On Wednesday she returns from the hospital and I go to visit her in her bedroom. She is propped up on pillows, and has a stack of magazines resting in her lap. All of her medications are collected neatly on the table beside her bed. She shows me the crusty spot in the crook of her arm where the IV was, and raises her shirt to reveal her new scar, alongside the old scar. It is ragged and oozing, the stitches like cruel, thick hairs sprouting out of her belly. I trace the scar lightly with my finger, and she shivers and sucks in spit.
I hear her mom downstairs, calling the pharmacy and rattling her pans. Demanding receipts, a little service, some goddamn respect. “Goddamn it,” she shouts. But it is without heat. She is always on the phone with the doctors or the hospital or the insurance companies because as soon as she hangs up she thinks her daughter might die.
“Did it hurt much?” I ask as I kiss her neck. I am careful.
“Yes.” She offers more of her neck, and pulls her hair back so it isn’t in the way. Her skin feels cool. Her throat is long and blue.
“The same ugly nurse? With the bad breath?” My hand reaches across the bedspread, under her thin shirt, and finds her breast. She presses it against my palm by arching her back.
“Yes. Her breath was even worse this time. Fishy. And those veins showing through her hose!” She cringes for my benefit as I continue my examination. I kiss along the length of her old scar. She lowers her chin and kisses my ear. “So, what is the diagnosis, doctor?”
We know we have to go slow. Nobody told us this, of course. Not outright. Not her doctor, or the horrid nurse who offers her nothing but bitter smiles. And not her mother, who often hugs me and tries to console me, looking silently at me as if to say, “Why don’t you go find yourself a healthy, normal girl? You are just too young to have to deal with this.”
We have read about it in books, about her lopsided heart. The heart she was born with. Damaged and leaky, diminishing daily. Her heart must not go too fast. So we don’t either.
