A Mother's Goodbye_A gripping emotional page turner about adoption and a mother's love

by Kate Hewitt

  I decide to leave things as they are, and I tell myself that next week I’ll go into work after my chemo, since it’s done by ten in the morning. I compose an email to HR saying that ‘personal health issues’ are going to make me an hour late to work on Mondays and Tuesdays for the next two weeks. I hold on to the desperate hope that I’ll only need one round of chemo to shrink the tumor and move onto the next stage of my treatment and recovery.

  And so the weeks drag on, and I survive. I manage. The effect of chemotherapy is cumulative, so I feel worse – sicker, achier, more tired – but somehow I still struggle on. It’s amazing how quickly you can get used to feeling horrible.

  It all becomes depressingly normal, and when my hair starts to thin in the third week, that almost feels normal too. My skin is pale with a strange, waxy feel, and I develop sores in my mouth, which feels unbelievably dry all the time. Dr. Stein prescribes what she calls ‘a magic mouthwash’ to help with the sores, and it does, but I still feel like a walking wreck. I’m just used to it. When I look in the mirror, I don’t see myself any more; I feel as if I’m looking at a mannequin, and I just have to wait until she’s replaced. This isn’t going to last forever.

  Isaac asks again and again if I’m sick, and each time I tell him in as matter-of-fact a way as I can that yes, I am sick, but I am going to get better. That, I tell both Isaac and myself, is non-negotiable. It’s just going to take a little while.

  He seems to accept it, but I can tell he’s worried, and I spend as much time with him as I can, wanting to reassure him, as well as myself, of my constant presence. I sit next to him as he plays his iPad, listening to the clatter and ding of his game. I watch him do his homework, noticing the furrow in the middle of his forehead, the way he sticks his tongue out as he does his times tables. I read extra stories at bedtime, sometimes falling asleep next to him because I’m so tired, but I don’t think he minds. We need each other. Now more than ever, we need each other.

  One evening as I am coming in from work, all my focus on just getting into my apartment, Eileen opens her door. I haven’t seen her in a while, and now is definitely not a good time for one of our chats. No time is good any more.

  ‘Grace!’ She sounds so happy to see me. Then she clocks how I look, and her forehead dissolves into wrinkles. ‘Are you under the weather, my dear?’

  ‘You could say that.’ I feel too tired even to fish for my key in my bag. I turn to her, take a deep breath. ‘Actually, I have cancer.’ It feels good to say it. Liberating, in a way I didn’t expect, and yet also horrible, because somehow saying it out loud to my well-meaning neighbor makes it even more real than it already is.

  Eileen’s mouth drops open and her eyes crinkle up. ‘Oh, my dear. My love,’ she says, and then, to my surprise, she opens her arms. Even more to my surprise, I walk into them.

  Her bosom is soft and pillowy and she smells old, like lavender and mothballs. She pats my back and after a few seconds where I feel unbearably comforted, I step away and sniff.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Her smile is both sad and understanding. ‘My dear, when did this happen?’

  ‘I started chemo a few weeks ago.’ It feels like a million years.

  Eileen shakes her head sorrowfully. ‘What kind of cancer is it?’

  ‘Breast cancer. My mom had it. She died when she was forty-five.’ I’m holding on to my matter-of-fact tone with effort. Eileen nods again, and I wonder if she knows that I’m forty-six.

  A few days later Heather calls and leaves a voicemail, sounding accusing and annoyed, and I realize I completely forgot about our meeting, the all-important meeting that was going to determine whether Isaac and I kept visiting. I finally dredge up the courage to call her back, and my lack of excuse makes her even more irritated. When she asks about our visit next Saturday, I want to both laugh and scream: I can’t face a trip to Elizabeth, not on top of everything else.

  But I don’t tell Heather I have cancer. I don’t even know why; it feels like a self-protective instinct that doesn’t make sense. But still I stay silent.

  After three weeks of chemo, I go back to Dr. Stein for a re-evaluation and discover the tumor hasn’t shrunk enough to operate. Disappointment drags through me in a leaden wave as she explains, with a cheerful optimism that I don’t share, that for a tumor of this size, with this stage of cancer, she would expect two or three rounds of chemo before she was able to operate.

  I keep from saying that she could have told me that before, because I know why she didn’t. Hope is the single biggest factor in cancer treatment. There’s no substitute for it. I’m trying to hold onto it, but it’s hard when I face at least three more weeks of the drip, the vomiting, the feeling that I am nothing more than a bag of aching bones and screaming joints. And maybe another three weeks after that. Maybe this is what the rest of my life will look like. That’s how it was for my mother, and there’s no reason I should be any different.

  I’ve thought a lot about my mom as I’ve lain in that stupid reclining chair and watched the poison enter my body. I feel sad and guilty that I don’t have more memories of her, that for seven years she seemed to me nothing more than an inconvenient invalid, but I don’t think she actually was. She drove me to school sometimes, I remember, and she came to some of my piano concerts, and she tested me on my French vocab.

  No, the truth is, I realize now, I don’t have many memories of her because I chose not to. Because as an eight- or ten- or twelve-year-old, her illness, her cancer, bored me. I didn’t like how tired she got, the wan, apologetic smiles she’d give me, the endless naps she took. I hated the wigs she wore; my father bought her several, all in wildly different styles.

  Looking back, I see how brave she was, picking me up at my swanky girls’ school wearing a fire engine red bob, but at the time I was embarrassed and annoyed. I was so petty, focusing on such small, stupid things, and I didn’t even realize it until now.

  And so I find I can’t be hurt by Isaac’s occasional impatience with me when I have trouble getting off the sofa, or when I’m not up for another game of Hungry Hippos, as much as I wish I were. He doesn’t understand. Illness is an irritant. Children are, by their very nature, selfish, and they’re allowed to be. Sacrifice and self-restraint take time to develop and grow.

  At least I’ve managed to hire a nanny – a twenty-four-year-old woman from Croatia named Yelena. She was friendly enough with Isaac, in an overly bright sort of way, but with me she had a bit of attitude, assuring me that she doesn’t do any cooking, cleaning, or laundry.

  Since I have a housekeeper, Maria, who comes in twice a week, whom I never actually see, I tell myself this doesn’t matter, but Dorothy did do a fair bit of tidying, and all of Isaac’s laundry. Still, I don’t have much choice. I need someone to start now, someone with a driver’s license, good references, and flexibility.

  I don’t tell Yelena I have cancer. Maybe that’s unfair, bringing her into such a fraught and volatile situation, but I have a feeling it would be a dealbreaker for her and I’m too desperate to risk it.

  The second round of chemo starts, and it feels twice as bad as the first. I thought I was prepared, but I soon discover I wasn’t. The first day is manageable, just, but the second day feels like I’ve been felled and then flattened.

  I take the day off work and lie in bed, groaning softly, while Yelena huffs around in the living room, clearly not pleased to have me at home, cramping her style. God knows what she gets up to when I’m not here. She works from two until seven even though Isaac doesn’t need to be picked up until three thirty. It was the only way I was able to get her to agree, and as I lie on bed, I realize how weak I’ve become in every respect, to agree to pay this woman to mooch around my house for an hour, refusing to cook or clean.

  I end up composing an email to Lenora in HR, invoking FMLA and taking two weeks off work. I don’t say the C-word, just mention health issues. I don’t know what the legality of the situation is; can she force my hand? Is she allowe
d to ask? Should I talk to an employment lawyer? I’m too tired to care.

  Another week passes, in a blur of nausea and pain and exhaustion. Is chemo this hard on everyone? I read stories of people who kept working through their treatments but on a day like today, when I have eaten nothing, still thrown up twice, and wince every time I move, I can’t imagine it.

  Stella calls and texts a couple of times, and I fob her off, saying I have the flu. I don’t know why I don’t tell her; I know she’d help me in a shot. I know she’d hug me, which is something I feel like I desperately need. And I also know she’d look at me differently, that I would become a cause, a charity case. Maybe that’s just in my own head, maybe it wouldn’t be that way at all. And yet still I say nothing.

  I do end up, out of necessity, confessing to Yelena that I’m undergoing some treatment. She stands by the sink, peeling an orange with brightly polished nails, her eyes narrowed, her hair pulled back into a high, tight ponytail.

  ‘Treatment? What is this treatment?’

  I look at her and feel a welling-over of dislike. She’s so young and pretty and cold. She doesn’t care about me at all, but why should she? I’ve known her for all of two weeks.

  ‘Cancer,’ I say flatly, and she recoils as if I’m contagious.

  ‘You should have told me,’ she says haughtily, and I have no reply because I know she’s right.

  ‘It doesn’t affect anything,’ I say, which is a joke. I can barely stand up straight. ‘Your hours or…’ I trail off as I feel tears gather in my eyes. I do not want to cry. I have never been a crier. And I certainly don’t want to start bawling in front of pert-bottomed, Lycra-wearing Yelena, who will merely wrinkle her nose at me.

  ‘I should have known,’ Yelena insists darkly, and then she walks out of the room. I officially hate her.

  Another week drags by, and then the inevitable happens: Yelena calls in to say she can’t work on a Friday, because of some appointment or other. She gives me proper notice and agrees to take the day unpaid; there’s nothing I can do. Stella is away for the weekend with her family and there’s no after-school club, because it’s the Memorial Day weekend, and the entire city is evacuating. I tell myself I can get in a cab and get Isaac from school. Surely I can manage that.

  But at two o’clock I am hanging over the toilet, dry-heaving into its porcelain depths, utterly wretched. I can’t get in a taxi. I can’t even get up from where I’m half-lying.

  And there is only one person I can think of in the whole world, who might be free to pick up Isaac, and more than willing to do it.

  I call Heather.

  Twenty

  HEATHER

  My mind is spinning as I drive into the city. It’s Memorial Day weekend, and thankfully the traffic is going entirely in the other direction. Getting home is going to be a pain, but I don’t care. When Grace called me, sounding tired and desperate, of course I only had one answer to give.

  The very fact that she called me when I know she wouldn’t want to, that I’d be the last person she’d want to call, both alarms and pleases me. Something must be really wrong.

  I find Buckley School easily enough, an impressive-looking building on East Seventy-Third Street, and then I not so easily find a parking space two blocks away. As I head up the school steps I feel underdressed in my black skirt and plain white blouse, both from Walmart.

  Everyone here is in designer clothes, the kind where the labels are obvious. Mothers swan up and down the stairs, heavy handbags dangling from their skinny wrists, faces made up, hair expertly highlighted.

  I push past them, practically rude in my desire to get to Isaac. To see him. I’m ten minutes late, and he’s been taken to the office, sitting in a chair, kicking his legs, looking glum. He isn’t surprised to see me, because Grace already called them, but he doesn’t look happy, either. He’s unsmiling, wary, and my heart lurches.

  ‘Hi, Isaac.’ I want to hug him but I don’t.

  ‘Identification, please?’ The office secretary holds her hand out, snooty and authoritative. I blink.

  ‘Identification…?’

  ‘I need to confirm your identification. You are Heather McCleary?’

  ‘Yes.’ I am annoyed; she’s acting like I’m some kind of criminal. Would a ‘Hello, nice to meet you’ be too much to ask? I fumble through my purse, my hands practically shaking in my nervousness. I don’t even know why I’m nervous. Seven years on and I’m finally doing something for Isaac, for my son, other than seeing him on a strained Saturday afternoon. I should be excited. Thrilled.

  I finally find my driver’s license and thrust it at the sniffy woman; she inspects it thoroughly, as if checking it’s real. I start to feel angry, and then she hands it back.

  I turn to Isaac. ‘I have my car.’

  He nods silently and picks up his backpack, which looks huge for a boy his age and size. I realize he hasn’t spoken since I’ve seen him. He remains silent as we walk out of the school and down the block. It’s a beautiful spring afternoon, not too hot yet, and this block of elegant brownstones with flowerboxes and wrought-iron railings is serene and beautiful, unlike any street I know back in Elizabeth. I feel slightly awed by it all.

  ‘Do you want me to take that?’ I ask, and reach for Isaac’s backpack. He shrugs it off without a word, and I hitch it over my shoulder. I shoot him curious, searching glances; he’s wearing his school uniform, khaki pants and a blue polo shirt. Shiny shoes. He’s had his hair cut, pretty short. He looks different.

  ‘Are you taking me home?’ he asks when we reach my car.

  ‘Yes. Gr—your mom couldn’t pick you up, so she asked me to.’ I speak lightly, as if this is a totally normal event, as if I haven’t dropped everything and driven an hour simply to do this one small favor – not for Grace, for my son.

  I unlock the car and Isaac slips into the back seat. I toss his backpack on the passenger seat and then get in, wishing I could prolong this moment. Could I suggest we go out for ice cream? I wouldn’t even know where. I glance back at Isaac; he’s staring out the window, seeming uninterested in everything, including me.

  ‘How have you been, Isaac?’ I ask as I pull out into the traffic, which is getting heavy. He shrugs, not replying. My fingers tighten on the wheel. ‘Well?’ I press, keeping my voice playful.

  ‘Okay.’ His gaze remains on the window. I focus on driving, because the traffic is intense and I’m not used to driving in the city. Trying to force a conversation with Isaac now will just frustrate and hurt me.

  It takes us thirty endless, silent minutes to get to Grace’s apartment on Eighty-Sixth and Park Avenue. She told me there was a garage under the building, and that I could park in one of the visitors’ spots.

  Isaac slouches out of the car toward the entrance to the building; I don’t have a key, obviously, but there is a video intercom and the doorman; and after seeing Isaac and listening to my halting explanation, he buzzes us in. I follow Isaac into the elevator, clutching his backpack, again wanting to prolong these moments, wishing things could be different.

  We’re silent in the elevator, and Isaac steps out first, going ahead of me to open the door, which Grace has left unlocked. I follow, pausing to breathe in the expensive smell of her apartment; it smells just as it did the last time I was here, over seven years ago, of lemon polish and leather. It looks the same too; the same plush carpet and abstract art, the same leather sofas, although perhaps they’re identical replacements, because they look pristine. Everything does.

  There are differences too, of course; evidence of Isaac is everywhere. I run my hand along his various coats hanging by the door. I step into the hallway, noting the jumble of sneakers and boots in a wicker basket. A card table has been set up in the corner of the living room with a half-completed jigsaw puzzle.

  I look around for Grace, expecting her to bustle out from somewhere, but I can’t see her. Isaac has kicked off his shoes and stands in the middle of the living room, looking a little lost. ‘Can I have my i
Pad?’

  ‘Are you allowed to have that now?’

  ‘Yes, I get an hour of screen time when I get home from school.’ He blinks at me, so serious.

  ‘Okay, then.’ He fetches it from a rattan basket beneath the coffee table and flops onto the sofa.

  ‘Do you know where your mom is?’

  ‘She’s probably sleeping.’

  That pulls me up short. Probably sleeping? That doesn’t sound like Grace. I go through the apartment, looking for her just in case, and also because I’m curious – about her, about the home she’s made with Isaac. She’s not in the dining room that adjoins the living room, separated by pocket doors that are half-pulled out. The glass table that seated twelve has been replaced by a more modest and kid-friendly table of burnished wood that seats eight. I wonder if they eat there, the two of them, fancy organic meals by candlelight.

  I follow the hallway toward the kitchen, where I have never been. It is enormous and elegant, with oak units, marble counters, and a huge fridge. Isaac’s cereal bowl is still by the sink, Cheerios stuck to its bottom like cement.

  The fridge is covered with schoolwork and pictures he’s drawn, kept in place by big, colorful magnets. I pause to examine a spelling test – ninety percent – and a drawing of Steve from Minecraft, done back when he still liked Minecraft, I suppose. I glance at the calendar tacked to a bulletin board – Taekwondo, swimming, and piano every week. So many opportunities, just as I’d once hoped for him.

  There is a little room off the kitchen that Grace clearly uses as her office. It’s empty, and looks as if she hasn’t gone into it in a while. There is a patina of dust on the closed laptop.

  I am starting to feel uneasy, like something must be seriously wrong. Is Grace sick? Back in the living room Isaac is absorbed in his game, and hesitantly, almost on tiptoes, I walk toward the bedrooms.