The Cast

by Amy Blumenfeld

  “Seth!” she screamed, her hands flying behind to cover her ass and right hamstring, which were now exposed, thanks to a huge gash across her sundress.

  “I am so, so, so sorry, Lex,” I said, and bent down to help her lift the dangling piece of cotton fabric. I couldn’t believe that in the course of a single hour I had whacked her in the head with a slab of wood and ripped off her clothes with a garden instrument. It wasn’t kinky; it was klutzy and embarrassing.

  With her smudged makeup and shredded garments, Lex peered at me as I crouched in front of her, and she burst out laughing.

  I gazed up and smiled. “I know what you’re thinking. You’re amazed at the lengths I’ll go to get your clothes off. . . .”

  She was howling and could barely catch her breath. “If this is how . . .” Inhale. “You treat women . . .” Inhale. “I now know why . . .” Inhale. “You’re still single!”

  I was glad to see she had a sense of humor about it all. “Listen, do you want me to get you anything to cover it up? A sweatshirt or blanket?”

  Her eyes darted around the shed for an adequate cover-up, but the only thing that came close was an enormous orange plastic tarp concealing a pile of firewood. She looked back at my face and then lowered her eyes to my chest, where they rested for a moment. “How ’bout the shirt off your back?” she asked softly, and bit her lip in a way that was both seductive and endearingly vulnerable all at once.

  I smiled, granted her request, wrapped the shirt behind her backside, and pulled her toward me.

  Chapter 15: Becca

  When Nolan and I heard footsteps creaking up the basement staircase, we opened the door, and there on the last tread before the kitchen were Seth and Lex, wrapped in an embrace, his bare chest and her perfectly taut, lace-thonged butt displayed before us. She immediately spun around, our jaws dropped, and the four of us just stood, aghast, staring at one another.

  For a solid thirty seconds, no one moved or uttered a word.

  “Minestrone?” I asked, breaking the silence and awkwardly extending the half-eaten bowl of soup in my hands.

  What are they thinking? This is incest! Once I fully registered that their inebriated flirtation at Tanglewood had actually come to fruition, I was overcome with fear. Fear of how this would change our group’s dynamic. Fear of how this could upend Lex’s entire life. And, selfishly, I feared this was a foreshadowing of my own fate. If I’m not careful, my marriage could fall apart, too.

  Lex looked at me (as well as my soup) with absolute horror, and then, like a shot from a cannon, secured Seth’s shirt around her waist as a cover-up and bolted off to her bedroom.

  “Well, it’s getting late,” Seth said, as he stepped into the kitchen, “I’m gonna call it a night.” It was as if he thought he could get away with murder.

  While my mind scrambled to find the right words, Nolan folded his arms across his chest and blocked Seth’s path. “What are you doing, bud? Lex is married!”

  “Like you’re one to talk about marriage,” Seth bit back, and pointed an index finger in Nolan’s face. The intensity in his eyes scared me. “Did you really think riding up here in your shiny Cadillac made you some kind of prince on a white horse? I got news for you, bud . . .” The way Seth said bud made my muscles tense. “You’re no Husband of the Year.”

  Nolan glowered, slack-jawed, at Seth. Their faces were just inches apart, like flared-nostril featherweights in a boxing ring, preparing for a showdown. I knew Nolan’s frozen stance meant he was crafting some sort of humorous retort to keep the peace, but with my pulse throbbing as it was, I couldn’t wait for his wit.

  “Okay, guys, that’s enough,” I cautioned, and placed my soup on the counter. I walked over to position myself between them, but it was too late.

  An elongated, guttural grunt emerged from my husband like a precursor to an explosion. He lifted a knee to his waistline and then, with all his might, slammed his shoe downward. Clearly, Seth’s foot was the intended target, but, not surprisingly, Nolan missed and smacked the floor instead.

  This pitiful attempt at a fight elicited a snigger and disapproving head shake from Seth. “Nice try. You learn those moves in prep school? Let me show you how it’s done in Queens.” He then balled his hand into a fist and threw a punch at Nolan’s stomach but stopped short of impact. Nolan, braced for a beating, looked confused. “Don’t fuck with us,” Seth growled, his fist still in position. He stared confidently up at my considerably taller but less muscular husband and then walked away, giving Nolan a final, sideways glance that I interpreted as, I’m watching you.

  Nolan did not look at Seth or at me. His gaze was fixed straight ahead like a soldier’s.

  As Seth climbed the fourteen creaky stairs to the second floor and blew me a kiss good night, I wondered what I would say to Nolan. After all, which words do you use when one of your best friends calls your husband an asshole and 90 percent of you concurs?

  At that moment, however, all I could think about was the dissenting 10 percent—that voice, which sounded a lot like Jordana’s, whispering in the back of my mind, You’re not the only one hit by this diagnosis. I was overcome with a need to repair whatever I could so I’d never find myself in a troubled marriage like Lex’s.

  I reached for Nolan’s hand, and he pulled away angrily. “Nol, please,” I said gently, and tried again. This time, he followed me to the couch by the fireplace. “Listen,” I started, looking him directly in the eyes, but I wasn’t sure what to say next. Between the fight with Seth and my diagnosis, I was overcome with a sense of guilt. As if I were a bad investment Nolan had made back in college and he was now getting a shitty return. I knew that neither the cancer I had as a child nor the one I faced as an adult was in any way my fault, and yet I felt as if I had somehow pulled a curtain over his eyes and duped him into believing he had married someone normal. He could have had anyone, but he chose me. This handsome, smart, kind man took a chance on a pediatric-cancer survivor and never looked back—not in law school, when he skipped a ski trip with his buddies because my crap immune system turned a case of sniffles into pneumonia; not six weeks after our wedding, when a suspicious mammogram ended up being a false alarm; and not on our third wedding anniversary, when we decided to deplete our savings so that we could pay a more fertile woman to birth our biological child. He has never given up on me. He has never made me feel weak or inept or anything short of beautiful and limitless. Why should I give up on him during his moment of weakness? Is it really so terrible that he doesn’t want his wife’s appearance to change?

  I took a deep breath. “I’ll book the entire surgery for the end of the month,” I said, stroking his hand. As my chest tightened and my gut turned at the sound of my promise, a mammoth smile spread across his face.

  “Oh, Bec,” he sighed, and then hugged me so tightly I coughed.

  “I need to schedule the mastectomy anyway,” I said over his shoulder. “I can always cancel the reconstruction at the last second, right? At least we’ll have something on the calendar while I do my research. I’ll read everything I can get my hands on. I’ll talk to women who have done the reconstruction, and I’ll try to find some who have passed on the reconstruction. I promise I’ll keep an open mind.”

  This is an olive branch, I thought. I’m doing right by my husband and my marriage.

  Nolan gripped my biceps and held me at arm’s length in front of him. “I knew you would come around! I knew you were too smart to give up the chance to look like a woman.”

  I could almost hear the screeching of the brakes in my ears. “I’m sorry? What did you say?” I asked in disbelief. I must have misheard, I assured myself.

  He said the words again, just as earnestly: “I knew you were too smart to give up the chance to look like a woman.”

  My face grew numb. Any goodwill I had possessed at the start of our conversation vanished. I jerked my hands away from his. “Why are you making this so difficult for me?” I cried. “Can’t you see I’m trying here? I
want to make this work.”

  “But—” He tried to interject, but I wouldn’t let him.

  “Are you listening to yourself? I can’t believe this is you! You keep attacking me! You’re punishing me for this situation that isn’t my fault. I didn’t choose this! I love you, and I love our family, and I just want to live without risk and pain and operations and hospitals. I just want to move on and continue living our lives. Don’t you get that? Where the hell are you in there?” I asked.

  I was raised to believe that people who truly love each other don’t walk away or get embarrassed. They stay. They buoy. They help you straighten your own back and lift your own chin in a moment of weakness. I witnessed this tenfold during my illness, and I knew then that would be my model for love. I thought my husband understood. I thought we were on the same page. But all I could feel at that moment was negativity, disapproval, and pessimism grabbing like poisonous tentacles. The thought that he of all people could strip me of my confidence infuriated me even more. My husband had transformed from my other half into someone I barely recognized.

  “Do you honestly think I won’t be a woman if I pass on the reconstruction? Or that I’d be stupid”—I made air quotes with my fingers—“not to have it?”

  “You’re not stupid. That’s not what I meant.”

  “Bullshit,” I seethed.

  “No, really,” he protested, and mumbled something about how his big mouth was ruining every part of his life. “What I meant was that you are too smart to base this huge, life-changing decision on one doctor’s appointment. You still have time to learn more. Let’s get a second opinion.”

  I slumped lethargically onto the sofa cushion. Yes, I agreed we needed to gather more information. But this was no longer about the surgery; it was about his response.

  A door unlocked down the hall, and I could hear someone shuffling toward the kitchen. The interruption wasn’t unwelcome. I was spent and just wanted peace.

  “I thought I heard voices out here,” Holly said, as she opened a cabinet, pulled out a glass, and pushed it into the water dispenser on the refrigerator door.

  I raised my eyebrows and looked at Nolan as if to say, I think this discussion is over. I walked over to Holly. “Can’t sleep?” I asked.

  She smiled and took a swig from her glass. “Sleeplessness is sort of my general state of existence these days,” she said, and tucked a few loose strands of auburn hair beneath the edge of her headscarf.

  I looked at Holly, in her long-sleeved, neck-to-ankle bathrobe and the blue cloth wrapped around her scalp, and wondered if she was uncomfortable. Had I been eight months pregnant on a hot July night, I probably would have stumbled barefoot into the kitchen, braless, in an oversize college T-shirt, my hair a mess. I knew Holly could walk around with her long hair flowing freely when she was alone with Adam, or even privately with me, but she was required to cover up in the presence of the rest of the world. I wondered if she felt stifled, or if she still welcomed the customs the way she had in the past. Never once, in the twenty-something years she had lived this way, had she complained. And yet I couldn’t help but wonder if this was what she had been referring to that morning at Babies “R” Us. Was she yearning to break free from all these rules?

  “I’m gonna turn in for the night—it’s too late for me,” I said, and gave her a kiss on the cheek.

  “Love you,” she said softly, and squinted her eyes, as if to ask, Everything okay? I responded with a shrug, which I hoped she would interpret correctly as, No change; it is what it is.

  “I’ll be in soon, hon,” Nolan called out, in the same way he did almost every night at home when I retreated to our bedroom to read and left him sprawled out on the living room couch, watching Jimmy Fallon.

  “Okay,” I called back, as if everything were normal. It was the easiest road to take; I didn’t want to fight, but I didn’t have it in me to offer up a good-night kiss.

  I changed into the coral tank top and matching cotton pajama pants that Emma had given me for my birthday and stepped into the bathroom to wash up. I opened the mirrored medicine cabinet to retrieve some toothpaste, and, upon shutting the door, I noticed how the bottom of the mirror cut off my reflection just a few inches below my collarbone, so that I couldn’t see my chest. Up on my tiptoes, I could see my sagging, braless boobs, but if my feet remained flat on the marble-tiled floor, it appeared as if the smoothness of my décolletage simply continued southward. I arched my feet into the relevé position I used to do in ballet class as a girl, so that my chest was now in view, and smashed my boobs down like thick pancakes with my hands. I tried to envision what it would be like to see my entire torso as one long, smooth plane. I turned to the right and then to the left, but gained no insight other than that I looked like an inept mammogram tech. I collapsed my arches and dabbed some Colgate onto my toothbrush.

  Twenty-seven more days until the end of the month, I thought while I rinsed. I played out the various permutations in my mind while I flossed: husband and boobs; husband and no boobs; no husband and no boobs. I dug dental floss deep into my gums for a pinch of reality.

  I shut the bathroom light and climbed into bed. Tucked beneath the pale gray-and-white patchwork quilt, I stared up at the vaulted ceiling and listened to the central air push through the vent. The breeze blew against the mattress, and the linens felt cool against my skin. Had Nolan been next to me, and had this been a typical night at home, I would undoubtedly have slid my feet beneath his calves to warm them. He had always been my comfort zone—emotionally and physically.

  Twenty-seven days, and my life will change forever, I thought. It was similar to the sensation that had percolated inside me for the entirety of our pregnancy with Emma—when I had embraced the powerlessness of having another woman carry and deliver my baby.

  As I pulled Jordana’s quilt around me, I thought back to all those instances when I had no control—like the end of the first trimester, when Elizabeth called to say she had booked herself on a Mexican cruise. Of course we knew she was entitled to a vacation, but, given our against-all-odds pregnancy, we never would have gone so far from home had I been the one carrying. Then there was the time Nolan and I flew to California for the sole purpose of sitting in a darkened ultrasound room and experiencing the joy of seeing our baby appear on the monitor. But when we checked in at the reception desk, Elizabeth decided that she preferred to have a private consult and Nolan and I realized we had flown three thousand miles to sit in a waiting room. And then, of course, there was the pièce de résistance, when she called to say she was tired of being pregnant and wanted to move up our scheduled C-section and deliver early.

  “You can’t do that,” I said, laughing. I really thought she was joking.

  “Actually, I can,” she said. “The doctor will do it at thirty-seven weeks as long as the baby’s lungs are mature. So I’ll need an amnio to test the lungs.”

  “An amnio? Now?” I asked, exasperated. “But you’re in the home stretch and the baby’s healthy. What’s another week or so? Why introduce a risk when we’ve come this far?”

  I called doctors. Nolan called lawyers. Sympathetic as they were to our situation, everyone agreed Elizabeth, not our baby, was the patient. As long as the doctor was willing and the baby’s lungs were indeed mature, thirty-seven weeks was permissible.

  I felt sick to my stomach the day we left New York for the amnio. I packed our suitcase, along with a duffel bag full of gender-neutral baby clothes prewashed in Dreft, booked a room at an extended-stay hotel near the hospital because I had no idea how long we would be living on the West Coast, interviewed pediatricians with rights to the hospital where Elizabeth would be delivering in California, as well as New York–based pediatricians for when we returned home, and looked into renting an RV to drive across the country, in case we were told we were free to leave but that air travel was too risky for a newborn.

  I’ve done all I can, I remember telling myself throughout the process. All I can do now is remain
cautiously optimistic.

  Those words swirled in my mind as I drifted off to sleep. The bed felt empty and the sheets were cold as my foot drifted fruitlessly to the other side of the mattress in search of warmth.

  Chapter 16: Nolan

  After Becca went to bed, I assumed Holly would follow suit and that I would lie on the suede couch in Jordana’s great room for the remainder of the night, strategizing about how to repair the shit storm of my marriage and my career. Instead, Holly opened a kitchen drawer, pulled out a pair of scissors, and snipped the strings off one of the bakery boxes she’d brought up from her store.

  “It’s a new recipe,” she said, carefully lifting a chocolate babka out from the cardboard packaging and lowering it onto a paper towel atop the kitchen island. “Tell me what you think.”

  This was a deliberate invitation—no doubt about it. I wasn’t interested in desserts, and I dreaded what Holly really wanted from me. After all, I’d received a monumental amount of stink-eye from Lex, and Seth had practically thrown a punch at me minutes earlier. I wondered if it was now Holly’s turn to chastise me. Seeing no way around it, I walked over to the island and broke a piece off the flaky loaf to take my lumps like a man.

  “This is delicious! You made this?” I asked in amazement, licking the sweet golden crumbs from my fingers.

  “So, I take it this is a positive review?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, and shoved a second helping into my mouth, savoring the taste of chopped pecans embedded in chocolate.

  “Well, if you like that, I have some other new recipes I brought to test out on everyone at brunch tomorrow. You want to be the first?”