Doreen went every day to the hospital to see her daughter. At first everyone told her to keep her spirits up, to hold out hope, never give up on a miracle. But as the weeks wore on and Doreen became a regular fixture in the long term ward, her confidence in that projected miracle began to erode. Her daughter remained lifeless, lying in the hospital bed with tubes running in and out of her body, breathing for her, eating for her, keeping her alive.

If you could call it that.

Doreen brought things that she considered to be food for thought. Tolstoy, Shakespeare, William Hesse, and her own beloved F. Scott Fitzgerald. She was an avid reader and burned through the books with alarming speed. Of course, the simple fact that she spent two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon reading to her daughter meant that she would over achieve. But what else was there for her? This late in her life, with her son, Reese, off at his important job in Colorado, and her husband playing rounds of golf and frittering away the hours losing at cards down at the country club, Doreen hadn’t much else to occupy her time. Her house was always neat, and the minor chores of a load of laundry or dishes here or there didn’t take much time these days. In some ways, she wondered how she had spent all her time before the accident.

On Fridays she brought cookies down to the children’s ward. It was one of the few places that made her grateful for what she had. Here, especially seeing the parents whose children suffered from terminal illness, so young? It made her deeply thankful that she had had so many blessed years with her own children. Reese would be getting married soon, and Desiree? well, she could always hope.

One afternoon the air felt thicker; spring was melting into the humidity of summer, and Doreen could feel it coming. She put down her book and looked at her daughter lying flat and dormant on the bed.

“It will be summer soon,” Doreen told Desiree. “You know what that means? The dreaded bathing suit season. You’ll need a pedicure, too, since you’ll be wearing sandals?”

She looked thoughtfully out the window. “And it’s a shame your room here doesn’t face the afternoon sun. Your tan has faded so much from last year. You look like one of those horrible gothic teenagers I see skulking around the shopping malls. You can’t do a whit of shopping without tripping over them.”

She pursed her lips and picked up the book again, though she did not read its words. “You need a tan, I think. Yes, and I’ll see to that tomorrow. Have you had enough of this book? I think I have. Yes, my darling Desiree, I have had enough.”

The next day Doreen returned, armed with three bottles of nail polish, nail clippers, and a bottle of self-tanning lotion. She had to put on her glasses to read the tiny print on the back of the self-tanner, but once she’d parsed through the instructions a few times, she figured she had a handle on it. She shook the bottle vigorously before she squeezed out some of the lotion and began applying it to her daughter’s pasty skin.

“There,” she told Desiree, “now you won’t look so pale. That’ll freshen you up nicely, I think.”

She paused when she got to Desiree’s face. She hesitantly rubbed a small amount into the skin and smoothed back the strands of dirty blond hair just lying so limply on the bed. Doreen dug around in her handbag and found the tiny travel hairbrush she kept there for emergency primps. She lovingly brushed her daughter’s hair, carefully turning her head to the side to brush the back. The blonde hair fell away, revealing a small black mark on the back of Desiree’s neck. Doreen licked her thumb and tried to rub off the dark smudge, but it wouldn’t go. She leaned in closer and realized it was a patterned smudge? a tattoo!

But when did Desiree get a tattoo? And why?

Doreen peered at it more closely, trying to make out the exact design of the little mark. It appeared to be a character from an Asian alphabet, though which she certainly couldn’t say. Doreen sat down in her chair again, put her travel brush away, and simply stared curiously at the mark on her daughter’s neck.

What did it mean?

Doreen shook her head. So her daughter got a tattoo; lots of kids get them in college, she consoled herself. And at least it was someplace small and unnoticeable. That was something.

Doreen finished applying the self tanner and discarded the empty bottle in the wastebasket. She then held up the two bottles of colored polish she’d brought, plus the bottle of clear topcoat.

“What do you think, Desiree?” she asked in a pleasant tone. She held the colors close to her daughter’s arm and said, “The plum or the pink umbrellas? They’re both pretty. I think the pink umbrellas for now; it’s not quite summer enough for the plum.”

She set the bottles down on the side table and pulled back the sheet covering her daughter’s atrophied legs. She took the nail clippers in hand and stationed herself at the foot of the bed. But something was wrong; her daughter’s toenails were a horrible shade of green. At first glance, Doreen had thought it was a fungus. She looked more closely and discovered it was a horrible shade of chartreuse nail polish. And though they had grown out a little much, it looked like a professionally done pedicure.

Doreen frowned. She hadn’t ever known Desiree to go to a nail salon, nor to be bothered dressing up her feet. She always wore sensible shoes to her waitressing job and to walk around on the community college campus. So why would she get a pedicure?

Doreen sat back and evaluated her daughter as if meeting a new person. Typically you only got pedicures if you thought someone would see your feet, or so Doreen presumed. So who was seeing her daughter’s naked feet?

And what, if anything, did it have to do with the tattoo on the back of her neck?