“No fuss,” she muttered, unconditionally pleased by that. “So what did you think?”
“Eh. I liked
Night of the Living Dead
better.” He grinned.
When he brought her to her apartment, he patted her shoulder, and she said, “I’m so scared, Spencer. Of what’s ahead. What if I can’t do it?” And he said, “You’re going to do great, you’re going to be all right,” and Lily tiptoed up and softly kissed his stubbly cheek in the beige corridor.
On Monday at five-thirty in the morning Lily’s front door intercom rang.
“It’s your grandmother,” the voice said.
“Who?”
“Let me in.”
“Grandma?” Lily buzzed her in.
Ten minutes later her grandmother showed up at the door, clutching the walls and panting.
“Grandma?”
“Oh my God, those stairs! Oh my God—what have you done with yourself, what have you
done
with your hair?”
“I cut it. It’s all going to fall out anyway. Grandma!” Lily put her hand on her heart.
“What? Come on, ready to go?”
“Grandma!”
“
What
?” Her grandmother was looking at her as if she had no idea what the fuss was about.
“You left your house!” Lily said, trying not to cry. Left her house for the first time in six years.
“Yes, so?” said her white-haired little grandmother, opening her arms to her. “I left my house for
you.
Now get ready. But for the love of Mary and Joseph, do yourself a favor and don’t
read the newspapers. The news is terrible today and overwrought.”
“Remember what Truman Capote said, Grandma. He said he didn’t care what people were saying about him as long as it wasn’t true.”
“Well, let’s just pray your brother feels the same way. Come on, let’s go.”
At Mount Sinai, at six in the morning, Marcie and Dr. DiAngelo were already waiting. He was wearing hospital whites, not a track suit this time, to impress her grandmother, Lily was sure, and he had on glasses, and didn’t look like a kid. Grandma was not impressed. “He looks too young to be a doctor,” she stage-whispered.
“Thank you for that,” DiAngelo said, “but I’m fifty-four this year.”
“As I was saying,” Claudia whispered, but quieter. “A
child.
”
After DiAngelo explained what was about to happen to Lily, she got up off the bed and said, “I’m going to have a hole in my chest?” She shook her head. “I’m going home. Thanks anyway.”
Marcie said, “A little Port-A-Cath, so we can administer the meds, take blood, give blood, without having to scar up the veins on your arms. The Hickman catheter is nothing to be worried about. A central venous catheter is implanted just under your skin above your chest plate. It goes straight to your vena cava, which goes straight to the heart.”
Lily would take Vitamin A once a morning by mouth, and then in the afternoon, bagfuls of liquid drugs would pour into her vena cava. She would do this for seven days. Then she would have three days to recover. They would then do a biopsy and start again. And then again. Three treatments, thirty days.
“Very very aggressive,” said DiAngelo. “But we have no choice.” He coughed slightly. “Just to let you know, these doses of Vitamin A, or ATRA as it is known in pill form, are associated with the potentially lethal pulmonary leukostasis syndrome.”
“What?”
“White blood cells clump in your lungs and cause you to stop breathing.”
“Oh.”
“ATRA is very toxic.”
“So what about chemo without ATRA?”
“Varying degrees of success and major morbidity. I don’t recommend it. ATRA works very well, however, in combination with the other drugs.”
“What are the names of these other drugs, young man?” said Claudia, officiously, as if she was going to look them up as soon as she got home.
A smile crossed DiAngelo’s face. “Cytarabine, to kill the existing cancer cells, cerubidine, to stop the cancer cells from reproducing, and VePesid, which does both, for good measure.” Cytarabine, or Ara-C as it was called, would be on a continuous drip for seven days.
“That sounds like a tremendous burden. Is this going to affect her?” Claudia asked.
“Oh, yes, but not as much as dying would affect her,” DiAngelo said.
Claudia gasped. Lily, in bed, in her ugly gown, patted her grandmother’s pale hand. “Sit, Grandma. He’s just joking with you.”
“That’s not funny, young man. We don’t appreciate that kind of humor in my family. We survived the war, the death camps, we lived through too much to—”
“Grandma, Grandma.” Lily was making serious eyes at her grandmother. “He is just
joking.
To lighten the mood. It’s all right. He knows what he’s doing.”
“He better.” Claudia turned to DiAngelo. “How long is she going to be in the hospital? After Wednesday I’m coming to take her home.”
DiAngelo and Marcie exchanged a look. “Lily, you haven’t told your grandmother everything, have you?”
“Not yet.” Lily turned to her grandmother. “I’m going to be here a month.”
“A month!”
“I can’t release her if she’s unable to stand up,” said DiAngelo.
“Why can’t she go home on her rest days? One of my friends had leukemia and she went home between treatments. Everybody goes home—to recuperate, to get strong, to eat.”
“How’s your friend doing?”
“Well, she’s dead.”
With a prolonged polite smile, DiAngelo leveled a look at Lily.
“Give her something milder,” said Claudia.
“Lily, mild or life—you choose.”
“Life.”
“I thought so.”
Claudia sank into the chair. “And after a month?”
“You know what, let’s get through the next thirty days, and then we’ll talk about what then. If we’re lucky to have a what then, she’ll be thirteen weeks on consolidation chemo on an outpatient basis. I’m not counting my chickens yet. Are you ready for that Hickman, Lily?”
“Absolutely not.”
“That’s my girl.”
“Lilianne,” said Claudia, “have you thought about getting a second opinion?”
“Lilianne,” said DiAngelo. “I see you have not told your grandmother how sick you are. You didn’t level with her.”
“I leveled,” Lily said. “It’s just that no one can quite believe it.” Least of all me.
“Don’t treat your granddaughter as if she’s got the common cold, Mrs. Vail. Treat her as if she has cancer.”
Claudia grabbed on to her chest and started panting.
Lily squeezed her grandmother’s hand. “You’re going to be just fine, Grandma. Relax. You’re going to pull through this, you’ll see.”
The insertion of the chest catheter seemed like it would hurt, therefore it hurt. They cut a hole in her chest and put a tube inside her! They gave her a local, but when the doctor asked her if it was hurting her, Lily said yes, even though there were other things in her body that were feeling worse. They asked her to rate her pain from one to ten. Nine, she said, and then down-graded it to four when she saw their raised eyebrows. But seeing the tube in the hole in her chest did something to her, she started to cry. Her grandmother started to cry, too, which made Lily even more afraid.
Marcie calmed her down by pressing Lily’s buzz head against her big black bosom. Lily was comforted. Why couldn’t Grandma have breasts like this to be pressed against?
Lily worried about one thing—could she take the constant nausea, could she throw up and live through it? She hated feeling nauseated, always had, and had never in her life made herself be sick. She was a vomiting wimp. Could she tell them that? They’d only laugh at her. “Ho, ho, Lily, what’s a little retching compared with your life?” But she wanted to know: exactly how much retching would her new life entail?
The ATRA by mouth was quick, like Advil, and the bags of chemo wheeled to her bedside by the afternoon were so innocent-looking Lily couldn’t believe they would make her bleed intestinally. She felt optimistic that she was going to be one of the ones who wouldn’t get very sick, wouldn’t throw up, wouldn’t grow deaf.
By the afternoon, Amanda and Anne came. All were horrified at her haircut.
“Who did this to you? You paid money to get butchered like this, why?”
She didn’t want to tell them who did this to her. She didn’t think they’d understand. She hoped that if Spencer came to visit, he didn’t come when they were all here.
Amanda held one hand, Anne the other, Anne was in a suit, Amanda in mother clothes, elastic pants, baggy sweatshirt. An
hour was a long time to lie there and watch the cytarabine drip drip drip into her chest catheter. It was a clear solution; it could’ve been water, or a placebo. What a weird concept—an open hole in her body for things to drip through. They were injecting chemo into her, but potentially could they also inject chocolate? Or strawberry syrup? Or melted vanilla ice cream? How do you feel, how do you feel, Marcie kept asking, her grandmother kept asking, Anne, Amanda kept asking Paul, Rachel kept asking.
Paul, Rachel were here?
“Oh my God, Lil, who did this to your hair?” Paul said. “This deeply hurts me as your personal hair stylist.”
DiAngelo shooed them all out. Grandma stayed.
Lily was sleepy. How about a Cosmopolitan into the Port-A-Cath? Vodka, Cointreau, cranberry juice, lime, ahhhh…
The first bag emptied, Marcie hooked up a bag of VePesid. “I like the way you smell,” muttered Lily. “Of Milky Ways and nicotine.”
“I’ll bring you a bagful of Milky Ways when you get through this,” said Marcie.
“Hook me up—right into the Port-a-Hole,” said Lily.
This second hour was longer because she started feeling…should she say? Nauseated. It was psychosomatic. They told her she would feel this, and so she did. The room, so plain and unadorned, almost like a convent room, began to change color, from more drab (was that even possible?) to hunter green, to pumpkin orange. The TV image overhead was doubling. Lily asked them to turn it off. Now the turned-off TV was doubling. She was on hallucinogens! They were giving her mescaline, magic mushrooms, morning glory seeds!
Marcie was no longer black, but green, with funny fish-eye glasses and freckles. She said, “Lil, you okay? You looking a bit white around the gills.” Just to prove her right, Lily asked to be unhooked from the IV, which they wouldn’t do, so she dragged the IV stand into the bathroom and threw up. She had to hold on to the toilet to have physical confirmation of the
uncertainty before her eyes—the toilet was doubling. Did she throw-up twice?
Her two grandmothers remained quiet; they may have nodded off in unison.
The third hour, a bag of cerubidine. The nausea decidedly not psychosomatic. Displeased with herself, Lily asked Marcie if she would get used to it, if she would get less nauseated as the chemo went on.
Marcie was quiet a moment. “Worse,” she said. “The cumulative effect is what gets you. This is nothing.”
This was nothing? The swirling wretchedness was nothing!
After three hours and three bags it was six in the evening, and Lily mumbled to her grandmother to go and get something to eat. She mumbled to Marcie, “What if I don’t eat, will I be less nauseated?”
“More,” replied Marcie. “Food absorbs some of the acid. Would you like to eat something?”
A resounding no. “Tell me a story, Grandma,” she whispered.
“Want a story, Liliput? I’ll tell you a story,” said Claudia. Lily quarter-listened as Grandma told her that in her village south of Danzig when the Germans came in December of 1939, they took all the food for themselves, leaving only a small amount for the villagers, and some of the Poles during the morning head count started pushing the Polish Jews forward out of line, so that they would be taken away and there would be more food left. Suddenly after centuries of living side by side as Poles, people became split up as Poles and Jews. Not Polish Jews, just Jews. It was only after the Germans came and annexed that part of Poland as their own that this trouble started. Hunger is a powerful tool at the hands of the enemy. “So eat something, Lily.”
A new bag of cytarabine remained attached—permanently, for six more days.
“Tell me about you and Tomas,” Lily breathed out.
“Not Tomas. Would you like me to tell you about your
mother? I think you might like to hear. I have some stories about her.”
“No. I would like my mother, though…”
Lily didn’t remember the rest of Monday.
Dear Mom and Papi,
It’s been very hard for me to get you on the phone, but there is something I wanted to tell you. Two days ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I have something called acute myeloid leukemia. I’m starting chemotherapy on Monday. Everything is up in the air depending on how I respond to the treatment. The doctor says I’m very sick.
I need you. I need your help.
Love,
Lily.
George Quinn sat on the lanai with Lily’s letter in his hands. He sat for an hour, then he lit a cigarette, and then he cried. It was eleven in the morning, and he wished that he could tell his wife about their youngest child, but his wife was inside, ranting in the kitchen, dropping cups on the floor. She was irate over the lack or abundance of something in the house.
George wanted to call Lily, but he knew instinctively that he was not what she needed. And also, what she needed, perhaps even from him—strength and support—he could not give her. Not knowing any of the facts, not knowing anything about
myeloid leukemia, or the seriousness of Lily’s condition, he instinctively understood that Lily was not getting over pneumonia or bronchitis, and suddenly in that hour outside on his shiny sunny lanai, George Quinn, at the age of sixty-five, learned something about himself. What George wanted from life,
all
he wanted from his newly retired life, was peace. He had been a beat reporter, then a section editor, had stress his whole life—stress, anxiety, deadlines every day for almost half a century. Now he wanted to have his walks, and to have his coffee and read his paper, and do his quiet shopping, and cook a nice dinner, and watch his sports at night. He wanted to smoke cigarettes, and have a drink of cognac later in the evening. It was so little from life he wanted, and it was constantly being denied him—first by the frenzied woman in his kitchen, and second by his last-born child. The shame was hot on his face. He couldn’t really be sitting here blaming Lily for crashing into his reality! He wanted to put on his dark sunglasses to shield him from her letter—and then from himself. He wanted his wife of forty-two years in this hour. She didn’t come out.
The evening came. And then he told her. On their lanai, where all matters of importance and trivia were discussed and discovered and decided, George said nothing when Allison sat down heavily, with fresh bruises on her upper arm and neck, with cuts along her jaw line. Her hand shaking, she picked up her water glass. She had some of his noodles and tuna.
He let her eat in peace. He refilled her water glass but the rest of the time sat immobile, except for the cigarette from his hand to his mouth. He was listening for the ocean. He still hadn’t called Lily. He wanted to ask Allison if she remembered the day in September, nearly twenty-five years ago when she went to Booth Memorial Hospital to give birth to her. Allie ate too many pancakes for breakfast and her water broke—as if the two were related. She was at the hospital for six hours and then Lily was born and she was only six pounds and the nurse said to Allie,
how did you gain sixty pounds when your baby is only six? The other three children came to look at her in the nursery. Andrew was a senior in high school, but the way he held Lily, you’d have thought she was his child. But George couldn’t open his mouth to speak any of these words to the mother of his children. His voice was not strong enough.
When Allison was done eating, George said, “Lily sent us a letter. Here, read.” And pushed the piece of paper toward her.
She didn’t pick it up. She lit a cigarette and said, “I don’t have my glasses. What does she want? More money?”
“She has cancer.”
Allison did not stop smoking. “What did you say?”
“She has cancer.”
“What are you talking about?” she said, raising her voice. “What cancer?”
“Read the letter, Allie. She is sick. She needs our help.”
“Oh God! I’m so tired of hearing you talk and talk! Yak, yak, yak. What are you talking about, what cancer?”
He stood abruptly and walked back into the house.
She finished her cigarette, took the letter, came back inside, and slowly made her way to her bedroom where she’d left her glasses. He sat in front of the turned-off television and waited. In five minutes she reappeared. She stood to the side of him, by the couch.
“I don’t understand this leukemia.”
“Allie, what do you want from me? Call your daughter. Find out what’s going on.”
“Well, what is this acute myeloid? I’ve never heard of it.”
“Me neither. We’re not doctors.”
“How serious do you think it is?”
“I don’t know anything. If she needs chemo, it’s probably serious.”
“No, not necessarily. They give you chemo now as a preventive measure. They don’t even care anymore if you need it or not.”
“I can’t imagine that’s true.”
“What, you’re calling me a liar now?
She stood. He sat.
“Call your daughter. She needs you.” George couldn’t look at her.
She stood to the side of him for a few more minutes and then said, “Why don’t you call her.”
“She doesn’t need me. She needs her mother.” The words got stuck in his throat. He stopped speaking.
Slowly Allison turned and went up the two stairs back to her bedroom.
In the bedroom she sat at the edge of the bed, near the phone, with the letter in her hands, glasses on her nose, and she re-read it. The thing she responded to first, or rather most, was the
I’m sick and I need your help.
It was the
I need your help
that Allie’s insides were responding to. What she wanted to do was call Lily and scream at her, the anger inside was so deep.
You need my help? My help!? What do you want me to do? I’m seven thousand miles away, what can I possibly do for you? You never call me, you never call your mother even to ask how I’m doing, and I’m doing horribly, I’m so depressed, I’m on medication, my teeth are falling out, I can’t eat properly, I’m so sick myself and done with life, and you are asking me to help you! Why don’t you help me? I need help too, do I call you up, do I write you letters and ask you for help
?
She held on to her stomach.
She tried to get control of herself. Cancer. Everybody has cancer. Lily is, as always, exaggerating. She probably has blood poisoning from all the drugs she’s taking. I know that’s what I’m supporting, her drug habit. I know she wants money from me. She has no insurance, how is she going to pay for chemo? First she tells me she’s sick, then she tells me she needs money to pay for her treatment. I know how this goes. Mom, my phone is being turned off. Mom, I can’t pay my rent. I can’t pay for my books, for my art supplies, for my crayons. I need a new winter coat, a
new quilt, new pillows. It doesn’t end. Now she’s run out of excuses, so now she’s got cancer. It’s a ruse for my money. I know it. Cancer. A friend of mine at the bank, once had skin cancer, we were all apoplectic with worry, we sent flowers, we took her out to dinner, we had a collection for a present, I put in a hundred dollars. She went to the doctor and with a little local anesthetic he cut the thing out of her face, and with a bandage she was back to work on Monday. A hundred dollars I put in!
Allison looked at the phone. She didn’t hear the TV outside. He’s probably reading the paper, totally unconcerned but to me blowing it all out of proportion with his moist eyes. How he loves melodrama.
The phone was right at her hand height, two feet away. She barely had to reach over. I’m going to call, she thought, standing up and heading for the bathroom. I am. But first I’m thirsty. I’m going to get a glass of cranberry juice. She poured herself a little, a drop of cranberry juice into her highball glass and brought the glass to her lips. This is the right thing to do, she thought, going to her closet, and rummaging in the pile of clothes until she pulled out her third-full gallon of Gordon’s. This will help me take the edge off my anger. I can’t talk to her when I’m this upset. I’ll just end up yelling and she’ll end up hanging up, like always because she has no respect for her mother. She poured the gin into the cranberry-juice glass, poured and poured, until the glass was full, and then she picked it up and opened her mouth and poured it in until the glass was empty. She waited a moment, and swayed. I think I need a little more, she thought. I’m still angry. I’ll have one more and then I’ll call her. She poured the gin into a now empty highball glass until the glass was full, and then she opened her mouth and poured it into her throat until the glass was empty. She waited. She swayed and this time she had to hold on to the countertop. Better. Better. Allison felt the warmth in her throat, in her belly, in her head. The warmth was all over her body, and it was so pleasing and
so
comforting. She wasn’t angry anymore. It’s all right now. Now I
can call. But just a little more comfort. She tipped the bottle into her throat for the third time. And after that one she still managed to remember to stagger over to the closet and hide her now empty bottle, and to rinse her glass under water. She crawled back to her bedroom on her hands and knees, tried to pull herself up onto the bed, but failed and fell on the floor into the black abyss, still two feet from the telephone, now two feet above her head.