The Spectacular

by Zoe Whittall

  “But you said no to joining the new supergroup!”

  “Right. Because it’s a girl band.”

  “Ah, of course.”

  “I know, it’s just weird. Doesn’t feel right. Plus, I just want to play for fun. I see the potential for it to get complicated, with egos and such. Agatha and I had a falling out, as you know.”

  “Sorry, I just got excited because I wanted to be in a band with you.”

  “Let’s write some duets, then?”

  He reached out and grabbed my hand across the table. His hands were so sexy.

  “So, what is it like to be a dad? I’ve been thinking about becoming a single mom, considering the option, anyway.”

  “For me it was really, really difficult sometimes, especially at first,” he said. He was the first person who didn’t automatically add But it’s the best thing I ever did, and you should do it, too! Instead, he spoke honestly about the positives and negatives, the things most parents don’t talk about.

  The conversation turned to dogs (he loves them, but never had one), gardening (his passion), and cooking (his bane). We ordered a second round of cappuccinos, still jittery from the first. We edged closer together, our knees touching under the small table.

  “I guess we don’t have the awkwardness of the first kiss, since we’ve already kissed before,” I said. “This is our second date.”

  “I guess it is,” he said.

  He reached across the table, touched my face, and I put my hand against the soft flannel of his shirt, and then he kissed me. It couldn’t have been more than three seconds. But it was the most exhilarating three seconds I’d experienced in years. I looked around the room after, embarrassed, as though the café patrons could see how a relatively chaste kiss felt more erotic to me than the entire encounter with the Uber driver, or the last few years of married sex.

  When we pulled away, he looked at me and smirked. “You’re trouble, Missy. You’re real, serious trouble.”

  Later that night, I woke up in bed to a jolt of pain in my abdomen. I stumbled to the bathroom and sat on the toilet, assuming it was my period. There was so much blood. I was almost four days late and still hadn’t taken the pregnancy test that sat by the sink. But here was the answer.

  I pressed my hands against the back of the bathroom door, running a finger along the grooves, as another wave of pain tore through my uterus. Eventually, I crawled back to bed and tried to sleep, though it was fitful, as I kept waking up with cramps.

  In the morning, I called Agatha.

  “I feel awful and I’m bleeding kind of heavily. Do you think I should go to the hospital?”

  “Sounds like you might have had a chemical pregnancy—it’s a very early miscarriage—or maybe it’s perimenopause,” she said, “Everything gets heavier and weird around our age.”

  An early miscarriage? The pregnancy had never been quite real, so I wasn’t sure this could be, either. I put her on speaker and googled it.

  “I guess either way, the pregnancy dream is over.” I put my cheek against the bathroom wall, feeling more disappointed than I’d expected to.

  “Well, if you’re sad about it then you know your true feelings.”

  “I guess.”

  “So, how was your Tinder date?”

  “It was kind of amazing. And you know him,” I said.

  “What? Who is it?” asked Agatha.

  “Andy, from your old band!”

  Silence on the other end of the phone, then a sigh.

  “Oh girl, Andy? He’s great, but he’s complicated.”

  “Why? He seems literally perfect, like God created the perfect date for me.”

  “Nah, no, of course. He’s an incredible person.”

  There was a bit of an edge in her voice, but I couldn’t decipher it.

  “Did you hook up?”

  “No, he had to go pick up his kids, but we had so much chemistry. He said he’d call.”

  “Well, great. I’m happy for you.”

  We talked a little more, mostly about the new band and when we would meet up next, and then she had to go because she was taking Emily to a swim class.

  I hung up the phone and wandered into the living room. I looked around my house with new eyes. It was all mine. There was a vase of wildflowers on the coffee table, my red Converse by the front door, Penny was sleeping on the living room couch, and my cello was leaning against the fireplace. I sank into an armchair and got out my phone, looked more closely at the results for chemical pregnancy. I’d had the symptoms, but maybe I wouldn’t ever know for sure.

  Chapter 8

  carola

  i have never been good at sitting still. Of course I practise meditation and have for decades, but I am not a natural. I have built a muscle, and it is useful. Cancer reduces you to your earliest self. Every day I wore my softest, loosest clothing and woke up feeling like a cranky newborn. And for the first few weeks post-diagnosis, when I wasn’t asleep, I was moving around, trying to get away from my body. I set the timer to do my morning sit, and ended up bolting upright after five minutes, unable to breathe deeply or just observe my thoughts. I was pulled to reorganize the house, scrubbing every sliver of discoloured grout between the bathroom floor tiles with a toothbrush. I fell asleep with my cheek against the wall of the shower stall, woken up by Saturday’s cold nose and a lick across my face, worried I’d lost consciousness.

  A lot of the work of having cancer is administrative. I had readied myself for the spiritual work of being sick, the necessary introspection and self-care rituals I thought would be required. I booked vitamin C IVs and afternoons at the sauna, lymphatic massages. I started a new journal and sketched out an elaborate wellness plan, complete with charts and illustrations. But very quickly, every day was subsumed by the endless river of forms to fill out, calls to my insurance provider, the doctors who didn’t talk to the other doctors, the labs who forgot to call the doctors, the doctors who forgot to order the labs. I routinely paced the living room with the cordless phone on speaker, listening to hold music, spelling out my last name and date of birth—again—saying the words You told me to call back, so I’m calling back until I would begin to cry. Again.

  I was lucky that they caught it early enough that I had only minimally invasive surgery to remove the lump, and four weeks of chemo afterwards. I knew I was lucky. The treatments were brutal, but more or less what I expected. I went in with such a positive attitude, but over the first few weeks I felt demoralized. Larry was my rock, but there was only so much he could do.

  And in the middle of a particularly bad day during the week off between treatments—often when I felt the worst physical symptoms—I realized that I hadn’t seen Rufus in a while. I looked everywhere in the house. I couldn’t hear his gentle snoring, or the tap tap tap of his limping jump with his single front paw. I went out to the bunkhouse, where Larry was painting the walls, the final step before it could house visitors.

  “I can’t find Rufus,” I said, a rising panic in my voice. He steadied himself on the stepladder and dipped the brush back into the paint can.

  “Oh, I let him out yesterday. He’s probably just enjoying his freedom.”

  He ran the brush up and down, slopping blue over the masking-tape border, so carelessly I wanted to reach up and redo it immediately.

  “How could you do this, after he lost the paw, after the trauma of the surgery? We decided he was an indoor cat now.”

  Larry put the brush down in the paint tray. “No, Carola, you decided that. He’s a cat. He deserves to be outside. We haven’t seen the bears in a long while.”

  “How could you make this decision without me?”

  I was livid. I circled the house and went into the forest paths holding a bowl of kibble and shaking it, calling his name over and over. I walked across the road and up the long driveway of our neighbours, to ask if they’d seen a three-legged black-and-white cat. No luck. I wandered their fields, calling his name. I gave up after a few hours. He was gone.
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  I caught a chill outside that felt as if it was eating into my chest. “I don’t know why you keep pushing yourself. You shouldn’t be wandering outside for hours. You are sick,” Larry said, pushing the buttons on the microwave as I shivered under the couch blanket. He brought me a bowl of broth and set it on the coffee table.

  “Carola, I used to let him out while you were at work. We had a whole ritual. Cats like rituals. I don’t know why he isn’t coming back around by five, it’s a mystery. But I mean, ultimately, he has had a good life, hasn’t he? Most cats don’t get to murder that many creatures, that was his whole passion in life.”

  “Leave me alone,” I mumbled into the bowl.

  I emailed the centre’s discussion list about Rufus being missing, to look out for him, that he was microchipped and very friendly. Blue responded right away saying she’d make posters. I missed being at work. I missed people who wouldn’t just shrug like Larry would shrug. A week went by, and everyone at the centre looked for Rufus on their walks around. Someone emailed to say they thought they saw him in the forest. I brought the cat treats out to shake every afternoon when I walked the dogs. No luck.

  I wanted to be well enough to work. No one could teach my particular brand of workshop, especially when women signed up to come and learn from me. I tried to train some of the volunteers, talk them through it, but it felt like more work to explain the work than to just do it myself. I had been a pillar of strength for the women who attended my retreats, an example of success in conquering my mind and building a strong, clean body. But now I was not strong. My body was not clean. I thought about all the times I had had cancer survivors in my workshops, how much I thought I could help them. The hubris! I had truly had no idea. What would I even say to them now? In moments of clarity, I wrote notes toward a workshop for cancer survivors. One that could have helped me right now, or after this was over. But mostly my mind felt fried from the chemo. I was lucky to make it through the day remembering where I kept my shoes and who I was supposed to call for what. Most nights I gratefully collapsed in front of episodes of Murder, She Wrote, until I fell asleep. By the time the break between treatments was over, I would have started to feel normal again and I’d be loath to start over. I felt so heavy even as I knew I was getting lighter.

  Blue was trying very hard to be a support person. A few weeks after Rufus disappeared she showed up for her weekly Sunday drop-off of the meal-train lunches. As I was placing the neatly labelled Tupperware in the fridge, I said to her, “It’s funny, the wellness industry is for people who are already well, isn’t it?”

  “You’re just tired,” she said, “but you’re a fighter. You’re going to fight this and you’re going to win. You know, I heard about a guy who was stage four and cured his cancer with qigong.”

  I couldn’t look at her after she said that. I’m not sure why I felt such rage. I handed her a bag of cat treats and told her where to go and look for Rufus. She nodded. I crawled up to bed for a nap and heard her through the windows of the loft calling Rufus’s name.

  I felt more tired than I thought possible. Even more than when I was pregnant with Missy.

  Tegan would call every few days.

  “I’m so tired. I can’t teach, I can’t inspire. I have one week left of treatment. What is my purpose here?” I moaned into the phone, the TV on mute, a plate of sprouted toast untouched.

  “Your purpose? Jesus, Carola. You don’t have to do anything but rest. You don’t owe anyone any lessons, or any positivity. You can be mad every day. Maybe it would help? But even if it doesn’t, you’re allowed to complain.”

  “I don’t want to lose hope, it could make things worse.”

  “Okay, okay. What do you need?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about the old days at Sunflower a lot, why everything went wrong. Did you know that Bryce’s mom killed herself instead of doing chemo?”

  “But wasn’t she already a hundred years old?”

  “I’m just saying, I used to think it was a bit of a selfish choice. Or weak. But now I get it.”

  “You are not going to do that, though? I thought you had stage one. You can kick stage one, babe.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “It wouldn’t be fair to Missy, to leave twice.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Sorry, but you have a second chance with her now, and I’m glad you’re taking advantage of that.”

  “Not really. I don’t have time for relationships that require much work right now.”

  I could hear her breathing, but she didn’t respond.

  “Look, she doesn’t actually know.”

  “Doesn’t know what?”

  “That I’m sick. I haven’t told her.”

  “Holy shit, Carola. You love your secrets. Jesus. You need to tell her.”

  “Every time I’m about to, I just feel a rush of guilt, like I can’t put this on her. Asking her for anything feels like too much.”

  Before Ruth died, I failed Missy again. Ruth invited me to Beaurepaire to reconcile with her and Missy, and I’d arrived keen and hopeful, and every day that hope had slowly withered. Those few days with Ruth and Missy were intolerable, and things got worse after Ruth left for Turkey. I tried not to think of it much, how I’d failed that reunion. I’d promised Ruth I wouldn’t leave before Missy did, that I wouldn’t re-traumatize her. But it was a shock to see her as an adult, as though we were in a science-fiction film and she was regressing before my eyes. I could barely make sense of what I should do, how I could help her. She wanted the abortion and I could support that, but her problems went deeper. I almost felt like I was her biggest problem, so how could I possibly help? But I stayed through her abortion, through her recovery, even though she would barely speak to me. I brought her soup. I kept the house clean, watered the plants until Ruth was due to return from her trip.

  But then Bryce returned alone, grieving over the astonishing loss of Ruth.

  So I stayed even longer. I helped Bryce pack up Ruth’s house. Missy skulked around us, shooting me mean looks, then rushing in to hug Bryce every chance she got. That was fair. I deserved it, but also Bryce was just a mess. The dynamic felt familiar, though. Back at Sunflower, everyone else was allowed to have big emotions and act on them, but I was never seen or heard. I just kept on keeping on. Bryce had his big dreams and big plans, while Missy ran wild, and I washed the pots, fed the animals, and led the meetings. I sorted through Ruth’s belongings, a life’s worth of things, while Bryce collapsed into sobs and Missy raged. My feelings would get sorted out later, by myself, since no one there was interested in them.

  The last thing I did before I left was to try to gently coax Missy to talk about her addiction issue. I was told, quite vociferously, that it was none of my business. My offerings were left untouched and I was getting nowhere. If anything, our relationship was getting worse, a mash-up of grief, anger, and withdrawal. I didn’t know what else to do, so I decided it was time to return to my own life. Melissa was an adult, and she had a right to be angry with me, but I couldn’t be her punching bag.

  The morning of my departure, Bryce crept into the living room, where I had been sleeping on the pullout couch, and gently shook me awake.

  “Carola, she did it on purpose. She killed herself,” he said.

  “What?” I said, bolting up. I thought he was talking about Missy. “What happened? Where is she?”

  “My mother,” he said. “She killed herself.”

  “Bryce, what are you talking about? You aren’t making sense.”

  “On the boat. My mother killed herself,” he said, his voice catching. “It was suicide. But we can’t tell Missy.”

  He held out three envelopes. One had his name on it. The others said Missy and Cy.

  “Who’s Cy?” I asked.

  “The neighbour down the street,” Bryce said, smiling a little. “I guess he was Mom’s boyfriend.”

  I stared at him, open-mouthed.

  “I can’t be
lieve it,” I said. “What do the letters say?”

  “Mine is saying goodbye,” he said, his voice cracking as he fought another wave of tears. “I am guessing Missy’s and Cy’s letters are the same, but we can’t give Missy the letter.”

  “Why not? We have to, Bryce. It’s not our decision to make. Those were Ruth’s last wishes,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “Missy is too vulnerable right now. You’ve seen her. She’ll get better, she’ll get over this, and then maybe I’ll show her the letter. But not now. She’s not strong enough.”

  I didn’t argue. I couldn’t imagine what I could say to convince Bryce, plus I had given up fighting with him years ago. Moreover, I didn’t feel like I had the right. When it came to Missy, Bryce was the parent, wasn’t he? I had given up that privilege, so how could I claim it then?

  To this day, I hadn’t told Missy about her grandmother’s letter. And to my knowledge, Bryce never shared it with her. So here I was, undergoing cancer treatments and still keeping secrets from my daughter. None of it was lost on me—in fact, I was reflecting on my mistakes near constantly—but I couldn’t see my way clear to make any of it better.

  I told Tegan everything, tearing at the now-dry toast in front of me, trying to take a small bite. “So, what should I do?”

  “I don’t know, Carola. I think you might want to make a list of things you want to make right, and when you’re well enough, start working through them. But it’s a two-way thing. You can’t control how Missy reacts. For now, just let other people take care of you. I know that’s hard for you.”

  “It’s literally all I’ve wanted, to be cared for, protected.”

  Tegan didn’t say anything. I felt embarrassed by my candour and ended the call.

  I went outside and walked the trail behind the house that goes into the woods. Larry had strung up a hammock between two trees so I could get time in the woods without walking all the way to the riverbed if I was having a very difficult day with no energy. I curled up in it and stared at the fluttering leaves, at the chickadees popping from branch to branch, a curious fat squirrel unnerved by my presence. I closed my eyes and tried to take three cleansing breaths.