by Ann Hood
“You look so good,” he’d told her. And he’d kissed her and kissed her until she laughed and pulled away.
“Don’t muss me up yet,” she told him.
He’d looked around at the table, all done with gold candlesticks and a gold tablecloth. He couldn’t quite figure out her theme, but he didn’t really care.
“Where is everybody?” he’d asked her.
“Caitlin’s. And who knows where the son is.”
That night he had made love to her for hours, the way they used to out on those country roads, in his Firebird and in the cornfields. He buried his face between her legs and thought he might never leave there. When she came, it was with more fervor, more intensity, then she’d ever come before, squirming and screaming and twisting. After something like that, why would she leave?
Even when all of Millie’s hair started to fall out, she remained optimistic. A real Reader’s Digest kid. The kind who won over all the nurses’ hearts and inspired everyone around her to seize life, to be happy. To Renata, Millie’s attitude was maddening. Even eight-year-old children should be angry at death, Renata thought. Even little girls should feel cheated, robbed. Should insist on more time.
But Millie took her illness in stride. She was all those Drama in Real Life children Renata used to read about with fascination. All the ones who fell down wells or got mangled by farm machinery or submerged in icy waters; all the ones who suffered from unpronounceable illnesses that left them aged, crippled, blind. As a young girl, Renata used to read those stories over and over and try to imagine herself as one of these dying children. Would she bravely face needles, transfusions, transplants? Would she be the one to assure family and doctors that all would be well?
In those stories, the last lines were always an image of the parents walking away from the hospital, heartbroken but infused with the will to carry on. Little Becky would want it this way, the mother would think. And she would do something life-affirming, like plan her summer garden as she walked into the blazing sunlight. Somehow, back then, Renata could not see herself in the role of smiling, dying child.
And now, watching as her own daughter smiled bravely up at her while radiation zapped her small body, Renata could not see herself in that other role either. The role of the mother looking toward a childless future seemed just as impossible.
“What are you thinking about?” Millie asked her.
This child did not speak in a feeble, fading voice. She did not whisper. And her glazed eyes were opened wide, their gaze directed right on Renata’s face.
“Flower gardens,” Renata said.
“You mean flower boxes?”
They had tried that once, tried to coax geraniums out of a box hung from their kitchen window. But there was too little sunlight and they’d had to give up.
Renata sighed. “No, Millie,” she said. “I mean gardens. Some people have yards where they plant beautiful flowers that actually bloom.”
“Like the Brooklyn Botanical Garden,” Millie said. “Like Daffodil Hill.”
Renata did not believe in epiphanies, in moments when suddenly the world shifted somehow and brought renewed insight. But if she did believe in that, she would point her finger to this moment when her own realization hit. Here was her little girl with chalky skin and only a few patches of hair littered across her bumpy head, smiling and remembering a spring day when they took the number 2 train out to Brooklyn to see a hill blanketed in daffodils in full bloom.
It was in that moment that Renata leaned her face close to Millie and said, “I think we should move away. I think we should go to Massachusetts.”
One of the things that most disturbed Renata was how the treatment had robbed Millie of her smell. She knew that the smell of children had been much romanticized, described as sweet, as powdery, as honey or lavender or milk or spring air. Her child’s smell was none of these. Millie’s hair sometimes went unwashed. She sometimes stayed indoors too much. She ate spicy food—beef vindaloo and chicken with garlic sauce. The combination made her smell like a foreign country, musky and exotic. It made Renata think of places like Rangoon or. Casablanca. Places that had bent streets, strange spices, hot weather.
The radiation had taken away Millie’s smell, and left in its place something neutral and antiseptic. The smell of cafeterias and public rest room disinfectant and classrooms.
“What are you sniffing at me for?” Millie said, trying to pull away from her mother.
“They’ve taken your smell away,” Renata told her, more out of surprise than as an answer.
“My smell?” Millie repeated, and laughed. “It does smell like pee in here. Maybe that’s what you think is me.”
“Listen,” Renata said. “Listen to me.” She gripped Millie’s shoulders a little too hard. “We’re going to move back to Massachusetts so you can run around the woods and see people’s flower gardens and eat vegetables right from the dirt. I mean tomatoes that are not smooth and perfectly round.”
“Like tomatoes from New Jersey,” Millie said, using the voice she used when she was trying too hard to please her mother.
Renata loosened her grip. If she believed in poetic license, she would have believed that she was actually feeling her heart ripping, tearing apart. She pressed her face to her daughter’s. She thought that with her hair gone like this, Millie looked the way she had as an infant, bald and lovely. Renata tried to remember when she had last cried.
Renata believed in absolutes. You got the facts and came to conclusions, figured out solutions. But Dr. Jinx had no solutions. He talked about the MRI results, and what the biopsy showed. He ordered more radiation. Yet in the end he said, “Treatment of neuroblastoma is always controversial.”
“But you took a biopsy,” Renata reminded him. “You went inside her head.” Then she added, “You have the facts.”
Dr. Jinx sighed. He made a church out of his fingers, the way children did in that game, and then he stared at it. “It appears the mass is too close to major blood vessels to operate—”
“Is it malignant?”
He folded his fingers into the steeple. “Neuroblastoma is a tricky one. It’s somewhere in between malignant and benign.”
He turned his hands around and wiggled his fingers. Renata watched them move. She’d gone for a second opinion with a Dr. Wu who’d said the same thing. The radiation might work. This one, Dr. Wu had said, was a wait-see.
So Renata took Millie for radiation. She watched as the technicians donned the lead aprons and masks. She watched too, through a small window, as Millie got her dosage, her bald head the only part of her body exposed, the rest covered with sheets of lead to protect her. The technicians drew Xs and lines on her head in blue Magic Marker that did not wash off fully but instead left shadowy figures behind. If only those pens really were magic, Renata found herself thinking.
Many of the children in the waiting room wore hats to cover their bald heads. On the day of her last treatment, Millie sat slumped on Renata’s lap, surveying her options.
“That girl over there,” Renata said, nudging Millie toward the right direction. “Very tasteful.”
Millie sighed. “She looks very old, Mama.”
The word stuck in Renata’s throat like a dry bone. Old. The thing was, the girl did look old. She sat, slightly hunched, the lids on her eyes heavy and drooped. On her head she wore a colorful silk scarf, decorated with bright dancing horses. Renata guessed she was maybe twelve or thirteen.
“Whatever happened to millinery shops?” Renata said. “Stores devoted entirely to hats.” She wondered if there were still millinery shops in places like Los Alamos. Places where people lost their hair, where people needed hats.
A nurse walked out, clutching a clipboard, wearing a worried face. Renata hated the way she recognized all the nurses now. The portly one who looked and sounded like she worked in a beer garden in Munich. The short pregnant one named Tracy. That one had Renata worried. Should a pregnant woman be exposed to so much radiation?
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This one, Louise, was the one Renata most disliked seeing. She spoke in earnest, hushed tones. She confided in the parents. A few weeks ago she had admitted to them that she’d had cancer herself. Breast cancer. “I survived a mastectomy,” she’d said. “You’d be amazed what a person can live through.” She’d sounded more earnest than ever.
But mothers with sick children don’t take comfort in survival rates for cervical and breast cancers, for adult diseases. They want to see teenagers graduating from high school, or very young children starting kindergarten. They want survivors like their own children so that at night they could whisper that everything would be all right. So that as they held their little ones’ head over the toilet, watching the radiation and drugs ravage their small bodies, they could remind them of the other little girl who had just won the GE Science Award or the boy who now played in a rock band. Survivors of plane crashes or fires or adult cancer did not matter. Only this did.
Louise, the nurse, was walking right toward Renata and Millie, all frowns and concern.
“Renata,” she said. “Hi.” She patted Millie’s arm. “And how’s this little one?”
“I’ve been better,” Millie said.
She always seemed to confess these facts to everyone except her mother.
Renata said, “Of course you’ve been better.”
Louise lowered her voice. “This is her last treatment,” she said. “You know that, right?”
Renata nodded.
The electric doors opened and a young woman came through, holding her whimpering son in her arms. She was not speaking, but instead she made small noises meant to comfort him. It sounded as if she was talking in some ancient forgotten language. Renata tightened her grip on Millie.
The nurse shook her head. “That’s a sad story,” she said. “Bones.”
“Bones?” Renata repeated, then wished she hadn’t.
The nurse touched her shoulder. “You don’t want to know,” she said. With forced enthusiasm, she said, “So, Millie, this is it.”
Her words were meant to give hope, but to Renata they seemed even more final.
“You can be anyone you want,” Renata whispered to Millie. “Wigs are the answer.”
Millie was too ill to respond. Her tongue was swollen, her lips chapped. The smell of her vomit clung to everything in the room.
“When I was in junior high,” Renata said, “everybody wore these things called falls. They were hairpieces. Ponytails or braids that you bobby-pinned on. Very cool.”
One of the scariest things about all this, Renata thought, was the way Millie’s skin seemed to be turning translucent. The way her veins stood out against her flesh so that Renata could almost see the blood pulsing through her body. Even the veins in her eyelids were apparent. Renata closed her eyes a minute and tried to imagine all that radiation attacking the tumor in Millie’s head. She tried to imagine battles, world wars. She tried to imagine victory.
Finally, the nurse, Louise, returned.
“This was a bad one,” she said, staring down at Millie.
Renata could only nod. She felt exhausted from all the fighting.
Louise whispered, “Why put them through this? It’s pitiful.”
Why? Renata thought. Because you hope it works. Because Dr. Jinx and Dr. Wu got the facts and thought this might be the solution. Because when it’s your kid you try absolutely anything. Why did all those sick people board planes to Lourdes and Fatima and Chimayo? Why did they bother to wash themselves in clay or grotto water? Mrs. Ramone had told her just yesterday to sprinkle a silver dollar with holy water, tape it over Millie’s heart, and leave it there for thirty-one days. “Trust me,” Mrs. Ramone had said.
“I’ll get her some ginger ale,” Louise was saying.
Renata watched as the woman moved. She tried to see if she could notice the missing breast, the place in her where cancer had once been. But Louise’s uniform betrayed nothing. She was, Renata supposed, healed.
“Tina Turner,” Millie said to the saleswoman.
The saleswoman wore half-glasses attached to a gold rope. The glasses were outlined in fake jewels. She looked out of them, at Renata, as if for permission.
“Anything she wants,” Renata said.
The wig store was on a noisy corner of Fourteenth Street. The women inside were serious about their wigs. Most customers crowded around the Oprah Hair section. One woman sat, head back, while another wove hairpieces into her own black hair. Above her hung a sign in green fancy letters: EXTENSIONS.
“Tina Turner,” Millie said again.
She clutched Renata’s hand in her own feverish one.
For the walk there, Millie wore an old navy blue bandana over her head. But when the saleswoman brought out the Tina Turner wig, she quickly removed the bandana.
The saleswoman’s mouth opened, then closed quickly. Her face softened.
“Tina Turner it is,” she said.
Her eyes drifted toward Renata again, but Renata avoided them. She could not stand to see the pity that she’d find there.
Instead, she adjusted the wig on Millie’s head, then lifted her up toward the mirror on the counter. Her daughter seemed almost weightless.
Millie giggled. She held a clammy fist to her mouth like a microphone and belted, “What’s love got to do with it?”
Basically, they had nothing. When it came time to pack, to leave New York, Renata felt they could walk away from everything they owned and it would not matter. The thought seemed liberating. They could start over, shed this life completely. She didn’t articulate to herself all that could mean. Snakes shed their skin, she thought. Who knows what else could be molted, left behind.
Since she’d gotten those wigs, Millie spent a lot of time looking at herself. Today she wore the curly bright red one, the one that made her look like Little Orphan Annie.
Renata was holding a pair of candlesticks in her hands, trying to decide if she should bring them or not.
“This year,” Millie told Renata, “I think I want a Ninja Turtle lunch box.”
“Millie, you don’t need a lunch box,” she said, then decided to leave the candlesticks behind also. She could use old wine bottles to hold candles. She even knew how to get by with no holders at all. Take a piece of aluminum foil, drip wax onto it, then stick the candle on. That would hold, she knew. She smiled at how simple it was.
“You mean I’ll eat in the cafeteria?” Millie said. The thought seemed to upset her.
“No. I mean you’re not going to school when we get to Massachusetts.”
“But I have to,” Millie said, her voice even more hysterical now.
“No, you don’t,” Renata said.
She knew that sick children always did go to school. She’d watched mothers on television protesting for children with AIDS to be allowed to go. On 60 Minutes they’d had an entire segment on a little girl with cerebral palsy and how she’d finished at the top of her class.
But Renata had always thought those kids should have stayed at home. They should do whatever they wanted with their days. They should learn the songs of birds, the names of wildflowers. They should have pets, and dolls, and eat only ice cream if they wanted. What good would spelling or arithmetic do them?
“But Mama,” Millie was saying, “I’m in third grade. I get to write in cursive this year. On white paper instead of yellow. I have to go.”
“Wouldn’t you rather stay home all day with me?” Renata said. “I have big plans for us.”
Millie looked puzzled. “But kids go to school,” she said. “Even in Massachusetts.”
Renata looked around at their apartment. She thought that the day she left this place she’d be filled with emotion. But everything had changed. She felt calm and certain. They would go to Holly and watch the autumn leaves burst into color. They would see deer, and porcupines, and all the animals in Millie’s picture book, What Lives in the Woods ?
“In third grade,” Millie said sadly, “you get to write cursive.
”
Renata said, “We’ve got so much to do, you’re not going to want to write cursive. You’ll see.”
When they finally were ready to go, after Renata lugged all the boxes downstairs and piled them on the street to be taken away, she carried Millie to the car. It was Jack’s car, and he’d loaned it to them for as long as they needed it. Tonight they would drive to the beach with him for a bon voyage party, for lobster and champagne. Then they’d be on their way.
“I’m just going to take a last look,” Renata told her daughter, buckling the seat belt around her small waist, pulling it tight. “I’ll be right back.”
At the door to the building, Millie called to her.
“Mama,” she said, “is this an adventure?”
Renata hesitated. Then she smiled. “Yes. It is.”
Upstairs she walked around the three rooms of their apartment, although she wasn’t sure what she was looking for. A friend of Jack’s would stay here until the lease ran out in six months. She’d told Jack his friend could do whatever he wanted with the furniture then. You might be back in six months, Jack had told her. You might need this stuff. She knew what he meant, why he looked down at the floor when he said it. But she, unlike the doctors and Louise and Jack, had hope. She was not coming back to New York. Especially not alone. So she’d said, No, I won’t need it. He can keep it or sell it or give it away.
After all, she thought now, she was off on an adventure. Furniture was not necessary. It would only get in their way.
When she left the apartment again, she noticed an envelope tucked into the door frame.
Renata peered into the hall. The light bulb was too low a wattage, so the hall was poorly lit, all dark and shadowy.
“Mrs. Ramone?” Renata called.
But no one answered.
She opened the envelope. Inside was a silver dollar. Renata held it in her large hand, closing her fingers over it. This had been blessed, she knew. Someone else had hope too.
