The Faucet

The faucet is dripping. The drip is loud in the quiet room: Splat! Like a children’s book: Splat! Splat! Goes the water.

“Mom?” Jessica is watching me. She says something else, a thing I can’t hear because the drip is so loud.

I jump to my feet to wrench the handles shut but it’s a faucet without handles and for a moment I’m baffled. How can there be a faucet without handles?

Foot pedals. Sure. It’s a doctor’s office and you use your feet to operate the faucet. It’s more hygienic.

“I don’t know how to fix it,” I say, staring at the faucet. “I don’t know how to make the water stop.”

“Mom?”

“Isn’t it loud?” I swing around to address her. “It’s so loud.”

Her expression is just as baffled as mine. “Are you okay?”

I plop myself down in the chair. “I’m not the one who has to go through this,” I say. “It just seems loud, doesn’t it?”

Her eyes never leave my face and I say, “I’m sorry, you said something earlier. What was it?”

She shrugs. “I just asked how long you think we’ll have to wait.”

“Hard to know. Hopefully before that leaky faucet drives me around the bend.”

The exam room is cramped and I’m in the chair by the door. I tuck my toes under so that it’ll be my leg that gets whacked when the doctor flings open the door. I have been in so many tiny exam rooms over the years that personal self-protection is ingrained. Tuck the toes, sit slightly aslant so the meat of the thigh takes the impact, not the knee. Second nature. Sometimes you can hold a hand up to stop the door from making its full arc but today I can’t quite work out how I would do that. I am sure I would be able to think if the leaking water weren’t so loud.

Another drop thunders into the sink.

The door whaps my thigh. The nurse comes in. “Oh, sorry.” She breezes by and starts firing questions at us. I wonder how she can stand working in this room with that drip, drip, drip.

She breezes out and Jessica asks again, “How long do you think it will be?” Which is a question she has asked me so many times that for a moment I can’t even recall where I am. An exam room, obviously, but which city, and which day, for which specialist?

I have to get my shit together but that faucet—

“Hello, hello.” The door whaps me on the thigh. “Oh, sorry.” The doctor breezes in. “So, tell me what’s going on.”

I am trying to find the way to summarize what has brought us here today when Jessica says, “The other doctor is worried about my weight loss.”

This doctor has called up Jessica’s record, and her smile freezes on her face, it looks as though it has been sutured there.

“What is the word the doctor used, Mom?”

I find my voice. “Unexplained,” I say. “Unexplained weight loss.”

I’m surprised the doctor can hear me over the leaking faucet but apparently she can. Eventually her smile disappears, and she frowns, and then smooths away the furrow from her brow with two fingers, there and gone. I hear a medical school lecture in that action. Don’t let them see you look worried.

After a while she says, “We’ll run some tests, just to make sure, but you know—”

I know but Jessica is not good at following implications through to their end, and she asks, “Know what?”

The doctor’s smile is back; she’s striving for reassurance, I think, but it scares me, and I can’t hear her over the faucet.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t catch that.”

“Oh, I was just saying  . . . it’s the progression of the disease.” Her hand describes an arc, and I know what’s at the end of it and I look away. I stare at the sink. Splat! Goes the water.

“We’re your team, and we’ll help with the . . . symptoms.” She nods encouragingly and leaves the room and the nurse comes back in and says what we have to do now, printing it all out on a sheet of paper, highlighting the relevant bits, and I know exactly how to fold the paper so it fits in my purse, I have been doing it long enough. But never, in all the hospital rooms and clinics and offices, have I heard a faucet that drips loudly enough to drown out all sound.

“They really ought to fix that,” I say to Jessica, as I help her with her jacket and hand over her shoulder bag.

“Fix what?” Her hand is arrested at her collar.

“The faucet!” I laugh. “Didn’t you notice how loud it was?”

She stares at me. “Are you okay?”

“Yes, I’m just laughing,” I say. “I mean, it’s ridiculous, how obnoxious that faucet is.”

She doesn’t move.

“I’m fine, it’s fine. I was laughing.”

“Oh,” she says. “I could have sworn you were crying.”