Читать книгу Golden's Rule - C. E. Edmonson - Страница 6

MOM WAS ON the phone the minute we walked through the door. She was calling Dr. Martin, my pediatrician (yes, I was still seeing a pediatrician—talk about mortifying) to arrange an appointment. The office was closed, naturally, and she got his answering service. I didn’t listen to the conversation, but I’m pretty certain she used her I’m-a-lawyer-and-don’t-mess-with-me line, because she always did. Unfortunately, the attack failed, just like with Nurse Cole. My mom was told to take me to the emergency room if I needed immediate care. Otherwise, she could phone Dr. Martin in the morning.

While this was going on, I was in the kitchen, emptying the dishwasher. Talk about feeling guilty. I mean, puh-leeeze. Emergency care? A one-time sports injury was hardly an emergency, and I liked to think that I was beyond needing care. Daycare, childcare, even caring much about the dance—all in the past.

Independence was my thing. I took care of myself. Not that I was a drudge; I didn’t mop the floor or clean the bathroom. We had a housekeeper who came in twice a week, on Monday and Thursday. But I did make my bed, and pick up after myself, and do the occasional laundry. Now my mom would have to take a day off; maybe more than one. I mean, who knew where this was going? And all this drama over something that had already magically healed itself! If only my leg could write a medical note.

After she gave up on bullying the answering service, Mom ordered up a thin-crust pizza and a Greek salad and we sat down to a mostly silent dinner. I could see that she was more worried than she let on, but there wasn’t much I could do about it besides assuring her that I was fine and suggesting that I go to the doctor alone, or that we make an evening appointment. I wanted to get this ordeal over with as soon as possible and get back to normal, like my leg had already decided to do. Mom wasn’t listening, though. It seemed that Nurse Cole’s nervousness was infectious.

“Don’t worry,” she told me over nibbles of mushroom pizza. “Come tomorrow morning, I’ll get us an early appointment. I promise you.”

I wasn’t worried. But the more the adults acted serious and strange, the more worried I was becoming.

I went up to my room after dinner and sent a collective text message to the Mag-7s, just in case they hadn’t heard from Jasmine. The responses poured in—mostly questions I didn’t have answers for. After texting back a series of “IDK” (“I don’t know”), I suddenly discovered that my “attack” was something I didn’t want to talk about. It’s like when I’m on the basketball court and I’m knocking down shot after shot. You don’t want to jinx yourself by talking about the streak. So, I made an excuse about having homework to do and signed off.

I guess I was expecting NBDs (“no big deal”) instead of this outpouring of concern. People break their legs or tear muscles on the court all the time. That was something we had all seen up close and personal—and let me tell you, it isn’t pretty. Really, my leg spazzing out was no big deal in comparison. So why were the kids all of a sudden acting as crazy as the adults?

So, I did what I told them I was going to do and actually attempted to get some homework done—but I couldn’t concentrate on the math problems in my workbook. See! I told you the craziness was catching! I finally found myself staring at the photos on the wall opposite the foot of my bed: my Wall of Fame.

President Barack Obama was there, along with singer Alicia Keys, baseball great Derek Jeter, musician Lenny Kravitz, and two of my favorite actresses, Tia and Tamara Mowry. There were dozens of other photos as well, including the author Walter Mosley, and news correspondents Soledad O’Brien and Christiane Amanpour. These were some of my favorites as well, role models for my writer ambitions. Especially Soledad and Christiane, fearless reporters who’d been covering news stories around the world for the past twenty years.

But that wasn’t why they were up there. No, everybody on my Wall of Fame was multiracial. And my PROUD TO BE MULTIRACIAL t-shirt, long since outgrown, was tacked right in the middle of the photos.

This was another piece of my personal puzzle. Like being independent, defiance was a shield. Montclair was like this integrated oasis. Yeah, we had our gangsta wannabes, rocker wannabes, jock wannabes, and preppy wannabes, too. But wannabes or not, we had one thing in common. We’d been prepped for success, like from the day we were born. So it wasn’t a question of whether or not we’d go to college. The issue was whether we’d get into a top-tier university like Duke or Stanford, or one of the Ivy League schools, or the big burrito in the sky, MIT.

And my new question was whether I’d get there on a basketball scholarship or not. Because if something serious was really happening with my leg…I stopped myself from completing the thought. I really didn’t want to jinx myself. It was just that everyone’s sympathy was starting to spook me out.

Eventually, I settled down. I actually did a few of the math problems and read a chapter in my history book about Prohibition before I went to sleep. Like, normal, okay? That’s what I wanted. It was scary while it lasted but now it was over—all except getting a doctor’s note. A pure technicality. Students came to school with those things all the time, waving them in the air like they were get-out-of-gym-free cards. And there was never anything wrong with any of those kids.

I told myself it was time to get back to worrying about more important issues, like a date for the spring dance, and should I go to basketball camp or try to catch on with a local summer league, and isn’t it about time I buckled down because mid-term exams were coming up in a few weeks and I hadn’t so much as looked at George Orwell’s Animal Farm? And somewhere in the midst of all of that, I managed to fall asleep.

The next morning, I swung my legs over the side of the bed and stood up. Nothing out of whack. Totally cool. It was a minor glitch, that’s all. I was ready to get my doctor’s note and move on.

I brushed my teeth and took a shower, then dressed and went into the kitchen. Mom was pouring some kind of granola into a bowl and there was a glass of juice next to my place at the breakfast bar. I sat down, picked up the juice, brought it to my lips and—

Passed out cold. Thwack!

I woke up totally confused. The only thing I knew, from the omigosh expression on Mom’s face, was that something really bad had happened to me. My brain was spinning like a top and I had to wait for it to slow down before I was finally able to sit up. Then I tested my arms and legs, one at a time. Everything worked.

“Mom, what happened?” “I think you had a seizure.”

“What?” I heard the words, but it was like I couldn’t understand them. Not when they were being spoken about me.

My mom took me in her arms and lifted me to my feet. She led me, stumbling, into the living room, then onto the couch.

“I’m going to call Dr. Martin right now.”

When my mom left the room, it was the first time I became seriously scared. A bum leg was one thing. But blackouts and seizures? Maybe Nurse Cole wasn’t just being an unreasonable dictator by making me go see a doctor. Maybe something really was wrong with me… horribly wrong.

I counted the seconds until my mom came back into the room. One hundred and twenty-three. Alone like that, helpless, not knowing what was happening to me, they were the longest two minutes of my life.

Before I knew it, my mother and I were on our way to the emergency room at the Essex County Medical Center, following Dr. Martin’s recommendation. I mean, given a choice, I would have gladly gone to the pediatrician instead of the ER. Emergency rooms are for really bad cases, like car crash victims or someone with an axe stuck in his head or people who accidentally cut off their fingers while chopping up carrots with a kitchen knife (something my mom always warned me about). The only other time I was rushed to an ER before was when I was little and stuck loose beads from my Barbie bracelet way up my nose and couldn’t get them out. Life or death stuff. Like, actual emergencies. Not like now. Right?

I wanted to ask my mom, but didn’t. Instead, I fiddled with the radio and watched cars zip by in the other direction as I tried to fight off one of those Chicken-Little-was-right moments. I mean, word up, the sky was falling. Seizures? I was fourteen and this absolutely could not be happening to me.

I glanced at my mother from time to time but avoided making real eye contact. I couldn’t stand to see the worry in her eyes. Knowing that she was scared would have made the situation so much worse. So I just focused on her voice, soothingly repeating, “It’s okay, baby. We’ll be there soon.

Everything will be okay.” I think she was trying to convince herself as much as me.

They took us seriously in the emergency room. I mean the triage nurse, and the examining nurse, and Dr. Sandoval when she came into my little cubicle. In fact, they let us in almost right away, before the grayish-looking guy with the hacking cough and the woman with a dishtowel tied around her arm as a makeshift tourniquet, both of whom had been there ahead of us. I wouldn’t have minded waiting. Really. That was one race I actually didn’t want to win.

Dr. Sandoval was a heavyset woman, in her thirties, wearing pink scrubs. She conducted almost the same examination Nurse Cole had on the prior afternoon—except this time around, I think I forgot to breathe once during the entire thing.

“I don’t find any gross abnormalities,” she told my mother afterward, much to my relief. “Still, I’d like to order a CT scan of Madison’s brain.”

A scan? Of my brain? What?! Had something gone wrong with my hearing now, too?

“I’d order an MRI, but your insurance company won’t approve the test,” Dr. Sandoval continued matter-of-factly.

“The insurance company?” Mom asked. “Tell me why.” “They feel we should do the CT scan first. And fighting them will only cause a delay.”

Finally, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I was pretty sure the doctor just said “brain scan” and now these people were chatting about insurance? “Hellooooooo? Maddie calling. Do you wanna tell me what’s wrong with my brain, or is it a secret?”

Dr. Sandoval and my mom both looked at me as if they’d forgotten I was there. Like I was something they’d misplaced. Then Mom reached down to stroke my hair. “Sorry, baby,” she said.

We were inside a narrow space separated from similar spaces on either side by curtains. I was lying on one of those rolling hospital beds, called gurneys, mainly because there was nowhere else to sit or lie down. My mom was forced to stand up, and with Dr. Sandoval in the space, it was like we were jammed into a closet.

Dr. Sandoval turned to me. Like everybody in the emergency room—the nurses, the doctors, the aides, and even the patients—she looked as if she needed to be somewhere else in a big hurry. But she forced herself to focus on me for the time being—and the expression on her face made me wish she hadn’t. It looked like she was trying to screw up the courage to tell me something, and I realized that it would have been easier to let her just keep talking over me instead of to me directly. That way, we could have both pretended she was talking about someone else.

“The purpose of the CT scan is to determine what, if anything, is wrong with you,” she said. “But it’s possible that you’ve had a mild stroke.”

Mild? Gimme a break! That’s how I order my General Tsao’s chicken. But a fourteen-year-old kid with a stroke? There’s nothing mild about that, any way you look at it. This is, like, guess what? Somebody tossed a refrigerator out of a window and it landed on your head. But don’t worry. It was empty.

“The procedure,” she continued, “is simple. We’ll inject contrast material through a vein and take a few pictures. Nothing to it. It’s entirely painless.”

Yeah, for you, I thought.

And then she was gone, off to give thirty seconds of her precious time to some other chump. Mom sat next to me on the gurney. Her eyes were red and swollen, and her forehead was lined with tension.

“I don’t think it’ll be anything,” I told her. “I feel great.”

Physically, that was true.

“I know, honey. You’re a strong girl,” she said, squeezing my hand. “Just keep being strong.” Then she stood up and paced around the small space. “I need to get in touch with your father.”

“You didn’t call him last night?”

“I tried, but his cell phone was out of reach. Anyway, it’s probably better if we get this pinned down first.”

I wanted to ask why, but a nurse pulled the curtain aside and stepped up next to the gurney. She was carrying a plastic container full of needles and vials. My eyes grew wide at the sight of them and I shot my mom a quick look of panic. I mean, she wouldn’t let me rent any of the Friday the 13th movies because I’d have nightmares—and now I was living one!

“We’ll just take a little blood,” the nurse said, smiling sweetly. “Just a pinch is all.”

Promises, promises, that’s all I got. She had to make three attempts before she hit a vein. I mean, was she a trainee? Or did she just like to torture people? Not that she was apologetic or anything. No, her failures didn’t seem to bother her very much—she somehow kept up that beauty pageant smile, like someone was going to hand her a crown and a bunch of roses after this. With any luck, they’d have thorns on them.

Hey, I was allowed to be bitter about this. After all, it was my arm getting stuck like a voodoo doll—I halfway expected to look down and see the nurse’s initials tattooed on it.

When she finally finished taking the blood and labeling the vials, she handed me a plastic container with a lid and directed me to the bathroom. “We’ll need a urine sample, too. Drop it off at the nurses’ station when you’re finished,” she said cheerily.

Then she was gone, no doubt off to find her next victim. And I was, like, so totally bummed out I couldn’t even talk. I felt like I was disappearing, the incredible shrinking Maddie—like I wasn’t a person anymore, just a series of test results or a lab rat to be tormented and studied.

“Do you want me to go to the bathroom with you?” my mom asked.

Oh, yeah, like that’d make it better.

I did my duty, then settled back on the gurney to wait, wishing I’d thought to bring a book or something. Anything to take my mind off of what was going on around me, to me…inside of me. It seemed surreal to be sitting there while everyone else went about their usual business, poking and prodding patients, and talking about strokes like they were the most normal things in the world.

I guess if you work in a hospital, that kind of stuff becomes second nature to you. But to me, it was as if my life had been turned upside down in just a matter of a few hours. Nothing was less normal than sitting here on the gurney, waiting to find out what was wrong with me. Being probed by aliens wouldn’t have been much weirder!

But everything was normal just yesterday morning, just a short twenty-four hours ago. Life was perfect. No complaints. Now here I was, being checked for signs of a stroke. Could this really be happening to me? I kept wanting to wake up or turn back time. With something this serious, shouldn’t they give you at least one do-over?

My answer arrived in the form of an aide pushing a wheelchair. I did get a do-over—unfortunately, with the wheelchair! Why did I need one when I could walk? Hospital rules.

My mom and I looked at each other, but I think we both knew that we couldn’t fight procedure. Better to get it over with. I sat down with a sigh. Only the trip was even more depressing than lying on the gurney. When you’re in a wheelchair in a hospital, everybody looks at you. Like, what’s wrong with this one? And the elevator they put me on was already occupied by an old man on a gurney who stared at the ceiling and groaned with every breath. I don’t even think he was in pain or anything. He was just groaning. Maybe that was his way of protesting against what was happening to him.

I understood how he felt. I wanted to groan myself.

In the CT room, some space-age-looking equipment was set up, similar to what I saw on the school trip to the planetarium. I focused on that while another nurse pushed an Iv into the same vein used to take blood. “Just a little pinch, dear.” Then before I knew what was happening to me, I was put on a platform that slid into a machine that completely encircled my head. “Don’t move, dear.” A liquid was injected into my arm and the machine began to spin, whirring like the sound of birds’ wings, first to the left, then back to the right, finally making a sound that reminded me of bees in a hive.

Being in there was one of the worst experiences of my life. I felt so utterly alone, so cut off from everyone in the outside world. Almost like a living robot. And it didn’t take just a minute, like X-rays in a dentist’s office. By the time the machine stopped, I felt like I was the victim of a cave-in. Don’t move? It was all I could do not to jump off the table and run away from the machine that was trying to devour me headfirst.

I was feeling dizzy when I finally got to my feet, but the unit was already being prepared for the next patient. My mother was arguing with the X-ray technician, who wanted us to go back to the emergency room. The scans, she told him, would have to be read in this very unit by a radiologist, so returning to the emergency room was pointless. Therefore, we’d be sitting in the small waiting area until that radiologist made an appearance. Then she handed him her business card: Abigail Moore-Bergamo, Attorney at Law.

“Hospitals,” she told the man, “have certain obligations with regard to their patients, obligations that are best honored. We’ll be in the waiting area.” It was a small victory but, as Coach Stover taught me, every win counts.

I held my tongue until we were sitting next to each other on plastic chairs, the kind with a little depression that never really fits your bottom. “What kind of obligations do hospitals have?” I asked. The question was sincere. I mean, I couldn’t demand my rights if I didn’t know what they were, right? But Mom was a step ahead of me.

“I have no idea, but at least he didn’t call security,” she said, and we both started laughing. For me, the laughter was a kind of release of all my pent-up nerves. For Mom, the laughter turned into tears that suddenly streamed down her face. Finally, she swiped at her eyes. “Don’t you worry, baby. Whatever happens, we’ll get through it together.”

Okay, so it’s just what you’d tell a little kid, which a day before I definitely didn’t want to be. But it worked. I felt better—at least until Dr. Rosenberg came into the waiting area holding a sheet of X-ray film. Then my nerves began to act up again. It was worse than getting back results for a test you weren’t prepared for.

Dr. Rosenberg was a younger man, most likely still in his twenties. Like Dr. Sandoval, his eyes were red, his eyelids swollen. He looked as though he hadn’t slept in a week. Still, he did manage to smile as he introduced himself.

“Would you like to discuss this in private?” he asked my mother.

Mom’s response was quick in coming. “No,” she announced as she moved over to allow him to sit between us. “We’re in this together.” She flashed me a brave smile.

Dr. Rosenberg sat down. “I don’t want to sugarcoat what I’m about to tell you, because it’s serious.” He turned up the X-ray to reveal what was obviously a brain—my brain—and pointed to a white patch on the left side. “This disorder might be some sort of inflammation, or even multiple sclerosis.” Then he paused briefly. “But the most likely cause is a brain tumor. An MRI will tell us for sure.”

He went on for several minutes, but I didn’t hear a word. There was a voice inside my head, screaming so loud I couldn’t hear anything else. The voice’s vocabulary consisted of two words: brain and tumor. And that’s all I heard as we made our way out of the hospital and drove home.

Brain tumor, brain tumor, brain tumor. Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? Brainnnnnn Tuuuuuumorrrrrrrrrrrrr.

I felt like I was floating, like my mind had left my body and was off alone somewhere, trying to escape and return back to the reality that made sense to me: the girls’ locker room before yesterday’s game. Even history class, which I was missing right now. Anywhere but here, now, in this car, next to my mother, who was trying so hard not to cry.

I couldn’t cry, either, because crying would mean that, at least emotionally, I had accepted this situation. Which I hadn’t. At all. It was grotesque. Wrong. What the doctor said was a mistake. The MRI would clear it all up. It had to.

As soon as we entered the house, Mom was on the phone. Two phones, actually—the house phone and her cell phone. She was doing what she does best: taking command. I didn’t blame her. Controlling the situation was the only defense she had. Abigail Moore-Bergamo would find the best doctors, and the best hospitals, and the earliest appointment for her daughter.

And me? The daughter part? I still couldn’t get my mind around what was happening. Didn’t Dr. Rosenberg say it might not be a tumor? Didn’t he say something about an inflammation? Okay, so I didn’t have the faintest idea what an inflammation was. But why get technical? It had to be better than a brain tumor—and it was the only hope I had.

I left Mom to her phoning, went to my room, and turned on my computer. For the next hour, I played a game of pretend. I pretended that nothing had changed and my history paper on Prohibition still needed to be written. When in doubt, Google. That’s the way we all did it. Google and Wikipedia and a trip to the library for a few titles we could stick in the bibliography. I briefly thought about searching “brain tumor” and “inflammation” and even “multiple sclerosis,” but I didn’t. Like I said, why jinx myself? Besides, the Internet was good, but it wouldn’t give me all the answers.

I printed out what I found as I went along, until my printer tray was full. Then I read through the articles until I found an angle I could work. I mean, we’re talking about a middle school essay. Nobody expected scholarship. But I definitely wanted an A and figured I could get it with an organization called the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, an organization devoted to outlawing alcohol. My history teacher, Ms. Marrano, was big on women’s issues.

By the time I finished up, I thought I was feeling better. I thought I was strong enough to e-mail the Mag-7s. I thought I was ready to type the words brain and tumor as a remote possibility. And maybe I was, because I managed to hit the right keys and click the SEND button. In fact, I didn’t realize that I was crying until I shut down the computer and the screen went dark, and I saw the tears streaming down my face.

Then I blubbered like a baby, and I kept on blubbering. Brain tumor? Brain tumor? No, that wasn’t right. I was only fourteen—my life was just starting out. I was the Montclair Flash. Now you see me, now you don’t. The fastest girl in the school. An athlete. Strong. Healthy. Unstoppable. Was it possible that my body would turn against me like that?

My mother came into the room before I broke down altogether. Maybe she was using some of that mom radar. Or maybe I was emitting some kind of kid-in-distress signal: beep, beep, beep. But when she took me in her arms, I didn’t try to pretend that I was too old to be held. No way. I was scared out of my mind, and the safest place I could think of was right where I was then.

She cradled me, rocking slightly back and forth, stroking my hair and all the while whispering, “Ssshhh, it’s okay. I won’t let anything happen to you.” She kept repeating that until I finally believed it.

Eventually, I calmed down enough to go into the bathroom and wash my face. After I shut off the water and toweled dry, I stared at my reflection in the mirror for just a moment. Mostly, I think I’m a cute kid. My skin is the color of coffee ice cream and, at least on this particularly day, relatively zit-free. My eyes are light brown and large enough to draw compliments from my relatives; my mouth is full and my chin firm. But I wasn’t looking at my features. I was running my fingers through my hair, searching for a lump, as if brain tumors grew on the outside of the skull. “Honey, you all right?” my mother called from the other room. “Yeah, fine.”

I took a last look—still no lump. But the face in the mirror seemed strange somehow, far away, foreign. It didn’t feel like me anymore. I stared back at her for a few seconds, then turned out the light and headed back to my bedroom.

Mom was sitting on the edge of my bed, holding what looked like a book in her lap. It was about the size of my algebra book, covered in brown leather, and about an inch thick.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a memoir, honey, written by your great-great-great-grandmother. Her name was Golden Lea Jackson and she was born sometime during the 1830s. She called her memoir Recollections. It’s about her time growing up as a slave in Kentucky, and it’s been passed down to the women in the family for more than a hundred years. I’ve been saving it for when you’re older.”

The first thing I thought was, And you’re giving it to me now because I might not get older? But Mom was having enough trouble dealing with the situation, so I kept that particular thought to myself.

“Golden who?” I said. “My great-great-great what?”

“Your great-great-great-grandmother.” My mother patted the bed alongside her, and I sat down. “The book was written in Golden Lea’s own hand and the ink was starting to fade, so we had the pages bound into this book with archival page sleeves to preserve them. You’ll have to be careful while you’re reading, because the paper is very brittle.”

“Why don’t you just make a photocopy of it? Or scan a digital copy?”

“We have made copies, honey, of course. But reading the words in Golden Lea’s own hand is a way of reaching back to touch the past. At least, it was for me.” Mom stopped long enough to put her arm around my shoulders. “I know you’re looking ahead, baby, into the future. That’s natural at your age. But sometimes the past can help us deal with the present. Your great-great-great-grandmother was a woman with true spirit, a fighter to her bones.”

I started to shake my head. I didn’t want to be tied to a black past any more than I wanted to be tied to a white past. But I couldn’t say that, just like I couldn’t talk about a future without me in it.

“All right, Mom,” I finally said. “I’ll give it a try. But I just hope it’s not too depressing. I mean, I’m not trying to be a wise guy, but slavery doesn’t sound all that uplifting.”

Mom smiled and hugged me, then stood up to go. “I’m still trying to reach your father. I left word at his hotel, but I’m going to try calling him again.”

I waited until she left the room, then opened the book. My first thought was that I was in for a tough time. The handwriting inside was very neat, but also very small, and the black ink was pretty faded and many of the letters ran together. Plus, there were no lines on the pages and the words slanted up to the right. I told myself, You so totally don’t need this right now.

But I was wrong. I did need Golden Lea Jackson’s book. I needed to step out of my own skin for a while, get outside of my own headspace. I needed to hear from someone who survived an almost impossible situation and reached out to guide future generations of her family to do the same. And I didn’t have to read more than a few paragraphs before I was utterly hooked.