The Instant When Everything is Perfect (15 page)

Mia bends down to pet Mitzie, and then Dick and his dog leave, Mitzie’s tags jangling as they walk away. Mia closes the front door and then takes the envelope into the kitchen, where Sally can hear her cutting at it with the kitchen shears. Then there is the tinkle of pills in a plastic bottle and the rush of tap water.

Mia walks back into the living room and puts a little blue oblong pill in Sally’s palm and gives her the glass of water.

“There you go.” Mia stands over her, her hands on her hips.

“What is it?” Sally asks, but she doesn’t wait, putting the pill on her tongue and swallowing it down.

Pushing her hair away from her forehead, Mia cocks her head and holds Sally’s gaze. This is what Mia has always done before she lies, the very move she’s made since she could talk and make up stories. Maybe this is what she has to do when she writes, the crooked way she looks on the world.

“It’s for pain. It will make you feel better.”

Sally sighs and hands Mia the glass. Mia walks toward the kitchen, and in the instant, a slash of sun rounds the house and hits her neck, warming Sally’s skin. At its pulsing, light touch, Sally wants to weep, loving how the heat and light bathe her firmly, gently, not letting her go. Back in the kitchen, Mia suddenly begins to hum, the melody a song Sally recognizes as her own, a made up song her mother sang to her.

Sally closes her eyes. She’ll give it, this, all of it, two more days. If she doesn’t feel better, she’ll find the gun, the knife, the hose. It’s possible that all those long, loose things she hid from David are still in the trunk she brought from the old house. But with whatever she can find, Sally will end it all. And for now? She closes her eyes, lets the sun tell its daily story on her skin, listens to the highs and lows of the familiar lullaby her oldest daughter pushes out into the air, and falls asleep.



Later that afternoon, she doesn’t argue when Mia helps her up the stairs, and she doesn’t cry again, though she waits for her tears, even as she falls asleep. The next day, she even finds herself smiling when Mia drives them over to her house and Harper tells them the story of how a cop pulled him over because his girlfriend was sitting in the back seat.

“Looked weird,” the cop said.

“I’m pretending he’s my chauffer,” Harper’s then girlfriend Lizette told him. “Keeps him in line. Reminds him who’s really the boss.”

When this happened, Mia told Sally what Harper is omits, the part about the cop finding Harper driving with only one pant leg on. Harper only told Mia the truth when she threatened to call the cops and find out why they were pestering the youth of Monte Veda.

“I think the cops are a form of birth control,” Mia said. “I’m going to just going to let them do what they do.”

Later during the visit, Sally holds the phone when Lucien calls from college to talk about his philosophy class, and tells her that no one has free will. “It’s a grid. It’s all planned. You can’t stop it.”

“Who?” she asks her grandson. “Who plans it?”

“That’s the big question,” Lucien says, now done with his theory of life. “How are you, Grandma? Are you doing okay?”

If she is, she wants to tell him, it’s not because of her will. Someone planned it. Someone is making her feel better.

“I’m okay,” she says, not knowing if she means it.

“I’m not coming home for spring break,” Lucien says. “But when I come home for summer, we’ll go to the movies.”

And somehow—Sally’s not sure why or how or when, exactly—two days pass, and then three and at some point, something begins to close in Sally’s body, and it’s not her incisions. Something that was wide open and gaping and full of sadness has shut, at least partially. The jagged, harsh tear of grief that had made her want to grab Dick Brantley by the shirt collar and beg him for relief has lessened, as if sadness was a radio station she just turned down. By the following morning after that, she manages to switch the station off for most of the day, the morning the hardest part. But after Mia helps her shower and then they go down to eat breakfast, she feels lighter.

Sally looks at the little dish of pills Mia set out on the table, knowing that something in the mix of blue and white and yellow is helping her. Of course whatever is making her feel better is something here on earth and not a square in Lucien’s god grid. Besides, Sally knows that she’s not evolved enough to fix herself on her own. She’s known that since David died.

By the time of her follow up appointment, a little over a week after the surgery, Sally sits straight on the examination table, her shoulders held back.

“Are you getting around at home okay?” Dr. Jacobs asks.

Sally nods. “Mia’s been there with me since the operation.”

Mia looks at the doctor and smiles, and Dr. Jacobs reaches over and pats Mia’s knee. “I bet you feel like running away from home about now.”

Though Sally feels a tiny ripple of loss run through her body, she barks out a laugh, the sound harsh and different and almost scary. Both the doctor and Mia look at her, and then smile, seeing that the sound—though unexpected—is happy.

“She left at seventeen, and I know she didn’t plan on coming back,” Sally says. “But I don’t know what I would have done without her.”

Dr. Jacobs nods, and Sally wonders if she can tell her about the gun. Maybe this is a normal reaction, women all over the world craving steel and power and forgetfulness just after the surgery that takes their breasts. Perhaps this is information for a medical journal, and the very idea seems distant to Sally, as if it wasn’t just a week ago that she wanted to smatter her brains over a wall.
Maybe I’ll tell Mia later
, she thinks.
Maybe one day she will write about it
.

Doctor Jacobs places her fingers gently on Sally’s neck and upper chest, feeling for what? Sally can’t remember now what she should be scared about. Something about her lymph nodes? Swelling? Watching the wall as the doctor’s hands move patiently along her body, Sally knows that she is done. Finished. It’s time to start fresh.

“I’ve changed my mind,” Sally blurts out.

“About what?”

“About reconstruction. I don’t want it. Not now, not ever.”

Mia uncrosses her legs and leans her elbows on her knees. “Mom? When did you decide this?”

“Today. I don’t want to go through that. All that stretching and filling of saline and the like.”

Sally looks down at Dr. Jacobs, who blinks, bites her lip, nods. “I did a skin saving mastectomy.”

“I know.”

“You will most likely want me to go in eventually and reduce the amount of skin. Smooth out your chest.”

Sally feels the doctor’s words rush along her bare arms. But she knows she’s already lost the most important parts, and a little skin removal is nothing. Not one thing. Maybe she won’t even have it removed. But if she does, she’ll be as smooth and free as an eight-year-old girl.

“Of course. After the chemo, right?”

Dr. Jacobs writes in the chart. “Right. I’ll confer with your oncologist, Dr. Gupta. And I’ll let Dr. Groszmann know as well.”

Sally plucks at the ties on her gown and then smoothes the fabric over her thighs. “Thank you, doctor. I’m sorry I waited so long to decide.”

Dr. Jacobs stands and smiles, setting down the chart and putting on a pair of latex gloves. “Better you decided now than after you got the implants. So, let’s see how your incisions are doing.”

Sally opens her gown, noticing, as she does, that Mia isn’t looking at her but at the diagram on the wall with the woman with one breast, her mastectomy scar like a wicked wink, a one sided smile, a half a kiss on her perfect chest.

“Mia?” Sally says, and Mia looks up, her face not that of the forty-two-year-old woman she is, but that of the girl Sally remembers at David’s funeral, the one begging her mother to tell her, “What will happen next, Mom. What are we going to do?”

Then as now, Sally has no answer. No information that would have prepared them for the lives they’ve all led since then, Mia, Katherine, Dahlia, and Sally. No words could have foretold any of it.

We have to live through it
, she wants to say now, understanding, finally, that these words are true. But she has no voice for them, can feel nothing but Dr. Jacobs’s stethoscope on her chest, the cold metal against her wounded skin.

Seven

Mia

For the first day in over a week and a half, Mia is alone. Sally is at home, Nydia Nuñez sitting with her until three, when Dick Brantley will come over with Mitzie. He promised Mia that he would make Sally walk down her front path and then up and down the street once, maybe twice.

The strange thing is that Sally agreed to the arrangement, not arguing as Mia expected she would.

“Sure,” she said. “Dick and Mitzie and I will tear up the street. I’ve just got to remember not to swing my arms.”

Since Dr. Jacobs removed the drainage tubes, Sally has felt a little sore, tender at her incisions, scared to move too fast for too long. But she wanted the walk, wanted Nydia and Dick, wanted Mia to go home.

“I’ll come over at six with dinner,” Mia promised.

“I don’t need a thing,” Sally said.

“Mom, I’ll be there later.” And then she left Sally’s condo, feeling as though she could breathe for the first time in weeks.

Now she sits at her desk at home, her computer screen open to her latest novel, a story she doesn’t know how to write any more. Before Sally’s diagnosis, Mia had loved this plot, one about two sisters who basically raise themselves after their father’s death. It’s set in the seventies, and Mia researched all the music and clothes and movies, laughing as she remembered all their terrible haircuts and huge bell-bottom pants.

But since Sally’s call, her “I have some bad news,” Mia hasn’t known how to be in the seventies anymore. She doesn’t want to be there at all, close to the time when David died. Even though the story is not about her and Katherine and Dahlia, she doesn’t want to remember what is was like in that house. What she wants is here, now, in the new millennium.

After the night she kissed Robert Groszmann on the cheek, she went home and lay down in bed next to Ford, watching his smooth back all night. He breathed slowly, up and down, his rhythm, all his rhythms, so familiar, so known, so calming. She pressed up next to him, and promised him silently that she would never talk with Robert Groszmann again. She wouldn’t look for him or email him or talk to him. She would forget how he looked at her as they sat across from each other at the cafeteria table. She would ignore the way her body wanted his. It was over, over, over. It was over before she had more to feel guilty about.

She softly stroked Ford’s shoulder and vowed to ask him again to go to counseling, even if he would get angry life before and say, “We don’t need it. We’re fine.”

She’d ask again, bring up the sex, knowing that he’d say, “It’s not my fault.”

That night she promised to do all these things, and she’s kept most of the promise.

She asked Ford to pick up Sally and bring her back to the condo, telling him she needed to set up the sickroom. Instead of calling Robert and asking him to prescribe an anti-depressant, she called Dr. Jacobs, who arranged for the drugs to be delivered to Sally’s house.

Mia’s avoided her email entirely, even though she knows that she is probably missing messages from her agent, editors, colleagues, and friends. But she doesn’t care. If it’s important enough, they will call. Later, after a long while, she will open her email and delete all the messages without looking at them, never knowing if he wrote back or not. And because Sally has decided not to have reconstruction, there will never be any excuse to have to see Robert Groszmann again. Not one. Not ever.

And tonight? Tonight she'll bring up the counseling. Tonight, she’ll do it.

But now she can’t write. She turns to look outside her window and watches the goldfinches fighting over their positioning on the thistle seed bag she bought at Orchard Nursery. Birds seem to fight constantly, each seed a victory. She’s been staring at the bag for so long, she can recognize the finch that usually wins the fight, a scruffy female, her olive colored wings a bit ruffled from scuffles. But there she is, time after time, right in the middle of the bag on the thickest bulge of seed.

If she’s not watching the birds, she’s watching the squirrels eat the discarded bits off the ground below. If not the squirrels, it’s her cats sitting on the fence. One writer she read about taped his office windows dark with paper and then wore a blindfold while writing, so all he would concentrate on were his words. The idea of that makes Mia want to bolt outside. She needs to see. She needs to breathe.

But she can’t breathe anywhere right now. If she tries, she takes in Robert, the smell of his cheek, the taste of his skin on her lips. When she closes her eyes, she sees him pushing his hair back from his forehead, smoothing his perfect long ponytail. As she stares at her month-old words on the screen, she hears his voice, hears him say, “I’m drawn to you.”