What We Have (32 page)

Sara and Geoff had one hamper between them, Julie had Maddy in a Snugli, Jacques had the towels and the beach chairs, and Jon and my father were helping my mother balance, each of them holding one side of her as they inched their way down the stairs, pausing when she needed to catch her breath. We weren’t completely sure what was causing this breathlessness, whether it was anemia from the cancer or her ribs constricting her lungs, but even so, she made it down, and there it was: the little oval of beach winnowed away by time and tide, but still there, pungent and glowing. Jacques set up the folding chairs facing the lighthouse, and we took things out of the ungainly black-and-white hamper. Same hamper, same beach. It was almost like we were little again, crouching here and staring out at the lake.

My mother used to tell us if we looked hard enough we could see Chicago on the opposite side, but we could never see anything but lake as far as we looked, the
Beaver Islander
trudging slowly across the horizon with its burden of tourists. Sara was teaching Jenny and Rachel how to find Petoskey stones, with their octagonal crenulations. It took patience. You had to walk slowly, stooping down just at the point where the waves lapped the stones and darkened them, and between the shiny dark greens and the quartzes and the opalescent whites; if you were lucky you’d find one, gazing up at you like a magic eye with its octagons of fossil veins.

Julie laughed, watching them. “Remember how we used to paint the ones we found with clear nail polish so they’d look like the ones they sold in town?”

I remembered. You couldn’t see the fossil lines when the stones were dry. The polish, we thought, would preserve the lines forever.

A family scene. Three generations. Blue water, white boats, the sun still hot. Now and then a cool breeze raised gooseflesh on our arms, and you could smell the slightest whiff of autumn in the air.

It was a good day. It had taken enormous effort, but we’d done it. We’d had lunch, kidded around, Jacques and Jon were throwing a football back and forth, in an aren’t-we-like-the-Kennedys kind of way, all bluff and boyish humor. And there was a nice sense of being, just for this little while, free from worrying about anything having to do with the body, with being hungry or tired or hurting, with being too hot or too cold or needing to go to the bathroom. . . . Even my mother seemed relatively comfortable, at least for the moment. We were actually all, stupefyingly enough, OK, and then—

Which one of us asked about the F-U? Was it because, woven into one another’s lives as we were, we were even in that sunlit moment imagining the next step, the next visit, the effort, the plans, the coming back? We were each of us so tied to what was coming next: school starting for Jenny and Rachel; the semester of teaching about to begin for me; Maddy’s first sets of shots. Like anchors, tethering us to the and-then-and-then-and-then of next month, and the month that followed.

In any event, someone asked, “When’s the next round of F-U?” Simple question. Could be answered with a date, or a number: two weeks from Tuesday, for example. Or, we’re not sure yet, we’re waiting to see how the blood counts look.

But that wasn’t how it went. My mother, lying back in her folding chaise, her Jackie O glasses on, said—casually, as if she’d just remembered something she’d forgotten to mention, something insignificant, maybe, like a change in plans for where we were eating that night, but it wasn’t that, it was something else—“Actually, I’m done with the F-U.”

Silence. The loud horn of the
Beaver Islander.

“What?” I asked cautiously, like I didn’t want to break something fragile. It was funny how this happened, how someone said something and for a minute you literally didn’t understand. Then you did, and the lack of understanding opened up into something worse.

She was stopping the chemo.

Why?
What did she mean?

“Does Dr. Brenner want you to try something less toxic?”

She shook her head. I could see the veins on the side of her neck. She was so thin, it hurt to look at her.

Here’s how we were sitting when she told us this: my father to one side, my sisters and I to the other. Jacques, Geoff, and Jon had moved farther down the beach, a pantomime of throwing and catching. We couldn’t see the ball. Julie was nursing Maddy, trying to keep her screened with a tent of towel. Sacha was asleep in her backpack, which we had opened up and jammed upright in the sand. Head wobbling to one side, mouth open, a rivulet of drool forming at one corner of her lips. Jenny and Rachel, squatting on thin haunches, were yards away, out of earshot, poking at an emerald fringe of seaweed.

“No,” my mother said with a gentle shrug, “no, we’re just going to take it as it comes, that’s all. No more poison.” She was looking out at the horizon, at the
Beaver Islander
, at the place where we couldn’t (whatever she said) see Chicago.

“So,” Julie said, feeling her way. “You’re saying—”

My father put his hand over my mother’s. They’d talked all this through, I realized; they were telling us something that had already been decided.

“Girls,” my mother said, and in that collective noun I imagined the hundreds of moments, back when we were girls and she was Mom, calling upstairs to tell us dinner was ready or urging us to hurry because we were running late for school. A hundred memories crowded one another: I was lying on the floor of Sara’s bedroom, watching her pick snails off the wall of her aquarium, we must have been late for something because my mother was calling us, irate,
Girls!
, or we were in the mudroom kicking our boots off and one sailed across the kitchen, leaving an arc of slush across her perfect floor; she was furious with us (
Girls
), or withholding, or folding herself up in her reading chair with a frown; or she was holding up a thermometer with a puzzled glare, assessing our illnesses—she hated us being sick; or she was braking behind some crazy driver (to her they were all crazy) and her arm flew up instinctively, across the space in the passenger’s seat where one of us either was or ought to have been sitting.
Girls
. Only now, of course, we were no longer girls. Sara was here with Jenny and Rachel; I was with Sacha; Julie, with Maddy. Or if we were girls we were girls only to her, and a lump began forming in my throat, as half comprehending what she was trying to tell us, I realized that inside of her there was still our girlhood. When she went, that went. When Sacha woke up and opened her cat-gray eyes and blinked herself back into consciousness and looked around for me, she saw something else, someone in the process of becoming the person she’d one day think of as her mother, but no girl. Never a girl.

The girls
were going.

“I don’t want to spend the time I have left that way,” my mother said, not looking at any of us. My father still had his hand on hers. They were in cahoots—they had planned this.

“It was awful, taking that stuff. Having that poison drip into me.” My mother shook her head. “It made me so much sicker . . . and Dr. Brenner says . . .” She took a deep breath. “He says for me, it isn’t helping.” She lifted her shoulders. They were so thin. A month ago she weighed ninety-two pounds, and my father threw out their scale. “Not much quality of life after all, I’m afraid. Not in my case.”

Julie started to sob. Her shoulders heaved, and I could see Maddy trembling against her with the motion. Julie understood before I did: My mother was telling us it was over. She was giving up. I barely heard the rest of what she and my father were saying, the importance of having time left with dignity, with her faculties intact, with some chance of enjoying—this was the phrase they both used, as if they’d scripted it—“the time we have left.”

Time left with dignity. Terminal Time. This was like no time I knew. It was time that was finite—
Isn’t all time finite, aren’t we all mortal
, my mother was saying. Yes. But this was different. This was time cut off from hope. With nothing left to try, not even the fiction this could work.

I wanted to argue her back into sense. There were other things, experimental things. Hadn’t Dr. Brenner said that, when I was there with her at the clinic earlier that month? If the F-U didn’t work?

Yes, my mother said, patient, using her teaching voice. But if the F-U only got a “limited response,” the chance of the next level of drugs working was slim. Dr. Brenner had told her that. And by this point she was so weak from the F-U, or from the cancer, or both, that he was worried she couldn’t tolerate anything stronger.

It was just a question of time, she said. “Quality of life” and time. Dr. Brenner had met with my mother and father last week and laid it all out for them. They were all on the same page. They were shifting now to what he called “palliative care.”

“What does that mean?” Sara asked.

Palliative care, my mother said quietly, meant they would try to keep the pain to a minimum. Taking care of the symptoms, basically, instead of trying to slow them down.

So, in essence, keeping her comfortable. Waiting for her to die.

I just stared at her.

There was nothing to say. Nowhere to look. In the distance, the
Beaver Islander
blew its horn again: a signal to the drawbridge.
Get ready. We’re coming into the harbor
.

My father wanted to help her back up to the car and then to the condo. She was exhausted and needed to rest.

The steps looked different, standing at the bottom, holding her by one arm, staring up. The spaces between them wider. So many times as a kid I’d run up and down these steps, stopping (maybe) to wriggle out a splinter, the damp wood cold under my bare feet. But now, seeing them with her, they looked unwieldy. From behind she looked so sick, her back hunched, shoulders stooped, her sweatshirt billowing around her emaciated frame like a sail. Like a hieroglyph, where once a person had been.

 

BACK IN BOSTON, I HAD
a Charlevoix dream.

We were on our way to The Park Side, all of us. My mother was well, tanned, healthy, way ahead of us, impatient because we were dawdling (
Girls!
) and we were going to lose our reservation. She had her laundry bag slung over one shoulder, kind of like Santa Claus, because she liked to drop it off at the village Laundromat before we ate. Such a multitasker, my mother, even in dreams. She crossed the bridge first, hurrying across as the bells begin to ring, turning back to us, urging us on,
hurry, hurry
, but it began to lift just as she reached the other side.

“Girls,” she said, chiding us. We could hear her perfectly, it was like she was right next to us instead of all the way across the bridge, then she was shrugging, smiling, a what-can-I-possibly-do-about-this? expression on her face, and at the same time a don’t-worry-it’s-fine-we’re-all-fine look, too. She was on one side and we were on the other, and the drawbridge kept lifting higher and higher, its metal jaws locking us apart.

NOW THAT LABOR DAY WAS
behind us, you could feel it. September: cooler in the evenings, the shadows longer, shop fronts crowded with mannequins in sweaters, paper cutouts of leaves at their feet. You could smell fall in the air.

Next week I’d be teaching again.

I’d been preparing for weeks—getting my office organized, Xeroxing things to put on reserve in the library, meeting colleagues. Since we’d come back from Charlevoix, I’d been going to my office most mornings, but we were so close to campus I could still come home for lunch to see Sacha. I didn’t feel like running, for some reason—I must’ve gotten some kind of bug while we were traveling, because my stomach felt funny. But in the afternoons, while Sacha napped and Annabel was still with her, I took walks—usually to Newton Centre, a mile and a half away. I liked walking around the center of town, watching people, going in and out of stores, trying on clothes I thought looked like what I used to wear: skirts with a rumpled, linen feel, loose sweaters, boots with flat heels. Once I stopped in to see Sandi at Centre Realty to see if she’d heard back from the owner of the house Jacques liked. “Yes!” she said, setting her pencil down; she’d actually just heard, if I could believe it—the owner had been away, but had just gotten back from the Cape. And apparently she was more flexible on price than she’d been previously. She’d come into some inheritance money, and that meant there might be “some wiggle room” on the asking price. Would we like to go over and take a look and see what we thought?

“Yes,” I told her. “We would.”

Sandi said she’d call and set it up, and get back to us.

Later, I walked back to the House with the Green Shag.

It felt funny not having Sacha in my arms or in a stroller—I’d forgotten what I used to do with two free hands. Annabel and I were starting to fall into a routine, but it was all still new to me. At about nine each morning she’d come in, smelling of shampoo, carrying a batik bag bulging with a paperback novel and a huge water bottle. She’d call out enthusiastically to Sacha, put her things down, and right away, they’d start playing.