The Jewels of Tessa Kent (56 page)

“It’s so vitally important for her to keep eating,” Helen Lawrence fretted, sitting forward and fixing Maggie with earnest eyes. “I was very upset when Susan Hill told me Tessa had decided against any chemotherapy or radiation, but obviously,” she sighed, “treatment would have made it impossible to make all these public appearances for the auction that you’ve been telling me about.”

Maggie, too stunned to seize the deeper meaning of the doctor’s words, felt brute instinct telling her to maintain her calm at any price.

“Obviously,” she agreed in a voice that revealed nothing.

“Maggie, are you able to notice if she’s feeling any pain yet? Doctor Hill has all sorts of methods of keeping it under control, but of course, knowing Tessa, if she had a job to do, she wouldn’t use anything as strong as Roxanol, which really does the trick. She’d probably just pop a Percocet or a Dilaudid and get on with the show.”

“Roxanol?” Maggie asked casually, her nails biting into her palms.

“Morphine in an elixir, a liquid, form. It tends to slow you down and numb you, you’re not as alert or sharp as usual and you won’t be as willing to make the effort to eat. Food aversion is such a difficult thing to do anything about. Whatever you can do to get her to increase her fat intake is important, Maggie, since you’re traveling with her and seeing her every day. Most people with her kind of cancer lose a shocking amount of weight, and the last time I saw Tessa she didn’t have an extra pound on her to lose.”

“Fat intake?” Maggie parroted, sitting straight in her chair by using all her willpower.

“She’s never carried any extra weight, Maggie, you know that as well as I do.”

“True, but how about … about her kind of cancer?” Maggie said carefully, keeping her face as immobile as possible and her voice utterly level. If she didn’t find out
as much as she could from Doctor Lawrence, Tessa was entirely capable of not saying anything to anyone until she absolutely had to. “I don’t quite understand it.”

“That’s not surprising. Most people don’t. Pancreatic cancer is so rarely diagnosed before it’s spread. There usually aren’t any symptoms until it’s too late. If Tessa hadn’t come to me for something else she wouldn’t have known for months. Quite possibly not even now. Often it’s other people who notice when they see someone after a period of time and realize how thin they’ve grown.”

“ ‘Too late,’ too late to cure it, you mean?”

“Too late to treat it. Maybe someday there will be a cure, but not yet, Maggie, that’s the terrible pity of it. Thank goodness you’re having a baby—that’s going to be a great happiness and distraction for her. She’ll have lots of time to enjoy your baby, months and months with any luck.”

“Only … months? Not … a year?”

“Oh, yes, maybe a year, even a little more, God willing. We just don’t know.”

“Do you think … would it be a good idea … if I suggested that she stop making these trips?”

“No, absolutely not. Obviously South America agreed with her. She’ll know when she feels too tired to travel. With Tessa’s willpower, all this hoopla probably helps to keep her going, now that I think about it, and serves to distract her at the very least. The worst thing would be having too much time to think. Anyway, it’s her choice how she spends the time she has left.”

“How much … morphine is it safe to take?”

“As much as she wants, Maggie. I hate doctors who dole out pain relief to the dying. It’s not as if there’s a danger of long-term addiction, is there?”

“No, of course not, I never considered that.”

“No reason why you should,” Helen Lawrence replied briskly as she got up to show Maggie to the door. “Now be sure to take those vitamins I prescribed for you and make an appointment for a month from
now with my nurse. I’ll call you as soon as I have the results of all your blood work, but from everything I’ve checked, you couldn’t be healthier and you’re perfectly all right to travel. You’re very pale, but that’s what the winter in New York will do to a girl. I guess I should start calling you a ‘woman’ now, shouldn’t I?”

“I don’t care,” Maggie said, “it doesn’t make any difference.”

Maggie walked up Lexington Avenue as purposefully and quickly as she always did, although she was absolutely aimless. She wasn’t expected anywhere. Once she’d been able to get a doctor’s appointment, she’d told the office that she was taking the rest of the day off, since she and Tessa had arrived home so late the previous night.

Everything she passed, every store window, every traffic light, every man and woman on the street looked unnaturally bright and clearly outlined, as strangely and flatly illuminated as if she were walking through a comic strip. She crossed the street when other people crossed the street, she avoided the taxis that made their turns too close to the curbs, she kept from being jostled with her habitual agility, she put one foot quickly in front of the other to keep up with everyone else, but she wasn’t conscious of anything except Helen Lawrence’s words.

She didn’t feel shock, she didn’t feel sad, she didn’t feel surprise, she didn’t feel pity, she didn’t feel anything, Maggie realized. She felt blank, as blank as a sheet of white paper covered by fresh snow. She felt cold and blank and white. The only thing to do was to keep moving.

Maggie reached the Carlyle. Without bothering to have herself announced, she took an elevator directly up to Tessa’s floor. She rang, and when the maid opened the door she pushed by her and walked into the living room, where Tessa was arranging a vase of flowers.

“I saw Helen Lawrence this afternoon. She told me.
About you. About your cancer.” Her voice was hard and furious.

Tessa carefully adjusted a rose and straightened up as slowly as possible, putting off the minute when she’d have to look at Maggie’s face.

“Helen must have thought you knew,” she said calmly. “I was going to tell you in my own way, Maggie darling, but not yet, not until I had any real symptoms. I feel perfectly fine. I wouldn’t believe there was anything wrong if I didn’t know.”

“Don’t ‘Maggie darling’ me!
How could you, Tessa?
How could you be so cruel to me? Why didn’t you just leave things the way they were? Everything was great before you came along and dangled an irresistible auction in front of Liz—all she had to do was turn me over to you. You said Luke bought people—what about you? God damn you, Tessa, I didn’t need you, I didn’t miss you, I had my own life and you weren’t remotely part of it. I never gave you a thought. I didn’t hate you, I was indifferent. But now! You trapped me. How could you plan a way to
get
at me, how could you arrange it so that I’d find out what it was like to have a mother? You knew before you started that I’m going to lose you, but no, you weren’t satisfied to let me live my own life, you had to make me love you—”

“But that wasn’t—”

“Don’t tell me that! It was! You know you hoped I’d love you when I got to know you. Deny that!” Maggie challenged Tessa, her anger as unstoppable as breaking surf.

“I can’t deny that I wanted us to mean something to each other,” Tessa said in a voice that was all but demolished by Maggie’s rage. “I wanted to try to repair the things I’d done, I didn’t want to die without your forgiving me for the way I neglected you. I had to try to explain why it happened, no matter how ashamed I was of myself.”

“
Yourself
.” Maggie shouted. “Always yourself! That’s all you thought about,
your
needs and
your
reasons
and
your
feelings and
your
lies and why you did this and why you did that for endless whole lousy years! Did you ever put yourself in my place? Even for a minute? Just look at the way you acted in São Paulo, knocking yourself out, showboating, taking care of me as if the world depended on it. So what if I’d had a miscarriage? You knew I wasn’t married, what made you assume I even wanted to have a baby? It was an excuse, that’s all, you saw a chance to mother me and you grabbed it. Nothing was too much for you. Why didn’t you take care of yourself? You knew and you slept on those chairs! You knew and you spent your precious energy running around a hotel doing my job. How the fuck do you think that makes me feel? Guilty, that’s how, guilty as sin.”

“There’s not one single thing I did on the trip that will shorten my life and a rest cure wouldn’t make me better, didn’t Helen explain that? But seeing your baby … that’s going
to
make a big difference to me. I was just being selfish again.”

“I understand that, damn it, but it doesn’t help, don’t you understand anything? I still feel so terribly guilty and it’s all my fault. Why couldn’t I have opened at least one of those letters you kept sending, why was I so stubborn, why was I so devoted to collecting the injustice of it all, why did I never even try to find out your side of it? Oh, Tessa,
I can’t bear it
 … I literally can’t bear it.… I don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong anymore … I don’t know what to do …” Maggie faltered, as her storm of emotion swept her suddenly into the tumult of tears she hadn’t been able to shed before.

“Come sit down here.” Tessa tugged Maggie down onto a sofa and pulled her close. She wiped away the tears that streamed unceasingly down Maggie’s hot face, smoothing her cap of curls and giving her little kisses all over the cheek she could reach.

“Don’t blame yourself! If there’s only one thing I can tell you, it’s to not blame yourself. I’ve done enough of it for both of us. Please, Maggie, I’d have sent those letters
back just the way you did, honestly, truly, cross my heart. You had your pride and you were right to turn away from me. It was the least you could do. You were right to resent me. If I hadn’t found out how little time I had left, who knows what I would have done? Left you alone, in all probability. I never thought of it from your point of view, only from mine.”

“Oh, Tessa, what are we going to do now?” Maggie asked in a tone of uncomprehending anguish.

“We can’t walk out of the theater and ask for our money back,” Tessa said, with a note of genuine self-mockery in her voice, although tears were running down her cheeks and mingling with Maggie’s. “We’re stuck in our seats, we’ve got to make the most of the rest of the performance. At least we can sit next to each other and hold hands for as long as it lasts.”

“A pretty pair,” Maggie sobbed. “But what are we going to do?”

“Stop crying, I guess, and start living again.”

“I love you, Tessa. I’ve always loved you, even when I thought I didn’t, but now I love you so much more. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes, my own darling, my daughter, my little girl, I do. That’s what we’re going to do now, love each other, very hard and very much. That’s the only answer I can think of.”

“You’re going to tell me something you think I don’t want to hear,” Sam whispered to Tessa as she lay naked in his arms that evening. “Eli’s finished the script, hasn’t he, and they want you out on the coast tomorrow.”

“Why do you say that?” Tessa asked, her voice muffled in his chest.

“Because I’ve never been seduced the way you seduced me tonight … I felt like an innocent, young, untutored broth of a lad in the arms of a magnificent female who had decided to make a real man out of me. Is this what actors mean by ‘getting into the part’?”

“You thought I was being Cassie? Passionate Cassie?” Tessa asked, lifting her head.

“Passionate Tessa with something … astonishingly new, something I’d never even dreamed of before.”

If only it were that, Tessa thought, burrowing again into his arms. If only her frenzy had been Method acting, instead of a driving need to make love one last time before she had to tell him about her sickness, a last celebration of pure sexual playfulness during which he wouldn’t know about her cancer, in which such awareness couldn’t cross his mind while they were together.

“But what you don’t know, and couldn’t guess,” Sam continued, “is that I’ve made arrangements to begin my sabbatical year early so I’ll be able to spend it with you, while the picture’s being made. I realized I couldn’t let you go away on location without me, or rather, to be honest, I couldn’t stand to stay here while you were gone. I know it’s boredom squared to watch a picture being made so I’ll do research during the day and be there when you get back at night, or whenever you have a free minute. How does that sound to you?”

“Like a dream of impossible bliss.”

“Nothing impossible about it—it’s already arranged with the dean of my department.”

“But it can’t be, Sam.” Tessa sat up in bed, leaned against the headboard, and pulled a robe over her naked body. She took a shuddering breath and reminded herself that if she didn’t tell him now, she’d have to do it tomorrow because she couldn’t let him find out the way Maggie had. “It can’t be because I can’t make the film and I can’t make the film because I have cancer,” she said, forcing her voice to be as ruthlessly direct as a well-thrust dagger.

Sam swung his feet to the floor, his body reacting against the blow before his mind.

“I don’t believe it.”

“Yes, you do. You know I wouldn’t say it if it weren’t true.”

He looked at her sitting with her arms folded defensively
over her breasts, her hands balled into fists, and moved quickly toward her, until he could hold her fiercely close. “Tessa, we’ll fight it together, darling, you’re going to be all right, I promise you.”

“No, I’m not going to be all right, Sam.”

“
Don’t say that
. Whatever it takes, you have to do it, I’ll be with you every second.”

“There’s nothing to do.”

“Who told you that nonsense?”

“The doctor.”

“For God’s sake, Tessa, what kind of quack told you a thing like that? Tomorrow we’ll find the best doctor in New York—”

“Sam, Sam darling, listen to me. I’ve been to one of the best doctors in New York. I have pancreatic—”

“God! No!” He let her go abruptly, stood up, and punched the wall so hard that she could hear a bone in his hand break.

“Sam?” Tessa asked in the sudden silence.

“My father died of it.”

“So you understand.”

“Yes.”

“How old was he?”