Side Effects May Vary

Natalie was sick. She never got sick. Even her immune system knew better than to fail her.

Simone, the jazz teacher, had subbed all of her evening classes, and because Natalie was not here and it was a Thursday night, I had no ride home.

I called home and left a message on the voice mail. Now it was just a toss-up between who would pick me up. My bet was on Dad, seeing as my mom had relegated everything involving me to him. She was still pissed about the whole iron-skillet thing.

At two minutes to nine my mom’s car pulled into the parking lot.

I sat down in the passenger seat and pulled the seat belt across my chest. It was completely quiet, no radio, just the low hum of the engine. She sat there with her arms folded across her chest and her lips pressed together in a straight line.

I knew that eventually one of us would have to crack and break this silence, but I never expected it to be me. “Mom?”

She put the car in park and took her foot off the brake, then rolled down her window. “Your dad asked me to pick you up.”

“Oh. Was he not home?”

“Oh, no. Your father was home.”

More silence.

Her eyes seemed to be focused on the rain-slick pavement in front of us. “He said that we need to talk.”

It’d been three weeks since the beach house incident, and I wasn’t surprised that my dad had finally lost his patience. “So, what now?”

She shrugged.

Her indifference pushed me from annoyed to infuriated. “Fine, Mom. Let’s pretend. Let’s pretend that I didn’t see you with some man and that this friction between us is nothing but a little mother-daughter tension. Is that what you want? If this remission is the real deal, then it’ll only be one more year and then I’ll be off at school or wherever. We can pretend for one year, right? And then you can leave him and everything will be broken, but at least we’ll have been honest. Because that’s what counts.”

Then she did something I rarely saw my mother do. She cried. Laying her head against the steering wheel, her whole body curved into a hunch.

No matter how angry I was with my mother, I didn’t know how to watch her cry. So I said what people always say when someone cries. “It’s okay, Mom.”

“It didn’t last for long,” she said through her tears. “He was an old law school professor. I told your dad about it right after you were diagnosed.” My diagnosis. It would always be a landmark in our lives. There would always be before and after. “I wanted to be honest with you, Alice. But then you got sick. I couldn’t do that to you. I couldn’t tell you that truth and expect you to deal with my lies on top of everything else.”

“He knew? This whole time Dad knew?”

She nodded.

Maybe I should have been mad, but I was relieved to know that my dad already knew and it wasn’t because he had heard it from me. Still, that day had been this domino in my life, and she wanted to brush it aside because for her it had been over this whole time. Finished business. But I’d lived with this and carried it like my own secret. I wondered what life would have looked like if I’d stayed at school that day or if my mom had left five minutes earlier. “Why?” I asked. “Why’d you do it?”

“Getting old is a bitch.” She laughed a little. “Life starts happening, and you begin to realize that every decision in your life only eats away at the control you have over everything else until there’s nothing left. You get married; decision made. That chapter of your life is closed. Kids, college, jobs. It’s easy to let all those decisions take away the unpredictability and excitement even when they don’t. Choosing to—” She paused. “Choosing to be with someone else gave me some of the control back.” Her tears splattered down her face. “And then you got sick, and I realized life was going to do whatever the hell it wanted and the control we think we have is a façade.” She paused again. “In the last year, life stopped being about what and started being about how. I’m proud of my choices—you, your dad, the law—and now I want to be proud of how I live those choices.” She took a second to catch her breath. “I’m sorry. I am so sorry. I’m not going anywhere. I love your dad. And I love you,” she said, wiping her face even though there were no more tears. “I want to work on us.”

“I don’t know how to talk about this,” I said. And it was true. “But I don’t think either of us is in the habit of talking about our feelings.” Telling Harvey how I felt that morning hadn’t been easy, but I did it. With my mom, this felt different. I didn’t know how to tell her that I understood. That when it came to me making commitments, I felt cornered too.

“I’m going to make an effort to change that, Al.”