Leaving Unknown (14 page)

R
uby was waiting at the door, and led us to my room with her precise steps. I buried my face in Samuel’s neck, ignoring everyone. He started to speak but Ruby gave a shake of her head. He nodded, and after laying me down, gave me a gentle kiss and left the room. Noah hovered uncertainly in the doorway, but with everyone ignoring him, he followed Samuel. When we were alone, Ruby poured water into an ewer and gently washed my face with a cold, wet washcloth. It felt stupendous. Then she brushed my hair.

“You’ll sleep now.” Her voice didn’t invite contradiction. I blinked at her. Maybe I could, maybe I couldn’t. But if Ruby thought it was the thing to do, I’d try. She pulled the shades on the unaffected afternoon sun, then faced me in the gloom. “A closet isn’t scary in the daytime, Maeve. It holds clothes, not monsters. Whatever is scaring you, bring it into the light. Its strength will fade.”

My first reaction was that she didn’t know how strong cancer was. Then I stopped, because how did I know? One thing you learned when you were sick was how to hide it, like vodka bottles in the basement. You’d see people heaving in treatment rooms, then exiting the hospital with bright smiles and the best wigs money could buy. Many pulled it off, though it required distancing yourself from people. But that happened anyway.

I figured Ruby wasn’t talking about cancer itself being my monster in the closet, but its memory. It was a nice idea, but almost three years later, I still looked over my shoulder, fearful. Ruby pressed her palm gently on my forehead and held my eyes with hers. As if she’d drawn something out of me, I relaxed, lashes fluttering down, and sighed. Perhaps I could sleep, just for a bit.

When I woke it was full dark. For a moment, I was confused. Then memory flooded back. I tensed. Then slowly relaxed. A part of me was relieved. It’d been getting harder and harder to hide my secrets.

At home, people knew I’d been sick, but by my dictate no one talked about it. We’d all go back to normal and eventually I’d be normal too. Once my hair grew back we’d forget it ever happened. Of course no one forgot, but we pretended pretty well. We pretended I ate normally. We pretended everyone took nine million vitamins. We pretended that eight years of college was about average.

In Unkown, no one knew better. I’d refused to spoil their untainted image of me with the truth. I couldn’t bear the pity creeping back into my life. But it had begun to chafe. How could I make new friends if I couldn’t trust them enough to be myself? Samuel was like heaven. I’d cut him short whenever he’d tried to discuss my medical history, but he knew everything all the same. Maybe because he was a doctor, or maybe just because he was Samuel, he’d been perfect. God, it was nice
to have, to
want
, sex once more. Samuel made me feel human again. It was the sweetest drug, and I craved more.

Cancer
is a word like
rape
. You can never say it comfortably. It’s irretrievably tainted, and I dreaded becoming an untouchable in Unknown. I knew how people changed toward you. You even change toward yourself.

Being told you have cancer alters everything. Before you feel sick, before you lose your hair, before people have to hide their pity, before the first cold sore. Just that word, lingering like a rapacious specter after it’s verbalized, transforms you forever. I used to think my body and I were partners, together against the world. We acted in synch. We were a team.

With that word, our relationship broke. Suddenly, I was going to bed with a stranger. Who was this body, full of rabid cells, out to destroy me? This would change, of course, as my body and I forged an uneasy truce to unite in our battle against a shared enemy. But it was never the same after that. We became two separate things, me and my body. I’d catch myself staring at an alien-looking hand or knee thinking, who do you belong to? We paired up for specific ventures, but become untethered easily. I resented the secrets it kept from me. How was it that I didn’t know what was happening before my diagnosis? We just didn’t talk anymore. Even now I distrusted it. I could discipline it, and make it run, but I always worried what it was doing behind my back.

In the dim light, I saw that Ruby had laid clean jeans, a T-shirt, and my favorite Rainbow Brite striped kneesocks on the chair by the bed. I was fairly certain those socks had been in the dirty laundry this morning. I pushed back the bedcovers and sat up. My secret was out now, so no help for it but to face them. And maybe…I looked at the clean socks. Well, just maybe. I smiled as I pulled them on.

Tuesday was sitting with Ruby at the kitchen table, talking over mugs of tea. I tensed walking in, but for once, the conversation didn’t stop, replaced by guilty looks and fake, over-broad smiles when I entered the room. Instead, Tuesday said, “Hey there, Sleeping Beauty.”

Ruby rose, stepped to the stove. “Ah, Maeve. Excellent timing. You can help us settle the matter of whether Tuesday should allow Ronnie Two Shoes to take the hula class she is offering to the Cowbelles at the senior center. He claims he needs the exercise, but we suspect he just wants to watch the belles shaking their booties.”

I laughed. “I don’t know. I might shake my booty if it meant I got to see Ronnie in a grass skirt.”

“Fair point.” Ruby nodded, turned on the kettle. I joined Tuesday at the table.

“I brought over Season Three of
Bones
,” said Tuesday. I remembered it was date night, and felt guilty for assuming she was there to cluck over me. “I’ll cook ’cause you’ve had a rough day,” she continued matter-of-factly. “Do you want cereal, salad in a bag, or frozen pizza? Uncle Frank doesn’t care.” I laughed at my choices.

“Don’t you want to hear about the cancer first?” I surprised myself by saying. No one gasped, no glasses shattered as they slipped from startled fingers.

“If you want,” said Tuesday. “There’s time.” Her response astonished me more than my offer. “
There’s time
,” so nonchalantly. The presumption that you could get to something later was novel. I turned it over in my mind. Could you be happy doing half a trail because you could go back and do the rest another time? The idea was like a green shoot poking through the dirt. The kettle whistled and Ruby prepared tea the way I like it, a squirt of honey, no milk, setting it before me as she sat.

“You’re good now?” Tuesday met my eyes straight on. It was alarming but pleasing.

“I like the way you ask. The first time someone asked if I was ‘in remission yet,’ it took the wind out of my sails, like if I said no I’d somehow failed. But I am—about two and a half years.”

Tuesday nodded. “That’s excellent.”

I stuck to the facts. I wasn’t good with speculation. “I was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia spring semester of my freshman year of college. I had chemo and radiation treatment for two years. I dropped out of school and moved home. I was pretty sick most of the time.” I’d never spoken about it to someone who didn’t already know. I wasn’t sure where to go. Tuesday sensed I was a little lost. She was too, but she did her best.

“Did you lose your hair?”

“Every strand. That wasn’t the worst, though. It’s the things you aren’t expecting that get you the most,” I said. “I knew my hair would fall out. Anyone who’s ever watched TV knows their hair would fall out. I was prepared.” After that first day, I’d stoically watched clumps of hair swirl down the drain during each shower—a brief, lukewarm affair, devoid of the fancy products I’d once delighted in, to protect my chemo-dehydrated skin. “My sister, Vi, and I bought hats and scarves and pretended it was fun. And when the time came, I bore up just right, going through the typical Girl-Exuding-Strength cycle of bob to pixie to shaved head. I learned how to wrap an African scarf and pretended I felt stylish.”

They both sat quietly, listening. It felt obscene and ungrateful to say what I was saying, considering I’d lived when so many hadn’t. But I couldn’t stop now that I’d started.

“It was when the hair fell off my arms that I lost it. It was an inconsequential thing—I can honestly say that prior to its ab
sence I’d never appreciated arm hair to any degree. But when it was gone, I felt like I couldn’t live without it.” Both Tuesday and Ruby contemplated their forearms. I did too, covered now in fine blonde hair.

I remembered the day sharply. I’d felt the loss so keenly I’d slid boneless to the bathroom floor. All my sorrow over the chapped lips and cold sores and baldness, all the stuff you were supposed to be brave and stoic about because that’s a part of having cancer, had poured into my naked arms and I had sobbed and sobbed. I’d felt as exposed as a writhing grub without that thin blonde pelt. After a while, I’d pulled it together and finished moisturizing so I would be ready for the next day’s chemo. I hadn’t had much of a choice. Later, when I’d lost my pubic hair, I’d been prepared. But I didn’t tell them that. Some things the healthy don’t need to know.

“But the treatment worked,” I said. “After two years, I was in remission. My hair grew back, I returned to school. I was fine for a while.” No point in being suspenseful about the hard part. I reflexively rubbed at the furrow on my forehead. “I relapsed a year and a half later.” I hadn’t felt sick at all. I’d been planning to shop after my appointment. It had been five days before Christmas.

“That must have been hard,” Tuesday said.

There is absolutely no way to tell someone how it feels to be racing the clock to get to your sister because if you’re alone when realization sinks in you’ll drive your car at maximum velocity into a wall. That instant when choosing your own death seems better than it taking you against your will.

“Mm-hmm.” I avoided eye contact. “It was tough for my family. They warn you that it’s easy to get caught up in your own drama and overlook your family’s pain, but that’s wrong. When I relapsed, I dreaded telling them more than being sick again. I couldn’t bear the fear returning to my father’s eyes.”

“Is it different when you relapse?” Tuesday asked.

“The second time, we caught it early. The treatment was nowhere near as bad. They’d made a lot of advances, and I needed a much less severe regimen. The side effects weren’t as bad.” Except the dry skin, cold sores, nausea, fatigue. The distancing of people wasn’t so bad the second time as I hadn’t replaced the ones I’d lost the first time around. “I knew what to expect.”

“Does that make it worse?” Ruby asked. “Piling dread of anticipation on top?”

“You’d think so, but no. The scariest thing about being sick is the complete lack of information. I spent my first months obsessively researching medicine. If I could throw around words like
lymphocytic
,
anthracyclene
,
intrathecal
, or
nanotechnology
and understand what they meant, I could have some control. I had flash cards for the drug names. I still remember them—L-asparaginase, vincristine, dexamethasone, daunorubicin, methotrexate, 6-mercaptopurine. It helps, knowing. Walking around in a strange room in the dark is a lot harder than walking around it with the light on.”

We were quiet for a moment. Then Tuesday said, “Well, from now on I’ll remember not to tug your braids so hard in case they fall off. So what do you want to eat? Uncle Frank is starving.” And I snorted tea out of my nose, I was laughing so hard.

When Samuel came over later, we didn’t talk.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, as he settled me against him in bed.

“I’m sorry too,” I said, “for putting you in that position for so long. And I promise we can talk about it. But not now, okay?” I was worn out from talking. I felt rather than saw him nod. He held me close, stroking my hair until I fell asleep.

I
t was the most ordinary day. I was in the hospital and we were waiting because that’s what you did. Even though it was Wednesday, everyone was there, paper blue booties on their shoes.

“Another game of Uno?” asked Vi.

“No.” I was sullen. I flicked a stray card from my bed to the floor. Green six. The doctor was late.

She picked up
Us Weekly
. “Britney Spears is going back on tour.”

“I’m sure my treatment includes an auditorium full of breathing, coughing tweenies.”

“Brit Brit would love the blue booties. Mine make me feel fancy and beautiful.”

“I feel like I got ready in the employee bathroom of Rax after my day shift cleaning grout with Pete Doherty’s old toothbrush.”

It was sunny outside. I wanted to feel it so badly.

“Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet are doing another movie.” Vi tried again.

“Maybe they’ll both drown this time.” I was too tired even to be crabby properly.

My dad looked up from his sudoku. “Don’t worry, Maeve. I’m sure you’ll be able to come home today.”

“You’re sure? Really? How sure? Medium sure? Super-size sure? Sure like Johnny-Depp-is-a-hot-piece sure? Or more pork-bellies-are-the-way-to-go sure?” The words lashed out, trying to fill the space of my impotence with their vigor. Everyone froze. I wilted. “Sorry,” I muttered.

“How about some iced tea? Lemonade?” My dad stood carefully, expression controlled. I didn’t want to think what his face would turn into out of my sight. “We could all use some refreshment.” I didn’t answer. The mere thought of lemonade made my ulcers sting.

“Maeve? Want anything?”

“A pony.”

“I’ll have half unsweetened iced tea, half Diet Dr Pepper,” interrupted my mother. “And a kiwi if they have any.”

“I’ll take a beer,” said my brother.

My dad thumped him. “Call me when you’re twenty-one, kiddo.”

There was one of those shock-freeze moments in the room where the air went still and everyone’s heart stopped for a beat. A single, unacknowledged stutter of time. Casual references to events far in the future were to be avoided. Ba-boom. One beat. Shimmer. Then life resumed.

“Be right back.” My father escaped.

“You know what? I want something after all.” Vi straightened once my dad was out the door. “Let me grab him.”

She hurried out. She was gone longer than a drink order. I
could only imagine what was being said. The repairs that were needed.

“Having cancer doesn’t make you noble,” I said to my mother. In the movies they don’t show you too fretful for another stupid game of Uno or being rude to your sister.

“It doesn’t make you excused either,” my mother said.

I was silent. She took pity. “What do you think of my execution?” She held up her Etch A Sketch.

“I’m all for it.”

Brick snorted a laugh. My mother went back to her sketching. “
I
like it.”

“It’s hard.” I whined. I wanted her attention back.

“Anyone who would debate it is an imbecile.” She didn’t look up.

“You win.” My smartmouth wouldn’t stop.

She put down the Etch A Sketch. “Would it hurt to be nice?”

“Depends on your pain threshold.” I plucked at my blanket.

“I’m taking that repartee book away.”

“Don’t,” said Brick. “Quoting has improved her normal conversation.”

“There’s so much
waiting
. If I’m not vomiting, I’m waiting,” I complained. It wasn’t fair. They could go home whenever they wanted. “If they really think the treatment isn’t working, shouldn’t there be frenetic activity?” I demanded. “Bells and flashing lights? White-coated people thundering down the hallway? Zach Braff interior monologues?” Being faced with death is supposed to be dramatic, not weird pockets of nothing to do.

My mother leveled me with her look. “We’re waiting too.”

And with that I felt their pain. Shame washed over me. They were there for me and I was being a bitch. I resolved to be better.

It didn’t last long.

Brick tossed down his magazine and started playing with my new wig. “You know baldy, you almost look like a man.”

“So do you.”

He held up the wig. “Who does your hair?”

“How would I know? I’m not there when it’s done.”

He played with strands and affected a snooty French accent. “And ’ow do you want ze hair done today?”

“In silence.”

He tossed the wig at me and looked at his watch. “Unfortunately, you got it. I gotta go. I missed track practice yesterday, so I have to go today. Sorry, kid.” I hated the unspoken accusation. The relief he was hiding behind the
sorry
. I thought of my brother running free and far away, and when he kissed me good-bye, I couldn’t help thinking, “You asshole, I could do that, if only…”

I got to go home that day.

When the knock came, I turned off the safelight and admitted Child to the darkroom. I hadn’t been printing. I’d been staring at drying images in the amber glow, wondering how I might have fit into the pictures if I’d never gotten cancer. Would I have had the self-absorbed confidence of Beth? Would I have dared Sandy’s short hair? Would I have had the fearless ability to scatter love and dance like Tuesday? If I knew, I’d do it.

“I thought I might find you here,” Child said. No surprise there. For days I hadn’t been anywhere else.

“I gave myself the week off work,” I said.

“I’m beginning to better understand Noah’s good-luck wishes when I hired you,” he joked.

I snorted. “Noah’s an example of why freebasing while pregnant is not a good thing.”

Child examined the hanging prints. “Nice work.”

“I’m not in any of them,” I said. It wasn’t self-pity, it was
more like a question. I remembered Noah’s earlier comment. How could I be expected to be in the picture, if I was taking it? Was it strange to love being behind the camera? It didn’t mean I didn’t want to be with people too.

Child didn’t answer right away. “I think you’re in all of them,” he said, finally. “Your eye, your world, how you see things. Anyone looking at these is closer to you than to the subjects.”

He tapped a picture of Samuel sitting alone, eyes closed, meditating. “This is how you look at someone with affection.” Then he tapped a picture of Bruce with Ruby. “This is how you look at someone with love.”

I frowned.

“And this.” He chuckled. “Well, don’t let Beth see this.”

“What do you mean?” It was just a picture of Beth sitting in the Wagon Wheel, looking like…Beth.

“Trust me.” Again the chuckle. “I was thinking you could assist me in developing some prints. It’s just one roll.”

“Sure.” I didn’t know Child took photos.

He turned out the lights. “Hand me a spool?”

I heard him pop the film canister open on the counter and pull the film.

“The night my wife died wasn’t special.” Child’s disembodied voice prompted a jolt of adrenaline. “I’d cooked a pot roast. Janie did most of the cooking, but I chipped in where I could. It wasn’t a dramatic event, table romantically set, me waiting into the night as candles guttered lower. It was the ordinary plates in the kitchen.”

I recalled the ordinary days. Waiting and
Jeopardy
. Getting the right answer, getting down a whole serving of Jell-O, getting the news that the boy next door had died. I knew what he meant. “Her name was Janie?”

“Janie Sugar, sweet as candy. I ate my dinner and put the rest away. I figured she got caught up in Tucson and could reheat something when she got home. I was watching
Prime Suspect
when the state trooper arrived. She loved that show.”

“What happened?”

“She hit a deer. They gave me a box of her things. Everything sparkled from the dusting of glass. At her funeral, I almost expected Janie to glitter too. In a way, I wish she had so I could remember it. All I really remember about that day was almost choking to death on a miniature mushroom quiche because I didn’t have enough saliva in my mouth to swallow it down.”

I reflexively swallowed.

“It was a long time before I could face her closet. Her sweaters smelled like Tea Rose. Every time I tried to box them up the smell would drive me right out of the house, and restart the fantasy that it was all a terrible mistake and any second she’d walk in the door and want to know why in the name of the good Lord I’d packed her favorite twin set with foul-smelling moth balls. In the end I gave in and let the ladies take care of it. Twelve hours and everything was gone. Except her camera. That was the only thing that mattered to me. She never went anywhere without it. The lens was shattered in the crash, but the film was safe.”

I knew it didn’t take Child this long to thread negatives. “What was on it?”

“We’re about to find out.”

I took in a breath. “Child, when did Janie die?”

“Six years ago. I was afraid to know the last thing she saw. What if she’d spent her last day immersed in disappointment or injustice? You never knew what Janie would shoot. I wasn’t ready for her final impressions of the world.”

“Why now?”

“For six years no one’s used this room, or stepped into Janie’s shoes. I think folks didn’t want to offend me. They hauled their children to the Sears in Tucson for their Christmas card.”

“But all the film.” I was busy on Mondays.

“Three times as much as before you came. You unfroze things, Maeve. It’s like we all got pulled in the wake of your forward motion when you run. Watching you work images reminded me that no matter what’s on this film, Janie loved her craft.”

We were quiet. “No one talked to you about it?” I asked.

“Some of the widows tried, but I wasn’t interested. I didn’t want to be defined by being a widower.”

“When I had leukemia,” I said, then paused. I tried to recollect how many times I’d spoken those words. Not many. “I met this girl, Cameron. We were on the same treatment schedule. We became best friends, comparing radiation tattoos and bragging about who had more side effects—you get oddly competitive about symptoms. It was stupendous to have someone who understood. But then she got sicker and I felt guilty because treatments working for me were failing her. We both had to fight resentment. I got scared too. My ‘treatment twin’ faded and died in front of me. At the funeral being alive felt like a brand—my family a bubble of toxic happiness among her family’s pain. After that, I put space between myself and other patients.”

“Seems to me you keep the healthy world at arm’s length as well.”

“I didn’t start out secretive, but no matter who you were before, once you tell people, they change toward you. A guy I was dating broke up with me because he thought I might be contagious. Can you believe that? It’s hard to imagine in this day and age that anyone would think cancer was contagious, but I can assure you that many of our comfortable assumptions
get shattered when you go to the other side.” I shook my head.

“Most people don’t appreciate how lucky they are until they aren’t.”

“My cousin told me I was unfairly lucky, because she’d been dieting for years and I lost tons of weight just like that. She said I looked like I’d been in a famine like it was a good thing. I told her she looked like she’d caused one. There should be a Miss Manners for cancer. Though I don’t think Miss Manners would’ve approved when I put hair remover in my cousin’s shampoo. But hey, if you want the cancer look, who am I to deny?”

Child chuckled. “They need Miss Manners for loss too. I had a fellow tell me I was lucky to be able to date again, that he was stuck with his old lady for the rest of his life. I remember thinking I’d trade half of my remaining days to have Janie back, and the other half to shove the guy into a sack and stow him on a plane to Uzbekistan.”

“I detest the hijackers that turn your diagnosis into their drama. One aunt was so overcome with my news that she had an asthma attack, fell over, and had to be rushed to the emergency room. I had cancer cells coursing through my body and I was breathing just fine.”

“I recall a widow that wanted to hold hands and weep together over our loss. I wanted to stuff her in a sack bound for Uzbekistan too.”

“Some people, no matter what I say, they’re visualizing the chisel on my tombstone.”

“It’s real nice to have you talk with me, Maeve.”

“People make it hard to keep to yourself here,” I said. “Folks want to talk about stuff. I’m surprised they left you alone.” Maybe it was different when you were old.

“Even widows run out of steam eventually. Though if I never
see another casserole with Fritos on top it’ll be too soon.” Child chuckled.

“I hate cut flowers,” I said. This time my mind spun away.

“Look at what you got,” Maria sang, as she brought a gorgeous arrangement of lilies and hydrangea into the room. My mother and I were sitting quietly, reading. Well, my mother was reading
Wesley the Owl: The Remarkable Love Story of an Owl and His Girl
. I was reading the back of my eyelids. Transfusions made me tired. For that matter, my mother may have been reading her eyelids too. Donating her platelets to me wore her out.

Maria had the body of a sand-filled balloon tied about the middle with a rubber band, and favored teddy bears on her scrubs. Her clogs squeaked in a perfect note of high Bb when she walked, she called me “Sugar,” her hugs were squishy, and her smile never wavered. I loved her.

“They’re beautiful!” my mother exclaimed. “Who are they from?”

“A florist,” I said.

“Sugar, you crack me up!” Maria’s laugh sounded like bells. When she laughed and walked at the same time, it was a symphony. She read the card. “It looks like it’s from your aunt Leigh.”

“I’m astonished it’s not an ugly sweater,” my mother murmured. Aunt Leigh worked at J. Jill. Her sweaters to our family were a Christmas staple, and regularly brought joy to at least five people at Goodwill around December 26th. There was nothing wrong with J. Jill. There was everything wrong with Aunt Leigh’s taste in sweaters.

“It says ‘Happy Birthday Maeve.’” Maria looked at me over the card. “Maeve! Did you have a birthday?”

“At least once,” I said.