“No need,” Rhiannon said. “Consider me your chauffeur.”
Kathleen
Kathleen prepared the wooden box, laying down first a layer of damp leaves and then a layer of dirt. She began to pat the dirt so that it was even.
She thought of the advice she had given Maggie an hour earlier: nettle root, and Saint-John’s-wort, and oh, did I mention getting rid of that horrendous Waspy jerk boyfriend once and for all? Not just waiting around, as she knew Maggie would, to see what he wanted? No, Kathleen hadn’t said this last part. She knew Maggie didn’t like it when she blurted out her opinions like that. Everything in due time, she told herself. Still, it was hard to watch your baby torture herself over an unworthy man. She had had to rush to get off the phone so she wouldn’t say as much.
“Uh, Kath, I think you’ve beaten that dirt down enough,” Arlo said.
She hadn’t been paying attention. In her frustration, she had packed it too hard. She’d have to start over, and there were twenty-four boxes to go after this one.
“We need a goddamn intern,” she said.
“Calm down. Maggie will be okay.”
“This isn’t about Maggie,” she said, though she knew it was. Then she added, “Sorry. I’m not myself today.”
He shrugged. “You can’t help it if your family drives you nuts.”
“Maggie doesn’t drive me nuts,” she said. “The rest of them, yes. But not Maggie.”
She could not believe Gabe had broken up with her daughter the day before they were supposed to leave for vacation. Kathleen had never liked the kid. She wished Maggie would go somewhere fun with her girlfriends, or come out to California for a visit. But for some reason she wanted to go to Maine instead. It couldn’t be good for her to be isolated up there with only Alice for company.
The whole idea made Kathleen nervous. She could picture her mother giving Maggie all the wrong advice (He’s great! You’re fat! Drink more!). That was the best-case scenario. Worst case, she’d be cruel, and hurt Maggie, who was already hurting enough.
Kathleen wished she could be there to help. But there was nothing on earth that could get her to Maine. She associated the place with Alice in every way. It made Kathleen remember what she wanted to forget.
When she reflected on her childhood, she thought of how Alice had had three children in her twenties, right on the heels of her sister’s gruesome death. No wonder she drank. Alice would never discuss the death, but Kathleen recognized her mother’s response as a clear case of survivor guilt. Though why Alice had decided to have children when she did, Kathleen would never know. No doubt, they all would have been better off if she had waited.
Five years back, after her brother Michael died, Alice had gone into a deep depression. He was the last of her siblings. Her husband was gone and so were most of her friends, her family. Kathleen talked to Alice at length—a rare moment of connection between them—and convinced her to come along with her and Maggie to a yoga retreat in the Bahamas for New Year’s.
Kathleen had long dreamed of going on one of these immersion trips. A friend at AA had told her they were a great way to see the Caribbean on the cheap. Kathleen thought the whole excursion might be a bit too hippie dippy, even for her, but she loved the serenity that yoga brought, and on these trips, her friend had told her, you got to lie on the beach and connect with your surroundings. Each day, there were mandatory classes and an afternoon lecture by a master swami. Kathleen read up on him and thought he was terribly impressive. He had developed the Five Points of Yoga, the most important of which was “We become what we think.”
Kathleen imagined the three of them—Maggie, Alice, and herself—side by side, three generations of women absorbing power and wisdom from one another. She realized it was a mistake from the moment they arrived. The swami asked to inspect their belongings. Kathleen had expressly told her mother that there was no caffeine or alcohol allowed, and Alice had said that was fine by her. But when he unzipped her suitcase, he found two Ziplocs full of tea bags, three bottles of red wine, a huge bottle of rum, and a blender. A blender!
“What were you thinking?” Kathleen demanded, mortified.
“I was thinking, what’s the Bahamas without mixed drinks, that’s mostly what I was thinking,” Alice said, flashing a big flirty smile at the swami, who sort of smirked in response.
“Grandma!” Maggie said, sounding amused. “You’re bad.”
Alice refused to accompany them to the yoga and meditation classes, even though Kathleen had prepaid. Instead, she walked the beach alone for hours. When Kathleen said that she could have stayed in Massachusetts if she wanted to do that, Alice’s venom came out: “I wish I had stayed,” she snapped.
She got in trouble with the swami for smoking, and—done with flirtation now—shot him the deadliest look before saying, “Oh, honestly, we are paying to be here. Go ahead and send me to the principal’s office.”
Maggie chuckled at that. Apparently she too thought it was ridiculous.
That night Kathleen discovered Alice and Maggie out on the beach, sipping rum they had mixed with organic pineapple juice. They were giggling, and she felt furious at the idea of being the odd man out.
“I don’t know why either of you even came,” she said. “You’re making a fool out of me in front of a man I very much respect.”
Maggie got to her feet then. “Oh, Mom, please don’t be upset.”
“I’m fine,” she said sharply. “I’m going to bed. There’s a sunrise meditation in the morning, but I’ll go ahead and assume you two will be too hungover to come along.”
She stomped back toward the bungalows. Maggie didn’t follow her.
Kathleen felt stupid now. Perhaps she had overreacted. But she worried about Maggie and Alice spending time together. As far as Kathleen was concerned, her mother was like Hannibal Lecter: you’d be a fool to get too close, but sometimes her charm made it hard to resist. Kathleen herself still told Alice things she shouldn’t from time to time, only to have them thrown back in her face.
When they got home from the Bahamas, Kathleen called Alice and said, “You know, I brought you there to help you figure out a way to cope.”
“I don’t need help. What you people get from headshrinkers and gurus and meditation, I get from my faith,” Alice responded. “I need to focus on going to Mass more, that’s all.”
“You already go every day,” Kathleen had said.
“I go for all the Sundays you’ve missed in the last twenty years,” Alice replied.
Well, she had walked right into that one.
At the end of every AA meeting, before coffee, they joined hands and said the Lord’s Prayer: Our father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name … The defiant teenager in Kathleen always rose up at that moment: these words, forever synonymous with the spicy air and somber music of the Catholic Church. They evoked countless Sunday mornings spent standing in a pew with her parents, brother, and sister; wearing a ridiculous hat on her head; glancing nervously at the Stations of the Cross, the crucifixion displayed so graphically on the walls. She didn’t understand a word of the Latin Mass, though she had memorized the entire thing somewhere along the line. She stood there each week, waiting for the hour to pass, thinking of Hell and pancakes and high school boys.
Kathleen’s days as a practicing Catholic were all based in fear. She spent most of her time searching for the loopholes. No sex before marriage, unless you really truly intended to get married. Absolutely no drinking during Lent, except out of state.
In recent years, she had come to detest the Church. She knew one of those grown men on the news in Boston, with his head lowered, telling the tale of how some priest had forced sex upon him when he was an altar boy. His name was Robert O’Neil. He had been in her class in grade school. Kathleen pictured him as he had been then—freckle-faced, dressed in corduroys and crocheted sweaters, a slight gap between his teeth. She seethed to think of the private hell the poor kid was in all along. Now, he said, he was ru
ined—estranged from his wife, afraid to let his own children so much as sit in his lap.
Alice’s parish had shut its doors two years back, and she had mourned that church as if it were a loved one. Kathleen felt for her, imagining what it might be like to have to let go of the community that you felt was the most essential part of you. But what about the fact that her church and dozens of others like it were in financial trouble to begin with because the archdiocese of Boston could hardly afford all the legal bills associated with the accusations made against priests? She tried to engage her mother in a conversation about this, but Alice would not hear it. Though she lived to criticize pretty much everything else, she plain refused to see anything bad in the Catholic Church.
Until she was in her mid-twenties, Kathleen had always thought of her mother’s religiosity as semi–trumped up, just another way in which Alice could pose and be dramatic. Did she really need to go to church every day, with that ridiculous white scarf covering her hair? Kathleen imagined she did it only to make her children feel guilty about their comparative lack of devotion.
But then one Easter, her uncle Timothy told her a story about the time he was home on leave from the war and bragged to Alice and the rest of their siblings about how Marlene Dietrich had performed for his squadron in Italy.
“I was the first to ship out,” Uncle Tim said. “The other boys hadn’t gone yet, but we knew they would soon. So I wanted to get them revved up. This was before Mary died,” he added, a rare reference to the sister they had lost. “I was going on and on about what a looker Dietrich was. She was a good person, too, you know—a German, but she renounced Hitler. He had all her films banned. Anyway, there I was going on and on about how sexy she was, how much all the guys were falling all over one another imagining what they might do with five minutes alone with her. I’ll admit, I got carried away. My brothers were egging me on. We were all crazy about Dietrich.”
Kathleen tried to picture her bald old uncles as a posse of horny young guys.
“So then Alice said, ‘What do you mean? What would you do?’ and then Mary said, you know, ‘They’d have their way with her.’ ”
He paused, took a sip of his drink. This was all that Kathleen had ever heard about her aunt. There were no pictures of her anywhere; no one ever told stories. She wanted more.
“All of a sudden,” Tim continued, “Alice stormed out of the room crying.”
“Why?”
“No one knew. I thought she’d like the story. She was always nuts about those old movie stars. Anyway, we ignored her. Typical drama queen Alice. But the next day she told me that she’d been up praying for me all night, for me and the rest of those souls in my squadron. She said we’d go to Hell for thoughts like that.”
“How old was she?”
“Twenty or so? You see, she was always an innocent,” Uncle Tim said. “A flirt, but a clueless one. She pretended she never wanted to get married, but I think that was just because all of that man and wife stuff scared her. You wouldn’t think it to interact with her since she can be such a pain in the ass and she’s always acting so fancy, but the truth is, she’s never changed. Her whole life she’s been asking God for help, and really expecting it to come. She’s been to Mass every morning since me and my brothers shipped out, as far as I know. She actually wants to be good.”
It dawned on Kathleen that the church was Alice’s public forum, the place where she went and behaved herself, the place where others viewed her as she wished to be viewed. At St. Agnes over the years, Alice had organized the Sunday school classes and the canned food drives, the fund-raisers for the retired priests and the Christmas swap meet. No one there knew what kind of cruelty she was capable of at home. They all saw her as a saint.
She actually wants to be good.
Kathleen had thought of this at her father’s funeral, as she watched Alice with her eyes fixed on the priest, as if his words might provide an explanation, an answer. She envied her mother that level of faith, especially at that moment.
They were in Maine when he told them he was dying. It was the last time Kathleen had been there, probably the last time she ever would. The whole family had gone up for Labor Day weekend, and everyone was getting along unusually well—no blowups or heated words or incidents of someone (usually Kathleen) storming out and checking into a motel. Ann Marie and Alice had made a big dinner of grilled steak, corn on the cob, potato salad, and tomatoes and cucumbers from the garden. Afterward, the kids stood out on the porch roasting marshmallows over the charcoal grill, like they had done when they were small.
Daniel put a hand on Kathleen’s shoulder and said, “Take a walk with me?”
They headed toward the beach, and she looked back at the cottage, thinking that everything seemed perfect, at least for the moment. The sun had set, and there was her whole boisterous, bizarre family outside their favorite spot in the world. Patrick and Ann Marie and Clare and Joe were drinking beers and sitting in beach chairs, while the kids stood over the coals. Alice was in one of her moods. She buzzed around them, picking up stray napkins and paper plates in a huff, but no one paid her much attention.
“Are you doing okay with the drinking?” her father asked. He asked this at almost every family gathering, even though she had been sober for fifteen years.
“Yeah, thanks, Daddy.” She wondered whether he ever asked Alice that same question, but figured the answer was no. For Alice, quitting drinking hadn’t really been a choice. Kathleen knew she resented Daniel for it.
“I’m proud of you,” he said.
They walked toward the shore, and when they reached the water, he slipped out of his Top-Siders, letting the waves pool around his feet.
“It’s a beautiful night,” he said, and before she could respond he added, “Sunshine, there’s something I need you to know.”
“Okay,” she responded, thinking of other things—that it was nice to be up here, that there was nowhere else on earth where you could see so many stars.
“I’m dying,” he said plainly. “I have cancer.”
For a moment, she thought it was just one of his stupid jokes.
“That’s not funny,” she said, but when she looked into his eyes, she saw tears there for the first time she could remember.
Her heart sped up. “You’re serious?”
“I found out on Tuesday,” he said. “Well, the doctor sent me in for tests two weeks ago, and to be honest I had a feeling even then. But I hoped I was wrong. Anyway. Turns out I was correct, as usual.”
He gave her a wink.
“Daddy,” she said. “What type is it?”
“Pancreatic. Same as your uncle Jack had.”
Her head was swimming. “How did this happen?”
“Well, remember I told you I was having some chest pains?”
“Yes.”
“They started to get really bad. I’d wake up at night and the pain would be sort of all the way through to my back. Your mother thought I was having a heart attack every darn night. I thought, maybe, you know, heartburn. Anyway, Alice kept nagging me to go see Dr. Callo. He sent me in for an ultrasound, which I thought was excessive, but then he told me it was cancer. Then there was another test to determine what stage. And that’s all she wrote.”
She could tell he was trying to sound cheerful, as if a light tone might soften the blow of his words.
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t want to worry you kids.”
She could swear she heard her heart thump against her ribs. “What now?”
“Now we wait.”
“What do you mean, we wait? Wait for what?”
“There’s not much they can do for it, sweetheart. It’s spread to my lungs. It’s everywhere. There’s almost no chance of recovery.”
“Well, almost no chance is better than no chance,” she said. “You can’t just leave it. They’re doing amazing stuff these days.”
She was beginning to feel hysterical
. He was usually the one to make sense of life for her.
He squeezed her shoulder. “Listen to me: I have given it a lot of thought. I don’t want any of that—no hospitals, no tubes, no radiation microwave bull crap. I just want to keep going. I feel fine, really. This is what I want.” He gestured back toward the cottage. “I want all of you together. I want to see your mother’s smile as many more times as I possibly can.”
“What does she say about all this?” Kathleen asked. “Why hasn’t she tried to talk sense into you?”
“She has,” he said. “Believe me, she’s livid. But from now on, I want us to pretend nothing’s happening, okay?”
“No, it’s not okay. Are you saying there’s no chemo, no surgery that will—”
“No. Radiation might help to shrink the tumor a bit, but not in any meaningful way. Surgery’s not an option. I’m too far gone for that. Anyway, I never believed in surgery. My father used to say that once they cut you open, you’re done for. I think there’s some truth to it. Something about the air getting in.”
She wondered whether he might have brain damage, if maybe this was one of those moments in life when the child was supposed to do the opposite of what her parent said. But then he continued: “Kathleen, if I thought there was even a shred of hope that all that junk would make me better, I’d do it in a heartbeat. But the doctor made it very plain that it won’t. I’ve known him forever. I asked him, ‘Jim, if this were you—,’ and before I had even finished the sentence, he said, ‘I would just try to enjoy the rest of my life to the fullest.’ Fact is, if I’m lucky I could have another good year left.”
With those words, Kathleen felt a black cloak wrap itself around her body, tight. She wanted to cry into his sweater as she had often done over the years when life got too hard, but she knew that she needed to be the strong one now.
“I understand if you don’t want radiation,” she said softly, remembering her sponsor, Eleanor, at the end—too weak and sick to walk, her hair falling out. “But there are natural approaches too. Homeopathic medicine has made big strides.”
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