Part 34 (1/2)

CHAPTER 34

The Medical Records

A few minutes later, Deborah pounded on my door. She'd changed into an enormous white T-s.h.i.+rt that hung past her knees-on it was a picture of a stick-figure woman taking cookies out of an oven, and the word GRANDMA in big childlike print.

”I decided I'm not going to bed,” she said matter-of-factly. ”I want to look at that stuff with you.” She was jittery and twitchy, like she'd just had several shots of espresso. In one hand she clutched the Crownsville picture of Elsie; with the other she grabbed the bag filled with her mother's medical records off the dresser where I'd put it. She dumped the bag's contents on my bed just as she'd done the first night we met.

”Let's get busy,” she said.

There were more than a hundred pages, many of them crumpled, folded, or torn, all of them out of order. I stood staring for a long moment, stunned and overwhelmed, then said maybe we could sort through it together, then I could find somewhere to photocopy what I'd need.

”No!” Deborah yelled, then smiled a nervous smile. ”We can just read it all here and you can take notes.”

”That would take days,” I said.

”No it won't,” Deborah said, climbing on all fours across the pile of papers, and sitting cross-legged in the center of the bed.

I pulled up an armchair, opened my laptop, and started sorting. There was a land deed from the small chunk of Clover property Deborah bought with two thousand dollars from her father's asbestos settlement. There was a 1997 newspaper mug shot of Lawrence's son with a caption that said, WANTED. LAWRENCE LACKS, ROBBERY W/DEADLY WEAPON. There were order forms for buying HeLa cells online, receipts, newsletters from Deborah's church, and seemingly endless copies of the photo of Henrietta, hands on hips. And there were dozens of notebook pages where Deborah had written definitions of scientific and legal terms, and poems about her life:

cancer

check up

can't afford

white and rich get it

my mother was black

black poor people don't have the money to

pay for it

mad yes I am mad

we were used by taking our blood and lied to

We had to pay for our own medical, can you