“Where’s your water bottle?”
“Gone.”
“What do you mean it’s gone? The one with the whales on it?”
Lola had not wanted the cute sparkly water bottle that Darby picked out to replace the one that got squished beneath her tires when she accidentally left it on the roof of her car. She also didn’t want the purple unicorn water bottle that matched her backpack.
Lola isn’t prone to suggestion. She doesn’t go with the flow. Darby can’t present Lola with a surprise and expect happiness. Her daughter doesn’t work like that. And so they returned to the store where Lola picked out whales. That was five days ago. And the whales are now gone and Darby thinks she might—probably will—scream.
“It’s stolen.” Lola is defiant for no reason.
Darby beats the heel of her hand—the one that was recently spattered with pee while helping collect her daughter’s urine sample—gently against the steering wheel. “It’s not stolen, Lola. It’s misplaced. There aren’t water bottle burglars. That’s not a thing.”
Lola pouts. “I’m thirsty,” she repeats. “I wish I could bite you.”
The meanness of her little girl’s words pierces Darby. She gave up her whole day to take Lola to the pediatrician. And she feels like a bag lady in her shapeless tan dress that looked sort of chic on the mannequin but not on her. And she can spot pretzel bits and goldfish crumbs in the space between her seat and the console. She’s not even mad at Lola. It’s worse. She’s annoyed. Her daughter is bugging her. For a split second, she can see the appeal of Lola’s tantrums. It would feel so good to throw her sunglasses into the windshield and pull her hair and scream at her daughter to shut up, shut up, shut up.
Instead, she sits very still, growing angrier and more exasperated both with Lola and with herself. She should feel relieved. They’ve dodged at least one potential catastrophe. If it were an emergency, she could call Griff on his office line and speak to the receptionist, but it’s more like the opposite of an emergency. What about that? Does that still warrant a call?
She’d done the thing so many mothers had done before her, put herself on the Mommy Track in her career. She didn’t want to miss her children being little. She wanted to experience childlike wonder through their eyes. Except that’s the problem. It’s their wonder. She thought she was giving up her big, fancy job for something more exciting, but watching kids is pretty mundane stuff.
She tries calling Griff. His voice mail recording picks up immediately. Her husband has turned off his phone.
TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW OF WITNESS, BEATRICE “BEX” FEINSTEIN
APPEARANCES:
Detective Wanda Bright
PROCEEDINGS
DET. BRIGHT: What’s your favorite part of the school day, Bex?
BEX FEINSTEIN: I’m tired of talking. I don’t want to talk about school. I hate talking about school because it’s boring.
DET. BRIGHT: We just started, Bex.
BEX FEINSTEIN: Why do you keep calling me that? Bex Bex Bex.
DET. BRIGHT: That’s your name, isn’t it?
BEX FEINSTEIN: Well, yeah. Okay. How about it’s my turn to choose what we talk about, then?
DET. BRIGHT: I have a few questions I need to—
BEX FEINSTEIN: But that’s not fair because you had a turn already.
DET. BRIGHT: Actually, I didn’t.
BEX FEINSTEIN: Do you have any pets?
DET. BRIGHT: I have one cat.
BEX FEINSTEIN: What’s your cat’s name?
DET. BRIGHT: Stabler. Bex—
BEX FEINSTEIN: You said my name again! That’s kind of weird!
DET. BRIGHT: At the end of the day, when it was almost time to go home, can you remember noticing anything different? Maybe close your eyes. Imagine that you’re back in your classroom. Do you notice anything, anything at all?
BEX FEINSTEIN: There was one thing. I smelled blood.
DET. BRIGHT: Okay, okay, good. How did you know it was blood?
BEX FEINSTEIN: I can always smell blood now.
SEVEN
“I’ve tried everything.” Mary Beth declines to sit on the exam table at the clinic. Not necessary. It’s just her head. Just blinding pain that lights up her entire skull with absolutely no warning or regard for her schedule. Only a silly thing like her brain.
And thank God she doesn’t work, doesn’t have a real job. Thank heavens she’s so fortunate that she can turn off the lights and nap when she feels one coming on. Another doctor had said those words to her. Those very words. And Mary Beth had blessed his heart.
“It could be anxiety,” says the doctor, liver spots speckling his cheeks. “That’s usually the trigger for these things. Are you under a lot of—” His cough is phlegmy. “Stress?”
“Isn’t everyone?”
“But the migraines have been relatively manageable until now?”
“No.” She wrote that on her intake form, which he obviously didn’t bother to read. “That’s why I’m here. They’re terrible. A ten out of ten on the pain scale. Right now. I feel like I’m going to be sick. And then I start to panic because I have no idea when it will stop. They can last days and days and days.”
Hope. That’s what she feels every time she enters a new doctor’s office. Here she is giving this new medical person the chance of a lifetime, the chance to be a hero. That’s what she wants to tell him. Be my guest! Save my day, Dr. Whatever-Your-Name-Is!
But she recognizes the signs. The aloof expression. The interminable time in the waiting room. He came highly recommended by the friend of a friend of a woman in her Bible study. （This is the guy!）
She’s willing to try anything. Already she’s sampled acupuncture and Botox at the top of her neck. She took magnesium supplements and went cold turkey off of coffee, then tried to drink even more of it after hearing conflicting advice. She takes topiramate at night and whatever triptan is currently on trend at the outset of her symptoms. And still they come for her.
“I hear you,” he says. “That panic may actually be contributing to the severity of the pain. It’s incredibly frustrating, I know, but I see this in my office every day with women.”
“And?” Her entire face feels like a rotting bruise on an apple. Driving herself here felt borderline dangerous.
“Nine times out of ten it’s a nasty cocktail of anxiety, depression, and hormones. I know that probably isn’t what you want to hear.”
“It’s just that I don’t feel anxious or depressed.” She carefully measures out her words, trying to sound like a person who should be taken seriously, not like someone who barely graduated from college. “Or hormonal.”
She thinks vaguely of Miss Ollie and what she’d said about the reasons the children may be manifesting a physical urge to crave blood based on psychology. Or something like that. Mary Beth doesn’t really understand the details, but she could swear she did see a smear of red across little Asher’s cheek this morning that could have been jam, but looked distinctly, she feared, like blood.
Is that this doctor’s point? Psychology and anatomy and whatever else all conspire to make the human body go haywire?
“Maybe you don’t. But your body is telling you otherwise. It’s flashing the ‘check engine’ light. You’re a busy mom of…”