by Ethan Joella
With his hat on, with the sunglasses protecting his eyes, he almost feels normal. Just another guy turning forty next week, out for some exercise. “Hey there,” he says to the old man getting his paper three houses down. He looks at the sidewalk because there are uneven parts, and he doesn’t want to stumble. With the blood thinners, a fall would be a mess. Freddie would go crazy. She would wrap him up like a baby. He also is happy not to meet the man’s eyes. Bob something or other, owner of the theater in town. A complete grump. Yet he seems healthy as a horse. Bob nods and mumbles, “Good day.”
Marcia Peters walks her big Saint Bernard down Maple Street by Woodsen Park, and he notices that she pulls the dog closer. “Hey, Oliver,” he says, and purposely goes over to pet his head. I am not fragile, he thinks.
“You’re looking well,” Marcia says.
“Yup. Thanks.” He pats the dog’s side and keeps moving. No time to think that everything hurts—his knees, his joints, even his bones. He grits his teeth. That is probably why his jaw hurts now. He’s been doing that too much. But he’s alive. And it’s still worth it. Will there come a time where it won’t be worth it? He chases that thought away. He is a fighter. He will keep fighting. That’s what he knows.
Pain is nothing. If handling pain is all it takes, he will win this. He promised Freddie he would.
“I’m not going to die,” he said one night a few days ago as he lay awake an hour after they’d gone to bed. He wasn’t sure if she was still up. He said the words, and they echoed in the dark bedroom. She didn’t say anything at first, and he watched the slow movement of the ceiling fan. He saw the way their front porch light made glowing lines above their curtain. He shifted his legs, and the dog jumped off the bed. He heard the heat kick on and the rush of air to the vent on the floor. He figured she was asleep, but then he heard the small gasps, the sobbing she was trying to choke back. “Stop,” he said, nudging her leg with his knee. “I’m not.”
“Greg.” She whispered his name, and he could feel her body tremble as she tried to fight the tears. When he reached to touch her face, her pillow was damp, and he felt like a failure. For making her cry. For being this close to dying. He smoothed his thumb under her eyes, and tried to wipe her tears. He couldn’t undo what he’d started, and now that he’d said the words, the businessman in him couldn’t let them go.
“I promise I’m not.”
His pride had always done this to him. Made him grab that drunk guy at the Yankees game a few years ago who told him to hurry the fuck up at the urinal. Made him drive two and a half hours back to Boston after he’d just gotten home from a meeting there because a client had emailed him and was unhappy. His pride once had him take apart a clubhouse he’d built for Addie the day before—hours of unbuilding and rebuilding most of its parts (in the dark, so she wouldn’t see) because he didn’t like the way the floor buckled. Freddie said he was crazy, ridiculous. “Get to sleep,” she said. “Addie won’t even notice. She will love it because you made it and because you sit in it with her. She’s not putting a level on the floor!” But there he was sawing and measuring and setting it right. Where did this come from? Because he was an only child? Wanting, always, to be perfect, be a hero? His parents were lovely people. They never pushed him. But he always reached further than he should, always wanted more. Instead of running a 5K, he’d sign up for a marathon; instead of turning in a requested five-page report to Alex, he’d deliver fifteen pages with pie charts and color-coded data. Now, with cancer, one of the deadliest kinds, he can’t roll over. He can’t just try to survive. He has to promise he will. In some weird, competitive way, he is even happy his type of cancer is one of the most aggressive. When he survives, he will have survived the worst. What is that in him? Who did this to him?
He did it to himself.
And these days he couldn’t feel more imperfect, more inferior than he does now. He wants to unzip his skin and crawl out. Did that lead him to up the ante and make that promise?
Now he has made a vow he may or may not be able to keep. She squeezed his hand that night like she was going to twist it off, and he listened to her get quieter and quieter until her hand felt still, and she sighed as she went to sleep. And then he lay there for another two hours, her body silent against his. His mind raced with guilt, with worry.
Why would he say this? He heard his father’s voice. When are you going to learn enough is enough? His father had said that often—after Greg had signed up for two spring sports in high school, or after he’d stayed up all night working on his speech for student government, or even in college when Greg was doing double shifts in his bar runner job at Sidecar. He lay there that night with Freddie and wished his parents were alive again, for Freddie to forget this promise even though he suspected this had helped her fall asleep. But did she even believe him? She knows he can’t know for sure. But still. She has trusted him all these years. What hubris, what haughtiness, to say that. Everything felt unbearable, even their comfortable bed. He finally brought sleep on by trying to remember all the kids in his third-grade class; then trying to revisit every hotel room he’d ever stayed in. He finally reconciled this ridiculous promise by remembering that most of the promises he has made have been challenging, nearly impossible, mostly out of reach, too. And he has fulfilled all of them. Wasn’t this more of the same?
Now he is at the treatment center. One of those hospital satellite places with imaging and therapy and new signs with crisp logos and doctors’ names. And beyond the sliding doors, standing there in the vestibule is his cancer gang. Rosco holding on to his walker and waving; thin Imogene with her small green hat and drooping earrings, holding a bag of something she probably baked for them; and Brandon in his thrift store overcoat, black nail polish on some of his fingers.
“What a motley bunch,” Greg says. He thinks he’s used that line a few times.
They wave to each other (hugging is too germy, too risky). They tell Greg he looks cold. “Brrr,” Imogene says. They set up camp where they always do in the lounge for the patients receiving radiation. Imogene doesn’t have any treatments prescribed for her (her numbers are good at the moment), and Brandon, whose dark hair is longish because he never had chemo, only has a week to go until he can ring the bell, a celebratory gesture patients do at the end of their treatment. Rosco, a spunky old man who reminds Greg of his grandfather, and Greg have the longest sentences of radiation: five days a week for six more weeks, give or take. This is a breeze compared to chemo, compared to the stem cell transplant the doctors are telling him they might try down the road if the numbers look good and they find a match. Greg’s job now is to stay healthy.
They open the ginger ale Rosco has brought, and Imogene puts out small chocolate cupcakes with cream cheese frosting. They are not supposed to eat anything unhealthy these days, but Fifi, the nurse they all love, said small treats are fine. The group breaks off pieces of cupcakes and says they’re like heaven and wow and thanks. Greg tastes only metal.
They have a good forty-five minutes until Brandon’s appointment, and then Greg and Rosco go in later. Greg always looks at the toys in the corner of the room—one of those abacus-looking things with sliding balls, and Dr. Seuss books, and a small kitchen with plastic dishes and pots and pans. He is grateful every time that the toys seem undisturbed. He hopes they stay that way. He thinks of Addie and what she would do if she were here waiting with him. He imagines her sliding the wooden abacus balls back and forth. He imagines her sitting at the table next to him and resting her face in her hands patiently.
The group makes small talk about the Super Bowl commercials and the snow (just three inches) the other night. How fast it melted, they say. They shake their heads about the bombing on the news, and no one can believe it’s been that many years since Peter Jennings died, and then Fifi pokes her head out to see what Imogene baked. “I might steal the whole tin,” she says, and they smile and sigh and look at each other. What is it about this crowd that Greg so enjoys? He wants to get up
and hug each of them. Even Brandon, who is sometimes a little whiny.
“How’s our Addie?” Imogene says to Greg. She dabs her mouth with a Valentine’s cocktail napkin she brought with the cupcakes.
“Good, good,” Greg says. “Getting big.” She likes to rub my bald head, he wants to say. She started writing in a diary, he wants to say. Greg can’t bring himself to read it. He wants to say: What if, despite all we do to distract her, she’s scared and worried that I’ll die? It was always his number-one goal to never have her worry about anything. His parents worked hard to let him be a worry-free kid, and maybe that is what gave him this determination, this unshakable confidence. But Addie stares at him longer than she used to. She hugs him tighter, he thinks. Once he saw her close her eyes in the mirror when she hugged him, and he wondered what that meant—if she was trying to memorize him or something. He silently says a prayer for her—a quick one—and turns back to Imogene. “She joined the glee club at school.”
“Cute,” Rosco says. He coughs, and they can all hear the wetness in his lungs.
Brandon looks out the window and says something about the girl he’s seeing. Selena. He says her name with a touch of an accent, which annoys Greg. Brandon likes drama. He is still young enough to want drama.
Imogene thinks her daughter is up to something. She keeps asking Imogene to write down her medication, the pension information, the stocks. She shakes her head. “Does she think I’m losing my marbles?”
“We’ll straighten her out,” Greg says. He only ate what amounts to a large crumb of cupcake. He sips the ginger ale. Metal fizz. He wants something extra sweet—so sweet it will eat through the metal—like purple Kool-Aid or Cherry Coke. He keeps feeling guilt over his promise to Freddie. Days later, and it still burns him. What business did he have saying those words?
Once a week they make it a point to get together like this—though he ends up bumping into Rosco many other days, and sometimes Brandon. He met Imogene in chemo after the holidays. They would sit side by side in their chairs, with the tubes and the beeping monitors, and look over at each other and roll their eyes. “I’d rather be doing my taxes,” Imogene said to him that first day.
He laughed. He got a dizzy spell at that moment, and she waited and watched him. “Sorry,” he said.
“You okay? Should I call the nurse?” And just like that, he had a cancer buddy. This new friend who started to phone the house, who bought a ballerina music box for Addie once. Freddie started to pick them both up (it was impossible to walk home after chemo) and would drive Imogene to her small apartment in the retirement home. When the phone would ring, Freddie would hand it to him. “It’s your girlfriend,” she’d say.
When he was prescribed the weeks of radiation after his numbers were still sketchy, Imogene asked for the details. “Mind some company?” she said.
“Actually, no, I wouldn’t mind.” He didn’t. He had gotten used to her at those chemo appointments. The way they stared at the tubes together. The way she never cried—only shrugged, only sighed. And he liked her jokes. “Just put it in this pincushion,” she’d say, holding out her thin arm. Or, “You better stick a few extra doses in there, baby doll. Fill ’er up.”
In no time at all, she had ingratiated herself with Rosco when Greg started at the radiation place. Rosco’s wife died two years ago, and his grandson drives him for treatment and picks him up. Greg and Imogene collected Rosco to join them, and then Brandon, whom Imogene found outside with his hands in his pockets, wearing his headphones. “We’re all on the same team,” she said to them that day.
Now he tells them what he’s wanted to say, about his promise to Freddie. Imogene looks up at him. Rosco shakes his head. A deliveryman comes through the doors with boxes stacked on a hand truck. Brandon laces his fingers together. “That’s a shitty promise, man,” Brandon says.
Greg glares at Brandon. What did he expect from his group? That they’d say an outrageous promise was okay, that it’s fine for sick people to enter into risky contracts? Yes, he wants them to say this. He wants them to say they understand. That maybe they have made similar promises. In fact, he wants them to all promise right now that they will get through this. Sometimes a voice screams in his head that maybe half of them or most of them or all of them will die, and sitting here like this will not have meant anything.
“You thought you needed to,” Imogene says. She pats Greg’s hunched shoulder blades. It hurts, he wants to say. When you pat my back, it hurts like hell. It shouldn’t hurt. He wonders the way he always does if his cancer has spread—he imagines an X-ray or scan with every part lit up, showing disease. But they’ve been monitoring him closely and he would know.
Rosco declares, “We got no business messing with God.”
Greg groans and looks up at the ceiling. What God? he wants to say. It’s just each of us alone. Each of us trying to hold on to who we love before we’re ripped into the abyss. Greg frowns. He picks up his ginger ale can and what’s left of the cupcake, stands, and walks over to the garbage. He is not pissed at Brandon or Rosco. He is ashamed. Haunted by what he said. He wanted their forgiveness, their understanding, a benediction of sorts. Can’t he at least have this? He’s lost so much. Can’t he at least make a fucking long shot of a promise?
He glances over at the toys. He never noticed the jigsaw puzzle among the stacks: a winter scene with cardinals and squirrels. He stands there and looks at it. He imagines for a second spilling it out on a table in the corner by himself and how good it would feel to hold each piece and study where it belongs.
Brandon and Imogene and Rosco are staring at him. Imogene is so brittle. She must weigh ninety pounds, and Rosco wheezes as he shakes his head slowly. Brandon doesn’t look sick at all. Greg never noticed how tall he was. How broad his shoulders are. Fucker. No one would look at them in a lineup and say Brandon has cancer. He will probably waltz in and out of cancer, and that will be that. He has a mild kind of lymphoma or something. They don’t ask the specifics.
Greg sees Fifi and the other nurses march back and forth with files behind the glass window. He sees the clipboard by the window and wonders if he signed in. There are still Christmas cards taped to the ledge of the reception area. He thinks of cards he used to write Freddie when he was in college. I’ll be home soon. The weeks will fly by. Or postcards he would send her and Addie from business trips to New York. Or Los Angeles. Or London. I miss my two girls. Be back in a jiffy (with gifts!). He has been solid with his promises. He has done what he’s said, and now Brandon and Rosco are right—this is a promise out of his hands. He wonders what his mom and dad would say about all this. Easy does it, honey. Let’s just wait and see before we get carried away.
He sees the bell by the door that people ring when they are finished with treatment. He can’t wait to ring that damn bell. A shiny brass bell on a plaque with a small rope hanging from it. He wants his cancer gang to cheer. Brandon will ring the bell in a week. In college, Greg was on the rowing team, and in one match, his crew got off to a terrible start. They had no way of catching up to the other crews, but they paddled anyway. He feels as far behind as that. So many more weeks and days of this. He remembers being in that boat, how cold and black the water looked, how the sun seemed small behind clouds.
“Come sit, buddy,” Rosco calls to him. Rosco holds a tissue in his hands, and his brown sweater vest has lint balls. He unwraps a cough drop and puts it on his tongue.
“I sounded like a dick,” Brandon says to Greg. “Sorry.” Imogene bristles for a minute at Brandon’s language, but then smiles at him.
Greg pulls out his chair. He takes his hat off and the air feels good on his head. He rubs his smooth scalp and looks down. “I had no right… I wanted to have a right to say it, and I don’t.”
He stares ahead and purses his lips as he watches the nurses laugh about something behind the glass. He doesn’t feel insulted by their laughter the way some might. He is glad life is going on as usual for much of the world. “I jus
t want to know I’ve done everything in my power to stop this,” he says, his voice far away.
Imogene pats his hand. “None of us knows what works, do we?”
Over in the rows of chairs, a woman with a scarf on her head is clipping coupons and filing them into a binder. A man with glasses is turning the pages of Vanity Fair. Fifi calls Brandon in and he moans and plods toward her. “See you when I see you,” he says. The hood on his sweatshirt bobs as he walks, and for a second, Greg thinks of him as a younger brother even though he doesn’t know what having a sibling feels like. They wave to their friend as he disappears behind the door.
The three of them don’t say much. Something about more snow on the way. Something about how the groundhog in Pennsylvania didn’t know what he was talking about. Outside the big window, the trees are bare but sturdy. A cluster of birds lands on the branches. They are small and gray with orange beaks. They hop around and fly off again.
Greg feels for his cell phone to make sure it’s there. He might have to call Freddie for a ride if he doesn’t feel better. He holds his teeth together for a moment and the pain seems to stop. The door opens for him, Fifi smiling and waving him in, and he slips his hat on, stands tall like he has an important meeting, like inside there are new clients to impress, and he is about to walk toward her.
But then the idea comes to him. He gives Fifi the just a minute signal with his finger. He feels the other patients watching as he rushes toward the door. He tugs the rope on the bell that no one told him he could ring, and he stands there and listens to the clanging, the victorious loud metal sound like a race has begun or the stock market is open, or a war is over, and it feels good to hear it whether he deserves this ringing or not. It feels good.