As I lay in bed, my stepmother whisked away the tissues stained with blood and pus. She closed the shades, changed the sheets, fetched compresses for my eyes. She went on multi-grocery-store quests for liquid foods we hoped would be bland enough to not burn my mouth. Since I had only planned to stay at her and my father’s house for Thanksgiving—my symptoms began the day I arrived—I had packed just three pairs of underwear for my visit; she bought me more. The days stretched into a week, then two. Then three, then four.
Throughout, she reported to my father on the state of my skin, my eyes, and my mouth. She told him how much I slept, read off the latest temperatures, reassured him that they were doing everything they could to take care of me.
He was the person I loved most in the world, which was something she and I had in common. I knew that was part of what made her so vigilant; she was taking care of me on his behalf when he was at work. But I also knew that she had spent her entire life acting as an advocate for her legally blind half-brother. That she visited her bachelor Uncle Joe every week until he died. That she brought my aging grandmother to medical appointments, baked cupcakes for her hairdresser, and was still in touch with the owner of a dog she once saw get hit by a car. That she had never been anything but kind to me, no matter how I acted as a preteen and teenager.
That she had never said anything bad around me—or responded with anything but compassion, to my knowledge— when it came to my mother.
*
Jo Ann and my father waited until I was 18 to marry, saying their vows just two days before I left for college. My father didn’t know about my list of poisonous plants—didn’t realize that I’d taken every third photo of Jo Ann from his albums and burned them in a coffee can, or that I referred to her exclusively as “Drania” in my journals, a name I thought fitting for an evil queen. But he knew I’d declared I would never set foot in their house if he lived with her. He knew that I sent my friend Lisa to sit at the dinner table in my place to “act as my proxy” if Jo Ann was there. When he asked me to give Jo Ann a Christmas present, I found a plastic bag filled with broken ornaments at Goodwill and poured the shards in a box, then neatly creased the edges of the wrapping paper and added a shiny bow.