Page 71 of Spectacular Things
Tickets
After skipping hemodialysis and treating herself to a pedicure, Mia enters the kitchen to the delighted squeals of her daughter and the competing smells of macaroni and cheese, baked beans, and broccoli.
“Join us for dinner?” Oliver asks, just as Betty chucks her bottle at his head.
As Mia and Oliver try to limit the number of broccoli florets that end up by their feet, Mia tries to act like she isn’t debilitatingly nauseated.
What she won’t admit to Oliver is that the sight of food on the floor doesn’t upset her nearly as much as the food on her plate.
The baked beans are especially revolting.
But Mia can only blame herself as she tries to eat without gagging.
Acute queasiness is one of the more immediate side effects of skipping a treatment.
“You okay?” Oliver asks, wiping his mouth with his napkin and clearing his throat as if to speak.
Instead, he takes a long drag of ice water.
This gets Mia’s attention, because Oliver is one of those people who “doesn’t like the taste” of water and only consumes it in small, forced sips.
But now, Oliver takes yet another deep chug.
“What are you not telling me?” Mia asks.
“I could ask you the same thing.” Before Mia can formulate an answer, Oliver levels with her.
“Ro called me,” he says. “I’m your emergency contact, in case you forgot, and she considered you skipping your session an emergency, as do I—as does everybody invested in your well-being.
” His voice trembles, and Mia struggles to discern whether he’s angry or upset before realizing he’s terrified.
“You can’t do that,” Oliver says, crumpling his napkin in his fist. “Okay, Mia? You can’t do that? People die from skipping treatment.”
Betty, with a broccoli stem hanging out of her mouth like a green cigar, stares at her parents, rapt. She has never seen her mother scolded or her father scared.
“I love you,” Oliver continues, reaching for Mia’s hand as Betty smashes a fistful of macaroni into her own hair.
Mia would stop her, but she is having a hard time sitting up as she imagines what’s happening inside her body, how in the absence of clean blood, her kidneys are getting overwhelmed by toxins.
Skipping dialysis, just wanting those three hours back, means her body is suffering fluid overload and electrolyte imbalances.
There is urine in her blood now because she didn’t feel like sitting in a chair. What was she thinking?
Oliver reaches into his back pocket and pulls out his phone.
“The National Team is playing Mexico at the Rose Bowl next month,” he says, holding up his screen to display the announcement. “On May twenty-eighth.”
Mia gives him the look he expects, the look every spouse receives far too often, especially after a baby arrives—the look that universally translates to, What the actual fuck are you talking about?
“I think we should go,” Oliver says. He devised this plan weeks ago, but it was the phone call from Ro today that has empowered him to broach the idea with Mia tonight.
“She ghosted us,” Mia sputters in disbelief. “She said she just had to think about it, and that she’d call us, and then she never did. I checked with Wendy for the first three months and Cricket never reached out to the donor coordinators, or even texted to see if I was out of the hospital.”
The nausea is no match for Mia’s anger at the mention of Cricket.
“I am literally dying and she doesn’t care.
” It’s this interpretation of events, this version of the truth, that undoes Mia, just as it was this same conclusion she had drawn in the chair this afternoon that made her abandon the clinic, the plan, the regimen she knows she needs to stay healthy.
“Hear me out,” Oliver says, pulling his chair closer to hers. “Okay, Mia? Listen to me: You have every right to be furious.”
Mia wipes her eyes, unbuckles Betty from her high chair, and puts the baby on her lap.
“We both know your mom’s ten-year anniversary is coming up in November—”
“What’s that got—”
“I’ve been paying close attention, and given it a lot of thought, and then today happened, so now I’m that much more—look, your kidney may stop functioning.
” Oliver’s voice breaks. “You might die. It’s highly unlikely, a slim possibility, right?
” Mia nods. “But what’s not a possibility,” Oliver continues, “what’s an absolute certainty as far as I’m concerned, is that not speaking to your sister is killing you. ”
Mia bends down to retrieve her napkin off the floor only to reappear with glistening eyes.
Oliver pulls both his girls toward him. Betty wriggles while Mia burrows into Oliver’s shoulder.
She doesn’t cry so much as heave from the weight of his words.
Diagnosing her unspoken affliction, giving the pain a name, a space, is a release unto itself.
“We don’t have to go to the game,” Oliver murmurs. “I just thought—”
Mia pushes deeper into his shoulder, the seam of his fleece a wet mess of her emotions. “How are the seats?” she asks, which makes Oliver laugh.
“Very good,” he tells her, wiping Mia’s tears with his napkin.
Betty balks, so Oliver picks a broccoli tree off her plate and successfully airplanes it into her mouth.
Like everything else her dad does, Betty finds his sound effects hilarious, which means spewed bits of broccoli fly across the table and down Mia’s shirt, but her daughter’s giggles are contagious and Mia doesn’t care.
The mess is worth it. The mess is always worthit.
From the same kitchen chair she has sat in all her life, Mia watches Betty and Oliver tickle each other and feels her lips separate like a stage curtain, a familiar warmth lighting her up.
This is her family. So much of life has happened to her, but she did this.
She chose this place, with these people.
Oliver is right.
“Let’s go,” Mia says, reaching for his hand.
She feels exonerated, having finally admitted that Cricket’s absence is killing her.
“Thank you.” She weaves her fingers through Oliver’s and squeezes.
Amid all the pain and loss and chaos of her past, every choice that was made for her, Mia looks at her husband and sees her best decision smiling back at her.