If We Had Known

by Elise Juska

  “No,” Bill said, and she was startled by the depth of sorrow on his face. “I can’t imagine that you did.”

  Four

  Suzanne had developed a theory, even before her own marriage started falling apart, that the people who put the most cheerful things on the Internet were the ones whose lives were the most unhappy. They were pretending otherwise (to the world, and maybe to themselves) by posting idyllic pictures of their husbands and children—date nights, summer vacations, first days of school. Suzanne understood this impulse, but also recognized that it was not without consequences. For sometimes, these same people would abruptly stop posting anything, and Suzanne would hear through her sisters or old friends that the husband was having an affair or the bank had foreclosed on their home or the youngest son had developed an addiction to Vicodin following surgery on his knee. Lately, this kind of thing seemed to be happening more and more. It was probably the age—fifty-three, a time in life when one’s body began to falter, and the problems of one’s children grew more dire, the problems in a marriage more intractable, and time seemed suddenly not so indefinite, as one began to weigh how happy one’s life was against how much life was left.

  Suzanne was careful to never put anything online that might misrepresent her life as happy, nor anything that might hint at all that was wrong. To get too personal either way seemed in poor taste. She’d been raised by a mother who, above all else, valued privacy and propriety. (Her mother would have despised Facebook, Suzanne thought.) What Suzanne posted were nature photographs, mostly. She’d taken an eight-week course at the adult school back in Indiana, and for her birthday that year Robert had given her a digital camera. It was one of the few things Suzanne liked about living in Maine: There was so much to photograph there—the woods with their thin veil of new snow, a stubborn beach rose the color of a dog’s tongue, a shaggy tree draped in fog standing by the side of the road. Sometimes, after an appointment at Central Maine Medicine, she would drive to Meer Cove and sit inside her car with the engine running, warm air blasting from the vents, and watch the sea smoke dance on the water, curling and twisting across the frozen surface like a ballet. It was exquisite, and impossible to capture with a camera—both the smoke and the way it echoed inside her, took the haze she felt trapped inside and lifted it off her like a coat, manipulating it into something beautiful and visible and filling her with a sweeping sadness that was, somehow, pleasurable too.

  Her photos always received a polite flurry of responses (the beach rose had been particularly well liked), and in return she clicked dutifully through her sisters’ children, old friends’ and old neighbors’ children, even when the preponderance of children made a darkness come nibbling at the edge. Mostly, though, the world online was purely an escape—a distraction. Except for those times when a real-world tragedy was so horrific that to post about anything else was heartless, or ignorant. She pitied her sister Julia, asking for beach-read recommendations on the same day as the bombing at the Boston Marathon.

  The shooting at the Millview Mall hadn’t generated the highest level of attention—four victims sadly no longer ranked that kind of coverage—but as Suzanne sat shakily in front of her laptop screen that Friday afternoon, it was enough to trigger a surge of messages from friends both actual and virtual who recognized the name of the small Maine town and wanted to make sure that she and Robert were okay. Yes, she typed back, very close, just down the road. But we’re fine. Yes, a student at the college, but R didn’t know him, she wrote, though this was not quite accurate. Robert had in fact taught this boy—Suzanne had recoiled when he told her—but said he didn’t remember anything about him. She’d found this both amazing and unsurprising. Regardless, it wasn’t something she wanted to admit to people; to say Robert didn’t know him was true enough.

  Now, Saturday morning, the house was quiet except for the sound of a somber newscaster on CNN. Robert had left the television on when he went running. Suzanne had thought he might skip his run this Saturday, out of deference to the tragedy, but no—to her husband, that would make no sense. Would it change anything? Suzanne returned to her laptop. She sifted through all the new messages, the relieved responses. So many, in fact, that she felt obliged to post a note of general thanks. Dear Friends: Robert and I appreciate all of your concern. We are shaken, but we are fine, and we are grateful.

  As soon as the words were inscribed on-screen, she regretted them: we are grateful. It sounded so tidy, so made. This was why she was wary of putting anything on the Internet—it was so hard to get it right. She didn’t want to risk sounding unaffected. Nor did she want to admit to the raw nerve the news had opened, or exploit their connections to the event. The fact that, yes, incredibly, Robert had taught this boy. Yes, it was a mall that Suzanne went to regularly, though not to shop (it was a depressing mall, and she’d never really shopped there) but to walk her laps when it rained. And, yes, it was the very town they lived in—though if she was being honest, except for a few kind nurses, she felt no deep connection to the place, to the entire state. She’d lived there just over two years and it had brought her nothing but heartbreak.

  She left the computer for the kitchen, where she poured a glass of water, hands trembling, and removed her pill organizer from the sill. Before yesterday, the pain she’d felt had been mostly personal, but now it was spreading. Four people dead. She made her way through her morning dose. Vitamin D supplements. Tamoxifen, 20 mg. In late July, she’d had her final blast of chemicals. A clean scan. A quiet dinner celebration for two. Since then, she’d been following a strict regimen of hormone therapy. Vitamins, exercise. Laps around the neighborhood, the mall. Omega-3 fatty acids, 1000 mg, for inflammation, depression. Calcium and magnesium, 500 mg each, for bones. As she was swallowing the last pill, she heard, from the living room, the somber newscaster say Doreen Howard—she choked the pill back up, spat it into the sink and ran to the television. When she saw the girl’s picture on the screen, she let out a cry, and sank to the couch.

  It was early spring, the Empire Hair Emporium on Meer Creek Road. After more than a year in Stafford, Suzanne was still shopping for a passable hair salon, and though she’d gone to this one only once, she remembered the girl: Doreen. She was young—not much older than twenty-one, she’d thought then; in fact, she’d been only nineteen—and friendly, the kind of hairdresser who chatted the whole time she was cutting. This was something Suzanne usually found intrusive, and generally avoided by opening up a magazine, but that day, she hadn’t wanted to be alone with her thoughts. She’d met with the surgical oncologist the day before, so it was nice to just sit and listen, bathed in mild chatter, away from the tests and doctors and the relentlessly falling snow.

  Doreen, she could tell, was not chatting out of obligation. She was a friendly person, a cheerful person. She and her boyfriend had just gotten engaged. His name was Arlen—Suzanne noted the name because it wasn’t one you heard. Doreen had paused to show Suzanne the ring: a chip of diamond whose smallness only made it more poignant. The wedding would wait a few years, Doreen explained, because they were saving money, but that was fine by her. As long as I know I’ll be his wife someday, she said, in her voice a sincerity and fullness, and Suzanne had felt a quick affection for this girl, and also a tick of worry, thinking of marriage and all that came with it, things Doreen couldn’t possibly yet know. The small disappointments, and big betrayals, and the surprises that befell you out of nowhere. The way you mourned the life you’d always imagined for yourself—the babies you wanted, closeness you always felt you deserved—and recalibrated your expectations: accepted that this was what it was, this was all it was, decided it was enough.

  In the mirror, while Doreen was cutting, Suzanne studied her face: thick stripes of eyeliner, lavender lids, frosted lips. Never leave the house without lipstick on, Suzanne’s mother had always told her, and in fact there was something about the lipstick her mother wore—a deep red knot against the gray haze—that seemed to gather her together, take the du
ll parts and give them definition. Beneath Doreen’s makeup, her cheeks were a natural pink; she had a smile that suffused her entire face. She was so palpably happy—it was nice to be near such happiness. When she said, I just feel lucky I get to spend the rest of my life with him, Suzanne marveled at her certainty. Maybe Doreen knew more than Suzanne did about marriage, after all. Maybe she knew intuitively what she was doing, that she was choosing the right person, and her marriage would be the kind that lasted and lasted, devotion deepening with age. She seemed the kind of girl who would have babies easily—she was so young, for one thing. By the time Suzanne had started trying, she’d been thirty-eight.

  Suzanne had closed her eyes for a long minute, and when she opened them Doreen, maybe catching this in the mirror, said: I talk too much, don’t I? She smiled apologetically. What about you?

  So while she had never made a habit of chatting with hairdressers, Suzanne found herself telling Doreen about her move to Maine. Two summers ago, she told her, from South Carolina—she skipped over the places she’d lived in between, college towns in Pennsylvania and Indiana so indistinct they’d barely left a mark. When Doreen asked what brought her to Maine, she guessed, The college? and Suzanne said yes, but quickly added, for my husband, not for me. Doreen nodded, as if in commiseration. Suzanne was tempted to tell her more. That she was deeply unhappy. That the biopsy had come back positive. That her husband, she was fairly sure, was having an affair.

  The irony was, when Robert took the job in Maine, he’d been convinced Suzanne would be so happy there. A pretty little town, he proposed, only about an hour from the coast. You love nature, he said. He was referring, she supposed, to her photography, though Suzanne didn’t take pictures of nature because it was beautiful; at least, not beautiful in the obvious ways. When they first arrived, he’d taken her on scenic walks and drives, to glassy lakes and rocky beaches, and she had to concede that compared with the other college towns, this one was picturesque. But it didn’t change anything. Occasionally, she’d feel her dead mother knocking in her bones, the impulse to lie down in a darkened room—but this wasn’t something Robert could understand. For him, sadness was a decision. When he came home from campus to find her in bed in the middle of the day, he looked at her with naked disappointment, but there was nothing she could do. It was all just so much effort—should it be so much effort? At this age? (Maybe that had been the pleasure of Doreen’s company, the abstracted scrub of fingernails along her scalp, the chatter like warm milk—it was no effort, none at all.)

  Over the next months, Robert stopped trying. No more hikes, no more breakfasts with his colleagues and their wives with whom he thought Suzanne might hit it off. He spent more time in his study, or on campus. He bought a mountain bike. He started working on a book about foreign policy, started taking running more seriously. He slept in the guest bedroom: two nights a week, then four, then all of them. Something had sidled into their house, into their marriage, and one day, Suzanne knew, it would burst open, but until then the best she could do was try not to provoke it. She lived in it and around it, spoke of it to no one. She was fifty-three: It was better than being alone.

  It was January—start of the spring semester, though still the depths of winter—when she began to suspect Robert was having an affair. He was coming home late more frequently. Always with flimsy excuses, long meetings or needy students. A few times, when she walked into his study, he’d say hastily, “Right, thanks for calling,” and hang up the phone. She didn’t confront him. Though she was fairly certain he wouldn’t lie about it—her husband could be direct to a fault—she couldn’t bring herself to ask. Because if she did, she would know, which would mean she’d have to do something, and the prospect of actually getting a divorce was unthinkable—all the logistics, the pity, the shame.

  Then came February. Still freezing. Still dead and dark out, still snowing, though they had more than done their time. She despised the cold, the way it seeped through the invisible cracks in the windows and made it impossible ever to get truly warm. For more than a year she’d been telling Robert they needed to install a woodstove, taping plastic over the big lovely windows and stuffing those awful padded snakes under the doors. In early March, on a whim, she booked a trip home to visit her sisters, hoping when she returned it would all have gone away: the snow melted, the cold lifted, her husband’s affair purged from his system. But when she returned, the drifts were even more monstrous. They climbed, like ragged gargoyles, up the sides of the roads.

  It was that week, her first week back, that the doctor found the lump. A routine exam, a doctor she’d seen recommended online. As she lay on the table waiting, dressed in a paper gown and staring at the popcorn ceiling, she experienced, ironically, a moment of pure but passing joy. Heat was streaming from the vents in the exam room. Extravagantly, luxuriously. She could have lain there all day. Then the doctor came in—a brief introduction, apologies for his cold fingers—and she saw his face go still. Here’s something, he said, pausing. Maybe I’m allergic to winter, Suzanne replied. It wasn’t like her to be flippant; she was embarrassed to have said it. Worse, the doctor humored her, smiling gently. Let’s take a look, just to be sure. When the results came back, she was stunned. And scared. And also, in a very small, unspeakable way, relieved: because she knew now, given the man her husband was, any further speculation about their marriage, their future, would have to wait.

  As expected, Robert shifted into action, contacting doctors and soliciting second opinions. There was no need; they all said the same thing. Lumpectomy and radiation. They compared Suzanne’s tumor to various small unthreatening foods, a peanut and a pea. Suzanne told her sisters, who cried and panicked, then resolved not to tell anyone else. She insisted Robert do the same. He pressed the doctors to schedule surgery quickly. He surprised her with the woodstove. Soon she’d be filled with heat, more heat. The previous afternoon, at her appointment, she had gazed out the waiting room window: It was spring now, gutters dripping, but the old snow was still parked by the entrance in stubborn gray heaps. The woman beside her kept turning to smile, trying to strike up conversation. Suzanne wished that she would stop. Then the woman was telling her about a group she’d joined online. It’s private, she said. It’s helped me. I’ll invite you, she added, as if it were a ticket to an exclusive party, and asked for her email address. Suzanne was taken aback but gave it to her, not wanting to be rude, wondering what it was about her that had telegraphed needing help so clearly. Later, when she climbed in bed with her laptop and found the invitation waiting in her inbox, she bristled but clicked ACCEPT—and to her surprise was flown directly to the page itself. She was amazed by what she found. Strangers, hundreds of them, confiding in each other about their cancers. Their side effects and treatments, help for getting through it, extremes of fear and resolve. Suzanne was stunned by their honesty. She kept on reading, worried she was invading their privacy but unable to stop. It was like stumbling upon a secret compartment of the Internet, a suite of hidden rooms. If she closed her eyes, she pictured a constellation of other houses, other rooftops, other lonely women staring at screens in the dark.

  Now, not twenty-four hours later, as she watched Doreen’s kind face in the mirror, still smiling, still ready to listen, it was all Suzanne could do not to open her mouth and vomit her own secrets all over the floor.

  Instead, she confided in Doreen about the college—they had been talking, after all, about the college—and how she’d never really felt at ease among academics. She found them a little smug and self-involved, to be completely honest, Suzanne said with a laugh. Doreen nodded seriously, seemingly agreed. Then she told Suzanne that Arlen, her boyfriend—fiancé, she corrected herself—was actually a junior there, at Central Maine. He was majoring in business. He worked part-time at the Lowe’s in Elkton. Doreen hadn’t gone to college but read books on her own, she said, to expand her vocabulary. Suzanne had found this both touching and maddening, thinking of the chronic laziness among Robert’s studen
ts (for some reason, it always seemed to bother her more than him).

  At the end of the appointment, the haircut was all wrong (too puffy, too done-looking) and Suzanne was disappointed, because this meant she wouldn’t be back. Nonetheless, she smiled and touched her hair and told Doreen it was just what she’d wanted. She felt a twinge of fear, imagining what her hair would look like later, after whatever treatments lay ahead. As she watched Doreen dust stray hairs from her shoulders, despair drenched her like a wave. She knew she would miss Doreen, already missed Doreen (which, even then, struck her as a strange thing to feel), and then found herself telling the girl that she was a photographer, an amateur, but still, if she and Arlen were ever interested, she would take their engagement photos at a discount—she wanted to say free, but feared it would sound like charity.

  Now she wished she’d done it anyway. The television screen swam before her. In the photo of Doreen, she was standing on a beach. It was windy, and she was smiling, clutching her blowing hair back with one hand. Her smile was not just for the camera, Suzanne could tell, but for the person taking the picture. Then there he was—ARLEN MACKEY, said the caption along the bottom of the screen. Just a boy, Suzanne thought, not older than one of Robert’s students. A square, earnest face. A cross around his neck, a gold chain. His fists pressed to his eyes. As Suzanne stared at him, she could not stop crying. The unfairness of it all—it leveled her. That some get to survive. That some don’t.

  By the time Robert walked in, she was curled on the floor—“Christ, what happened?” he said, rushing to her side. He thought she’d fainted, a side effect of the hormones. “It isn’t that,” she wept as he lifted her onto the couch. She told him about the victims—about the hairdresser, Doreen Howard—and as she was speaking, saw the quality of concern changing on his face. “You met her that once?” he said, gently, but that was entirely missing the point. Because, Suzanne admitted, her husband simply didn’t understand her. Because it was possible, even after many years together, to know a person well but not at all. She tried to recall how she’d felt when she was younger—perhaps she’d assumed the knowing would come later; perhaps she hadn’t realized it was missing. She could still summon the thrill (a luxurious gut roll that felt almost indecent) she’d felt the first time she brought Robert home to meet her mother and sisters and he’d asserted his intentions: complete his PhD, get a tenure-track position, marry her, have a family. He’d seen a point ahead and driven toward it. He’d split the cautious stillness of her childhood into a million little bits.