Once Upon a Time, There Was You (17 page)

“You know, I think I understand for the first time that my life is
my
life. This horrible thing that happened somehow showed me that. Even if the attorney said I’m eighteen; I don’t
have
to call my mother. Maybe … I mean, I might not tell her about this at all. That might be the best thing.”

“I don’t know,” Ron says. “It just seems strange, is all. I mean, you’re really close to your mom, aren’t you?”

“Well, you’re really close to me, right?”

“Yes.” He smiles. “
Yes
, Sadie.”

“But you keep certain things from me.”

He looks away. “Yeah.”

Sadie stares past him. She watches people going down the sidewalk: a middle-aged woman walking a dog wearing a pink dress with ruffles; a group of tourists, fanny packs on, smiling and pointing at this and that. Saturday morning, she leaned into a car window to give a strange man directions and he took her. What if he had killed her? She tries to imagine this, herself lying sprawled on the floor, her eyes wide open and lifeless, but it won’t compute. Already the whole event is beginning to assume fantastical proportions, to fade like a bad dream, and she’s glad about that.

If she tells her mother what happened, Irene will ask a million questions and Sadie will have to relive the experience. Then, because of her own fears, Irene might tell her not only that she has to stop seeing Ron, but that she has to live at home when she goes to college. And it’s certain that Irene will tell Sadie’s dad—
“I have to!”
she’ll say—and it will hurt him, it will kill him, and this kills Sadie.

So no, she decides. She’s not going to tell her mother. What good can it possibly do? Ron’s the one who can console her; he’s the one who saved her, he’s the one she can talk to about what happened. He won’t push her; he’ll wait until she’s ready to talk. Sadie will think of some excuse to offer her mother for why she was missing. She doesn’t really feel bad about deceiving her. It’s self-preservation. And besides, if there’s anyone who can understand keeping things to herself, it’s Irene Marsh.

A couple of weeks ago, Sadie read an article in the paper about kids living in college dorms who were allowed to have pets, and she asked her mother if they could go to the shelter and adopt a kitten for Sadie to keep in her room, so long as her roommate agreed. Irene thought it would be a good idea; look how much joy Shadow had brought to both of them.

They were in the kitchen when they were talking about this. It
was late at night, and Irene had just finished an Indian-style marinade for the chicken she would be serving to Valerie and a couple other women friends the next night. Her mother was tired, and when Sadie saw the bags under Irene’s eyes, the sagging of the flesh on her cheeks, she got that mixed feeling of tenderness and irritation that she felt toward her mother more and more often, lately. Irene was older, and it was starting to show. It seemed to bother Sadie even more than it did Irene, though Sadie was hard-pressed to say why. It wasn’t because Irene’s getting older suggested too blatantly that Sadie’s own youth would inevitably fade. It wasn’t that she was embarrassed by a woman who used to be undeniably good-looking who now looked washed out and weary. No. It was that Irene’s aging had launched something inside Sadie that she didn’t understand, and that she was ashamed of: a hard-edged impatience, a burgeoning anger; at times, a near revulsion.

But that night, Irene sat at the banquette in the kitchen and smiled up at Sadie. It was an invitation to join her, and although what Sadie really wanted to do was go and talk on the phone with Ron, she slid in opposite her mother. “What kind of kitten do you want?” Irene asked.

“Orange guy,” Sadie said.

“That’s what my first kitten was,” Irene said. “An orange tabby, with blue eyes.” And then she told Sadie the story:

Irene was twenty-two, and had just moved into her first apartment. And this was the first pet she’d ever had, chosen from a big litter that Irene had driven out to a faraway suburb to see. She’d always wanted a kitten, but her parents had disallowed it, so as a little girl, Irene used to cut pictures of cats from magazines, keep them in a shoe box, and rotate them out. Her paper kittens got laid on her pillow for sleep, got put beside her plate when she ate her meals. She taped them to her window so that they could
watch for her to come home from school. She had names for every one of them.

She told Sadie that she was so excited to go and get the cat, she had to keep taking her foot off the accelerator to avoid speeding. When she got there, she had no difficulty at all in making a selection: the kitten she chose, chose her—it walked up to her, sat at her feet, looked up and meowed. Irene named the kitten Gracie, and she bought it a blue collar with a silver name tag, two toys, and the best food she could afford. She prepared a bed in a box, using one of her flannel nightgowns to line it, though the kitten preferred to sleep with her.

After only four days, it died. Irene had no idea why; she woke up one morning and the kitten lay unmoving at the foot of her bed. She wondered if the tenants before her had put down some sort of poison that the kitten had found. She wondered if the kitten had been born with a fatal anomaly. She didn’t take it to a vet, for what could they do? Instead, she buried it in a nearby field, and decorated the little grave with the kitten’s collar and a bouquet of wildflowers. “I never told anyone about this,” she said, and then laughed at the tears she wiped away. “Good grief; I don’t know why I’m crying, it was so long ago!”

“You didn’t even tell Valerie?” Sadie asked.

Irene shook her head no.

“Why not?”

“Oh, she was out of town when I got it. And then, when she came back, there didn’t seem to be any reason to tell her. The cat was gone.”

“But it would have helped you to tell Valerie!” Sadie said, and Irene said, “No it wouldn’t. She would have tried to make me feel better, but she wouldn’t have been able to. And anyway, telling her about it would only make it bigger in my own mind. It would move it out into the world. I wanted to keep it as small as
possible, so that it would go away sooner. I needed to keep it to myself.”

So this need for a kind of secrecy, for autonomy, is something Sadie comes by honestly. And anyway, isn’t sparing her parents the details of what happened to her a kindness? They’ll only worry. Or blame themselves. She’ll call home when she’s feeling a little more stable. When she feels sure of the story she’ll tell.

She looks over at Ron. “Can we go somewhere and just talk?”

Ron drives to Golden Gate Park, and they leave the car on the Fulton Street side. In a wooded area, they find a grassy place and lie down beside each other. When Ron very gently takes her into his arms, she begins sobbing.

Ron says nothing, just holds her.

“I thought he might kill me,” Sadie says, finally. “And I was thinking how to be about that, I was trying to think of how to
be
. And I was going to try to be like my cat.”

“Like your cat?”

She laughs, despite her tears. “I know it sounds stupid, but he was … When he died, he was
okay
. And I wanted to be okay. I wanted to be grateful. Even though I was dying. I know it doesn’t make sense. But you can’t imagine what it’s like when you think you might die!”

“Yeah, I can, Sadie.”

“No,” she says. “It’s just an abstraction until something like this happens. You have no idea, Ron.”

“But I do know what it’s like. That’s part of what I was going to tell you today.”

“What do you mean? You said it was good news, what you were going to say.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“So tell me.”

He sits up, and she does, too, wipes her face and takes his hands. “
Tell
me!”

“Okay, so … When I was fourteen years old, I was diagnosed with cancer.”

“What? What kind of cancer?”

“Colon,” he says, then adds quickly, “But it’s gone. That’s the good news. Last week, I was at the five-year mark and I got all the usual tests. I went in yesterday for the results, and they told me everything was negative.”

She stares at him, doesn’t move.

“Negative meaning good,” he says. “He told me I’m one hundred percent cured.” He laughs. “It’s
gone
, man.”

Now she breathes out. She looks over at him: his hair, his ears, his soft mouth.

“I don’t get it,” she says. She means life.

“Me, either.”

“But you … Why didn’t you tell me this?”

“It wasn’t time.”

“Well, tell me now,” she says.

“What do you want to know?”

“I want to know everything. I didn’t even know kids got colon cancer.”

“They don’t, usually. One kid in one million is the statistic we were given. It was so weird, the day I was diagnosed. I had no idea anything big was wrong. I’d been having a little trouble with, you know, my bowels, and my mom took me in for a quick look-see, it was time for a regular checkup anyway. So he does this and he does that and then he says, ‘Ron, did you know we have some new fish out in the waiting room?’ He had this cool aquarium in his office, I used to love to watch the fish there. He said, ‘How about you go and check out the fish? I want to talk to your mom for a bit.’ I wasn’t really worried. Nothing hurt. I was
fine. The day before, I’d hit a grand-slam home run. I was
fourteen
.

“I went out to the waiting room and sat watching the fish, and after a while, the doctor called me back in and I could see my mom had been crying. I thought,
Oh, no, something’s wrong with my mom
, but then I saw in her eyes that it was me. I remember I got really cold, and I wanted to run. I thought,
If I get out of here, I won’t have to hear it, and it won’t be true. It won’t
be.

“I looked at the door, and the doctor must have sensed I was thinking about bolting, because he moved to stand in front of it. He said, ‘Ron, your mom needs to tell you something.’ So she stood up and came over to me and she took my face in her hands and she said, ‘Ron, you’re going to be fine, but you’re going to have to have an operation and then some medication for a disease we’ve just discovered that you have.’

“ ‘What disease?’ I said, and she told me colon cancer, and she just kept looking right in my eyes. And all I could think of was my dad, who died of that disease, how weak and thin he was at the end, just totally wasted. I said, ‘Dad died from that.’ And she said, ‘You are not Dad. And we’re going to get through this one day at a time. Today is the hardest day.’ ”

He looks over at Sadie and smiles. “It was a hard day, but it wasn’t the hardest.”

“Did you have to have chemotherapy?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you get sick?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Did your hair fall out?”

“Some. But I learned this rubber band trick; I put a rubber band right at my hairline, and it helped keep the medicine from going to my scalp. I lost a lot of hair anyway, but not all of it. You couldn’t really tell.”

“Were you scared?”

He looks up into the sky. “Yeah. My mom told me I’d be fine, but I did some digging around and I saw that the chances of surviving were practically nil. That was the hardest day, when I read that. Kids don’t fare well with colon cancer; it acts more aggressively in them, and it usually gets diagnosed later. By the time it’s found, it has spread all over. So that got to me. I read all that and I felt really scared. I thought a lot about death, what it might really be, what it would feel like to die. And then, all of a sudden, I just knew I’d be fine.”

“How did you know that?” Sadie asked.

“Well, I didn’t
really
know it, of course. It was more … I guess I kind of insisted on it. My mom had lost my dad to cancer; and I just decided that was enough for her to take.”

Sadie shakes her head.

“So anyway … Can I ask you something? Is this a big turnoff?” He laughs.

“No.”

“It’s not a turn
-on
, is it? Because that would be just as bad. That would be weird.”

She rises up on one elbow and looks at him. “It makes me see you better. It makes me know you better, too. I want to know every part of you.”

“Yeah, me, too. You, I mean.”

She lies back down, picks up a blade of grass and considers it. “So did this just completely change your view of life?”

“Well, it was a pretty intense education, right? At first, I didn’t know what to think. On the way home from the doctor’s office, everything looked so vivid. Really beautiful. I saw everything like I was seeing it for the last time or something. But then I kind of got used to having cancer. People say you can get used to anything, and it’s true. One thing that’s lasted is that I always try to find … 
the
better
part of everything. Like when I went for chemotherapy, I really liked this one nurse. So when I had to go for treatments, I didn’t think about how sick I’d get; I thought about how I’d get to see Leslie; she was really pretty and she always made me laugh. I guess my general orientation toward life is something that cancer gave me. The idea that, no matter how long we live, we don’t live long enough, so we’d better appreciate each other. And we’d better, you know, take risks, speak up.… I for sure learned that there aren’t many situations where you don’t have a choice about how you want to
be
about it. So when you said that about your cat … I get it.”

“Yes,” Sadie says.

“Anyway. That’s why I didn’t want to sleep with you. I didn’t want to get too involved if …”

“But now we can get involved?”

He smiles. “Oh, I’d say we’re involved all right. I’d say it’s a little more than that.”

Inside, she feels a wide ripple of pleasure. Of enormous relief. “I like you so much,” she tells Ron. “I love you. Actually.”

“
Love
’s a big word, Sadie.”

“I know. I know it is. But I do.”

“Okay, I need to tell you something. I had decided that, if I got bad news, I’d break up with you. I wouldn’t want you to have to be in on whatever followed. But if it was good news, I promised I’d tell you something else.