“What if you want to have more?” I ask.
“I swear, three is enough. Too much, probably. The next one won’t get breastfed at all, I’ll need a cocktail so badly,” she says. “But what about you? How are you feeling, honey?”
“Good, I’m good. Sam is taking excellent care of me.”
“Of course he is.” Lucy’s smile is always genuine when she turns it on Sam. “I knew he would.”
I try to ignore the private bit of affinity that passes between them. I think of being twelve years old and watching from the living room on Friday nights as Sam waited for Lucy at the bottom of the stairs. Of looking at their prom photo, sitting in its frame on my mother’s desk. Of waking up cold and gasping in my hospital bed, and finding Sam gone. It was Lucy who told me Sam had the flu, that the doctors wouldn’t let him in the ICU. Lucy blinks a lot when she lies.
Thinking of that morning sours my stomach. It is the source of all of my doubt; it makes me wonder what sort of secrets remain between the two of them, the ones that linger from their time together, all those years ago, and the ones that are as fresh as a new wound.
“Mom has been calling,” Lucy says.
“Here, too,” I reply. “Sam talked to her. Something about the water purification systems getting caught up in customs?”
Lucy lets out a little huff. “It’s the Sudan, honey. You know they would be here if they could. So many people are depending on them out there.”
“I know,” I say, nodding. Trying to remember the last time I spoke to my parents, in between one of their Africa trips for Clean Water First, the nonprofit they founded when I was a teenager. We were angry when we spoke, I’m sure. We always seem to be angry at one another, because they’re off putting their wealth to good use saving lives, and I’m in Chicago painting pictures. They are good people, the way Sam is a good person, the way I have never been. I try not to wonder if their anger, their disappointment, is part of the reason they didn’t come back when I got sick.
“I mean, they didn’t come back when either of the boys were born,” Lucy says. “It would take an act of Congress to get them out of there in the middle of a project.”
“I know,” I say again. Lucy straightens.
“Did you get the flowers Roger’s firm sent?” she asks, glancing around the room, its flat surfaces crowded with a kaleidoscope of bouquets and balloons and miniature stuffed animals.
“Yeah, the ones by the window. Be sure to thank him for me, they’re lovely,” I reply, as Lucy gets up and walks to the overflowing bouquet.
“You would think his secretary would know better than to order anything with baby’s breath. It’s like sending carnations. Jesus,” she says, turning the vase a bit. I can almost see the flowers wilting under her scrutiny. I feel the same way when she glances back at me. “Your face looks so different. You know those reality shows where people lose all that weight and they show before and after shots? It’s sort of like that.”
Sam winks at me over the screen of his laptop. It’s impossible to have a conversation with Lucy that doesn’t somehow wind its way toward the topic of her lingering baby weight. I try to keep from grinning. “Hey, thanks.”
“Have you set a date for the wedding yet?”
My desire to smile evaporates. “Lucy, it’s only been a couple of days.”
“But that was the deal, right? That if the transfer went well . . .” she says. Sam’s face is impassive. His eyes track over the screen in front of him.
“I can’t even walk down the hall on my own, Luce. I think planning a wedding is a little beyond my reach right now.”
Lucy perches on the edge of my bed. “I’m not saying you need to start planning. Just set a date. Something to look forward to. Anyway, you know I’ll take care of whatever you don’t feel up to dealing with.” She takes a curl of my hair between her fingers, pulling it lightly until it straightens. “You’ll make such a beautiful bride,” she says. I take her hand and kiss the back of it. She clears her throat, blinking fast, and turns to Sam.
“You enjoy that new body of hers while you can, because once you two start having babies, it’s nothing but stretch marks and flab everywhere, I swear.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Sam says, nodding sagely, as if he’s taking her seriously.
“You remember what I looked like in high school,” she says. “Believe me, no amount of Pilates will get my ass back to where it was back then.”
“Well you can always hope you have the gene for metastatic lung cancer too,” I say, because I can’t stop myself. Lucy looks like she might begin to cry again, and I press my fingers against my lips, just in case there are any more choice words threatening escape.
“That’s really not funny,” Lucy says.
“I’m sorry,” I say, catching Lucy’s hand as she tries to extricate it from mine. “Cabin fever, you know? It makes me a total ass.”
“Right,” Lucy says, looking at our intertwined hands. Hers is puffy and worn, her fingernails short and utilitarian despite their bright pink polish. A mother’s hand. Mine might as well be a child’s for how delicate it appears. She notices the contrast, I’m sure. It’s a terrible feeling, Lucy’s unhappiness. I’m always the one to apologize, the one who requires forgiveness. The one who brought her curly fries and ice cream and rubbed her back for hours when Sam broke her heart in high school, as if it were my crime to atone for instead of his. As if I knew, somehow, that his crime would become mine, in her eyes, years later.
“How are the boys, Luce?” Sam asks, and Lucy’s face lifts and reforms into something more serene. Even her eyes smile, when she looks at Sam.
“A handful,” she replies. “They think my new sectional couch is the best jungle gym they’ve ever seen. And Roger just encourages them, of course. I’m all by myself, trying to keep the barbarians at bay.” Sam has a marvelous talent for handling my sister. Somehow, what would take hours or even days of pandering and groveling on my part, he manages in a matter of moments. Lucy pulls her hand from mine and moves toward him, as he promises that we’ll be by for dinner soon, that he’ll bring the boys some of his old baseball cards to trade. I watch the two of them, reminded so well of the days when I lived on the periphery of their vision, when being five years younger made me all but invisible to them. And I wonder, again, about the morning I woke to find Sam gone, and the sort of secrets they’re keeping from me now.
Connie
I’m able to beg a pair of tweezers off of one of the nurses before my first support group meeting. My eyes water as I pluck my eyebrows into something close to arches, the pain of it more acute than I remember. Everything is fresh and vivid in this body, nothing dampened by time or wear or damage. I shudder to think of what my first bikini wax will be like. There’s really nothing to be done about my hair, which is lank and flat and unwashed, but I find an elastic band in my purse and pull it back into a knot at the crown of my head. And there she is, the woman with no history. Helen of Troy. The face that launched a thousand ships.
It’s not hubris, or at least not just hubris, that informs my opinion of myself. While I was growing up, my mother was a connoisseur of beauty. A failed actress/model/dancer herself, she raised me to be a passionless appraiser of aesthetics, and I was always an eager pupil. Together we would paw through fashion magazines and critique the women on the shiny silk of the pages, or watch a continuous loop of barely clothed dancers in music videos. She would hold a mirror in front of my face and demand that I contort my expression into a whole slew of emotions, correcting each flaw she witnessed, smiling her prim little smile when she was pleased. Now my reflection is just as flawless as it was then, at twelve, before the world had a chance to work at it.
It was what made my disease doubly cruel, that the death of beauty in me would precede my actual death. I did everything I could at first, to salvage and prolong what little of it was left, scraping fungus from underneath my fingernails and having my withered face injected with fillers until it brui
sed black and dyeing my hair to keep its bright blonde hue until it was all too much. Until I was just a silly, saggy, ugly woman with a bad at-home dye job. After that I stopped going out so much, began spending my evenings with a blind man. I got rid of all my mirrors.
A nurse appears in the doorway to bring me to the meeting. It’s the sort of thing I always avoided when I was sick, crowded little rooms full of skeletal AIDS patients trading stories about toxoplasmosis and Pneumocystis pneumonia. I never understood people who derived comfort out of shared experiences, particularly bad ones. I preferred to be alone, to ride out the spells of grief and depression and hopelessness under my own steam, instead of unloading them to a room full of strangers. The last thing I wanted was to be around other people who were sick too; it felt too much like looking in a funhouse mirror and seeing a hundred reflections of myself, all my problems multiplied and manifested again and again. Though it’s probably much easier to go to a support group where no one is actually dying—quite the opposite, in fact.
Linda is already there, sitting in the small conference room with a younger woman when I arrive. We’re all dressed the same, in cotton hospital robes over our gowns and cheap cloth slippers. They glance up when I enter, and I can feel that familiar current of electricity in the air as I move through it. It’s like a held breath, something palpable in its absence. I want to grin. It’s been years since I’ve lit up a room just by entering it. I give Linda a little wave, and her jubilation shows in the quick breath she takes, her shoulders pinned to the back of her chair.
I take a seat across from them. There’s already an awkwardness in the room, as they avoid my eyes, and each other’s. I wonder how long they’ve already been sitting there without talking. The one is so small she looks like little more than a girl, but pretty. She has huge dark eyes and a tiny nose and thick, curly hair, what people in the business would call ethnic-chic. She could easily be French or Irish or Jewish or maybe even Hispanic, in the right lighting. Natalie Wood, singing on a fire escape. By comparison Linda, with her wandering eyes, looks a bit unhinged. I can’t tell if she’s tamping down some manic, wall-climbing energy or if she’s terrified of sitting in this room, but she looks like she might make for the door at any moment. There are two other empty chairs in the circle. When I glance back to the girl, she meets my eyes for a moment before looking away. I take it as an invitation.
“I have a pair of tweezers if you want to borrow them,” I say, motioning to the space over her nose, where her eyebrows nearly meet. She looks at me like she’s not sure if I’ve insulted her, but then lets out a little laugh. Rising to the occasion. A girl with a backbone. Before she can answer a man enters, one who is clearly not a SUB from the creases in his face, all his edges soft and withered. Good bone structure, though, and it leaves him with a somewhat dashing edge. That’s the thing about good bones, they hold up even after everything else has lost its steam.
“We’re not all here yet, I see,” he says, taking a seat between Linda and me. He checks his watch, obviously annoyed to make his entrance before an incomplete group. The fifth member arrives a few minutes later. At first I think he’s another young doctor; he’s wearing blue scrubs and he’s clean-shaven, with a certain air of importance around him. But when he comes to sit in the remaining chair I realize, with more than a little surprise, that he’s a SUB as well.
“My apologies,” he says, with a feigned sort of antebellum bashfulness. “I didn’t mean to hold everyone up.”
His face is too perfect, like a corn-fed high school quarterback, though he carries himself with the calm assurance of a much older man. He has dark hair and perfect cheekbones, and a mouth stuffed with bright white teeth. You can tell, just by looking at him, that he is blessed in just about every way a person can be. And already, I don’t trust him.
Hannah
He says his name is David. We all go around the circle and introduce ourselves. There’s Linda, who sits next to me, close enough so I can feel the ripples of anxiety washing off of her like the rhythmic gust of an oscillating fan. And then there’s Connie, the bombshell, sitting with her arms crossed as if she’s posing for a camera. And Dr. Bernard, the psychiatrist in charge. But David is the one who holds my attention, because even though he looks ten years younger than he is, even out of context, out of his usual expensive suits, isolated from his gaggle of aids and lackeys, away from the TV cameras and microphones, I know who he is. He’s David Jenkins, and he’s a U.S. Congressman.
I can’t count how many times I’ve seen this man on TV, when Sam turns on MSNBC after work and we flop down on the couch, letting long minutes slip away before we’re hungry enough to cook dinner. People have said that, one day, this man could be president. And Sam swore up and down that he’d leave the country forever if that happened.
He’s handsome, up close, and I have no control over this body yet. I cannot curtail its impulses, instruct it not to want the wrong people. So attraction hits me like a sledgehammer, pulsing in my stomach with the insistence of starvation. David must notice that I’m staring at him because he looks me right in the eye, a testing glance, a challenge too well controlled to become a threat. I look away on reflex alone and realize that Dr. Bernard is already in the middle of his introduction.
“This is the forum,” Dr. Bernard says. “Not only for your questions, your experiences in recovery, but for your fears and your frustrations as well. This is uncharted territory for all of us, medical personnel included, and no one has any illusions that this is going to be an easy process for any of you.”
David is still looking at me. He cocks an eyebrow as my eyes meet his, and again, I’m forced to look away. I can feel my perfect skin grow ruddy with the mix of embarrassment and attraction and anger that this man’s presence has created within me, out of nothing. Whatever game it is that we’re playing, I’m certain that I’m losing.
“I have a question,” Connie the bombshell says, half-raising her hand, though she doesn’t wait for his acknowledgment before she keeps talking. “What exactly is the point of this whole exercise? I mean, as far as I can tell, everything worked the way it was supposed to. I don’t get why we have to come here and talk about it every week for the next year. It seems like a waste of time, if you ask me.”
“You signed an agreement to participate in this support group when you were admitted into the program,” Dr. Bernard replies, and Connie gives a little laugh.
“What are they going to do, sue me? They can take me for all I’ve got doc, believe me, it won’t exactly be worth their time.” Dr. Bernard’s mouth seems to constrict a bit, though he doesn’t look angry, not exactly.
“It does seem sort of strange,” I say, thinking of the single cancer support group I attended after my diagnosis, a group for terminal patients that met once a week in the school room of a local church. I remember how traitorous I felt, knowing that the slick SUBlife brochure was sitting on my dresser at home as I listened to the others describe the agony of chemo, the indignities of colostomy bags, or the triumph of climbing a flight of stairs. “I mean, isn’t this sort of thing usually reserved for people who aren’t going to get a miracle cure?”
“I think we all need to recognize what a wholly significant event you’ve all been through here,” Dr. Bernard replies. “Just because you’re not going to die doesn’t mean that your journey won’t require support.”
“Isn’t it funny how the only people you hear describing life as a ‘journey’ are bad poets and shrinks?” Connie says. I’m beginning to like Connie. She has a quality I’ve always envied in Penny, the ability to speak without being careful, without worrying what others will think of her. I wonder if it is the privilege of beautiful women, or if it’s a freedom that comes from not being the daughter of wealthy philanthropists or the girlfriend of a crusader journalist. I wonder who I’ve become, after so many years of being polite and appropriate and unassuming, so as not to reflect badly on the people in my life. I wonder who I’m allowed to be now.
>
“Listen, doctor, all joking aside,” David says, fixing Dr. Bernard with what appears to be his best ‘come to Jesus’ expression, a mixture of earnestness and condescension that makes me bristle. Dr. Bernard, to his credit, holds David’s gaze with a look of calm, professional interest. “I think what we’re all saying is that we just want to get on with our normal lives now that the medical legwork is done. We’re all tremendously grateful to be part of this program, but coming here every week is just going to serve as a constant reminder of what we’ve been through.”
“I appreciate your opinion, David,” Dr. Bernard replies. “But this group serves a dual purpose within the pilot program. Not only are you coming here to provide support for the other group members, but these weekly meetings give us the opportunity to monitor your recovery and quickly address any issues that might arise over the next few months.” He pauses. “I also think it’s important that all of the members in this group have the opportunity to speak for themselves. So, I would ask you in the future to feel free to express your own opinions, but to please refrain from generalizing about the group as a whole.” I think I hear Connie snicker at this, but her face is placid, with only the barest hint of amusement.
“Linda,” Dr. Bernard says, everything in his posture and demeanor gentling, as if he’s speaking to a small, lost child. “There must have been questions you wanted to ask before the transfer, and couldn’t. Do you want to share any of those now?”
Linda seems to shrink into her seat, her gaze darting from person to person as we all turn expectant eyes in her direction. I wonder who she was, in her former life. It’s Connie who finally gets her to speak, nudging her in the arm, which has the same effect on Linda as if she had administered an electric shock. At first I think Connie is being cruel, but Linda looks at Connie as if she’s her own personal Jesus. Connie smiles, and then so does Linda, a slightly dimmer version of Connie’s radiance. “You must have questions,” Connie says. “I know I do.”
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