The Perfect Stranger (4 page)

The Day My Life Changed Forever

It was a Wednesday: August 24, 2005.

Rain was pouring down as I drove to the doctor’s office after dropping the kids with a sitter. I was about to get the results from a routine biopsy that had been done after a routine mammogram showed something that was probably nothing, according to my doctor.

Probably was the key word there, but I wasn’t really worried. Not even when they called me in to get the results in person.

I wasn’t worried, either, when I heard on the car radio that the tropical depression out in the Atlantic had been upgraded to a tropical storm and named Katrina. I remember that the meteorologist reported that it would likely impact the Gulf later in the weekend, and that he had that breathless anticipation of a child discussing the prospects for a white Christmas.

Looking back, I’m struck that I paid so little attention to the forecast; that I failed to interpret the gloomy weather as a harbinger of catastrophe looming out on the water, much less inside the obstetrician’s office.

—Excerpt from Landry’s blog,
The Breast Cancer Diaries

Chapter 3

During the height of her cancer battle, Landry learned that sometimes going through the motions of a normal day can almost convince you that you’re living one.

So she forces herself to embark on her morning ritual: take a shower, get dressed, make the king-sized bed, and transfer the contents of the master bathroom hamper into a wicker basket.

With every task, she thinks about Meredith. What happened to her? How can she be dead?

She was so content with her life. It was obvious from every post she wrote that she loved every minute she had on earth.

So what wasn’t she saying?

After her electronic conversation with A-Okay earlier, Landry had gone back through Meredith’s blog posts for the past several months, trying to read between the lines. This time she thought she detected a bit more wistfulness than usual; perhaps a melancholy undercurrent here and there . . .

Maybe she was just seeing what she needs to see, though, in her retrospective search for rhyme and reason.

A-Okay didn’t have any details, either, and Landry couldn’t get a response from the other two bloggers she’d tried to reach.

Jaycee, who writes
PC BC
, lives in New York City. Elena, whose blog bears the irreverent title
The Boobless Wonder
, is somewhere in New England—Rhode Island, maybe, or Massachusetts? Knowing it’s an hour later on the east coast, Landry figures she must not have caught either of them before their workdays began. Elena is an elementary schoolteacher, while Jaycee . . .

What does Jaycee do, anyway?

Some kind of business—maybe finance? She travels a lot, Landry knows. But Jaycee doesn’t spend much time writing about her personal life on her blog, and was the only one of the regulars who didn’t write a post about the day she received her initial diagnosis when they all decided to share their stories a few months back. She doesn’t even post a head shot on her page, just a pink ribbon with a circle around it and a slash across it. As her blog title indicates—PC as in Politically Correct—she’s one of the more politically aware bloggers, concerned with what she calls the Cancer Industry rather than day-to-day, postdiagnosis details. She’s only been around for a year, maybe a year and a half.

Carrying the basket of dirty clothes, Landry makes her way along the upstairs hall, her mind settling on her children.

Just five minutes ago, it seems, they were toddlers: blond, blue-eyed Tucker the picture of his handsome daddy yet with his mama’s laid back demeanor; Addison resembling Landry, with her delicate features, pale green eyes, and silky dark hair, but motivated and energetic as Rob from the moment she could walk and talk.

Now Addison is going to be a high school senior and Tucker a sophomore. Soon he’ll be driving, and she’ll be off to college. Life is careening along, a blessed string of ordinary—and extraordinary—days.

Addison’s door is open. The white plantation shutters are parted so that sunlight splashes in through the windows. The quilt, in patterned shades of Caribbean sea foam, is neatly spread over the white iron bed, pillows plumped just so. A pile of magazines aligns at right angles with the edges of the nightstand, and the toiletries clustered on the bureau are precisely arranged as always. Stacked on an adjacent worktable are half a dozen compartmentalized plastic containers that hold the colored glass and metallic beads Addison uses to make jewelry.

Ambitious and goal oriented, with a lifelong flair for aesthetics, Landry’s daughter is already certain about her future: she’s planning to apply to Savannah College of Art and Design this fall, and intends to build a career in architectural or interior design.

For now, she works a few days a week in the gift shop over at the Grand Hotel. She’s off Wednesdays, but she likes to get up early anyway—unlike her brother, who just started at the hotel as a summer busboy.

Across the hall, Tucker’s door is still closed, but his alarm should be going off any minute. Not that he’ll hear it.

Landry knocks on his door, then opens it a crack. “Tucker? It’s almost time to get up.”

No response. She crosses the shadowy room, stepping over piles of clothes on the floor, and opens the shutters. Daylight falls over the mess—not just clothes, but soda cans and snack wrappers on every surface, CDs and video games lying around without their cases, stray electronics cords and chargers tangled like heaps of black and white spaghetti on the desk and floor.

“Tucker?”

No movement from the lump beneath the covers. Only a few tufts of dark hair are visible between the quilt and the pillow.

“Tucker . . . ”

“Tucker.”

“TUCKER!”

Finally, a muffled sound from her son.

Balancing the laundry basket on her hip, Landry marches over to the bed and pulls the covers away from his face. “Come on. Up.”

He throws a tanned, muscular arm across his eyes, and she notes the fuzz in his armpit and on his upper lip. Her little boy is becoming a man. A man who often acts like a little boy.

“Aw, come on, Mom,” he rumbles. His voice changed months ago, but sometimes the low pitch still catches her off guard. “My alarm didn’t even go off yet.”

“It’s about to. Get busy. This room is a mess. You have a lot to do before you leave. Get it? Got it? Good.”

That’s their thing:
Get it-got-it-good.
She and Tucker have been saying it to each other, usually to add a hint of lightheartedness to no-nonsense conversations, since he was a little boy. It used to make him laugh. Now he doesn’t crack a smile.

She gives him another nudge and then another, waiting until his gigantic bare feet are squarely planted on the hardwood floor before heading downstairs.

The large living room is her favorite spot in the house. White woodwork contrasts with wide-board hardwoods and walls painted a muted, mossy shade of grayish green. Couches and chairs with cushy upholstery in soothing earth tones are clustered into several seating areas: near the fireplace, facing the flat screen television, and in a cozy nook lined with bookshelves. Paned glass windows and doors line the back wall, opening onto the lower level of the double-decker porch overlooking the landscaped yard and, beyond, the hundred-year-old boardwalk and the bay.

Landry crosses into the dining room, passing the formal table they use only on holidays and the built-in cabinets holding china that’s been in her family for over a century.

On the wall is a gallery of family photos. Some are vintage shots of ancestors who settled around Mobile before the Civil War. Others are more recent: hers and Rob’s wedding day, the kids’ baby pictures, toddler and elementary school shots, a couple of family portraits. The four of them with her parents—one of the last snapshots before her father’s fatal heart attack a few years back. The four of them with Rob’s parents, his brother Will, and his sister Mary Leigh and her husband at their Christmas destination wedding in the Caribbean.

Landry doesn’t like to look at that one. In it, her smile is forced. So is Rob’s, and the kids’, too. Not just because they were all jet-lagged after flight delays, or because no one wanted to spend the holidays away from home, or because they weren’t crazy about Mary Leigh’s new husband, Wade—but because breast cancer had struck just a few months earlier.

At the time, she was miserable and terrified, and so were her husband and children.

She really should take down that picture. Maybe some of the others as well. Make room for new memories. Happier ones.

Landry continues on into the kitchen, with its custom-built cherry cabinetry, sleek stainless steel appliances, and slate floor. They had just finished remodeling it when she was first diagnosed, and one of the first things that popped into her head in the doctor’s office that day was that after all the renovation stress, she wouldn’t be around to enjoy the new space.

We probably shouldn’t have wasted all that extra money on the gourmet six-burner stove and double ovens,
she’d thought, since no one else in the family even cooks.

She kept that regret to herself, of course, not wanting the doctor to think she was shallow.

When she later blogged about it—about the crazy thoughts that run through your mind in those first few moments when you assume you’re going to be dying of, and not living with, or after, cancer—she found out that she wasn’t alone.

Her online friends shared similar initial reactions to their diagnoses. One confessed that she was irrationally concerned about having just booked a nonrefundable timeshare; another said she rushed to cancel an expensive salon treatment, saying it felt wrong to waste time and money on hair that was just going to fall out anyway.

Though Landry had long since forgiven herself for fretting about her fancy appliances in the wake of the doctor’s bombshell, it made her feel better to know that she wasn’t alone.

It always does, doesn’t it?

Yes. It helps to know there’s someone out there who can say, “I know exactly what you mean!” or “Wow, you too? I thought I was the only one!”

So often, Meredith was that person, and now . . .

“ ’Morning, Mom.” Landry’s firstborn is sitting on a stool at the granite-topped breakfast bar, eating a container of Greek yogurt in front of her open laptop.

“ ’Morning,” she returns, finding comfort in the sight of her daughter. Addison is just a kid, but there’s always something reassuring about her presence in a room.

“She’s an old soul,” Landry’s friend Everly likes to say. When her marriage ended, she developed a fascination with New Age philosophy. Sometimes—like with her observations about Addison—her groovy insight feels dead on. Other times it’s out there. Waaaay out there.

Addison’s damp hair hangs long and loose, tucked behind her ears to reveal beadwork earrings that match her bracelet—all handmade, of course, by Addie herself. She’s wearing a pair of cutoffs that bare her toned, tanned legs and a tank top that barely covers her taut midriff.

Oh, to be sixteen going on seventeen again. Oh, to look like that . . .

Again?

No. At that age, she might have had the same coloring, hairstyle, and build, but her daughter has a confident poise that she herself lacked. Addison is Rob, through and through.

Addie glances up from the computer screen, then takes a closer look at her mother’s face, and immediately asks, “What’s wrong?”

“Why?”

“You look upset. What happened?”

“I got some bad news this morning.” Setting the laundry basket on the slate floor, she quickly explains about Meredith.

Addison digests the information, then reaches out to touch Landry’s arm. “I’m sorry, Mom. I guess it doesn’t help to hear that her suffering is over and she’s in a better place?”

“No, it does . . . I just . . . I wish I’d known in the first place that she was suffering.”

“Maybe she wasn’t.”

“Maybe not.”

But she doesn’t believe it. She’s seen it happen among her online friends too many times to think that there’s an easy way out.

“Meredith never even mentioned that she was sick again,” she says, more to herself than to Addie.

“Really? Well, then, maybe she wasn’t. Just because she’d
had
cancer doesn’t mean she
died of
cancer. Maybe something else happened to her. A car accident, or a heart attack, or—” Addison cuts herself off abruptly. “Sorry. I guess that doesn’t make it any better. But you said it seemed sudden, so . . . I don’t know. I was just looking at it logically and thinking maybe it
was
sudden.”

“You’re right. I’m so used to assuming . . . you know. Cancer.”

“I know. But so many people survive it, Mom. Look at your grandma. She had it, was cured, and then died of old age.”

“Meredith wasn’t old enough for that. She’d just turned sixty. But her daughter did say . . .” She hesitates, trying to remember the wording of the post. “I think she said she was still in shock.”

Seeing the troubled shadow cross her daughter’s green eyes, Landry remembers that she’s the adult here and Addie’s just a kid, old soul or not.

She abruptly changes the subject. “What are you going to do on your day off?”

“I’m not sure yet. Maybe I’ll go shopping. I need a new bathing suit.”

Ordinarily, Landry would offer to go along, but today she’s not in the mood. Instead, she offers her credit card and use of the car, then carries her basket full of clothes toward the laundry room off the kitchen.

A few minutes later, as she’s pouring detergent into the washing machine, Addison calls out urgently from the next room.

“Mom? You need to come in here. Hurry!”

Landry doesn’t bother to start the washer, hurrying back to the kitchen to find her daughter still seated at the breakfast bar. The yogurt container is pushed aside on the counter and she’s leaning over her laptop, delicately arched eyebrows furrowed as stares at the screen.

“You said your friend’s name is Meredith and she lives in Cincinnati, right?”

“That’s right. Why?”

“I plugged that and her age into Google—is her last name Heywood?”

“Heywood. With an e. Yes. Why?” she asks again, already leaning in to look over her daughter’s shoulder.

“This is from a Cincinnati newspaper. It was just posted. I’m . . . I’m really sorry, Mom.”

Addison points at a headline.

Landry stares.

LOCAL WOMAN MURDERED IN APPARENT HOME INVASION

“Is that . . . is that—” She can’t seem to get the words out.

Addison points mutely at name in the lead paragraph.

Meredith Heywood.

“Dad?”

When her father, sprawled in the leather recliner where he spent the night, doesn’t turn around, Rebecca Heywood Drover crosses into the den and reaches out to gently touch his shoulder.

He jumps, and jerks his head to look at her with wide, red-rimmed eyes. “Beck! You scared the hell out of me.”

Three days’ worth of beard shadows Hank Heywood’s lower face, and his brown hair has gone mostly gray since Beck saw him before all this—before he left to take care of Gram in Cleveland, before Mom . . .