On the Road to Find Out

by Rachel Toor

  I felt like a real runner. I’d been going farther and farther. If I planned to be out for a long time, I carried water with me. I learned from Joan to monitor the color of my pee. Dark pee means you’re dehydrated. I had an impressive collection of socks with the Runner’s Edge logo, but I tended to wear the same pair—and the same pair of shorts—and wash them out in the shower. When my nose started to drip, I held one nostril and blew out the snot the way Miles had done. Or I wiped it on my sleeve and didn’t care. I never hit the wall again, though after a couple of my longest runs, all I could do in the afternoon was lie in the hammock on the back deck and sigh. I stayed outside because I still didn’t like being in my room.

  I hadn’t seen Miles since we ran together the day Walter died, though each time I came into the store, Joan would say, “Oh you just missed Miles.” I had started thinking about him again, and for a nanosecond I wondered if he would have said yes if I had asked him to the prom.

  A nanosecond later I realized he was the kind of kid who might hate prom as much or even more than I did.

  A nanosecond after that I thought, I hardly know him. I don’t know what he’d like or not like.

  Just as I was finishing my Saturday-morning shift and had gone to the stockroom to change into my running clothes so I could jog home, I heard the door jingle.

  A bunch of runners, mostly men and a few women, came in like a pack of stray dogs, skinny and hungry-looking in tiny shorts and flashing lean arms and messy hair. I saw the mass of red curls that belonged to Nikki and heard her unmistakable laugh.

  “Need water,” Nikki said. “Who knew it was going to be so hot this morning?”

  “Weather.com?” said Joan, as she went over to the water cooler and started filling paper cups for the sweaty runners.

  Nikki said, “Thanks, Joanie. You’re always here when we need you,” and she gulped the water so fast that it ended up dribbling down her chin. She wiped her face with the back of her hand and then said, “Okay, crew, let’s go. Saturday morning run’s not over until”—she glanced at a short woman with her hair in two pigtails—“we get the baked goods!” and with waves and grunts goodbye, they filed out the door.

  Everyone except Miles.

  “Alice,” he said. “Hey.”

  “Hey,” I said.

  I wore a short-sleeved shirt and a pair of running shorts Joan had tossed at me saying, “Sale!” They had built-in underpants and I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to wear anything beneath them. I had asked Joan and she said it was totally up to me. Some people did, some didn’t. I did. My legs were still Clorox-commercial white, but when I looked down at them I noticed how after only four months, they’d become more muscular.

  I’d seen my body develop and get stronger. Nothing much jiggled on me anymore. My thighs were still big, but they were solid. My gluteus maximus had gotten only a little less maximus, but like my thighs, my butt was hard and no longer Jell-O-like.

  Right after Walter’s death I hadn’t been eating much, and I’d felt myself getting weak. But since I’d started running longer distances, I’d built back up. I felt strong.

  Miles said, “You look really good.”

  Gulp.

  “I’m headed toward the boulevard for my warm down. Wanna?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  19

  “Miles from nowhere,” I said when we’d started to run.

  “You saw it!” Miles said.

  I nodded, even though we were running side by side and he couldn’t see me.

  “What parts did you like best?”

  “You mean besides everything?”

  He laughed. “Including everything.”

  I told him there wasn’t anything I didn’t like about it, but my favorite part was when Harold and Maude were sitting together and Harold says to Maude that she has a way with people and Maude just kind of shrugs and says, “Well, they’re my species,” and he gives her a present and it says …

  Miles chimed in and we said the line together. I thought how right Maude was that if you toss the material stuff away, you’ll always know where it is and you can hold on to the feeling instead.

  We were running pretty fast, but it felt good. At times we were even running in step, like a pair of horses harnessed together.

  He said, “God, I love that movie. Can you believe it’s more than forty years old? The woman who played Maude, Ruth Gordon, was also a screenwriter. She and her husband, Garson Kanin, wrote one of Harry’s favorite movies—Adam’s Rib, with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. It’s about a married couple, both lawyers, who end up on opposing sides of a case. Wouldn’t be a big deal, except that it was made in 1949 when there weren’t many women lawyers and Katharine Hepburn’s character makes an argument about treating women equally.”

  He was geeking out. It was really cute.

  “That’s your kind of movie?”

  “You bet. Harry is a feminist from way back. It rubs off.”

  “But you’re also kind of a romantic?”

  “Not mutually exclusive,” he said.

  “Too bad you have such bad taste in books.”

  He turned to look at me, but I kept my eyes straight ahead. “No one’s ever said that to me before.”

  “The Catcher in the Rye? Really?”

  “What’s your problem with Catcher?”

  He asked it as a real question, not a challenge.

  So I told him.

  I told him all the stuff I’d written in my crappy college-admission essay about how Holden was a big phony, how he was all polite to people to their faces but he went around judging everyone, and it wasn’t fun to be in the head of someone who was pissed off at the world all the time. Teenage rage wasn’t that interesting. He was a hypocrite and I can’t stand hypocrisy.

  Miles slowed and said, “Hmmm. I read it a little differently from you. I don’t think it’s just about teenage rage. I think it’s about something else.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “Death,” he said. “Dealing with death.”

  That stopped me. Literally. I stopped running. So Miles did too.

  “Think about it,” Miles said. “Where is Holden at the beginning of the book?”

  I tried to remember. I started running again and Miles fell in beside me. “At that fancy prep school he’d just been kicked out of.”

  “No,” said Miles.

  “Yes he was. And he went to see his English teacher, who had the grippe.” I have to confess that after reading that book, whenever I got a cold, I said I had the grippe.

  “No,” said Miles again, patiently, like a teacher. “He was writing down all the crazy stuff that happened. It was because he was in the same place he was at the end of the book. In the loony bin. Right? He’d been having all this trouble at school, and made that wild trip to New York because—”

  “Because he was still so upset about his brother’s death,” I said, “which was, like, years before.”

  “Three years before, when he first started having trouble in school.”

  I hadn’t thought about that.

  I’d read the book before I lost Walter—before anyone I’d ever loved had died—and I hadn’t understood how grief makes you more angry than sad, how you can’t control your behavior, can’t control your thoughts.

  I had missed the main message of The Catcher in the Rye.

  It was a book about grief.

  20

  My last day at the store wasn’t as sad as I thought it would be because Joan told me I had to come in on Saturday mornings for the group run. I knew Nikki and Miles and other speedy people always showed up, but Joan promised there would be people who ran my pace. She said, “Caroline runs about an eleven-minute mile, and you’re a lot quicker than that.”

  “Miles is pretty great,” I said. And then felt embarrassed and busied myself dusting the counter.

  “He is,” she said. “You are too. Guess it runs in the family. Your mom—you know this. Your mom is an i
ncredible doctor. And a wonderful person. I don’t know what we would have done without her.”

  I finally felt like I knew Joan well enough to ask her. “So did my mom find a mole? On Ricardo?”

  Joan exhaled. “No, not a mole.”

  “Sorry. I was just wondering.”

  “No, it’s okay. Your mother is really the hero, so you should hear it.”

  “My mother? A hero? I mean, I know the women whose wrinkles my mom erases worship her, but it’s all cosmetic. Not important stuff.”

  Joan sat down on the bench that faced the START wall and patted the spot next to her. I settled in beside her. We both looked at the wall blanketed with bib numbers for a while, and then, finally, she began to speak in a soft voice.

  “I’ve known your mother for a long time. Someone with skin like mine”—she extended her pale arm in front of her, dotted with freckles and moles—“who spends as much time outdoors as I do, I knew it was important to keep an eye on things.

  “Ricardo, on the other hand, was dark, and didn’t like going to doctors. He began to suffer from back pain. He’d had a bike crash, not terrible, not for a cyclist at least, and assumed that’s what it was from. After about a year, I got him to go to a doctor, and the doc said it was nothing. Said he should do exercises to strengthen the muscles that support his back, that many people have weak backs. Ricardo tried to explain he didn’t think that was the problem, but the doctor wouldn’t listen.”

  Joan choked out a laugh. “Ricardo’s back was stronger than anyone’s. He wasn’t a whiner, never complained about pain.” She rubbed her hands over her slim hips.

  “Then he got these purple dots on his lower eyelid. One day, when I was seeing your mom for my mole check, I told her what was going on with him. At the end of the day, she stopped by the store and said she wanted to take a look at Ricardo’s face. She talked to him for a while, asked a bunch of questions, and said to us, ‘I’m afraid I know what this is.’ She explained she had trained in oncology and people tend to diagnose from within their specialty but—”

  “She didn’t train in oncology. She’s a dermatologist.”

  Joan kept going. “She said she had been through an oncology residency and she’d seen this before. She said the spots were purpuras and that, with the joint pain, she was worried Ricardo might have multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood. She sent him to a friend of hers who is an oncologist—”

  “Sylvia,” I said, interrupting, and then felt bad about interrupting.

  “Sylvia,” Joan said, nodding.

  “And sure enough, your mom was right. Ricardo had to go through radiation therapy and chemo and even a stem cell transplant. He was so strong,” Joan said, and her voice wavered. “It was awful. For him, the worst part was not having that first doctor take him seriously. Ricardo knew his body. He knew what muscle pain was and he knew this was different. Your mom didn’t doubt him for a minute.”

  She fiddled with her necklace. “He died four and a half years later.”

  “Oh god,” I said.

  “Before he died, I got to tell him everything I wanted him to know. How much I loved him.” She swallowed. “How he’d helped me to refocus my life, to learn to enjoy things and give up being tortured by my own competitiveness. Even though the treatments were rough, we had Sylvia and your mom with us all along the way. He liked Sylvia, but boy was he crazy about Sarah.”

  I wondered where I was during all of this. Ricardo must have been diagnosed around the time Jenni’s mom had died. Of cancer. And my mother’s own mom had died of cancer.

  Joan said, “You may think what she does is cater to wealthy women who care about their appearance, but your mother is one of the finest people I’ve ever known—smart, capable, and caring. You’d be hard-pressed to find a better role model, Alice.”

  21

  That night, when Mom was reading Vanity Fair magazine, I asked, “How do you know Joan?”

  She looked at me kind of funny. Then she said, “I can’t tell you that.”

  “She already told me she was a patient of yours. She also told me about Ricardo. And about what you did for him.”

  She turned a page of Vanity Fair without reading it.

  “I didn’t do anything for him,” she said quietly. “I wish I could have.”

  “Joan told me,” I said, insistent. “She said you figured out what was wrong with him after his own doctor couldn’t.”

  She looked in my eyes as if there was something lost in them.

  “She told me you were trained in oncology. That’s not true. Is it?”

  She put down the magazine. She held her hand in front of her and examined her French manicure. The white half-moons on the tips of her fingernails caught the light.

  “Yes,” she said, after a long pause. “Originally I wanted to be an oncologist. After my mother died, I was determined to find a cure for cancer. Or many cures for the many different cancers. I was young.”

  She glanced up and to the side, as if to excuse her own silly thoughts. Then she continued. “I got into an onc residency at Duke. When I was nearly finished with my third year, Dr. Agrawal, my mentor—the woman I hoped to become—took me aside and said, ‘This is not the right field for you.’ I thought she was telling me I wasn’t good enough. She said no, it wasn’t that I couldn’t do the work, but what the work was doing to me. I got too attached to the patients, many of whom were very, very sick. I’d sit with them for too long and run late, and when they died—and most of them died—I’d be destroyed. Residency’s no picnic, but I was more ragged than most.”

  “Her photo. On your dresser?”

  She nodded. “I was Dr. Agrawal’s star student. She was a consummate clinician and was also doing important research. I thought I’d have a job with her when my residency was over. She said she wouldn’t hire me. She said it would do me in.”

  I couldn’t imagine my fierce mother not getting a job she wanted. I thought she’d always gotten everything she’d ever wanted. I didn’t interrupt, just listened.

  “Dr. Agrawal steered me toward dermatology. She said I’d have lots of happy patients and would be able to treat them over many years. She knew how much my mother’s death had affected me. She also knew I was always going to choose the hardest path and she thought it was unhealthy. I dismissed the whole idea until she told me dermatology was the most competitive residency to get into.”

  She laughed. “Funny, right? I worry about how hard you push yourself and worry that you’re never satisfied with anything less than perfect.”

  I wondered how I hadn’t known this before.

  I knew my parents had met at Bowdoin, their cozy college in Maine, and had both gone to graduate school at Duke, where I was born. The only stories I had wanted to hear from them were about me, about after I’d come onto the scene. I hadn’t really thought of my parents—especially my mother—as people who had lives before me.

  “As it turns out, I love derm,” she said. “I love being able to fix things. Because I’ve seen so many cases, I can, often in the blink of an eye, recognize patterns and make diagnoses that general practitioners miss. I love that I get to check in with people for so many years, see them grow up and age, hear their stories, become a part of their lives. And, even though I know you don’t approve, I like being able to make people feel better about the way they look. It makes them happy, and I’d rather see happy patients than people in pain who are going to die anyway.”

  I listened and said, “I never knew.”

  She said, “You never asked.”

  22

  The next day, when Jenni and I were at the Coffee Shop after school, I said, “Get this. My mom started out as a cancer doc.”

  Jenni said, “Yeah.”

  “What?”

  “I know. She’s told me all about it. She worshipped Dr. Agrawal.”

  “What? Why’d she tell you, not me?”

  Jenni stared into her double mocha caramel cappuccino and blew on it until some foam float
ed up and landed on the table.

  Finally she said, “I don’t know, Al. Maybe she thought you’d judge her.”

  I stopped eating the chocolate chip scone I’d been craving, the whole reason we’d gone to the Coffee Shop.

  “She thinks you don’t approve of her. She thinks you look down on her choices—not just about career, but about everything.”

  “Since when does Sarah Davis give a hoot about what anyone thinks of her?”

  “I guess since she had a daughter who cares even less.”

  “When did she tell you all this?”

  “Geez, I don’t know. Over the past few years. You think we only talk about shoes and makeup, but when we drink coffee in the kitchen while you’re playing with Walter”—she broke off, but I motioned with my hand that it was okay—“when we go on shopping trips, mostly what we do is talk. Sure, we look at clothes and we experiment with testers at the Chanel counter, but wandering around department stores gives you a lot of time for conversation.”

  “You talk about me?” It came out sounding like an accusation.

  “Of course,” she said, and laughed. “You’re the most important person in each of our lives.”

  I didn’t know whether to feel betrayed or flattered. Mostly, I was surprised.

  “Alice,” she said. “We love you. And we know you love us in your own sometimes obnoxious and self-absorbed way, though you’re better at showing that to me than you are to your mother. You push her away. It’s hard for her.”

  “You’re my friend.”

  “We talk about lots of things. You don’t really like to hear about Kyle and you tend to say mean things about Tiffany. And there’s other stuff.” She looked into her cup.

  I thought about Jenni’s face after her mother died. And about how she didn’t like to be at home when her dad was drinking.

  “I’m lucky to have her. It’s like you and Walter-the-Man. I mean, he’s okay, but I find him a little—”