Photos of You (ARC)

by Tammy Robinson

  “You just have to try, Ava. Just try. Miracles happen every day—who’s to say one won’t happen for you?”

  “No, they don’t.”

  “Yes, they do.”

  “Name one miracle. Nothing religious,” I say, making no effort to help her.

  “What about that boy who was born completely blind but miraculously gained his sight after bathing in—”

  “Sounds religious.”

  “OK. What about that woman who had triplets after the doctors had said she could never carry a baby because her uterus was shaped like an upside-down seahorse—”

  “Nothing religious or out of one of your trashy magazines.”

  She squints as she thinks. Eventually she sighs. “I can’t, not specifically off the top of my head. But that doesn’t mean they don’t happen. You just have to believe.”

  “Gee, if only all the cancer sufferers around the world had you to coach them,” I say sarcastically.

  She pauses to arch her eyebrows at me. “I’ll allow you to speak to me that way just this once, because of everything that’s happening. But try it again and see what happens.”

  “Sorry.”

  She picks up a particularly hairy plate and peers at it. “What on earth was this?”

  “Chinese, I think. Or pizza.”

  She shudders. “Right, get in that shower and get dressed. I’ve made an appointment with your oncologist and I don’t want us to be late.”

  “Jesus, Mum, I’m not five. I don’t need you to make my doctor’s appointments for me.”

  “Well, someone had to.” She sits down beside me and takes my hands in hers. “I know you’re scared. But you have to let them try and fight this, Ava. You have to give it everything they’ve got.”

  “I’m not scared. I’m terrified.”

  “Oh, my baby girl,” she whimpers and pulls me in for a hug. “I know. And if I could swap places with you I would, in a heartbeat. But we just have to do what we always do, OK? We have to put one foot in front of the other and we have to carry on, not give up. We just have to try whatever we can to prove them wrong, to buy you some time. Because who knows when a cure will be found. New drugs are invented every day.”

  “I just don’t know if I can go through it all again, Mum. It was hard enough the first time.”

  “I know. I know it was. But you’re not alone. We’re all here for you, all of us. Your friends and family. And if you won’t do it for yourself, then do it for us. We need you here. Your father’s barely eaten a thing since your birthday party. All those leftovers just going to waste.” She looks around the room again and frowns unhappily.

  “I’ve been thinking that it might be a good idea for you to move back in with your father and me, so we can look after you.”

  “And give up this place?”

  She snorts. “News flash: it’s hardly the Taj Mahal.”

  “I like my little flat,” I protest.

  “Oh, darling. It’s grotty, admit it. Even the cockroaches take one look and leave. I hate the thought of you being here all alone. Come home and I promise I won’t fuss.”

  I tilt my head to one side and give her “a look.”

  “OK,” she admits. “I’ll probably fuss, I can’t help it. It’s what mothers do. But I’ll try not to go over the top.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I say to mollify her.

  “OK. I won’t pressure you. Well, not much. And you’ll come see the doctor?”

  “Yes. I’ll go and see what he has to say.”

  “Thank you,” she says. “Now get in that shower, seriously. You stink.”

  I’m in the shower when a thought occurs.

  “Mum,” I holler.

  She opens the door and sticks her head around. “What?”

  “Aren’t seahorses the same shape upside down?”

  She looks surprised and draws an S shape in the air with her finger. “I think you’re right.”

  “Told you those magazines are full of shit.”

  She gasps. “Blasphemy.”

  “It’s really not.”

  We go back to Dr. Harrison, my tail between my legs, and I ask him to help me. He comes up with a treatment plan that works for us both. I refuse the same chemotherapy I had last time—fat lot of good it did, as it turns out—but agree to try an oral chemotherapy drug.

  To my mother’s delight, I also take her advice and give notice on my flat. To her dismay, I move into Kate’s instead of back home under her motherly bosom. I love my parents more than anything on this earth, but I can’t go backwards. Not now. I have to look forward. So when Kate suggested I move in with her, I jumped at the offer. Who wouldn’t want to live next to the beach? I made sure first, though, that she knew what she was in for. That it wasn’t going to be like one big house party and that there would probably be just as many bad days as good. I made her promise that if it got to be too much she would tell me.

  I try hard not to dwell on the fact that this is most likely my final stop before hospice. It just doesn’t feel real.

  Chapter Seven

  The majestic colors of autumn bleed away into the barren starkness of winter. All but the most hardy of plant life withers and dies. I go into hibernation and watch it happen from my window, leaving the house only for hospital appointments and when my mother drags me to the supermarket to buy fresh fruit and vegetables. They, too, wither and die inside my refrigerator. I have no appetite for food and no energy to eat, let alone cook. I am bitter, and I can’t seem to shake it.

  Why me?

  Why again?

  It’s too cruel to understand, though I spend hours trying. I am tortured by the things I haven’t done with my life. Things that weren’t even really possibilities until the possibility was taken away from me.

  Sail the Atlantic Ocean

  Climb Kilimanjaro

  Cross the Sahara Desert on camel back

  Raft the River Nile

  Fly across the Tasman in a hot air balloon

  Kayak solo down the Grand Canyon

  Hike the Appalachian Trail

  I could have been an explorer. An inventor. In a parallel universe there is a Nobel Prize for literature with my name on it.

  In another, I cured cancer.

  I spend hours obsessively searching the Internet and compiling an exhaustive bucket list, which I then tear into a thousand tiny shreds and sprinkle out the kitchen window, watching as the wind carries them away like snowflakes.

  I would have been happy just to be loved.

  The oral chemotherapy does what it says on the box and drains me to new levels of exhaustion and lethargy. I don’t care if it drains me to the brink of death, as long as it takes the cancer cells as well. My skin dries out like a lizard, scaly and brittle. I slather it with moisturizer to no avail. I feel old and withered myself.

  I end up admitted to the hospital twice. First, when the vomiting and diarrhea leave me dangerously dehydrated, and the second when routine tests show my blood count is low and I need a blood transfusion. The IV line blows a vein and I end up with a swollen and bruised hand. I tell the nurse she is a sadist. She looks at me sadly and says nothing, which makes me feel bad. Not bad enough to apologize, though.

  I am sick of needles. My skin is marked with the faint scars of all the needles that came before. I worry I look like a junkie. A cashier in the supermarket once looked at me with disgust, and it wasn’t until I got home and looked in the mirror that I realized my pale skin, shadowed eyes, and bruised arms could be taken either way.

  I watch my favorite movie, Love Actually, six times in one day even though it is not Christmas, because I worry that I won’t still be around at Christmas to see it when it comes on TV. There are one hundred and forty-two days, nine hours, fifty-six minutes, and twenty-three seconds until Christmas. I find a website that gives me a countdown and make it my new screensaver. Morbid, for sure. But it gives me something to aim for.

  Reluctantly, I put any more thoughts about the weddin
g on hold. My mother is convinced the treatment will buy me more time, and I allow some of her optimism to rub off on me.

  Chapter Eight

  Spring insinuates itself upon the land quietly and unassumingly. New growth splits the soil. Animals prepare to birth. The circle of life continues.

  I go to my appointment filled with hope, while telling myself I am a fool for doing so.

  The scan reveals the last-ditch treatment has had no effect on the cancer. In fact, like a tenacious weed, it has spread, sending offshoots to find new strangleholds. Better prepared this time, the doctor refuses to be drawn by my mother into giving out any time frames.

  “I’m sorry, Ava,” he says. “Please don’t think we’re leaving you to deal with this alone. There are still treatments we can offer.”

  I don’t say anything. I just get up and walk out. Although shuffle is more appropriate, given I am wearing the plastic slip-on shoes I reserve solely for scan days because of the ease with which they can be taken off and put on. I shuffle past signs that I have read a hundred times: BIRTHING UNIT, RADIOLOGY, SURGICAL DAY UNIT, CAFETERIA.

  “Ava?” My mother catches up and falls into pace beside me. “Darling?”

  I shuffle past men, women, and children. Of all ages and in varying states of disarray.

  “You don’t want to talk, I get it,” my mother says, her breath catching in her throat. “Let’s go and get a coffee somewhere, eh?”

  When I see the big glass automatic doors that lead outside I shuffle faster, as if I have sniffed out freedom on the other side.

  Outside, I blink. The sun is brighter than I remember it being when we arrived, and I have no idea how much time has passed while I was inside. How many minutes I have just wasted.

  “Ava?”

  But one thing I do know: now that I am out, I don’t intend to ever go back in.

  Chapter Nine

  The french door leading out to the deck sticks, like it always does, until I throw all my body weight into it, and then it opens with a reluctant “pop.” I nearly drop my green tea but manage to hang on to it. The morning sky is the color of apricot and lemon, like a pretty Italian sorbet. There’s a perfect stillness in this moment, right before the world wakes and the pace becomes frantic and harassed and people forget to stop and just breathe. I know because I was like that once.

  “Morning,” Kate says, joining me outside with her freshly plunged Brazilian-imported coffee. I love the smell of it, but not so much the taste. She scans the coastline with a satisfied smile, as well she might. If this view was mine to wake up to for the rest of my life I’d be the same.

  “Any plans for the day?” she asks, blowing on the surface of her coffee gingerly to cool it down.

  “Wedding planning.”

  Her eyebrows arch. “So you’re really serious about this whole wedding idea?”

  The night before, we’d had a few drinks and I’d brought up the subject again. The treatment had been unsuccessful in halting the spread of the cancer, and I was more determined than ever not to waste whatever time I had left. As far as I was concerned, it was full steam ahead with the wedding.

  “Yes. Now more than ever. I know it’s hard for you guys to understand, but it’s what I want.”

  “Hey, I have no issue with it, but I think your mother’s worried the cancer has spread to your brain.”

  I wince. That’s the thing with Kate being a GP. She’s become desensitized and says things without thinking how they might sound.

  “Harsh, Kate.” Amanda emerges from inside and blinks in the daylight as if she’s been locked in a cellar for nine years.

  “What, the sunlight?”

  “No, you and your brain-cancer comment.”

  “Oh, right.” Kate looks at me guiltily. “Sorry, Ava.”

  “Fuck, this view is something else,” Amanda says, collapsing down on to a deckchair and looking around. She lifts her feet on to the small glass outside table in front of her and leans back contemplatively. “Seriously, I’d never leave home if I had this to look at every day.”

  “I have to leave home to earn the money to pay for this view,” Kate points out.

  Kate earns a decent salary due to a nationwide GP shortage, and one of the first things she did upon graduating and accepting a position back in our hometown was make an offer on this place. It sits almost on the tip of the small peninsula that shelters our small town from the open sea. The houses along this couple-of-hundred-meter-long stretch of land vary in style and price, due to the fact some have been here for decades and some are new builds. More and more of the old beach houses are being bulldozed to make way for city folks’ holiday homes, each trying to outdo the others with sleek angles and new materials and ground-breaking architectural designs.

  We’re just half an hour and one large, windy hill away from the country’s third-largest city. Half an hour from a heaving metropolis of glass and concrete, where people walk so fast my mother says it’s a wonder their ankles don’t catch fire. Here the pace is much slower; ankles pause in the street to catch up with neighbors and friends. Deadlines are loose and appointment times vague.

  Kate’s pride and joy is a neat 1950s-style beach house. A square box shape, it’s fashioned from weatherboard that she had repainted a nondescript gray, with cream on the wooden window frames. The section it’s perched on is steeply sloped, with a path that leads from the house down across the lawn and through a short section of native bush to the relatively private beach.

  “What are you doing out of bed so early?” Kate asks Amanda as she drains the last of her coffee cup. “Not used to seeing you before noon.”

  “Couldn’t sleep. Damn Tui outside my bedroom window kept chirping.”

  “Budgies chirp,” I tell her. “Tuis sing. And beautifully. You should be grateful.”

  “Yeah, so grateful that I’ll throw a shoe at it if it wakes me again tomorrow. I need coffee,” she groans.

  “You have legs.”

  “They’re on strike.”

  “I’ll get it,” Kate laughs, poking Amanda’s thigh with her foot as she goes inside. “You are my guest, after all.”

  Amanda has been living in the city for years. She moved there to kick-start her music career and never looked back, only returning for special occasions. Normally when she’s back for visits she’d stay with her parents, but when she knew I was going to be staying here she insisted on staying too.

  “The three amigos, back together again,” she’d insisted, ignoring the fact that everything had changed.

  I lean against the balcony railing and enjoy the feel of the sea breeze on my neck. My hair is up in a loose messy bun and I am still in my pajamas. Days like this I struggle to believe I am sick. I don’t feel sick. I certainly don’t look sick.

  “Will my hair fall out again?”

  That was one of the first questions I asked the day Mum dragged me back to see my oncologist and we decided on a course of action.

  Not Will it make me sick? or Will it work?

  Call me vain, but I’d hated the way I looked the first time around. No empowering head-shave parties for me; I clung to my locks for as long as possible, until chunks started to come out in my hand and there was no longer enough to do a comb-over and hope that no one would notice. I’d been expecting it, and it was hard to come to terms with. My hair, along with my breasts, represented my femininity. With one gone and one faulty and pockmarked by illness, I felt sexless. Unattractive. It rocked me to my core. What I hadn’t been expecting was the rest of the hair on my body to fall out too. My eyebrows, gone. Eyelashes followed, except for one stubborn one in the middle of my right eyelid. I waited and waited for it to declare defeat and fall out like the rest of them, but it never did. In the end I couldn’t stand looking at it, this one stubborn lash that mocked me every time I looked in the mirror, so I plucked it out myself.

  I went wig shopping with Kate and Mum. We tried to make light of the situation by joking around and trying on different sty
les and colors that were so far removed from my pre-cancer look. I could be anyone, Kate said. Like an exotic spy. Yeah, right. Some spy. I couldn’t even stand for too long before I became exhausted and had to sit, like the invalid I was, in front of the mirror while they fetched wigs and tried hard to keep the pitying looks to a minimum. In the end I got one similar to how my hair was before in color, although much shorter. Less maintenance, Mum said.

  I never wore it. When I tried, I felt like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, when she was dressed as a prostitute and everyone stared at her like she was a freak. I felt like a freak. So I stuck to bandannas if I went out. At least then it was obvious I had no hair for a reason, rather than someone choosing to wear a bad wig.

  After the chemo finished and my own hair grew back, it was thicker, curlier.

  “About this wedding.” Kate comes outside again and passes Amanda a coffee.

  I brace myself against the railing, prepared for her to try to talk me out of it. “What about it?”

  “I want to help.”

  “Me too,” Amanda says.

  I look from one to the other. “Seriously?”

  “Of course. If this is what you want, then we want to help give it to you.”

  “Oh, wow. You guys are the best.” I well up with emotion.

  “Only thing is,” Amanda says tactfully, “you’re kind of missing something important.”

  “You mean a groom?”

  “Yeah.”

  This is where I got stuck trying to explain it to my mother too. I don’t blame them. When you think of a wedding you automatically think of a happy couple. The man in the penguin suit and the woman in the meringue dress. The plastic couple on the top of the cake. The exchange of rings and the “will they or won’t they” moment as they cut the cake and threaten to wipe each other’s faces with it. It’s kind of a team sport, this wedding business. A team of two.

  “Obviously that would have been the ideal situation,” I say. “Although maybe not, given that any man I’d be marrying would be signing up for imminent widowhood.”