Beach Roses

by Jean Stone

  Rita suggested that once they had the new Center, hopefully the choice of “heads” would improve. She returned to her bag and produced an armload of cosmetics and lotions and all things “good and girlie,” donated, she said, by those “wonderful folks who bring you chemotherapy.”

  The ice at last had melted and they tried out the makeup and were starting to have fun, when Hannah asked if Katie planned to see her mother. She said that real support systems started in the home. She had no doubt meant well.

  But how could Katie explain that she needed a break? After two months with her father, who wouldn’t talk about her illness, who said neither Miguel nor Ina could be told because no one could be trusted … after all that, Katie had needed air.

  Her father had canceled the six-week tour, saying Katie had been stricken with fatigue. He postponed the CD, Katie Live! He would not cancel Central Park; he said there was no need. Surely it would fall between the baby’s birth and her six weeks of radiation.

  He was, as usual, so one-track-mind determined, it was hard not to believe him.

  “You’ll be fine,” he said after the lumpectomy. “If you’d had the abortion, we’d know that even sooner.”

  Why did it always come down to an abortion?

  Still, she had refused. She sometimes thought God punished her with cancer because of the abortions that she’d already had.

  Yes, she’d needed air.

  She’d gone to the Vineyard because she couldn’t stand her father hovering; she couldn’t stand Miguel’s pleas to get married; she couldn’t stand to know that Ina didn’t know the rest; she couldn’t even stand loyal, caring Brady—she did not want his 24/7 allegiance right now.

  She’d gone to the Vineyard because, from a distance, being with Joleen seemed the sane thing to do, the lesser of two dysfunctional evils.

  But when Katie had arrived, a new feeling greeted her: for the first time in her life, Katie was free.

  Free to think.

  Free to do.

  Free.

  Instead of going to her mother’s, she had the taxi take her to Edgartown, to the Harbor View. That had been two weeks ago, and she’d gained respect for solitude. She almost understood why her mother preferred it to the bother of other people.

  For fourteen blissful days Katie had been alone. She had only yielded to responsibility when she’d called Doc Hastings, a name she remembered from long ago when Joleen had a miscarriage.

  Doc examined Katie. He told her about the support group. He hadn’t pressured her to call her mother.

  The baby kicked inside her now.

  Katie held her arms around it. “Sssh,” she whispered. “Sssh, my sweet one.” Then, softly, Katie sang to her baby the lullaby her mother had sung to her at night, the lullaby Joleen had written for her little girl.

  The night is yours and mine alone

  For magic in all things

  While other boys and girls sleep tight

  We’ll fly on butterfly wings.

  You and me we’ll float on high

  We’ll visit queens and kings

  We’ll travel off to sweet, sweet dreams

  On lovely butterfly wings.

  We’ll live a life of fairy tales

  Of silver crowns and golden rings

  Just Mommy and her baby

  We’ll fly on butterfly wings.

  On lovely butterfly wings.

  The baby rested. Katie put her head against the chair back and thought of Joleen, the gifted poet. In recent years there had been tension between mother and daughter, but now that Katie was pregnant, couldn’t that somehow change? Didn’t babies bring out maternal instincts in women?

  She closed her eyes and felt a small smile curve up at the corners of her mouth. And Katie decided it might be okay to try and go home after all.

  It was one of those rare mornings when Oliver and Olivia sat together on their playmat in a Norman Rockwell tableau, studiously arranging foam rubber blocks together as if the two-year-olds always got along and never screamed or cried: Olivia, the screamer; Oliver, the crier. The morning, indeed, was rare, and Rita savored the quiet. Hazel was at the Senior Center and Mindy was at school and Rita was on the floor next to the twins, looking through the brochures and articles Doc had given her, wondering if anyone had written anything about what to do when a patient got up and walked out.

  The phone rang.

  “Shit,” Rita said softly.

  “Shit,” Oliver repeated.

  “Shit,” Olivia said.

  Rita sighed and heaved herself up from the floor. Sometimes she simply wasn’t used to being a mother again, never mind one who, at forty-nine, had spent too many years as a single woman without a care of what she said to whom.

  She grabbed the phone on the fourth ring. “Yeah?”

  Silence.

  “Hello?” Rita asked.

  No reply.

  “If this is some kind of crank call, I’d appreciate it if you’d call back another time. Like when my husband’s home.”

  She was about to slam down the receiver, when a soft voice asked, “Is this Rita Rollins?”

  Well, apparently it wasn’t the wrong number. “Who’s this?”

  Silence again.

  “I said, who is this?” Her voice was tight. Just then, Olivia toddled to her mother and pulled the phone off the end table. Across the room, Oliver jettisoned to the pile of breast cancer brochures and quickly scattered them. “Sorry,” she said quickly, “but I have to go.”

  “Wait.” The voice grew louder. “Rita, it’s me. Katie. From last night.”

  Rita covered the receiver with her hand. “Oliver, stop that!” She turned back to the phone.

  “Katie Gillette,” the caller said.

  Rita’s jaw went slack. Katie? Katie was calling her? She looked quickly around the room to be certain Mindy wasn’t there, even though she knew the girl had gone to school.

  Olivia punched at the number buttons on the telephone. A shrill beep-beep sounded in Rita’s ear. She grasped Olivia’s hand and moved it from the phone. “Hello?” she said again. “Are you still there?”

  “I’m here,” Katie replied. “I’m at the Harbor View. Could you drive me to my mother’s?”

  FIVE

  Hannah woke up in the morning to a familiar soft, white stillness that told her it was going to snow, despite the fact that it was April and the crocuses had already peeked their purple heads out. The weather station said it could be a nor’easter.

  Evan said he didn’t care if there was ten feet of the white stuff.

  Gazing out the window of the pickup truck now, Hannah could not believe they were headed up Route 28 toward the Bourne Bridge, toward Boston, toward the ultrasound appointment that she’d allowed Evan to make.

  Doc could have arranged for her to have it on the Vineyard, but Evan had gone silent and Hannah had decided to relent. The test, after all, was at a satellite office on the South Shore. She would not have to go into the city; she would not have to face her past. Besides, she and Evan still had not made love. Perhaps she could at least do this for him.

  At the meeting last night, she wanted to ask about how to help her husband deal with the breast cancer. But when the older woman left, the mood had lightened, and Hannah hadn’t wanted to darken it again. It would have been easier, however, to ask the detached strangers than any of her friends.

  She wondered if John Arthur would have handled things better if he’d been her husband.

  They’d only spoken of the cancer once, when he approached her at her locker in the teachers’ lounge.

  “Hannah,” he’d said. “Oh, God, I am so sorry.” He had, of course, been told. The school grapevine had been at work. “I’ve missed our morning runs.”

  They’d never had a structured schedule, but often met on Beach Road in Oak Bluffs and run together in the silence and the solitude of the morning mist.

  “I’ve missed running, too,” she’d said and forced a smile. She did not say t
hat maybe it was for the best because he was as married as she was and had three kids as well. She did not say it because she would not acknowledge that she had lust-filled feelings for a man who was not her husband.

  He’d started to speak again, but then the French teacher entered the lounge, dropped onto a faded sofa, and began to chatter about the inconvenience of teachers’ meetings being held on Friday afternoons.

  Hannah had averted her eyes from John and had not looked into them again.

  And now she turned her eyes from the window of the truck, where a different kind of storm was building. She noticed Evan check his watch. “I’m sure we can reschedule,” Hannah said as he steered around the rotary, past the family restaurant and the sign that asked if you were “desperate,” and prominently displayed the phone number for the Samaritans.

  “No chance,” Evan said. At least he wasn’t angry today. “It’s April, Hannah. If a storm comes now, it won’t be bad.” He said the word storm as if it didn’t have an “r.” She shifted on the seat and sensed that if an earthquake were predicted, her stubborn Yankee husband still would have made the trek.

  The truck climbed the hump of the bridge. Looking down upon the steely waters of Cape Cod Canal, Hannah saw no vessels bunched along the narrow waterway, slugging their way from New Bedford to Provincetown or back again. The weather, she supposed. “I called Sally Dotson. She’ll bring the kids home and stay with them until we get back.”

  Evan nodded and did not mention that she’d already told him that at breakfast. He checked his watch again; he punched his foot on the accelerator. “I hope the state police are in the barracks, resting for the storm.”

  “We don’t have to speed, Evan. The ultrasound isn’t until one o’clock.” It was only nine-thirty; Boston was ninety minutes away.

  They glided from the bridge and landed on Route 3. “Actually, we have to be there at eleven-thirty,” he said.

  Hannah was puzzled. “Why?”

  A trace of a smile curled around Evan’s mouth. He leaned his left elbow against the bottom of the window on the driver’s door. “Honey,” he said, “I don’t want to upset you. I’ve done something you might not like, but you’ll be grateful later on.”

  Hannah was too stunned to speak.

  “The appointment at eleven-thirty isn’t at the clinic. It’s at Brigham and Women’s in the city. With an oncologist.”

  A state law prohibited minors from being in a place where alcohol was served, not because of the booze, but because of secondhand smoke or the possibility thereof. But Rita didn’t have time to worry about that now. The only one who’d be available to watch the twins would be Jill’s daughter, Amy, who was at the 1802 Tavern getting ready for the lunch crowd, which wouldn’t really be a crowd because it still was the off-season and which also meant that law enforcers might not be around, or, if they were, they might look the other way. Hopefully they would not be in West Chop, where Rita would be driving Katie because that’s where Joleen lived.

  After a quick shower, Rita packed two pastel quilted bags, as if the twins were going on vacation for a month or maybe more. She loaded twins and bags into the minivan and drove to the tavern a few blocks down the road.

  With beef stew already simmering and chowder on the stove, Amy was sitting on a bar stool, studying for her MBA. A catch came into Rita’s throat, as it so often did when she saw the girl: Kyle would have loved her right, if only there’d been time, if only he hadn’t died in that awful fire so many years ago.

  She said she’d be glad to baby-sit, emergency or not. “Anytime, Rita,” the fresh-scrubbed blonde with her mother’s built-in elegance and easy smile said without hesitation. She slid off the bar stool and bent to hug the twins, wrapping one up in each arm. Rita blinked away her sorrow, said thanks, and quickly blew out the door.

  Back behind the steering wheel, she wondered how many more emergencies would be linked to the support group before they had the funding and Doc found them a real leader.

  Then again, who would have ever thought that Rita Rollins would have the chance to meet, of all people, Joleen?

  She drove past the swollen surf and barely paid attention to the heavy layer of clouds suspended from above, poised to dump their cache of snow.

  Joleen.

  How many hours had Rita spent listening to Joleen’s music, the music of the seventies that had taken her through those long, long hours after she had left the island and had hidden out in Worcester at her aunt’s, first with a pregnant belly and no husband, then hiding with the baby that Rita refused to give up? Kyle. The child she brought back to the Vineyard along with a sad, made-up story about a GI that she’d married who’d gone off to war and not returned.

  Joleen’s low, throaty ballads had helped Rita through the loneliness and given her the strength to face each day, as if she, too, would one day be “Goin’ Home,” like in Joleen’s greatest song. There still were days and nights since Kyle died when Rita dusted off the old LPs and turned on the stereo.

  And now, there she was, headed to pick up Joleen’s daughter and bring her to Joleen’s house, because now Katie was the one who was “Goin’ Home.”

  As Rita pulled into the Harbor View and the snow began to fall, she realized that the worst part was that she was sworn to secrecy and couldn’t share the news. Not with Mindy or with Charlie or with her best friend, Jill. Not even with Hazel. But wouldn’t they just shit?

  It had seemed like a good idea at the time. But as the bellman set Katie’s bags inside the minivan, Katie had second thoughts. Nostalgia, after all, was one thing; reality was another. She handed him a ten, then climbed into the front seat. She closed the door and looked over at her driver. “Thank you, Rita.”

  “No problem,” Rita answered and backed out onto the street.

  Katie did not know what else to say. She stuffed her hands into her pockets. “Hard to believe it’s snowing.”

  “A nor ‘easter, they’re saying.”

  “But it’s April.”

  “I know.”

  They wound around the curve and wove through the white-housed, gray-shingled maze of Edgartown until they reached the main road. Inside Katie, the baby did not kick, but seemed to twist.

  “I guess I’m really nervous,” she said.

  “About going to your mother’s?”

  “My mother’s not exactly a regular kind of mother.”

  Rita paused a moment, then said, “Well, of course she’s not.” She did not say that Katie should not be nervous.

  Katie looked down at the console of the van. A tiny baby doll rested in the cup holder; a small cloth book had fallen beside the seat; what looked to be a few crumpled Cheerios were sprinkled here and there.

  “I was a mother long ago,” Rita continued. “And now I am again. If ever there was an unlikely mother, it would be me. Be patient with her, Katie. My bet is that she loves you very much.” She took her eyes off the road and glanced at Katie’s stomach. “You’ll see,” she said, and smiled.

  Katie turned her head out toward the hemline of the road that curved along the beach. Tears came to her eyes. “The doctor said I should have had an abortion. Then a mastectomy. That it would be quicker, safer.”

  Rita didn’t say anything at first, then, “Why didn’t you?”

  “I would never look the same. You know. In certain costumes.” She shrugged.

  Rita nodded. She did not say she didn’t think that was true today, that reconstructive surgery had come a long, long way.

  “It’s okay, though,” Katie added. “I had already started my second trimester, so it’s not like radiation is that far away. I’ll be fine. I know I will.” She laughed. “God, I’m only Stage One! That poor woman, Hannah. Stage Three. Yikes.”

  Snow began to frost the windshield; Rita turned on the wipers. “Are you seeing Doc Hastings while you’re here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you can trust he’ll give you good advice.”

  The baby twisted again. K
atie grabbed her stomach.

  “Are you okay?” Rita asked.

  She closed her eyes. “Some days I’m not sure I can go through with this.”

  “Which might be one more reason to be with your mother.”

  Katie opened her eyes and used her hand to wipe away the fog inside the window on her side. She looked out at the snow that was sprinkled on the water. She wondered what Rita would think if she knew the truth: that Katie had called Rita because she’d been afraid to call a cab, afraid she’d be dropped off at the end of the long driveway only to have Joleen turn her away.

  And then what would she have done?

  The ultrasound had been simply that. Hannah barely paid attention to the routine procedure; she was too busy trying to stuff down a load of anger at her deceitful husband, who was now sitting in a chair beside her in the doctor’s office, awaiting the results.

  “Mrs. Jackson,” said the white-coated man who entered the room. He was young, not old and kindly like Doc Hastings, and he was foreign, Indian perhaps. Evan quickly stood up; the doctor waved him to sit down.

  “Your ultrasound looks good.”

  Hannah let her breath relax.

  “But I’ve been on the phone with your doctor on Martha’s Vineyard.”

  But. Hannah did not like that word. Evan shifted in his chair.

  “According to your records, your tumor has only shrunk a small percent. By now, we would have hoped for more.”

  She stared at the doctor. She did not know what to say. Then she realized Evan’s hand was on her arm. When had he put it there?

  The doctor riffled through a file, then held a paper up. “Doctor Hastings also gave me a list of the chemo you’ve been taking. You’ve had two rounds so far?”

  Hannah nodded, mute.

  “He was planning one more round. We agree that it should be two. The treatment you’ve been getting is right on target, though. I would have administered the same dosages. We simply can’t control how the body will respond. The trick is not to get discouraged.”

  Hannah nodded once again.

  The doctor set the paper down. “Keep on your current course of treatment. If you want to come here for your mastectomy, certainly that’s up to you.”