by Leslie Gould
Jill was an art major with an emphasis in art history. Caye had been sure that Jill had aspirations to teach, sure that was the real reason they’d chosen Ashland.
“No,” Jill had said when Caye had asked. “We chose Ashland because of Rob’s consulting job. I want him to make a ton of money.”
Caye’s eyes grew wide. Jill smiled.
“I’m serious,” Jill laughed. “I want him to make enough money so that I never have to work—besides at home. I want to have five babies, garden, and do my art. Maybe someday, when the kids are grown, I’ll open a gallery. Or a bed-and-breakfast. That’s my plan.”
Hudson was just learning to walk when Jill revealed her plan to Caye. Jill was already trying to get pregnant again.
Caye found Jill’s ideas refreshing. No one else she knew talked so frankly about wanting to make a ton of money. And all the other stay-at-home moms she knew wanted to have some sort of career again, someday.
That was certainly Caye’s plan.
But Jill made her plan sound so convincing that it was obvious, as long as the money was there, that she could pull it off. She made it sound so convincing that Caye became jealous. And then she realized that part of the reason Jill’s plan sounded so convincing was because of what her friend had already experienced—and Caye found herself envious of that, too, of Jill’s art major at USC, her time in Argentina, her wedding in a field of tulips south of Portland. Everything Jill did had purpose and meaning. She had a California way of owning everyone and everything.
For the first year of their friendship, Caye admired Jill without hesitation. Caye absolutely admired her longer than she’d admired anyone else—except for her children, but that was a different sort of veneration.
It was when Jill and Rob seriously started looking for a house to buy, when Liam was a newborn, that Caye began to suspect Jill wasn’t entirely genuine. When Caye would mention a house nearby that was for sale, Jill would say in her characteristically cheerful voice, “Oh, that house is so cute.”
Caye continued to imagine Jill living a few blocks away: the two of them sending kids back and forth, all the children attending the same elementary school.
When Jill and Rob found the house above the Boulevard, the thirty-two-hundred-square-foot Victorian house on two lots, Jill was ecstatic. Still Caye knew that Jill was holding back, not letting Caye know how absolutely overjoyed she was.
When they walked up the front steps of the house with their Realtor the first time, Jill said she knew they’d never be able to afford it. “We only went on a whim,” she explained. “On a what if?’”
Caye imagined them walking through the door. Liam in Jill’s arms. Hudson on Rob’s shoulders.
The house needed work: a new roof, new paint on the outside and throughout the interior, and a new kitchen. The garden was horribly overgrown; the picket fence was practically dismantled.
It turned out that Jill had some money from her father that she and Rob used as a down payment, or that was what she said. Caye knew Jill’s father had left money for college, but she was under the impression that was all he had left. Now it seemed it wasn’t.
It was so unlike Jill to be vague. She was usually so forthright, too forthright at times. But when it came to money, or her mother, she was reticent. Caye had the idea that, even though Jill said the money was from her father, perhaps it had come from Marion. Jill portrayed her mother as a miser with both money and secrets. “I really know nothing about my parents,” Jill told Caye. “My mother never wants to talk about anything.”
Although Jill visited her mother once a year, and her mother visited them in Ashland occasionally, Jill never elaborated on the visits.
“Oh, it was fine,” she’d usually say when Caye asked. Once she said, “Oh, my mother. She gave up too easily on life. On everything.”
Jill and Rob made an offer on the house, and it was accepted. Caye knew from the advertisement in the newspaper that the asking price was $495,000.
It was the first time Caye felt truly jealous of Jill. First, she felt betrayed that Jill hadn’t told her right away that she didn’t want a house in the Railroad District, that she let Caye go on with her fantasy. And then Caye felt jealous—out-and-out jealousy. Not the fleeting envy that was part of appreciating Jill—the way she dressed, her beautiful paintings, and her photography that was embarrassingly better than Caye’s.
No, this was jealousy.
From the jealousy, she feared meanness. Feared that she would turn on Jill. That she would somehow slip into making cutting remarks, that she would grow more suspicious, that she would grow to distrust Jill about things more important than a house, like their friendship. Why does she want to be my friend? I live in a box; she lives in a mansion. I take second-rate photographs; she truly is an artist.
Nathan told Caye to get over it.
He was right. Caye had never had a friend like Jill before. “So she’s been a little secretive about the house, but probably because she didn’t want to hurt your feelings,” Nathan said. “Ditto with why she never talks about money.”
But Jill had never been petty with Caye, and her finances really weren’t anyone else’s business. Caye would never have a house like Jill’s; Nathan would never make as much money as Rob, and Caye would never have five babies—in fact, she’d accepted the fact that she’d never have another baby. She’d said good-bye to those two fantasy children who played so quietly in the backyard.
And so Caye sat on the jealousy, hoping to control it. And mostly she had. The realization brought her some relief as it collided with the present. What if she’d walked away from Jill about something so trivial only to have her get this sick?
As she stirred the margarine into the macaroni, Caye thought about how much easier it was to deal with a friend’s misfortunes than her good fortunes. Is it because we filter what happens to a friend through our own lives? If it’s good, it makes us look worse? If it’s bad, it makes us look better? And therefore act better?
As she scooped the mac and cheese into five little red Tupperware bowls, Nathan came through the back door, interrupting her thoughts. His dark, wavy hair stuck out from under his black Baltimore Orioles baseball cap, which he wore backwards. He moved his stocky frame quickly into the kitchen.
“How is she?” Caye asked softly, not wanting the kids to hear.
“It’s bad, Caye,” he said, his brown eyes heavy. “Rob thinks that they’re testing for pancreatic cancer. He’s going to spend the night. He’s upset—and not just about how sick Jill is. It seems she hasn’t been totally honest with him.”
Simon began to cry in Audrey’s room as Nathan took off his cap and started telling her what Rob had said. Caye hurried down the hall to the baby. Nathan followed, waving his cap as he talked. “Her father died from it, and so did her grandfather and her aunt, and she never told Rob—not until today.” She knew that was what bothered Nathan the most. In his world there were no secrets. “And she’s been jaundiced all week. The whites of her eyes are yellow.”
Caye answered, like a defensive child, “So?”
Holding red-faced Simon, she hurried back into the kitchen.
“This is bad,” Nathan said, following her again. “Hardly anyone survives pancreatic cancer.”
“How do you know?” Caye demanded.
“I read about it—in Reader’s Digest or somewhere like that.”
Caye rolled her eyes.
“What’s wrong with my mommy?” Hudson asked.
Caye realized that all four of the bigger kids had grouped around their legs, that in one collective swoop they might all crash down onto the kitchen’s yellow-and-green plaid linoleum. Andrew looked at her intensely, his big brown eyes concerned. How much have they heard?
“Here,” she said loudly, pushed to the edge, unable to balance any longer. She teetered as if on stilts, as if she were in some macabre parade high above the floor, above t
he children, stamping out a circle to collapse upon. “Take Simon. I’ve got to go. You stay with the kids. I’ll get the crib and diapers. And Pull-Ups.”
She grabbed her keys off the hook by the back door. “And change Liam, would you?” she asked, rushing down the wooden steps of the back porch. “Put him in a pair of Andrew’s underwear.”
4
Caye unlocked the kitchen door to Jill’s house. Scout met her at the door, whining and whimpering. They’d all forgotten about the dog.
“Out you go,” Caye said, opening the door wide. She’d have to take Scout home for the night.
She wondered if Jill’s mother would call and talk to Nathan while she was gone. What would Nathan say?
Caye started in the kitchen, in Jill’s Home Beautiful kitchen with the stainless steel appliances and vineyard mural painted on the far wall. She threw the corn dogs away, scrubbed the dried mustard and ketchup off the plates, loaded the European dishwasher, and started it. She pulled out the full garbage bag from under the sink and headed to the backyard. She walked along the brick path to the side of the property and slung the bag into the plastic can against the garage. The sky was cloudy, but it had stopped raining—and hailing. She looked up at the hills to the west. The evening light filtered through the clouds, but there were no shades of color from the soon-to-be-setting sun. Scout sniffed along the pathway.
Caye walked slowly back through the garden. Weeds were scattered around the emerging sweet pea seedlings under the cherry tree. Jill’s dahlia bed hadn’t been tilled. The irises were starting to bud. The old-fashioned variegated tulips that faded from striking ruby red on the outside to a pale pink on the inside, the ones that Jill especially loved, were ragged, pelted by the hail. Jill had promised to divide the bulbs this year, to give some to Caye.
Caye had never been fond of pink—but these tulips looked like ruffled peonies. She would accept them regardless of the color. The forget-me-nots crowded around the tulips.
Climbing up the steps to the back door, with Scout on her heels, Caye noticed the indigo-colored paint peeling on the siding. It seemed too early for the paint to peel—it had only been two years since Jill had hired painters to do the work.
Caye felt nearly as comfortable in Jill’s house as in her own, but tonight, to be in it without Jill, felt strangely intimate.
She grabbed two unused garbage bags from the box under the sink and headed to the basement, flinging the bags open as she hurried down the stairs. Fisher-Price pirates and knights were scattered across the playroom. Jill’s worktable was covered with the remaining Echinacea ready to be bagged for tea. In the laundry room, Caye found the dirty clothes tubs overflowing; she stuffed clothes into both bags and clutched them with one hand.
She picked up Scout’s nearly empty bag of dog food and lugged everything up the steep carpeted stairs and left it by the back door; she grabbed two more bags and headed up to the boys bedroom. She dumped the contents of their laundry hamper into one bag and then grabbed diapers and Pull-Ups and the wipes from the changing table drawers and put them in the other. She pulled the portable crib, folded in its duffel bag, out of the closet and carefully made her way down the stairs, balancing her load, coaching herself not to trip.
She carried the load out to the car, went back to retrieve the additional bags of laundry and the dog food, and put them in the back too.
Caye should have left then, taken Scout, and gone home to help Nathan get the five children to bed. They all needed baths; they all needed hugs and a story. But she went back into the house and wandered from room to room, down the hall to the back of the house; Scout shadowed her every step.
She opened the door to Jill and Rob’s bedroom and turned on the light. The sea-green walls were covered with framed botanical prints—columbine, trillium, and lupine—and Jill’s paintings. Black-and-white photos covered the dressing table. The violet-print duvet was pulled back, the sheets were twisted in a lump in the middle. A plate of dried toast sat on the dresser next to a cup of cold tea.
Caye wondered if Jill had called Rob to come home early the night before. She wondered if Jill had thought about phoning her, or if the irritation in her voice yesterday afternoon kept Jill from calling back.
The phone rang. Perhaps it was Nathan. She would tell him she was bringing the dog.
“Rhone residence.”
“Hello, this is Marion. With whom am I speaking?”
“Caye,” she said. “Jill’s friend Caye.”
“Cancer,” Marion said calmly. “It’s pancreatic cancer, isn’t it?”
Rob began to sing.
“My hope is built on nothing less …” He had hymns from his childhood burned in his brain. Jill hoped for all four verses.
She opened her eyes. Her husband didn’t understand that his doubts ultimately made his faith stronger. That his questions, his desire for indisputable answers, made him dig deeper. She knew he was scared. She knew his faith—which he wrestled with constantly—was at the moment the top contender against his intellectual doubts.
He hadn’t opened his laptop since she’d told him about her family history of pancreatic cancer. It had been easier than she thought. One sentence: “My father, my aunt, and my grandfather all died from pancreatic cancer.” She didn’t add that, according to Marion, her aunt died just months after her baby had been born.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” Rob had asked.
Like on our second date? “I was told that it wasn’t genetic,” she said quietly. “That it was probably environmental—like from diet or pollution, something they all had in common. Something in Pennsylvania. Like the coal mines or all the animal fat they ate. Or because they all smoked.”
“On Christ, the Solid Rock, I stand,” Rob sang, his deep voice clear but soft.
Jill needed to talk to Caye. She felt listened to when she talked to Caye. As much as she loved Rob, there were times she felt they were stuck in the mud, like her SUV on Mount Ashland last spring. Sometimes it took weeks to talk a subject through with him, to rock and spin and inch forward, fall back, sink deeper. Half a conversation one day, continued nine days later, with a phrase thrown in late at night when one of them was half-asleep. With Caye it would take a few minutes, maybe an hour at the most.
“All other ground is sinking sand,” Rob finished.
“You don’t have to stay,” Jill said. “You should go home and get some sleep. Then come back in the morning after the tests.”
“No,” he said. “I’ll stay.”
“Pancreatic cancer,” Marion repeated over the phone. Caye envisioned the two words speeding from L.A. and then north through the telephone wires, charged with emotion, sending sparks over the mountains and through the valleys along the way. She wanted to hang up. She’d wanted to flee when Nathan told her that pancreatic cancer was one of the things they were testing for, to flee far away from Nathan and the children, to sneak into the hospital without Rob knowing and find Jill. She wanted to discover that it was all a nightmare, that none of it was true. Not Jill who ate brewer’s yeast and wheat germ, who didn’t even drink coffee, who walked every morning—or used to—and did yoga three times a week.
“Caye,” Marion said, “are you there?”
“Did you talk to Nathan?” Caye asked. “My husband. Did you call my house?”
“No. No, I didn’t.”
“They don’t know that it’s cancer,” Caye said, again surprised at her defensiveness and the adrenaline rushing through her body, suddenly aware of the scent of Jill’s Fleurissimo perfume, the oils of flowers blended to perfection. “They don’t know that it’s pancreatic cancer. They’re doing tests. Tomorrow. Tomorrow morning.”
“It came sooner than I thought it would.”
“You can call Rob at the hospital,” Caye said, aware of how shrill her voice was growing.
“I won’t bother him,” Jill’s mother responded. “I’m sure he h
as enough to deal with right now. I just wanted to leave a message. I had no idea you would be in Jill’s house. Please just call, or have Rob call—or even Jill—when the tests come back. Good-bye.”
Caye clicked the Off button. She felt furious. That woman! How dare she? And then, How dare she what? Think it’s cancer?
“God, don’t let it be true,” she pleaded. An image of Jill drinking herbal tea at The Beanery while Caye downed a double espresso slipped through her head. The memory of Jill power walking in upper Lithia Park, five months pregnant with Simon, her frosted breath hanging in the February cold, hurried through Caye’s mind. That was over a year ago. When was the last time Jill had been on a walk at all, let alone a power walk?
Caye sat down on Jill’s bed. She rubbed her forehead with the heel of her hand, and then ran her fingers through her short hair. She undid her clippies, one at a time, and slid them back into place with a snap against her head. Her hair felt dirty. She felt shaky. Had she had lunch? Had she not eaten since breakfast?
What was the use of thinking it was cancer until they knew for sure? But what if it was? And one that was as hopeless—or so everyone seemed to think—as pancreatic cancer? All the days that she thought life was predictable marched by in a row, stretched out mercifully, day after day of taking care of the kids, doing housework, gardening, hanging out with Jill, waiting for Nathan to come home from work. She’d been fooled. Nothing was certain, nothing was sure.
Just like the hail.
Not even Jill, with her perfect life, could control this. They all, in an instant, could be shredded like the tulips.
5
Nathan hadn’t started the kids’ baths by the time Caye arrived home. “We just got back from the park,” he said. “Simon was so happy in the swing that I didn’t want to leave. We probably would have stayed longer if Liam hadn’t wet his pants.”