“Two points,” said Tony.
“The team could have used you Saturday night,” said Sasha. “It was sad.”
“A thirty-point loss,” said Karin. “Nick and I left early because we just couldn’t watch anymore. Thirty points, to Rhinelander! I was embarrassed to be wearing a Summer sweatshirt.”
“And I bet you let Nick take it off as soon as you were in the car,” said Tony.
“What a whiner,” Cory said, ignoring Tony. “It was their first loss all season.”
“It was pathetic,” Karin said emphatically. She pointed across the lunchroom. “I’m surprised they even want to show their faces here.”
Cory considered stuffing something in Karin’s face but found nothing suitable. She shrugged and looked to where Karin had pointed.
The population of the cafeteria hushed as four members of the girls’ basketball team hesitantly stood and scanned the room for a place to sit. The atmosphere was barbed with the school’s nearly universal reproach and disappointment.
“Thirty points,” Karin said. “Embarrassing.”
“
You
are embarrassing,” Cory said. Suddenly she raised her arms, then pounded down on the table with her fists. “Yea, Stormers!” she bellowed. She pounded again. “Yea, Stormers!” Pound. “Yea, Stormers!” Pound. Tony and Sasha joined her, then another table, and another. By the time Cory’s hands were red and stinging from the pounding, the cheer had grown to a tumultuous and deafening uproar.
It wasn’t enough. Cory stood on the table and urged on the cheering by clapping her hands over her head and swaying back and forth. The demonstration finally subsided when she jumped off the table to hug the team captains, who had made their way through the crowd to Cory’s table.
Cory picked up her book bag and smiled at Karin. “That was fun, but it’s time for algebra.”
Mac was sitting alone at a table near the front of the cafeteria. He was eating and reading. Cory spotted him as she followed her friends out of the room. She walked over to him.
He looked up and smiled. “Hey, hey, it’s Cory K.”
“You really do go to school here. I was beginning to wonder.” She sat down across from him and needed a moment to catch her breath. Either she was limp and drained from the cheering, or his smile was working its magic again. He leaned forward. His glasses had slipped down his nose a bit. Cory restrained the impulse to reach out and gently push them up.
“Cory…”
“Yeah?”
“I liked your dancing.”
She shook her head. “Not exactly dancing. When I dance I
move.
Like you, Mac.”
He held his sandwich between his fingertips and stared at it.
“Must be a pretty interesting sandwich,” she said. “Peanut butter?”
He looked up. “Salami. Cory…” He stared again at his sandwich.
Though she’d never had a steady boyfriend, Cory had been dating since ninth grade and she quickly recognized the signs of a boy’s interest. She saw them now in Mac and immediately engaged herself in a speedy mental debate. Did she want to? Yes, she realized, she did.
Mac looked up, looked around, looked again at his sandwich. Obviously, she was going to have to help him. “Mac, maybe you could—”
“Cory, you’re wanted in the office. Now.”
Cory turned and saw Mrs. Hartwig, the lunchroom supervisor and possessor of the world’s largest voice. She faced Mac again.
Mrs. Hartwig laid a hand on her shoulder. “Now, Cory.”
Mac smiled. “I guess they just got word of the riot up in the office.”
“I suppose I’ll get one of Mr. Donaldson’s famous lectures.” She tried to shrug off the woman’s hand, but it wouldn’t slip loose.
“Upstairs, Cory,” the woman said.
“What were you going to say?” asked Mac. “Maybe I could what?”
The woman’s claw pressed on Cory’s shoulder. “Call me?” asked Cory.
Mac tapped her on the hand. “You’d better go; she’s about to lose it. I’ll call you later.”
Cory rose and grabbed her bag. “It’s listed under Mike Knutson, Big Bass Road.” She turned and followed Mrs. Hartwig out of the cafeteria, and they walked across the crowded room accompanied by a wave of applause. Cory bowed to the cheers.
“It wasn’t really a riot,” Cory said to the principal as soon as she was in his office. “You know I wouldn’t do that, Mr. Donaldson.”
He waved his hand to silence her. “Your father is on his way—”
“That’s ridiculous! All I—”
“Your mother collapsed at work, Cory. Doc Scudder took a look and sent her by ambulance to the regional hospital in Wausau. Mike is on his way to get you so that the two of you can drive down together. They had to resuscitate her. I hate to tell you this, Cory, but they said it doesn’t look good.”
*
“I don’t know a damn thing more,” Mike said as Cory got into the car. “Not a damn thing.” It was the last either of them spoke until they had driven at racecar speed the sixty miles to Wausau.
The hospital was at the edge of town. Mike parked in the emergency lot and rested his head against the steering wheel. “Oh, God, please,” he said then.
Cory held back as they approached the emergency desk. If her mother was dead, she would know by watching Mike. She couldn’t bear to hear it from a nurse while standing in a room full of strangers. Mike spoke to someone behind the desk and didn’t collapse, so Cory stepped to his side.
“…stabilized first, then monitored carefully. Can’t say what caused it. Tests during the next few days will determine that.” The nurse looked at Cory. “No, you can’t see her right now.”
Cory didn’t know she had even asked the question. Ninety minutes earlier she had been dancing on a tabletop; now she moved and thought and spoke in a fog of shock and fear.
The fog lifted slightly two hours later when she was allowed to see her mother. Sleeping or unconscious, pale and still, her mother lay among the wires and tubes.
“Oh, Mom,” Cory whispered. Then she kneeled and laid her cheek against her mother’s hand.
4
Heart trouble had never meant more to Cory than the problems her friends had when they were ignored or dumped by their boyfriends. Within a few days of her mother’s hospitalization, however, she learned a broader definition. She now knew about the three layers of heart tissue. She knew about the Greek roots of the word
cardiomyopathy.
She knew that diseased and weakened heart muscles could go undetected for too long while they grew large, thick, stiff, and incompetent. She knew that complete rest and medications could maintain a diseased heart temporarily. She knew that without a transplant her mother would die.
“I want some salt,” Margaret Knutson said to her daughter. “It’s the strongest craving I’ve ever had, worse than wanting sex. Cory, you didn’t really hear that.”
“I did, but I’d rather not talk about it.”
“I can’t believe I will never again eat a pile of fries loaded with fat and salt.”
“You never did before and you certainly never will now. Should I pack these hospital slippers?”
“Gorgeous, aren’t they? Almost as gorgeous as I feel. Pack them. Take everything. We can throw it out when we get home.”
A nurse entered the room pushing a wheelchair. “Let’s load you up and get you out. They’re predicting another five inches of snow by night and you don’t want to drive through that.”
Cory couldn’t wait to leave the hospital. She couldn’t wait to get away from the mauves and grays, the indiscernible intercom voices, the cafeteria food and vending-machine coffee. It had been a terrible ten days, but at last she and Mike were taking her mother home.
They had spent that first awful night in the hospital lounge. At midnight Rob had arrived, bursting into the lounge with pent-up anguish and uncertainty. Cory had watched as Mike soothed his stepson and explained what little they knew. Rob was strung tight and spent most of the night switching chairs, rebinding his ponytail, and buying fresh cups of coffee. His restlessness was comforting to Cory, as it was something she had known in him forever. Hurricane Rob, everyone had called him. Rob had raced to grow up, her mother said: walking at nine months, swimming at two, building forts and rafts before he was in school, first gun at eight, first deer at ten, and, he’d recently confessed to Cory, first sex at fourteen.
Once she knew her brother was there and worrying, Cory could sleep. And she took the first of many lousy naps curled uncomfortably into a stiff-backed, scratchy waiting-room chair.
The second night they rented a motel room, but no one wanted to sleep there. Then the next day, reassured that Margaret was no longer in imminent danger, Rob returned home. Later that afternoon, after exchanging a few words with her groggy mother, Cory went home, too, full driving privileges restored. She quit her job, collected missed schoolwork, and called a long list of concerned friends. Then, every day for another week, she drove from Summer to the hospital after school, bringing Mike fresh clothes and delivering cards and letters to her mother.
It was a rough week. She failed two tests, skipped another, lost some favorite earrings, had a flat on the highway, and gained five pounds.
Sitting and eating, sitting and eating. That was it. So, as the nurse pushed the wheelchair out of the hospital to where Mike was waiting with the truck, Cory felt like jumping on a table and dancing.
Instead, she pounded on the engine hood. “Take us home!” she cheered.
Two miles out of town, Margaret turned on the radio and started singing along. “You can’t imagine how good it feels to be going home. You can’t.” She resumed singing loudly.
“I know where I get my voice from,” said Cory. “I love you, Mom, but this isn’t pleasant.”
“Don’t sing,” said Mike. “Don’t sing, don’t dance, don’t whistle, don’t work, don’t carry firewood, don’t eat salt.”
“Don’t have sex,” whispered Cory.
“I didn’t hear that,” said her mother. She turned to her husband. “Did they tell us that?”
“Don’t do anything until they find the right heart and put it in,” Mike said.
“It will be a good chance for me to catch up on the soaps.”
“You’ve never watched the soaps, Margaret. You’ve worked your whole life. That stops now.”
“Being an invalid might not be half bad. I can just lie around and watch the two of you do everything.”
“A plot,” said Cory. “This was all a plot to get out of doing your share.”
Her mother closed her eyes and smiled. “A bit extreme, but that’s what it took.” A new song began on the radio. “Turn it up, Cory. That’s Crosby, Stills, and Nash. ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.’ The best song ever.” Cory turned up the dial. “These guys are old men. I saw them on television last month.”
“They weren’t when they did this song. Listen to those guitars. Oh, how I wish I had gone to Woodstock.”
Mike’s laughing drowned out the music for nearly half a mile. “Margaret,” he said finally, “it’s not your heart that’s sick, it’s your brain. I can understand how a brush with death would make you think back and do some wishing, but Woodstock? You wish you had spent three days going naked in the rain and mud?”
“The music, darling. I wish I had been there for the music.” She turned to Cory. “Be sure you marry a man who doesn’t laugh at you.”
“In 1969,” Mike said, “you were twenty-two, married, a mother, and still active in the church. Lord, Woodstock.”
The roads were snow-covered and slippery, and Mike drove slowly. But as they headed home together, their spirits soared, and they could have been flying. They marveled at the beauty of the familiar scenery, Mike told his best stories, and Margaret taught them to sing the “doo-doo-doo” part of The Best Song Ever. The hospital was behind them, and they hadn’t yet reached home, where they would live with the fearful uncertainty of Cory’s mother’s precarious health. For a treasured two hours, Cory sat between her two favorite people, talked, listened, and sang. She had never been so happy.
5
“Aren’t heart transplants expensive, like thousands?” Cory asked Mike. She glanced at the rollaway bed on the other side of the living room where her mother was sleeping, and would always sleep until a new heart was found, transplanted, and healed. They had been told that climbing stairs was as dangerous as eating salt, or running, or working. Everyone was adjusting.
“These days a tetanus booster costs thousands. But yes, it is expensive. Bless the union, though; it’s almost all covered.”
Cory closed her math book. The twenty remaining problems could wait, maybe forever. “Almost covered?”
“The medical part will be taken care of, but there are plenty of other things that won’t be: our expenses for staying in Minneapolis while she’s hospitalized at the transplant unit; equipment rental, like that bed; some of the prescriptions; and a home health aide for after surgery.”
“I’ll take care of her, Mike. We won’t need anyone. It’s why I quit my job, so I could be around. And now that you’ve canceled my debt, I feel like I should be doing more.”
“You’ll be doing plenty, Cory. She and I were talking about that this afternoon, and we don’t want you to be enslaved by her illness. We aren’t going to let that happen.”
“She’s my mother. It’s not slavery.”
“Listen to you! Just two weeks ago when we would try to get you to finish a chore list around here, all we heard was moaning about child labor laws.”