Darling Rose Gold, page 4
Man with eye patch, I wrote, watching an old guy make his way across the lobby. Thirty minutes later, my doctor announced I didn’t need the MRI after all. An eye patch became a good omen.
Two gray hats, I noted in a hospital parking lot. That afternoon, the doctor took my vitals and said I’d lost six pounds. A gray hat meant something bad was coming.
Seeing the world this way gave me certainty at a time when I had zero control over my body and health. I knew now that these signs didn’t actually predict anything, but they were like a childhood blankie—I just felt better holding on to them.
Vinny walked two big mugs over and set them on the table. Coffee spilled over the side of one cup and onto Vinny’s hand.
“Shit,” he grunted.
I stared at him.
“Can you grab me some napkins?” Vinny said, jabbing a finger at the dispenser. I rushed to pull two from the metal box. Vinny rubbed his wet hand on his jeans, where a dark coffee stain was forming. He took the napkins from me and rubbed at it.
Dab. Don’t rub, she chided. See what happens when you don’t carry a Tide to Go pen?
Vinny glanced up and saw me watching him. I looked down and studied my drink. Someone had drawn a heart in the steamed milk. I wanted to take a photo, but when I scanned the café, no one else was photographing their coffee. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to care. “Thanks for the drink,” I said.
Vinny stopped rubbing his jeans and tossed the crumpled napkins on the table. He let out a disgusted sigh and sat across from me, defeated. “I got you some muffins too,” he said. He looked me up and down. “First time in Chicago?”
I nodded.
“You in town long?”
“Just the weekend,” I said, making sure I blocked my mouth with my hand. “I’m visiting a friend.”
Alex had been at the gym when I’d arrived this morning, so I went straight to the café. I’d texted her a couple times but hadn’t heard back.
“She was my neighbor in Deadwick,” I explained.
The barista set a basket of muffins in the middle of our table. I counted five. Vinny blew on the coffee he had left. He didn’t take a muffin, so I didn’t either. I wondered how old he was—early forties, maybe?
“She was the first person I told about my mom,” I mumbled. I’d tried making muffins last weekend, but they weren’t very good. I wondered if these would be better. Under the table, my leg pogo-sticked.
Vinny shook his hair out of his bloodshot eyes and sat up a little straighter. “Why don’t we start with your illnesses?” he said. “What have you been diagnosed with? And can you speak up a little?”
My eyes widened at the thought of listing them all. “I was a preemie, born ten weeks early. That’s how it started,” I said, rubbing my hands on the thighs of my jeans, not making eye contact. “At the hospital, I had jaundice and then pneumonia. I think those were real—the nurses wrote it down in my medical records.”
Vinny still hadn’t touched the muffins. Starving, I grabbed a blueberry one and popped a piece in my mouth. I nearly moaned in appreciation. The base was moist and fluffy, the top buttery, the blueberries fresh—these were a million times better than the batch I’d made at home. I took bite after delighted bite before remembering I was in the middle of a story.
Once Mom was allowed to bring me home, I told Vinny, I had issues with sleep apnea. Mom got me a CPAP machine and medicine. She said I also had constant fevers and sore throats, and these awful ear infections. A pediatrician put tubes in my ears.
Mom was most worried about my digestive issues. I couldn’t keep anything down—formula, real food, none of it. I was shrinking when I should have been growing. When I got down to the tenth percentile in weight, the doctor agreed with Mom that I should get a feeding tube. All of this before I turned two.
I don’t remember when Mom came up with her “chromosomal defect” theory, but she clung to it for the rest of my childhood. How else to explain all the bizarre symptoms—the headaches and stomachaches, the dizziness, the near-constant fatigue—that weren’t connected to any single disease? A chromosomal defect sounded serious enough to be devastating, but vague enough that any illness might stem from it.
Mom had a solution for everything. As I grew up, my hair started falling out in clumps—she shaved it so I wouldn’t be embarrassed by the uneven growth. When my vision problems didn’t go away, Mom bought me glasses. I started fainting more often, so Mom got me a wheelchair. All her solutions created the appearance of a chronically sick child. What healthy ten-year-old had a buzzed head and was more or less confined to a wheelchair? Nobody doubted my illnesses. Including me.
Vinny thought for a minute. “How much of this do you remember?”
I picked up the second half of the muffin and took a bite. When most people looked back at their childhoods, I assumed they thought of oven-baked chocolate chip cookies at Grandma’s house or the salty-sweet mixture of coconut sunscreen and sunburned skin after a long summer day.
When I thought of my childhood, I smelled disinfectant.
“I was too young to remember the appointments when they started,” I said. “But Mom explained them to me once I was old enough. She said no matter how many doctors we visited, no one could ever figure out what was wrong with me.”
Vinny watched a pretty young woman gather up her belongings and leave the café. Was he losing interest in my story? What if he cut the interview short and I didn’t get the money for my teeth? I grabbed a second muffin: chocolate chip. I might as well get a free lunch out of this.
“The pattern was always the same. Mom would find a new doctor, and before the appointment, she’d give me a fresh buzz cut. She said I could wear my wig in the lobby, but had to take it off in the doctor’s office. That he needed to see how sick I was.”
When I was a kid, I hated showing my shaved head. I could pass for a little boy. But I never seriously considered letting my hair grow out. I couldn’t remember what my real hair looked like, but based on my mom’s descriptions, I didn’t want to find out.
“Mom told me what to say before the doctor came in,” I continued. “‘I need you to be brave. You have to tell the doctor how you’ve been feeling. About the headaches and dizziness and vomiting. Don’t hold back. If you don’t tell him, he can’t help you.’”
I worked my way through the chocolate chip muffin and told Vinny that when the doctor came in, I’d just repeat the words Mom had used. I wasn’t lying about being sick—I was in pain every single day. But a four-year-old doesn’t know what fatigue is. Everything I knew about my body came from Mom. I trusted her.
Mom would get annoyed with my two-word responses and pump up the pain. “These are debilitating headaches, Doctor, and she’s getting them all the time.” She’d run through my entire medical history, starting with apnea when I was a preemie. I’d sit in silence, bracing myself for when she reached eighteen-month-old Rose Gold. That was the age I got my feeding tube, and Mom always lifted my shirt to show it to the doctor. That horrified me every time.
“Thirty minutes later, the doctor was ready to do anything to get Mom to stop talking. He’d listen to my heartbeat, take my blood pressure and temperature. My stats were normal, with the exception of my weight, which was always way too low. He’d offer to run a few tests, and if he didn’t, Mom had a few ideas on a legal pad in her purse to get him started.
“‘Have you thought about a chemistry panel? What about a CBC?’ She’d lean in with this little wink and whisper, ‘I was a nurse’s aide for twelve years,’ letting the doctor know she wasn’t your ordinary overprotective mother. She knew what she was talking about.
“Anyway, the doctor would agree—‘Sure, I could run a CBC’—and Mom would clap her hands, all excited. She loved nothing more than being on the doctor’s team. She just wanted everyone to work together to get the best possible treatment for her little girl.”
I reached for a third muffin and glanced up at Vinny. To my surprise, he was leaning forward, watching me with SpaghettiOs eyes. I put a few crumbs in my mouth, self-conscious. He stared at my hand covering my mouth while I chewed.
Vinny scrunched his brows, eyes never leaving my mouth. “What about your dad? He wasn’t in the picture, right? The trial reports said he died when you were young.”
For the first time in I didn’t know how long, I took my hand away from my mouth when I talked. I let Vinny see my teeth. He scooted closer and winced, but he was also intrigued. I had his attention.
“He died before I was born,” I said.
“Of what?”
“Cancer,” I lied, guilty for a minute but too embarrassed to tell him the truth. I couldn’t believe how the fib slipped from my tongue, how quickly Vinny bought it. I’d been wondering how Mom kept her own stories straight all those years. Turned out, lying was much easier than telling the truth.
Vinny bowed his head for a moment, as if praying for my dead father. Don’t let the silver cross around his neck fool you, Mom whispered. He’s never prayed a day in his weasel-faced life. Vinny picked his head back up and opened a voice-recorder app on his phone. “Okay if I tape?”
I nodded, and he pressed the record button. I smiled at him, a big openmouthed grin. Vinny shuddered a little, but didn’t even bother hiding his stare. I ignored the heat of humiliation in my face. I was going to get the money for my teeth after all.
“What about family on his side?” Vinny asked. “You ever meet any of your relatives?”
I shook my head.
“Okay, so your ma is telling everyone you’re sick, and both you and the doctors believe her. You’re going to the doctor’s office all the time. What about life at home? What was that like?”
I dug into the third muffin, teeth first. “She pulled me out of school in first grade after one kid was mean to me, said homeschooling would be easier on my health. I spent most of my time alone with her until I was sixteen.”
“How’d she justify that?” Vinny asked.
“She said I was too sick to be around other kids. My weak immune system wouldn’t be able to resist their germs. She was always holding the chromosomal defect over my head. I was too scared of my sicknesses to argue. So I sat in my chair and let her shave my head and played the good patient.”
“But you had to get out once in a while,” Vinny said.
“We left the house for doctors’ appointments, running errands, and visiting neighbors,” I said. “Before Mom’s arrest, our neighbors thought she was a saint. She took part in every food drive, roadway cleanup, and raffle. And all this with a sick daughter at home. ‘That Patty is something, isn’t she?’ they’d say. Their praise was just what she wanted.”
Vinny thought for a minute. “You said you didn’t hang around a lot of other people until you were sixteen. What changed?”
I smiled. “We got the Internet.”
* * *
• • •
When I explained to Vinny how I stopped Mom, I’m not sure why I left Phil out of the story. I mentioned once in our chat room that broccoli and turkey and potatoes reminded me of maple syrup mixed with cotton candy. Phil was the first person to tell me none of those foods was sickly sweet. I described the weird bitterness on my tongue and throat as I swallowed Mom’s meals, how the tingling lingered no matter how hard I scratched. Nothing could get rid of the taste—not mouthwash, gum, water, more food.
It’s odd that hospital food never makes you sick. Only your mom’s food, Phil said.
I remembered that moment in perfect detail, like it was preserved in a snow globe. I was sixteen, sitting at the desk in Mom’s bedroom, where she insisted we keep our computer. It was the middle of the night—the only time I dared talk to Phil. Mom was snoring loudly in her bed a few feet away.
I stared at the computer screen, fingers frozen on the keyboard. My illness. My mother. Illness because of my mother. The connection had never crossed my mind.
I have to get to bed, I told Phil. Thanks for listening. XO.
I signed off but stayed up all night, following link after link like a scavenger hunt. The sun was starting to rise when I found it: an image of a small brown bottle with a white cap and blue lettering. I had seen the bottle once before while putting away laundry.
Holding my breath, I tiptoed to Mom’s dresser and, an inch at a time, opened her sock drawer. Buried in the back was the same brown bottle. Lettered in blue were the words “Ipecac Syrup.”
I hurried back to the computer and scanned the page for more information. Ipecac syrup was used to make kids or pets vomit when they accidentally swallowed poison.
My mother had been poisoning me.
I became aware of a throbbing in my chest. My hand couldn’t feel the mouse it was holding. The chair fabric under my thighs disappeared. I was terrified of reading further.
Suddenly I felt hot, angry breath on the back of my neck.
I whipped around in my chair, expecting Mom to be looming over me. What would I say? But I was imagining things. She was still in bed, the quilted comforter rising and falling with her steady breath. How confident she was, even in sleep. Nothing kept her up at night. I read for as long as I dared, then erased my search history.
I climbed into my bed that morning with no idea what to do next. I understood Mom was putting ipecac in my food, but it still didn’t occur to me then that I didn’t have any food allergies or digestive issues. It took me another six months to figure out I probably didn’t need the feeding tube. Piece by piece, I realized everything she’d told me was a lie: the vision problems, the chromosomal defect, all of it.
Back in the café, Vinny said, “So lemme get this straight: the only thing wrong with you was your ma put ipecac in your food?” He sounded disappointed.
“When I was given food at all,” I pointed out. “The ipecac explains the vomiting. The rest of my symptoms were malnutrition.”
“But you had the feeding tube.”
“After Mom was arrested, I found out she’d been feeding me half of the daily calories I needed.”
Vinny let out a low whistle. “At the risk of offending, I’ve gotta ask”—he paused—“how did you not know? I get not understanding when you were a kid, but even at fifteen, you had no idea?”
Vinny King was an a-hole. I wished I could dump my gross coffee in his lap. I’d heard comments like these before: Why didn’t you get up out of the wheelchair? Why didn’t you cook your own meals? You really didn’t know you were playing sick? They were judgments more than questions.
I narrowed my eyes at Vinny. “What Mom said was true—I was sick all the time. I did throw up every food she put in front of me. I did get really bad headaches and dizzy spells. I never had the chance to make my own food, because I was too weak, and she was always a step ahead of me. If your mom and your doctors and your neighbors all say you’re sick, why would you question them? The pain was there. The proof was in my medical file.”
By the time I was ten, I’d had ear and feeding tubes, tooth decay, and a shaved head. I needed a wheelchair. I was allergic to almost every food on the planet. I’d had cancer scares, brain damage scares, tuberculosis scares. I told Vinny I’d been weeks away from a heart catheterization, which wasn’t totally true. My doctor had rejected that idea as soon as it came out of Mom’s mouth. But by now Vinny was hanging on my every word.
I took a breath and continued. “How could I have known malnutrition was causing my hair to fall out and making it hard to breathe? How was I supposed to know the ear tubes and the allergies were all one hundred percent made up, all lies my mother told before I could even talk?” I thought of her betrayal for the thousandth time and let my eyes fill with tears, heard the pitch of my voice rise. “When you’re a kid, there are things you don’t question. This is your mom. This is your dad. Your name is Vinny. This is your birthday. When you turned fifteen, did you ever ask your parents if your birthday was really your birthday?”
A couple tears rolled down my cheeks. This was not at all the cool person I’d been hoping to be, but this version of me was even better, because this version of me was the one Vinny paid attention to.
He made a sympathetic face, like a nurse right after she stuck a needle in you. “You’re right. I’m sorry. That was a dick thing to say. It’s like Stockholm syndrome or a cult or something—impossible for people on the outside to understand the inside.”
I didn’t say anything, let an awkward silence fall between us. I wanted to eat another muffin, to show my teeth some more, but I thought I might throw up if I had another bite.
Vinny cleared his throat. “What about the doctors? You blame them? How could they not have known?”
I had this part memorized from the trial. “Doctors rely on the parents to understand a kid’s health. They assume the parent has the kid’s best interest at heart and is telling the truth. If any of my doctors got suspicious after a few months, we’d move to a new doctor’s office. I went to dozens of doctors all over the state.” I combed my fingers through my hair. “Mom told me we were moving on because the doctors weren’t smart enough to fix me.”
Vinny shifted in his seat. “So how’d you stop her?”
I started the chain of events that got Mom arrested by accident. I told Alex about Mom’s abuse not because I thought she’d call the cops, but because I wanted to impress her. Alex had boyfriends—plural— went to school in a big city, and majored in graphic design. She had fascinated me my entire life. All I’d wanted was to fascinate her once.
“I had to take action,” I said instead. “But I was too scared to do it by myself, so I went to the friend I mentioned earlier, and she helped me do the right thing.”
“Any chance you’d tell me your friend’s name?”
