Severed Mother-Daughter Ties novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Room 412

Kristen breaks her own rule and meets Lacey, who shows her a stuffed rabbit with a crooked green stitch Kristen sewed at six. Colleen walks in and asks her to tea.

I had not planned to go into Room 412.

A recused surgeon does not visit the patient, and I knew the rule better than anyone on the floor.

But Dustin had said days, and I found myself walking toward it anyway.

I stopped outside the door and told myself I was going to read her monitor.

"You can come in," a voice said. "I can hear you breathing out there."

Lacey Pemberton sat propped against three pillows with a tray table across her lap.

She was small and thin, with short honey-blond hair and an oxygen line looped over her ears.

She had her mother's hair and her mother's chin, and I made myself look at the monitor.

"Dr. Shirley," she said. "You're the one who said no to me in front of a committee."

"Nurses talk?"

"Nurses live to talk. It's the most honest thing anyone's done for me since I got here."

"It wasn't about you."

"Everybody says that right before it is." She grinned, and then she had to stop and catch her breath.

I stepped closer and checked the line without being asked.

"Three hospitals told me I was too complicated," she said. "You're the first person who has refused me for a reason."

"The reason isn't something I can explain."

"Then keep it. I've been told no by experts all year. I know the good ones from the bad ones."

On the bed beside her sat a stuffed rabbit.

It was grey, with one ear flopped down and a bald patch where a nose should have been.

"That's Biscuit," Lacey said. "Don't judge him. He's got a better résumé than either of us."

I kept my hands in my coat pockets.

"Mom gave him to me when I was five. He was my sister's."

The room was very quiet.

"You have a sister?" I asked.

"I have a sister on a poster." She said it lightly, the way you say a thing you have said at a hundred dinners. "She got lost at a mall before I was born. Mom lights a candle on her birthday every year."

"I got her bedroom. I got her rabbit. Dad says I got her laugh, which is nice, because she isn't using it."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. I've shared my whole life with a girl who never had to disappoint anyone."

She picked Biscuit up and turned him so the ear faced me.

"His ear came off once. Somebody sewed it back on with green thread. Mom says my sister did it herself at six and was very proud."

I looked at the stitches.

They were crooked, and one of them had crossed itself.

I had sat on the floor of a rented apartment with a needle and a spool of my mother's green thread, and I had been very proud.

"It's a good repair," I said.

My voice sounded normal, and I was grateful to it.

"That's the first thing you've said that wasn't about my heart," Lacey said. "Do you want to hold him?"

I took the rabbit.

The fabric was soft with years of being held by someone else.

"Tell me honestly," Lacey said. "Is the surgeon from Cleveland as good as you?"

"She's better."

"Liar."

"She is better at this one repair. Not at everything."

"Will you be there on Friday?"

"I'll be in the gallery. I'll be watching every move she makes."

"That's all I wanted." She settled back. "Cleveland doesn't know my heart, and you do. I've been looking at your reports for a month. You write like someone who has never once lied to a patient."

I did not answer that.

I put Biscuit back beside her, and I made sure the bad ear lay against the pillow.

When I straightened, someone was standing in the doorway.

Colleen Pemberton held a paper cup in each hand.

She had stopped on the threshold, and her face had gone completely still.

She was looking at the rabbit, and then at my hand on the blanket, and then at my face.

"Mom, this is the doctor who turned me down," Lacey said cheerfully. "Dr. Shirley, my mother."

"We've met," Colleen said.

She came in and set a cup on the tray table without looking at it.

"Lacey, sweetheart, would you rest for a while? Dr. Shirley and I need a moment."

"Mom, she doesn't do the family thing. She told Dad off."

"I'm sure she's very busy." Colleen turned her head toward me, and her smile was kind and wide and absolutely steady. "Will you have tea with me, Doctor? Just the two of us, downstairs. I'd like to thank you properly."

Lacey looked from her mother to me.

"Say yes," she whispered. "She'll never leave you alone if you don't."

I looked at Colleen's hands.

They were steady, but her thumb was pressed white against the paper cup.

"Yes," I said. "I'll come."

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