatever feelings you think I need to work through? I’m telling you, they don’t exist.”

Poppy’s heart raced as she continued. “Maybe you need to work through something. Maybe Therese isn’t the woman that you think she is, and you’re having a hard time understanding how the woman who mothered you and the woman who abandoned me could be the same person. Maybe you want me here because if I forgive Therese then it’s easier for you.” Poppy pulled her purse tighter against her side and turned toward the door. The room was too small. She felt hemmed in by everything crammed inside it. The incessant beeping of the machine, Therese dying, Mimi with judgment in her eyes. Poppy walked out through the doorway and stopped.