“Good job,” says Ruth. As if this—the successful maneuvering of a metal contraption—is worthy of praise.
“Where did you find this guy, anyway?” Clara asks.
Their voices are deadened in the tiny vestibule. As soon as the words emerge, they are snuffed out. No echo, no reverberation. No sound at all.
“The
Today
show,” says Ruth.
“The
Today
show! Since when do you—”
“I’ve had a lot of time to lie in bed.”
A second buzzer sounds, and Clara pushes open the office door. The doctor’s waiting room is furnished in a soothing blend of earth tones. An enormous fish tank is built into the far wall. The artificial aqua-blue water appears to be a distant ocean, and all these people—sick people, waiting—are stranded on the sandy shore of some interior decorator’s idea of peace. Plants are everywhere, hanging from baskets by the windows, in terra-cotta pots in the corners. Low-maintenance plants. No African violets for this holistic oncologist. No ferns. Nothing that will die easily. A huge, hardy rubber plant spills out from behind a bald girl in her twenties.
“Can I help you?”
“Ruth Dunne, to see Dr. Zamitsky,” Clara says quietly. They’re on the Upper West Side, after all. Someone here will know the name, though it’s possible, in this environment, that no one will care.
Pages and pages of forms to fill out. Paperwork. Clara wheels Ruth to an unoccupied corner of the office and brings her a months old copy of
Vogue
on which to balance the forms as she checks off various boxes.
“Crazy,” says Ruth, as she quickly runs down the list. “Diabetes, heart attack, stroke, high blood pressure…no, no, no.” She jabs her pen against the box next to cancer. “Such a stupid thing,” she says. “Nothing’s ever been wrong with me. I’ve never even been in the hospital, except to have you two girls—and now this.”
Ruth’s eyes are watery from the cold. The tip of her nose is bright pink. She pulls off her fur hat, and beneath it is a silk scarf wrapped elegantly around her head. She wears no makeup, her bare face still surprisingly youthful. Ruth has always looked a decade younger than she is, and even now, even with no hair and pale, almost transparent skin, she is like a china doll. Soft and lovely and breakable.
“At least it got you here.” She turns to Clara. She reaches over and takes Clara’s hand. Her own hands are warm and dry. “Nothing short of this would have gotten you home, would it?”
Clara doesn’t answer. Her mother’s touch—the very fact of her hand encased in Ruth’s—is almost more than she can bear. Ruth has been inching toward this—pushing Clara toward a greater intimacy—for the last few days.
So, darling, tell me about your life. Not just the broad outline; tell me what it’s really like. Your days—what do you do? How do you feel?
Ruth wants to know everything about the last fourteen years, it seems.
And your daughter? I would give anything
—here she held Clara’s gaze until Clara finally looked away—
I would give anything to meet her.
Clara’s mere presence, unlikely to begin with, is no longer enough. Her mother wants more of her. And now the hand. Foreign. The skin thin and dusty. Clara closes her eyes for a moment, tries to pretend that the hand is Jonathan’s. Or Sam’s. But it isn’t working. She pulls away.
“Oh, Clara. Please don’t,” Ruth says.
“I can’t—I can’t help it.”
Clara starts to cry. Despite everything, despite every cell in her body struggling mightily to keep it together, she’s losing it. Her eyes are flooded—the tears are almost horizontal. She swipes at her cheeks with the sleeve of her sweater. She had sworn to herself that she wasn’t going to let her mother see a single feeling. Not rage, not grief, not loss, not a fleeting moment of tenderness. Fourteen years. It’s just goddamned unacceptable.
In the upholstered chair across from them, a middle-aged woman in a velour sweat suit is thumbing through a copy of
People
magazine. She resolutely keeps her gaze on the magazine, but her brow creases in sympathy. She thinks Clara’s crying because her mother is ill. Because they’re at the last stop on the cancer train, the office of the
Today
show doctor.
“You hate me,” says Ruth.
“It’s not that,” Clara says, her breath ragged. And it’s true. She doesn’t hate her mother. Not exactly. There may have been a time, a stretch of months or even years—but even then, inside the hate there was something else. Something she didn’t want to look at or think about. A bright glowing thing—a core of softness. Clara never allowed herself near it. She had worked so hard to disconnect. To release herself from the bondage of Ruth. But now it isn’t so easy. Ruth is in front of her: her mother—always her mother, forever her mother. Incandescent, beautiful, fragile, gravely ill. Ruth’s smell hasn’t changed in fourteen years, as if the mingled scents of the darkroom—the developer, stop bath, and fixer—have become a part of her.
Clara breathes her in. Tries to exhale her out. Tries to hold on to herself. Without even realizing it, she is gripping the sides of her chair.
“Mrs. Dunne?” A nurse looks around the waiting room. “Ruth Dunne?”
A few startled looks. An older man in a dark overcoat. The bald girl in her twenties. Ruth’s name may be known, but physically she is anonymous. She is rare among photographers for never—not ever, not even once—having taken a self-portrait. It is Clara whose face is known. As she pushes Ruth’s wheelchair through the waiting room, she keeps her head down. No one would think it, anyway. She has lost her girlhood face, along with its Ruth-like softness. No one will ever again look twice at her in confused recognition. Samantha is the one. The uncanny likeness passed down from one generation to the next.
My dear, you’re the spitting image of that girl in Ruth Dunne’s early photographs. The daughter. What was her name?
Not Sammy. She can’t think about Sammy now.
The nurse leaves them in an examining room. What is there to examine? The X-rays Ruth has brought with her, large manila envelopes tucked into an aqua blue Metropolitan Museum shopping bag, should tell the whole story. Clara looks around the small, brightly lit space. She’s never been good at small talk, but all she wants to do right now is keep the conversation with Ruth skimming along the surface of things. She searches for a subject. The weather—
Cold out there, isn’t it?
—the news—
Did you read about those two guys who were arrested at JFK?
Anything to keep Ruth from pushing harder, probing deeper.
But there’s nothing much to see, nothing to distract. No piles of well-worn magazines in here, no hardy plants, no striped neon fish swimming madly around faux-coral reefs. Only a life-sized diagram, tacked to the wall, of the human body. An acupuncture chart. In the sinew, the muscle, the nerve endings from the crown of the head to the tips of the toes, hundreds of small red dots are shown, each one illustrating a particular pressure point. Crisscrossed lines run throughout the diagram, linking one pressure point to the next and the next—patterns of energy. The arm bone is connected to the leg bone after all.
“So tell me about seeing this guy on TV,” Clara finally says, filling the silence. The low buzzing of the fluorescent light overhead could drive a person crazy.
Ruth wraps the blanket around her shoulders, even though the room is already warm, the clanging radiator emitting a dry oppressive heat.
“It wasn’t so much Dr. Zamitsky as some of his patients,” she says. “He cured one woman of pancreatic cancer, using green tea colonics. And another woman, with the same kind of lung cancer as me—she’s been in remission for six years now—he sent her to Mexico, where they use a special mud—”
“Special mud?” Clara repeats.
“They heat it up, like a compress,” says Ruth.
Clara tries to keep her face expressionless. What does she know? Green tea. Special mud. Anything is possible. Particularly when it comes to Ruth, who has spent her whole life defying the odds.
A knock on the door, and then immediately the door opens, and Abraham Zamitsky, M.D., walks into the examining room. He’s holding Ruth’s paperwork in his left hand, his right hand outstretched.
“Mrs. Dunne,” he says.
“Ms.,” Ruth says faintly.
Clara can’t tell: Is Ruth insulted that the doctor clearly has no idea who she is? To him, she’s just another Upper West Side lady with cancer, or perhaps a housewife from Larchmont who has driven into the city after seeing him on TV. He’s the famous one in this room. Illness, the great leveler.
“This is my daughter Clara,” says Ruth. As if Clara is not thirty-two years old. As if she weren’t about to introduce herself.
Zamitsky shakes Clara’s hand. She’s not sure what she had been expecting. She’s surprised by how young he is. In her mind, a holistic oncologist would look something like Abbie Hoffman, with a curly mane of hair, a bushy beard, maybe an amulet strung on a leather cord around his neck. But Zamitsky is maybe thirtyish, wearing a good suit. He’s bald—his head shaved in sympathy for his patients. His brown eyes are clear and limpid, radiating good healthy habits. He probably cleanses himself with green tea and takes Mexican mud compresses preventatively.
He gives Ruth’s chart a quick read.
“I see you’ve been to Dr. Abelow,” he says. “Ah, and Dr. Krellenstein.” He reads farther. “And Dr. Chang.”
Ruth watches him carefully. Clara remembers this look. Her mother’s eyes—large, unblinking, as dark and impenetrable as a telephoto lens—taking everything in, processing it with her quick, visual intelligence.
“I brought my X-rays,” Ruth says.
“Let’s have a look,” says Zamitsky.
He pulls the X-rays from their manila sleeves and attaches them with clips to an illuminated board. Six films in all—two of each lung, and two of another part of the body—liver? Spleen? Clara isn’t sure.
Zamitksy stops in front of each image and examines it closely, as if it were hanging on the wall of a gallery. Clara can’t possibly tell, looking at the X-rays, where the malignancies are located. That shadow on the far left? The white swirly material in the center? They look like the night sky, seen through a telescope. Bits of cosmic matter. The images are nothing more than abstract harmless shapes, if one hasn’t been taught how to read them.
“Ah,” Zamitsky says, tapping the last of the six films with the eraser end of his pencil. “And has Dr. Chang discussed these with you, Mrs. Dunne?”
“No,” says Ruth. “Dr. Chang’s office just received them from radiology yesterday, and I asked for them to be messengered directly to me.”
“Why is that?” Zamitsky raises an eyebrow.
“I don’t feel comfortable with Dr. Chang,” says Ruth. “His receptionist was rude to me, and I…”
She falters. And in the space left where her words trail off, Clara knows that the reason Ruth has left Dr. Chang—as she has left the doctors before him—is that he’s not telling her any news she wants to hear.
Zamitsky continues to tap the X-ray on the far right with his pencil.
“Here’s our problem, Ms. Dunne.” He waves the pencil around a wide area on the film, which looks grainy to Clara, full of hundreds of tiny specks. An aberration. An image left too long in the developer, breaking apart.
“What are we looking at?” Ruth asks.
“Your brain,” says Zamitsky.
Ruth sits up straighter in her wheelchair.
“Can you see all these pinpoints in this area here?”
Ruth stares at the X-ray, uncomprehending.
“I don’t see—”
Zamitsky points with his pencil. “They’re hard to see, if you’re not used to it; they’re very small, like grains of sand.”
She still looks a bit puzzled, her head cocked to one side. Clara sees her try to swallow.
“What are they?” Ruth asks.
Zamitsky turns off the light, plunging the films into darkness. They are now blank. The images disappear. As if Ruth can’t be hurt by what she can no longer see. Zamitksy sits on the step leading to the examination table, so he is eye level with Ruth.
“They’re tumors,” he begins. “Very, very small tumors.”
“Small is good,” Ruth says. “Right? I mean, small is better than big?”
Zamitsky sighs. “I wish I could tell you that it matters, in this case. But what we’re seeing here is that your primary cancer in the lung has metastasized to your brain. This is what usually happens, when—”
“Usually!” Ruth coughs from the effort. “I’m not interested in usually, Dr. Zamitsky. What can you do for me?”
“I’m sorry,” he says. How many times a day does he have to do this? How often is he in the position of telling a patient there is no hope—that the illness has progressed beyond the miracle cures of green tea colonics and Mexican mud? And how does he relieve himself of that burden at the end of each day? He must be a marathon runner. Or maybe he smokes a lot of high-grade medical pot. He must have some way of escaping.
“But what about that woman you treated?” Ruth says. “The one who had lung cancer—”
“It was caught earlier.” Zamitsky shakes his head. Clara’s beginning to think he regrets having gone on national television. “She was extremely, unusually lucky.”
Clara sees the fight go out of her mother’s body, almost as if a shadow—the warrior part of Ruth that has served her so well—steps away from Ruth’s physical self and leaves the room. Ruth’s shoulders cave. She slumps down in her wheelchair. Her face falls, aging in an instant.