by Cathy Holton
Booker was one of those people who laughed at his own jokes even when they weren’t funny.
“That’s right. Why would I send you to do my talking for me when you can’t even string a coherent sentence together?”
“Down where everybody talks like they’ve got marbles in their mouth. Down in the land of ignorant hillbillies.”
Mel knew at that moment that her marriage was over.
Two months later she found a lump in her breast, and shortly after that, Booker left for good.
One word. Two syllables. Can anyone who’s never heard the diagnosis cancer truly understand what it conjures? (Dread. Despair. Death.) Mel walked out of the surgeon’s office feeling like a reprieved felon. (You won’t be executed today, but perhaps tomorrow, or maybe even the day after that. I really don’t know. We’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?) Mortality is just a word until cancer. Every night you go to sleep aware of one more day of amnesty, and every morning you wake with fate hanging over your head like a noose. A trapdoor waiting to be sprung. A guillotine blade waiting to fall. A nightmare without end.
On the day Mel walked out of the surgeon’s office, it was a bright, glorious spring day. The trees along Central Park were in full leaf. Traffic crowded the streets; plumes of exhaust disappeared against the pale blue sky. Everything was the same, and yet everything was different. Mel watched an old woman tottering along the street and she thought, I’ll never grow old. She watched a young couple kissing in the park and she thought, I’ll never laugh again. I’ll never love. Despair settled over her like a thick, dank cloud. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t feel. As she walked she was thinking, I can’t live like this, I can’t live like this. It ran through her head like a mantra. By the time she reached her apartment, the mantra had changed. I don’t have to live like this, I don’t have to live like this.
It was her life. She could end it any way she chose.
Somehow that changed things. The idea that she could end her life if the despair became too much to bear caused a sudden shift in her perspective. It was odd, but the idea that she could step off a ledge or walk in front of a train or slip into a drug-induced coma if she so chose was strangely comforting. It gave her back a feeling of control over her life.
She told two close friends and then swore them to secrecy. She couldn’t bear the idea of people looking at her with pitying eyes. She couldn’t bear the thought of people whom she didn’t like, or who didn’t like her, being kind to her because of pity. She didn’t want to see the fear in other people’s eyes. She had her own despair to deal with; she didn’t want to deal with theirs. She jettisoned all the negative people in her life, the depressives, the therapy addicts, the naysayers. She couldn’t afford to have them around her anymore. It would take everything she had just to get well again.
“What are you going to tell Booker?” her friends asked her.
“The truth.”
When she told him, he went into the bedroom and shut the door. Later he came out and his eyes were red and puffy. “What is it you want from me?” he said. “What is it you expect me to do?” She saw then that the tears had not been for her; they had been for himself.
“I want you to leave,” she said. She hadn’t decided until that moment but now that she’d said it, she knew it was true. She couldn’t get well with him here. She couldn’t take care of herself and Booker at the same time.
The doctors were guardedly optimistic. “It’s early stage, and with the right treatment you have a ninety-five percent chance of making it five years,” they said, as if they were granting her a boon. But then, in case her spirits should rise too high, they would add, “Of course, with breast cancer there are no guarantees. The literature is filled with cases of women diagnosed with Stage IV who live twenty years and women with Stage I who live nine months.” They had been trained not to give hope. How much better to paint a bleak picture first, and then when things turned out to be not so dire after all, the patient would kiss their hands in gratitude.
By the time she’d finished treatment, Mel hated them all.
Gradually, she began to pull herself out of despair. She agreed to surgery to remove the lump, and afterward she agreed to chemotherapy, putting her head down and plodding through it like a dumb animal, saying I can do this. I can do this. But first she bought a wig (she refused the bald head and scarf that loudly proclaimed Victim) and then she had herself hypnotized to alleviate the hair loss and nausea. She ate a healthy diet and took large quantities of vitamins; she learned to meditate. She read every book she could find on miraculous healings and promising alternative therapies. She followed her doctors’ orders but she supplemented them with whatever alternative therapies made sense to her. She learned to trust her intuition. (After all, the doctors could not guarantee success with their horrific treatments, so what did she have to lose?) Her hair, which had fallen out soon after the first chemotherapy treatment, began to regrow after the fourth. With her healthy diet, her constant exercise, and her afternoon naps, she began to feel better than she had in years. She didn’t work, she didn’t call friends, she didn’t fritter her time away on meaningless pursuits. She spent all her time trying to get well.
When she called Leland and told him, he cried like a baby. Later, he said, “Don’t you die up there with all those Yankee strangers. You come home to die, Sister.”
She knew then that she wouldn’t go home. And she wouldn’t die either. She was strangely grateful to him, grateful for the anger he always roused in her, for her sudden determination to outlive him no matter what. She was glad now for his money, thankful that he’d pulled himself up from poverty and turned himself into a self-made millionaire. She had no health insurance, and he paid for everything, the doctors, the trips to Germany and Mexico.
She went to see a new therapist to help lighten her load of childhood anger and regret. She kept a dream journal. She paid close attention to her fourth-chakra issues. She meditated and tried to open her heart to love, trust, and compassion.
After her last chemo treatment, she went out with her friends to celebrate. When do you start radiation? they asked her.
I don’t, she said. It had just occurred to her. She would do no more damage to her body. No scarred lungs, no late-blooming leukemia. Enough was enough. Quality of life was more important to her than quantity of life, although she knew most cancer patients didn’t share her philosophy. And that was okay, too.
Her surgeon, when she told him her decision, wasn’t happy.
“Well, if I’d known you weren’t going to do radiation, I would have just taken the breast.” His attitude was so condescending, so cavalier, as if her breast was his to do with as he pleased. He was blond, blue-eyed, the darling of the ward. But by then, she had had enough.
“Really?” she said coolly. “Well, how about if I just take your balls? Hmm? How about if I just cut them off? Would you like that?”
His eyes flashed anger (no one had ever spoken to him like that), then concern, and then fear (My God, she was crazy She was capable of anything. Did no one screen these women?) as he turned and hurried out to find the nurse, leaving her chart behind on the table in his haste.
Mel watched him go. As the door closed behind him, she felt hope welling up inside her, swelling like a sail. She put her head back and laughed.
She knew then that she’d get well.
What else is there to say? Human beings are resilient; they can adapt to anything. Life returns in degrees, in increments, like the sun inching its way across a bare floor on a winter’s day.
Mel continued meditating, she chanted and opened her heart to the Infinite, she walked in the park and drank her wheatgrass shakes and ate brown rice and seaweed until she could stand it no more. She went for her three-month checkup and then her six-month checkup, endured the X-rays, the scans, the gentle prodding of competent fingers. Her new doctor (a woman) patted her arm and said, “Whatever you’re doing, keep up the good work.”
E
ach visit was a milestone, a celebration. Six months cancer-free, one year, two years, and you give a deep sigh of relief. By five years, it’s all begun to fade.
She thought often of Sara and Annie and Lola during these years, thought about calling them and letting them share her burden. She knew they’d do it gladly. But how to begin? They were no longer wide-eyed girls standing on the cusp of life. Their lives had gone in such different directions.
They had chosen motherhood and she had not. That, in itself, was not a barrier to friendship but it was an impediment, at least to Mel. They had their own busy lives, and she was gradually returning to hers. In moments of quiet reflection, she pondered the irony of their situations. She had rejected motherhood; yet while her friends had been happily growing fetuses, she had grown a tumor.
There was a book waiting to be written.
She went back to work, pulling the novel she had begun all those years ago, her magnum opus, out from underneath her bed. Her writing now had a new depth, a maturity, a quality of infused suffering that hadn’t been there before her illness.
By seven years it was all a distant memory, a nightmare, something that had happened to someone else. She was who she was before; and yet, not quite. Never quite.
Chapter 31
y four o’clock they’d had enough of the sand and the sun and the synchronized swimming, and they headed back to the yacht. April made another batch of frozen margaritas and the four of them sat on the aft deck around a long table, watching as the sun fell slowly in the sky. Captain Mike put Jimmy Buffett on the stereo and went to help April in the galley. They could hear them from time to time in between tracks, laughing and talking.
“Is there anything more annoying?” Mel asked sullenly, lifting her drink.
“What?” Annie said, listening while Jimmy Buffett sang about changes in latitudes and changes in attitudes. She had never, until this very moment, understood what that song meant.
“Being stuck in an enclosed space with two people who can’t keep their hands off each other.”
“You wouldn’t be complaining if it was you in the galley with Captain Mike.”
“I told you. He’s not my type.”
“You told us, but no one believes you.”
Mel glanced at her but didn’t say anything. Nighthawks darted over the deserted beach like large exotic insects. The sun hung low over the horizon, catching in the branches of the distant trees, staining them crimson.
“Are you dating anyone right now?” Sara asked Mel.
“No.” She stared at the bottom of her glass. “There was an editor I was seeing, but that didn’t work out.”
Lola asked, “Do you like being alone?” and Annie said, “Lola!” as if she’d said something inappropriate. Lola blushed, but before she could respond, Mel answered, “Not really. No.”
“No one likes being alone,” Sara said.
Mel looked at her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. I’m agreeing with you.”
“Well, don’t say it like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like, Oh, poor Mel, she’s spent her life making shitty choices and now she’s all alone”
“Look, Mel, no one’s trying to make you feel bad about your choices. It’s your life.”
“That’s right.”
“Okay, forget it then.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
Annie looked at Lola and rolled her eyes. Jimmy Buffett sang about Mother, Mother Ocean. Over in the corner, the elephant raised its trunk and trumpeted silently.
Annie went down to the forward stateroom to use the head, and when she came back up on deck, Sara and Lola were standing at the rail watching a school of skates swim by. “They remind me of underwater bats,” Lola said, standing with her feet on the bottom rail and leaning over excitedly. Sunlight glinted off the lenses of her dark glasses.
“I think they’re creepy,” Sara said. “They look a lot like stingrays. Can they sting you?”
“No,” Mel said. She was sitting at the table with her feet up on an empty chair. “They don’t have stingers.”
Lola crossed her arms on the railing and stared pensively at the black shapes gliding through the water. “They look like dark angels,” she said. “Like avenging spirits.” Sometimes Lola said the strangest things.
Annie joined them at the railing. They did look like bats gliding through the water, their black wings flapping. There were probably twenty of them swimming in circles between the boat and the shore, clearly visible against the sandy bottom, flitting through the water like wraiths.
“Once I was swimming and they came up to me and let me pet them,” Lola said. Her skin was the color of honey. Her nose was covered by a sprinkling of freckles. Looking at her, Annie was reminded suddenly of Agnes Grace, the girl she had met while volunteering at the Baptist Home for Children. Agnes Grace would love the skates. She would love the beach. Annie was pretty sure the child had never been any farther than Bakertown but she would love the ocean and its exotic sea life.
Sara said, “If I was swimming and I looked down and saw those things, I’d probably have a heart attack.” She pointed with her glass. “What was that?”
Annie looked where she was pointing. “What was what?”
“That dark shiny shape that just passed beneath the boat. And don’t tell me it was a skate because it wasn’t. It was long and narrow like a cigar.”
“It might have been a barracuda,” Lola said. “Did it have big teeth?” She grimaced, showing her teeth.
Mel got up and came over to the railing. “Maybe it was a shark.”
“Okay,” Sara said. “Now I’m getting chills.”
“Don’t be such a chickenshit,” Mel said.
“I don’t see you getting in the water.”
“Well, I would if I wanted to.”
“If it was a shark,” Annie said, not wanting them to get started again, “it was a small one.”
“Even small sharks have big teeth.”
“There it is!” Lola said, pointing.
“Where?”
“There!” She stood up on her toes and leaned far over the railing. “It’s a barracuda.”
“Damn it, Lola, if you fall in I’m not going in after you.”
Lola began jumping up and down. “See!” she said. Without warning, her glasses slid down her nose and plopped into the water. They sank slowly, weaving back and forth like a small frightened sea creature. “Oh, no,” Lola said.
“I hope those weren’t expensive. I have an extra pair of sunglasses in my purse,” Annie said.
“They’re not sunglasses,” Lola said, staring blindly at the water. “They’re real glasses.”
“What do you mean, real glasses?”
“You know. Prescription. They turn dark in the sun, but they’re not sunglasses.”
They stood staring at her while, behind them, Jimmy Buffett sang about cheeseburgers in paradise. Mel said, “Are you still legally blind?”
Lola laughed and put her hands on the railing to steady herself. “Yes,” she said.
“Do you want me to go down to the stateroom and get your other pair?”
Lola stopped laughing. “Other pair?” she said vaguely. She swiveled her head in Mel’s direction. “The other pair’s back in Birmingham.”
Annie groaned. Mel stared at Lola. “Okay,” she said patiently, as if she was speaking to an afflicted child. “What about your contacts?”
Lola bit her lower lip. Annie was reminded again of the child at the Baptist Home, Agnes Grace, after she’d done something wrong and been found out, and was trying to charm her way out of trouble. “My contacts are back at the beach house,” Lola said. “But that’s okay,” she said, squinting and holding one hand out in front of her. “I’ll be okay.”
“What’re we going to do?” Sara said to Mel. “We can’t leave her wandering around the boat, not without a Seeing Eye dog, anyway, or a cane.”
/> Lola giggled. “Seeing Eye dog,” she said, “that’s funny.”
Mel stared despondently at the spot where the glasses had disappeared. “All right, well, one of us will have to go in after them. The water can’t be much deeper than twenty feet.”
“Are you crazy? There’s a barracuda down there.”
“So what? It won’t hurt you.”
“Fine. You go in then.”
They both looked at Annie. “Count me out,” she said, tapping the side of her head as if she were trying to dislodge something. “I have an inner ear problem. I can’t dive much deeper than five feet.”
Mel thought about it a moment, and then turned to face the galley doors. “Oh, Captain Mike!” she shouted. When he appeared in the doorway she crooked her finger, beckoning for him to come on deck. “We need you,” she said sweetly.
It took him about twenty minutes of diving in thirty feet of water to find the glasses. When he surfaced, holding them above his head, they all cheered. He climbed aboard, and handed the glasses to Lola with a little flourish. She couldn’t see a thing, of course, but Sara helped her grasp them and watched while she slid them on to her face.
“I can see! I can see!” Lola said, and for some reason they all laughed, more with relief than anything else because now they wouldn’t have to motor home early. Everyone was happy again, resettling themselves in the deck chairs as the sun sank finally beyond the horizon and evening came on.
April came on deck carrying a T-shirt and a towel that she draped across Captain Mike’s broad shoulders. He dried himself and snapped the towel at her playfully, and she squealed and ran back through the sliding doors into the galley. He was in a good mood. The closer it got to the end of the week, the more jovial he became. Mel wondered if it had anything to do with the fact that they’d all be leaving soon and he and April could get back to the private life they lived when no one was around.
“Join us,” Mel said to him, lifting her margarita glass. She knew it was useless. He was in love with one woman, and nothing else mattered. J.T. had been like that.
