“I have. I’ve seen three doctors, and they all say it’s the only way. To get rid of the cancer before it can spread.”
I sat down on the bed, my body so heavy my legs couldn’t support it anymore. But I knew that I couldn’t let on that I was terrified, that fear was blooming red, the missing mums blossoming in my chest, in my throat.
“Maybe they’re wrong,” I said.
She sat down next to me on the bed. She closed her eyes, tears escaping through her closed eyelids. She slipped the strap of her slip down over her shoulder, revealing her right breast. She reached for my hand and pulled it to her flesh. Her skin was hot in my hands, and I wondered if this is what cancer felt like, like a child’s feverish cheek. She guided my hand across her breast, searching, and then she stopped and pressed my fingers with hers.
It felt like one of the children’s marbles. And for a single, deluded moment, I pictured it, a marbled, amber cat’s-eye, somehow lost beneath her skin. Misplaced. That I needed only to pluck it from her, return it to the purple velvet Crown Royal bag where Johnny kept his marble collection.
Our fingers lingered there.
“It’s just the one?” I asked softly, trying to call up my rational, logical self. “If it’s just the one, then why are they operating on both sides?”
“It can spread,” she said. “But if they take both of them, then there is nowhere for it to go. It’s preventative, I guess.” She lowered her hand, but I left mine there, touching that searing skin. And then I pulled her in close to me, kissing her, trying so hard to comfort her. To make this okay.
“What does Ted say?” I asked, his name bitter in my mouth.
She shook her head. “He won’t talk about it. He doesn’t say a word. He’s drinking more, of course. One night he called the doctor, the first one I saw, and called him a butcher. Told him he wasn’t going to let him mutilate his wife.”
I laughed out loud, not because of the humor but because it was so ridiculously ironic. This man, this monster who had struck his own wife, calling a doctor, a healer, a butcher.
She laughed sadly too. And I put my chin on top of her head.
“I’m home,” I said. “It’s going to be okay.”
The surgery was scheduled for a Tuesday morning that September. The older children were in school, and I offered to watch Rose. Ted and Eva drove together, and I could see her watching me in the side view mirror. I should have been going with her. I should have been there with her, not Ted with his silence, with his
violence
.
“Come here, Rosie,” I said, scooping her up. She was crying. She only knew that her mother and father were leaving her behind, but she cried as though she knew the reason behind their departure. Her entire body convulsed with her sobbing.
“How would you like to do something really, really special today?” I asked.
She sniffed deeply, loudly, wiping her runny nose with her sleeve.
“Would you like to get your mama some apples?” I asked, and she nodded.
The next town over from Hollyville was Wilmington, where the claim to fame was the Baldwin apple. There was even a monument there on Chestnut Street, a seven-foot-tall granite slab with a perfect, granite Baldwin apple perched at the top. The orchard where we’d taken the Girl Scouts, where we’d stolen apples and been chased down by that fat farmer, had Baldwin apples. They were tart and hard and
hardy,
able to last through the entire harsh winter without spoiling, though they were more difficult to come by now, only a few orchards still growing them. They were winter apples, beautiful red apples that ripened later in the season, their best flavor coming when nothing else was growing, when the rest of the crops were dormant. I’d seen the orchards in winter, the barren, white landscape dotted with the surprising bursts of scarlet.
It was this I tried to think of as I pushed Rosie in her stroller the two miles to the farm stand where I liked to buy my eggs and vegetables. That beauty can exist even in a barren landscape.
The old woman who ran the stand was weathered and grumpy, but she had the best sweet corn in the summer and the best butternut squash in the fall. I perused the bins of gourds and the paper bags of apples, plucking a ripe nectarine from a pile and handing it to Rosie in her stroller. She bit into it, and juice dripped down her chin.
“I need some Baldwins too,” I said to the woman. She was perched on a hard wooden stool, counting her money.
“No Baldwins,” she said.
“Not ready yet?”
“Not till later in the season. October at the earliest.”
“Oh,” I said. I should have known this. Last winter Eva had made ten pies for the Girl Scout bake sale, but that had been in December. Right before Christmas. But I couldn’t wait until Christmas. I needed something to give her now. Something that would be a bright spot in this dark time. Something sweet.
“I got some nice Macintosh,” she said. “Some Paula Reds?” She was clearly getting impatient with me. But I was overwhelmed by disappointment. It was such a simple wish.
Apples
. Just a stupid bag of apples. I knew it was crazy, but the denial of such a small request seemed especially egregious.
We walked all the way back home without anything, and I wept. I wept openly but soundlessly, Rosie sitting obliviously in the stroller. She finished her nectarine about halfway there, and I tossed the pit into the woods along the side of the road.
Eva was in the hospital for a whole week, but I didn’t visit. I couldn’t bring myself to see her in a hospital bed; I knew that my grief and worry would overwhelm me at the hospital, and this was not a chance I could take. How could I possibly explain the way the thought of losing her crippled me? How could I justify the collapse of my heart at the mere thought of her leaving? And so instead, I called her every day, and I sent flowers from our garden with Ted. Ted’s sister, Mary, arrived again to take care of their children, and I waited for Eva to come home. In that single week, the weather grew cold, the leaves fell from the trees; everything died. It was as though the very earth were mourning Eva’s absence along with me.
Finally, Ted pulled up one morning and rushed around to the other side of the car to open the door. Eva emerged and immediately looked over her shoulder, as if she expected me to be there, as I was, watching from my front window. It was Saturday. Everyone was home. And so while the only thing I wanted was to go to her, to hold her, to make sure she was okay, I couldn’t.
At around noon, Ted appeared again outside with a rake and started cleaning up the leaves in the front yard. The children were playing outside, destroying every pile he managed to make. Calder played with them, rolling around in all that glorious muck. I took the coffee cake I’d baked, the same coffee cake I’d brought her when she first moved in, and hollered down the basement stairwell to Frankie that I’d be right back.
He was busy restoring an old oak dressing table he’d found discarded outside a house in Cambridge. He planned to give it to Francesca for her tenth birthday. The fumes from the paint thinner were strong, dizzying.
“Where are you going?” he hollered up.
“Over to the Wilsons’,” I said.“Eva’s home from the hospital.”
Frankie and I hadn’t talked much about Eva’s surgery. When he asked, I’d simply told him it was female troubles, and that had sufficiently silenced him. And if he’d sensed my unease, he didn’t let on. That was the good thing about Frankie’s projects; they tended to consume him, blinding him to everything else going on around him: that and the stash of wine I knew he helped himself to in the basement while he was working.
The children were also oblivious. The Wilson children had been told that Eva was going to visit her father in Oregon, and so I had told my girls the same. Hannah Flannigan stepped in to help me lead the Girl Scout meetings. I offered Hannah only enough information for her to understand that I would need help while Eva recovered.
“My mother had a complete hysterectomy last year,” she had said, nodding her bottle-blond head, hoping, I think, that I might confirm or deny her suspicions that Eva had undergone a similar procedure. Hannah was a terrible gossip. It was from Hannah that I had learned that our school principal was having an affair with his secretary; that the old man from down the street had once worked for the CIA; and that Lisa Miller, one of our Scouts, had a different father from the rest of her siblings. Francesca and Penny, Hannah’s eldest daughter, were in the same class, but Francesca steered clear of her.
“Penny’s a big fat liar,” Francesca said. “She said she’s getting a pony for her birthday, and that she’s related to Jackie Kennedy.”
I tolerated Hannah only because I truly needed her help. With five Brownies and ten Girl Scouts and without Eva, I would have taken any help I could get. I couldn’t wait until Eva was well again and I could send Hannah back to where she came from.
I walked across the street to the Wilsons’ house, and Ted stopped raking. “How is she?” I asked.
It was brisk out, and his face was red. He was wearing one of those hats that hunters wear, the ones with the earflaps. He didn’t have any gloves on, and I noticed that his meaty hands were chapped. “She’ll be fine,” he said. “You shouldn’t stay long though. The doctor says she needs her rest.”
Ever since the day we got the flat tire, Ted hadn’t been able to look me in the eye. He was always shifty, but now his avoidance of me was pronounced. He must have known that I knew what he’d done to her, that Eva had confided in me. This made me feel both satisfied and terrified. He needed to know that what he had done to her was not a precious little secret Eva would keep for him, but I also feared that he might see my knowledge as a threat and somehow keep me from seeing her, that he could, and
would,
wield his power to keep us apart. Ted was a slippery slope, and I was just trying to keep my footing.
“I brought her some cake,” I said stupidly. “Is she up to eating?”
Ted shrugged and started raking again. I took this as my cue to disappear into his house.
Eva was not in her bedroom as I had expected. Instead she was sitting at the kitchen table in her nightgown, smoking a cigarette and looking at a magazine. She lifted her head when I came in, and her face crumpled when she saw me. I went to her, put the coffee cake down, and sat in the seat next to her, grasping her free hand. She snubbed the cigarette out and leaned into me.
The movie magazine was open to a picture of Brigitte Bardot. She laughed, pointing at the picture. “Liam used to say that I reminded him of her,” she said. “I always thought it was so silly. Maybe before she was blond, but not now.” She looked up at me, up from the photograph. In the picture, Bardot was nearly nude, lying across the empty expanse of a bed, wearing only a sheet.
Eva’s nightgown was sheer, and through the bodice, I could see her bandages.
“Does it hurt much?” I asked.
“It hurts,” she said, nodding, tears rolling down her cheeks.
“You’re still beautiful,” I said, trying so hard to make her feel better but feeling useless.
She shook her head violently. “It’s not even about the way I look. It’s about who I was. I look in the mirror, and I don’t know this body. I feel like someone stole something from me.”
It was my turn to shake my head, but my denial was futile, because it was true. She was right; it was not her body anymore. She was still beautiful. Still Eva. But it
was
as though they had removed something else, something elemental, with their scalpels.
“But they got the cancer?” I asked, the word like a tumor in my mouth.
She nodded. “They got everything.”
But still, at night, I dreamed of losing Eva. I dreamed of all the ways she could be taken from me, all the ways she could be removed from my life. It was as though I knew, through this first whispery brush with possible disaster, that what we had was precarious. When I recollect that fall, all I can remember is the feeling of imminent catastrophe. Even Khrushchev and Kennedy’s standoff that October, the threat of nuclear annihilation, felt only like a loud and absurd reminder that everything I had, everything I
loved,
was precious and fragile. That everything I cared about could, like the brilliant leaves outside my window, be blown away if the wind were simply to change direction.
A
bout an hour into the flight to Pittsburgh, my eyes start to blur, losing focus on the words inside my book. Then the plane dips sharply, startling me like one of those dreams where you fall through a crack in the ice or down a steep flight of stairs. I grab for the armrest, forgetting that, because of my neighbor, it isn’t there, and I get a handful of his thigh instead. I open my eyes wide, embarrassed.
“What was that?” he asks, too frightened himself to notice my accidental groping.
“I don’t know,” I say, lifting my hand from his leg and looking out the window as though there might be an answer out in the clouds.
As if on cue, the pilot comes over the loudspeaker. “Sorry about that, folks. We’re going to be experiencing some turbulence for the next little bit. Please remain seated with your seat belts securely fastened. I’ll turn off the ‘Fasten Seat Belt’ sign as soon as we’ve made it through this rough patch.”
“Just bumps in the road,” I say, trying to reassure myself as much as my neighbor. Still, I feel my heart beating just a bit harder in my chest. I try again to concentrate on the novel in my lap. I’ve brought two books for the trip, both of them library books stamped with due dates just two weeks from now, as if this somehow guarantees my return: as if the ink numbers demand it.
The first book is by Sam Mason, a local writer who comes into the library once a month or so. Not long after I started volunteering at the library we began chatting, and I learned that he and his family own a cabin at Lake Gormlaith too. He even knows Effie and her husband. We both stood shell-shocked in the nonfiction section when we made this connection. Three thousand miles away from home, and here was someone who knew that lake, loved that lake (my lake!) like I do. After eighty years I’ve learned not to be surprised by many things, but this genuinely surprised me. It was like some strange serendipity, and we had no choice but to become fast friends after that. I’ve had dinner at his house dozens of times; his wife, Mena, is a marvelous cook. They live within walking distance of my cottage, and every time I’ve gone over, she’s sent me home with enough leftovers to last me a week. I think there’s still a pan of her pastitsio in my freezer.
I actually saw Sam on my last day of work, and I promised him I’d take a little walk around the lake and check on his place while I’m there. The phone I have supposedly takes pictures, so I told him I’d try to get a photograph, though there’s no cell reception at the lake as far as I know. I’ll have to ask Effie.
I’ve read three or four of Sam’s novels now. He lost his daughter a few years back, and the books he’s written since her death are the most achingly beautiful of all of them. It’s as though he’s channeled all of his sorrow and all of his love into his writing. This is what artists do, I think. I wish sometimes that I had an outlet for all my own sorrows, that I could have transformed my own losses into something like this. Eva would have; she could turn even the sharpest sadness into something beautiful.
I try to lose myself in his words as the entire plane jerks and dips, my heart plummeting with each bump. Hugh’s face is the color of milk. He reminds me less and less of Ted as time goes on, and more of Johnny. He’s like a big child, this man. Impulsively, I reach for his hand, intentionally this time, and squeeze. The plane shudders violently again, and he squeezes back.