Dirty Little Secrets

I’d expected the same cranky, irritated person I saw at home every day, but once she stepped through the sliding doors, she was different. Her face softened, and there was a slight smile on her lips as we approached the floor where she worked.

“Good morning, Mr. Evans,” she said to a tall, skinny bald man as we got off the elevator. He was wearing red plaid pajamas with a matching red plaid robe and gripped a tall pole that held an assortment of IV bags. Tubes snaked from under his robe and attached to the bags as he wheeled the contraption along beside him.

“Good morning, Joanna,” he said, his gaunt face assembling into a slight smile. He turned to me. “Do we have a new nurse on the ward?” I’d picked the least objectionable pair of scrubs in her closet, but I was still mortified to be seen with roller-skating penguins all over my shirt. Mom said if I was going to miss an entire day of school, I had to look the part.

“This is my daughter Lucy,” she said, putting her arm around me like it was the most natural thing in the world. “She’s come to see what we do here all day, so you boys better behave yourselves.” She winked at him as she said it. Arm around my shoulder? Winking? It was like Mom had been taken over by some kindly nurse alien.

“Aw, come on, Jo,” he said, winking back. “That’s no fun now, is it?”

“Just see what you can do for the next few hours, okay?” Mom patted his arm as he continued his slow shuffle down the hallway.

Mom turned to me. “Let’s get you settled, shall we?” she said brightly, like we were going to spend the day at Disneyland instead of in a hospital cancer ward. We went to the nurses’ station and put our purses in the locked filing cabinet that held her stuff. She introduced me to the other nurses on the floor, reminding me which ones I’d met over the years. She kept saying, “My youngest, Lucy,” as if she was actually proud of that fact rather than thinking I was a liability.

For the next few hours, I followed her around the floor, watching her check charts and stick needles into IV tubes. Mom chatted with the people in the beds like they were old friends—asking about their kids or their husbands, talking about the latest episode of some cop show they both watched, even while she had to pump some chemical into their bodies that was bound to make them feel even worse than they did already. She let me carry the bottles of medicine and once let me hold an IV bag, but most of the time I felt embarrassed for being upright and healthy while all these people were so sick.

Late in the afternoon, we stopped by a half-closed door to a darkened room. Mom pushed it open, but turned to me. “I’m going to take this one alone, okay? Do you mind waiting here for just a minute? I’ll be right back.”

“Yeah. Okay,” I said. She sounded so calm and reasonable I almost didn’t know how to react. It was like we’d spent the day reading a script of how a good mother-daughter team should communicate. I couldn’t help watching through the crack in the door as she talked softly to someone I couldn’t see behind a curtain. Instead of the harsh florescent lights and blaring TV in the rest of the rooms, this one was lit by a small bedside lamp and had soft classical music playing in the background. I could see Mom standing at the foot of the bed and stroking the tops of the person’s feet under the blankets.

“Your mama is good at what she does,” her boss, Nadine, said, coming up behind me so softly I jumped.

“Oh, I was just, uh . . . she asked me to wait out here,” I said, looking as guilty as I felt for peeking.

“It’s fine, sugar,” she said. “Mrs. Collingwood is one of your mama’s special people. No family or even many friends around, so Joanna tends to spend a little extra time. Mrs. Collingwood’s been in and out of here so much over the years that we told her last time we’d issue her a FastPass so she could go right to the head of the line.” She looked at my blank face. “That was a joke.”

I smiled weakly, but it seemed wrong to joke in a place that held this much pain. “I got it,” I said.

Nadine reached out to pat my shoulder. “Been a hard day for you?”

I shrugged. It had been weird to see Mom so efficient, so capable of taking care of other people when I knew deep down she was a failure at taking care of her kids. Maybe she used up all the good stuff before she got home. The person Nadine saw at work every day and the person who slept in her robe on our green recliner every night seemed like two different people.

Nadine peeked through the crack in the door. “I’d tell you it gets easier, but it doesn’t, really.” She nodded toward Mom. “Joanna is one of the most caring and knowledgeable nurses I’ve ever worked with. Plenty of times she’s caught things even the doctors have missed.” She turned to me. “Think you’ll ever become a nurse? Or a doctor?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, but that was really just to be polite, because I did know. Nursing was one more way I wouldn’t be like Mom when I got older.