My mother has never been an easy woman to love. I have known this my whole life the way you know certain weather: not a surprise, just a condition you learn to dress for. Irene Voss loves loudly and inconveniently and mostly on her own terms. She borrows money she does not return. She calls at midnight and hangs up without explaining why. She has a talent for making you feel, in the same breath, that you are everything to her and that you are never quite enough. I love her anyway and that has always been my particular problem.
I am back at Mercy General by nine the next morning. I stop at the small cafe on the ground floor first, buy two coffees and a blueberry muffin because my mother has never been able to resist a blueberry muffin, and take the stairs up to the third floor. The corridor looks different in daylight. Less quiet. A nurse moves briskly past me carrying a clipboard. Two men in scrubs talk outside a room at the far end. The antiseptic smell is the same. I knock twice before I push open the door to room 312.
My mother is awake this time. Sitting up slightly, her silver hair pinned back, her eyes sharper than they have any right to be given the monitors still attached to her wrists. She sees the coffee in my hand and something in her face softens.
"You remembered," she says.
"I always remember." I pull the chair close and sit down. Hand her the cup. Set the muffin on the bedside table. She wraps both hands around the coffee like it is the most important thing in the room and for a moment we are just two people sitting together and it is almost simple.
The doctor comes in at half past nine. Dr. Ames is younger than I expected, early thirties, with the particular confidence of someone who has been told they are good at their job enough times to believe it. He explains the procedure clearly. A valve replacement. Standard, he says, though the word standard does a lot of work when applied to someone's heart.
He wants to operate in three days. I ask every question I have written down and two I think of on the spot. My mother watches me do this with an expression caught between pride and irritation, which is the expression she has worn at me most of my life. When he leaves I open my notebook again.
"You don't have to manage everything," my mother says.
"Someone has to." I replied
"Elena." She called out firmly
"Mom." I replied instantly
A small silence. She picks at the edge of the muffin wrapper. Outside the window the sky is the same grey it was yesterday, low and flat over the Voss City skyline.
"How long has it been?" she asks. "Since you were here."
"Four years." I answered
"Five," she says quietly. "It has been five years, Elena."
I do not correct her. She is right. I have been rounding down without realizing it. We have never talked about why I left. My mother has always preferred to build around the things she cannot say. I learned it from her. I have been living inside that method for five years. But today she is tired in a way she cannot perform around.
"I made mistakes," she says. Not looking at me. Looking at the window.
"Everyone makes mistakes." I said softly
"Not like mine." She turns her cup slowly in her hands. "I got involved with people I should not have. I borrowed from people who do not lend out of kindness. I told myself it would not touch you girls."
My pen stops moving. "Mom."
"I thought I was protecting you both by keeping you close to that world. Foolish." She almost laughs, but it does not make it all the way to her face. "Utterly foolish."
I am very still. I know what world she means. Irene Voss spent years drifting in and out of Voss City's money, the kind that does not ask questions. It was how I met Damien. Through her world, at a party I was too young to be at and too proud to leave.
"You don't have to do this now," I say.
"I'm having heart surgery in three days, Elena. If not now, when?"
I have no answer for that So I just stayed quiet.
She sinks back against the pillow. The energy it took to say even that much is visibly costing her. Her eyes are getting heavy, the medication pulling at the edges of her.
"He was good to you," she murmurs. Softer now. Drifting. "Whatever else he is. He was good to you."
My throat tightens. "Don't."
"Raymond--" she starts.
I go very still. That name, she has not said that name to me in five years. She does not know what that name means to me. She cannot know, because I have never told anyone, not even her, what Raymond Cole said to me in that parking garage on a Tuesday night when I was twenty-one years old and completely alone.
"Raymond what?" I say. My voice is careful. Quiet.
But her eyes are closed now.
"Mom." I lean forward. "What about Raymond?"
Nothing she said. Her breathing has steadied into the long, slow rhythm of sleep. Whatever she was about to say has gone under with her, back into the place where tired people keep the things they almost said.
I sit back. My hands are not entirely steady and I make them be.
I stay until noon. I eat the second half of the muffin she didn't finish and read through the surgical consent forms and sign where I am supposed to sign. A nurse comes in to check her vitals and gives me a small nod that means everything looks the way it should. Before I leave I stand at the foot of her bed for a moment and look at her. Irene Voss Complicated and Frustrating.
"I'll be back tonight," I tell her, even though she cannot hear me I pick up my bag, step out into the corridor, and pull the door quietly shut behind me. I am halfway down the stairs when my phone rings. Unknown number. Voss City area code. I stare at it for two full rings. Then I send it to voicemail and keep walking. But my chest is tight all the way through the lobby, all the way out through the glass doors and into the grey Voss City morning, and it stays tight the whole cab ride back to the hotel.
Raymond.
She had been about to say something about Raymond Cole. I get back to the hotel, let myself into room 412, and sit on the edge of the bed.
My phone buzzes. A voicemail. I press play. Silence for two seconds. Then a man's voice I do not recognize, low and even.
"Miss Voss. Mr. Cole would like to meet. Tomorrow morning. He says you'll know which Mr. Cole he means." The message ends.
I lower the phone from my ear and look at the wall for a long time. I do know which Mr. Cole he means. The question is
which one?