Becca looked around and surveyed the kitchen. “How can I help? Give me a job.”
“There’s another jar of marinade in the pantry. Can you open it and pour it over the chicken wings? I’m clearly inept,” I said, gesturing to the shattered jar in the sink as proof.
While Becca prepared the meat, I picked up shards of glass that had sprayed across my counter and pine floor. What started out as a conversational lull had now matured into an uncomfortable silence.
“So, what’s the deal?” I said at last.
“The deal with what?” Becca asked.
“Bec . . .” was all I said, but the voice inside my head screamed, Don’t play coy with me!
Becca walked over to the sink to rinse barbecue sauce off her hands.
Fine, I thought. I’ll fold. “I just need to know that everything’s okay. I was worried when you suddenly changed our plans. And then Sal got a message from Nolan saying he might not even come up this weekend. What’s that about?”
“Listen, it’s a lot to get into,” she said, drying her hands and looking out at the mountains through the window above the sink. “Here’s the deal. I went to the—”
Just then, Adam opened the basement door and walked into the kitchen. “Hey. Hope I’m not interrupting anything,” he said with a smile.
Becca and I both jumped, as if we had been jolted out of a deep sleep. Motherfucker! I thought. I was finally getting somewhere.
Though I could barely make eye contact with Adam, given how mortified I was by my new insight, I did glance his way long enough to notice the leather-bound book in his hand.
“Jordana,” he said politely, “I was wondering . . . would you mind if I went out on the deck for a bit? I need to daven before Shabbos starts.”
I had not heard the word daven, the Yiddish word for pray, in years. Neither had I heard Shabbos—the more traditional pronunciation of Shabbat or Sabbath. I loved the sound of both; they reminded me of sitting at my grandparents’ dining room table, slurping matzo ball soup over a white lace tablecloth.
“Of course. Go right ahead,” I said, mutating back into happy hostess. I reminded myself that my high school heartbreak was ancient history. I needed to move on, act like an adult, be gracious to the people I’d invited into my home, and try to ignore the tensing muscles between my neck and shoulders. “I’ll be out on the deck in a few minutes to start the barbecue. Make yourself comfortable.”
Becca and I watched through the kitchen window as Adam opened his prayer book and began shukkling—standing with his feet in a fixed position, subtly rocking his body forward and backward to enhance concentration.
“I’m gonna go see how Holly’s doing,” Becca said. I wondered if she was trying to escape the conversation we had started. Before I could pick up where we’d left off, she had exited the room.
I stared at the horizon out the kitchen window, thinking about Becca and how screwed-up this dream weekend was turning out to be, but then the sight of Adam praying caught my eye again and I was transfixed. There was something incredibly intriguing about someone who could jam to the Red Hot Chili Peppers one minute and wholly immerse himself in prayer with such profound devotion the next.
I wondered what he was saying. It had been so long since I’d heard anyone speak Hebrew. My parents were both raised in observant homes but chose not keep up the traditions. Instead of going to synagogue on the high holidays, we went apple-picking. Rather than lighting candles on Friday nights to welcome the Sabbath, we ordered in pizza. It wasn’t that my parents were atheists or disliked the customs; they were simply tired from working all day and didn’t care to put in the effort to make a formal Sabbath dinner or a Passover seder. To them, it was enough to be culturally Jewish—to use Yiddish-isms like schmutz and oy vey and eat gefilte fish year-round. While they did send me to Sunday school at the local synagogue, I was enrolled because it was the thing to do, not because it was particularly important to my parents. Yet, despite a relatively secular upbringing, I was quite spiritual. Faith and culture had always fascinated me. While I did not convert to Hinduism when Sal and I married—there was something I couldn’t abandon about my Jewish upbringing—I was very excited to adopt his family’s rich Indian and Hindu traditions as my own and to blend them with Judaism in my children’s lives.
I slowly slid open the glass doors and tiptoed onto the deck so as not to distract Adam, who was standing several feet away. As I quietly arranged the disposable aluminum pans of marinated raw meat along the side of the grill, I noticed Holly step onto the deck, make a beeline for her husband, and quickly whisper something in his ear while he was praying. He nodded in recognition, though his body didn’t break the shukkling stride.
Before stepping back inside the house, Holly turned to me and asked, “Do you need any help setting up?”
“No, go relax. I’ve got it,” I said softly.
Seconds later, as I placed the chicken on the grill, I heard Adam passionately recite several Hebrew words aloud. Most were unrecognizable, but a few sounded familiar, like Mi Sheberach, which I knew was a prayer for healing. Immediately following the prayer, I heard him say “Rivkah avigail bat Sarah”—Becca’s Hebrew name. From the time of Becca’s diagnosis until a year after her remission, my parents recited the Mi Sheberach, along with Becca’s Hebrew name, to pray for her return to health. Given my parents’ general indifference toward Jewish customs, their unwavering dedication to reciting this particular prayer for Becca always surprised me. When I finally asked my father about it, he said simply, “There are no atheists in a foxhole.”
A shiver went up my spine. Adam and Holly knew something I didn’t. Something about Becca and her health. I now knew why Becca was behaving so strangely. The thought that something might be wrong with her—again, after all these years—made me dizzy. And it was compounded by the fact that she had let them in, but not me.
I walked back into the house and downed a tall glass of water. I knew I couldn’t make Becca talk to me, certainly not in front of all these people, so I decided to busy myself with preparing dinner. I set the table. I folded napkins. I pulled out tinfoil, covered the food, and placed the serving platters along the island—appetizers on the left, entrées on the right. I wrote the names of the dishes in cursive on tiny linen place cards and put them behind the platters—the same way buffets were presented at the corporate cocktail events I attended with Sal. There was something calming about creating order out of chaos.
The house was eerily silent. Alone in the kitchen, I dimmed the lights in the cavernous great room and poured a glass of cabernet. Through the back window, I could see that Adam had finished his prayers and was strolling around the property with Holly and Becca. I glanced at my watch, over to my perfectly set table, which would have made Martha Stewart proud, and then at a photograph of my children on the mantel. A wave of homesickness overcame me. I felt abandoned, uneasy, and scared—like a little girl who wanted nothing more than to cuddle with her parents after a nightmare. I yearned for normalcy, for routine, and to go back to my apartment in the city with Sal and the boys.
Minutes later, Seth, Lex, and Sal arrived, and Adam, Holly, and Becca returned inside. The house filled with the sounds of laughter and squeals—the music of old friends reuniting. I summoned the strength to fill drink requests and busied myself with unnecessary kitchen tasks, like taking out the garbage and wiping down the already-glistening countertops. The last thing I wanted to do was stand up in front of everyone and deliver the heartfelt toast I’d crafted about lifelong friendship.
“Hey,” Sal said softly, walking over and kissing me on the head as I folded the dish towels. “It looks great in here! Have you heard anything from Nolan?”
I shook my head and looked at the dinner table. Nolan’s absence was grossly apparent, particularly now that everyone else had arrived. While my guests chatted around the island, Sal and I quickly removed Nolan’s place setting and chair from the table. I feared the empty seat would highlight what n
eedn’t be a focal point.
As everyone nibbled on appetizers and caught up, I ducked into my bedroom to call Nolan. Not surprisingly, he didn’t pick up. I didn’t leave a message.
I stepped into the bathroom and splashed some water on my face. “Just keep it together,” I said to my reflection in the mirror.
When I headed back to the kitchen, I saw Holly reaching for a matchbook. Although this had not been billed as a Sabbath dinner, I had purchased kosher wine, challah, and special candles because I knew Holly would want to light them to welcome the Sabbath at sundown. I had fond memories of watching my grandmother light candles on holidays and was looking forward to seeing the tradition carried out in my own home, even if I wasn’t the one to do it.
After everyone gathered around the table, Holly lit the two white candlesticks and waved her hands three times over the flames, before covering her eyes and reciting the blessing.
“Wow, I haven’t seen someone do this in years,” Seth commented under his breath to no one in particular. He had renounced religion within hours of returning home from our hospital visit with Becca back in ninth grade and never looked back. He wouldn’t even attend his parents’ Passover seders.
Just like my grandmother, Holly continued to keep her hands over her eyes until she had completed her silent prayers. We all stood quietly behind our chairs and watched. I suspected they were all as mesmerized as I was by the breakneck speed at which Holly moved her lips. I could hear her inhale through her nostrils and exhale out unidentifiable words that blended together to form a swish-swish-swish sound. At one point, her mouth curled and a single tear came streaming down her left cheek. She sniffled, and everyone looked around uncomfortably. Adam put his hand on the small of her back, but the gesture didn’t interrupt her concentration. It was as if this happened all the time and was part of their routine. Is Holly praying for her unborn child or reciting a Mi Sheberach with Becca’s name, like Adam did? I wondered.
Eventually, her hushed tones became more audible and I heard Holly mutter the same prayer for healing that Adam had said on the deck. This time, I was sure of it, because when Becca’s Hebrew name was detectable amid the swish-swish-swish, I wasn’t the only one to flinch. Though Sal was oblivious, the rest of us had spent our childhood carpooling to Hebrew school three days a week. If there was a single takeaway, it was recognition of each other’s Hebrew names.
Lex’s hands shot over and squeezed Seth’s arm, as if she were holding on to him for dear life. Weird, I thought, of the lingering, intimate gesture. They haven’t seen each other in years. I shifted my glance to Becca, who was staring at the candle’s flames. She looked up, our eyes locked, and then she lowered her gaze to her plate, as if to say, You got me.
I felt winded. Something was very wrong with Becca. I knew it as surely as if she had told me herself.
Holly removed her hands from her eyes, wiped away the tears that had made their way to her chin, clasped her hands together, and said, “Amen!”
“Excuse me,” Becca whispered politely, grabbing her cell phone from the kitchen island and walking out of the room.
Everyone looked around the table with identical expressions of shock.
“I’ll go,” said Holly.
“No,” I said sharply, stepping ahead of her. Had she not been pregnant, I might have shoved her. “I’ve got this.” She could have Adam, but I’d never let her take Becca.
Chapter 9: Becca
As we all stood around the knotty-pine farm table, watching Holly recite the prayers over the Sabbath candles, all I could think about was my daughter. Being away from Emma made my heart ache. Had it been a typical Friday evening, Nolan, Emma, and I would have been playing Uno, baking brownies, or curling up on the living room couch to watch a movie. Instead, I was stuck in the middle of nowhere, missing my daughter and wondering where in the world my husband was—when suddenly I heard Holly say my Hebrew name. Like an inattentive student jolted out of a haze by a teacher, I was thrust back to the present.
I looked up at Holly and saw a tear trickling down her cheek. A moment later, I felt an onslaught of penetrating stares. I glanced up at Jordana. When our eyes locked, my stomach lurched.
I headed to the bathroom to compose myself. I knew the time had come to tell Jordana, and I dreaded it the way I dreaded having to tell my child.
As soon as I caught sight of the subway-tiled walls, my mind immediately flashed to my own bathroom and how the cold, sterile environment seemed bizarrely appropriate for the conversation I was about to have. After all, my most intimate talks with Emma have taken place while she was on the toilet and I was seated on the stepstool beside her dangling feet.
The most recent one took place when she was six. She was sitting naked on the toilet, and as I drew her bath, she asked the question. It came out of nowhere; we hadn’t had a conversation in recent weeks about her birth story. Nevertheless, she wanted to know, right then and there, at six thirty on a Tuesday night, exactly how my belly broke.
When Emma was born, Nolan and I agreed never to sugar-coat how she entered this world. She is the product of my egg, his sperm, and the womb of a West Coast angel who affectionately referred to her uterus as the Penthouse Suite. I had told Emma that my belly was “broken.” After all, I reasoned, it’s not a bad lesson to learn that beauty can emerge from imperfection. We couldn’t have been more grateful or proud, and wanted Emma to feel the same. Hiding it during her childhood but divulging the truth later on didn’t seem right. Why lie?
As she got a little older, the explanation blossomed into a baking analogy. Nolan and I became the ingredients, our surrogate the oven, and Emma the delicious cake. This elementary version of the events satiated her curiosity. But soon she craved more—more details about our carrier, about the experience. Did we feel her kick in utero? Yes, when we flew out for some of Elizabeth’s ultrasounds. Why couldn’t we use a surrogate here in New York? Gestational surrogacy wasn’t legal in New York State. Did Elizabeth have her own children? Yes, a boy and a girl. Had Elizabeth been a surrogate before? Yes, twice.
For reasons I never understood, all of these conversations took place in the restroom—during a bath, while brushing teeth, or as a procrastination technique to avoid flossing.
Emma’s question that night when she was six, though, was different than the others that came before it. Those were about the surrogacy process; this was about the catalyst—about what caused her birth story to be so different than that of her friends and cousins. Her question deserved a thoughtful response, and I was guided by our cardinal rule not to lie. So, once again, I ventured down the path of diluted truth. But how do you explain to a six-year-old, without scaring the absolute shit out of her, that you had cancer when you were a kid? Would divulging this fact make her wonder if I’d get sick again? That maybe Mommy wasn’t as healthy as she looked? That, God forbid a billion times, it could happen to her one day, too?
I leaned over the bathtub, turned off the running water, and assumed my position on her stepstool.
Me: “Well, honey, my belly broke because I didn’t feel well and needed some really strong medicine. That medicine made me all better, but it made it hard for me to carry a baby.”
Emma: “Was it pink medicine, like when I have an ear infection?”
Me: “No, it was different. I didn’t swallow it. It was like a laser. I lay on a table, and the doctors zapped me in different spots.”
I lifted my shirt to show her the tiny tattooed dots along my torso that targeted lymph nodes from my neck to my thighs. I then pointed directly to one on my abdomen.
Me: “That’s the one that hit the spot where babies grow.”
Emma: “But the laser didn’t hurt your cake ingredients, right? That’s why I look like you.”
Me: “That’s right! Isn’t that amazing? My ingredients were protected. I had an operation to move the ovaries—sort of like the carton holding my eggs—over just a little bit inside my belly so the laser couldn’t hit them. I h
ad smart doctors. They were thinking ahead.”
Emma: “What was the name of your cold? Was it an ear infection? A stomachache?”
Me, as cool and calmly as I could manage: “Cancer.”
Emma: “Oh.”
Silence.
Me: “Ready for your bath?”
Emma: “Don’t old people die from cancer?”
A teacher at her school had recently passed away from the disease, so she was familiar with the word and its impact. Even little kids can get what it means when someone is there one day and gone the next.
Me: “Sometimes people die from it, but lots of people are able to get healthy again and live a long time. Just like me.”
Emma: “Mommy, you’re not old. How did you get cancer?”
Me: “Anyone can get it. But listen—it is not very common. Most people do not get it.”
Emma: “How old were you?”
Me: “I was a teenager. But I took my medicine, and then I was healthy again.”
Emma: “How did you know you had it?”
Me: “I was really tired a lot. I had a cough and a fever. I went to the doctor, and they did some tests and told me.”
Emma: “Can I catch it?”
Me: “No.”
Emma: “Will you get it again? Promise me you won’t get it again!”
I held her arms and looked directly into her eyes.
Me: “Listen to me very carefully, Munchkin. That was a long time ago. I’m strong, I’m healthy, and I’m staying right here. With you.”
Emma: “Mommy, promise me you won’t get it again.”
I thought of the peace of mind that promise could give her. I wanted to tell her I was vigilant about my follow-up care for that exact reason—so I could be around to be her mom. I would never tell her that I could relapse, or that I was at higher risk for a secondary cancer, or any of the other things long-term survivors of childhood cancer think about. No. She would never know that my worst nightmare was dying young and leaving her. In that moment, all my six-year-old wanted was a promise that I’d be fine. I had no idea if it was a promise I could keep, but I gave myself permission to make it. My two cancer-free decades were proof enough that I was in the clear.
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