Authors: Shirley Jump
“Don’t stay gone much more. You leave a man alone too long and he tends to forget.”
“You are not reassuring me here. You’re supposed to be my friend. This is not making me feel better.”
Karen laughed. “You’re right. Okay, I’ll go over to Nick’s place and plaster the walls with your picture. Is that better?”
“Yeah. And while you’re at it, get a life-size cardboard cutout of me and leave it on his doorstep.”
The hangers stopped moving again. “A life-size cardboard cutout?”
“Just kidding.” Even I knew that wouldn’t be enough. It was either me or nothing. Nick wanted the whole package. The problem was this package came with way too many ties to make it work, even with a man like him. And even if I could find a way back, his heart clearly had already been lost.
Or, had Nick simply gotten scared again and decided he didn’t want a commitment? Men did that every day, and he had done it once before, albeit four years ago.
I hated being this far away and not knowing.
I said goodbye and hung up the cell phone, then started pacing again. I looked up at the ceiling, but didn’t find any answers there. Instead, I ended up colliding with my mother’s open suitcase, knocking it off the edge of the second double bed and onto the floor, spilling the contents across the dark mauve carpet.
I cursed, then sighed, bent down and began refolding my mother’s clothes and putting them back into the Samsonite. Pajamas, underwear, blouses, slippers—
And a book.
My mother liked to read before she went to sleep, so the book wasn’t a surprise. I flipped it over, giving the cover a quick glance before laying it on top of the pile of clothes. The bright yellow-and-red cover caught my eye again, though, and I glanced at it a second time.
FIGHTING CANCER: MEDICAL AND NATURAL METHODS
My hand froze, fingers tracing over the raised letters in the title.
“Cancer?”
The title didn’t change to a Stephen King or a Nora Roberts novel, just because I pronounced the words aloud.
I opened the book. Dozens of pages had been dog-eared. Passages highlighted. Yellow Post-it Notes stuck along the edges, marked with my mother’s tight scrawl. Notes marked in the margins about things to eat, alternative treatments to try.
And more notes about alternative treatments that had been tried—
And hadn’t worked.
I swallowed hard, betrayal slamming into me with a tidal force, knocking me from my knees and onto the floor. How could she have kept this from me? This wasn’t some simple blood clot, this was a major disease.
A life-threatening, life-
ending
disease.
I scrambled to my feet, clutching the book to my chest, leaving the rest of the clothes where they were, no longer seeing that mess, only this new, much bigger, much worse one.
My steps faltered, knees knocking together. I could barely see to get out of the room, the words on the pages still swirling in my vision as I hurried back to the hospital.
This time to find out the truth, the whole truth—
And nothing less.
“You know.” My mother pushed her dinner tray to the side when I entered her room.
“When were you going to tell me?”
“I wasn’t.”
“What?”
I glanced at her roommate, a woman maybe ten years younger than my mother, who was watching soap operas on her TV with a set of headphones, and lowered my voice anyway. “What do you mean, never? How could you do that to me?”
A heavy sigh escaped her, seeming to weigh down the very air, the room. “I didn’t want you to do exactly what you’re doing right now.”
“And what am I doing right now?” My words were a whispered shout.
“Worrying.”
“I’m your daughter, Ma. That comes with the territory.” I tossed the book onto the foot of her bed, then turned to pace and run my fingers through my hair, still damp, now a mess, like me. Worrying didn’t even begin to describe what I was do
ing, feeling right now. “Did you want to go through this alone? What was your plan? To run down to Mexico and try out some alternative treatment? Head to Canada and score some illegal drugs? Or maybe call up some faith healer and order some holy water over the Internet? Or were you going to actually go home, listen to some real doctors, and take their advice?”
She shook her head. “It’s too late for that.”
“What the hell do you mean, too late for that?”
“I have stage four lung cancer. Inoperable.”
The wind left me in a whoosh, sucked out by a giant vacuum. I rocked on my heels, unsteady now, looking for a compass, finding none, nothing to hang on to that would help me through this, hold me secure as I absorbed news I didn’t want to hear.
The second hand on the wall clock ticked along on its journey, a long skinny line marking time. Beside it hung a calendar, most of May marked off with big black
X’
s, as if the nurse had wanted her patients to see the days pass, one after another. What kind of masochist did that to people?
Here, watch your life pass you by while you lie here, powerless to stop it?
And yet, even as I watched that second hand move, it seemed nothing else in the room moved. Not the air, not my lungs. I forced myself to turn back to my mother. To the truth I still couldn’t hear. “Did you…did you get a second opinion?”
She nodded. “A second. And a third. In two other states at that.”
“In Indiana and Utah,” I finished. My feet started moving again, taking me from one end of her bed to the other, trying to work off the frantic energy now running through my veins, my mind.
Too late
. How could it be?
Every step only seemed to make it worse, to multiply anxiety atop of panic, twisting my stomach into a tight, confused knot. I wanted to run out of the room, scream at her, and hug her, all at the same time.
But mostly I wanted to run. To get back in that minivan and be anywhere but here, to pretend this wasn’t happening, that I hadn’t just found that book, hadn’t just heard the words, “Stage Four. Inoperable.”
That I could go back to my life, to working at Ernie’s and living in limbo with Nick and everything would be as it was. That I wasn’t going to have to grow up really fast in some strange city in one of those square, in-the-middle states I couldn’t have picked out on a map of the country if you paid me.
My gaze strayed to the book, to the reality blared in red across its cover, then to my mother’s face, looking the same as it had last week. Last month. Last year. “But…but that’s impossible. You aren’t that sick.”
“Yet.”
One word, hanging in the air between us, ticking like a bomb. Only no hero was going to rush in and defuse it, no Bruce Willis type saving the day with a clever deadpan delivery and last-minute miracle. “Are you sure?”
She nodded, and averted her gaze, as if even she didn’t want to accept the truth.
And then, my legs went out from beneath me. I collapsed onto her bed, still not believing what I’d heard. The information refused to stick, as if its glue had no staying power. But somewhere deep inside me, the whisper had already begun.
My. Mother. Is. Dying
.
My mother
.
Is dying
.
Dying
.
Our eyes met and held for one long, pointed moment, both of us mute. Inside my chest, the whisper gained in volume, tangling with my heart, and the disbelief I’d held on to so stubbornly began to crumble, broken down by the simplest of all weapons—
Tears.
No, no, no. Not now. Not yet. Not my mother
.
One tear slipped down my cheek, then another, and then I was surging forward, gathering her into my arms, no longer separated by past arguments and frustrations, all of that set aside in the clarity of time’s shortened fuse.
“Oh, God, Ma,” I cried, my heart tearing in two, breaking in a way I had never thought it could break again.
She clutched at me, her hands fisted on my back at first, then one at a time, their tight grips released and her fingers sought strength in my back, in me. She sobbed into my shoulder, her tears mixing with mine, mingling together, shared grief for an invisible thief who was stealing her at the very moment when she had finally found me—and I had found her.
This time I was the one inhaling her scent, memorizing that Chanel No.5, as if I could commit every inch of her to my memory now and hold it for later.
But I
knew
—I already knew from losing my father—that in a year, two, five, there would be holes and gaps that I’d never be able to fill, and that only made me clutch harder, hold tighter, the rage inside building anew at those twin devil diseases of cancer and clots, that were mounting a dual war on the only parent I had left.
I ran a trembling hand along her hair, soothing and calming her sobs, switching roles. I drew in a breath, forcing myself to put my own tears aside.
In some intuitive sense I’d realized a startling twist in our relationship—she needed me to be strong. Now. She’d said as much back in the van earlier. She needed me to take care of her, to take over the wheel. To tell her where to go, what to do, what direction to take from here.
If I broke down, if I became the needy one, my mother would set herself aside and tend to me—because that’s what mothers did.
And that, I knew now, was what Rosemary Delaney had done, in her own way for me for the past thirty-six years. It may not have been the way I would have dreamed a mother should be. Or the way my childhood friend Lisa Rindell’s mother had parented her, with Oreo cookies and handmade jumpers.
But it had been the best way my mother knew how to do it, and I hadn’t ended up in jail or addicted to meth, so clearly it hadn’t been all bad.
Now, it was her turn, and I had damned well better suck it up and find a way to put on a smile, even as everything within me fell apart, piece by shattered piece, as it lost the woman who had come to mean more than I ever realized.
My mother is dying.
And I had to learn how to deal. Immediately.
I swiped the tears off my face before drawing back and facing her. “It’ll be okay, Ma, we’re going to fight this.”
She shook her head, defeat heavy in her eyes, her shoulders. “There’s not much we can do.”
“There’s
plenty
.” I didn’t know whether or not that was
true, but did know there were chapters of that book she had yet to dog-ear. “There are other books, other doctors.”
Her face took on the stern, don’t-argue-with-me Rosemary look. “Hilary, the doctors told me—”
“Ma,” I said, cutting her off, not wanting to hear her death sentence, not again, not wanting to hear her give up. I only had so much strength in me right now. “I don’t give a damn what the other doctors told you. Like I said, there are other doctors. Besides, since when have I ever listened to anyone? Maybe it’s time you took a cue from me.” I planted my hands on either side of her hips and reflected that Rosemary look right back at her. “We are not giving up. Not now. And I am not letting you give up.”
A smile took over her face, but it barely reached her eyes. And when she spoke, I still heard tears. “You’re stubborn, you know that?”
I had to swallow so I wouldn’t cry, because in her face, and in those words, I saw the reflection of everything I thought had driven me crazy about my mother. And now I realized that was the very thing we needed for the days ahead.
Stubbornness. Who’d have thought that was exactly the key I’d be looking for to drive
this
bus forward?
“Well, who the hell do you think I inherited that trait from?” I sucked in another breath, and with it, one more ounce of strength. “We are going to fight this together, Ma.”
“Together?” She was asking for a promise.
For a commitment. For me to be there for the long, tough haul ahead. For me, the undependable one to finally step up to the plate, and not let go of the bat when she needed me most.
I smiled and I nodded, even though it hurt my face to be
brave. “Of course. You didn’t think you’d get rid of me that easily, did you? Not after all these miles.”
Then I drew her into my arms again and hugged her very, very tight.
So that my tears could fall behind her back.
“Why did the blonde get fired from her job at the pharmacy?”
“I give up,” my mother said.
“You can’t give up. It’s not allowed. You have to make an educated guess.”
“Isn’t that an oxymoron when you’re telling dumb-blonde jokes?”
“Probably. Now come on, guess.”
My mother thought a minute, her mood considerably brighter than when I’d arrived that morning. She’d been picking at her breakfast, barely eating any of the bland oatmeal and plain toast she’d ordered from the hospital cafeteria. I’d smuggled in a cheesecake muffin and a grande mocha with caramel from Starbucks, then sat down with the joke book, determined to get her laughing. It had taken one chicken crossing the road, two ducks in a bar and three monkey jokes before she’d found her good humor.
“Okay,” Ma said, a twinkle in her eye. “She was fired because she kept trying to sell the Q-tips as rectal thermometers.”
“Ma!” I covered my mouth to keep my laughter from waking her roommate, whose biggest problem seemed to be narcolepsy. “I cannot believe
you
said that. You are bad.”
“Hey, it’s all your influence.”
I put up my hands. “I take no blame for that. It’s your own twisted mind. But I have to admit that was a pretty good one.” I looked down at the book. “Okay here’s what it says. The blonde was fired from her job at the pharmacy for failing to print the labels on the prescriptions. ‘Helloo,’ she argued,” I said in a high-pitched goofy voice, putting on the full blonde act, ‘“The bottles didn’t fit in the typewriter.’”
My mother’s laughter rang like Christmas bells. “Oh, Hilary, that one was even worse and much tackier. But so, so funny. It’s a good thing you’re a blonde.”
“Hey, who better to tell blonde jokes?” I grinned. “Now, do you want to know how to thin your thighs, rid yourself of those pesky wrinkles?” I shuffled through the magazines beside me, reading the blaring headlines and their impossible promises aloud. “Or how to get men drooling over your amazing fashion sense?”
“Hmm,” Ma said, putting a finger to her lips, thinking it over, “I choose how to get the men drooling, because my fashion sense could use a little work.”
“What, you’re thinking of giving up the suits? The pumps?”
“Maybe it’s about time. I am retired, after all. Aren’t I supposed to be going around in polyester pants and a sun visor?”
“Only if you’ve got the matching bowling shoes.” I flipped through the first magazine, then turned it around, showing her pages of too-thin models in flouncy skirts with high-heeled boots, cowl-neck sweaters and hair that no one had in real life. “There you go. Fashion that attracts a man.”
My mother looked down at her diamond-print hospital gown. “And I take it this is the kind that attracts frogs instead of Prince Charmings?”
“Exactly.” I gestured at my own less-than-runway-worthy attire. “Though I can’t talk. I could pretty much pass for homeless.” Nick had never complained, I thought.
That brought back a pang. He still hadn’t called. I’d stopped calling him, because I couldn’t stand the ringing, the cheery voice mail. The no Nick on the other end.
And facing the fact that I’d probably lost the last great guy I’d ever meet. Right now, though, I was dealing with a lot, and trying to figure out the mess between Nick and I was one thing too many.
“Then we’ll have to go shopping together,” my mother said. “Make a day of it, take the train to Washington Center, grab some lunch in Boston.”
“That would be…interesting. You and me, shopping. We don’t exactly have the same taste, Ma.”
“What, you can drive all the way across the United States with me but you’re afraid to tackle a department store?”
I grinned, then tossed the magazine to the side. “All right. I’ll take your shopping challenge and raise you a shoe department. We’ll find some man-hunting-worthy attire for you, something more professional for me—”
“Something befitting a budding restaurant entrepreneur—”
“I like the sound of that,” I said, and as I did, I realized that I was excited about the possibility of owning my own restaurant. About a future that involved…dare I think it…responsibility. Challenges. Self-motivation. Big steps for a girl like me. “And after that, we’ll both get some really killer shoes that are
not
pumps.”
“I happen to like my pumps.”
“Ma, they are the ugliest shoes ever created by God or man, and you need something cute and more appropriate for a traveling woman such as yourself. Some kind of flats with—” I waved my hand “—I don’t know, ornamentation.” I grabbed one of the magazines, flipped the pages until I found a picture that summed up what I meant. “Like those. They have a cute bow and everything.”
“Those women have dainty feet. I have squat Fred Flintstone feet.”
“You are being uncooperative.” I wagged a finger at her. “That is not part of the plan.”
“And you are being very bossy. Like a mother.”
I sat back and laughed. “I am, aren’t I?”
“Yeah.” A smile stole across my mother’s face, one I’d never seen before. “I think you’re going to make a wonderful mother someday, Hilary. If you choose to have children of your own.”
“Oh, I don’t know…” But as my voice trailed off, I found the thought coming to my mind, as if all along that biological clock had been waiting for something to turn it on. Some trigger to open it up, take it out of the box, put it on the shelf and start it going.
Could I parent a child?
Could I see myself down the road, married to Nick, the two of us with a little girl? A little boy? Living in a three-bedroom Cape with the white picket fence that Nick wanted, wrapped around all of that?
“You really think I could be a mom?”
“Yeah,” Ma said. “I really do.”
Of all the people who would think that about me, my
mother ranked last on the list. I’d always thought she considered me to be the most irresponsible person in the world. In fact, she’d told me exactly that after she’d left Reginald with Nick and me for the weekend. The pig had gotten lost for three hours because we’d neglected to leash him when he’d gone outside for a potty break.
We hadn’t expected him to make a break for it. But hey, if I’d been the pig, maybe I would have run, too.
Either way, ever since the toll booth in Massachusetts, Sally in Sandusky, Carla and Louie and their weird hot-dog casserole, and the odd way the hospital rooms seemed to bring us closer together than the cramped interior of a Mustang could, my mother had begun to see me in a different light.
A grown-up light. One with different possibilities for my future, different paths than I’d been taking.
And I suppose I’d begun to see myself in that light, too. So I heard that clock ticking and for the first time considered answering it.
“Are you going to hang around to be a grandma if I decide to have children?” Hope and a future hung in that statement, a white-picket-fence future I still wasn’t sure I wanted, but if it made my mother try harder, made her listen to her doctors, then I’d give that fence a little more thought, too. “Somebody’s going to have to tell me how to raise them.”
She smirked and eyed me, knowing full well I’d just thrown a trump card on the table, and the Rosemary Delaney I knew came back. “I’ll do my best.”
“That’s all I ask, Ma.” I gave her a smile. “That’s all I ask.”
Dr. Gifford rapped lightly on Ma’s door, then entered the room with the same slightly hunched, limited-presence gait
as before. He gave each of us a nod. “Good afternoon. How are you feeling, Mrs. Delaney?”
Ma glanced at me. “Much better. Thank you.”
“Glad to hear it. We’ll let you go home tomorrow. Everything looks good—filter’s working as we planned.”
“She’s safe to travel?” I asked.
He nodded. “Safe as can be. Just take it easy going back to Massachusetts. Don’t push it. And check in with your primary care physician when you get there.” He gave my mother a smile, then patted her knee. “I’ll see you tomorrow before you leave.”
Then he was gone, the door shutting with a soft whoosh behind him.
“I bet you’ll be glad to get back home.” I picked up a magazine, flipping through it for another item that might tickle my mother’s funny bone. I was glad we were returning to Massachusetts, to a state where I knew doctors and hospitals were as plentiful as skyscrapers.
“Hilary, I want us to keep going.”
I paused, my finger running down the table of contents, my brain caught up in capital-lettered titles and cleverly written paragraphs. “What did you say?”
“I said I want to keep going. I want to finish our trip.”
“Ma, I understood why you said this back in Indiana. That was you being stubborn, wanting to pretend nothing was wrong, you were fine, all that. But now I know what’s going on with you. And we both know it’s really best if you go back home. For one, you’ve just had surgery and for another, you have…other things to deal with.” I didn’t want to come right out and say she had a battle with Death to fight, but we both could hear the implication left hanging in the air.
One I hadn’t quite completely accepted yet, as much as I tried. It still didn’t seem real, concrete. I’d deal with it in chunks, a little at a time.
Ma shook her head. “We need to keep going. I need to get to California.” She put up a hand, cutting off my objection before I could voice it. “Whether or not you want to face it, Hilary, I
am
dying. I may have a month, a year, two years. Hell, maybe God will take pity on me and give me five. But either way, I don’t have much time left.”
“Ma, no—”
“Don’t argue with me. I can’t—” She bit her lip and tears sprang to her eyes, choked in her voice. “I can’t do this if you argue with me.”
I didn’t want to cry. I had vowed to be strong, to be the one she could rely on, the rock my mother stood upon. But now, as she drove home the reality of her mortality, and asked the impossible of me, the sand shifted beneath my feet again, and I found my strength crumbling.
“Ma…” I didn’t finish the sentence, I didn’t argue, and I didn’t let the tears get any farther than the back of my eyes.
“Take me to the Pacific, Hilary. Let me dip my toes in the water. I did that with the Atlantic, and I’ve always wanted to do it with the ocean on the other side of the country. That was a dream your father and I had, all our lives. That’s all I want. Because—” And then it was her turn to cut off her words, to turn away, and swipe at her face.
“Oh, damn it, Ma. We can’t keep this up or the stupid hospital will run out of tissues,” I said, trying to inject a joke, some distance from all this heaviness, but it got all tangled in a sob.
Ma let out a half-laugh, half-sob and dispensed tissues to each
of us, cheap scratchy slips of paper that did little more than blot the damp from our faces. After we’d cleaned up the worst of the damage, she met my gaze. “Will you take me? Please?”
“Why? Why has this trip been so important? It had nothing to do with Grandma’s china cup collection and love seat, did it?”
“No.” She shifted against her pillows, adjusted her blanket. Stalling. I’d have never thought that the woman who had argued cases that had been splashed on the front page of the
Boston Globe
would avoid the subject.
But then again, arguing for a defendant in front of a judge wasn’t about telling a personal truth. I realized then that my mother was more like me than I’d thought. She may have been the Bulldog in the courtroom but when it came to getting personal, she ran from the emotional flames as easily as I had.
So I waited. She was stuck in that hospital bed. She wasn’t going anywhere. And neither was I.
“I want to go to San Francisco because of your father.”
“Did Dad always want to see the Pacific Ocean? The Golden Gate Bridge or something?”
She laughed. “He didn’t give two figs about the Pacific Ocean or any particular place. All he ever wanted to do was experience life. Or at least, that’s what he used to want, before…” She grabbed another of those crappy tissues, but didn’t use it. “Before we lost the baby. Your father changed after that.”
“Changed? But I’ve seen videos of Dad before I was born, and when I was a little girl. I don’t remember him changing. I never saw…the trigger.” Everything my mother kept mentioning about change had never been some big moment in my life. All those days in those home movies seemed the same
to me. My father, always jovial, always the jokester, mugging for the camera, my mother shying away, waving off my father’s attempts to get her face on screen. My father’s one-liner filled narrations of Christmas, Easter, summer vacations, first in jerky eight-millimeter, then, later, in the smoother, less grainy VHS format.
I’d searched my memory a hundred times but never seen a detour, a door opening down the dark path my father had finally chosen. No big sign that pointed to a change in him, a different man than the laughing, happy one immortalized in life-size cardboard back in my mother’s motel room.
Just a gradual decline, like a shade drawing closed, a little at a time, so slow you almost couldn’t tell the light was gone until everything went dark.
“There was never anything on the surface, Hilary. If there was one thing your father was good at, it was keeping that part of him hidden.”
“Even you didn’t know?”
My mother studied the blanket, her neat, perfect nails. “No. I never saw any of it coming.”
That
was what I was most afraid of in committing to Nick. That was the elephant in the room I kept circling and avoiding. If things changed with him, with me, with us…and I never even realized it? What if I just blithely went along, never seeing his sadness, his dissatisfaction, until one day when he either walked out or ended it all with a bullet?
If I maintained the status quo, kept the boat we were on from changing course, then maybe Nick and I would never take the detours my parents had. Because I couldn’t bear that. Not a second time.
If the great Rosemary Delaney had missed all the billboards and road signs, what made me think I’d be any better of a navigator in my marriage?
The magazines beside me no longer seemed cheery and happy. I set their too-bright, too-fake headlines on the floor and slid them beneath the heater with my toe. “He left us both in the dark, didn’t he?”