Two Sisters: A Novel

by Mary Hogan

  Part II

  None So Blind

  Chapter 17

  IT WAS ABSURD the way it happened. If the scene had played out in a movie or a book, Pia would have groaned and thought it contrived. Funny the way life can shake your beliefs down to their skeletons, make you realize you don’t know anything at all.

  On the very morning of her thirtieth birthday, when Emma was eight and her love for her mother still glowed around the edges like a tourist painting of Jesus, Will Winston handed his wife a plain white envelope.

  “A flat diamond?” she asked, playfully.

  “Open it.”

  Inside, neatly clipped together, were two first-class plane tickets and a spa brochure. Pia sucked in a mouthful of air. “You didn’t.”

  “We leave tomorrow morning.”

  She kissed her husband softly on the lips. “You’ll love it. I promise.”

  Will smiled. It felt good to please a woman who was so hard to please.

  It had been an ongoing issue in their marriage, the way Pia so often felt like a single parent. Even with Blanca there every day vacuuming, dusting, emptying the dishwasher, refilling it, making Emma’s lunches, marinating dinner in the fridge for Pia to sear on the grill pan when Will got home late, she felt alone in her beautiful home. Sometimes, when her husband sat across from her at the kitchen table, she felt most alone of all. It was the jiggle in his knee. The way he vacantly smiled at her and nodded when she hadn’t even asked him a question.

  “It’s so obvious you’d rather be elsewhere,” she said, more often than she wanted to.

  “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “I want you to want to be with me. With us. Even when you’re home, your mind is at the office.”

  Will said, “The mortgage will pay itself?”

  “You wanted this huge house, not me.”

  “And yet I notice how quickly you and Emma settled in.”

  The bite in their voices alarmed her. Not so long ago, they’d kissed each other in doorways.

  Before sunrise most mornings, Will was up, eating toast in three bites and scrambling to catch the early train into the city. Foreign currency exchange markets were active twenty-four hours a day; a missed few hours could cost millions. Particularly with the euro in such flux. If he wasn’t on top of it, a younger, smarter trader would be. The firm’s investors were fickle. Long term, to them, meant a full day. Panic set in overnight. The fact that he’d already made them wealthy, well, that was to be expected. What had he done for them lately? The pressure never let up.

  Honestly, Will loved it. The feeling of skirting the very edge of a fault scarp, fractured rock chipping beneath his feet, losing his footing, jerking backward, rebalancing and righting himself—it was exhilarating. He was a high roller in the VIP room at a casino, a heli-skier outrunning an avalanche. Though he’d never admit it to his wife, Will would be happy in a bachelor’s studio eating Chinese out of the carton every night. Hell, he’d be fine on the couch in his office with fresh shirts delivered each morning. They’d bought the Connecticut house because Pia wanted it. The way her eyes lit up in the circular marble foyer, her open-armed whirling in the master bath like Julie Andrews in the Austrian Alps. Will had only pretended to want that monstrosity. Before they were even done with the walk-through, Pia was mentally remodeling the kitchen!

  Though he’d never admit it out loud, Pia and Emma were his life, but making money was his passion. His addiction, really, as devouring as heroin or meth.

  “Let’s do a spa vacation,” Pia had suggested months earlier. “Just the two of us.”

  “A spa?”

  “You golf while I get a massage. I play tennis while you have a steam. We meet back at the suite for predinner sex.”

  Will had joked, “Can’t you come by the office for a nooner?”

  At best, vacations, to Will, were the equivalent of eating lobster. They sounded better than they actually were. If not done perfectly, lobster was a mouthful of rubber. Really, no more than an excuse to eat melted butter. The ideal vacation to Will was absolutely not a spa. If he was going to go away at all, he wanted a resort with Wi-Fi. He wanted excess: overeating pancakes at breakfast, overdrinking wine at lunch, overspending at four-star restaurants after the sun went down. Lobster done so exquisitely it melted in your mouth. Even on family vacations, when Emma was hanging on his arm and soaking up his example, the last thing Will wanted to think about on a vacation was his health. A spa? No way. Pia was into all that healthy stuff, not him. She could eat salads daily without losing the will to live. She could do yoga without feeling dizzy and leave her iPad at home without feeling sick to her stomach.

  “Someday,” he had said every time his wife suggested a spa, though they both knew he didn’t mean it.

  Until one day, he did.

  “Why now?” Pia asked, teary eyed, the morning of her birthday.

  Will shrugged. “Why not?”

  It was as good an answer as any. Much better than the truth—that he’d forgotten her birthday entirely until Blanca reminded him the day before. Panicked, he instructed his secretary to set everything up, spare no expense.

  “You don’t have to lift a finger, my love,” Will said to his wife. “I’ve taken care of every detail.”

  Lidia was going to stay at the Connecticut house with Emma. A limousine would pick them up in the morning, drive them to the airport. Another limo would be waiting in West Virginia at the other end to deliver them to the elegant Greenbriar Spa. All Pia had to do was pack a bag, kiss her daughter and mother good-bye, and meet her husband at the front door.

  “I ordered you a special sushi entrée for the plane,” Will said, beaming. Truly, he had the best executive assistant in New York.

  Pia flung her arms around her husband’s neck and said, “I’ve died and gone to heaven.”

  THE GREENBRIAR WAS a polished gem rising up from the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains. Like Pia herself, it was a graceful beauty—all class and propriety. Though thoroughly modern with its multiple golf courses and restaurants—a steakhouse, even!—entering the Greenbriar was like walking into a Jane Austen novel where horseback riders were called “equestrians” and pheasants were hunted via wing shot.

  “Oh, darling. It’s perfect,” Pia said the moment she walked through the grand front door. Beaming, Will couldn’t agree more.

  That night, after a very unspalike meal of Wagyu rib-eye steak and bananas Foster, on top of the white Egyptian cotton comforter on their king-size bed in the stunning Heritage suite, with the air conditioner blasting and the Bose playing her favorite CD (Will’s secretary really did think of everything), Will hungrily grabbed his wife, expertly unhooked her Simone Perele bra with his left hand and kneaded her breast with his right. Abruptly he stopped.

  “What’s this?”

  “Has it been that long, my sweet?”

  “Seriously, Pia, have you felt this?”

  He rolled off her and she sat up. Lifting her arm overhead, she put her hand on her breast, felt what he felt. It was a hard pebble, an M&M beneath her skin. Instantly, Pia felt the blood in her body drain down to her feet; she felt faint, as if the wine she’d had with dinner had suddenly taken effect. In that moment, less than a second of human time, she sensed the ground shift beneath her. A faint deviation in the earth’s rotation, a speed bump, a celestial hiccup. Just like that, Pia Winston knew her old life was over for good. Literally, she felt her heart break.

  “Oh that,” she said, dismissive. “It’s nothing. A cyst. Where were we?”

  Grabbing her husband, she pulled him back to her, holding him so close he couldn’t see the tears welling in her eyes. That night, as wildly as they had before Emma was born, they made love. Pia pressed her body flat against Will’s, wanting to meld with him, wanting to disappear. Afterward, he fell back on the sheets, winded, saying, “Why didn’t you tell me spas were so sexy?”

  The next morning, Pia took a hot shower before her Detox Kur and warm stone mass
age; the day after she booked a cellular repair facial with collagen mask.

  “You want décolletage, too, Mrs. Winston?”

  “Pourquoi pas?”

  Will played golf every day and answered e-mails on his iPad by the infinity pool. Together, they hiked the nature trails behind the stately hotel. In the evenings, after dinner, they played roulette in the casino and Pia kissed Will’s dice for luck at the craps table. Across the dinner table, they held hands and toasted their charmed lives with glasses of Château Monbousquet Bordeaux.

  “You were right,” Will said. “This place is perfect.”

  “Yes. Perfect.” Again, Pia’s eyes filled up.

  In the same corporeal way Pia had felt the first cells of Emma dividing inside her on the night she was conceived, she knew malignant cells from the gravelly lump in her breast had already infested her body. Not sure why, she just knew. Like waking up one second before the alarm goes off, you don’t want to believe it’s morning already. Didn’t you just fall asleep? If you close your eyes again, let sleep retake you, perhaps time will run backward? In the darkness behind your eyelids, doesn’t the world disappear?

  For the rest of the week, Pia decided to close her eyes. She thought of nothing but pleasing her husband, enjoying herself, and celebrating their love. A few more days of being herself couldn’t hurt. Soon enough she’d become someone else—a patient, a survivor, a statistic. One of those women with a head scarf and a pink ribbon. Why ruin their trip?

  As each day passed, it became easier to forget what she knew. Stunningly so. By degrees, her brain dismantled all frightening thoughts. The talent of the cherished child. Ugliness needn’t be dwelled upon, not when her existence was filled with such beauty. By week’s end, Pia had nearly shut out the whole messy business entirely. On the way home, her consciousness shifted back to Connecticut: Emma’s ballet shoes were hurting her feet, Root Beer was due for a lepto booster. Lidia would greet them with pyzy, her favorite Polish dumplings. Pia would have to double up on Pilates for the next few weeks to repair the damage of all the rich food she’d been eating. She sighed happily. Manageable problems were her favorite. They made her feel worthwhile. By the time the limo pulled into their circular drive, the only thought of her health was a shallow one: Emma was at that awkward age when kids were so easily embarrassed. A mother without hair would spoil her entire year.

  Chapter 18

  PIA WAS QUITE certain the PTA hadn’t consumed her mother’s life. Nor myriad school activities. But times had changed. There was the monthly PTA newsletter to compose and publish and the nutrition committee minutes that seemed to have a life of their own. Plus, she had to organize the Audubon Trail field trip for the entire third grade, and raise money for the kids’ overnight museum tour in Manhattan. Chairing the landmarks committee had always been more exhausting than she’d anticipated. With all those clashing personalities, it was like running a day-care center. Both pairs of Will’s dress oxfords needed new soles and he seemed to use the front of his silk ties as a napkin. Pia practically lived at the dry cleaners when she wasn’t returning books to the library or filling the tank with gas. Always, always there were errands to run. Endless. Emma was struggling with multiples and arrays and had to be dropped off and picked up at the tutor three times a week. Plus, she’d stubbornly decided to go vegan, of all things. Grocery shopping took twice as long with all that label reading. And her earnest and impressionable daughter had refused to sleep under a down comforter or even wear wool. Keeping her warm through a Connecticut winter was a challenge all its own.

  Beside her bed, a stack of flagged magazine articles nagged at her—not to mention the relentless book club chapters! What had possessed her to join a book club? As if she didn’t already have enough to do. And Blanca, their longtime housekeeper, needed a lawyer for her eldest son who had been arrested in a bar fight in Bridgeport. Blanca was practically family. Pia couldn’t send her to just anyone. Their own attorney recommended several less pricey lawyers who had to be interviewed and evaluated. Blanca barely spoke English. What, she could talk to lawyers on her own? Certainly not in her vulnerable state with her son at risk. Not to mention the very real fact that Pia’s regular lunches in the city with Lidia ate up entire days.

  Who had time to see a doctor?

  “Emma, where’s your backpack?”

  “Not that shirt with those pants, Will. It’s the wrong shade of blue. And don’t forget to meet me at Emma’s school at four. Do not call me to cancel. You are her parent, too.”

  “Less bleach on the sheets please, Blanca. I can smell it in my sleep.”

  Truly, without her constant oversight, Blanca would watch Spanish soap operas all day and feed Emma nothing but those fattening tamales. Lidia would die of boredom in Queens and Will and Emma would wander pointlessly around their backyard bouncing off each other like zombies in the night. Pia was the heartbeat who made everyone’s life worth living.

  Not that she ignored her own needs. Far from it. Pia ate colorful vegetables and whole grains; she awoke a half hour earlier to fit in morning yoga and took Pilates twice a week. Having read a New York Times article about the scientifically proven value of friendship, she made a conscious effort to schedule “shopping dates” in the village with at least one friend per week. In the car—and she was always in the car—Pia vowed to schedule a checkup at the gynecologist as soon as possible.

  Each morning in the shower she quickly passed her soapy hand over the solid lump on the side of her left breast. Even as Will insisted she see a doctor every time he felt the same spot, unchanged, she assured him she would, then silenced him by asking, “Aren’t you overdue for a physical?”

  By the time Pia lay flat on her gynecologist’s examining table, her feet in the stirrups, her right hand on her left breast, casually asking, “Is this anything?” more than a year had gone by.

  “Hmmm,” the doctor said, palpating her breast.

  “Hmmm good or hmmm bad?”

  “Let’s schedule a mammogram.”

  “I’m thirty-one,” she stated, as if that might convince him to change his mind.

  “Let me call Dr. Rushkin. He’s the best. Can you see him tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow? Impossible. I’m having lunch with my mother.”

  “Cancel it.”

  At home that night, Pia said nothing. Why worry Will? Instead, at dinner she said, “Emma, my darling, there’s nothing wrong with yogurt.”

  “It’s dairy, Mom.”

  “Plenty of vegans eat dairy.”

  “Not me.”

  “Your bones are growing. You need calcium.”

  “Not if it comes from an animal with a face.”

  The following morning, up early and at the Pilates studio before her instructor even arrived, Pia pressed her spine into the floor mat and stretched her arms straight up. A ray of morning sunlight caught a facet in her wedding ring. “I’ll get a manicure after my mammogram,” she thought, noting the tiny chip in the top coat. “I’m sure Tara can squeeze me in.”

  As soon as Pilates class was over, she dressed and kiss-kissed her instructor and got into the car and looked at herself in the rearview mirror. Her eyelids hung more heavily than usual, her skin was the color of cheap paper. How had Will overlooked the change in her? The way her shoulders seemed crimped. Did her husband not really look at her at all?

  Pia put on her dark glasses and backed out of the parking spot. On her way to the radiologist’s office, she swung by the dry cleaners to pick up Will’s favorite suit and drop off several tomato-stained ties. Obviously, he’d been eating a lot of pizza lately. She emitted an exasperated puff of air. If not for her, Will would live the same way he had in college.

  “Glorious day, isn’t it?” Pia said, flashing her easy grin at a Westport woman who looked exactly like her. Same honey blond hair color. Same pressed white shirt tucked into skinny jeans. Both drove hybrid SUVs. Cypress pearl paint, the most exquisite greenish-gray. The car needed gas, but she’d fill
up after. More than anything, Pia hated to be late.

  Dr. Rushkin’s waiting room was nicer than most. Upholstered sofas lined the walls, classical music softened the air. Architectural Digest and People magazines were the current issues. A tall clear vase held real flowers and fresh water. Pia filled out the clipboarded form the receptionist handed her.

  6. Date of last breast exam? Never.

  7. Lumps? Tenderness? Nipple discharge? Possible.

  8. Family history of breast cancer? No. No one. Not anyone.

  “Mrs. Winston?”

  Pia looked up.

  “I’m ready for you.” A technician in blue scrubs stood smiling at the doorway, her hands gently clasped in front of her. Pia handed over the clipboard and followed her into a small room with a huge machine that resembled a telescope on steroids.

  “You’re right on time,” Pia said, making polite conversation.

  “Dr. Rushkin doesn’t like to make his patients wait.”

  The technician’s life revealed itself in her no-nonsense movements, her wash-and-wear haircut and dimpled hands. She was a mother, no doubt. One who stopped off at Wendy’s drive-through on her way home, too tired to make dinner. Her husband had a favorite chair. Remote in hand, he melted into it while his wife unpacked the white bags and smoothed the burger wrappings into plates. When asked how their school day went, her kids glumly said, “Fine,” and ate their meals in six bites.

  “Everything off from the waist up, Mrs. Winston,” the cheerful technician said. “Open at the front.” She handed Pia a blue fabric gown wrapped in cellophane and said, “I’ll be right back.”

  After neatly hanging up her bra and shirt on the door hook, Pia pulled open the cellophane and shook the gown open. She put her arms through the gown sleeves and tied a bow at the top. The room was standard-issue medical: scuffed eggshell walls, gray linoleum floor, a rolling stool, and a monstrous beige machine of unyielding metal. Softly knocking, the technician said, “Ready?”