Two Sisters: A Novel (21 page)

“You don’t know what to say to me?” Pia wanted to shout. “Too bad. I didn’t invite you here. I’m going to die and so are you. Deal with it.”

How was she feeling? That’s what Will wanted to know?

Pissed.

Cancer, she now knew, was like a recurring spousal argument.

“You think I
want
to nag you?”

“Apparently.”

“What I
want
is for you to take care of things without me having to ask you to.”

“You don’t feel taken care of? This house? Those shoes? Your life?”

“That’s not what I mean and you know it.”

“What I know is that you don’t have to be on my case every minute.”

“If I don’t say something, it doesn’t get done.”

“Try me.”

“Deal.”

Briefly, things get better. Until the inevitable relapse.

“You can’t
smell
that garbage?”

Cancer doesn’t listen. It doesn’t give a damn.

Let it go
, you tell yourself.
It’s beyond your control.
Tuck your anger beneath the blessings in your life. Pray.
Be strong and courageous. For the Lord, your God, goes with you. He will not leave you or forsake you.

It’s only garbage. Is it so awful that it reeks? Turn the other cheek. Walk away. And when you see the dirty socks on the floor, the wet towel draped over the edge of the tub, the pile of junk mail scattered on the kitchen table, the coffee mug making a ring on the bedside table with the coaster right
next
to it, turn away again.
Let it go.
Breathe. Focus on the positive.

Cancer doesn’t listen. It doesn’t give a
shit.
It’s a petulant, disrespectful man-child leaving bits of blackened tissue all over your body. Forcing you to clean up its mess. A
bout
with cancer? Who initiated that idiotic phrase? Cancer is a siege, a war, a massacre, not a spell. Jesus.

Will, God bless him, was suffocating. All that hovering. As if
he
could make Pia better by following her from room to room. Why had he never had time for her when she was well? Now, when she needed solitude to wallow, bald headed, behind her closed bedroom door, curled in a ball beneath the covers with her face buried deep in the pillow, screaming,
now
he was available to take her emotional temperature every minute?

“Feeling scared, honey? Sad? Frustrated? Upset?”

All of the above. Satisfied? Now leave me alone.

And why didn’t anyone warn her that her husband
would
leave her alone? He’d stop reaching for her in the middle of the night and she’d stop wanting him to well before that? That she’d cease to feel like a woman entirely?

The therapist who made the rounds each week in the chemo basement had a way of softly stroking Pia’s hand that drove her mad. She said, “It’s okay to admit you’re scared.”

Scared? Bull
shit
. Pia was exhausted. Bucking up wore her out. Pretending she wasn’t dying because nobody could handle it, well, that sucked the life out of her more than the rampaging cells now eating away at her lungs. Fury seemed to be the only thing able to fight its way through her collapsed veins.

“Want to help me? Explain why I got breast cancer at thirty-one? Not even old enough for a baseline mammogram! Explain to me how I was expected to believe that a mass in my breast was cancer? Women my age have cysts, not cancer.”

“I hear that you’re upset.”

“You’re damn right I’m upset. I’m not the cancer type.”

“What type would that be?” The therapist’s supercilious tone made Pia want to douse her in chemo juice.

“You know exactly what I mean—women who are unable to express their feelings. Doormats. That’s not me at all. How many times had I told Will that his twelve-hour workdays made me feel like a single parent? And when Emma’s school was considering adding more vending machines, I wrote a furious letter. Why, a couple of weeks ago, I asked Blanca to stop wearing that flowery perfume when she came to work. It was giving me a headache. Does a woman who can’t communicate say
that
?”

The damn therapist didn’t answer, merely nodded and stroked Pia’s hand as if it were a puppy’s paw.

Therapy was crap. All those platitudes:
Put yourself first. Don’t be afraid to ask for help.
The only help she wanted was a machete to hack through the manure. Someone to tell her how ashamed she’d feel. Embarrassed by her body’s weakness. Why didn’t the therapist tell her that everyone who saw her would Rolodex through their own lives to make sure they hadn’t done whatever she’d done to cause her cancer.

And what, exactly,
had
she done? Gone braless too often? Had overly spirited sex? Too many bong hits in college? Warm baguettes slathered in butter? Truth be told, she really
had
put Will’s needs ahead of hers. He gave her a great life, a perfect child. So many other women had to work, feel their lives press down on their shoulders like a rucksack full of books. Not her. Pia was blessed. God smiled upon her again and again. Had that fact been secretly eating away at her? Had
guilt
turned her pink cells black? Did she have Emma too late? Sex too early? Too many years on the pill? What the hell did she
do
?

Answers. That’s what she wanted. Not an insipid therapist with liver spots on her bony hands. Why had her body betrayed her? Been unfaithful, cheated on her while she was at the gym. Had she not treated it lovingly? Given it everything it needed? Vitamin water, yoga, Pilates. Was she not good
enough
? If she’d been paying more attention, this never would have happened. Why didn’t a therapist tell her that cancer would feel like the other woman?

It’s your fault. All your fault.

The murky shadow of guilt hung over Pia’s waning life. It followed her to the parent/teacher conference at Emma’s school that was cut short when she started coughing, into her walk-in closet as she tried to dress for the cocktail party Will’s firm was hosting—the one she swore she was well enough to attend.

“Wear that shimmery white dress,” he’d requested, both eyebrows pumping up and down.

“You got it,” she’d said, sexily, grinning through her nausea.

In the closet’s full-length mirror, the sight of her naked body was shocking. How had she ever carried Emma in that concave belly? Her kneecaps were the only part of her spindly legs that touched at all and her shoulders were two doorknobs. When she zipped up the white sequined minidress Will had bought her at the Greenbriar, the one she’d worn to dinner on their last night there, the dress he’d nearly ripped off her when they got back to the room, it swam on her. The armholes gaped. Her collarbone jutted out like a shelf bracket. The dress draped so pathetically on her skeletal frame she was ashamed to show herself to her husband.

Frantically, Pia flipped through her clothes for something else to wear, trying on every cocktail dress she owned. But the outcome was the same. She looked awful. Like Dachau. Like death. She couldn’t go. If she went to the party with Will, his office would be abuzz with whispers the next day.

“Did you
see
her?”

“She’s anorexic.”

“Poor Will. It must be hard living with someone mentally ill. Do you suppose he’s having an affair?”

“I wonder if they’re headed for a divorce. If so, I get first dibs.”

What she
needed
was permission to drop out of her marriage, miss family dinners, be a bad mom, sleep through breakfast. She needed Will’s assurance that he wouldn’t fall in love with someone else, that he meant it when he vowed, “In sickness and in health.” No matter how forcefully she pushed him away, she needed to know he’d stay put. Mostly, she needed him to help her bear the faraway look in their daughter’s eyes.

“Emma will pull away from you. She needs to protect herself right now and you have to let her. You’ll feel a crushing desire to grab your daughter and hold on so tightly she’ll melt into your ailing flesh. It will tear you up, but I’ll be here to hold you together.”

That’s what a good therapist would have said, instead of letting her see it—and feel it—for herself. Day by day, Pia witnessed her own disappearance through her daughter’s eyes. She became a hologram, nearly faded into thin air. Emma looked right through her. To Emma, her mother’s body seemed to have no blood in it at all; her loose gray skin looked like a dirty towel hanging in the bathroom. Seeing her constantly flat out on the couch or in bed was a pain. Always cold when it was a hundred degrees out. Too tired to do anything. And why didn’t she wear her wig all the time at home? That stuff sprouting from her head didn’t look like hair at all. It wasn’t blond anymore and it was completely gone in patches; the rest was see-through and as wiry as old sweater threads. A pointy ridge on top of her skull made her look like an iguana. It’s a total myth that heads are round; her mother’s head looked like a football, even in a scarf. Really, her mom didn’t look like her mom at all anymore and it made Emma not want to look at her because each time she did, she forgot what her real mother looked like a little bit more.

The
truth
. That’s what Pia needed. The bald truth that hope would slip away so subtly you wouldn’t notice until it was already gone. Life would become a counting of days. Minutes. You would look backward through photo albums instead of forward to anything. Why did no one tell her
that
?

“Next week,
rybka,
let’s treat ourselves to high tea at that darling new cafe in the Village.”

“Sounds fun, Mama.”

“It’s been so long since I’ve seen you, my
kochanie
.”

“I know. I miss you.”

“It’s a date then? We’ll meet Friday afternoon in the city?”

“Perfect. Oh, wait.
This
Friday?”

“Would Thursday be better?”

“No, Mama. I’m so sorry. I forgot all about Emma’s school thing.”

“What thing?”

“The parents have to volunteer at the school all week.”

“What kind of nonsense is this?”

“I know. Can you believe it? The principal is young and modern.”

“Ha. Old and old-fashioned worked fine for you, thank you very much.”

“How ’bout the Friday after, Mama?”

“Or this Thursday?”

“The Friday after is better for me.”

“Okay,
rybka.
We’ll meet then and treat ourselves to high tea.”

“Sounds fun. Can’t wait.”

Why didn’t anyone mention how good she’d get at lying? At keeping people at bay? It was the only skill that had sharpened since her body went south. Had someone told her she’d get
good
at something—even dishonesty—she might not have felt so useless.

Late nights were the worst. In the particled darkness when Pia’s sleep meds failed, with Will’s measured breathing the only sound in the room, the house, the entire universe, Pia’s demons effervesced. It was impossible to force them down. In those hours, fear literally paralyzed her. Curled in on herself, she was helpless to stop the sharp terror of death from stabbing her in the chest.
My God, why have you forsaken me?

Unable to move, she confronted the relentless pain in her bones, the way they seemed to splinter against one another. She cursed her damned body for its hoggishness. A whole family depended on her. Her lovely Emma—the sparks of womanhood were beginning to flare. In her young face, you could see the faint outline of the woman she would become. Her stubbornness would flower into independence; those gangly limbs would grow into a body every woman would envy. Already, she carried herself with elegance beyond her years. Emma needed a mother to help her accept her extraordinariness without arrogance. As Pia knew well, beauty had to be managed skillfully. The line between self-assurance and snobbery was razor sharp. Will couldn’t do it with that damn iPad affixed to his hand. Stock reports ran silently on every television. He could raise a daughter on his own? Never. Not
her
daughter.

In the blackness of those endless nights, Pia tumbled into a pit of loneliness so deep she couldn’t see so much as a pinpoint of light. In despair, she envisioned a future without her. Emma would walk down the aisle with Will and his new wife. Another woman would clutch her daughter’s hand in the delivery room repeating, “Breathe, sweetheart.
Hee hee hee. Whooo.
You can do it.” Those tiny yellow socks, the kind that every woman holds aloft sighing, “Awww,” would be wrestled onto kicking, toe-splayed feet by someone else. There would be no birthday cupcakes to decorate with smiley faces, no chilly Halloween nights standing on the sidewalk watching little animals pad up to a front door carrying plastic pumpkins and chirping, “Trick or treat!” Will would never encircle his tan, muscular forearms around her waist while she cooked her mother’s hunter’s stew, pressing his front into her back while whispering, “I am one lucky son of a bitch.”

On those nights, too, in the deepest crater of her pain, Pia gave herself permission to fantasize about letting go. It would be so simple, so peaceful. The ecstasy of nothingness, the glorious end of expectations, the utter calm of passing. Cheating death was no way to live. Fighting was beyond exhausting. An extra Vicodin or two was all she needed to ease the fear and clear her way. Not suicide, but surrender. God would understand. Surely he never meant for his children to suffer when they could let go of this world and join Him in the next so easily. Life, she now understood, was a gift that could be returned. A heartbeat was a
choice
. She had the power to emancipate her body and free herself into the void. Knowing that was a comfort, a shred of control.

“I can go whenever I want to,” she whispered to Will one evening when even morphine failed to bring relief. Worn out, he nodded, honestly unsure of which option he wanted her to choose.

No one told Pia that she might
want
to let go.

The truth. That’s what she needed. In all its ugliness. The goddamned unretouched
truth.