what we’re going to do? Sell off our lives one piece at a time until there’s nothing left?”
“You’re being a little dramatic, don’t you think?”
“Am I? You really think working on that old boat is going to be a windfall for our financial problems? I think it’s just an excuse for you to spend time downstairs away from everything going on around here.”
“That’s blatantly unfair and you know it.”
“Oh, really? You take up this new hobby, try to say it’s for money, when what we really need is a good insurance policy. It just seems like screwed-up logic to me. Your time could be better spent.”
He stood stunned for a moment, then he said, “I’ll bring up the rest of the groceries.”
Was she unfair? Lauren could see the future; he’d be working on his pet project and she would be holding back her child’s hair while Ainslie rested on her knees in front of the toilet bowl. There. That’s what Emmett would call bitter. But she wasn’t bitter. She was exhausted, both mentally and physically.
He said she had changed—well of course she had. Her life had become doctor appointments and medicines, Internet searches and worry. Her days were filled with her daughter’s struggle to home school on par with her peers, those fortunate children whose brains were not racked on chemotherapy.
Emmett would never voice his opinion of her personality in crisis, although he made sure she was aware of it in subtle ways. But Lauren believed that if she were truly bitter she would be asking why her child, why their family? She’d turned to God for answers, but none had been forthcoming. That was another place where she and Emmett parted company. While she tried to have faith, Emmett seemed to have very little. Where she wanted to believe life had purpose, he believed things were simply random.
Did she believe Ainslie was sick because God wanted to teach their family some sort of lesson? No. Of course, she’d thought about it, but she’d finally come to the conclusion that God didn’t directly affect physical things here on Earth. If a child and a bowling ball were both tossed from a high building you couldn’t pray for God’s hand to catch the child and spare her. Both child and bowling ball would hit the ground at the same time with very different results. Lauren had decided that praying was for comfort. Hope was necessary. She didn’t expect God to spare her child when other children died. That was too self-centered. She had never asked why her child, but she had asked why any child.
Emmett thought she had unexamined faith, that she believed blindly, but that was simply not the case. The people with blind faith, the ones who assured her God had a plan for Ainslie and it wasn’t up to her to question His plan, made her want to scream. In Lauren’s opinion, those people were simply too weak to face the fact that life can be shit sometimes. They want to think that ultimately they are not responsible for their decisions, for their lives.
Faith for her was not about turning over responsibility for her child. It was about comfort and mental health. She knew God was there, and how anyone couldn’t feel this was a foreign concept to her. Her faith was basic in her bones, a truth she felt as solidly as she felt her own fingers, but it wasn’t an excuse to be blind to life’s darker moments.
Still, her faith hadn’t translated to the rest of her family. It seemed that very little God shine, as her oldest daughter called it, had rubbed off on any of them. The girls had both been raised in a church family, but neither girl ever sought the church or any type of faith when they had problems. They never gravitated to the young Christian clubs at school nor wanted to spend a week of their summers at Bible camp.
Where Sloan and Emmett were openly disdainful of organized religion, Ainslie continued to be the only one willing to attend services with Lauren. Still, as soon as Ainslie left church, she left that train of thought behind. After lunch, when they arrived home on Sunday, Ainslie immediately went on the hunt for bugs and lizards, and all thoughts of God vaporized. Lauren tried to inject the beauty of God’s creativity into her nature talks with Ainslie, but doubt always hovered behind her daughter’s eyes.
So of course, Ainslie had taken a scientific approach to disease. She’d asked doctors if she could look in the microscope to see what her cancer was like. Ainslie had expected it to be moving and was surprised to find the cells were dead. She told Lauren that the slide looked like tadpole eggs or a pink-and-purple polluted river, but the pathologist had told her the color was from dye used to stain the slide.
Lauren had prepared herself for the questions Ainslie would have about God and why he allowed her to get sick. Lauren had spoken to her minister, but Reverend Michael had been vague and less helpful than she had hoped. He certainly hadn’t equipped her with the solid answers she was seeking. Presbyterians were a contemplative bunch, independent of thought and questioning. Reverend Michael had simply said that times like this tested us all and that she needed to show Ainslie how strong faith can ease pain and give meaning to life’s struggles.
But Ainslie hadn’t asked many religious questions. Instead, she watched Animal Planet and movies. She read the wildlife books people sent her and made beaded jewelry and ragged potholders. Lauren had prayed with Ainslie, but she guessed that her daughter just saw it as another thing she was required to do. She wasn’t as questioning or as angry as Lauren had expected, although Lauren could see anger building in her other daughter each day.
Some sort of faith could help Sloan deal with what was happening to them, but Sloan was deep into the independent-teenager phase. She was never without white earbuds snaking down from her head to block conversation. Sloan pulled her sunny hair into elastics and let it spew angrily from her head. She wore jeans with artfully placed holes, and unusually feminine baby doll tops. And the flip-flops, the ubiquitous things she wore most of the year, even on days when Lauren was sure her toes would freeze. No. Sloan was her own person and she had used Ainslie’s illness as a source of freedom. Ainslie had felt the sting of her sister’s long absences, but who could blame Sloan? It was hard to watch these terrible things happen to a person you loved. It was wearing on everyone’s psyche, this daily reminder that doom lurked around the corner.
Luckily, the girls had a special connection. Last week, Lauren had been coming around behind the house with a bag of trash when she’d heard the girls talking inside the latticed carport. Ainslie asked Sloan what she thought getting an MRI would be like.
Sloan said, “Like this.” And she had climbed into the old fish sink where three generations of Sullivans had cleaned their catch.
“And they’ll take a picture of your insides,” Sloan said.
Ainslie said, “Duh. I know that. What I mean is, will it hurt?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Move over.” Ainslie crawled into the tub beside her sister.
Lauren stood there, waiting for them to talk more, but they didn’t. They just lay beside each other, dangling their feet over the edge of the tub.
Sloan had successfully hidden this part of herself since she hit puberty, and sometimes Lauren forgot this side existed. She was such a moody little thing, Lauren feared she was on the verge of being one of the pitiful goth kids who lurked in bookstores and outside hamburger joints around their little town of Litchfield. But she hadn’t gone over that edge yet. Sloan had rejected nearly everything Lauren had suggested as far as clothing, hobbies, or social graces. Still, she made good grades and kept out of trouble. She wasn’t drugged out or pregnant and she hadn’t run away. Now she was eighteen, so technically she couldn’t run away. For all intents and purposes she was an adult—able to vote and get married, hold a job and pay taxes. She was more independent now than ever, with all of Lauren’s energies focused on Ainslie. Emmett had said to let her go, that it was unnecessary to try to keep track of her anymore, and Lauren had decided he was right. She had held on longer than most parents do these days.
But it was hard to let go. Lauren had wanted her girls, had never even blinked when Sloan came along unexpectedly. She and Emmett were married, and they moved into this house, and Emmett started his company, and life was good. Along came Ainslie,