by Kaya McLaren
That seemed to send a silent shock wave through the group.
“Did she live?” Isabella asked after a moment. It didn’t surprise Carly that she was the one who would be brave enough to ask.
“Yes.”
“Is she okay now?” asked Sydney’s mom.
“Pretty much.”
For a little while, they rode in blessed silence, and then normal conversation resumed again. This time, Sydney and Isabella left Carly out of the conversation, and Carly was glad.
That night, while Carly was prep cooking, Sydney’s mom approached her. “I want to apologize for saying you were a little young to be reevaluating your life. I was making assumptions, and you know what they say about making assumptions.”
Carly didn’t, and her expression gave it away.
“When you assume, you make an ass out of u and me. You’ve never heard that? It’s an idiom that breaks the word apart.”
“Oh.”
“And I want to tell you something else. My whole life I’ve been an achiever. I became a lawyer because it’s one of two jobs considered the pinnacle of success, but you know what? It’s miserable. I work sixty or seventy hours a week—sometimes even more. And yes, it feels good to do a good job for someone, to win their case, to succeed … but am I happy?” She shrugged as if to say she didn’t think so. “I was thinking about your mom today and about how if something like that happened to me, I sure would have regretted not spending far more time with my daughter. So … I just wanted to say that I think you’re smart to figure out what really makes you happy, because you’re right—it is more important to be happy and kind than excellent. I wish I had known that twenty years ago.”
Carly didn’t know how to reply, so she just said thanks, and Sydney’s mom joined the others at the table, where Great-Aunt Rae was teaching them how to play BS before leaving them to cook dinner.
Carly passed the solitary days that week reading the books Great-Aunt Rae had left for her, sometimes while lying on T. Rex’s back and sometimes with her feet in the cool creek. She looked up birds and flowers in the field guides, and other times just lay back and watched clouds drift by. Despite Sydney’s presence, Carly felt more peaceful this week than she had during the others.
When Saturday afternoon came and they all were saying good-bye, Sydney’s mom said, “I want to thank you for being a role model to Sydney. She would never say so, but I could tell that she was watching you closely and listening to everything you said. I suspect she’ll think about it for some time and that she might be a happier and kinder person for it.”
Carly didn’t know what to say, but before things became too much more awkward, Sydney’s mom hugged her, and then the others hugged her, and then they piled into their rental car and drove off.
Great-Aunt Rae turned to her and said, “Sometimes this job makes me so glad to be who I am.”
Carly thought about that as she untacked the horses, rinsed them off with the hose, and then wicked the excess water from their backs with a tool. She wanted to be able to say that when she was Great-Aunt Rae’s age and every age in between—that she was glad to be who she was. She wasn’t there yet. She had a ways to go.
* * *
Usually Saturday nights were a time when everything was pretty much done, so Carly was mystified when Great-Aunt Rae insisted that she go with her on a special errand. First, Great-Aunt Rae had already been gone at the store for a good long time, and second, she turned left instead of right, going out into the national forest instead of to town. She bumped along a dirt road for a bit and then pulled over in a well-worn turnout. There was nothing remarkable about the spot—no panoramic views, no water … just little bits of garbage … a beer can with holes in it, bullet casings.
Great-Aunt Rae told her to face in the other direction and close her eyes, and after Carly did, she could hear her lift the tarp off the bed of her truck and move it to a spot not so terribly far away. She heard a big thud, followed by the crinkling of the tarp, and then another. After that, she heard her great-aunt make several trips between the truck and that spot. Finally, she heard the truck door open and close and then her great-aunt say, “Okay, you can open them now.”
Great-Aunt Rae stood with a revolver in her hand, barrel down pointing to the ground. Behind her, Carly could see that Great-Aunt Rae had moved two log segments onto the tarp and piled several pink objects on them—a pink mailbox, a pink decorative bottle, a small pink metal pail, a pink ceramic mug, two pink ceramic salt and pepper shakers shaped like roses, and a small pink lamp.
From inside her pocket, Great-Aunt Rae pulled out bullets and loaded the revolver, pointed out the safety before taking it off, and handed it to Carly. “I tried getting stuff that would shatter. When you’re ready, pull back the hammer with your thumb until it clicks, and then hold it like this”—she put her arms straight out in front of her—“two hands, and pull the trigger. Try not to hit the tarp. We don’t want holes in it when we collect all the broken glass in it later. Look at your target through that little V on the top. Don’t forget to breathe.”
On the first try, she aimed too high, but on the second, Carly shot the pink mug, shattering it to bits, and it felt good—really good. Then she shot the bottle, which exploded into a million pieces.
“Do you have it?” Carly asked.
“Have what?” asked Great-Aunt Rae.
“The BRCA2 gene mutation.”
“Uh … I guess I don’t know. I never thought about it.”
“Your sister died of pancreatic cancer at age forty-three, so it seems likely she had it. That’s one of the other cancers people with this gene mutation are more likely to get. So, if she did, you would have a fifty percent chance of having it too. A lot of the breast cancer happens to women around fifty, but a lot of the ovarian cancer happens to women in their sixties. You should get tested and then get your ovaries out if you’re positive so you don’t die early. I mean, your odds of getting ovarian cancer would only be twenty percent so the surgery would either be completely unnecessary or absolutely life extending. It’s either one or the other and you’ll never know which one it was for you. So, it comes down to peace of mind, right? Like if you just have them removed, you don’t have to live the rest of your life feeling like you’re being stalked by a cancer cougar.”
“Is that how you feel?”
“Pretty much. I mean, I don’t know whether I inherited it or not, but fifty percent odds are pretty high, so what do I do with that?” Carly held up the gun and lined up one of the salt and pepper shakers through the little V on the top of the gun, then blew it away. “I mean, say I have it. Is it ethical to have children when there is a fifty percent chance of passing this gene mutation on to my children? Is it ethical to create kids that are destined to get cancer? That’s not something people have had to think about before.”
“I suppose not. Back in my day, people had to get their blood type identified before getting a marriage license … and there was sickle cell anemia … but people knew whether they had that or not.…”
Carly fired another two shots at the other salt and pepper shaker that sat on top of the mailbox. She hit the mailbox instead and it flew off the stump. Great-Aunt Rae took the gun from her, double-checked it was empty, and put the safety on. Then she trotted over to the pink junk, put the mailbox and salt and pepper shakers back up on the stump, trotted back, and reloaded the gun.
“If I have it, it could stop right here with me. But if I decide that I’m entitled to live the life I would have had if I had been able to live it in ignorance, not just my kids, but hundreds of more people, mostly women, down the family line could go through what my mom went through. And if it’s not ethical for me to have children, is it ethical for me to date guys who want to have children without telling them that I shouldn’t? Am I obligated to tell all the guys I date that I am flawed and that half of all the children we would have would likely get cancer, possibly significantly earlier in life, and die of it?” She pulle
d the trigger and shot the remaining shaker and then shot at the lamp, missing the base but getting the shade. Firing again, she hit the base. “Do I tell him that I might? That I might leave him with a bunch of children to raise on his own because my odds of dying early are greater than average? Who is going to want that? So, what’s my plan now? Because my plan was to go to college, meet someone nice, graduate, get a career, and marry that someone nice and have a family, and now I don’t really see that happening. I mean, I could twist the truth. As long as I don’t get the test, I can claim I didn’t know. But that feels like lying. And bringing children into this world that are pretty much destined to get cancer just seems wrong to me.”
“Well, what about adoption?” Great-Aunt Rae asked.
Carly shrugged. “I still might leave them orphans.”
“I think if you knew you had it for sure, you could have frequent enough checkups so that any problems would be found early and your survival would be fairly certain.”
“Fairly certain.”
“Look, kid, none of us get certainty. We drive in cars. We get the flu. We ride horses—big ones. People see cougar walk through my property, so I just stick a shovel down the back of my shirt when I chop wood, hoping the blade would protect the back of my head if a cougar bit into it. I painted eyeballs on it so that the cougar might think it’s my face. That’s nuts, right? But we just live with it.”
“And you can … because no one is telling you that you have a ten percent chance of getting attacked by a cougar in the next twenty years, or a five percent chance of dying in a horse accident. You don’t have those numbers floating in your head, where you try to manipulate them into something you can handle. You get to live your life in ignorant bliss about all the odds. I looked it up on the internet. If I have this gene mutation, I have a sixty to seventy percent chance of getting breast cancer, a twenty percent chance of getting ovarian cancer, a five percent chance of getting pancreatic cancer, and chances of getting lung, brain, peritoneal, and skin cancer that are less than that but still many times higher than most people. If you add all of those up, that’s maybe a hundred percent chance of getting cancer. How do I live a normal life knowing that? Because it feels like being stalked by something that intends to kill me.” She shot the mailbox with all the remaining bullets in the chamber.
“Seems to me, you could needlessly wreck the rest of your life thinking about all of this when there’s a fifty percent chance you don’t have it.”
“Yeah,” Carly said, unimpressed, because the possibility still loomed so large.
“And again, if you do, you can increase the odds of your survival by having more frequent screenings.”
“Say I do. Do I run right out and replace my boobs with fake ones like Angelina Jolie? Do I have my ovaries out like Mom? That has risks and side effects, too.”
“I suppose you could, but there’s a thirty to forty percent chance you will never develop breast cancer and an eighty percent chance you’ll never develop ovarian cancer. So, I would say … if it were me … I would say no. At least not for twenty or thirty years. I would say just show up and do your screenings whenever they want to see you.”
Great-Aunt Rae reloaded the gun two more times and Carly obliterated everything that was left.
“Well, I’ll tell you what, kid. Whenever you’re ready, I’ll go with you. I’ll get tested, too. We’ll do it together. You won’t be alone. And whatever the results … well, we’ll either celebrate them or we’ll face them together. We’ll figure it out together. Because you’re right. All of this is a lot.”
“Yeah,” Carly said, not as if she were saying yes to taking a genetic test together but as if she were simply agreeing that yeah, this is a lot.
Amy
Waking up on her birthday, Amy had a recollection of hiking to two lakes as a child and swimming in the second one. It was in a deep cirque just below Little Tahoma, the small peak on the side of Mt. Rainier, and a field of snow led down steep cliffs and right into the water on the opposite side. Yes, finding this lake would be the perfect way to spend her birthday. She felt strangely excited about this one. She’d made it to forty-seven. It was a privilege not everyone got.
Of course, it could be argued that going home to heaven early was a privilege not everyone got, and that likely was true too. It served no purpose to see one as success and one as failure. She had no clue how it all worked. She simply had to trust that it was all good. Even when it was scary. Especially when it was scary.
She felt grateful for more time to be in nature here on earth and intended to make the most of it. Studying the topo map she’d bought at the visitor center, she figured out that the lakes she remembered might be Bench Lake and Snow Lake and that if she and Alicia had hiked it when they were little, it was probably within her ability even now. Ready for a little change of scenery, she set off, driving first for several miles on the road to Paradise before parking and beginning her hike.
Along the trail, bear grass bloomed nearly waist high, and she giggled, remembering a long-ago conversation with Alicia, who must have been about fifteen or sixteen at the time.
* * *
“I don’t like these,” Alicia said. “They remind me of penises.”
The word “penis” alone was enough to get Amy laughing, but as she looked around at all the thousands of creamy white blossoms and knew her sister was imagining they were all penises, well, that just sent her over the edge. “Is that what penises really look like?” she asked. “I thought they were longer.”
“Yeah, they are. These just look like the tips.”
“How do you know what penises look like?”
“Tina’s mom subscribes to Playgirl.”
Satisfied with that answer, Amy slowly turned around and took in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the flowers. “That sure is a lot of penises.”
“I kind of feel like they’re out to get me,” said Alicia.
“Quick! Put your knees together and run!” Amy shouted jokingly, attempting to do just that.
Awkwardly, Alicia joined in, their little bodies turning with each stride to compensate for the lack of movement in their hips, laughing hysterically until they were out of the meadow and back in the woods.
“That was close!” Amy joked, tears streaming down her face, hands clutching her sore sides.
Alicia, laughing just as hard, agreed, “So close! Way too close!”
When their parents caught up to them, they asked what was so funny, and instead of telling the truth, Alicia said, “Amy just blew a really big snot bubble out of her nose.”
Left with no choice, Amy said, “I didn’t mean to. Sometimes I’m just really disgusting,” and this set both of them off into a fit of giggles again.
* * *
Amy stopped with her sketchbook and sketched a close-up of three bear grass blooms with the alpine meadow in the background. Later, she would cut it to the size of a postcard to send to her sister, writing nothing except, “Thinking of you!” or maybe, “Wish you were here!” It would surely give Alicia a laugh.
It wasn’t long before she reached the shore of Bench Lake. The opposite shore dropped off steeply, making the lake seem not quite believable and more like something that had been photoshopped poorly. Behind it sat majestic Mt. Rainier. Being in no particular hurry, Amy stopped to sketch it as well.
As she walked on, she thought about all the parts of her body that were relatively the same. Her arms and legs still worked, and her hands and feet too. Her heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, pancreas, gallbladder, thyroid … they all worked. They even worked without her doing a thing, without her telling them what to do, without her thinking about them at all. Her digestive system still worked. After chemo, she knew what a big deal that was. She could still smell and taste things. She still had all of her teeth, and they were in decent shape. Her eyes and ears still worked. Her wonderful brain still worked. Gratitude filled her. Most of her body was normal now. Sure, some things were different,
but most things were the same. If she had to lose a body part, breasts were a pretty good one to lose, really. Sure, they had played a lovely role in lovemaking. That was a loss. And sure, they filled out women’s clothes. But mostly they were pretty nonfunctional. She hadn’t needed to feed a baby with them in a very long time. She wasn’t ever going to feed any more babies with them again. She didn’t use her breasts to walk or lift things or even float. Having them didn’t make any activity easier. They didn’t make her smarter. They didn’t make her a better friend. And yeah, if given a choice, she would have kept them, but life was going to be okay without them. It was. If she lived to be in her late eighties, she would live as many of her adult years without them as she had with them. That was plenty of time to solidly get used to this changed body.
The changes in her abdomen were harder to grasp. She had been using her ovaries and had hoped for more time before menopause. Up until now, she had no idea what a big role estrogen played in so much of what went on in her body—the suppleness of her tissues, including her circulatory system and her skin, thermoregulation, even the clarity of her thoughts. Estrogen replacement wasn’t an option for her because her tumor had been estrogen positive—fueled by estrogen. Replacing estrogen would make her far more likely to have a recurrence or a new cancer. This was how it was, and not having to deal with periods was pretty darn nice, so … onward, she supposed.
Along the trail stood a grand old tree, too large for her to put her arms around. No one judged it as less desirable in any way because of its age. Trees did not judge themselves for changing, for getting wrinkles in their bark, for getting larger. They were simply part of nature. Putting her arms as far around the tree as she could, she rested her cheek against its bark.
Just a little farther on down the trail, she found herself at the shore of Snow Lake, and sure enough, it was the one she remembered. On the other side of the lake was a curved cliff, carved like a bowl by a glacier. Snow still covered most of the talus slope that interrupted the forest. Behind the cliff, Unicorn Peak protruded like a breast, complete with a nipple. Behind it was another small peak, giving the illusion of looking at a woman’s chest from the side. Ugh, she thought. Boobs were everywhere. Just when she was feeling good, there they were again.
