Doug. Attentive, so positive, so certain in the efficacy of aggressive treatments, Doug chased down every medical option with a tireless, almost ruthless aplomb. He never complained, never expressed doubt or sadness. In a certain sense, her cancer brought out the best in Doug, a revelation she at first found startling, but one that, over time, grew troubling. But he’d been right. The treatments had worked to an extent. Six months of hell had passed and she was still here. Doug had been right. But at what cost? Misery as routine? The anguish becoming ordinary? Her days chained to IV drips, needle sticks, and radiation blasts; nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, nosebleeds, skin bleeds, yeast infections on her tongue. And in the fading background, a memory of passion that had run its course, a sliver of pulsing life fading away.
“I miss you,” Adam said at last.
“I know you haven’t changed your mind,” Wendy said at the restaurant. “But I have. I want this, Charlie, as much as you want a career. I want to have kids. Why can’t you see how important this is?”
Wendy talked with her hands, waving them higher as she spoke. He took another sip of her wine and tried to surrender to her excitement. More than anything, he wanted to share her joy over nursery colors, video monitors, strollers, and diaper bags. He wanted to believe in family too. But the more she talked about it, the more he felt his own dreams slipping away, and the more he felt the shadows of his past creeping in.
“I’m going to see a house in Vienna tomorrow,” she said. “I want you to come with me. I need you to believe in this.”
“Nothing has changed for me,” he said. “At the very least, I need time to process all this, to think about it.”
“This isn’t a math problem,” she said. “You have to feel it. You can’t solve it—you can’t collect data and reach a conclusion.” She paused and took a bite of her food. Charlie had lost his appetite.
“Show me the house,” he said.
Between shifts at the hospital, where Wendy worked as a critical care nurse, she’d been house shopping, in a progressively widening arc away from D.C. While she talked about the local schools, Charlie calculated the traffic. While she extolled the virtues of the eat-in kitchen bar, he pondered how much a nanny would cost. Water bills, home warranties, gas money, property taxes, wear and tear on the car, hours and hours in traffic. He loved seeing Wendy happy. He loved seeing her dream. But he suddenly felt a wave of sympathy for his father. No wonder his old man worked extra jobs on the weekends. No wonder he drank so much, was always tired and cranky.
“I’m scared,” he said, interrupting his wife’s analysis of plantation shutters versus drapes.
“What?” she asked.
“I don’t know the first thing about being a father. I don’t know how to raise a kid.”
He thought about Dickie Gray. How would Charlie ever get to the top with all these distractions? Or would he, like his father, short-circuit his family by working too much? Either way, he lost. Why was he worrying about fatherhood before changing his first diaper?
“You’ll be a wonderful father,” she said.
“My old man was a prick,” he said. “My mother was in church most of the time. They loved me, Wendy. I know they did their best. But I don’t think either one of them smiled more than three times in eighteen years.”
She ordered another glass of wine. A wonderful blush spread high across her cheekbones. Had he ever loved her more than he did at that moment?
“I want to be someone you’re proud of,” he said.
“I am proud of you,” she said, reaching for his hand. “I want to start a family with you. I want to be the mother of your children.”
“I’m a goddamn bureaucrat,” he said. “I might as well work in an office.”
“You love your job,” she said. “You’re good at it.”
He told her he didn’t understand why she needed to make this decision now. They were still young. Maybe in a year or two. Maybe once he had more security in his job. Maybe she didn’t understand what he was saying.
“Charlie, there are no road maps in life,” she said.
“I need clear paths,” he said. “I always have. If I can’t see where I’m going, I shut down. I stop moving.”
“No, you don’t,” she said. “My god, look at the work you do. More than anyone I know, you make sense out of chaos.”
“I wish that was true,” he said.
“Charlie, all you have to do is love a child. Everything else is a bonus.”
“I love you,” he said.
“If you love me, then you’ll understand how important this is.”
Outside, the rain had started. The wind picked up. Charlie watched a young couple on the sidewalk duck under the restaurant’s awning. They curled into each other, laughed and then dashed back into the rain.
9
The cool spring evening began to give way to darkness, and the general boarding began, for Pointer Airlines flight 795, with nonstop service from Washington Dulles to San Francisco. Passengers queued and gathered their belongings. Text messages radiated out from the departure gate.
Seated across from where Erin stood, a young mother combed the tangles from her daughter’s hair while the girl tapped on a cell phone. An elderly couple shared a coffee and a bagel. A soldier dozed against the wall. Others packed up, flipped through fashion magazines, played video games, talked on phones, stared out windows. All those private desires, those common sorrows. And above their heads, a flock of porcelain cranes. What beauty. What abundance! They thought only about where they were going, whom they would see, and, of course, the people they were leaving behind. It was only a cross-country flight, something that happened hundreds of times daily. They simply took it for granted, this flight ahead of them, such blind faith in the next hour, the next day, the next year.
Out of nowhere, Erin Geraghty filled with pure joy. She wanted to hug all the people around her, to break out a notebook and write poems about them and the wreath of birds circling overhead. Who were those people? What secrets did they possess? Who was grieving? Who was in love? Didn’t they realize how tentative all of it was?
She thought about how selfish she’d been. For almost a year, she wore selfishness like a shell. As her world collapsed into misery and disease, that shell hardened. Even toward her family, she became cruel and tyrannical. She shoved everyone away. Doug. The girls. Her parents. Doctors and nurses resented her. A most difficult patient. The entire world was fighting for her, but she just wanted to be left alone.
Inexplicably, standing in line at the departure gate, the shell began to crack and splinter. She filled with something she would describe only as gratitude. Gratitude not only for being alive, but gratitude for the disease itself, for cancer, for the journey through hell that delivered her to the other side.
She sent Doug a text: “See you in a week. Thank you for letting me have this time. I love you.”
He deserved so much more than that text and a wan message of love, but at that moment, a few words and escape were all she could muster. For months, Doug cared for her without complaint. He took time off work, drove her to every appointment, bathed her, wiped her ass when she couldn’t. He deserved a medal, and she’d have happily pinned one on his chest, if only he’d shown some honest emotion, betrayed some depth of feeling, some sadness, some joy, even anger. His attention and anxiety were, at times, harder than the cancer itself. His care came from duty and obligation, not choice. Doug stopped choosing her years ago. They were married; they had children, obligations. Adam chose her. Cancer chose her. And both those choices only exaggerated her husband’s deficits.
A young woman stood beside her. The woman had long curly hair, natural blonde. Pristine skin. Perky breasts. Slender legs. Three silver rings on her right hand. None on the left. This woman filled Erin with a boundless curiosity.
“Where you heading?” Erin asked.
The woman glanced over and shrugged.
“Away,” she said.
Then the young
woman popped on headphones and turned aside. Erin felt a flash of embarrassment, as if she were still a child excluded from the group. But the feeling passed quickly, a cloud moving across the sun. The beautiful woman had no idea. Even her rudeness didn’t matter. This was simply how she carried things that day. There was no right way, no wrong way. Only the carrying.
Then she laughed. Right there at the departure gate, Erin laughed out loud, like a madwoman. For the first time in almost a year, she felt happy. Light. Like she could float. The young mother seated across from her looked up.
“Say goodbye to the birds, sweetie,” the woman said to her daughter.
“I don’t want to go, Mommy,” the girl said.
Erin followed the line moving forward, still caught in a private reverie. What was it, she wondered, that ecstasy? She would wonder about that moment many times after. She would swear it was real, like a drug, blocking the pain in her legs, shielding her from the constant worry in her gut. She would wonder if perhaps that sudden joy was some sort of withdrawal, a sign of the toxins at last draining from her body. But even as she exalted in it, she sensed its shadow too. Her cancer had only gone dormant. Once it returned, the disease would devour her for good.
The mother hugged her little girl. The soldier hoisted his bag. The elderly couple packed up their belongings and ambled to the jetway. Even the rude woman with the golden curls glowed. And above them all, the flock of porcelain cranes. She never wanted to forget this moment. She wanted this feeling to rise above the others, above all the darkness that had surrounded her. Her whole body trembled.
The line moved slowly. A man stepped backward and plowed into her. She stumbled, almost fell over. The man turned, apologized.
“These damn bags,” he said.
She smiled.
“It’s such a beautiful night,” she said. “Where are you heading?”
The man nodded. “My sister’s getting married,” he said with a slight accent. South African? German? He was strikingly handsome, like a movie star from another era.
“That’s wonderful,” she said.
He handed his boarding pass to the gate agent and moved away. Erin smiled as she handed over her pass.
“Have a good flight,” the gate agent said.
Halfway down the Jetway, Erin approached the man again. He turned.
“Hurry up and wait,” she said.
He really was Hollywood handsome, much like Adam. The man wore suit pants, a sapphire shirt, no tie. Salt-and-pepper stubble shadowed his cheeks and chin. She wondered what the man did for work, imagined him as a father, a son, a lover. The line stretched to the fuselage door. The smell of fuel wafted in from outside.
“Where are you heading?” he asked.
“I’ve been sick. I’m going to a cancer survivors’ retreat. It sounds ridiculous to say it out loud.”
“My sister,” he said. “The one who’s getting married? Had brain cancer two years ago. It doesn’t sound ridiculous at all.”
Everyone getting on the plane possessed an incredible story. Only the shells had to be cracked, Erin thought. She fought an urge to hug him as the line inched forward. The man said that his sister went through hell but seemed okay now. He spoke without the guarded optimism of most well-wishers. He seemed to understand the bleakness, the need for truth instead of pandering.
“She bought her own casket,” he said. “She really did.”
How many hours had she spent on funeral home websites? Too many to calculate.
“You just never know,” he said.
They were almost at the jet’s door. She wanted to ask him to sit near her. How wonderful it would’ve been to continue that conversation. But she didn’t. She was trying to let go of control. She said goodbye to the man and stepped aboard the plane.
Along the Potomac, on the Virginia side, a light rain glazed the cobblestones. Charlie Radford paid their dinner bill, pulled out his wife’s chair. They walked home over slick sidewalks, laughing as they entered their condo, closing the door, turning on lights, and stepping around boxes. He took Wendy’s hand and led her upstairs, kissing her neck at the top of the stairs, slipping off her sweater, unbuttoning her dress as her breath warmed his chest.
Thirty miles west, Pointer 795 taxied to the active runway at Dulles. Final checks were performed. A full moon rose off the plane’s starboard wing, casting yellow reflections on water in a catch basin along the runway. Seat belts were fastened low and tight about the waist. A baby screamed. The plane rumbled down the runway, climbed into the clouds, and began a long, slow turn to the northwest. Climbing through twenty thousand feet, it crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains, a range formed more than four hundred million years ago, its isoprene falling back to the earth as the cool evening raised pockets of fog deep in the hollows. The passengers settled in for the long flight ahead as the plane picked up the airway that directed it west over the Appalachian Plateau, toward the Rust Belt, toward the once-grand cities of the Midwest—Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Dayton, where, just over a hundred years ago, two brothers, Orville and Wilbur Wright, once operated a bicycle shop but secretly dreamed of powered flight.
By the time Charlie Radford fell asleep beside his wife, Pointer 795 had crossed the Mississippi River south of Saint Louis, before turning in a southwesterly direction, lightning flashing in distant clouds.
10
Martin Radford never played ball with his sons, never took them to an Orioles game in the city, never vacationed with his family on the Eastern Shore. A stonemason by trade, Martin worked long, grueling days building garden walls, resurfacing buildings, and repairing fireplaces. He’d come home sore, tired, bloody nicks in his hands, silica dust in his hair. The family’s happiness and misery were chained to the boom-bust cycle of the Tidewater economy, always dependent on the metric-ton price of granite and the vagaries of home construction. The only good memory Radford had of his father was the air show at Patuxent River.
Charlie was eleven that summer, heading off to the sixth grade. Already something of an airplane nerd, he had begged his parents to take him to the show for weeks, but they’d ignored him. Charlie’s mother hadn’t driven out of Aberdeen in five years, and Saturdays were sacred time for Pops—reading the paper, pushing the mower around the yard, the first highball before noon. But the night before the air show, his father came into his room and told him to get to bed.
“I want to get on the road early,” his father said.
“Where are you going?” Charlie asked.
“Just make sure you’re up.”
Rolling south out of Baltimore, they picked up Route 2 before the sun rose. His father turned on sports radio but didn’t speak much. It was one of the few times Charlie had ever been alone with the man. They stopped for breakfast at a McDonald’s, and Charlie asked for a taste of his father’s coffee. Martin laughed when his son could barely choke down a single sip.
Charlie was excited, and the anticipation he felt over this adventure was unlike any he’d ever experienced. The world he inhabited and the world he dreamed about were suddenly merging. Though he hadn’t confirmed it, Charlie knew his dad was taking him to the air show.
Martin lit a cigarette and cracked the window. His father’s companionship felt strange to Charlie, uncomfortable at first, but the tension eased as they drove south and the Calvert Peninsula thinned. On their left, through gaps in the trees, the bay came into view. Between puffs of his glowing Pall Mall, Martin pointed out various birds, some in flight, some on the shore. Herons, egrets, wading bitterns, and black cormorants. His father talked so eloquently about migration patterns, alluvial plains, and the salt line. Charlie wondered where such knowledge came from. What other secrets lay hidden behind the man’s usual, deep silence?
Martin lit another cigarette. “Okay, tell me—what makes this damned air show so important that I had to give up a whole Saturday for it?”
Only then did Charlie begin to talk about the Blue Angels.
“They fly six jets,
Pop. They fly so close together that it looks like one giant plane.” He’d seen a video at school and it set the hook. And Charlie had bitten. “I want to do that, Dad,” he said. “When I grow up, I want to be a navy pilot.”
Martin held the wheel steady with his left hand and grasped the cigarette with his right.
“That’s a lofty goal,” he said. “It’s important to dream, but it’s important to be realistic too.”
As they approached the Governor Thomas Johnson Bridge, Martin cursed.
“God damn it,” he said. Ahead, a steady stream of brake lights halted their progress.
Charlie wanted to apologize for the traffic souring his father’s mood. As much as he wanted to see the air show, he would’ve happily traded any zooming jet for a chance to stay longer in the moment with his dad.
“Reach in the cooler and grab me a beer,” Martin said, his voice blistering with familiar wrath.
He’d never contradicted his father and wasn’t about to start, but he was sure that his father shouldn’t be drinking beer while behind the wheel. Ice water chilled his hand as he fished out a can of Carling Black Label and wiped it dry with his shirt. The traffic had come to a dead stop.
Martin drank three beers before they pulled through the gate at the naval air station. Men in uniforms directed a long procession of cars into orderly rows. By the time they found parking, the beer had steadied his father’s mood. Charlie relaxed and fiddled with loose change in the ashtray when the roar of an approaching jet rattled the windows. It was a sound unlike anything he’d ever heard before.
The Falling Woman: A Novel Page 5
