I raised this with Janice the following Tuesday.
“It’s very normal for patients to become attached to their caregivers,” she said. “They’re the ones who looked after you like no one else could. They’re literally the ones who saved your life. If you weren’t grateful, it might be strange.”
“That’s true,” I said, nodding in agreement. “But don’t you think something’s wrong with the fact that I feel like they’re the only people I can rely on?”
“I don’t know. Do you think that something’s wrong with it?” Janice’s doublespeak was now second nature to me, so I barely took notice.
“Well, yeah. To be honest, I do.”
“So what’s the solution?”
I knew that she wouldn’t tell me the solution because she never offered her own advice, a trait that I found as annoying as I did endearing. “If I gave you my own advice,” she once said when I begged her to actually just lay out a course of action for me, “then it wouldn’t be organic to you. You’d have less incentive to follow through. And that would defeat the whole point of our sessions.” I supposed that she was right, but it would be helpful nevertheless.
“I’m not sure,” I said, mulling it over. “I guess that I could trust in the people in my life more, give them a chance to prove that I can rely on them.” I thought of Sally and the crossroads we’d reached. And I thought of Zach, minus that inconvenience known as my second-best friend, Lila, and his mint chocolate chip ice cream. I thought of Susanna and how I should probably return her messages.
“That’s certainly a good start,” Janice said. “What else?”
I looked around her office, at her silver-plated picture frames with photos of her gleaming family and just-handsome-enough husband and wondered how they’d all come out so normal. I noticed her equestrian awards on the wall behind her desk, and the books on her shelf, at least half of which had nothing to do with medicine.
“How do you find that balance?” I asked, changing the subject entirely. “The one between caring too much about your patients and the one where you get to have a life of your own?”
“This isn’t about me, Natalie. Let’s focus on you.”
“Janice, please. This is about me. And I’d like to know how you find that balance. I always seem to be off-kilter, putting too many eggs in one basket while ignoring the other one entirely. But I’d like not to do that anymore.”
She thought about it for a minute and took a sip of her coffee. “How do I find that balance? For me, it’s not so much a struggle. I think if you give too much of yourself to any one thing—work, marriage, even your cancer recovery—you’re bound to lose sight of the other parts of yourself that need nurturing. Like a tree. If you just focused on bringing out the blossoms, you’d never see the gorgeous leaves or the age-old roots or the bark that holds all of its scars and tells its history.”
“So I should be more like a tree?” I asked.
“No.” She laughed. “But you should water every part of yourself that is thirsty.” She looked at the clock. “Our time’s almost up, and you still haven’t answered your original question.”
“What was that? I don’t remember.”
“You were answering the second part of your question. How you can come to rely more on the people in your life.”
“Oh,” I said, thinking it over. And then it hit me. “I suppose that it’s not just about relying on the people who have proven themselves, but cutting out the ones who haven’t. Because they taint it for everyone else. After all, if one person can sink me, who’s to say that the others won’t, too? Or at least that’s the excuse I can tell myself when I push them away.”
Janice smiled and rose to lead me out the door. “That, my dear, is what we call progress. That’s what we call progress, indeed.”
“THANKS FOR MEETING me,” I said, gingerly taking a bite of a currant scone and wiping the butter off my fingers with a napkin.
“My pleasure. I was so thrilled when you called.” Susanna Taylor waved her hand and took a sip of her tea. She paused to let the hot water go down. “I know that this isn’t easy for you.”
“The cancer?”
“The whole thing,” she said. “Calling. Asking for help. Juggling the job. Feeling alone.” She smiled when she saw my eyebrows rise. “No, I haven’t been stalking you. I’ve just been there. So I know. That’s why I started the support group to begin with.”
When I got home from my session with Janice, I sat at my desk and turned Susanna’s card over and over again in my hands. I’d been thinking about calling her the entire cab ride home, but when I was faced with actually doing it, I tried to come up with all the reasons that I shouldn’t instead. Finally, I realized that if nothing else, she was a link to Sally, a link that could perhaps help bring us back together. So after twenty minutes, I picked up the phone and dialed.
Today, Susanna set down her porcelain saucer, the kind that my mother inherited when my grandmother passed. “So how’s work going?” she asked.
I stared down at my own teacup and shrugged. “Okay, I guess.” I looked around the café, which had been designed to evoke a quintessential British tea shop. Wire-backed chairs with lavender seat cushions, blooming floral wallpaper with paintings of the English countryside on top. The scent of butter wafted in the air. “I’m not sure that your husband missed much when he lost the election.”
“Try telling him that.” She snorted. “But I take it this term isn’t running as smoothly as the last?”
“It’s not that.” I shook my head and sighed, choosing my words carefully. “It’s just that…well, it feels like we’re doing all this work, and I’m not sure how much it matters.”
“Hasn’t it always been that way?” she asked. “I mean, I’ve never been in politics—I was a lawyer before I quit to focus on fund-raising—but that was always my impression. A lot of self-aggrandizing bullshit. I never understood why anyone would want to get involved.” She took another sip. “Why did you?”
“A million reasons, probably,” I said. “Mostly, I’d say, because I wanted to be president.”
“Wow, lofty goal. You mean, become president so you could change the world for the better?”
I watched a mother clench the hand of her young son and guide him down the front steps to the café. “No,” I replied, still staring. “I mean become president for the sake of becoming president.” I shook my eyes from my daze. “Well, maybe that’s not entirely fair. There was a time—and this was so long ago that it’s hard to remember—but really, there was a time when I thought that it was about being a good man.” I circled my fingers over the rim of my cup and thought back to fifth grade when my history teacher, Mrs. Roberts, talked about Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, about good men, and how my ten-year-old heart swelled because I felt like I could be one of those people. A really good man. “And Dupris used to inspire me to be that. In her first few years, it felt like maybe we could really change the world. But now, I mean, it sort of feels like you fight the fights to win them, not because the fights really matter.”
I ran my hands over my face. The senator had been deflecting my requests for a meeting for weeks now. I still hadn’t told her about the exposé, and according to Maureen, who’d allowed Senator McInytre to speak with Sally, the article would indeed be explosive. And Sally had been right: Just because I kept Dupris directly out, it didn’t mean that she hadn’t been discussed.
The senator and I would bounce by each other each morning: Kyle and I would bring her up to speed on the news headlines, the latest maneuvers by various senators, and whatever gossip floated our way. But I needed to sit down with her—I made this clear—to go over the intricacies of ensuring the votes for the stem cell bill, the very one that was causing me so much angst, but she kept waving me off. Finally, I had Blair pencil me in. I mean, literally, pencil me in. I couldn’t believe that this was what it was coming to—that the assistant had to write in a slot for me two weeks down the line, but ever sin
ce Senator Dupris had gotten the secret nod as the next in line from the DNC, she was virtually AWOL.
Susanna Taylor saw me staring into my teacup, as if the leaves could read my fortune. “Sally called me back to ask me a few more questions about my thoughts on the stem cell bill,” she said, as if reading my mind. “I’m sorry that you two are at such odds. I know how much she values you.”
“I’m just so lost,” I said, as my voice caught in my throat. “About Sally, about who’s right, about life.” I glanced down at my breasts and shook my head. “About all of this.”
“It’s funny, isn’t it?” she said, but I looked at her blankly, so she just continued. “How the thing that cancer changes the most isn’t your breasts or your hair or anything at all on the outside.” I felt my eyes rush with tears. “What it changes is everything else instead.”
I glanced down and saw fat, heavy drops land on my lace placemat. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said, wiping my cheeks, apologizing for displaying my too ripe vulnerability to a woman I barely knew.
“Natalie, it’s okay,” she said, as she reached across the expanse of the table and clutched my right hand, holding it until I met her eyes. “You have to know…” She paused and took a breath. “What you have to know in all of this, through all of this, is that no matter how lost you are in this maze of this hell and confusion, that in the end, I promise you, you will be found.”
AFTER MY LAST round of chemo, Dr. Chin called me back in to run the usual battery of tests: MRI, ultrasound, you name it. He took a look at my new breasts and declared them nearly healed, though he said that the scars wouldn’t recede for a few more months. I flipped my hand and told him that I didn’t mind them anymore—it seemed somehow appropriate that I bore literal scars from this all. Battle wounds, really. I wouldn’t get a Purple Heart or a Medal of Honor, but I’d been to hell and back, and there’s simply no way that you can come out unscathed. If this was the damage of war, so be it.
And besides, I’d nearly gotten used to it, my new chest. My boobs were much perkier than my old ones, and despite the fact I’d asked for the same size as before, these were rounder, firmer, fuller. I’d turn to look at myself in the mirror, and though it took me a while, I’d recently come to admit that they were indeed a nice pair. A fine rack, as Kyle would say. Maybe this summer, I’d even sport some cleavage.
Because Sally and I had retreated to our respective corners and in spite of the fact that I was still less than happy with my parents, my mother came up for my last visit with Dr. Chin. She met me in the lobby of my apartment building, a cashmere scarf knotted perfectly on her collarbone, her highlighted hair languidly toppling over her crisp Italian wool blazer. Before I could even say hello, she pulled me close to her, and I could taste her Jil Sander perfume.
“I’m sorry about Australia,” she said in my ear. “We shouldn’t have gone.” Since they’d returned, my parents and I had kept up a guarded facade. Me, pretending like I didn’t feel abandoned. Them, pretending like they hadn’t left me adrift. They called diligently, dutifully, and I returned their messages with updates on my health and my progress. But the void remained nonetheless.
I tried to pull back from my mother’s embrace, but she wouldn’t let me break free. So I tried to remember the last time I’d heard my mom apologize for anything. And I realized that I never had. And then I realized how closely our cloths were cut.
“Thank you,” I said, when she finally released me.
“Can you forgive us?” She held open the glass door to my apartment building and raised her right arm to hail a taxi.
“Come on, Mom,” I said, scooting into the back of the cab and wondering how Sally’s last-minute wedding preparations were going. “There’s no time to hold grudges when you’ve seen how fragile things can really be.”
She slid in next to me and grabbed my hand. She didn’t let go until we landed at the hospital.
We sat in Dr. Chin’s office, just as I had with Sally nearly seven months back when he delivered the potential death sentence, and we waited. I’d been sick since the night before, but this time, it wasn’t from the chemo. It was from my nerves, which were fraught with anxiety, with fear, really. With the fear that after all of this, it wouldn’t be enough. That even though I felt like I’d earned a slot in that 56 percent of survivors, it would turn out that earning it, deserving it, had nothing to do with it at all. I sat in his office, my stomach plugged full of Imodium, my palms sweaty and my fingers shaking from the adrenaline, and I supposed that this was true: that getting cancer, that beating it or succumbing to it or defying the odds of it, had nothing to do with worthiness or deservedness or who you were as a person. It just happened, and nothing I could or couldn’t do would change that. I reached for my lucky charm around my neck and hoped that today, it would grant me good fortune.
Dr. Chin came into his office holding my chart, and before he even sat down, I started weeping. It began with a trickle from my left eye that I wiped away, but snowballed into heavy, purging sobs. The truth of it was, I wasn’t even sure why I was crying. It was over. The worst of it was over, I told myself. Unless, of course, it wasn’t.
Dr. Chin cleared his throat and offered me a tissue. Then he smoothed his hands over the manila folder in front of him and waited for me to compose myself. So I blew my nose, dabbed my eyes, and waited for my verdict. I knew it before he said anything. His grin belied the news.
“Natalie, I have only good things to report,” he said. Never in my life have I seen my mother cry, but then she started in, too. “You have licked this thing. Knocked it out of the park. We ran through your tests, blood work, and scans, and I could not be happier to declare you officially in remission. We couldn’t detect a cancer cell around. I’d like to put you on a radiation schedule to ensure that we maintain your progress, and then other than that, all we need is to see you every three months for a checkup.”
I heard the enormity of what he said. I heard it first and then I absorbed it, and after the relief washed over me, and after I thanked him over and over and over again for saving my life, for giving back to me what I didn’t know was possible to lose, I clutched my mother’s hand, and we walked out of there. Just as I was about to close his door, I turned back to him.
“Dr. Chin, what do most of your patients do once they learn that they’re cancer-free?”
“That’s a good question, Natalie. And I feel like I should answer it by saying that they go to Disneyland.” We both laughed, and he continued. “No, really, I suppose that they go about finding the lives that they want to live, rather than the lives that they think they should be living. If nothing else, beating cancer gives you that second chance.”
BECAUSE SALLY AND I weren’t speaking, Lila threw me an “I Kicked Cancer’s Ass Party” on Saturday night. She invited everyone I think I knew in the city. People I hadn’t spoken to in months, people who might not have even bothered to call when I was sick. But it didn’t matter. I asked her to. The only one who wasn’t there was Sally. And really, as I looked around, hoping to make out her face, I realized that even in a room packed with people, I somehow felt lonely without her.
My mother had taken me shopping for the occasion. “It’s your coming-out party,” she said. “We have to find you something fabulous.”
“Actually,” I said, plunging my hands into the pockets of my jeans. “It’s my coming-back party.”
It was one of those afternoons in early April in New York where you can’t imagine living anywhere else. Pink blossoms dotted the trees, and candy yellow daffodils tried to poke their necks out of the soil of the planters that lined Fifth Avenue. The smell of spring hung in the air, and to me, it was the smell of hope. My mom, who I’m quite certain hadn’t eaten ice cream since 1965 treated us to cones along the way. I had mint chocolate chip, and I thought of Zach and wondered if he’d be there tonight.
As we rode the escalator to the top floor of Bergdorf Goodman, I watched my reflection pass by on the mirrored wa
lls. I literally looked nothing like I had six months back. It wasn’t just that I was twenty pounds thinner or that the hair that hung from my head wasn’t my own or even that my new breasts protruded ever so slightly more than my old ones. It was more in my eyes. Behind the fatigue and the wrinkles that had seemingly appeared overnight, there was new light—the light that turned on when I became a survivor. I watched my eyes over and over again as I climbed to the sixth floor. I could barely believe that they were mine.
“This would look great on you,” my mom said, as we cruised through the designer racks, pulling out dark jeans and a cashmere shell.
“Too boring,” I said, placing it back.
“Sweetie, you could never be boring,” she said. “No, these are classic. Refined. So you.”
“Screw refined. Screw the old me,” I said. “I’m ready for fun.”
That’s how I ended up in the dressing room with two Pucci print dresses and a leopard-print mini. I stood naked in front of the mirror, just like I had at my bridesmaid’s fitting, and stared at my body, so foreign, so different from when I started. I stared until my mother called from in front of the curtain and asked me if I were okay, and then I double-blinked my eyes, snapped out of it, and remembered Susanna’s wise words: that my body was just a vessel. What it carried inside of it was what really mattered.
In the end, I settled on the second Pucci. The bold-patterned, bright pink, yellow, and green Pucci. When Kyle saw me in it at Lila’s apartment later that night, he said that he didn’t recognize me, I looked so different. I smiled and told him that was the point entirely.
Jake had to meet me at the party, and he wouldn’t show up until well past 10: 00 anyway. He had a prescheduled dinner with his manager, but I didn’t mind so much. I wanted to get ready by myself, to transform myself from cancer victim to cancer survivor in the solitude of my own presence. I zipped up the back of my dress and thought about how it might feel to break free of Jake and find that I wasn’t broken. That there are worse things in life than walking away from someone whom you once loved, and that if you’re granted a second chance and choose to embrace it, you better run like hell toward it or else it keeps getting farther and farther away.
Department of Lost and Found Page 20
