Paperback Writer

The fifteenth of June that year had been a perfect day, right up until the moment they told her her mother was dead.

Cate remembered how nice it was.  It was the first truly nice day of the entire year.  The winter had been long and dumped a record amount of snow on the city.  May, keeping with a long standing New England tradition, had been a month of wind and rain, saturating Boston and everyone in it until they were all wet to the bone.  June had been drier, but still gray and unseasonably cool in its first two weeks.  The entire city was on the verge of rebelling but, on the fifteenth, the sun appeared in all its radiant glory and suddenly, the entire population of Boston was fighting the urge to ignore obligation in favor of lounging in the warmth of a much missed sun.

Cate had been no exception.  It was the first day she’d cursed her decision to take a summer class at the university and had contemplated skipping her philosophy lecture altogether.  Ultimately she’d gone, mostly because she didn’t want to either lie to her mother about going, or suffer through a lecture about skipping.

So she sat in the windowless lecture hall with about fifty other students, few of which she judged as being actually enthusiastic about their attendance.  She neglected to take notes and spent the time alternately drawing random patterns, staring off into space and wondering why the first really nice day— the first really warm day— of the year wasn’t automatically declared a city wide holiday.

By the time the lecture came to an end, Cate had filled two pages with Celtic looking knots, pyramids, cityscape outlines and a variety of stick figures in various death throes.  She looked over her handiwork before shoving the notebook in her bag and considered declaring a major in art or art history.  She decided against it though and instead joined some friends with plans to waste time being marginally disreputable around Quincy Market.  Her cell had been off during class— her professor insisted— so she took it out of her bag and turned it back on so she could check in— at her mother’s insistence— with Fiona, the housekeeper.  She saw she had a message waiting and accessed her voicemail in order to hear it.
“Catherine, love,” Fiona’s Irish lilt was saying.  “You have to come home.  Right away.”

She stopped then at the top of a flight of stairs and lowered the phone, holding it against her chest.  She never heard Fiona sound mournful before.  Angry, or disappointed, appalled by Cate’s sometimes questionable behavior even, yes, but mournful?  No.  Not once.

Her friends called to her then, noticing she was no longer with them.  She looked up at the sound of her name and saw Daniel looking back at her.  Daniel was her mother’s man, Laura’s jack of all trades, and right now he stood next to her friends at the bottom of the stairs.  He was a man who made stoic people seem down right emotional and the look on his face made her drop her phone and hold onto the stair railing for dear life.

“What happened?” she asked.

Your mother’s dead, they told her, Daniel and Fiona together, as they all sat in the living room of Cate’s Beacon Hill townhouse.  She’s gone.

Cate looked at them, dry eyed, for a moment and then turned her head to her left.  The windows overlooked the street and she watched the people walking past, wearing their shorts and short sleeved shirts.  Fiona came and sat beside her, taking her hand.

“Cate,” Daniel said.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

And she hadn’t.  She hadn’t understood it any more three days later when she was standing grave side, watching her mother’s coffin being lowered into the ground.  She still didn’t understand it.  It had been nearly a month now and still she just didn’t understand it.

Maybe if there had been a reason.  People died suddenly all the time, some crazy tragic accident or something, but all Daniel and Fiona had said, or would say, was that her mother had a sort of cancer.  And it killed her.

Cate knew they were lying.  Laura Cole did not have a sort of cancer.  The woman was healthy, the woman had always been healthy, never even a damn cold, forget cancer.  And if there had been, by some freak chance, a tumor, Cate would’ve known.  Her mother never would have kept that from her.

They’d had the sort of mother-daughter relationship that only existed in fairy tales or whatever, but not real life.  Cate told her mother the truth— the truth— about things.  Everything.  Almost everything.  Boys, fights with friends, the stupid stuff she did in school, whatever.  And her mother reciprocated.  Of course, her mother never dated, didn’t really have many friends and never, ever did anything that could be counted as stupid.  But still, she shared.  She damn well would have shared that she was dying from a sort of cancer.

“Catherine?”

Cate came out of her reverie suddenly.  She was sitting in the waiting room of her doctor’s office.  The receptionist— Rosie maybe?— was standing in front of her, hand on her elbow.

“Hi,” Rosie said, smiling her very best fake smile.  “Sorry to interrupt your day dreaming.”

Day dreaming.  Right.

“No problem,” Cate said.

Rosie nodded.  “Dr. Blaire will be with you in a moment,” she said.  “He’s just running a little late.”

He was always running a little late and yet they still expected her to show up for appointments on time.  Whatever.  Cate nodded and Rosie patted her elbow before retreating back to her desk.  Cate glanced at the clock on the wall and saw she’d been waiting almost thirty minutes already.  Not that she’d noticed.  Time sure did fly when one was obsessing over one’s dead mother.

She leaned forward then and selected a magazine from the table in front of her.  People.  Swell.  An outdated issue even.  Bonus.  Cate threw the magazine back.  One would think, with the money she was paying them, they could afford better magazines.  Current magazines even.

And better music.  Right now they seemed to be working their way through the elevator music genre’s greatest hits.  Only, that was kind of an oxymoron, wasn’t it?  Cate cast a discerning look at the speaker in the ceiling before settling back in her chair.

She looked at the magazines again.  As much as she didn’t care about celebrity fashion or break ups, reading something, anything, would be better than letting her mind wander.  It would probably be safer too.  She was reaching for the copy of People when Rosie called her name again.

“Cate?” she said.  “You can go on back.  He’s ready for you now.”

She nodded and let the magazine stay where it was.  For a brief moment, she thought about continuing on with her time killing plan and making the good doctor wait, just to see how he liked it, but instead she pushed herself out of the chair, passed Rosie’s desk and walked down the hall to his office.

She opened the door without knocking.  Dr. Richard Blaire sat behind his desk, looking at the contents of a manilla folder.  He glanced up and smiled at her.  She came in and closed the door.  She didn’t smile back.

“Come on in, Cate,” he said.

His voice was warm and booming, calm and comforting.  She wondered if they taught that in med school.

“Have a seat,” he continued on, gesturing to the two chairs in front of his desk.

She thought it was nice of him to invite her in considering she’d made an appointment so he could later bill her for the privilege of his company.  Still, she did as the man bade and sank into a chair.

“How are you?” he asked.

He asked the question like they were friends or something.  Like he’d known her all her life.  He had, in fact, known her all her life, but he wasn’t her friend.  If anything, he’d been her mother’s friend.  Laura had called him Richard.  Cate generally called him nothing but, if asked, would have confessed to lately calling him Dick.  She was nothing if not spectacularly immature when the opportunity presented itself.

“I didn’t come for small talk,” she said.  “You can give it to me straight.  I can take it.”

The smile became a little less brilliant and Dick put the folder on the desk.

“Well, Cate,” he said.  “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with you.”

Cate sat back.  She hadn’t been expecting that.

“Are you sure those are authentic?” she asked, gesturing to the diplomas on the wall.

“I swear you’re in perfect health.”

“But you ran all those tests,” she said.

“We ran all those tests because you were convinced you had a heart attack.”

She loved his use of the past tense.  Like she had somehow become less convinced in the two days since it’d happened.  He’d known her all her life.  He should’ve known that sort of thing just didn’t happen.

“I did have a heart attack,” she said.

He smiled at her again.  Kindly.  Patronizingly even.

“No,” he said, holding up the folder as if it meant anything to her.  “You didn’t.”

She thought about that.  If not a heart attack, then what?  She’d been in the shower that morning, two days ago, getting ready for the semblance of moving on with life, when the pain had started.  It was in her arms first.  A sharp, shooting, burning pain.  She’d turned the spray off and got out.  She was getting ready to yell to Fiona when her legs buckled and her right knee exploded in pain.  She’d screamed then, suddenly in more agony than she’d ever felt in her entire life.  She lay on the bathroom’s tile floor and screamed until her heart seemed to explode.  And then she’d lain there in silence and felt other parts of her just stop working.  Her heart, lungs, her brain, everything.  Life drained right out of her until there had been nothing left.

She didn’t know how long she’d lain there but, all of a sudden, it had been like coming out of a trance, or waking up from a nightmare.  Her knee had been throbbing and her heart— her heart had been beating where before it hadn’t.

The doctors in the emergency room didn’t believe her.  They told her to rest her knee and sent her on her merry way because there had been no evidence in any of the tests they’d run showing there was anything wrong with her.  Stupid emergency room doctors.

She looked at Dick.  Stupid private practice doctors.

“Then what was it?” she asked.  “What happened to me?”

“I don’t know,” Dick said.  “But did you ever consider—“

Cate sighed inwardly.  This was going to be the part where he asked about her mental health because maybe she’d subconsciously invented some malady because her mother was dead.  Psychosomatic symptoms and whatever because her mother had dropped dead of some sort of cancer and now she was scared it was going to make her drop dead too.

And she might have been willing to at least consider that option if it hadn’t been for the sudden appearance of a scar on her chest, right over her heart.

She noticed it this morning when she was showering.  It hadn’t been there before.  Not two days ago when she’d had her non heart attack experience, not even last night when she’d changed for bed.  But there was no denying its existence now, however.  She was the proud owner of a shiny, ugly, purple gash that sat over her heart like she’d tried to cut the damn thing out of her chest with a grapefruit spoon or something.  Since she most certainly had not done any such thing, she had come to Dick’s office with the expectation of some sort of answer.  Some reason why she’d felt her heart explode.  Why now there was physical proof something had happened.

But all his tests had shown there was nothing wrong with her and she didn’t know what to do about that.  Dick could prattle on all he wanted but she knew it wasn’t in her head.  Psychosomatic symptoms did not leave physical scars.  It just didn’t work that way.  At least she didn’t think so.

While he talked, she looked out the windows to her left and took in the view.  Dick, for all his faults, had a nice view from his office.  It was a nice day outside too.  There had been a lot of them since June fifteenth.

“What sort of cancer was it?” she asked suddenly.

“What?”

He used that tone of voice people always used when they’d heard perfectly well what question had been posed to them but were hoping to stall for time before being forced to answer.  Cate put her hand on her chest and felt the scar through her shirt.

“The sort of cancer that killed my mother,” she said.  “What sort was it?  Brain, breast, bone, lung, stomach?  What?”

“You don’t understand—“

“Hence the questions,” she said, looking at him again.  “What sort was it?  Pancreatic?  Liver?  Kidney?  Skin?”

“She didn’t want you to know,” Dick said quietly.

“Cervical?  Ovari—“ she stopped and stared at him.  Her hand fell to her side.  “You’re lying.”

“I’m sorry, Cate, I really am sorry, but I am not lying.”

“Fuck you,” she said.  “She would’ve wanted me to know.  If there was some stupid tumor eating her from the inside out, she would’ve told me that.  The goddamn woman wouldn’t let me leave the house in the morning until she’d given me a minute by minute itinerary for the day and you want me to believe she wouldn’t have prepared me for this?  That she wouldn’t have told me she was dying?”

“She didn’t want you to know.”

Cate nodded.  “Fine.  She didn’t want me to know,” she said.  “But she’s gone now.  You can tell me now.”

“She didn’t want you to know.”

There was some kind of paperweight on the desk, shaped like a pyramid, and she grabbed it and threw it at the windows.  The paperweight bounced off them without doing any damage to either it or the glass.  It only managed to piss her off more.

“She’s dead,” Cate hissed as she stood up and leaned across the desk.  “She’s fucking dead and you still won’t say anything.”

Dick leaned across the desk and put his hands over hers.  She jerked away.  He let her and sat back.

“Did Fiona tell you?” he asked.  “Did Daniel?”

They hadn’t.  Cate shook her head.

“She didn’t want you to know,” he said again.

He said it slower this time, so he could emphasize the words.  Her mother hadn’t wanted her to know and, for whatever reason, instructed Fiona and Daniel and Dick to make sure it stayed that way.  And because they were so loyal to her, so goddamn devoted, they were going to follow through even if the woman in question was now rotting in the ground.

“You shouldn’t be surprised, Cate,” Dick said.  “You knew your mother.”

She was going to cry.  If she spent one more moment in that room, she was going to cry.  Crying in front of Dick, crying in front of anyone, was not something she was willing to do.  Especially because she didn’t know if she’d be able to stop.

“Guess not,” Cate said and then left.