by Leslie Gould
“Well, that’s an answer,” Jill said.
“I’ll put the little guys down for a nap before we leave,” Caye said, bending to kiss Jill on the cheek and to take Simon from her. Jill was right—they didn’t want to talk about faith and healing in front of her.
As Nathan and Caye headed out the door, Jill called out, “I always knew Jesus wore Levi’s.”
Caye smiled.
Nathan chuckled. “What was that about?” “I’ll tell you later.”
Caye knelt on the railroad tie beside her raised garden bed and pulled weeds from around the tomato seedlings. She didn’t wear gloves; she enjoyed the feel of the dirt against her hands, savored the smell of the soil, of the fresh baby plants.
Mother’s Day. What if it’s Jill’s last? No! Don’t think that. Faith. Have faith.
Caye wiped the sweat from her forehead up to her hairline with the back of her hand. The day had turned muggy. Nathan had taken Audrey and Andrew to the park to play so Caye could have an hour of peace.
Jill was sick. The Fellowship was a mess. Thomas and Joya were undependable. None of them knew, exactly, what faith was anymore. Marion was worse than no help at all.
On the way home in the car, Nathan had explained himself. “Everyone is acting like faith can heal Jill. Jill’s faith. Rob’s faith. Our faith. Only God can heal Jill. He’s called us to trust him, to have faith, not to heal Jill through our faith.”
Caye tossed another handful of weeds into her pile in the wheelbarrow. Show your faith through love.
Did she have enough love to care for Jill the way she needed to? To be a good wife to Nathan in the midst of all of it? To be a good mom to Andrew and Audrey? A good auntie to the boys? A good friend to Rob? Could she show her own faith through love?
She felt tired. Overwhelmed. Two weeks ago she had the adrenaline-driven energy to take care of all of them. Now she felt exhausted.
What held her back from talking with Jill about healing? Was she afraid of saying something stupid?
If they could talk about healing and faith, could they talk about other things? Could she tell Jill that Marion had fought breast cancer?
Nathan had told her to go with her intuition. Her intuition said that Marion should tell Jill, but what were the chances of that?
Leave well enough alone, Caye’s mother always said. Don’t put your nose in other people’s business. But Jill wasn’t an “other” person. She was Jill.
Caye pinched back the new growth on the tomato plants to make the vines stronger, sturdier, able to support the tomatoes that would soon develop from the yellow buds.
She wanted to talk with Jill about so many things. The boys for starters. Had Jill and Rob sat down with Liam and Hudson and explained what was going on? Had they considered talking to a counselor or a social worker to get some ideas on what the boys needed?
The pumpkin seedlings had popped through the ground and were wearing their ivory-colored seeds like hats. Abra picked her way through the vegetable bed, just out of Caye’s reach. “Here, kitty,” Caye called, noticing matted fur on Abra’s belly. The cat ignored her.
Caye moved off the railroad tie and sank to her knees on the grass. She wrapped her arms around her denim-covered legs. So tired. So sad, she thought. She rolled over to her side. The grassy earth felt good beneath her, against her bare arms.
She remembered watching the clouds as a child, calling out their shapes to her mother. Dragon! Whale! Crookneck squash!
There were no clouds today. Only the sticky overcast sky. It didn’t matter. She wasn’t interested in what was above her. She was interested in the earth, as if she could derive some comfort, some reassurance from the feel of the world beneath her. She closed her eyes. Took a deep breath. How long had it been since she’d felt relaxed? More than two weeks. What had Rob said today? Seventeen days. It felt like seventeen years.
“Mommy!”
Caye opened her eyes. Andrew stood over her. It had been a long time since he had called her Mommy. He was out of breath. She raised her head. Audrey and Nathan were running toward her, hurrying down the stairs of the deck.
“Caye!”
“What’s the matter?” she asked. Her heart raced. What had happened?
“Are you okay?” Nathan asked.
“I’m fine,” she said, sitting up, realizing that they were worried about her. Feeling foolish, she brushed her hands together and laughed. “I must have fallen asleep. It felt so good to be out in the fresh air.”
Nathan offered her a hand and pulled her up. He put his arm around her shoulder and squeezed her. “You scared us,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” Caye answered. “I didn’t mean to.”
Caye took Audrey’s hand. Andrew grabbed the handles of the wheelbarrow and headed to the compost bin by the shed.
“Did you call your mom?” Nathan asked.
“I will now,” Caye said.
Nathan squeezed her shoulder again. She knew he was thinking about his mother, who left all those years ago. He sometimes wondered where she was, how far she’d gone. He seldom talked about her, or his disappointment, his anger that a mother—his mother—would just leave. Caye put her head against her husband’s shoulder. Nathan bent toward her, and the bill of his baseball hat brushed against her hair. Audrey skipped along beside them as they walked toward the house.
21
Jill sat with the plastic tube stuck in the vein of her hand. She shot a quick glance at the woman beside her, stole a look at her drawn-on eyebrows. The woman across from Jill wore a turban. Thirty minutes is what the nurse had said. Jill looked at the bag hanging above her head. Bag of toxins, poisoning me. The nurse called it an infusion. Gemcitabine was the drug. Jill had asked the nurse to spell it. She hoped she’d be able to remember the name of it to tell Caye. She knew Caye would want to look it up.
Had her dad had chemo? Radiation? She had no idea. The question almost made her want to call Marion. She nearly called her mom on Mother’s Day, out of habit, but stopped herself.
What was it going to take for things to be better with Marion? Would her mother call in a month to see if she was still alive?
Caye told her last Friday, when they were sitting on the kitchen window seat after lunch, that Marion had asked when she should come back again. “It would be nice,” Caye had added, “for her to want to help with something.”
“See why I like your mom so much?” Jill responded
After twenty minutes, the bag was only half empty. She would have the chemo once a week for three months and radiation for the next five weeks. The nurse unhooked the woman with the turban. “You really do look great,” the nurse said, giving the woman a hug.
“Thanks,” the woman laughed. “Not that I believe you—but thanks anyway.”
Rob was in the waiting room with his laptop. That was good. At least he was getting work done.
Jill refused to let herself worry about Rob’s job, or money, or whether Marion would cut them off financially. She never intended for them to become so dependent on her mother. The little and not-so-little stuff helped—paying for the house to be painted, the house-cleaning and gardening services, Hudson’s preschool, the trip to Disneyland last spring. Marion hadn’t sent money for Hudson’s preschool since the beginning of May. Jill had already decided to keep Hudson home and use that money to help with other things—like the mortgage. She knew Rob’s travel pay would go down since he was cutting out work trips—at least until she was better. He was going to try to do as much as possible over the phone.
She imagined Marion all alone in her duplex on Mother’s Day. Had she hoped Jill would call? Had she thought about calling Jill?
She felt abandoned by her mother. She thought of her wedding day, of Marion’s behavior. Jill had felt incredibly lonely as the ceremony in the tulip field started. She and Rob walked down the pathway together, between the tulips. Marion had offered to w
alk her down the “aisle,” but Jill had declined; she was sure Marion was relieved. It seemed to Jill that Marion saw the wedding as something to be endured, not as a celebration. All day it seemed she was looking forward to the end.
Why did we include her? Jill walked through the tulips with Rob, catching a glimpse of Marion’s glum face. Because she’s paying for it. That was certainly one reason to include her.
Rob’s parents, grandparents, and older brother, who traveled from Spain, stood waiting for them. Rob’s dad officiated. After the ceremony, they had a wedding luncheon at a restaurant high on a bluff overlooking a bend in the Willamette River.
A few minutes into the meal, Marion spilled her red wine on the linen tablecloth and then dabbed at it with her napkin. “It’s okay,” Jill said, patting her mom’s wrist. “It’s not a big deal.”
Later the photographer took pictures of Jill on the deck of the restaurant. The wind whipped her fingertip veil around her face. After he shot the last photo, she raised her hands over her head, catching her veil and raising it upward. The photographer quickly snapped the image. The look on her face was pure happiness. It was Rob’s favorite photo from the wedding.
She had been happy. Happy to marry Rob. Happy to have the ceremony in a field of tulips. Happy to have had the elegant luncheon. Happy to have been with Rob’s family. Even, by the end of the day, happy to have been with Marion. But she was most happy that she’d just taken the first step to creating her own family, her life away from her mother.
Still, when Jill kissed her mother good-bye that afternoon, she felt a surge of unexpected compassion. Now Marion was truly alone.
Jill looked back over her shoulder as she and Rob drove away. The others had gone back inside the restaurant for coffee. Marion stood alone in the parking lot with the river behind her. She looked old; she touched her face quickly—Jill thought for a split second that Marion was going to blow her a kiss, then she thought perhaps Marion was wiping away a tear. But her mother turned back toward her rental car, and Rob sped down the road along the bluff.
As she watched the slow drip, drip of the medication entering her bloodstream, Jill didn’t feel exactly abandoned by God. In an odd, twisted way, she felt chosen by him, as if he’d just reached down with his hand and stirred up their lives, all of their lives, in some huge, galactic way.
Her arm began to burn where the chemicals entered her body. The oncology clinic had a strange, sharp smell to it, metallic. After so many years of taking care of her body, it felt appalling to let toxins enter it.
She wanted to go home. She wanted to crawl into bed. To sleep, sleep, sleep. To wake up and have it all be a bad dream.
She looked at the bag. It was almost empty.
She’d come back in a week for her next chemo. She had an appointment with Dr. Scott on Thursday. And then sometime soon they’d do another CAT scan to see if the cancer was shrinking.
Shrink she commanded. Shrink, shrink, shrink.
It had been an easier day for Caye. She and Jill had even sat out in the garden in the afternoon, after Caye had picked up Andrew from school, after Jill had napped.
“The nurse said my hair probably won’t fall out,” Jill told Caye after she’d explained the chemo procedure. “It’s not a common side effect of the drug they’re using.”
“That’s good news,” Caye said as she looked at Jill’s long hair.
And starting the chemo felt like good news too.
“Did Joya stop by while I was napping?” Jill asked.
“She brought a meal,” Caye answered.
“Did she say anything?”
“Not really.”
Caye was surprised that Joya showed up with the meal she had promised. Chicken and rice casserole. Easy to digest, she’d said. As she left, she said she’d be back on Thursday with another meal. Caye had felt awkward around Joya. She wondered if Gwen had reported back to Joya about yesterday’s conversation at the brunch.
Caye left Jill’s house after Rob arrived. The table was set; the boys were in their pajamas. Dinner was hot. When she got home, she threw a jar of Alfredo sauce in a pan and put water on to boil for pasta. Nathan was late.
He got home at seven o’clock. “How was baseball practice?” he asked Andrew, who was sitting at the table reading a Star Wars paperback.
“I forgot.” Caye answered from the kitchen, poking her head through the door, her heart sinking. Andrew looked up with a sheepish expression.
“It doesn’t look like Andrew did,” Nathan answered. “It looks like he just didn’t want to go.”
After dinner Caye hustled Audrey and then Andrew through their baths. At 9:15 she was loading the dishwasher, thinking she should restart the load of laundry that had been sitting in the washer since Saturday.
“Mommy,” Audrey called from the hallway, “I can’t sleep.”
“Go back to bed,” Caye said.
“But I can’t sleep.”
“Nathan,” Caye called into the living room. She could hear the TV. “Can you put Audrey back to bed?” He didn’t answer.
“Nathan,” she called again. Drying her hands and flinging the dishtowel over her shoulder, she marched into the living room. He was asleep on the couch.
“Come on, Audrey,” Caye said, leading the way down the hall. “Get back to bed.”
Andrew stood at the bathroom sink turning the tap on and off, bobbing a bar of verbena soap in the water. “Brush your teeth,” Caye snapped as she hurried past the bathroom. Most nights she checked his teeth and made him brush a second time. Not tonight.
Caye tucked Audrey under the blanket. “Don’t come out again—not until morning.”
Andrew had brushed his teeth in his usual record time and sat on his bed in a pair of yellow thermal pajamas. Caye smelled the herbal soap as she bent to kiss him on the forehead.
“In bed,” she said. “Now.”
“Mom,” he asked, “why don’t you read to me anymore?”
Caye stopped halfway to the door and turned around.
“I do read to you.” How long had it been? “It’s just that it’s so late. Sweet dreams,” she added, turning back to the door.
“Mom.” She felt her irritation rising. The dishes weren’t finished. Nathan was asleep in front of the TV. Laundry was souring in the basement.
“What?”
“Is Jill going to die?”
Caye turned back toward her son. He was sitting up in bed. His brown eyes glistened behind his round glasses. His face wrinkled, twisted, contorted. She turned and walked back to his bed, sat down, and pulled him toward her.
“I don’t want her to die,” Andrew said, starting to cry.
“I don’t either,” Caye said.
“Is she going to die?”
Caye stroked her son’s hair, moving his straight brown bangs away from his brown eyes. She could say “no,” or “I don’t know,” or maybe, or maybe not.
“I don’t know whether Jill will live or die,” she answered. “I really believe she’s going to live.” Did she?
“Why did God let this happen?”
Caye shook her head and swallowed hard.
She was missing some chance, she was sure. A chance to impart truth, to build Andrews faith, to do something, somehow. But she didn’t know what or how.
Andrew began to sob. “I think I’m mad at God.” He pulled away and put his glasses on the bedside table.
“That’s okay,” Caye answered. “He can take it.”
“Mommy,”—Audrey stood in the doorway—“I still can’t sleep.”
“Come here.”
“Why is Andrew crying?”
“He’s sad.” He’s mad. He’s sad. We’re all so sad. Caye thought. And mad. It was all twisted together. I’m mad at God too. Unless Jill is healed. Then I won’t be mad. She frowned.
“I’m sad too,” Audrey said, and then she began to
cry.
“Move over, Andrew,” Caye said. She pulled Audrey along with her and squirreled under the blankets.
She woke to Audrey’s soft snore in her ear. Her usual waking thought that something was wrong was followed by the image of Jill. Not of Nathan. Not of the kids. Jill.
She felt tense and tired. She’d slept but hadn’t rested.
She wiggled out from between Audrey and Andrew and walked, bleary eyed, into the living room. By the light of the TV she could see that Nathan was still asleep on the couch.
“Come on, honey,” she said. “It’s past bedtime.”
“Let’s go to the park today,” Jill said to Caye.
Jill could tell, by the way Caye looked at her, that she thought she was joking.
“I’m serious.
“Do you feel up to it?”
“Let’s take a picnic. We can go right after Simon gets up from his morning nap.”
“I’ll go get some laundry started first,” Caye said. “I brought mine over too. I’ll just mix it all together.”
Jill felt better than she had in days. She’d gotten up before Rob left for work and was giving Simon his bottle when Caye arrived.
She felt mixed emotions when she fed the baby. The other two were weaned straight to a cup. This was the first time she’d had bottles in the house. She felt as if Caye had made the decision for her.
On the other hand, Simon was calm and cuddly when he took his bottle—and he had been forced to go off the breast much sooner than Hudson and Liam. Each time she gave him his bottle, she felt uneasy, as if the bottle symbolized her failure. But then, by the time they’d snuggled for ten minutes, she felt sad when he was done and ready to get off her lap and practice his crawling. Soon he’d be practicing his walking.
She realized that if Caye was around, she let her feed Simon. She decided she wasn’t going to do that anymore. She would feed her baby. She needed to do everything she could for her boys—especially Simon.
