Daughters for a Time (25 page)

There was a moment while Mom was unconscious, while we were waiting for Larry and for the doctor to arrive, when Claire was on the phone taking care of the business of dying, and I slipped into Mom’s room and climbed into her bed. I did what I hadn’t been able to do just a few hours before. I hugged her, as I should have a thousand times in the past, and I whispered to her, “I love you. I really, really love you.”

The next day, Sam and I drove Maura to school, and then headed to the hospital to see Claire. Larry was waiting for us in the lobby. I had called him earlier that morning. We entered the elevator with hardly a word. When we exited, Larry touched my elbow. “Are you sure this is a good idea? Me coming to see her?”

“I don’t know if it’s a good idea,” I said. “But if not now, when?”

A nurse led us back to Claire’s room, where my sister was hooked up to an IV, her poor arms mottled and bruised purple from all of the abuse they’d endured these last few days. Ross was on the phone with his mother. Claire was staring at the television with the sound turned down. A notepad lay across her lap.
What morbid to-do list was my efficient sister working on now?
I wondered.

“What’s he doing here?” Claire asked, though her voice sounded weak, like she didn’t have enough energy to muster indignation.

“He’s our father, Claire,” I said softly. “You’re sick, and he wants to see you. Let him see you, Claire. Can we just be a family through your sickness, please?”

“How are you, dear?” Larry said, walking tentatively toward her.

“Not so good, apparently,” Claire said.

Ross finished his call and stepped over to us. He held his hand out for Larry to shake.

“You remember Larry, right?” I said to Ross, thinking that our wedding was the last time anyone had seen him.

“Thanks for coming,” Ross said.

Ross huddled over Claire, kissing her forehead and telling her that he was going to run home to get some of their clothes. He kissed her again, and then left. The three of us looked up at the muted television.

“Seeing you here brings it all back,” Larry said. “Your mom, how sick she was.” Larry’s mouth pulled tightly to the side. “I came to see her at the hospital, toward the end, only days before she went home to die.”

“I know,” Claire said.

“You never told me that,” I said to Claire.

She shrugged. Was there more that I hadn’t been told?

“She forgave you, you know,” Claire said in little more than a whisper, slowly smoothing the blankets, tucking the edges under her legs. “The sicker she got, the more forgiving she became. She said that we should forgive you, too.”

“Through it all, she was one hell of a woman.”

“I couldn’t do it,” Claire said. “And…” She took a long breath, and then another. “I think my grudge distracted me from the grief. Still, I was furious that she forgave you so easily.”

“You had every right to be mad.”

“I did,” Claire said, but there wasn’t any heat behind her words. “I still struggle to…understand those years.” She looked at him, took another breath, narrowed her eyes. “You and Mom separating, then Mom getting sick, and all of us just falling to pieces.”

“Your mother and I—”

“Not that,” Claire interrupted. “I can understand you and Mom. What I never understood was how you justified leaving us.”

Larry closed his eyes, opened them. “I wanted to come back,” he told her. “I tried.”

“It was too late,” Claire said.

He wanted to come back when?
I thought, my mind reeling. Before Mom died or after?

“The shame I felt grew bigger every day,” he said. “After your mom died, I’d come around. Tell myself that, after everything I had done, I could at least be there for you girls. Each day got harder, though, not easier. The reality that your mother was gone stared me in the face. The hurt I caused her before she was even sick. All I could think was I took her last few years. I was ashamed and finally got to the point where I could barely face you kids. I told myself that you were better off without me. That you didn’t want to see me, anyway. But hell, I tried all sorts of things to ease my guilt.”

The nurse came in and took Claire’s temperature, her blood pressure, and listened to her chest. “I need to take a little more blood,” she said apologetically.

“I hardly notice anymore,” Claire said, unfolding her arm.

We stared at the television while the nurse took the blood, and then kept staring at it until the room turned dark and Claire grew sleepy. Larry and I slipped out and stood in the bright hallway.

“Do you want to get coffee?” I asked.

We walked down to the cafeteria and filled our cups. He took his black; I poured cream and sugar into mine.

“Your sister doesn’t look so good,” Larry said as we were walking back through the corridor.

“Well, she just had surgery,” I said defensively. “She’ll perk back up.”

“I think you—
we
—need to prepare ourselves for the worst-case scenario.”

I stopped and turned to face Larry. Two doctors in scrubs walked by.

“No way,” I said. “Claire is going to be fine.” I could feel the heat in my cheeks, the thump of my heartbeat. “She’ll turn this around. Times have changed since Mom. Prognoses are better. You don’t know Claire like I do. You haven’t seen what she’s capable of.”

“She’s a tough gal, I know that.”

“Tough doesn’t begin to describe her. There’s no way in hell she’s leaving Maura like Mom left us.”

Larry looked at me for a silent moment and then said, “Your mother would have done anything to stay.”

“Mom was the best mother in the world, but she was too accepting of the hand she was dealt. Claire’s different. She’s got the faith, but when it comes to Maura, she’ll sell her soul to stick around. She’ll beat this, you’ll see.”

Larry nodded and placed a hand awkwardly on my shoulder. “I hope you’re right.”

Two weeks later, Sam, Maura, and I drove to the Fairfax Hospital campus. As I remembered, there was a playground, conveniently nestled in front of the children’s wing. Larry was waiting for us.

“Maura, honey, you remember that I promised you McDonald’s for lunch, right?” I asked.

“Aunt Helen, guess what? I want chicken nuggets, french fries, chocolate milk, and a girl toy.”

“Great! But do you remember that I said we’d have to make one stop first?”

“You have to see a doctor,” Maura said.

“That’s right. It’ll be quick, and while I’m in seeing the doctor, our friend, Larry, is going to watch you and Sam. You remember Larry, right? He’s the one who helped you make the fishing pole at the park a while back.”

“That was
so
much fun,” Maura gushed.

“Thanks for doing this,” I said to Larry, setting Sam down and handing her diaper bag to him. “I really didn’t want to give everyone something else to worry about. Especially if there’s no reason, right?”

“I’m happy to help,” he said.

“Make sure Maura keeps her mittens and hat on,” I said, adjusting Sam’s earflap hat and snapping her coat. “It’s not too bad with the sun out today.”

“Take your time,” he said. “The girls will be fine.”

Once inside, I took the elevator to the third floor and found the office marked Genetic Counseling. I signed in, took a seat in the waiting room, and flipped mindlessly through a
People
magazine.

After a short wait, I was called. A genetic counselor named Michelle completed a family tree of my medical history, an array of branches, some diseased, some not. I told her about Mom, about Claire, about Mom’s mom.

“The fact that your mother and sister have both been hit with ovarian cancer puts you at an elevated risk, obviously,” she said.

Obviously.

“We’ll draw blood. We’ll test you for a variety of things, including the mutations of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, either of which would mark you as genetically predisposed toward several different cancers.”

“Claire tested positive for those,” I told her.

“But you never had the test?”

“I was going to, a few years back, after my sister did it. But I got busy…Well, I guess I changed my mind…chickened out. At
the time, I was dealing with infertility. I thought if I came in, the doctor would find something that would confirm my inability to have a child. I was afraid of hearing that—more afraid of that than of finding out about the cancer gene,” I admitted.

“The gene is quite indicative,” Michelle said. “Women who carry the harmful BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations are definitely at an increased risk, especially when there’s family history.”

“That doesn’t sound very good for me,” I said. “I guess I’ll just hope like hell that I don’t have the gene.”

“Hope. Pray. It can’t hurt.”

Next, I met with a gynecologist who performed a pelvic exam and ultrasound to look for any ovarian lumps.

“You look good,” he said. “But given your history, I’d recommend repeat exams every six months.”

“In other words,” I said to him, “I’ll spend the rest of my life seeing doctors to make sure I’m still well, until the day that I’m not.”

“It just means that you need to be extra careful,” he said, shaking my hand and leaving the room.

Exactly an hour later, I returned to the playground. Larry was sitting on the bench with his coffee cup, his newspaper still folded at his side, his eyes fixed on the girls. Maura was climbing on an apparatus that resembled a giant molecule, and Sam was sitting in the sand, picking at tiny pebbles, her cheeks as red as roses.

“How’d it go?” I asked, scooping up Sam and pressing her cold cheek against mine.

“Good,” he said. “Sam took her bottle and ate some Cheerios,” he reported. “Maura fell and skinned her knee a bit, but she got right back up.”

I smiled. It was nice hearing Larry talk about the girls.

“What about you? How do things look?”

“The ultrasound was clean,” I said. “They drew blood to see if I’m predisposed. It’ll take weeks, maybe longer, to find out.”

Larry nodded, his mouth twitching. A minute or so passed. I sat down. He offered me a stick of Juicy Fruit. He cleared his throat. “You don’t remember my father, your Grandpa Bob. He died when you girls were little. Heart attack. Except for his time in World War II, he never left West Virginia. He was the toughest guy I knew. One time, he cut his leg with a piece of farm equipment. It was deep and needed stitches, but he didn’t believe too much in doctors. He gathered what he needed—needle, thread, alcohol. Sewed it up himself, right there at the kitchen table, without saying a damn word.

“As a kid, I worshipped the ground he walked on, but he ruled with an iron fist. The worst thing you could do was disobey him. One time, in the dead of winter, he made me sleep in the garage because I asked him for clarification on a chore I was doing. He said I should’ve been paying closer attention. Maybe he was right.

“He was tough on me throughout my childhood. Trying to make me a man. By the time I left home, what I felt for him was far from worship. I swore I’d be nothing like him. I had had enough. I married your mom, a loving woman. I thought that she’d be the antidote to my childhood. Then along came you girls. Never in a million years did I think that a farm boy from West Virginia like me would fall so in love with daughters. I did, though. I loved holding you, bathing you. Those were happy times. When you girls were little, you two looked at me like I hung the moon. God damn, I remember how that felt, the way you girls would hang on me, crawl on me. There was a lot of love in our house back then.” Larry stopped, looked up at Maura, and sighed.

“Then, hell, I don’t know what happened. Your mother was busy at work, volunteering at your schools. Then you girls got
older and there was no telling either of you a damn thing. You were both so smart; you seemed to have everything figured out. The more independent you all became, the more I felt my own father judging me for not having more control over my family. I guess a part of me was still trying to win my old man’s approval. Shaking him off was harder than I’d thought. You know the rest. I found other ways to make myself feel big again.”

Larry stood, walked to the edge of the playground, reached down for a stone, and then threw it into the trees.

I stared at Maura, held Sam’s hands in mine. So there it was—Larry’s soliloquy. His explanation of why he is the way he is. A childhood that undid him. His failed attempts to stitch himself back together.

I stood, walked to him, patted his shoulder. “I’m glad you’re here now.”