If Only in My Dreams (2 page)

Just yesterday, Betty Godfrey had cozied up to him over a chocolate malted and reminded him of the movie
Caught in the Draft
, which he had taken her to see after the Independence Day parade. “Remember how Bob Hope tried to avoid the service by getting married? Just think, Jed, if you were married, you wouldn’t have to worry.”

“I’m not worried,” he told her, mopping up the countertop with a dishrag. “If I get called up, I’ll serve.”

“Where would that leave your mother?”

“My brother’s graduating from Penn State next spring,” Jed informed her. “He’s planning to come back to Glenhaven Park. When he does, he’ll take care of Mother and the girls and run the store.”

What Jed didn’t admit was that he was counting the days until Gilbert’s return… and that he was planning to enlist the day his brother got back, anyway.

Just two years ago, FDR had staunchly promised that America wouldn’t fight unless attacked. Yet between the new draft, the Lend-Lease Act, and the Atlantic Charter, it was increasingly obvious that the president expected the country to be dragged into the war. And Jed would have to fight, like his father had back in 1917.

No question about it. Just as it had been his responsibility to step up as man of the house when Pop died, it would be Jed’s duty to protect his country from the tyranny spreading like a malignancy overseas.

Mingling with his patriotism was an unabashed desire to see the world beyond the Eastern Seaboard. Yet, much to his shame, he also harbored secret doubts that he could ever harm another human being, under any circumstances.

His father always liked to tell the story of Jed’s first childhood fishing expedition in the Catskills. Pop threw in his own line, landed a hefty trout—then fended off a surprise attack from his pint-sized firstborn, who tore the wriggling catch from the hook and hurled it back into the stream, shouting at Abner to pick on someone his own size.

Jed never did grow to enjoy fishing the way his father and brother did. Or, God forbid, hunting.

Not that he was a sissy. No, he lettered in three sports in high school, including football. But physical confrontation on the gridiron was one thing. Going hand to hand anywhere else was quite another. Unlike his volatile kid brother, he avoided school-yard skirmishes, though when forced, he rolled up his sleeves to rescue Gilbert from the clutches of neighborhood tormentors like Waldie Smith.

Maybe if Jed thought of the Nazis as overgrown bullies, he’d be capable of violence after all. Particularly in self-defense. But he didn’t like to think about that. And he didn’t have to… not yet. Not for another six months.

Though nobody in the family knew of his intent to join, he was certain they wouldn’t be surprised. His restlessness was no secret.

Here in the steamy, fragrant kitchen on this Thanksgiving Day, watching his mother set her cigarette aside to open the oven door to check the roasting turkey, he felt a twinge of guilt for even thinking about leaving someday.

Mother needed him. They all needed him. He had been the head of the family for two years now. Two years next week.

But I need a life of my own
, he told himself.
I need to get back out there. Just for a few years
.

I’ll put in my time, I’ll have some adventures, I’ll meet a swell woman, and I’ll bring her back here to settle down
.

Leafy, friendly Glenhaven Park was the perfect place for a fellow to raise a family. For Jed, it was home… and it probably always would be.

What he couldn’t know, as he sipped his hot coffee in the comforting warmth of home on this Thanksgiving Day, was that Someday was going to come much sooner than he expected… and that his coveted ticket out of town would be only one-way.

CHAPTER 1

The Present

New York City

M
alignant
.

It’s the last word Clara McCallum really comprehends, though it’s far from the last one Dr. Svensen utters.

Sitting in the patient’s chair, clutching the wooden arms with the tenacity of a white-knuckled flier, Clara is vaguely aware of other phrases. Phrases that are equally familiar, equally repugnant, hovering in the air like noxious fumes.

MRI and bone scan
.

Lumpectomy
.

Chemotherapy and radiation
.

None of this is registering. None of it seems to matter.

In the wake of
malignant
, what could possibly matter?

As Dr. Svensen goes on talking in her soothing voice, Clara sits staring at the robust, foil-wrapped potted white poinsettia on her desk, regretting…

Well, everything.

Everything she hadn’t had a chance to do and now, perhaps, never will: getting married, raising children, winning an Oscar or a Golden Globe or even just a Daytime Emmy, for God’s sake. Is a Daytime Emmy too much to ask?

What about the rest? What about celebrating her thirtieth birthday, living somewhere other than New York City, having a baby?

This can’t be happening
.

“… surgeon,” Dr. Svensen says. “… hospital…”

It is
.

It
is
happening, and Clara regrets not just things she hasn’t done, but things she
has
.

Smoking cigarettes back in her Broadway days, to rev up her metabolism and keep herself audition-svelte. Ingesting all those artificial sweeteners, every day, all her adult life, right up to the ubiquitous Diet Coke she drank in the cab on the way uptown just now. Never getting enough sleep, always under so much stress…

And then there’s Jason.

I probably shouldn’t have broken the engagement after all. We came so close… so damned close.
…

Why did I throw away a five-year relationship on a whim, thinking something better was going to come along?

Something better never did… and now it never will.

“Clara… here.” Dr. Svensen passes a box of Kleenex across her desk.

Only then does Clara realize she’s crying. She accepts the box, plucks a white tissue and wipes away the tears, only to have them instantly replenished like the biological counterpart of a Hollywood rainmaking machine.

“This can’t be happening to me. I have too much to do. I have a movie to make.”

It sounds so incredibly lame, even to her own ears. But Dr. Svensen’s sympathetic expression provides validation, so she goes on, brokenly. “Everything is finally falling into place with my career. I can’t be sick. I can’t
die
.”

“Clara, come on. Try to breathe. Deep breaths.” The doctor reaches for her hand, the one that isn’t holding a soggy tissue.

Clara knows the gesture is meant to provide comfort, but it only seems to seal the raw deal. Dr. Svensen, her gynecologist since high school, is not ordinarily a touchy-feely, emotional person. Clara’s prognosis must be pretty bleak if they’re holding hands.

The doctor’s fingers are as cool as her typical bedside manner; her grasp feels like a farewell handshake.

Clara wrenches her hand away and rakes it through her long brown hair, a longtime habit of hers.

“Clara—”

“I’m going to die.” She looks into the physician’s eyes, noticing that they’re gray. Light gray… like a granite tombstone. “Right? I’m going to die.”

She waits for the doctor to dispute the statement with reassurance. Or even just to put a philosophical spin on it with a bullshit line like
We’re all going to die someday
.

Neither of those things happens.

Dr. Svensen squeezes Clara’s hand again. “You’re fortunate that we caught it early. And to be living here in Manhattan, with access to a number of fine treatment facilities.”

Does she have to sound so professional, so… formal? Why can’t she just agree that this sucks? Why can’t she at least talk about miracle cures or something?

“My grandmother died of this same thing. What are my odds of surviving it?” Clara braces herself for the answer.

“Very good.”

A whoosh of air escapes Clara’s lungs and she slumps in her seat. “But… my grandmother—”

“That was decades ago.” Apparently having taken a recent refresher course in McCallum family medical history via Clara’s file, the doctor shakes her head. “In this day and age, a diagnosis like yours isn’t the automatic death sentence it used to be.”

So promise me I’m not going to die, dammit. Can’t you just say that?

She can’t die. She has a movie to make, her first big feature role. The kind of role that might propel a teenaged Broadway-dancer-turned-soap-actress directly to major Hollywood player.

Why is this happening? Why
now,
of all times?

It’s almost December, for God’s sake. Her favorite time of year. She hasn’t even started her Christmas shopping yet. She opens her mouth to tell Dr. Svensen, then quickly clamps it closed again.

Dr. Svensen won’t find retail deprivation significant. She won’t understand that it’s not about shopping. That for Clara it’s about more, so much more than that.

As a child caught in the middle of a heartbreaking divorce, Clara had lived for the holidays, when her parents seemed to call an unspoken and temporary truce.

Long after he moved out, Daddy had continued coming to their Central Park West apartment on Thanksgiving morning to watch the Macy’s parade pass beneath their window with Clara and her mother. He even stayed to eat turkey and stuffing and the Pillsbury Crescent Rolls Clara always made for him because they were easy, and happened to be his favorite food in the entire world.

Daddy would eat at least six rolls and announce that he couldn’t eat another bite, not even pie, though they all knew he had another dinner planned later in the day with whichever girlfriend he was seeing at the time. “I feel like the Pillsbury Doughboy,” he would say, pushing back his chair from the table. That was Clara’s cue to poke him in the stomach, and he would giggle, just like the Doughboy did in the commercials.

Clara loved Thanksgiving.

In December, there was Hanukkah. Daddy was half Jewish, his mother’s side. Mom was always invited to the celebration. She usually came, for Clara’s sake, and because she adored latkes and applesauce and sour cream almost as much as she loved her former in-laws.

Then there was Christmas. For years after he left home, Daddy carried on the tradition of choosing a tree with Clara. They would lug it along West Sixty-Eighth Street to the apartment, where Mom was waiting with hot chocolate. They decorated it as a threesome, always.

On Christmas Eve, for as long as Clara pretended to believe in Santa Claus, Daddy spent the night so he could see what Santa had left her under the tree. He slept on the couch, but Clara didn’t care. For one magical night of the year he was there, with her and Mom, where he belonged. For
one glorious morning, the three of them woke up together, sat around together in their pajamas, just the way they used to before the divorce. Just like a real family.

“Do you have any questions, Clara?” Dr. Svensen’s voice interrupts.

“Only one. But I’m assuming you can’t
promise
me that I’m not going to die of cancer, can you,” Clara says flatly.

“The survival rates at your stage are increasing every year, and you have a good chance of going into full remission.”

“Full remission?” Clara exhales the breath she didn’t even realize she had been holding.

Full remission. That’s reassuring. Still…

Malignant
.

And no promises.

How did a routine gynecological exam lead to
this?
How is it possible that just a few hours ago, she was on the set of her new movie, running lines with her costar? When her cell phone rang, it never even crossed her mind that it might be her doctor with the results of that routine biopsy.

After all, the lump was so small Dr. Svensen almost missed it. Clara certainly did—not that she’s in the habit of self-exams, anyway.

She probably should have been, with her family history.

Probably?

For God’s sake, how could you have been so lax?

Dr. Svensen didn’t seem particularly worried when she found the lump, high on Clara’s right breast, almost under her arm. She said she was going to test it strictly as a precaution. That it didn’t feel like anything Clara should be concerned about, so she wasn’t.

Nothing to be concerned about
.

Ha. Famous last words
.

Now her head is whirling with questions, from
Should I make a will?
to
Will I lose my hair?

She settles on asking the latter, because in her line of work, it’s hardly insipid.

“Possibly, depending on the chemo drug they go with,” is the disconcerting reply. “But you can get a realistic-looking wig. With all the performing you’ve done, you’re probably no stranger to wigs, are you, Clara?”

“I’ve never been bald underneath them,” she says curtly, and her trembling fingers once again thread their way into the thick brunette mane that became her trademark back when she was on
One Life to Live
.

One Life to Live
… ah. Talk about irony.