by Amy Boesky
“If I’m really in remission,” she asked me one afternoon on the phone, “does that mean I can send back all these flowers?”
What We Always Did
THREE NIGHTS BEFORE OUR FLIGHT to Detroit, the phone rang. It was Sara, calling from Michigan. Out of breath. Something was wrong.
“Mom’s in the hospital,” she said, shaken. “Dad thinks you guys should try to come out tomorrow instead of waiting till Friday.”
My heart started to pound. “What is it?” I asked.
“Some kind of infection, I guess,” Sara said. “They had to put her on IV antibiotics.”
My mother had been feeling fine, cooking up a storm. Then, on Monday night, she’d started to feel awful. Really bad, not like the earlier aftereffects of chemo. She’d felt a little better on Tuesday morning, but as the day wore on, she kept asking why it was so cold in the house. Finally Sara took her temperature. She had to hunt everywhere to find a thermometer—all they had was the old-fashioned kind, with mercury. My mother’s temperature was 103. Sara called my father, who called Dr. Brenner, and he told them to go straight to the ER and have her admitted.
“Dad’s there with her now,” Sara added. Call waiting interrupted and it was my father, who gave me the same story Sara just had, only translated into medicalese. My mother had spiked a fever around eleven o’clock, 102.8, evidence of an infection she’d gotten because her immune system was suppressed from the first round of F-U. She’d have to be on IV antibiotics until the fever came down. That was why she needed to be admitted.
“It’s up to you, whether you want to change your plans and come in early,” he said. “She’s not in any real danger. She’s just very weak. But I think she’d love to see you—”
Those were his actual words. But the tone behind them was different. Emergency! Emergency! Come now!
“I’ll call Northwest,” I said. “We’ll come out first thing tomorrow.”
“Good, that’s good,” he said approvingly. “Oh. And another thing.”
I waited.
Apparently, the chemo had killed off the cells in her throat and she was having a hard time talking. They had to keep siphoning saliva out of her throat, it was unpleasant but not dangerous, but—he cleared his own throat here—he wanted us to be prepared.
So: change of plans. Mom in the hospital. Mom unable to talk very well, if at all.
“OK,” I said, numb. I hung up and told Jacques what was going on and we started rearranging things, calling Julie and Jon, calling the dog sitter, calling Northwest to change our tickets. Sacha and I could get a flight out the next morning; Jacques, who couldn’t get away from work on such short notice, would still come out on Friday, as planned.
We were back to Cancer Calendar again. All the festivity had gone out of the trip. We were tense, dry mouthed, moving quickly and unhappily through the house, talking tersely about logistics. Julie was going to fly straight from Portland to Detroit this time—she didn’t want to drive down to Boston at this stage, she was so pregnant. This was the last time she’d be able to fly before the baby was born. She’d meet us either at the house or at the hospital Wednesday afternoon.
I flew out first thing Wednesday morning with Sacha. After we got off the plane, I rented a car and drove straight to Rougemont. It was hot out. Cars shimmered in the parking lot, light rays bouncing off silver tops.
There was a place in the lobby where they let me leave our duffel bag and the stroller. They gave me a claim check and I left our things there in a small heap.
Next, I stopped at the reception desk, asking for oncology. Sacha smacked the counter with both hands.
“Seventh floor,” one woman said. The other, peering up at me through her bifocals, looked at Sacha and frowned. “You’re not taking the baby up there, are you?” she asked.
I kept hearing that. “This is no place for a baby,” a nurse said sharply to us by way of greeting when we got to the seventh floor. Oncology patients wheeled by on carts, gaunt, hairless, glowworm pale. This is no place for my mother, I wanted to tell her, but instead I just nodded, like I agreed but was too numb to turn around.
She wasn’t trying to be difficult. Of all occupations, I can’t think of one that requires more compassion and generosity of spirit than nursing. She meant well. She took me aside, obviously uncomfortable, and explained that even though they did their best, the custodians never really managed to get to every last corner . . . and the floors . . . so many germs . . . She was looking down at Sacha while she said this. “It’ll be OK,” I said. I wasn’t going to let Sacha crawl around on the floor.
How could I come all this way and not let my mother see her?
Sacha, in fact, was the best possible visitor on floor seven. Because everything to her was equally foreign and unknown, she treated the gray-green hallway with the hopeful attention of a potential trip to the zoo: What have we here? Is this an IV pole? A wheelchair, left vacant? A cart full of used lunch trays? When we found our way to room 712A, she was content in my arms, wriggling a little, true, but upbeat, willing to see the positives here, what’s that, a circular curtain? A vinyl armchair?
Maybe, though, there was another reason why I brought Sacha. I saw room 712A through her eyes and it was less unbearable, just a room, OK, maybe a room made up of vinyl, linoleum, and chrome. A room all beige-gray-green, not exactly House Beautiful, not even A River Runs Through It, but Sacha was open-minded and that meant I could be, too. Here was my mother, propped up with about a dozen of those skinny hospital pillows behind her back, the tray table in front of her stacked with plastic cups of varying shapes and sizes, each with a flamingo of orange plastic straw, and if it weren’t for the fact that she looked like utter and complete hell, I almost would have thought she was OK.
But of course she wasn’t.
Her gown was gaping open a little and I could see her clavicle bones standing out like pins, grim and sharp. She’d clearly lost weight, but at the same time, parts of her looked puffy and swollen—her face, her fingers. She was wearing a terrycloth turban which had slipped to one side, bits of bare scalp showing. I could barely look at her. I struggled to regain composure, knowing she’d see in my face how changed she was.
None of this should be happening. She shouldn’t be here. She should be at home, defrosting moussaka, getting the Flag Cake ready.
Bomma, I said out loud, seemingly for Sacha’s sake. Look, here’s Bomma!
I sounded exactly like the host of one of those inane children’s shows on TV.
As if to say: Here we are! This was our new reality, this half-hospital room with its circle of curtain for privacy, a corner just visible from the next bed where her roommate was gasping inaudibly into the phone. We overlooked the roommate, Sacha and I, we were model visitors, we had eyes only for my mother. In fact eyes only for my mother’s eyes—we ignored the rest, the tubes coming out of her arms, the confusion of machines on either side, things squeezing and humming and dripping. We focused on her eyes, no, actually, we focused on her glasses, shining out at us, and tried as hard as possible to shut out everything else.
We. Sacha and I formed a unit. “I’m so sorry, Mellie,” my mother said, or tried to say, because the lining of her throat was literally coming off inside and choking her and every time she tried to talk she gagged. It was horrible. I could see tears in her eyes as she spat and wiped and spat again. Tears of anguish and shame.
Maybe the infection had done some of this, but it looked like the first course of F-U had crashed over my mother like a tsunami, leaving only wreckage behind. Deathly pale, cheeks sunken, blue-green shadows under her eyes, like a caricature of herself. Huge head, shrinking body. Because of what was going on with the lining of her mouth, she couldn’t talk. Her beloved voice, that voice I heard every single day, was thick as a plug. I could barely look at her; my stomach churned. I hated myself for the churning. Compassion battled in me with revulsion, and I leaned forward, trying to find a part of her to grab and squeeze that wasn’
t taped or tubed, and I could feel tears splashing down onto her arm.
“Oh, Mellie,” I said back, brokenly. “I’m the one who’s sorry. I’m—”
She wasn’t the only one whose words got stuck.
Unlike me, Sacha was an ideal visitor. She was oblivious, didn’t know what was normal and what wasn’t, was doing some of her own spitting and coughing, saw nothing unusual in the slowly deflating IV bag dangling over my mother’s swollen arm. She swung out from my waist reaching her arms straight toward my mother like a tiny diver, humming and spraying, while my mother struggled upward to meet her grasp, her cheeks sunken, her eyes dull, her skin stretched taut and shiny, her breath sour. I was a coward because they were right, the nurses, this was no place for a baby, but Sacha covered for me, kept my mother from seeing how horrified I was. She was like the part of me that could stand all of this, she stood between me and this ghost of the woman who was shuddering upward toward us from her hospital bed, reaching for us as if this were life itself I was holding toward her. As if all she had to do was reach upward and be saved.
BACK AT LAKEWOOD DRIVE, JULIE was upstairs in the Hilton, unpacking. Sara was getting things together for dinner. Sacha had fallen asleep in the car on the drive home from the hospital, and I let her stay asleep in her car seat in the front hallway. Julie inched her way downstairs, clutching the railing for balance—she was much bigger, even in just three weeks—and before long the three of us ended up in the kitchen, sitting at the table. I couldn’t remember the last time it had been like this: the three of us. Alone, with my father still at work. For eighteen years, this is how we’d lived, the three of us, in this immaculate, isolated four-square colonial, eating dinner every night at six thirty (each in our designated spot) around this same Formica table. Telling about our days. Then we left, one by one—first Sara, then me, and finally Julie. Light-years ago. Now, grown-up, we came back less and less frequently—instead, my mother and father “made the rounds,” flying around the country to visit us, seeing us one at a time. Over holidays—Fourth of July, Thanksgiving—we came back, but we were always surrounded: Geoff, Jon, Jacques; Jenny and Rachel. Enough din to cover the rattle of old ghosts.
Now, being just the three of us again felt bizarre. Stripped down to our essence, facing one another. With Sacha asleep and Jenny and Rachel not coming until Friday, it was literally just us. Girls, my mother used to call us—a collective noun. The girls are away at camp. The girls quit piano. The girls are in college. Three of us, like strands of a braid woven together. Then pulled apart.
Now, we alternated between being on our best behavior and falling back into the old patterns: oldest, youngest, middle. Sara, who had been back here for almost two weeks already, had almost effortlessly taken charge. She knew where all the frozen things were for the Fourth. Where things in the kitchen had been moved to make way for new things: my mother’s pain medications. Brochures from the infusion center.
Julie and I tried to fit ourselves in. I noticed we’d taken our old spots at the table.
My mother, never one to hold on to souvenirs, had scoured the house of our childhood, and all our old things had been packed away. The rooms were spare, streamlined, but the house still felt crowded by the past. I could feel our old selves watching us—leaning over the balcony, looking down, the way we used to crouch and spy when my parents had parties, whispering slyly to one another. Two against one. One against two. The tricky triangle of sisterhood—who said what to whom. Whose feelings hurt hardest.
We knew the old roles were there, waiting for us. The endless competition. Who was more organized? Funnier? Who did my mother think was the most “pulled together”? That was one of my mother’s prized judgments—the Pulitzer of personality. Being “pulled together” meant you could cope with life, whatever got thrown at you. If you didn’t have that, so what if you published your thesis or edited law review? You could find life on Mars and it wouldn’t matter.
We all still wanted her approval, much as we hated ourselves for it. Being back home was like tiptoeing across quicksand. We saw the old sinkholes, and much as we didn’t want to risk them—not now, with so much at stake—there was only one way across.
To distract ourselves, we kept busy. We threw out old newspapers, cleaned the fridge, made the beds. Put stacks of towels in various rooms, the way she would have. Watered her red geraniums. Eighteen pots, spaced all around the deck, all in need of pruning. “Why can’t she ever plant anything else?” Julie muttered, circling with the green plastic watering can my mother had owned forever.
My mother. Queen of what-we-always-do.
JULY APPROACHED WITH THE SMELL of burnt grass and barbecues. Lakewood was quiet, the Realtors gone, the glossy brochures advertising the house still lying (with a certain embarrassment) on the front hall table. Julie cooked—apron distended over her rising belly—while Sara and I organized: cookbook back in its spot on the shelf, cans and bottles rinsed, sorted in the appropriate recycling bins in the spickand-span garage.
The house was imperceptibly changed. Even in just three short weeks, it had become the house of a sick person. Everywhere there were signs: vials of pills next to the toaster. A kidney-shaped spittoon in the bathroom.
My father went straight from his office to the hospital. When he came back, he seemed glad to see us, but you could see the panic in his eyes.
“They think she’ll be ready to come home tomorrow,” he told us on Wednesday night.
Thursday, though, the fever was lower but still not gone. More antibiotics ordered.
We took turns. We had a relay going: my father at work, one of us at the hospital, the other two rotating things at home. We took turns cleaning the house, taking Sacha for walks, and thawing various dishes for my mother’s birthday dinner, which we were still hoping to have on Saturday night. On Friday morning, we decided to set the table in advance. “Let’s do it inside this year,” Sara said, a concession to what we didn’t want to admit: My mother shouldn’t be outside, not in this heat. She was too frail. We used her favorite plates, the ceramic ones they’d gotten one year on a trip to the Amalfi. I made festive menus, naming each course: Artichokes Toujours. Moussaka Lakewoode. Salade Extremely Verte. Tartine de Flagge.
We told one another it was important to be funny. Not just normal anymore, but funny. Humor seemed our best weapon now.
Jacques was coming in Friday evening, around the same time Jon was arriving from Portland. Friday afternoon I went over to the hospital alone, leaving Sacha with Julie, since Sara was on her way to the airport to pick up Geoff and the girls. My mother was asleep when I got up to her room, which I hadn’t expected, and her roommate was on the phone again—was it possible this could be the same conversation?—so I flipped through the pages of a Good Housekeeping magazine from February, waiting for her to wake up. There was something bleak about seeing all the recipes for Valentine’s Day cookies and creative ideas for making cards out of red and white tissue paper. Last February looked strangely innocent now, from the sad perspective of early July. My mother had been well then. Or at least if she was sick, we hadn’t known it. We were still back in DC then, getting ready to say good-bye to Julie and Jon. A lifetime ago.
That felt like such a big deal then: who lived in which city. I pushed the magazine away.
Hospital Time. Neither summer nor winter. Neither February nor July. There were no seasons here. No light or dark, just a perpetual artificial glow. It was like being inside of an enormous clock: You could feel the cogs moving, the wheels turning over and over, and every second a kind of sighing sound, as if to say, again, again. Or, not yet, not yet. Machines whirred. The oxygen meter beeped out its forlorn warning: broken! Broken! There was the ineffable sadness of three o’clock, the day nurses packing up their things, their pace quickening, moving out, toward fresh air, the out-of-doors, the release of evening, the long holiday weekend ahead, and the patients still lying here, trapped in their beds, while the world orbited, away, away. On the grainy telev
ision sets implausible news programs showed miniature catastrophes blooming and fading. I closed my eyes, trying to name the sounds I heard, each creak and whirr.
Not now. Not now. Or soon, soon.
I must have dozed off for a few minutes, because when I opened my eyes, my mother was awake, and Dr. Brenner was visiting.
He didn’t seem as short as I remembered, or as hearty. “Hey,” he said, noticing me. The colloquial greeting took me by surprise. He wasn’t all that much older than I was, after all. Seven or eight years, maybe. In another life, we might have been friends.
“You have a visitor,” he said to my mother, as if this needed pointing out.
He patted my mother’s leg under its heap of blankets.
“Not such a great day, is it,” he said. He sounded sympathetic, and I wondered if I’d misjudged him when we met in his office.
My mother was listless, eyes flicking on his as if she were trying to read a book in a foreign language.
I asked Dr. Brenner why the side effects had been so bad.
He explained she’d gotten an infection—not unusual, it happens. “We’re going to hold off on the second course of chemotherapy until she’s stronger,” he said, tapping with his pencil on her chart.
“What do you mean, ‘hold off ’?” I asked.
“We just want to wait awhile,” he said. “We’ll see how soon this infection clears up, then make a decision about when to resume.”
I stared at him. How could we stop? We needed everything we had to throw at the cancer cells! If we stopped—
He sensed my worry. “This can happen,” he told me. He was being nice. “The best thing is for Mom to get a little stronger, then we’ll start it up again.” I knew it was irrational, but I hated that he called her “Mom.” It seemed so awful already, her being here, wearing this dreadful hospital gown, in this ugly room with no privacy, when it was Friday and everyone was flying in and her birthday was on Sunday. Her favorite day of the year. At the very least he could give her back her pronoun. Your mom. That would be better.