“Ta-da,” O’Neil says.
He wheels them up to it and pushes the metal bar. Silence meets them, and a draft of cool night air that smells of grass. O’Neil turns the wheelchair around and backs through the door. Tomorrow it will be different, he knows. Tomorrow there will be papers and forms to fill out, and a visit from the pediatrician, and luggage to be packed; there will be more calls to make, and the nervous drive home through backstreets with no traffic, and Mary’s parents arriving from Minneapolis, their arms full of large, unnecessary presents. There will be meals to cook and beds to make and diapers to be changed. There will be a thousand details, and then a thousand thousand more, and at the end of it all, on a day far, far away, one of them will be alone.
But now it is easy, the simplest, brightest wish fulfilled: the three of them, and the cool moonlight silvering down the green grass on their first night together.
“I just wanted her to see it,” Mary says, and O’Neil wheels his wife and daughter outside, down the ramp, into the garden that lies beyond the lights of the hospital.
If you had seen them, you might have thought they were ghosts, or angels. You might have wondered if they were really there at all, these glowing bodies on the lawn. You would have known they were happy.
A GATHERING OF SHADES
March 1999–September 2000
T
HE FIRST TIME
, after the surgery, O’Neil drove. Kay had told him not to come, that the doctors would soon know more and then he should visit if he wanted to. But on he came anyway, arriving in the early morning darkness at the hospital, a citadel of light surrounded by dense green woods. The air was cold and very still, and smelled of the tall pine trees that were everywhere beyond the lamps of the parking lot. Eight hours at the wheel of his tiny car: he’d stopped only once, at a McDonald’s south of Albany, to empty his aching bladder and call Mary, who was already in bed. The baby had a cold, she said drowsily; it would be a long night.
The nurse was expecting him, the brother from Philadelphia; his sister was awake, she said, and waiting for him. She smiled with heavy lids when he entered the room. She wore a gown, of course, thin as a pillowcase, which embarrassed her; an IV was threaded into her arm. Someone was sleeping in the next bed, a dark form O’Neil glimpsed as he entered, shielded by a vinyl curtain. He helped Kay out of bed and into a robe, and down the hall to a small room where they could talk.
She had lost a breast to cancer eight years ago. There was some correlation, not well understood, between cancers of the breast and colon, and that was what was happening to her now. Fatigue, weight loss she welcomed at first and then worried over, some bleeding that she thought was hemorrhoids; it had happened slowly and then all at once, like anything. She hadn’t put all of it together, until two weeks ago. The cancer had moved outside the colon, she explained, into adjacent lymphatic tissues, though her liver and lungs were clear; that’s what the tests had shown. Her hair was grayer than the last time he’d visited, eight months before. In other ways she looked the same. He’d brought photographs of his older daughter, Nora, who was three, and baby Leah, just six weeks old, whom they called Roo; he brought a small CD player he’d purchased on his way out of town, and some disks for her to listen to: Bob Marley, whom she had loved in high school, Miles Davis’s
Birth of the Cool, Sticky Fingers
by the Rolling Stones. He told her that he had bought the last recalling a time, many years ago, when he had seen her dancing to “Brown Sugar” at a summer party. She was the big sister home from college and had smuggled him into a party at the house of friends, and he had stood in the kitchen doorway, a glass of warm beer in his hand, and seen her dancing. Why did some images stay with us that way, he wondered, arbitrary flashes of life seared into memory, while others vanished without a trace? Kay thanked him for the gifts, and when she said she was tired he walked her back to the room and kissed her good-night, the first time in years he had done this. I’m glad you’re here, she said sleepily, and squeezed his hand. The boys will be happy to see you.
It was late March, the sky sodden and gray. The mountains around the town were dolloped with white, and all the cars on the streets had ski racks. O’Neil slept on a foldout in the den that had been Jack’s office before the divorce, and spent the days of his visit with his nephews—ice-skating, pizza, trips to the movies and the mall. The oldest, Sam, was fifteen, Noah twelve, Simon five. O’Neil did not think he would ever have a son, and he welcomed this time with the boys, especially Sam, who was the same age as many of his students and had grown into a boy of surprising sweetness and touchingly mature enthusiasms: the flute, which he played expertly, and Scouts, and helping with his younger brothers, especially Noah, who was autistic and required almost as much looking after as Simon. Evenings, after dinner, O’Neil returned to the hospital. The room was awash with flowers, cards, gifts. Visitors came and went constantly, mostly women but some men, even Jack’s colleagues at the college. It was hard for her to rest, but good to see she had so many friends. I have the most famous colon in the Lower Champlain Valley, she said. Everybody here knows everybody else.
The rule was, she had to pass gas; it would mean that everything was working again. This happened on the fourth day after the surgery. The boys were at a hockey game with their father, and O’Neil and Kay were reading the Sunday
Times
together. She put down her paper and frowned. Honey, she said, I do believe I farted, and laughed. How wonderful to see her laughing! He hugged her, kissed her. Pull my finger, he said. Like they were kids again.
Her surgeon said she could be released the next day. It seemed too soon, but Kay was determined. O’Neil offered to stay longer, to help with the boys until she was really well, but she would have none of it. “Don’t they need you back home?” she said. “Don’t you have classes to teach? I’m fine. I miss my boys, I want to get back to work. Go home.” He brought them with him the next morning and found her up and dressed and looking well. The flowers that had not wilted were boxed in their vases to be carried down, wedged into place with the books and magazines and cards and the photos of her sons and O’Neil’s daughters that she had kept on the table by her bed. The boys flew into her arms. “My babies, my babies,” she said. Light poured from her face. “Did Daddy do fun things with you? Did Uncle O’Neil? And look at you, Simon. So big, in just a week!” The little boy puffed with pride. He had his mother’s hair, his father’s nose, eyes that were completely his own, iridescent and knowing. She hugged them again, each in turn, and then together. “It’s so good to see you all.”
He wondered how they would manage. She would begin her chemotherapy in three weeks, once the surgery was completely healed; it would last six months, each round taking a greater toll on her strength. Jack lived in a small apartment on campus, and though he and Kay shared custody, the boys had never spent a single night there. How would she make sure the boys got fed, that the bills were paid on time, that the complex enterprise of a house with children did not collapse into chaos? Already, the effects had started to show: the boys were living on pizza and hamburgers, Noah had worn the same sweatsuit three days running, the bathrooms reeked of piss. One of the boys’ rabbits—there were three or four, O’Neil could never be sure—had wriggled under the wire of his hutch and left droppings all over the garage. Before he left, O’Neil did the only helpful thing he could think to do, scouring the house from top to bottom and washing a dozen loads of laundry. He was angry at himself for failing to do these things before, for letting Kay come home from the hospital to a filthy house.
He planned to leave that evening; he could drive through the night, go home to shower and see Mary and the girls for breakfast, and then go straight to school. He had already missed five days of teaching. His students would be behind in everything, happily bewildered by this unplanned vacation; it would take him at least a week to get them back on track. He worked all day on the house, then loaded his car after dinner and went to Kay’s bedroom to say good-bye. Noah and Simon were under the covers beside her, listening to her read from
Treasure Island;
Sam, lying diagonally at their feet, was listening with earphones to the CD player O’Neil had brought for Kay and punching numbers into a calculator, recording them on a yellow legal pad. All eyes rose as he entered the room.
“Kiss your uncle, boys.”
They did, even Sam, though he also shook O’Neil’s hand.
Fifteen years old,
O’Neil thought.
Now you’re in charge.
He bent over the bed to embrace his sister. She was wearing a flannel nightgown, and he felt, against his chest, the doleful space of air where her left breast had been. He couldn’t imagine having to go through such a thing more than once. Their parents had died, swiftly, together, years ago, when O’Neil was still in college; it was Kay who had carried him through that awful time. A piercing loneliness touched him, and he realized, with a start, that it wasn’t his parents he was thinking of, or even Kay. He was thinking of his wife and daughters. He longed to hold them in his arms.
“Will you be . . . ?” he began.
“We’ll be fine,” his sister said merrily, “won’t we, boys?” and waved him out the door.
After that he flew: when she began the chemo in April, in mid-May when the worst of the sickness set in, again in early June when her white count crashed and she finally asked him—Would you come? For the boys? He flew on Fridays, always taking the same 5:00
P
.
M
. flight and renting a car in Burlington so that she would not have to send someone to get him, and because an extra car was always helpful: trips to the grocery or hardware store, to her doctor’s, to Noah’s therapist—he was always driving somewhere. His glimpses of Jack were cordial and fleeting, always in doors or driveways, when one or the other was delivering the boys. The divorce, two years ago, had been amicable; as Kay explained it, Jack had simply drifted away, like a comet slipping into a progressively wider orbit. O’Neil believed her but also knew this wasn’t the whole story. Though no one had said as much, he could tell there had been other women.
“In a way we’re better friends now than we were before,” Kay told him. They were folding warm towels at the kitchen table; it was early summer, and the boys were at the pool with friends. “All those years, I waited for him to get the hang of it. When I stopped asking for that to happen, I could appreciate him for what he is.”
“Okay, what is he?”
He’d meant it as a joke, but O’Neil could tell he had startled her. She snapped a towel into form and folded it across her chest with her thin arms. “He’s the boys’ father, O’Neil. He’s not a bad man. I know you think he is, but he’s really all right.” She sighed and looked away. “He just can’t face this sort of thing.”
Every three weeks she returned to the hospital for her infusions, and if one of these weeks coincided with his visits, O’Neil would take her. For the hour before these trips Kay would say nothing; an expectant quiet fell over the house, and O’Neil knew it was time to go when he saw her in the hallway putting on her coat or, in summer, a light sweater and a scarf, for the chills that came after. The hospital had a special parking lot for cancer patients, and inside there was a room of upholstered easy chairs facing a large television, though in all of O’Neil’s visits he had never seen anyone turn it on. O’Neil had heard some of the other patients call this room “the gas station.” It had been decorated to suggest a den or basement rec room, but the floor was bare linoleum and beside each chair there was a rolling tray of supplies: gauze and tape, needles holstered in cellophane, basins. Many of the other patients chatted away with one another like customers at a hair salon, and scheduled their treatments to coincide with one another’s. They introduced themselves to O’Neil by citing both their profession and their illness—Peter, for instance, was a mechanical engineer with chronic lymphocytic leukemia, Delores a lawyer with the state’s attorney’s office who had ovarian cancer—and when next they saw him, they always asked him specific questions about his life: his daughters, his teaching, the movies he had seen and the books he had read. Then a nurse would set up the IV of clear liquid for Kay, and while the medicine dripped into her arm, the two of them read magazines and listened to the new CDs O’Neil brought with him each time he visited: Charlie Parker, the Beatles’ “White Album,” a new recording of the Brandenburg Concertos. Sometimes Kay received an injection first, to control the nausea, and fell asleep at once, leaving O’Neil to watch over her, listening through his headphones to the same music on which his sister floated into dreams.
Her weight plummeted, stabilized, plummeted again; by midsummer her hair was mostly gone. In August there was a break in her treatments, and O’Neil rented a house for all of them on the Jersey shore. He had taken it sight unseen, over the phone, but it was perfect: a charming cottage on a quiet street that ended at stairs and the beach. He had lied to his sister about how much it cost, which was fifteen hundred dollars for the week. It took him two days before he realized his mistake. Her bony body, one breast gone, her balding head impossible to really hide, no matter what hat she wore: of course it would break her heart to be at the beach. She took off her T-shirt or robe only to swim; everywhere she looked she would see golden, healthy bodies in the sun. The next morning he drove around town, looking for a barbershop, but had to settle for an expensive salon called Trendz.
When his turn came, he sat in the chair. “Short,” he instructed.
The girl was slowly chewing gum; she was very attractive, with hazel eyes and silver bracelets all up and down her bare arms. She held her comb and scissors slightly raised, like a conductor preparing to lead an orchestra. She spoke to him through the wide mirror.
“How short, exactly?”
O’Neil nodded. “All of it,” he said.
She used scissors, then clippers, and finally a safety razor to scrape his scalp clean. At the first touch of the blade O’Neil felt the coolness of air on skin that had not felt it since the first days of his life. When she was done, he ran his hand over it again and again, amazed. And yet his face in the mirror was the same.
“I don’t get many requests for something like that,” the girl said, bewildered. “A lot of older guys come in here and actually want me to somehow make it
longer
.”
He paid her, tipping generously, and returned to the house. It was lunchtime, and Mary and the children were making sandwiches in the kitchen. Sam, reading at the kitchen table, saw him first and started to laugh.
“Holy shit, O’Neil,” he said. “You look like a white Michael Jordan.” But his face was proud—he understood what O’Neil had done.
Nora giggled. “Daddy lost his hair,” she sang. “Bald man, bald man.”