I waited for it all to sink in while Lucinda checked her texts and then gathered up her things.
She was one of those put-together ladies who always matched her shoes to her purse. She kept her hair no-nonsense and short, but she always had a full face of makeup. I’d always suspected she focused hard on her surface because there wasn’t much underneath. But I really didn’t know her that well. Even after all these years.
I did not anticipate, for example, that when her daughter, Parker, also known as my evil stepsister, FaceTimed her right then, Lucinda would answer the call. Or that she’d proceed to fill Parker in on everything that had just happened like she was relating the hottest of hot-off-the-press gossip. And then, when Parker said, “Let me see,” that Lucinda would turn the phone around and train it on me.
I frowned at Lucinda and shook my head. But it was too late.
There was Parker’s catlike face—as scary at iPhone size as it was in real life.
How long had it been since I’d seen her? Years.
I could go my whole life, and it wouldn’t be too long.
“Oh my god!” Parker shrieked. “I can’t believe you almost got killed by a Volkswagen Beetle! I mean, at least pick something cool, like a Tesla.”
“Noted,” I said.
It was strange to see her again. She’d highlighted the hell out of her hair. And she’d really taken a deep dive into the world of eye shadow. She had better style than she had in high school—in a newscaster-ish way. The sight of her kind of stung my eyes. But I couldn’t deny that technically—and I say this as a professional in the industry—she had a pretty face.
Too bad she ruined it by being … pure evil.
“You look terrible,” Parker said, squinting in faux sympathy. “Did you land on your face?”
I looked at Lucinda, like, Seriously?
But Lucinda just smiled and gestured for me to answer, like she thought this might be a nice conversation.
I sighed and shifted my eyes back to the screen. “I did not land on my face,” I answered robotically.
“You just look so bloated,” she went on.
“I’m fine.”
“Did they have to pump you full of saline or something?”
“What? No.”
“You just kind of look like James Gandolfini right now. That’s all I’m saying.”
Okay. We were done here.
“Hoo-boy,” I said, checking the nonexistent watch on my wrist. “Look at the time.”
Then I rolled over to face the wall.
“Is she pouting?” Parker demanded as Lucinda took the phone back.
“You’d be fussy, too, if it had happened to you.”
“But it would never happen to me. If I ever get run over, it’ll be by an Aston Martin.”
A thousand years later, after Lucinda finally hung up and was ready to go, she paused by my bed, looking me over as if she couldn’t begin to fathom my life choices.
“I hope the Betty Ford Center isn’t next for you,” she said then, shaking her head like I was an unsolvable mystery. “They said you showed up in the ER positively dripping in red wine.”
At the words, I sucked in a breath. “Where’s the dress?”
“What dress?”
“The one I was wearing. When I got here.”
“Oh,” Lucinda said, shaking her head with disgust. “It’s in the trash.”
“The trash?” I grabbed the bed rail.
“It was ruined,” Lucinda said. “Wine-drenched, bloodstained—and the paramedics had to cut it off you. It’s not even fit for cleaning rags now. Unsalvageable. I told the orderly to throw it away.”
I don’t remember starting to cry, but by the time Lucinda paused, my face was wet, my throat was thick, and my breathing was shaky. “They threw away the dress?”
“It was trash, Sadie,” Lucinda said, doubling down. “It was beyond hope.”
But I shook my head. “But I need it,” I said.
Lucinda lifted her eyebrows, like, This better be good. “Why?”
“Because…” I started.
But there was nothing to say. Lucinda had spent her entire marriage to my dad trying to erase all traces of my mother. If she’d known that dress was my mom’s, she’d have thrown it away even sooner.
And maybe set a match to it first.
“… Because I just do,” I finished.
Lucinda stepped back then and eyed me as if to say, Just what I expected. Like she’d called me on my insultingly obvious bluff. “It’s gone,” she said on her way out the door. “Just let it go.”
But after she left, I pressed the button for the nurse.
When she showed up, I was crying so much, she took my hand and squeezed it. “Deep breaths. Deep breaths,” she said encouragingly.
Finally, through breaths that were more like spasms, I conveyed the question. “The dress—I was wearing—when I came here—my stepmother said—to throw it away—but I need it. Is there any way to—get it back?”
Her sigh seemed to deflate her entire body. “Oh, sweetheart,” she said—and by the end of those first two words alone, I knew all hope was lost. “If we threw it away, it went to the incinerator.”
And so there was nothing left to do but cry myself to sleep.
* * *
LUCINDA DID NOT return “first thing in the morning.” Which was fine with me. I’d already had breakfast, an MRI, and begun a consultation with a deeply serious Filipino brain surgeon named Dr. Sylvan Estrera before she showed back up, appearing in the room just as he got to the juicy stuff.
“The scan didn’t reveal anything urgent,” Dr. Estrera was saying. “No stroke or hemorrhage. No significant bleeds in the brain.”
“That’s a relief,” I said.
Then he continued. “But it did reveal a neurovascular issue.”
Okay, that didn’t sound good. “A neurovascular issue?” The word neurovascular felt like a foreign language in my mouth.
“A lesion,” he explained, “that should be treated.”
“A lesion?” I asked, like he’d said something obscene.
Dr. Estrera put some images from the MRI up onto a lightboard. He pointed to an area with a tiny dark dot and said, “The scan revealed a cavernoma.”
He waited for recognition, like I might know what that was.
I did not. So I just waited for him to go on.
“It’s a malformed blood vessel in the brain,” he explained next. “You’ve had it all your life. An inherited condition.”
I glanced at Lucinda, like that didn’t seem right.
But Lucinda lifted her hands and said, “Don’t blame me. I’m just the stepmother.”
I looked back at the scan—and that menacing little dot.
Could he have gotten my scan mixed up with someone else’s? I mean, I just didn’t feel like a person walking around with a malformed blood vessel in her brain.
I frowned at Dr. Estrera. “Are you sure?”
“It’s plain as day right here,” he said, pointing at the image.
Plain as day? More like a fuzzy blur, but okay.
“Cavernomas frequently cause seizures,” he went on. “They can be neurologically silent. You could go your whole life without ever having a problem. But they can also start to leak. So your best option is to get it surgically resected.”