Good Harbor (8 page)

“She’ll be back in school next week,” said Philomena, who lowered her voice and added,
“And I hear you’re going to be okay, right?”

Kathleen brushed off Philomena’s question and the quizzical look on Joyce’s face.
“I’m fine. Can we have two of the world’s best cappuccinos?”

As she steamed the milk, Philomena got started on other people’s business. “So, is
that Mrs. Fry who teaches second grade pregnant, or not?” She set down a couple of
biscotti with the coffees. “On the house.”

Philomena was about to pull over a chair to join them when the phone rang. Kathleen
and Joyce exchanged relieved glances. They stirred their coffees with exaggerated
care, each wondering where to begin.

Maybe I’m too old, thought Kathleen. She tried to remember how she and Jeanette had
started to be friends. It had taken them two years to talk about anything more important
than the weather. And now Jeanette was out of her life. Kathleen knew why she hadn’t
called: too many friends and family members had been diagnosed with cancer in the
past few years, and Jeanette was terrified. Still, Kathleen would never be able to
forgive her. For a moment, she considered sticking to the weather. But then Joyce
smiled, revealing two perfectly matched dimples Kathleen hadn’t noticed the other
night at temple.

“What brought you to Gloucester in the first place?” Kathleen asked.

“Actually, Nina found it,” Joyce said. “She was a colicky baby . . . what a horrible
three months that was. She would only sleep in the car, and even then we had to be
doing at least fifty. Frank and I drove up and down 128, taking turns napping. So
one night, late, maybe three in the morning, Frank pulled over alongside Good Harbor
beach. There was no moon, and the stars were just staggering. I could see the Milky
Way like it was an address, you know? Like a real pathway through the sky. Eventually,
all of us fell asleep, and when we woke up, the sunrise closed the sale.

“After that, we came up for vacations. We rented cottages all over the place: Annisquam,
Lanesville, Rocky Neck. We were in an apartment near Bass Rocks for three years until
the place went condo. By then, I swore if we ever had the money, we’d buy a place
up here.”

Kathleen nodded, her eyes fixed on Joyce’s expressive face. She must be forty, Kathleen
thought. I can see the little lines around her eyes. Gray eyes, very striking with
the black hair.

“Of course we couldn’t afford what we wanted,” Joyce went on, “which is a water view.
Our place is about three blocks up from Smith’s Cove, near the theater. Oh, right,”
she said, remembering Ginny’s comment. “I guess everyone knows that.”

“It’s not bad, to be known by your neighbors.”

“I’ll have to get used to it. Belmont is totally anonymous by comparison.”

Kathleen nodded, encouraging Joyce to go on with her story.

“I love it up here. But when I try to explain what made me pick Gloucester, I end
up sounding like a Hallmark card. How can you describe the sky and the light up here
without getting all gooey?”

“It’s hard to describe love of a place,” Kathleen said. “I can’t do it, and I’ve been
here nearly thirty-five years. I remember reading a poem that said the harbor here
is big enough to hold the sky. Something like that. It was Charles Olsen. He used
to live in Gloucester, you know. And there was also a line about how Gloucester was
still a place to go fishing from. I should find that again.”

“I’d like to read it,” said Joyce. “Did you know Olsen?”

“Oh, no. I heard him speak at a town meeting once. Strange guy. A shame he died so
young.”

There was a pause, and then it was Joyce’s turn to ask a question. “Do your sons live
nearby?”

Kathleen told her about Hal, her oldest, twenty-nine and living in San Francisco,
a computer programmer; and Jack, twenty-three, a chef in New York, with a Broadway
actress for a girlfriend.

Kathleen asked about Nina. “She is totally into soccer,” Joyce said. “And most of
the time she wishes I would vanish from the face of the earth.”

“Oh, dear. That sounds painful.”

“It is,” Joyce said, shocked to find herself instantly close to tears. “Her room is
right off the kitchen at home, and from the time Nina was a baby she made us keep
that door open. She liked to listen to us moving around. She liked to know we could
hear her. She told me that once.

“But in January — God, it was just a few months ago really — she closed the door.
I remember it was a Sunday. And that was it. One day we were friends, tickling, and
going to movies together. The next day I was a terrible embarrassment, clueless, terminally
annoying.

“I wonder if the whole adolescence thing is going to be harder for me because Nina
is an only child, or because she was a miracle baby. I had three miscarriages and
two surgeries before we had her. I used to give myself hormone shots in restaurant
bathrooms, like some kind of junkie.” Joyce paused. “I haven’t thought about that
part of my life in ages. We worked so hard to get her. Now that she’s such a royal
pain in the ass, I should probably remember how much I wanted a baby. But that’s not
my first response when she screams at me for asking if she needs lunch money.”

“I think boys are easier,” Kathleen said. “But there is an undeniable loss when they
get to this age. And it’s never as sweet as when they’re little and sitting on your
lap.”

They sat quietly for a moment, each savoring memories of little shoes, effortless
kisses, bath time.

They smiled at each other. This is good, thought Joyce.

The conversation turned to work, and Kathleen talked about the never-ending budget
battle over funding for the library. Joyce told Kathleen how her first national magazine
article was completely “edited” to say the opposite of what she had intended.

They agreed to a second cappuccino and traded favorite authors.

“Jane Austen, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison,” Joyce said.

“Beverly Cleary, E. B. White, Maurice Sendak,” said Kathleen.

“Oh, Sendak is a genius.”

Kathleen beamed. “Absolutely.”

“Did you ever try writing a children’s book yourself?”

“Once upon a time. It was pretty awful. I’m good at helping children find books to
love.”

The door opened and two men walked in, shouting greetings to Philomena in Italian.
A moment later, four Japanese tourists crowded in. Kathleen looked at their cameras
and whispered, “They’re early this year.”

Out on the sidewalk, Joyce suggested that Kathleen and Buddy come for dinner the following
week; the deadline would help her get some painting done.

Kathleen hesitated and the invitation hung in the air for a moment too long.

“Don’t feel you have to,” Joyce said.

But Kathleen heard the catch in Joyce’s voice. “It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s
just that . . . I, umm, I’m facing radiation treatments, and I don’t feel like very
good company.”

“Oh my God. I’m so sorry. What is it? I mean, why are you having radiation?”

“Breast cancer.”

“Oh, shit.” Joyce flinched, afraid Kathleen would think she was crude.

“It’s not that I don’t want to get together again. I’m just . . . I don’t want to
talk about it anymore and I don’t want to be treated like a patient,” Kathleen said,
a little louder than she’d intended. “They’re all as sweet as can be — my family,
neighbors, people at school — but ever since the diagnosis, it’s all anyone can talk
about. Any room I’m in just fills up with cancer. My cancer. Their best friend’s cancer.
Their dog’s cancer! Honest to goodness! One woman cornered me and told me about her
twelve-year-old dog’s liver-cancer treatment, like I was an expert on the subject.

“Oh, dear. I sound furious, don’t I?”

“Well, why the hell shouldn’t you be furious?” Joyce said softly.

They smiled at each other. They were going to be okay.

The next day, Joyce called to say that she had found the Olsen poem about Gloucester,
and they chatted about the weather for a minute. Then Kathleen said, “I’m getting
measured for the radiation in a couple of days. They’re going to make some kind of
a plastic form for me to lie in so the ray goes to the right place. And then they
are going to” — she took a deep breath and tried to sound casual — “put tattoos on
me. So they zap me in the right spot, I guess. Or maybe so they don’t shoot the wrong
one by mistake.”

“That sounds hideous!”

“I think so, too,” Kathleen agreed. “They say it’s not going to hurt, and I’m usually
pretty good at putting things like this into perspective, but I’m dreading this tattooing
thing so much, I can hardly stand it. Is that silly?”

“Nothing about how rotten you feel is silly. You’re not going to a day spa, for God’s
sake. The whole thing sucks.”

Kathleen giggled.

“Excuse my language,” Joyce said. “But even the littlest part of this sucks. And don’t
let anyone try to tell you different.”

Kathleen felt better after she hung up. She hadn’t told anyone else how upset she
was about the tattoos. Thank goodness Joyce hadn’t tried to cheer her up.

Joyce knew she’d said the right thing — or at least that she hadn’t said the wrong
thing. After her first miscarriage, people had said nothing but the wrong thing to
her. One ex-friend patted her hand and said she should be glad “Mother Nature was
taking care of her mistake.”

The doctor who did the D&C said, “Don’t worry, hon. We’ll get you past this and within
a year you’ll have a healthy baby and forget this ever happened.” After he left, the
nurse snorted in disgust. “What a crock of horse manure,” she’d said, crossing her
large arms. “Losing a baby is a heartbreak that you never forget.” Nurse Phyllis Burkey
was a woman Joyce remembered with fierce affection. “It sucks,” Phyllis Burkey said,
“and don’t let anyone try to tell you different.”

T
HIS IS
ridiculous,” Kathleen said when Buddy insisted they leave two hours before her first
appointment. “I don’t want to sit there any longer than I have to.” But when he crossed
his arms and lowered his head, she knew he wasn’t going to back down.

She slammed the car door too hard, and they drove through the morning fog and over
the bridge without speaking. Just past the Ipswich exit they ran into traffic, and
the radio announced a four-car accident a mile ahead. Buddy glanced over, but Kathleen
refused to meet his eyes and admit he was right.

She looked out her window and tried not to think of the crash as an omen. Buddy wiped
his palms on his pants.

Once they passed the backup, the silent breach between them closed. “The trees are
beautiful,” she said softly, staring at the woods, filled in and fully green for the
summer.

“It was all that rain we had,” he said, squinting into the rearview mirror.

Dr. Truman had recommended this doctor, but the building did not inspire confidence
in Kathleen or Buddy, who remembered its earlier incarnation as St. Jude’s Hospital
for Incurables. Metro-North Medical Center was a brutally ugly, low-slung, yellow-brick
building. “It still looks like a tire factory,” Buddy muttered.

Inside, the crucifixes were gone and the lobby alcove where Saint Jude had once held
court had been turned into a spiky garden of flowering bromeliads. The blue plastic
pond was carpeted with pennies. They followed the signs to the elevators and down
to the basement, where the gray carpeting exuded the faintly toxic smell of renovation.
The magazines were up-to-date, and there wasn’t a speck of dust on the silk flower
arrangements. Someone had tried to soften the light in the waiting room by unscrewing
a few of the fluorescent bulbs and adding some table lamps, but they only cast weird
shadows on the acoustic-tile ceiling.

Kathleen thought she had never seen a bleaker place. Like the waiting room for the
best-behaved residents in hell, she thought, and decided Joyce would get a kick out
of the image. Maybe Joyce would write a novel and dedicate it to her, as a posthumous
memorial.

Kathleen was surprised by that morbid turn in her train of thought. After all, the
prognosis was, officially, “excellent.”

Five pairs of eyes looked up as they walked into the waiting room. Two women in their
sixties — one wearing a head scarf against a naked skull — interrupted their whispered
conversation and looked first at Kathleen and then at Buddy, trying to work out which
one was the patient. An elderly man in a pressed shirt and clip-on tie leaned forward
on his cane and smiled a weary welcome. A young black man — a teenager — stared blankly.
Beside him, his mother glared protectively. Buddy put his arm around Kathleen and
steered her to the desk, where the receptionist greeted them as though Kathleen were
a long-lost girlfriend.

“Oh, hi, Mrs. Levine. Marcy will be right out for you.”

“Marcy?” asked Buddy.

“She’s your nurse. She’ll set you up before you meet with Dr. Singh. I’m Carla.” Carla
handed them a clipboard. “You can get started on these in the meantime, okay?”

Sitting next to Buddy, Kathleen saw that the forms asked for the same information
she had supplied a dozen times in the past weeks: her insurance policy number, her
weight, her height, her family history, her social security number, her primary care
physician’s name. She couldn’t concentrate and handed Buddy the pen.

Kathleen kept her eyes on the floor. The young man wore an enormous pair of gleaming
white Nikes; his mother, a pair of cracked black patent leather flats. The two other
women wore identical pairs of sneakers with short white socks. The older man’s tasseled
loafers looked expensive.

Buddy’s tan work boots were the same ones he’d been buying at Sears ever since she’d
met him. Each pair lasted between three and four years. Kathleen calculated that this
would be his eighth or ninth pair since they were married.

Her own blue, beaded moccasins, bought years ago at an outlet store in Maine, suddenly
seemed ridiculous. Hal had teased her about them when they were new.

Kathleen wished Hal didn’t live so far away. Her hands were icy, and she could feel
her heart pounding. She didn’t know how to manage this fear. She was supposed to feel
fortunate. Noninvasive tumor and clean margins. DCIS is barely cancer at all. It was
the right breast, so the heart is clear of the ray. And she was left-handed. All good
news.

Then she recalled Joyce’s “This sucks” and smiled grimly.

“Mrs. Levine?”

The voice caught her by surprise, and she sprang to her feet. A pretty Asian woman
wearing a red dress introduced herself as Marcy Myers and extended her hand, holding
on to Kathleen’s until the meaning of her grasp was abundantly clear. Oh, for heaven’s
sake, Kathleen silently scolded herself. She’s just being nice.

In the office, Kathleen forced herself to listen while Marcy explained what would
happen next. After Dr. Singh met with them, they would take a tour of the center and
see the radiation machine and the simulator, which was used for taking measurements.
Measuring would take up most of the morning. Marcy recited the radiation litany, which
Kathleen already knew by heart: no deodorant before treatments, cornstarch instead
of powder, no perfume, and no lotion apart from the ones they would give her.

Why was Buddy writing this down again?

Then Marcy started talking about the “application of permanent landmarks.”

“You mean the tattoos, right?” Kathleen asked, unable to keep the edge out of her
voice.

“Do you have a religious objection to tattooing?” Marcy asked.

“I don’t understand.”

“Are you Jewish?”

“Yes,” Kathleen said, instantly defensive. Kathleen Levine was never an easy name
to explain.

“Some of our Jewish patients refuse the permanent markings on religious grounds.”

“I never heard of that.”

“Well, according to Orthodox law, tattooing is forbidden.”

“We’re not Orthodox,” said Kathleen.

“All right, then,” Marcy said gently. “Our patients say the tattoos don’t hurt. You
can barely even see them, and oncologists prefer the permanence.”

Kathleen said, “I know. They do it so that if they have to treat the other breast,
they’ll know which is which. I thought I already signed a paper agreeing to this.”

Buddy winced when she said “the other breast.”

Marcy looked at the bottom of her checklist, put down her pencil, and lowered her
voice meaningfully. “Mrs. Levine,” she said, and then urgently, “Kathleen. I would
like to emphasize the importance of support for women undergoing breast cancer treatment.”
It was the first time Marcy had used the words
breast cancer.
She cited statistics about the benefits of mentors and support groups.

Kathleen had seen the pamphlets about support groups, but she couldn’t imagine complaining
about her paltry symptoms to women who were throwing up and losing their hair. Besides,
she didn’t want to devote any more time to this thing than she had to. She wanted
to preserve the summer. She wanted to plant lilies, visit Jack in New York, spend
more time with Joyce.

Or maybe she would die, and what good would a support group do then?

Kathleen could sense Buddy’s concern, but she wasn’t even looking at Marcy anymore.
Her eyes wandered around the wall behind the desk, at a vaguely cubist rendering of
Rockport’s famous red fishing shack, the college diploma issued to Marcy Yamaguchi,
a nursing degree for Marcy Y. Myers, and a framed photograph.

The picture had been taken at a rocky seaside overlook. Marcy and a burly, bearded
man wearing a blue T-shirt and a yarmulke smiled into the camera, their arms around
two little girls. The older one looked to be about ten; the younger one had Down’s
syndrome.

Kathleen focused on Marcy with new interest, but just then Dr. Singh arrived and everything
stopped.

He was the most breathtakingly handsome man Kathleen had ever seen. He shook Buddy’s
hand and resumed a conversation the two of them had begun in the hospital.

He had seen them after her surgery, he said, and Kathleen realized she must have been
out cold. There was no way she would have forgotten these black eyes, the full arch
of these red lips. He was so good-looking that Kathleen blushed.

“Would it be all right if we stay in here, Mrs. Myers?” he asked Marcy with a wave
of his long fingers. His accent was British and formal.

“Have you found a house yet?” Buddy asked, picking up the thread of a conversation
that was new to Kathleen.

“In Marblehead,” said the doctor. “We moved in last week. My wife and I feel fortunate
to be living in such a beautiful place. But if we don’t find the television remote
control very soon, we may end up in divorce court.”

Kathleen felt her cheeks color again, in anger now. This wasn’t a cocktail party.
This was her funeral, thank you very much, and the corpse would like to remain the
center of attention. She coughed into her fist.

The doctor seemed to take the hint and began describing the treatment for what seemed
like the sixth time. He described the possible side effects: fatigue, aches and pains,
swelling or shrinking of the breast, a kind of “sunburn” caused by the rays. Buddy
scribbled furiously as Kathleen looked deeply into the doctor’s eyes and wondered
if his wife was from India.

Good heavens, he was a masterpiece.

The doctor stood up and took Kathleen’s right hand between his. “Setting the machines
properly will take a week or so,” he told her, “and then we will meet again for the
first treatment. I shall see you every week, and Mrs. Myers will watch out for you
as well. You may call upon us anytime, with questions.

“Mrs. Levine,” he said, drawing an inch closer and lowering his voice, “try to rest
easy. We will take very good care of you here, and your husband will take excellent
care of you at home, I’m certain. For your part, you must eat well, rest, and keep
up your spirits.

“I also prescribe long walks by the ocean,” he said, letting go of her hand and holding
up both index fingers, like an orchestra conductor. “I am quite serious about this.
The exercise alone is beneficial, of course. But the gifts of the sea are precious.
Surely you know what I mean.”

“Oh, yes,” she said, transfixed by the attention and his touch. “I love to walk on
the beach,” she said, almost stammering.

“Of course you do.”

As Dr. Singh left, Kathleen and Marcy caught one another’s eye. Marcy put a hand over
her heart and fluttered her fingers. Kathleen laughed out loud. Buddy looked at them,
clueless.

“I’m going to show you the treatment room first,” Marcy said, leading them down a
hallway. She opened the door to a room as big as Kathleen’s library at school. The
radiation machine loomed in the center, like an oversize prop from a 1950s science-fiction
movie.

Marcy introduced Terry and Rachel, who would be her regular radiation techs. Terry
showed them how the treatment table moved up to meet the movable “head,” which delivered
the ray. Rachel pointed to the mobile hanging from the ceiling: four angels made out
of clothespins and glitter. “A patient’s daughter made it,” she said.