The Milestone Tapes (3 page)

“Jenna,” his voice was full of the pleas he’d imposed on her over the past few days since she leveled her decision. He didn’t make them now, he just let the weight of what was left unsaid hang in the air.

“No, Gabe. Just don’t, please. Okay? The decision has been made, stop pretending as though there is still room for discussion because it just makes it harder for me.” She snuggled into his back, her body responding to his unspoken words, begging him to solve this with something, anything. Moments like this were being numbered starting today. The long goodbye.

Gabe threw the covers off and slipped out of bed, padding towards the bathroom without another word, anger and despair radiating off him like steam. It was thick and suddenly she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t wish herself back to three years ago, back to the memories that were so sweet and good. Rolling onto her back, Jenna looked up into the sky, tears of frustration, desperation and disappointment slipping from her eyes, wetting the pillow below her. The early morning clouds rolling in from the sea slugged by overhead, and she remembered this was exactly why she had championed the glass ceiling. Why waste time painting something in a likeness when you could have the real thing, she had said. Gabe had worried about the moon being too bright, the room being too hot, but Jenna had known this would be perfect.

This was killing them all. It had killed them over the years by inches, little by little with each moment it stole and each day it progressed. Her cancer had been their cancer, each of them sick with it in their own way. It hung over their lives, heavy like rain soaked clouds pouring down on them. If the first three years had been a practiced bliss, the last three years had been learned heartbreak.

After the doctors had found, and subsequently confirmed, the lump, she had rallied. She saw the right doctors, she sipped the right tea, she lay perfectly still while the medical tattoo artist marked her breast for radiation. She swallowed the pills dutifully with bottles of entirely pure water, she willingly removed her breasts, nipples, lymph nodes, glands and muscles praying to get it all. Take everything, she had bargained. Leave me with my life.

When it spread, she smiled blithely and bravely as the nurse slipped the needle into her shunt and opened the trickle of healing poison through her veins. She endured and prayed and hoped hard. Time slipped and faded into scenes of Jenna crumbled on the cool stone floor of the bathroom, retching hollowly into the toilet, brushing her hair out in patches when the chemotherapy stole that from her too, nursing her radiation burns with specific ointment, braving it all stoically.

There was never a moment that wasn’t subject to the precursor of treatment or disease. Birthday parties postponed or canceled entirely because Jenna was sick or was feeling better. God forbid one of Mia’s friends had a cold and attended. Holidays thrown together last minute for the sake of Mia because Jenna couldn’t muster more than that. And her marriage, what didn’t she sacrifice from that as well? The intimacy, spontaneity, and humor all slipped and changed. It felt like a tally of losses without a single win.

The home, once full of prosperity and well-being, was a hallow shell of its former self. Everything that had been a source of pride for the Chamberlands had shifted under the weight of reality. Landscapers now tended the gardens, a full time nanny was hired to care for Mia in shifts so that Gabe was free to meet Jenna’s ever pressing needs. Casseroles arrived on the doorstep like clockwork to feed the family during the bleakest moments when the treatment crushed Jenna to nothing.

Because of (or, in spite of) that, Jenna tired harder. Jenna cultivated a world that would make sense of the senseless for Mia. On not so good days, Jenna would encourage Mia to crawl into bed with her, and snuggling together, they would read stories, talk about school, or play with Mia’s menagerie of stuffed animals, Barbies or My Little Ponies, giving them voices and characters. On good days, Jenna would rise from bed and help Mia with her homework, encouraging the budding creativity, tuck her into bed at night and say their prayers together. If it had been a really good day, they would skip the heavy stuff all together and play hooky from real life and school. Hand in hand they would stroll the main street, burden free and normal, snacking on hand churned ice cream, splurging on impractical clothes, catching a movie and gorging themselves on buttery, salty popcorn.

But more often than not, there were really bad days. It was then that Jenna she was physically pained more so by the limitation imposed by her disease than the disease itself. Any common bug, flu or cold could kill her. In her weakened state, her immune system couldn’t handle any more outside stressors, her doctors had pleaded with reason; it wasn’t unheard of for the common cold to destroy someone, so naturally Mia became off limits.

Jenna would sit by the bedroom door, her ear pressed against the solid panes listening to her little girl play with the Nanny so freely; running through the halls as a princess or ballerina or magical pony, telling about her day at school, her friends and teachers, or engaging the nanny for help with homework. Jenna would break and shatter under the disappointment. That should have been her, she’d obsess, her hands balled at her sides and tears running uninterrupted down her sallow cheeks. She should be huddled over homework, or knee deep in Barbie clothes, or chasing after Mia cackling like a wicked witch enthralled by the game of make believe. She shouldn’t be sidelined while hired help raised her baby. Her daughter. But she was, and the further the tentacles of the disease spread, grabbing the remaining bits and pieces of her life and swallowing them whole, the more removed she had to become.

But always at night, Jenna would sneak into Mia’s room. She would gather her sweet daughter’s plump pink hands, and then Jenna would sink beside the bed on her knees and pray her own prayers.

She had spent those nights silently talking to God. Promising and pleading, appealing and eventually bartering, offering anything for more time and restored health— if not both, then please just one. She’d stare at her daughter’s shell pink lips, parted and slack with sleep, dreams running wild in her head, and Jenna would sweep Mia’s curly brown hair from her slightly sweaty forward, pressing her hand against it, trying to feel those dreams with the palm of her hand. Sometimes she would walk the room she had obsessed over. Every detail had been planned so perfectly, creating the nest that Mia would find her comfort in: the oyster pink walls, the crisp white bead board, the thick crown molding, the soft cream carpeting. She mused over the new big-girl-bed, remembering the crib Mia had since outgrown with its billowing taffeta drapery. Jenna had replaced it with a wrought iron double, roses reaching up the posts, right before she was diagnosed. She had loved the fact that the bed resembled a garden. Jenna had believed during those days, before nothing was more important, that a bed like this would bring about good dreams.

God had answered Jenna. Jenna was visiting her primary Seattle oncologist alone when he had leveled the blow. The cancer, at this stage, was no longer something they could fight and beat. Breast, brain, bone, blood, he had said morosely. They could fight, he explained compassionately, but they wouldn’t win. Winning was lost to them now.

Jenna had sobbed, screamed and begged. She couldn’t believe that, not after they had come so far in the past three years. There was no way she could simply roll over in defeat. But, as Jenna had learned, tears didn’t change anything.

She had boarded the air shuttle for home feeling nothing and everything in the exact moment. Exhausted from the emotional overload, she leaned her head against the Plexiglas window of the plane and let her eyes slip shut.

“Jenna, honey, you in there? You okay?” The knock and calling voice at the door was so sweet, soft and nurturing that it made Jenna’s heart seize up. Ginny.

“Hey Gin, I’m here and I’m okay. Just getting going, you know. We’ll be leaving in a few.” Jenna rolled from bed, planting her feet on the floor. Time, more time, had slipped past her.

“Okay, sugar, I’ll fix you and Gabe something to eat for the road,” and with that, the heavy footfalls retreated down the hallway towards the kitchen.

Jenna tapped lightly on the door of the bathroom and turned the handle in the same moment. Gabe sat on the rim of the tub. His hands shielded his face and his shoulders hunched over, elbows planted squarely on his thighs. He wasn’t moving and showed no signs of doing so any time soon.

“Gabe ... ” Jenna sunk down beside in him of the lip of the tub. She put her arm around his waist and rested her chin on his shoulder. “Please.”

“I’m just, just not ready. I wish I could be, you know--for you. But I’m just not there and I’m just fucking angry,” he looked up his eyes looked raw and red.

“You think I’m ready, Gabe? Seriously? No, I’m not ready either. I’ll never be ready. I’m scared and I’m fucking furious too. I’m also all sorts of things, the least of which is not hopeful.” She looked at him then without blinking, willing him to believe her; it was a look of sheer honesty, one they had traded so many times in their marriage.

She wasn’t quitting on him, or them or their responsibilities. She was giving everyone a chance. An ending come much too soon, but she’d be damned if it’d be anything short of happy or the closest to okay that she could make it. By stopping her treatments, they’d have time. God had given her that much, answered that prayer in a way it seemed. Would that time be six months or a year? No one knew and no one could tell her. But whatever it was, they’d have that, and it would count, this time would matter.

Mia could have friends over and if one of them had a cold, Jenna could just hand them a tissue. Gabe could take his wife to dinner and they could share a bottle of wine without worrying about the drug interactions. They could take a proper family vacation to somewhere warm and far away. Jenna could obsess over homework like a normal mother and cook hearty meals herself; they could trash all the take-out menus. Mia and Jenna could spend the summer planting flowers in the garden or go shelling on Hollywood Beach. They could take the ferry to Victoria or spend the day whale watching at Ocra Islands just off the Sound. Jenna could even, maybe, write just one more book and read a few cover to cover. They would have a snippet of life back, and if that were all she could offer them, then she would do just that and accept the consequences, which were coming regardless.

When Jenna had closed her eyes on the plane as it lifted off back to Port Angeles last week, a wash of calm had swallowed her. The decision that she had fought against for the past three years now was her harbor of peace. She had found it, finally. Stop fighting, Jenna, just stop. She’d enter into acceptance now and find a home in there.

Jenna stood up beside Gabe, taking his hand in her own and gently tugged him, urging him to stand up. She rose up on her toes and kissed him hard on the lips. Sighing deeply into his mouth. He felt so good. He had always felt so good to her. The passion of their relationship and ebbed and flowed over the years and dipped significantly when she had gotten sick, but she still loved him like crazy and that had never, ever changed. Never would. She lifted his shirt over his head, pressing herself against his bare chest, rippled with taut muscles and a soft smattering of hair. She backed away lifting her own shirt over her head. Once, not so long ago, she had shied away from these moments of raw exposure, her chest a plate of slashes and scars that wrapped around her back and upward into the crook of her arm pit. After her radical mastectomy, she had never felt less womanly; the breasts that filled her sexy dresses and feed her baby had been removed, leaving behind a complex circuit of drains and staples, which eventually healed to a web of violent scars. But in that moment, she lost the ability to care or feel even the slightest hitch of modesty. She felt him move away from her, twisting the handle of the shower on, and as steam filled the stall, they stepped inside together, lost to the outside world entirely.

“Ginny?” Jenna called as she made her way down the long hall towards the kitchen dressed in a soft cashmere sweater dress and black leggings with casual leather flats. The smell of warm sugar toast and coffee wafted around the bright, large space. Ginny never failed to make the house feel good just by walking through the door and made it feel even better when she set herself in the kitchen whipping her way around a meal. She was a naturally bright, warm, kind woman.

“Oh Jenna! Look at you, you look good!” Ginny smiled from across the kitchen table, sipping a steaming cup of coffee. The table was set for a party of one, awaiting the presence of Mia, who would devour her French toast and scamper off to play in the few precious moment before school.

“Ginny, you lie” Jenna bent down, giving Ginny a strong hug.

Ginny had found Jenna. For the first few months after the initial diagnosis, before the reality of what that would mean set in, Jenna tried to do it all. She cared for Mia and tended the house during the day, balancing that with her treatments and appointments, and wrote her stories at night. It worked, for a while. Jenna wore down fast; the neighborhood mothers had pushed for her to entertain the thought of “help.” They could have afforded care easily, but it was the idea that had horrified Jenna at the time. Handing off her bright, bubbly toddler to a stranger who would talk endlessly to her boyfriend on the phone and feed Mia nothing more than Mac and Cheese or pizza? No. Things were bad enough; she couldn’t handle knowing Mia wasn’t being loved enough or being handled by a stranger who didn’t care at all what Mia would need emotionally. Mia would need firm love more than ever.