Afloat (20 page)

It felt like a hard edge of flesh buried underneath my skin. Panic implanted in my body. Part of me felt relieved. Something to reward my searching. I made Alan feel it to be sure. I even thought about asking Russ, to have a third opinion. But I knew, and I made the appointment the same day. The doctor would tell me it was a cyst, or something else that didn't need worrying about and I'd drive home feeling proud that I'd dealt with it right away. I'd stop to get a thin crust avocado pizza from Roma's on Queen Street as a celebration.

So when the last doctor of five finally told me weeks later: this is what's happening, in your body, at this exact moment, I still couldn't believe they hadn't figured it all out by now. How to cure me. What were they doing, I wondered, these last few decades in universities, in government labs, eating sandwiches and taking lunch breaks while my body was getting ready to die. Why the fuck had I been giving my money away to charities all those years? My mother had breast cancer, I'd say as I opened my purse.

I got pizza on the way home, like I'd planned to weeks before. Thin crust avocado. I wanted to tell the smooth-faced teenager behind the counter, wanted to mention something about the hospital, about how that morning I'd rubbed the waxed and polished stone on my dresser for good luck, telling myself there was nothing inside me because nothing hurt, but at the same time knowing this was my last chance, this must be it, I must be dying. How I rubbed the stone fiercely until it became warm, how I put it in my purse. How four hours ago I was normal, but as I stood before her ordering extra cheese and commenting on the new vintage cuckoo clock they'd hung above the drinks cooler, I was no longer like her.

She shrugged when I mentioned the clock.

‘The little guy chopping wood is broken,' she said. ‘Only the dancing maids come out when it chimes.'

Seated in my car, the leather was hot, the summer air was stifling, and I started the engine and drove home having nowhere else to go. I told Alan when I handed him the pizza box, Luck had fucked us over. We'd lost the competition.

After that hot, impossible Thursday, my weeks were divided into
how much, how long, how likely
? I'd already surpassed the Stage One Designation because my body had been busy, my tumor already the size of a grape. I imagined a green grape. Watery and off color like phlegm turned hard. Edible, perhaps. Would the cancer spread if I ingested it? Or would my stomach acids destroy it? Would digesting my cancer grape create antibodies, tiny cells to live in my bloodstream, not to be fooled again by anything? I imagined them draining me, filling me up again with someone else, someone healthy. A transplant of my insides to keep me normal.

What I got was A Modified Radical Mastectomy.

The night before the operation Alan was in our bedroom, reading for the nineteenth time all the information we had been given. ‘
A Buddy is a Good Idea
,' the leaflet said. On the front of it was a young woman, looking reassuringly at an older woman wearing purple shoes, seated on a park bench.

He read aloud:
Even if you are an independent woman, it is nice to have someone with you before and after surgery
.

Sitting beside him on the bed I lifted his shirt and fingered his Lake Superior birthmark, pressing it firmly with my thumb. My fingers sunk more deeply into his flesh each year, his chest softer, lower. I wanted someone to ask
me
to be in a leaflet photograph. When I was finished and healed, I wanted to be dressed in reassuring clothing, ready to offer other women what those women had offered me.

‘You okay, buddy?' he asked me.

I never answered him, feeling the red ridges of his skin, the uneven shoreline.

Anna was at college in Wyoming. Thinking of her, I remembered that Mackinac summer. How the island's invincible isolation made me feel as if everything would always be okay.

Now it's Anna who might be left behind while I've taken my mother's place, and it doesn't seem fair – this cycle of daughters losing, and learning to be alone. I wondered if my mother had felt the same.

‘I'm going to say goodbye,' I told Alan.

‘Wait,' he said. ‘Let me pee first.'

With the door closed off from the rest of the house, I sat on our
quiet flush
toilet and looked at myself in our mirrored shower doors, imagining how much liquid I'd pissed out in that position over two decades.

Lifting off Alan's Minnesota Twins T-shirt, I carefully unhooked my expensive uplifting bra – a vanity purchase from when Patty had her breasts done and kept wearing low-cut shirts to work. I put the bra on the tile floor, next to the T-shirt. I was cold in there, naked, feet on white tile, the first snow of the year sticking to the window screen outside. Naked, fifty and I'd made it this far, but already I felt so far away from my past life.

I turned out the light, but still looked ahead – I knew what was there by touch. Flat and thin with years, nipples slightly dejected, but still mine. For one more night. I examined the place on my breast, feeling what my body was growing beneath the skin. I kneaded it hard, painfully hard with my cold fingers.

I'm winning
, I told it.

The part of me being removed tomorrow.

Because tomorrow, you'll have no place to go
.

My fingers warmed up as they dug into the tissue, then out and around in an unnecessary exam – what more could my fingers find? Then massaging my nipples, pulling at them
hard
and hoping to bruise them, I wanted the promise of that feeling forever, but knew I was shit out of luck.

‘Fuck you,' I told the mirror.

When I came out twenty minutes later, Alan was kneeling by our bed, his twenty-five-year-old rainbow house slippers knitted by his grandmother showing their worn bottoms to the ceiling. He didn't offer an explanation, but I didn't ask for one.

‘Who'd you pick to pray to?' I wondered, curious.

He shrugged.

‘It was kind of a general address.'

My wind chimes clatter together outside, making it difficult to concentrate. There's always something, an uninvited force trying to interfere when it should leave well enough alone. The door begins to make noise, but it's not my guest, just the weather intruding. The outer edge of the storm as it passes, I suppose. The siren wails and I sit, flipping the front cover of my blue journal open and closed, trying to channel my ghosts, but I know what happened next. There in blue ink on the first of September, it says
Sinking
.

I am wild with the thought of the wind breaking the door and sweeping away the treasures I have earned and kept safe all these years. I put the scab in my mouth. It will be safe inside me, and keeping it on my tongue like a pill, I let it get wet and hot. I won't let the weather take anything from me, not tonight. My souvenir is tasteless, hard, and I nibble
on the tiny bit of dried flesh – part of a body that loved me. And left.

What else is there left to remember, but that everything slowly went wrong?

September has been a bit cool so far, our clientele changing as residents from local towns like Cheboygan, Traverse City, Marquette and Cedar Springs plan their visits after the school year has begun. I haven't given out a children's menu in weeks. The wind off the lake is strong. Seagulls hover in the sky, riding air currents above the water. I spend the early morning hosing their shit off the slate patio; the white yellow gobs are bright against the black. It takes only minutes to dry, the sun heating everything quickly. Opening the umbrellas next, I stay for a moment under the white canvas, watching the one big seagull with the broken wing stagger around the rocks by the water. The dark creases of the waves are sharp, the sun illuminating the crest and shadowing the valleys.

Bryce joins me as we watch the first ferryboat angle into the harbor, its top deck empty except for an elderly couple.

‘There's you and me someday,' he says.

‘Can we have a dog too?'

He pats me on the head. ‘A bunch of fish maybe.'

The ferry docks and the couple get off.

‘I'd like to meet your mom and dad,' I tell him.

He spits onto the slate patio, and after a moment he says, ‘You'll like my sister.'

Odette is in her second year at Grayling High School. Bryce tells me she plays softball and is an excellent swimmer. The picture in his wallet reveals her shiny blonde hair and small frame, her eyes looking down and not at the camera.

‘Does she have a boyfriend?' I wonder.

He shakes his head, frowning. ‘She never has.'

He says nothing else, watching the seagull stumble over wet rocks towards the marina, dragging its wing awkwardly.

‘You haven't talked about your family much,' I say.

Rummy appears at the French doors behind us. ‘Phone's for you, Bryce. Your sister.'

Bryce turns to me.

‘That's because I'm not a boring asshole.'

He leaves me alone on the patio, and Rummy says nothing.

Trainer puts his arm around me later as Velvet reprimands Bryce for his poor performance this evening. A table of four middle-aged men has complained about his attitude, and his refusal to substitute organic asparagus for a baked potato.

‘The Tippecanoe
always
accommodates its guests,' she tells him fiercely.

Trainer looks at Velvet swanning off, and whispers in my ear –

‘I just ate fifteen jumbo shrimp from the walk-in freezer.'

I don't answer, and he gives a big sigh.

‘Let's let Uncle Trainer analyze your boyfriend, shall we? While
handsome
and
quite
charming, your ex-Mormon sweetheart has a problem with authority, especially of the male variety. He is also very protective of his female relationships, and often sees himself as a martyr.'

‘As a
what
?'

Trainer examines a fingernail and looks bored again.

‘
Newsflash
, cupcake – your boyfriend is a moody bitch. Vodka's the best thing for it.'

I take his advice.

We leave the Cock at three in the morning – everything feels close, even the sky. I can feel the evening sweat of bodies on my skin. The walk home is slow and stumbling, our bikes
veering off in directions uncontrolled. The street is wet and shit-free from its midnight cleaning, the water slapping from my flip-flops up the back of my jeans, but at least it's clean. A carriage clips past us, the driver yelling, ‘Up, Gerald, get up. Come on, Frances.' The two horses clatter off into the night ahead of us, hooves clopping, the sound of the carriage creaking and fading. In the grass by the side of the road are dead oak leaves, even though it's too early for them to be falling.

This is not a walk when Bryce and I hold hands while he points out Orion's belt. When he makes me find the Big Dipper and then kisses my face like it means something that I know where the stars are in the sky. We don't look up at all. Tonight he is concentrating on walking, drinking a can of beer smuggled from the bar. The pockets of his jeans are deep and wide enough to slide a whole can inside, which necessitates a kind of straight-legged gait so as to ensure the beer doesn't spill. I'm pretty sure John saw him take the beer anyway.

‘Is your sister upset? Is that why she called?'

Bryce drinks his beer and continues to ignore me. I feel something in him, something tipping and not in my direction. He has been quiet all evening. I try and remember the parts of that book I read about how men are like elastics and need to stretch out as far as they can before snapping back.

Near the horse barn, the chain falls off his bike. There is a clanking sound as it drags on the ground.

‘Fucking Christ,' he says.

He abruptly throws his beer can into the night, the amber spray twirling as the can spins. It hits a tree somewhere, the sound of impact high up, far away. The metallic sound of it hitting branches on the way down. A soft thunk as it hits the grass.

‘Motherfucker.'

Shoving the handlebars violently, his BMX hits the pavement,
pedal first, spinning. We both stare at the bike and Bryce's breath sounds hot and fast. He's beyond me now – his face is hard and closed. How can so much violence come so quickly?

‘Just go,' he tells me.

He flips the bike upside-down and tries to spin the front wheel.

At home when my mother says, ‘We are not discussing this further because you're being difficult,' my father retreats to his gardening shed to cut new wooden shapes for the birdhouse of the week, or to smear a pine cone in peanut butter and roll it round in a pile of shelled sunflower seeds for stringing up in the fir trees. I imagine he dreams of horses and the sky and how far away they are, waiting for him in Montana. I imagine my mother standing alone on our front porch, irritated, flicking her earlobe with her middle finger, and wondering if this is it – if the landscape never gets any larger.

‘I'll wait,' I say.

‘Just go,' he says again.

‘Bryce.'

‘
Bell
. Jesus Christ, please, fuck
off
.'

I turn immediately, yanking my bike and pointing it straight, leaning into the hill and shoving it ahead of me. I walk at a normal pace so he won't have to run to catch up, but he doesn't start fixing the chain until I am almost out of sight. He never catches up.

At the Pine Suites I ignore the lights and voices coming from Brenna's apartment, and leave the bike by my apartment door. There are no flowers here tonight.

Unslept in for months, my bedroom is cold and the sheets unfriendly, the pillow soon wet as well. The world has shifted slightly, outside of its frame. The sharp picture I'd begun with
is bleeding colors everywhere. Bryce's sister is fifteen and lonely and calls Bryce too often, but I like this about him, this loyalty to his family, but he won't tell me more. As long as we are here, he doesn't need to. On the mainland, the world will become large again, and there's always the worry that it could be too big.