All You Could Ask For: A Novel (24 page)

Person2Person

From: Samantha R.

To: Brooke B.

BreastCancerForum.org

What are you talking about? Why haven’t you told him?

Person2Person

From: Brooke B.

To: Samantha R.

BreastCancerForum.org

I said not to ask me that.

Person2Person

From: Samantha R.

To: Brooke B.

BreastCancerForum.org

No you didn’t, you told me not to tell you what to do, and that’s fine. All I’m doing is asking a question because I am totally confused.

Person2Person

From: Brooke B.

To: Samantha R.

BreastCancerForum.org

You wouldn’t understand.

Person2Person

From: Samantha R.

To: Brooke B.

BreastCancerForum.org

Listen, I’m not easily insulted.

I’ve had a lot of people say things that could have hurt my feelings. A friend of my father’s once told me my ass was too small. A soccer coach once told me I was a pretty good player “for a rich girl.” When I worked in TV, a news director once said he was sending me on a story because I “wasn’t as likely to get hit on” as another field producer we had. I once made out with a boy all night at a fraternity party and then he called me by the wrong name. And, of course, how can we forget: I caught my husband cheating on me during my honeymoon.

The point is that I can ignore or laugh off almost any insult, but for you to tell me I couldn’t understand your situation hurts my feelings. Tell me what happened. Help me understand it. I want to be there for you but I can’t if you won’t let me.

Person2Person

From: Brooke B.

To: Samantha R.

BreastCancerForum.org

I’ve already told you everything.

I was turning forty, so I went for my first mammogram upon the advice of a handsome young pediatrician who once slow-danced with you and made your insides turn to Cream of Wheat. I did not expect to hear bad news, so I was completely unprepared for what I was told.

Breast cancer.

The sort that does not respond to certain treatment options, triple-negative they call it, invasive cancer, the kind that can spread. The kind that can end your life. None of it made sense. It was like a dream, a bad dream. Life was no longer in color, it was black-and-white. I could listen to my kids but couldn’t hear them. I could watch them but couldn’t see. For the first time in my life I could not
feel
my own children. I couldn’t feel anything.

My husband was not aware of any of this. He is a Wall Street executive and was in China for three weeks, departing the day before the mammogram. I scheduled it that way, figured I’d have nothing much to do that day. I had that wrong.

So he was in China while all of this was going on, and would be for several more days. He called twice each day, without fail, and I told him nothing of this. When he is away he takes great comfort in knowing we are safe and comfortable. He calls once in the morning and once at night, and there is simply no room for bad news.

Then I was back in the doctor’s office, and he was explaining why I would still require radiation and chemotherapy even after the lumpectomy, and the good news that the disease was confined to the breast.

“This is very simple, Brooke,” he said. “We can minimize the chances of this disease coming back. The statistics are very clear, I can show you the numbers if you like. You substantially reduce the chances of recurrence if you have the adjuvant therapy, radiation and chemo. If the disease comes back, I cannot cure it. I can manage it, but I cannot make it go away forever. So we need for it
not
to return, and this is the way we maximize our chances of that.”

I had only one question, but I was embarrassed to ask it, so I found something else to say instead.

“Doctor, I made a mistake when we talked before, when I told you I had no family history. That was wrong. I forgot about my grandmother. She had cancer. She died from it when she was in her late fifties.”

The doctor nodded. “What form of cancer did she have?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“I mean, was it breast cancer? Ovarian cancer?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “No one ever told me.” Because no one ever did.

“Were you not born yet when she died?” he asks.

“I was a teenager.”

“You were a teenager when she died,” the doctor said, with a quizzical look, “and no one ever told you what she died from?”

It sounded strange, but it was the truth.

“Do you have any questions about the treatment?” he asked.

I did. Only one, and it was time to ask it. “Am I going to lose my hair?”

“The best therapy options would likely cause you to lose your hair, yes.”

That’s when I began to cry. I said I would go home to think about it, even though the doctor was telling me there was nothing to think about.

“It’s a hard thing to do,” I said.

“It may be a hard thing to do,” he responded, “but it should be an easy decision to make.”

But he’s wrong. It’s not easy at all.

So I sat in the tub again that day. I find myself spending an increasing amount of time there lately. Maybe because I feel a constant chill, and the hot water warms my insides. Or maybe because I feel unclean, as though something is all over me, or inside me, and nothing makes me feel more clean than a hot bath.

Then Scott came home.

He was
so
happy to see me. He told me he felt he’d been gone for years, that he felt he’d missed so much, and I said I felt the same way. He was desperate to squeeze his children and then his wife, in that order and in very different ways, so he did and it felt wonderful to be wanted. We snuck upstairs while the kids were busy with homework and did it in the closet, with me bent across a dresser and him fighting to stifle his moans. He squeezed me tightly the entire time, and I felt it all in a way I hadn’t been able to feel anything while he was gone. And then ten minutes later I was washed up and back downstairs helping with math problems. And it was just like it was supposed to be. It was my perfect life back again. I just
couldn’t
spoil it, not that night. Sometime soon, perhaps, but not that night. It was a night for perfect, and there is no room for cancer in that. So that was ten days ago. And everything is pretty well back to normal. My husband wants me first thing every morning before he dashes to the train, my children need lunches fixed and hair braided and arguments settled, my dog needs walking and tenderness, and offers unwavering affection in return, and when I have time to myself you will find me in the tub, soaking in the hot water, able to feel it now, perhaps not in all of its intensity but certainly more than I could a week ago. I had a lumpectomy and it left behind a scar, nothing huge, nothing my husband has noticed yet. If he does and asks, I will tell him I had a cyst removed. But there is no space for cancer in my life and I don’t want to create any, because it would change the way things are and I don’t want them changed. I have worked my whole life to make everything perfect, and I’m not at all prepared to have cancer come in and screw the whole thing up.

And when I am alone, when I am in the tub, I alternate between crying uncontrollably and feelings of intense joy, because I have what I begged for when this all began. I have yesterday, and most of today. What more could any woman possibly ask for?

Person2Person

From: Samantha R.

To: Brooke B.

BreastCancerForum.org

Well, you were right, I don’t understand.

You’re an intelligent woman, Brooke, no one could construct a life as perfectly in tune with her own wishes as you have without being very smart, but maybe in the same way that I could not see how lucky I was to quickly discover my husband was a scumbag, I don’t think you can grasp how deeply in denial you are. You
cannot
just pretend you don’t have cancer. Life doesn’t work that way. A specialist has told you that you need chemotherapy and radiation; you can’t just overlook that because you wish it were not true. You need to get fully well, you need to do that for your husband and your kids and, most important, yourself.

Do you worry that your husband will not be able to handle this? Do you worry that it will strain your marriage? Do you worry that he won’t love you anymore? Because it almost sounds to me like you do, and if that is the case I can answer your question about what more a woman could want. A woman could want a husband who can handle this.

You have to do this, Brooke. What can I do to help?

Person2Person

From: Brooke B.

To: Samantha R.

BreastCancerForum.org

Help me?

What on earth has given you the impression you can help me? And, while I’m at it, where on earth do you get the nerve to judge me and judge my marriage? I don’t want to remind you that one of us in this conversation has been married a little longer than the other, so it seems if there is marital advice to be given,
I’m
the one who should be giving it.

You don’t know me, and you don’t know anything about my life. The fact that we were born in the same town does not make us alike. I thought perhaps it gave us the ability to understand each other, but it is clear to me you don’t understand me at all.

When I was in middle school, we went on a survival trip in the woods and I sliced my hand on a tree branch. The counselors tried but could not get the bleeding to stop, and so they told me I was going to have to come out of the woods to get it stitched up. But even though I have hardly any tolerance for physical pain, I was not going to be the one who let my team down. I gritted my teeth and doused the cut with alcohol to prevent infection, refused to scream, despite a sting that would have stopped an elephant in its tracks, and stitched it up with a needle and blue thread I found in my backpack. It was not until after we had won the competition that I went to the hospital, where the doctor looked at my hand, laughed, and told me to come back in a week to have the stitches removed.

As for my husband, what you are really asking is: How wonderful can this man be if he can’t handle what is happening to me? And my answer is that I never said he couldn’t handle it. It is
me
who cannot handle it. There is a big difference.

So, I ask you not to reply to this message. If you do, I am not going to read it. I need some time to make up my mind how to proceed and I already know where you stand. I am not telling you I never want to hear from you again, but I am going to have to first get past the way your last message made me feel. When I have done that, I will let you know, and I will tell you then what I have decided to do, and you can think of it whatever you wish. I don’t know how long this will take, all of it is just as new to me as it is to you, so I’ll just be in touch when I’m ready. Until then, be healthy, be strong, and please leave me alone.

Katherine E.

BreastCancerForum.org

Greenwich, Conn

Date joined: 9/30/2011

Hello? Is there anybody out there?

I am in such desperate need of someone to tell me I am all right, that the last three weeks of my life aren’t the beginning of the end of me. I am looking for someone to talk to, to understand. Do they have that here?

My name is Katherine. I just turned forty. And I just finally met the man who was going to change my life, to give me exactly what I am telling you I need now, a partner and a lover and a friend. Someone to take care of me in a way I’ve never been taken care of before. I waited all my life for him, and then a week after he showed up my life imploded. I suppose this is what they mean when they say it wasn’t meant to happen. I hate to think of it that way.

I have worked on Wall Street for twenty years, and without getting into detail I’ll simply say I’ve done very well. Money is not going to be an issue for me, even now. I suppose I should take some comfort from that, but right now
comfortable
just isn’t in my vocabulary. I have never been less comfortable. Never.

In the dog-eat-dog world in which I’ve lived my whole life, I have never allowed myself either of two things that I now regret. The first is weakness. I have not allowed myself any weakness at all. I have always felt that showing any sign of vulnerability would destroy me completely, and as a result I have lived in a rather solitary world. The other is that I’ve never allowed myself to get over the one man who broke my heart. Perhaps the two are related. Perhaps allowing myself to get past him would have opened the door to a new man, a real relationship, and you can’t have one of those without allowing yourself to be vulnerable, and so there we are, back at the beginning again. You can’t have love in your life if you aren’t willing to suffer for it, and so rather than take that risk I have chosen instead to suffer for a man who hasn’t loved me in two decades. It sounds so stupid, which is infuriating, because I am so far from stupid, but this is the way I have lived and that is why in addition to being afraid I am also regretful and angry. There is nothing more debilitating than regret, and no anger worse than that which is directed at yourself. And I have all of that going on now, in addition to cancer.

I guess what I’m saying is I’m a complete mess.

What happened is I turned forty and decided I needed a vacation. That may not sound like much, but I never take a vacation. I have worked practically 365 days a year every year since I got out of business school, because I never want the assholes I work with to feel like they are outworking me.

But this year I turned forty, and I went on a blind date, and I won’t bore you with the details of that except to say it was bad enough that I decided I needed a vacation. I went to the mountains in Colorado and fell in love, first with the mountains and then with a man named Stephen. I met him on a hike and then he took me to dinner. He took me not to a restaurant but to a joint, one where they served burgers rather than filet mignon, and the silverware came wrapped in a paper napkin and you ordered your drinks from a bartender, not a sommelier. Oh, and his dog came with us and waited outside. I loved every second of it. I ate burgers and french fries and coleslaw and pickles, I drank three beers and three Cokes and we played darts and watched baseball on television. When we were done, he said he wanted to show me his favorite place in Aspen and he gave me the leash and we walked, the three of us, down a huge hill toward a park just as the sun was setting over the mountain. We walked through a huge grass field where some kids were kicking a soccer ball and a group of teenagers rode skateboards. We kept going, through the soft grass, talking so easily, without awkwardness or long pauses. It was all so easy, in a way it rarely is when you are with a man you hardly know but are aching to sleep with.