by Amy Boesky
The good news was, the fever was down. She could stop with the antibiotics, he said.
A nurse came in, there was a general flutter around my mother’s bed, unhooking her IV, taking away the bags of fluid. The work was all in the details now, cleaning, propping, swabbing, getting her ready to be discharged.
I hated the idea of delaying round two. Cancer Calendar was rearranging itself in front of us again, days evaporating, weeks being erased. I felt like the big picture was being lost, like something was being pulled out from under us. I followed Dr. Brenner out to the hallway.
I was afraid they were giving up on her.
“Isn’t there something else she can try in the meantime? Something less toxic?” I asked.
The look that he gave me was hard to describe. It was a mixture of patience, sadness, and ineffable fatigue, and briefly—just for a second or two—I wondered what it must be like to be Dr. Brenner, with those little boys at home, having to deal with so much suffering every day. I pictured a door opening, one of the boys calling out. Dad! How was your day?
He explained that once my mother was stronger—he gave her back her pronoun this time—she could get a drug called Neupogen that would boost her white cells. It was expensive, but worth it. Until then, any form of chemotherapy would be too dangerous. She was just too weak.
“It’s her birthday on Sunday,” I told him. It seemed faintly ridiculous, saying this, but I kept going. “She made a special dinner. The whole family’s coming in tonight.”
What I didn’t say, what I couldn’t describe, was the feeling of my mother’s birthday. How it always was. Sitting outside, the grass dewy against our bare feet, sparklers singeing our fingers. The arcs of light they made—Jenny and Rachel dancing with them out in the grass. The smell of coals burning down to ash. “It’s a big deal to her, her birthday,” I added lamely.
Dr. Brenner nodded, taking in this information.
“Let’s get her home, then,” he said.
So we did.
Help (II)
LATER, LOOKING BACK, I SOMETIMES played a terrible game with myself, trying to decide which good-bye was hardest. There were so many of them, layered on top of each other, and each seemed more difficult than the others. It was like listening to music that reached a crescendo only to build and build until you were certain you couldn’t bear it anymore.
The hard thing about saying good-bye on July Fourth was that we didn’t have fixed plans to see one another again until Labor Day. And even then, we weren’t sure Julie and Jon would be able to make it. So much depended on everything else—when Julie had the baby; when my mother’s blood counts went back up so she could start chemo again. I was planning to come out when she was ready for the second round of F-U, but when would that be? Even the trip over Labor Day seemed tenuous—would Julie and Jon be able to come? Would my mother be well enough to make it happen? Julie, starting her eighth month now, wouldn’t be allowed to fly again until after the baby came. Sunday afternoon before she and Jon left for the airport, my mother clung to her. Against Julie’s pregnant girth, she looked as tiny and shrunken as a child. Both of them were wet-faced when they pulled apart.
No tickets booked. No chemo schedule. No firm plan of what came next.
When it was our time to leave, my mother pulled herself together.
“Don’t worry, Mellie,” she told me, patting me on the arm as Jacques and I loaded up the rental car, getting ready to head to the airport a few hours later. “The minute Dr. Brenner gives me the all clear, we’ll get those tickets sorted out and you and Sacha will come back.”
So far, though, we were all in a holding pattern, like circling in a plane before you get cleared for landing. Her blood counts were still too low for more F-U.
Back in Newton with Sacha, I resumed cycles of my own. Walking with Sacha and Bacchus in endless loops. Circling in the car with Sandi, looking at houses. Calling my mother, waiting for her to be able to talk, calling her back. Cycles eclipsed other cycles. Orbiting back and forth from the house to my new office, pushing Sacha in her stroller. Calling Annie to talk about what I’d be teaching in the fall. Waiting for something to change.
MID-JULY, I STARTED RUNNING AGAIN. Around the same time, Sacha stopped nursing.
I don’t remember which came first, the end of breastfeeding or the beginning of running, but somehow, in those weeks after the Fourth of July, I started to become aware of my body again. My veins, how blue they looked on my wrists. The way my fingers moved when I typed. How good coffee smelled in the morning. The nap of things against my fingers—cardboard, rose petals. Flowers sprang up in the garden of the House with the Green Shag, weedy but lovely: tiger lilies. Coneflowers. Flowers of midsummer. Hot and humid as it was outside, I was suddenly ravenous for the out-of-doors. When Jacques came home from work each night, I’d run upstairs, peeling clothes off as I went—T-shirt, shorts—and grab my running clothes out of the bottom drawer of the dresser we shared. I’d take Bacchus with me and we’d bound out the front door, banging the screen door behind us, tearing down Middlesex Road and over the bridge to the reservoir. I could feel energy and nerves and something else coursing through my veins, and I wanted—needed—to run. By the time we hit the path around the water we were going full stride, he and I. Bacchus wasn’t very well trained, but if I ran fast enough, he left the squirrels and other dogs alone and more or less stayed with me, and because I needed to focus on him, I’d run without music, listening to the sound of footfalls, of his panting, of my own breath quickening and slowing. It had been eighteen months or more since I’d run, and for the first few times, my chest ached and my breath was ragged, but I pushed through, ignoring the muggy heat and the cyclones of tiny midges that swarmed near the water. I’d run for half an hour, forty minutes, sometimes even fifty, then I’d fall back through the door, sweaty and winded, my face red, my clothes sticking to me, and Sacha would look at me with bright, curious eyes. Who are you? her expression seemed to say, and where’s the mother I know?
Running, I was free of thinking or worrying. It was the only time I wasn’t anxious or angry. For that stretch every day, I could just be, swallowed up by motion and exertion. Running, I had a body again—legs that ached, calf muscles that tightened when I ran up the trails into the woods. Eyes that swam with tears.
Then I’d come back and take Sacha from Jacques, and bit by bit we’d slip back into being ourselves again. Except that little by little I noticed Sacha wasn’t interested in nursing anymore. She’d try and I’d try, but there was a subtle change; she’d fidget, lose interest, and before I knew it, we were down to twice a day—first thing in the morning, last thing at night. Then, only once a day, and not always even that.
Once I read a column in the newspaper called “Last Things,” by a woman who wrote features about being a parent. We make such a big thing out of every first, she wrote. First smile, first step, first word. Why don’t we record last things? She was trying to remember the last time she’d carried her daughter (now eight or nine years old) down the stairs. I remembered that column and I could feel Sacha’s interest in nursing slipping away and I promised myself I wouldn’t let that happen: I’d know when the last time came.
But I didn’t. Sometime over those last weeks of July it just stopped, with no fanfare or recognition. One morning I got up late, and Jacques gave Sacha a bottle; one night I stayed up late, working on my book, and he gave her a bottle again; or I was on the phone with Julie, or with my mother; one night Annie called and we talked for hours—and somehow, it had been a day, then two days, and Sacha wasn’t nursing anymore. A last thing, and I had missed it.
“It’s probably time,” Julie said, when I called to tell her. “Seven months—that’s about right, isn’t it?” She was deep into the baby books, getting ready.
I wasn’t sure. There wasn’t a timeline for this in What to Expect. It’s easier to chart out the beginnings of things, I suppose, than the ends of them. I looked at Sacha, whose laser focus was n
ow beamed on crawling. It was hard to put into words how peculiar it felt, watching the efforts she made, shooting away from me. Our drive to separate seems so much stronger at times than our drive to connect. Or maybe, separating, we just need to find new ways to come together.
WHEN I WASN’T RUNNING OR talking on the phone to my mother or calling Julie to see how she was feeling—the baby was just weeks away now—most of July I spent looking for child care.
Here is how I pictured the person we would eventually hire to help take care of Sacha in the fall:
She’d be younger than me, more energetic, less moody. Less bound by day-to-day details (laundry, plane tickets), more willing to get down on the floor and play with Sacha. Like a devoted niece I never knew I had.
When I described this hypothetical person—usually to Julie, on the phone—it was mostly in terms of binaries: Playful, yet responsible. Firm, yet flexible.
“Sounds like an ad for paper towels,” Julie said.
My mother—feeling pretty much the same, thanks, and still hoping for good news about her blood counts—called every afternoon to weigh in with her own adjectives. Energetic. Organized. (Did this surprise us?) Careful. This is Sacha you’re trusting someone with, she reminded me, in case I’d forgotten.
Truthfully, the only person my mother could imagine leaving Sacha with, other than my sisters or me, was her.
Jacques took an afternoon off work so we could meet with Eileen Diamond, the owner of the agency in Newton Centre we’d been sent to by Annie’s older sister, who always knew where to go for things like this.
“Listen, if DeeDee recommends this place, it’ll be great,” Annie told me, when she called me back with the number. DeeDee lived in an imposing house in Brookline and ran her life like a small corporation. She was the one who’d sent me to Dr. Millis, Annie reminded me.
“Right,” I said, remembering Dr. Millis’s brisk, no-nonsense tone, her cold hands. Maybe I should’ve listened to Jacques, and run our own ad in the classifieds.
“ ‘ Diamond’ can’t be her real name,” Jacques said, maneuvering our car into a parking space in front of Centre Nannies.
Real or adopted, the name fit. Everything about Eileen was sharp and faceted—she was tall and angular, wearing chunky metal jewelry. She looked like she was in her late forties, her own children off for the summer volunteering somewhere in Central America. Pictures of them were propped up on her desk facing outward, at dramatic angles.
Eileen brought us seltzer and glossy brochures and wriggled her fingers unconvincingly in Sacha’s direction, the whole time explaining to us how the agency worked. We would pay a (hefty) deposit, take a cluster of file folders home with us, and start selecting candidates who looked promising—“it’s all about fit,” Eileen reminded us. The agency ran clearance checks on everything from candidates’ psychological stability to driving records. We could choose up to five people to interview at a time. Once we’d settled on someone, we’d meet again and draw up a yearlong contract. If the person didn’t work out, we’d get some money back, as well as a “replacement nanny.”
It all sounded so contractual to me—like mail-ordering a bride. On the other hand, how did I think this was going to happen? Did I think I was going to meet a babysitter on the train?
“Now,” Eileen said, getting down to business. She peered at Sacha, who was chewing the corner of the brochure. “Were you thinking of live-in, or out?”
“Out,” we said in unison, then glanced at each other, embarrassed by how quickly we’d answered. And how loud our voices were.
Eileen frowned. “That’s a little harder,” she told us. “Most of our girls are looking for a place to live.”
She tried to pitch the live-in idea, but Jacques put up a hand to stop her. “We’re pretty private,” he told her. “We like to have evenings and weekends to ourselves, just us.”
That was an understatement. No sane, likeable child-care person would want to stay with us for a minute if they saw us on a typical evening, nine-ish. We didn’t even like seeing ourselves then, let alone each other. Evenings and weekends were subject to crankiness, half-dress, and eating takeout straight from the fridge.
I could barely imagine having a stranger around during the day, when we supposedly needed help. How could I talk to my mother and Julie and sob every afternoon into Sacha’s back in front of someone I didn’t know—even someone discreet, yet confiding?
“Live out,” I confirmed weakly.
It didn’t seem possible that we had already reached this point. July was coming to an end, and Sacha would be eight months old in a few weeks. She was crawling now. How long before she took her first steps?
The future was blank. All I could manage was to try not to plan, to focus on the here and now: mashing up steamed veggies and fruit for Sacha, taking her for walks, going running. My book had ground to a standstill in the middle of horoscopes, as if prognostication everywhere had come to a halt.
My mother—
I felt like I should say something about my mother to Eileen Diamond. I had a strange compulsion to tell everyone I met about her, like the speaker in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”: My mother has metastatic breast cancer. Stage 4, in her bones. Incurable, actually. We’re hoping chemo will buy her time, but she hasn’t been able to start the second round of treatment yet. We don’t know for sure when she can. She’s in a lot of pain from the cancer, and sometimes it’s hard for her to stay awake or concentrate—
Eileen was passing us each a questionnaire to fill out.
And this whole thing is so hard to understand, because even though we come from a cancer family, it’s not breast cancer, it’s ovarian cancer. We were always so worried about our ovaries, and so careful, and then this happened, and it just doesn’t make sense—
But there was no time here for family history. We had these forms to fill out. Parenting style, schedules, hobbies. These details would help us find a “match,” Eileen said.
Our hobbies.
Sacha wriggled around on my lap, trying to grab the pen from me. I had a brief flashback to senior year in high school, looking at the big space on college applications for listing major activities. Honors, national awards.
I didn’t really have hobbies.
Maybe it wasn’t too late to pick some up. Maybe my mother would rally. Maybe we’d find a great nanny, get the house issue settled, I’d get back to working on my book, we’d have a schedule—
I could study Farsi.
“What should I say?” I whispered to Jacques, who was busy writing. I read his entries for Hobbies over his shoulder. Squash. Biking. Sudoku.
Sudoku? “That’s not a hobby,” I objected, tapping on the word with my pencil.
He looked offended. Then he frowned at my blank page. “What about running?” he asked, looking me over like we’d just met. Only this time, he wasn’t planning to ask for my number.
Running! I’d forgotten about that.
Running, I wrote in one of the blanks in rounder-than-usual print. I thought for a while. One hobby didn’t seem enough. Hobby seemed to demand a plural. Travel, I wrote next.
Did flying back and forth to Detroit count as travel? I pictured the magazine racks in the Northwest Airlines, Terminal D. The last row of coach.
Apparently, we were out of time.
“Terrific,” Eileen was saying, taking back our forms. “Now, maybe we can just chat about these for a little while—”
Jacques was getting annoyed. He didn’t mind filling out a short form, but he was missing a meeting and didn’t want to talk about hobbies (real ones included sleeping late, scouring the classifieds for used trucks, and watching reruns of Law & Order). He wanted to find out what we got for our nonrefundable deposit. We were post-hobby, and we needed help.
All it took was a few terse questions, and Eileen—she had an MBA, after all—jumped into action. Of course, we could move on—of course, if he had a meeting—
She scattered a few brightly col
ored folders on the desk between us and disappeared into her inner office, where the contracts were kept. Jacques, frowning, took out a checkbook.
I looked over file number one. Annika Nilson, a sweet-faced girl relocated to Boston from a Midwestern farming community, straight A student, active in her church, her own hobbies (volunteering at a soup kitchen, stargazing) suggesting compassion and a love of nature. Her essay—“The Importance of Family”—centered on a tribute to her grandmother, who’d taught her to bake before dying of congestive heart failure when Annika was twelve.
I pictured myself opening the front door after a day of teaching to see Annika’s shining head bent over Sacha’s, nudging tiny fingers around a rolling pin.
When Eileen returned, I cleared my throat. “Annika looks like a nice girl,” I said, trying to sound noncommittal.
Eileen frowned, looked at the folder, reddened. “Oh—I’ve made a mistake,” she said.
Annika, it seemed, had already been placed. A couple in the Back Bay had just hired her. A pair of headhunters, Eileen said approvingly, taking the file back. With two-year-old twins.
In my envious imagination, the headhunters were doubles, with two of everything. Two toddlers. Two high-powered jobs. Twice as prepared to swoop in and grab Annika.
We were behind again.
“Don’t worry,” Eileen assured us, “there are other candidates”—maybe not quite Annika, her tone implied—“but it’s true, this is a very active time in the nanny-hiring season.”
End of July. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to get their child-care situation squared away before Labor Day. We should get back to Eileen with our top choices as soon as possible.
Jacques seemed to guess how I felt.
“They probably keep Annika’s file as a decoy,” he said under his breath as Eileen ushered us out. I could tell he was trying to cheer me up. “Just to scare people into choosing someone else quickly. Annika probably doesn’t even exist.”