All You Could Ask For: A Novel (21 page)

It got easier from there for us, my group of girls, who, one by one, took turns trading in our horrible bridesmaid dresses for equally horrible maternity jumpers and overalls. I think I spent $4,000 in one year at Liz Lange Maternity and I wasn’t even pregnant. They were gifts. It was, once again, the stage of life I was in.

The stage that came next was awful. It began in a steady flow when we reached our thirties, all of us young moms, when one by one our parents started to die. I remember it was David Michel’s dad who went first, only sixty-one, cancer of the liver. He was an oncologist himself, very prominent in our town. I recall Mother could not bring herself to attend the funeral. “He was such a kind man,” she said, “I feel I knew him my entire life.” I certainly had. All the mothers and fathers of my group were like family to me, and, one by one, they started to go. A heart attack here, a kidney failure there, they came in a wave. They’ve slowed some since, they still come now and again, but not as often as they did back then.

And so, as I sit here tonight, introducing myself to you in a state of horror, shock, denial, fear, sadness, and guilt, what I cannot help thinking is that I hope I am not the beginning of the next stage for everyone else. I have this terrible image of my friends gathering for drinks ten years from now, reflecting on this stage of their lives, the stage when their friends started to die. And it’s
me
they’ll be talking about, the way I talk about Jill in the hospital. I can almost hear them now. “Brooke went first, breast cancer,” they’ll say, dabbing their eyes with tissue. “Poor thing, she was only forty.”

I don’t have any idea what the etiquette is here. I have prided myself all my life on knowing the proper thing to do. That was Mother’s favorite word when I was a girl, “proper,” she could use it in almost any context.

At a proper dinner party, we would never be seated together.

A proper response would be, “Yes, thank you, Daddy.”

Please hold your fork properly, a girl without table manners is like spring without sunshine.

Table manners were a big deal. Starting when I was six, I attended lessons in etiquette where I was taught the proper way to behave at a social function. I was there while most of my friends were receiving religious instruction. For my mother, proper behavior
was
a religion.

I know some girls would have rebelled against a childhood like that but I did not. Quite the opposite: I liked it. I liked using the proper fork for the first course at dinner. I liked knowing the proper way to respond to an invitation. I liked all of it and I still do: life is much easier when you know the proper way to behave. That’s one of the things that make this so tough right now. I haven’t the faintest idea what the proper response is to being told I have triple-negative breast cancer. It’s happened so quickly I feel as though I’ve been watching it happen to someone else, like a character in a book, a character I feel really sorry for right now.

I’m a woman who has two doctors in my life, a gynecologist and a pediatrician, and of the two I see the pediatrician, Dr. Marks, by far more often. He’s young and handsome and funny and sweet; I’ve often thought he was the sort of man I would have an affair with if I ever had an affair. (Which I would not, by the way, not ever.) I happened to mention to Dr. Marks about a month ago, when we casually bumped into each other at the drugstore, that my husband had just turned forty and that I would be forty in a few weeks. And he, because he is this way, asked if I had scheduled my first mammogram. I said I’d thought of it, and he made me promise I’d call my gynecologist that same day. And perhaps because he was just so cute, I did as I was told. A week later I was in the office of Greenwich Radiology, with my shirt off.

“Can you tell they’re real?” I asked the technician, looking for a laugh as he maneuvered my chest in the least sexual way I could ever imagine.

“Yes, I can.”

“I’ve been thinking of getting implants,” I said. “Would that make this more difficult?”

“Not really, no.”

“I guess I just tend to talk a lot when I’m nervous,” I said.

“Nothing to be nervous about,” he said, as he squashed my breast into the machine, which was shiny and cold and smelled of the spray I used to use to clean the dust off record albums. “Nothing at all.”

Turned out he was wrong about that.

If I really was a character in a book, then at the start of the next chapter the radiologist would be telling me he sees a shadow, something really small, too small for me to feel, he would be surprised if I could feel it. It’s a solid area on the ultrasound, which needs to be biopsied. He is asking me if I want to call my husband first. I say no. I’m not really listening. Or, I am listening but not hearing, it’s not registering. It is as though it is happening to someone else. There is nothing very real about being told you have cancer, even if you are a character in a book.

Then the radiologist is cleaning an area at the outside of my breast with a cotton pad, soft and wet and cold, and there is a needle in my breast, and I am having a sonogram-directed biopsy. It hurts, but not enough to make me cry. I’m not sure I
could
cry anyway. I am having trouble just breathing. And then, just like that, I am in my car, on my way home. There will be no results for forty-eight hours. Blessedly, my husband is away. He’ll likely call late tonight. I’ll deal with that when it happens. First I need to get through dinner.

The kids are home when I arrive. One of them needs help with homework, the other is upset because “Connor called me stupid.” These are real issues for them. They need me, and as always I am there for them. I help with the math, and have a talk about what are and are not appropriate words to use with our friends. “We don’t use the word ‘stupid,’” I am saying. “It isn’t proper behavior at school.” In my own head, I hear my mother’s voice.

I had planned to make salmon for dinner, but now I am in no mood for all the fuss, so instead I put a pot to boil on the stove. Pasta with olive oil, a little butter, parmesan cheese. I know both kids will eat it happily. I don’t even make a vegetable, which I normally insist they eat if they want dessert. Aside from that, I feel as though I am behaving perfectly normally until my daughter bursts that bubble.

“Mommy, you seem sad,” she says.

I am seated at the dinner table. The children are on either side of me, eating. I realize I don’t even remember setting the table, straining the pasta, mixing in the butter, sprinkling the cheese, pouring the milk.

“I’m sorry, baby,” I say, with a smile that comes more easily than I would have expected. “I guess I just miss Daddy, that’s all.”

“Why aren’t you having any wine?” my son asks.

“I don’t know, sweetie, I thought I might not drink any wine for a little while.”

My two children exchanged looks. “Mommy,” Jared says, after a moment, “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.”

That makes me laugh and it makes me cry, both at the same time, and I ask the kids to excuse me and I run to the powder room and turn the faucet on full blast. I am pretty sure it drowns out the sounds of my crying.

I don’t even remember going back to the table, or what I said, or how I explained my tears to the children. The next thing I know they are fast asleep in their beds, and I am in the small hallway that separates their rooms. I can see them both resting peacefully in the shadows. There is no sight on earth more beautiful than my sleeping children. They are perfect and they are all mine.

“What more could a woman want?” I ask, aloud.

Then the phone rings. I am ready for the call. It will be Scott and I know what he’ll want. And I will give it to him. It doesn’t sound like such a bad idea, actually, quite the opposite. It sounds like something very normal, and right now normal sounds really good.

“Hey, big fella,” I say as seductively as I can manage, sinking between the sheets of the bed we share. “What can I do for you?”

The conversation doesn’t last long, it almost never does. Then I am alone in my room in the dark, staring at the ceiling, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. And I am thinking of a book I love, with a heroine I love. The book is called
The Hotel New Hampshire,
and the girl is named Franny. And one time when Franny is sad and someone asks if they can do anything for her, she says: “Just bring me yesterday, and most of today.” And I realize now that is exactly what I want. Yesterday, and most of today.

THE NEXT CHAPTER BEGINS two days later, when the phone rings again. The voice on the other end is one I do not recognize.

“Hi, Brooke, this is Dr. Downey calling.”

For a moment I cannot recall any Dr. Downey. Then I remember the throat infection I had two years before. He is a primary care physician, and when my husband’s company switched insurance companies, I had to choose one, so I listed Dr. Downey. Even though I haven’t seen him since then, his name is on all my insurance papers. And so it is that the call I have been waiting so impatiently for comes from, essentially, a total stranger.

“Hello, doctor,” I say, my throat barely open.

“I was hoping you could come into the office this morning,” he says. “I have the results of the test you took the other day and I think we should talk about them.”

Then I am in his completely unfamiliar office, staring at his completely unfamiliar face, listening to his completely unfamiliar voice. “We see breast cancer,” he is saying, “and we do see an invasive cancer. That means it is the kind of cancer that could involve your lymph nodes. We think it is localized but we’ll need some more tests to know for sure. I have the name of an excellent breast surgeon here in Greenwich and I recommend you visit him. Of course, if you have another surgeon you would prefer to see, by all means you should see him or her. But seeing a breast surgeon is the next step in this process.”

If I were you, this is the part where I would put the book down. I hate it when things like this happen to characters I like. I can’t count the number of books I haven’t finished because I didn’t like where they appeared to be heading. So if this was a book I was reading, I wouldn’t want to read any more. But when you’re the lead character, you don’t have that choice.

If you’re still reading, you’re braver than I am.

The next scene takes place six days later, first in the operating room, where the breast surgeon is performing a lumpectomy and a sentinel node, which is where they take out the lump in your breast and, while they are in there, inject a dye that makes its way into a specific lymph node beneath the arm. And then they take me to the recovery room and I wait. And wait. And the seconds feel like hours, much as they did when the twins were small and I was home alone with them, and there were days when they were crabby and uninterested and those were the days when time felt as though it stood still. The difference is now oftentimes I feel nostalgic for
those
days, but I am pretty sure I’ll never feel nostalgic for this one.

Then, finally, the doctor comes back, and the news is good.

“Brooke, we got the lump out, it looks to be about a sonometer and a half—”

“How big is that in English?” I ask.

“About an inch.”

I like the look of this doctor’s face. Which is not to say he is handsome, but rather that he doesn’t look troubled. I am pretty sure his face would look different if he were here to tell me I was going to die.

“The important thing is all the lymph nodes appear to be negative,” he continues.

“That’s good?”

“Very good, yes,” he says. “You are probably only going to need radiation to prevent the cancer from coming back in your breast, which means we probably won’t need to do a mastectomy. What you will need to do is see a specialist to determine what other treatments may be options for you.”

“You say that as though I have some choice in the matter.”

“Of course you do,” he says, “you’re the patient. It’s your body and your life, so you’re the one who should make the decisions. Don’t ever forget that.”

I would not forget. In fact, those would prove to be the most memorable words I heard through this entire ordeal.

The next chapter takes place in a different office. Now I am listening to an oncologist who specializes in breast cancer explain what he means when he says “the breast, and the rest.”

“Your tumor is triple-negative,” the doctor says. “That means it does not respond to hormones, or a number of other drugs we commonly use, treatments you may have read about in the newspapers.”

I nod my head to affirm, even though I have never read about any cancer treatments in the newspapers. I avoid stories about cancer in the newspapers, and everywhere else as well.

“We are going to use chemotherapy,” he continues, “because that gives us the best modality to prevent this cancer from coming back somewhere besides your breast.”

“Wait, I think I don’t understand,” I say. “I had a small tumor in my breast. They removed that. It didn’t spread to my lymph nodes. Why do I have to have chemo?”

The doctor’s face changed, a little. He looked more professorial now, and I was his student. “Well, we know based on the pathology, based on the tumor’s size and other factors, that there is still the potential for the cancer to come back somewhere else. So we do the radiation for the
breast,
and the chemo for the
rest
. That’s why we call this approach ‘the breast and the rest.’”

I think about it for a minute, as clearly as I am capable of. I’m still not sure I understand. “But why do we have to do this now?” I ask.

“If we wait for the cancer to come back somewhere else, we have lost our window of opportunity. We can
treat
it if it comes back in your liver or your brain or your bones, but right now our goal is to
cure
it.”

“But . . .”

I can’t really think of what to say after “but.” Or maybe I just have so many things to say after “but” that I can’t choose one. So I ask questions, lots of them. And the doctor is patient and supportive, but he never tells me what I want to hear. He never offers to give me back yesterday and most of today.