Wait Until Tomorrow (23 page)

“It's not appendicitis,” he tells us. “You have a tumor on your appendix.”

He shows us the CAT scan, which Hank is able to read but which looks like abstract art to me. “You'll need to have an operation to remove it. The surgeon will probably want to take out a third of your colon as well to check the lymph nodes for cancer.”

There it is: the C-word. Hank and I look at each other. His
heavy eyebrows are raised as if to say,
I knew it. I knew the worst was yet to come.
He has lost his sister and his father, and now they say that his wife might have cancer. I want to hold him, comfort him, but we've crossed some invisible boundary in our relationship. We can be friends, but we can't be lovers. We cannot touch each other.

 

I don't tell my mother that I might have cancer. I simply tell her that I have to get my appendix removed.

Emmy comes back home. At this point, she's like a refugee. She's numb to the news. She's lost her father and now she might lose her mother. She finds a little summer job and mostly stays with friends at night. I worry about her being at loose ends, not having a place where she feels safe, a place to call home. I think about moving out, getting an apartment somewhere, but now is obviously not a good time.

 

A few days before the operation I dream that I am in the ocean. My body is rigid like a piece of driftwood as I twirl out to sea. I am just past the breakers when I hear Hank's voice calling me back to the shallow water. So I begin twirling back, back through the waves toward the sound of Hank's voice. When I get to shore, I climb a set of stone steps and sit next to Emmy.

On June 24, Hank takes me to the hospital. I am put into a hospital gown, laid on a gurney, and told to start counting. The next thing I know I am floating, pleasantly drifting. I am conscious of worried voices, but I am not worried. I hear the voices as if they are on the other side of a thick curtain of fog.

“She should have come back by now. She's not breathing.”

Then I hear Hank's voice. I don't know what he's saying. I am utterly at peace until suddenly I am not at peace. Instead a violent upheaval wracks my belly. Pain sears my abdomen. Now the voices
are explaining something to me: “We had to give you Narcan. You were under too long. You had a bad reaction to the Dilaudid. Your respiration . . .”

“Stop!” I scream at the blurry faces now sharply coming into focus. “Stop giving it to me. It's making me puke.”

I would not normally say the word “puke” to people I don't know or any vulgarity for that matter, but after I relentlessly vomit the thimbleful of fluid in my stomach into a small plastic pan, I collapse against the plastic side of the hospital bed and whimper, “Fuck.”

“That doesn't look comfortable,” Hank says. “Should we move her?”

“No,” I croak. I equate the least movement with staggering pain.

The irony is not lost on me even in this crumpled state. Dilaudid had been my drug of choice in my early twenties, when I had helped my boyfriend break into drugstores to get pills. I had done time for the love of this synthetic narcotic. Then I met Hank, who, for whatever reason, was the first person to be more important to me than a drug. He was an engineer who could fix anything, including me. He was my anchor.

Because of my reaction to the Dilaudid, the doctor switches me to morphine and the nurse hands me a button to click whenever I need more. At first I don't click it all, but the pain after three and a half hours of abdominal surgery feels like the knife is still stuck inside me, so I start clicking and the pain eases and then almost disappears.

That night Hank sleeps in the chair by my bed with his sleep apnea machine quietly chugging fresh air through his mask. A small plastic tube pumps oxygen to my nose, and I doze off into a drugged sleep. Hank's presence soothes me, and I imagine our dreams blending together like blood with blood. Here we are at
the end of our relationship, and Hank and I are finally sleeping in the same room. I have never loved or needed him more.

After a while I notice I am forgetting to breathe. I let go of the button and force myself to stay awake until the morphine wears off a bit. These drugs that I loved so much as a teenager—I hate them now. How could I ever have enjoyed that feeling, I wonder. Of course, back then I had a death wish. Now, I'd rather live with the pain. Now I want to be awake. Now I want life.

Not only do I hate the drugs, I hate the hospital. I hate the hard, plastic bed; the stiff, uncomfortable chair; the catheter that makes me feel as if I constantly have to pee; the tasteless food. The thing I hate the most is the chemical stench that emanates from my body. I reek. When they finally take out the catheter, the disgusting odor of my own urine makes me wilt. The blessed bowel movement that signals I am ready to leave the hospital is a toxic tar.

As the days pass, Hank, who is generally fairly antisocial, makes friends with the nurses. He learns about their families, where they went to school, all sorts of things that hold no interest for me. He chats pleasantly with my friends when they come to visit. He examines my scar and helps me get out of bed and walk around. He monitors what I eat and how much. He tells the nurse when my Foley bag is full.

He does not, however, speak to Emmy once during the whole ordeal. He manages to leave for a long enough time each day for her to visit me. The truce he and I have achieved does not include her.

 

Four days after entering the hospital, I am able to go home. We still haven't learned whether or not the tumor was cancerous.

At home I spend my days on the couch or in the recliner. Once when I can't make the recliner work I wind up screaming at it and
crying until Emmy rushes in to help me. When my brain finally starts functioning again, I spend my time reading magazines several years old. Emmy stays nearby, and Hank locks himself in his room. He still refuses to speak to her. He thinks he can “win” if he takes a hard line. He is willing to go to whatever lengths are necessary to get her to do what he thinks is right. But he is going to lose us both.

At night Emmy and I watch movies. Our favorite comfort movie is
101 Dalmatians
. She huddles next to me on the couch.

“I miss him,” she tells me. “He doesn't love me anymore.”

“He loves you,” I reply, an answer I know to be true. I am sure, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, that he does love her. “He just doesn't know how to let you go.”

“Are you going to be okay?” she asks.

“Yes,” I answer, but of this I am not so sure.

Pongo and Purdy dash through the snow to find their puppies.

 

The next week Hank and I go back to see the surgeon. By now I am eating and shitting regularly, and I realize that all the things I thought were more important than those two vital functions are practically meaningless. Otherwise, I'm still not feeling great. I walk slowly, a little hunched over, skinnier than I've been in decades.

Hank has studied appendix cancer on the Internet. If I have cancer, then my survival chances are fifty/fifty, according to the data. Having lost his sister and father to cancer in the past six months, Hank looks at me with wary eyes.

Before the surgeon comes into the small white examination room, Hank asks, “Am I going to have to carry you out of here?”

Sitting on the table, I smirk at him and then pretend to get hysterical over my impending death. We both laugh. We can't help
it. We may be in battle, but I am grateful for his presence in these cold, boring little rooms with their walls decorated by pictures of wormy intestines.

The surgeon enters. He's a handsome, matter-of-fact fellow.

“The tumor was cancerous,” he tells us. Hank inhales sharply. “But we got twenty-four lymph nodes when we took out the portion of the colon, and none of them showed any signs of cancer.”

I sit and listen. Hank asks the questions. The surgeon believes they got all the cancer in the surgery.

“But is it possible that a few microscopic cells escaped?” Hank asks.

“It's possible,” the surgeon says. Then he turns to me. “I'm sending you to an oncologist. You may need to get some chemo as a precautionary measure.”

I am already resigned to the idea.

After our visit to the surgeon, Hank and I stop for lunch at an Indian restaurant. I load up my plate with palak paneer, dal, and naan. We eat quietly, comfortably. I know that while my chances of survival are only fifty/fifty, my marriage's chances are much worse. And yet today there is no one else I want to be with.

My mother called constantly while I was in the hospital. But I didn't want to talk to her. I couldn't even muster the energy to be around Emmy for very long when she came to see me after the surgery. Even now, Hank is the only person in the world that I can be with in my utterly joyless condition. He is simply a part of me, and we are dreamers, sleepwalking toward the end of our life together.

LATE SUMMER 2008

With our differences irreconcilable, Hank and I decide to sell the house. Aside from repainting the bedrooms, the house hasn't been updated once since we moved into it ten years earlier, and in upscale Charlotte no one is going to buy a house with linoleum kitchen counters. It needs so much work—new flooring, new bathrooms, and new paint, at the very least—before we can expect to sell it.

Fortunately, my mother has grown accustomed to her new surroundings, and I am freer than I have been in years. Which is a good thing because my life is divided now between helping Hank repair the house and escaping that house with Emmy.

Emmy leaves to visit a friend. She'll be gone for a couple of days, which means Hank will venture out of his room and we might get some work done on the house. We're going to repaint the living room and he wants to order a new bathtub for his bathroom.

At Home Depot, I follow Hank around listlessly and watch as he loads the flat cart with varnish, paint, two-by-fours, and two-by-tens. There's some rotted wood on the front of the house that needs to be replaced. So much work to be done. We've neglected the house the way we neglected our marriage.

Hank grabs a strange ladder contraption that can transform from a regular stepladder to an extension ladder like those weird
toys that kids love so much. I don't help load a single thing. I can't because of the operation. The nurse told me no heavy lifting for six weeks or I'd regret it. No exercise. No house cleaning. All I can do is read and watch movies. I even stop my yoga practices that I had been doing faithfully since last September.

I feel guilty for not helping Hank load the stuff onto the cart and then into the car, but I also realize he doesn't have to be doing this by himself. He could have asked Emmy to help with all of this, but the few times she offered, he simply shook his head and pointed for her to get out.

We haven't discussed the future; our only goal is to get the house in shape in order to sell it. Then we'll have another bridge to cross. But today we aren't talking about that.

 

Later I drive over to see my mother. I've just arrived when Mom tells me she needs to go to the bathroom.

“I don't know if I can do it with my shoes on,” she says.

“Your shoes?” I ask, grabbing the walker and bringing it over to her wheelchair. She can still walk a little. She can take a few steps from the wheelchair to the toilet. “I don't think your shoes will be a problem.”

“Well, they're up.”

She means, I think, that her feet are on the footrests of the wheelchair and they need to be moved. She knows at some level that she's not making sense, but we pretend that this is a normal conversation. In some ways, it is.

After her trip to the bathroom, she looks at me and says, “I love that dress. It's so pleasing to look at.”

Then we go downstairs, she in her hand-pushed wheelchair, and I walking beside her. I'm not allowed to push her yet.

When we get to the dining room, she takes my hand and brings it to her cheek.

“You can do no wrong,” she says.

“I'm glad you think so,” I answer dryly and bend down to kiss her cheek.

Emmy and I decide to take our annual trip to Florida. This year it is especially important for us to get away. Before we leave I stand in my bedroom and look down at my finger. My diamond shines as brightly as ever. How often have I gazed at this ring, happy to have it on my finger? Happy to be married. But Hank has not kissed me since Emmy's birthday. I feel more like a younger brother than a wife. I don't see the point in wearing it anymore. I put it in a small cloth bag, and stash it in a drawer.

“It's the divorce tour,” I tell Emmy as we drive out of town, Emmy's iPod playing through the radio. Our hearts weigh as much as bags of bricks, but we will manage to have fun anyway. We will sing along to our music at the tops of our lungs. We will drink champagne with friends in Tallahassee. We will drive to St. Pete and stay with my dear old friend, who did time with me back before I ever thought of being a mom. We will meet Sadhguru in person. I've got a new green notebook, ready for work.