Positively Beautiful

by Wendy Mills

  “My mom still doesn’t know I got tested. Mom’s genetic counselor told her it was best if I waited until I was at least twenty-one to get tested, and even then, there’s really nothing I should do until I’m twenty-five. But I had to know. I had to know now. I did an online test, and that’s how I found out.”

  “Are you glad you did?” She raises an eyebrow.

  I hesitate. Then, “Maybe I should have waited. In some ways it makes me feel so much more helpless knowing that I’m positive but that I have to wait so long to do anything about it. But at the time … it didn’t feel like I could.” How to explain that sense of urgency, that impending doom that I felt? Waiting did not seem like an option. But now … Now, I’m not so sure I made the right decision.

  She presses her fingers together under her chin. “From what I understand, these online genetic tests, which is the only genetic testing you can get without a doctor’s order, test for just a few of the BRCA mutations. In some ways, that gives you a false sense of knowledge, when only a genetic expert can truly help you understand the results and what they mean to you.”

  I sigh. “Well, I did it, and now I know I have two choices. Either I cut off my breasts, and maybe even take out my ovaries, or I wait and see if I get cancer. That seems impossible. I know the doctors do a lot of screening on women with the BRCA mutation, but it seems like with up to an eighty percent chance of getting it—”

  “That number is dependent on a lot of factors,” she says. “It’s not cut-and-dry.”

  “Still. I’m just waiting for the inevitable. I’ll spend the rest of my life waiting to go through what my mom is going through. I don’t think I can stand it.”

  She doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then she leans forward and takes my hand.

  “Even before we found out about the gene, my family has lived with cancer as a sort of unwelcome but necessary houseguest,” she says. “We’ve been battling it for generations. It’s a war that sometimes we win, sometimes we lose, but we’re always fighting. Living like that, it changes a person. You never feel so alive as you do when death is at the door. Life is hard, but it’s the only one we have, and I cannot envision living it in despair.” She stares at me without speaking, as comfortable with silence as her son.

  “Jason has been … great,” I say, because my thoughts are like a mass of swirling birds in my mind trying to get out. “I don’t know what I would have done without him.”

  She nods and smiles her lovely smile. “Jason has always loved life, but finding out he had the BRCA mutation … it intensified something in him. He made a conscious decision to wring every last drop of joy out of each day he lives.”

  I think about Jason deciding not to fall in love, but I don’t say anything, because it doesn’t feel right to tell her if Jason hasn’t told her himself.

  She sits back, and stares out at the sky and endless mangroves for a while without speaking. At first, I squirm, but then I follow her gaze and somehow get lost in the secret whisper of the mangroves, the smell of the oranges sweetly rotting on the ground under a nearby tree, and the sun-thrown water shapes wavering on the porch rail.

  “There is a poem I think about when I am afraid,” she says after a while, “when I need to be strong. It’s by Hannah Senesh, a young Hungarian girl who volunteered to parachute into occupied territory to help rescue other Jews during the Holocaust and who died by a Nazi firing squad. Her radiant, courageous heart shone through even in her poetry and it makes me feel strong when I read it.”

  Miriam closes her eyes and pauses a moment before reciting softly:

  “God, may there be no end

  to sea, to sand,

  water’s splash,

  Lightning’s flash,

  the prayer of man.”

  “After she died, they found that she had written ‘I loved the warm sunlight.’ Past tense, even as she wrote it in her cell, because she knew she was going to die. But still, she was able to enjoy something as simple as the warm sunlight on her face. I remember this when things seem like too much. I remember to notice the warm sunlight on my face.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  I’m standing at Ashley’s bedroom window when a strange car pulls into the Levinsons’ driveway early the next morning. The last person I expected to see gets out.

  Stew.

  Not only is he the last person I expected to see, he is the last person I wanted to see. I don’t want to face him, don’t want to try to explain what I can’t explain.

  Why did Mom send him instead of coming herself?

  The doorbell rings, and Ashley speaks from behind me. “Is that your dad?”

  I jump. “What? Uh, no. He’s my flight instructor.”

  Ashley is in a white T-shirt and boxers, and she looks so young, though she’s actually a month older than me. We talked for a long time as I lay on the trundle bed that pulled from beneath her bed, and she never once complained about the closet light being on. At first it was uncomfortable, because I could not talk to her about the BRCA mutation. Miriam and Jason are fiercely determined that she not know about it until she turns eighteen and I can’t help but feel a little jealous of her innocence. Jealous, and sadness for what she has coming. The knowledge feels like a weapon, a life-exploding bomb. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody, though a small part of me knows that ignorance is even more deadly. Ashley will turn eighteen in less than a year and then, for better or worse, she will know.

  But as we lay there together last night it was hard not to think: I am on the other side of a divide now. You are on the before side, and I do not want to take that away from you, because the after shatters your soul. What would you say if I told you we may share a death sentence in our very cells? I am a genetic mutant, and you might be one also.

  I’m thinking about cutting off my breasts, I might say, and what will you do?

  “Aren’t you going to go down?” Ashley asks.

  “I’d really rather not,” I say.

  But I do.

  Stew is standing awkwardly in the hall with Mr. and Mrs. Levinson, hand pressed to the small of his back, and a coffee stain down his shirt. He looks out of his element away from the airport, like a bird in a grocery store.

  “Hi, Stew,” I say. Hi, Stew, you must be superthrilled to see me!

  Stew nods brusquely at me and goes back to his conversation with Mr. Levinson about a detour route to Interstate 75.

  Jason comes down the stairs, and he’s wearing a pair of shorts but no shirt and I try not to notice because we are just friends.

  “Who is that?” he says, his voice husky with sleep.

  “Stew. My flight instructor,” I say in a low voice. “I don’t know why he’s here.”

  “Are you ready?” Stew barks at me.

  “Uh … okay,” I say. It’s not like I have any luggage. I have my purse, I’m wearing the same clothes I wore the day I walked away from Tweety Bird. I look like the same girl, but I’m not.

  “I think we should give the kids a little privacy to say good-bye,” Miriam says, and Stew looks like, No, I’m quite sure they’ve had enough privacy already, but he follows Jason’s parents as they go out the front door. Ashley drifts silent as a ghost after them, leaving Jason and me alone in the foyer.

  I stare at the grayish tile on the floor. I don’t know what to say.

  “Atlanta’s, what, eight or nine hours from here? Maybe I can come visit.” Jason is standing close to me, and I can’t look at him so I stare at the tiny golden hairs on his wrist, breathing the scent of him, which is warm and musty from sleep. “Erin?”

  I force myself to look up into his face. In the bright light of morning, his eyes are shimmering and sparkling with gold flecks. He’s not shaven, and he looks older still. Away from the island, I’m not sure I recognize him.

  “Will it be the same?” I blurt out. “Will we still be able to be friends now that … all this happened?” I wave my hand wildly around and he catches it in his own. Heat floods like molten suga
r from my palm to the soles of my feet as he stares at me without speaking. It is not a comfortable silence, but a sizzling one, volatile with unspoken feelings only needing a spark to take shape.

  “Nothing’s changed,” he says after a while, giving my hand a little shake. “We’re still buds, okay? We can still talk.”

  He lets go of my hand and I resist the urge to reach out for his again.

  Stew pokes his head inside the door and says, “Daylight’s wasting, sunshine,” even though it’s only been daylight for forty-five minutes. It’s that early. He must have driven all night.

  “Uh … okay,” I say, looking back to Jason.

  “See you, Erin,” Jason says, looking straight at me. His face, usually so clear and open, is shadowed.

  “Okay,” I say, before I start crying, and I leave.

  The ride back with Stew is excruciating. I try to talk at first, to apologize, to explain why I did what I did, but the words don’t come out right. It doesn’t matter, anyway, because Stew responds only in grunts and won’t look at me.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, “I really, really am.”

  He looks at me, in his dirty shirt and with tired, angry eyes. “I lost a student once. I lost one and I thought I had again. And to find out it was some asinine stunt? So that you could hang out with your boyfriend on some tropical island? Do you know what you did to your mother? To me? You wrecked my plane. I thought you had died. And your mother is so worn and exhausted by all this she had to ask me to come get you. How does that make you feel? This is why I don’t like kids.” He shakes his head in disgust and refuses to speak to me again the rest of the trip.

  I don’t have a phone or a book, and apparently the radio in Stew’s beat-up, old Chevy doesn’t work, so I put my head back on the seat and close my eyes, letting the hot, dirty air beat on my face. I already miss Jason, and the island, and am trying not to think about what comes next. So I immerse myself in memories of dark, secret water and manatees playing and sharks that feel like silk.

  She must have been waiting at the window because she comes out as soon as we pull into the driveway.

  “Erin,” Mom says when she sees me get out of the car. She looks frail and exhausted and her hair is almost gone, and I run to her, holding her tight, and we’re both crying.

  “I’m home, I’m home,” I whisper. “I’m so sorry, Momma, I didn’t mean to hurt you. I’m so, so sorry.”

  “I know, Rinnie, I know,” she says. “It’s the easiest thing in the world to hurt the ones we love, even if we don’t mean to.”

  “I’m here now,” I say. “I’m here now.”

  Part Three

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Some people are orally fixated. I’m pretty sure Mr. Jarad is hands-fixated. He has to be doing something with his hands, whether tossing a baseball, playing with his wedding ring, or cleaning his fingernails with a penknife. That’s what he’s doing today. I saw a real psychiatrist over the summer but when school started two months ago, I told Mom I would rather see Mr. Jarad. Sure, his sports stories are cheesy, but somehow I’m more comfortable with him.

  “Mom finished radiation yesterday! She is d-o-n-e. Done, done, done. I’m so happy for her, because let me tell you, the radiation department was way more depressing than the chemo department.” I swallow hard, because it was depressing. I don’t know whether it was normal or not, but two or three of the people in the waiting room were quite literally dying. They were only doing radiation to shrink the tumors that were causing them pain in the last few months of their lives. It was weird yesterday to sit in the waiting room looking out the window at the hundreds of pink ducks floating around the pond outside in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month and know that the people sitting beside me might not live to see the end of the year. “But anyway. Mom. Yeah, she has follow-up visits and stuff over the next couple of months, but everything looks great and wow, that feels good, you know?” It’s hard not to focus on Mr. Jarad’s knife; at any moment it looks like it might slip and jam under his nail.

  “Hey, that’s great,” he says, looking up. “I know that must be a relief. How’s school? Last week you said Ms. Garrison asked you to be on the e-zine again. What’d you decide?”

  I grimace. “It’s just not my thing. Besides, I’m trying to get my GPA up. Last year was pretty disastrous. But I got a B in physics over the summer, which was pretty good with everything I had going on with Mom’s treatment and all, so I just need to stay on it.” No friends and no flying makes Erin a very studious girl. “All in all … everything is going really well.”

  Mr. Jarad has a particularly stubborn piece of dirt, and he concentrates on that for a while after I stop talking. I start fidgeting. Sure, this is getting me out of chemistry, but I’m ready to get on with my life. I’m tired of talking about it so much.

  “You still having the anxiety attacks and nightmares?” Mr. Jarad asks after a minute.

  “Well, sure, the past six months haven’t exactly been stellar, you know. I mean, who wouldn’t have nightmares, right? Right? But I got through it, we got through it. And now that Mom’s going to be fine, I’m just glad it’s over, that she’s better, because I don’t think I could do it again. I mean, I never-never-never want to go through that again.”

  “There’s this guy,” Mr. Jarad says, and I mentally groan. Here we go.

  “And he’s first round pick and he’s really good. Everybody knows he’s going to be a Hall of Famer. And his first season, he gets hit real hard. I mean, it gave him a concussion, and you’re like, so what? Football players get hit all the time. But this guy, something happened to him. He couldn’t get back into the game after that. It was like it knocked the confidence out of him or something. He would get out there, but he was scared the whole time. He would fumble the ball, and he couldn’t make a throw to save his life because he was worried about getting hit again. He ended up retiring after the end of his first season, and the last I heard, he was selling insurance. Everybody said he should have come back and tried another season, but he just gave up.”

  “Isn’t that nice,” I say, and then, “I mean, what’s your point? That I’m never going to, what, be normal again, because of what happened to me and my mom? Or because I lost my dad? I’m fine. I really am. That’s what I’ve been telling you. Sure, I went a little crazy, but I handled it, I’m handling it, I did what I needed to do, and now it’s over.” I’m breathing hard now, because I really don’t want to hear any more.

  “That guy didn’t take enough time to work through it all. Just because something is over, doesn’t mean it’s over in your head. Give yourself some time, Erin.”

  “I’m fine.” But the words come out hard and angry.

  He nods. He doesn’t look convinced.

  When I get home from school, Mom is blow-drying her breast, or at least the spot where her left breast used to be. I’ve gotten accustomed to the sight of it, the dark scar running across where her breast was and the heartbreaking flatness of that side of her chest. She’s still thinking about whether or not she wants to reconstruct the breast. She could have gotten it done right after the mastectomy, but decided it was too much to do all at once. I can’t imagine not doing it, but she says she has nobody to impress and she isn’t sure she wants to go through the pain and trouble.

  “You know you really oughta use some suntan lotion,” I joke over the hum of the hair dryer as I walk into the bathroom. Her chest is bright pink, with a few places peeling, exactly as if she’d gotten a good sunburn. Of course, she hadn’t, it’s from the radiation. She’s got tiny, blue dot tattoos across her chest to help the radiation people know where to zap her. “And I always said I’d never get a tattoo!” she said when she came home with them.

  “If I could just stay here like this all day, I’d be fine,” she says now, waving the hair dryer back and forth over her chest. “Wow, that feels good.” She has it set on Cool and it’s one of the only things that has brought her relief over the past couple of wee
ks of radiation.

  “So when can you start wearing deodorant again?” I ask, eyeing the crystal deodorant on the counter, the one Jill sent. That was one of the biggest complaints Mom had about radiation. The treatment itself wasn’t too bad. She’d gone in Monday through Friday before work, and it only took twenty or thirty minutes. But she started in the middle of the summer and was horrified to find out she couldn’t wear regular deodorant during the month and a half of treatment. August plus Georgia minus deodorant equals a very stinky Mom.

  “Soon, I hope,” she says, wrinkling her nose. “It got to where I felt like I had to apologize to the radiation techs every time I went in. I smell funky.”

  “But it’s over,” I say. “How great is that? It’s all over.”

  She puts down the hair dryer and tousles my hair. “Erin, I wanted to tell you … I know this summer was hard on you. But I’m so proud of you. You’ve been a big help to me through all of this, and I really appreciate it.”

  “Super-Erin, that’s me,” I say. “I’m just so sorry I ran away like that. I still feel so stupid. If I had any idea how much trouble I’d get into, and … Stew … I just didn’t know. I wasn’t thinking.”

  Mom picks up a bottle of lotion and begins slathering it on her chest. She had always been sort of modest before she got cancer, but I guess she feels like there’s no point to it anymore. “I swear I feel like a Playboy centerfold, so many people have seen my breasts!” she told me at one point.

  “Have you talked to Stew yet?” she asks.

  I sigh. “As far as Stew’s concerned, I’m worse than the devil. He hates my guts.”

  “No he doesn’t,” Mom says. “He’s just angry, and you can’t blame him for that. He’ll come around. Your dad always said he was a good man.”

  So come to find out, Stew not only knew of my dad, but he was friends with him. They met in Iraq, where Dad was flying missions in Desert Storm; Stew was a maintenance-crew chief and they connected when they realized they had both grown up near Atlanta. That’s how Stew knew who I was way back when I started lessons. The flying world is evidently very small. Stew, being Stew, hadn’t bothered to divulge that little nugget of information.