Chapter Five – Part 2
The temperature had dipped below freezing during the night. By morning it strained to get over forty. Uneven slate gray clouds shrouded the sky, and the diffuse light faded all the tree-colors into a uniform mud-brown that fit Allison's mood perfectly; cold, ugly and perfectly horrible.
Allison couldn't remember the last time she'd been awake this early on a Saturday. It had probably been back when she spent her mornings watching cartoons.
It wasn't that she'd woken early. She'd never managed to get back to sleep. By the time she glanced at the clock and it read six-thirty, she'd given up, showered, and got herself breakfast. All along, Allison felt on the verge of a migraine, but the headache had never materialized.
At least the fresh air helped push away that prospect.
Now she was kicking her way through the leaves in the gutter, past mostly silent houses. She was winding her way toward the library. It would open at nine, so she was doing her best to take a twisted route to eat up time. She'd left at seven-thirty, as soon as she got her hair dry. She wanted to slip out of the house before her mother woke up.
Allison still didn't know what she would say when she finally talked to Mom. Would she mention the overheard conversation at all? Would she simply ask about her father?
Would she tell her mother the fact that the headaches had not ended with the doctor's visit, and— in fact— had persisted nearly six weeks beyond and were only now fading?
"Tell her!" her father had said to Mom.
Tell me what? Allison thought. Tell me that my father was still alive? That was an obvious interpretation, but the way her father had spoken—
She amazed herself by how calmly she was taking that. Her father? She was thinking about him as if he'd only been gone for the weekend.
The way John had spoken made Allison doubt that he simply wanted to divulge the fact of his existence.
When Allison turned back on to a main street, she sat down in a bus-shelter across from a closed deli and opened up her backpack. A sheet of frost on the bench chilled a strip of flesh through the seat of her jeans. She ignored it.
She pulled out a spiral notebook; her Trigonometry homework, notably sparse. She flipped open a blank page, fished out a pencil, and tried to transcribe the conversation from memory:
Mom: "How dare you call me here."
She erased that. It irritated her that she was already confusing the two calls. She re-thought what she'd heard last night. What was the first thing she'd heard?
Allison replaced her first line with:
Mom: "Calling here again."
Allison decided she should have done this immediately after she had heard the phone call. It was very hard to get the words down from memory. Mom's fist line was close enough. She wrote:
Dad:
Allison erased that as soon as she wrote it. She didn't know that yet. Until she had some sort of confirmation it was probably saner to assume that Mom's late-night caller was some other person named John.
She kept telling herself it was a common name.
John: "I deserve the chance to talk to her."
She thought for a while and couldn't remember Mom's next words exactly. She wrote down:
Mom: "You have some nerve. Good-bye, John."
The good-bye, that she was sure of. Now, what did he say?
John: "Tell her. You owe her that."
That was close enough.
Mom: "Don't tell me how to treat my daughter."
Allison nodded to herself. It was an odd sensation she had. It felt like she was trying to discover the plot of an entire novel from a stray page she'd found.
She felt her eyes watering and thought, why are you keeping things from me, Mom? Her breath was fogging in front of her, and she felt frozen to the seat.
The next line was the strange one:
John: "If they look they'll find out about the doctor's appointments."
Allison stared at what she wrote. Slowly, with a trembling hand, she underlined "they." "They" would be interested in her doctor's appointments over the headaches. John, or someone— they— thought her headaches meant something.
"Maybe I misheard it," Allison mumbled. "I was half asleep."
She thought on Mom's next line. It was impossible to remember the tirade exactly. She decided just to write down the gist of what she'd heard:
Mom: (goes off on the fact my headaches weren't anything to worry about.)
As she thought about it, she added the line:
"They cleared up after the visit."
Allison was sure Mom had said that. But the headaches hadn't cleared up after the visit. Allison simply had stopped telling Mom about them. She had managed to hide the six weeks of intermittent agony, and Allison began to think she had some unconscious complicity from her mother. Mom didn't want to believe Allison was having these migraines. On the phone she'd been psycho about it. Mom had broken down telling this John that Allison's headaches were nothing.
Allison added the words, "nothing, nothing, nothing!" to that line.
Now that it was daylight and she was beginning to think clearly, Allison was scaring herself. When Allison had returned from the doctor, what Mom had shown her wasn't condescension, insensitivity, or disbelief. It had been screaming denial.
I've contracted a rare genetic disorder, and it's going to kill me because Mom can't deal with it.
Allison got a grip on herself. If it was a disease, those endless examinations would have shown something. Even if the doctor didn't understand what. If there was anything medically wrong, they would have ordered even more tests, not sent mother and daughter home with the all-clear and a speech about tension headaches.
Allison's hand shook as she wrote the next line:
John: "Did the doctor know the other possibility?"
