by Amy Boesky
Just a month ago it had been enough for her to lie on her back and swat at the dangling toys we hung above her, or on her stomach—either was fine! Now, whatever position we put her in was wrong, because it wasn’t the other one. She flailed like a terrapin, hostage to gravity.
“It’s like she’s possessed,” I told Julie. “She wants to do this so badly!”
“I can relate,” Julie said. “I feel pretty much the same way these days. I can barely turn over anymore in bed.” Julie was due in just over two months, and you could tell it was getting harder for her to move around. She had that short out-of-breath sound women get when they’re very pregnant, and she moved awkwardly, as if in slow motion.
MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND WE HEADED up to Maine on Friday afternoon. I’d persuaded Jacques to take half the day off so we could leave early and beat the traffic, get a first taste of summer. It was great to be up here—we could smell the sea. I loved the feel of Julie and Jon’s house on Laurel Street. You could see a sliver of Casco Bay from some of the rooms, and the house was airy and sweet-smelling. I was upstairs in their second-floor family room, helping Julie sort through the stacks of infant clothes we’d brought up for them. While Julie and I sorted, Sacha lay on her blue blanket, struggling to propel herself from one side to the other.
I held up one of my favorite baby outfits. Blue-and-white terrycloth, printed with airplanes. “The Pilots,” my mother called it—a hand-me-down from Jenny to Rachel to us, and now to Julie. Sacha had worn this one over and over again her first few weeks. I wanted to conjure it all back up: those early, baffling days. Clara. The baby swing from Annie.
But Julie had something else on her mind.
“Listen,” she said. “Has Mom said anything to you about her back?”
“Her back? I know her side has been bothering her,” I said slowly. A jolt of fear ran through me, like a current. “She didn’t mention anything about her back.”
“I guess it started hurting a while ago. She saw an orthopedist last week,” Julie said. “They think it might be osteoporosis—Dad said she may be getting little compression fractures in her vertebrae.”
“Huh,” I said, thinking this through. She hadn’t said a word to me about her back being sore—only her side. But then, with a rush of guilt, I remembered I hadn’t let her get much airtime. I’d been the one doing most of the talking.
My mother’s favorite aunt had osteoporosis. She’d ended up with a hump on her back and stooped so badly she needed a cane. We knew that condition could be compounded by having a hysterectomy. No more estrogen meant my mother’s bones could weaken as she got older. “Is it serious?” I asked. And then—“Dad’s not worried, is he?”
“No,” Julie said. “I don’t think he is.”
That settled it. My father was the canary in the coal mine of worry. If he wasn’t concerned, everything must be OK.
“It’s just—” Julie hesitated. “She just hasn’t been sounding like herself, that’s all. And she didn’t call me yesterday, even though she knew I was seeing my doctor.”
We met each other’s eyes. That didn’t make sense. My mother might miss a day—even a few days—of phone calls, especially around this time of year, with all those final papers to grade. But she wouldn’t miss checking in after one of Julie’s appointments. She tracked Julie like a bloodhound every time she knew one was scheduled.
“Anyway, I tried her this morning, but there wasn’t any answer.” Julie was struggling to get up. “You try next, OK? You can use the phone in here. I’m going to go get dinner started.”
I tried twice, once just after Julie went downstairs, and again about half an hour later. Both times I just got my parents’ answering machine. Was it possible they’d gone away for the long weekend? But they would have told us! Anyway, my parents weren’t the types for spur-of-the-moment trips. I was getting worried. Sacha was napping and I was still up in the family room. I could hear Julie downstairs, putting silverware on the table out on the screened porch. I left a message for my parents. Then, on a whim, I called Sara.
“You know, it’s funny,” Sara said, when I got hold of her. “I talked to Mom the day before yesterday, and she didn’t sound great.”
“Why? What did she say?” I asked, twisting the phone cord around one finger.
“Oh, just the same stuff she’s been saying. How her back’s been hurting, but she’s sure it’s osteoporosis. And she said she was having some kind of scan done, but she didn’t want to talk about it.”
I looked out the window. Bright blue bay, white curtains. A smell in the air of summer coming, of the sea.
We promised we’d call each other once we tracked her down. In the meantime, Sacha napped, and Julie and I talked about plans, the way we always did. Getting ready for the baby. Where the crib should go.
One thing that amazes me about babies is how transparent they are. Whatever they’re feeling, you see it right away: Frustration. Fear. Mirth. Always on the sensitive side, Sacha’s face registered every one of her emotions. A loud noise, an unknown dog, a crash of thunder all prompted in her expression a depth of terror that made me ache for her. On the other hand, the simplest things could elicit joy. Jon playing spider games on her bare feet with his fingers. Julie making puppets for her by slipping socks over each hand. How do we learn to hide what we feel as we grow older? Watching Julie and Jon playing with Sacha after she woke from her nap, you’d never read in either of their faces what this past year had held for them. Emily. The move to Maine. Excitement and nerves about becoming parents.
WE WERE UPSTAIRS IN THEIR family room. Jacques, Jon, Julie, Sacha, and I. I stretched out Sacha’s blanket on the floor and laid her down on it.
Right away, Sacha got to work, shutting us all out as she concentrated furiously on trying to get her muscles to do her bidding. Julie eased herself down on the floor and stretched out on her side, ungainly, egging her on. “Roll, Sacha-la, roll,” she crooned. Jon cheered each time she almost made it.
Then Julie had an idea. She picked up one of Sacha’s toys—a small, stuffed clown with rattles for feet—and brought it close to her face.
“Look, Sachabelle, look!” she said, flicking the clown a little for Sacha as if she were a matador and Sacha, the bull. Sacha, stuck on her stomach on the blanket, stared wonderingly up at her. You could tell she wanted desperately to turn over, but couldn’t. Sacha gazed up at the clown, and Julie snapped it suddenly to the other side so Sacha had to turn her head the other way to see it. Back and forth, back and forth, and suddenly, without warning, delighting in the game, Sacha turned sharply to the left and kept turning until she’d rolled completely over.
There was silence, then a whoof of surprised, exhaled breath. Sacha stared up at all of us with a look on her face of astonishment, like, what just happened? Then she cracked a huge smile. Julie applauded. “Good job, Sacha! Look what you can do!”
Sacha made her happiest sound: half chortle, half snort.
She wanted to do it again and again. Jon bent over her to capture it on video camera. “She looks like one of those kids practicing ‘Stop, Drop and Roll’ during a fire drill,” Julie said, laughing. I could’ve watched them forever.
Instead, Jacques and Jon stayed upstairs with her, and I went downstairs to help get dinner ready. Julie tried calling my mother again, but there was still no answer. Later we ate out on the screened porch, and after a while Sacha got fussy and Jacques took her upstairs and got her settled, and Julie and Jon and I stayed out on the porch, watching the sky darken and the fireflies come out.
In a few more weeks it would be the solstice—longest day, shortest night.
Everything felt still, as if the world were holding its breath. Out in the bay the waves lapped the shore. It felt like we were almost perfectly balanced under the huge dome of sky, the scattered pebble-white stars just becoming visible.
It was almost nine, late for the phone to ring. Four long rings, before Jon got it. I had a funny feeling, watching him cross the kitchen, pickin
g up the receiver. It was like in a movie when the background music changes key, major to minor.
He covered the receiver with one hand.
It was my mother, he told us. She wanted to know if Julie and I were both there.
“She wants to talk to both of you,” he said, looking puzzled. “She says she has something she needs to tell you.”
JACQUES HAS ALWAYS SAID THAT bad news travels fast, and this seemed true, because by the end of that night we’d all talked: my mother and I, my father and I, Julie and each of them; Sara and all of us; Jacques and my mother, Jacques and my father; Jon and both my parents. My mother was trying to be matter-of-fact, but I could hear her voice cracking. She sounded so scared.
She kept going over what had happened: The pain wouldn’t stop, and she’d seen two different back doctors. The first suspected it was osteoporosis; the second thought she might have a degenerative problem with her disk, but when he reviewed her history he said just to be on the safe side, because of the breast cancer, he thought it made sense to have a bone scan done.
The safe side. I remembered my father’s toast at Christmas, her five-year anniversary coming up, the sense that she was almost home free.
Where was the safe side now?
She’d had the bone scan yesterday. Thursday. It had taken most of the day—first, they had to inject her with radioactive dye, which took hours to be effective. My father insisted on getting the results right away, and the radiologists did their best to rush them. Dr. Kempf met them late Thursday afternoon to read them the report. The news wasn’t good. “Poor Dr. Kempf,” my mother said sadly. “You should’ve seen his face, Mellie.”
The dye lit up where the tumors were. My father called them “metastases.”
All of this had happened yesterday, a whole day ago, and we hadn’t known. I tried to picture what we’d been doing—driving up to Maine, joking around with Julie and Jon. Watching Sacha turn over. Why did they wait to tell us? My mother seemed to read my mind. “Dr. Kempf got me an appointment with a new doctor—an oncologist,” she said. “His name is Dr. Brenner. We didn’t want to tell you until we’d heard what he had to say. We saw him late this afternoon—he squeezed me in at the end of the day,” she added. My mother had that everyone-is-being-so-nice-to-me tone in her voice. I guessed it was the old superstition kicking in: She thought if she were appreciative, a good sport, thanked everyone a million times, maybe then—just maybe—
My parents had gone out to dinner afterward, to talk strategy. They called Sara first, then us.
I pictured them coming into the house through the garage, putting their things down. Looking at each other. My father heading slowly toward the family room, where the telephone was. My mother on the kitchen extension.
Here’s what Dr. Brenner had told them: The cancer had spread to her bone. It was “advanced.” He wanted her to start treatment right away.
It all made sense now, her rib pain, her back pain. “We knew it could spread,” my mother reminded me. “Remember what Dr. Kempf said?”
LLBB, Lung Liver Brain Bone, that was the acronym Dr. Kempf had taught her five years earlier.
“But,” I said, my voice wobbling, “it’s been five years.” What happened to tiny? To 95 percent curable?
My finger flew, instinctively, to the place where my lump had been. By now, it was almost gone. My throat was dry as sandpaper.
“It can happen,” my mother said. “I guess all it takes is one microscopic little cell, jumping off into the bloodstream. Dr. Kempf said it’s possible,” she added, her voice catching a little, “that it’s been going on for a while. Maybe a year. Maybe longer.” She cleared her throat. “Sometimes it happens right away, at the very start. But they just don’t know.”
Anger took over. Why hadn’t they found this earlier? What had Dr. Kempf been doing all these years, joking with her about cruise ships and grandchildren? She should’ve gone to Mayo, I thought, my stomach in knots. We should’ve listened to my father. Where was all our Alpha Medicine when it really mattered? Where was our obsession with “experts” when we needed it most?
We’d let this happen. We’d forgotten to worry, or maybe we were sick of worrying, battle worn. We wasted worry in the wrong places so it was all used up when we needed it. We let our guard down, sent the troops home, and now—
This was supposed to be the good kind of cancer. This was supposed to be the kind to want! We were supposed to be glad she’d gotten this, instead of the awful cancer, the Sylvia and Pody and Gail killer. But we’d been duped. This was the Trojan Horse of Cancers, rolling into the city all affable and benign—here I am, a gift for you, you’ve been spared, no warriors here—and so we flung open the gates, welcomed it, Come in, OK, thank you, closed the gates again. And then one night, while we were all sleeping, the horse opened up, out sprang the warriors, thousands of them, no, millions, springing out on whisper-light feet, racing through the citadel with their spears of pain—
Did we think we were an ordinary family, that we could just take our 95 percent and be OK?
Not L, not L, not B, but B. Bone. Scaffold, frame. Bone of our bone.
I was holding the phone so hard my hand was sweating.
“Nothing,” I said to her, my voice breaking, “can happen to you.” I said it low and hard, half incantation, half command. In that tone of voice she used with us when we were little and she’d really had it. Girls.
Do you hear me?
My mother started to cry. She passed the phone to my father, who tried to keep his voice inside the clipped medical range of solid facts. Reporting what needed to be reported. I came away with only phrases—the nuclear medicine department of Rougemont. Injections of radioisotopic dyes. The room where she waited while the scan was being done. The films, meeting with Dr. Brenner. Treatment protocols.
My father kept emphasizing that this wasn’t bone cancer but breast cancer, which had spread to the bone. He said this several times. Was that better? Apparently it was, in terms of prognosis. “So we know what we’re up against,” he said, and I nodded, but of course he couldn’t see me. He cleared his throat, said something I couldn’t quite hear, and gave the phone back to my mother. She was in control again.
“Dr. Brenner says I could be OK with this thing for a long, long time,” she began, and I waited for the rest, guessing there would be a lot of this ahead of us, the Dr. Brenner-says, the quoting and citing. We were all so steeped in the culture of experts and he was our leader now. My mother seemed to trust him—I could hear the relief in her voice as she said his name—“Dr. Brenner says he has patients who are able to live with this for years. Many years,” she added, her voice finding a bit of its buoyancy again.
“This is not a death sentence, Mellie,” she added firmly. She explained they were going to start first with a drug called Megace, not toxic, almost no side effects, a kind of man-made progesterone that was especially effective with metastatic breast cancer. Megace was a tumor shrinker, and Dr. Brenner said many of his patients got a good response from it and didn’t have to graduate to anything stronger—not for a long time.
The longer the Megace worked, the better the long-range outcome.
How would we know it was working?
“Well,” she said, thinking this over. “The symptoms will get better.”
“Symptoms?” I asked. Wasn’t this invisible, this thing? Didn’t you need radioactive dye to see it?
“The pain will get better,” she said. “And that will be good, because the pain—” She hesitated. My mother hated complaining. The pain was bad. There was a chance—a good chance—Dr. Brenner thought she could have a positive outcome in a matter of weeks.
My father must have thought she was being too optimistic at this point because a minute later he came back on the line and explained that the cancer was not just in her back—though it was there, that was why she was in so much pain when she walked—I remembered walking up to the school with her over Mother’s Day now with a pang—but
also in her hips, her ribs, her neck. His voice cracked again. Had my mother moved out of earshot for a moment? She must have. His voice sounded different.
“Ame,” he said. His voice was very low. “It’s everywhere.”
Trying to get control, he translated that into medicalese: The metastases, he told me, were “advanced.”
For once, “advanced” wasn’t what we wanted. What an irony for our type A bunch. We wanted a remedial cancer, a held-back-again kind, not this overachiever variety. No AP Metastases, please. We’ll take your ordinary, run-of-the-mill C plus.
I hated the word advanced. All my life, that’s what it had come down to. Sitting at the dinner table, talking about which language class to take. Of course, take the advanced one! We pushed and pushed. I’d already started doing the same thing with Sacha and she didn’t even have words yet. I had an alphabet book of relatives I’d made her. Look, Sachabelle. This is the letter A.
A, for Aunt Julie and Aunt Sara. For Amy (me).
A could be for other things, too. Things not in the book, but hanging over it. For AP History, my mother’s subject. For the best grade. For getting ahead. For advanced. Horrible, horrible—advanced.
On the other hand, maybe we needed advanced now more than ever. Maybe my mother could take this AP personality of hers and turn it on the Megace, full force. What if she aced Megace? What if she were the best of the best? Dr. Brenner’s star student, the Rhodes scholar of Megace?
There was a pause. I could hear other voices (distantly) on our line. We must have gotten crossed with another call—a man and a woman, with southern accents. I wondered what they were talking about. Maybe they had news to share, too. Better news.
On our line, we were running out of things to say. None of us wanted to hang up yet, though, so we talked about talking: how hard it was to be far apart right now, how late it was, how hard this must be for us to hear, hearing and hearing, how we’d be all right, how she’d be all right. We went over dates, times, numbers, when we could come in, what days would work. When she’d be seeing Dr. Brenner again. Each fact was like a pin, tacking us to something real.