Page 18 of Woman on the Verge

“I think we need to take you to the doctor.”

“Don’t worry about me, Nikki. I’ll get better.”

“But we don’t even know what’swrongwith you,” I said.

Though I knew. I was sure I knew. The words kept flashing in my head—Brain. Tumor.

He hugged me tighter. “Let’s talk in the morning, okay? It’s late.”

I nodded. I felt so much like a little girl in that moment, a little girl being told by her all-knowing father that she needed to get some sleep.

I kissed his cheek and then walked back to my room, Merry behind me.

“Why haven’t you taken him to the hospital?” I asked her. I tried to temper my tone, but couldn’t help but sound accusatory.

She looked flabbergasted.

“He doesn’t think anything is wrong! You saw him!”

“But somethingisseriously wrong,” I said.

She looked like she was going to cry. That’s when it occurred to me that she wasn’t taking him to the doctor because she knew something was seriously wrong, and she didn’t want to know that, not for sure.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I know it’s hard.”

She stared past me. “My father, he had Alzheimer’s. It was just ... awful.”

I had vague memories of when her father had been sick. I was a teenager at the time, completely self-absorbed. A wave of guilt washed over me as I considered how Merry had continued caring for me during that time, keeping me blind to whatever horrors she was encountering.

I put my hand on her arm.

“I don’t think it’s Alzheimer’s,” I said. “It’s something else.”

“What do you think it is?” she asked me. Her voice was small, and suddenly, of the two of us, she was the child.

“I don’t know. I’ll take him to the hospital at UCSF tomorrow. I have an old friend who works there. Remember Prisha Patel from high school? She’s a doctor there. Anyway, I’ll figure it out.We’llfigure it out, okay?”

Her eyes were big and scared.

“I can go with you,” she said. “To the hospital.”

I could tell she didn’t want to, though. She seemed terror stricken at the prospect.

“Let me handle it for you, okay?”

She looked past me again, then found my eyes with hers.

“Okay,” she said finally.

“Dad’s right, though. We should all get some sleep.”

With that, she turned and went back down the hallway to their bedroom. I didn’t bother washing my face or brushing my teeth. I just stripped down to my underwear, put on a sweatshirt, and lay down, staring at the ceiling. When I got immediately overheated, I took off the sweatshirt and just lay bare chested, beads of sweat dotting my breasts.

I texted Kyle.

Sorry, forgot to text you when I got here. I’m here

While I waited for a response, I sent a message to Prisha on Facebook, asking her what to do about my dad, then swiped through photos of the girls on my phone. Thousands of photos, thousandsof moments when I thoughtI just have to capture this, thousands of reminders of motherhood’s magic. As eager as I was for time away from them, I already missed them. Or maybemissisn’t the right word. It’s more that it felt wrong that they were not near me, a troubling discordance.

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