by Amy Boesky
I came back to Boston. The Monday Annabel started working for us, my parents went in to review the latest set of bone scans with Dr. Brenner.
“What did they say?” Julie demanded, in that ragged, out-of-breath voice of postpartum sleeplessness. We were on the phone, comparing notes. I’d been able to get through to my mother before Julie did. But there wasn’t any news yet.
“She doesn’t want us to keep asking her about it,” I told Julie. “She said they’ll call when they know something.”
My father called back later to tell us what we’d more or less guessed. He set up a conference call so he could talk to all three of us at once. The scans showed the cancer was worse.
I could hear from my father’s voice how bad this was. Physically, of course, because she’d had absolutely no response now from either round of F-U. But also psychologically. It was horrible. The worst possible outcome.
“It sucks,” Julie said, starting to cry. “If she could just get one little bit of good news—”
My father didn’t want to stay on the phone long. “We’re trying to get a handle on this,” he told us. “Trying to figure out the next step.”
I WAS THINKING ABOUT THIS during a lull in a moment that might, from the outside, have looked like a photo on the front of a holiday greeting card. It was the first weekend of September, Labor Day weekend, and we were sitting, all twelve of us, on a small sandy beach in Charlevoix, a resort town on Lake Michigan. Surrounded by the detritus of an afternoon at the beach: a large umbrella; bottles of sunscreen, sand sticking to the caps; an upside-down novel with a gum wrapper stuck inside for a bookmark. The cooler, open, filled with the remains of lunch: skeletons of grape twigs; wads of silver foil; lonely sandwich crusts. Soda bottles with pastel droplets at each base.
It had been a haul to get down here from where we were all staying, in a row of just-painted condominiums overlooking Lake Charlevoix. The whole town seemed to have been scrubbed and renovated since we’d been here last. Baskets of impatiens hung from every lamp pole, and boys with wagons of water and specially outfitted hoses came around twice a day to keep them fresh. All the tatty stores we’d loved as children had been replaced with upscale boutiques selling pink and green sandals or coffee tables studded with shells. Everything was freshly repainted, barely recognizable from the dim lakefront town we remembered with its shabby Fudge Shoppe and shuffleboard courts on the green. Now it was all redone, resplendent, and somehow we’d managed to get ourselves here, even Julie and Jon and Maddy, the way we’d planned months back, when the things we thought we’d do still held.
Now, of course, this was more than an ordinary get-together at the lake, and we all knew that. We’d arrived late the previous day and spent the better part of the evening helping my parents unpack the car and set up their condo. After we helped Julie get Maddy in, we unpacked my parents’ car: the black-and-white hamper stuffed with before-dinner delicacies; cold bottles of wine sweating from exposure to the late summer air; folding beach chairs; the familiar striped towels we’d brought up here summer after summer as girls. Back when we stayed in a rooming house instead of condos, back when two weeks up here felt like an eternity, each day opening into the bright blue eye of Lake Michigan, the lighthouse throwing off its long pale beam, when my sisters and I lay on the burning sand, scooping up the silvery grains and letting them run through our fingers, dreaming of something vague and imperceptible—some kind of happiness that might, if we squinted hard enough, resemble the place where we were right now.
Getting things inside had been easy enough. Even getting Maddy set up went well. But getting my mother up to the condo had been hard.
She stayed in the car till the last minute, resting. We could see how much the drive had taken out of her—it usually takes four hours from the airport, but yesterday, given that we’d driven in caravan, given Sacha’s need for changing and stretching and being released from her car seat, given Julie’s need to find a comfortable position to nurse Maddy, given my mother’s need to find something cold to drink that didn’t make her feel worse, and my father’s conviction that stopping for lunch was a good idea, just to give everyone a chance to pull themselves together, it had taken over six hours. By the end my mother was extremely pale, breathing harder than usual, but each time one of us asked if we could help her inside she just said no, she was fine, go on in, she’d just be a minute. A teeth-grit of a smile.
There’d been endless discussion about how to manage this. The pros and cons, for instance, of renting a wheelchair from Rougemont, none of which was shared with my mother until my father had all the details worked out and then she was furious. She was not going anywhere in a wheelchair, thank you very much, and if it came to that we could just cancel the entire trip. So we backpedaled, of course we didn’t need a wheelchair ! We’d be fine! I was struck by the irony that this was the first trip Jacques and I had taken with Sacha without feeling completely weighed down by equipment—maybe we were beginning to lighten our load. But now, my mother needed things. Her cane. Extra pillows. Painkillers packed in a cooler. Two kinds of folding chairs my father hoped would make sitting on the beach easier.
Charlevoix had always been my mother’s favorite place.
At the center of town, the main road formed a drawbridge over the channel between Lake Charlevoix and Lake Michigan—the road giving way to a section of metal, hinged in the middle so it could lift upward and let the boats through. Every half hour the bell rang, tollgates dropping with a series of graduated warning chimes, and the metal bridge lifted open, bit by bit, until it stood implausibly ajar, like a jaw, letting the taller sailboats through the channel and out to Lake Michigan beyond. When we were little, we used to dare one another to run across the bridge after the first warning bell. I can remember my heart in my throat, panting, running across with terror as my sisters cheered me on. For years I had dreams of something going wrong, the bridge opening while we were still on it, grabbing at the edge of one section of road as we lifted skyward, screaming for rescue.
None of this ever happened, but one year—I was eleven, I think, or twelve—Mr. Larson, the man who owned the rooming house where we stayed, had a heart attack, and my father (psychoanalyst, yes, but MD first, and the closest thing to a cardiologist at the rooming house that week) was allowed to ride with him in the ambulance to the hospital. I heard my father explain when he got back that the bridge had been open and they’d been stuck behind the tollgate for almost ten minutes, waiting, with the insufferable chiming of the bells. Mr. Larson survived, but he was never the same. We still came back, summer after summer, and some things were still waiting for us: the rooming house with its old sloping floors, the lake smell, the flocked wallpaper, and Mr. Larson rocking slowly back and forth on the porch, eyes on the lighthouse, as if he needed the rhythm of the rocking chair to remind his heart to beat.
Now, the Larsons were gone—the rooming house sold, turned into condos. We couldn’t stop saying how different it all was. Where had the bead shop gone? Remember the place that sold fishing tackle? But of course, the biggest difference was in us. Not girls anymore. We were all in our thirties now, with husbands and children. We’d grown up, and now there was a whole new generation: my nieces; Sacha; and brand-new Maddy, who had endured two flights at barely five weeks to be here.
Some things were still the same—the restaurants we went to, one per night, each layered with memories of having eaten there every other time we came: the all-you-can-eat-shrimp place, where my father insisted we turn down the offers of homemade bread and steaming fries in order to buck the system and eat shrimp, shrimp, and only shrimp; the elegant inn an hour away with its buffet fantasia, white-clothed tables groaning under hand-carved melons, platters of iced tortes, and mayonnaise-y salads; and our sentimental favorite, The Park Side, a small restaurant with sparkly Formica tables and a view of the harbor’s bobbing boats.
But so much else had changed. The inn had closed. Mercury levels had contaminated the trout at
the “other” seafood restaurant, The Fish Pier; at The Park Side, the hostess with the blue-rinsed hair had retired, we needed a high chair for Sacha, a place out of the draft for Maddy, and Jenny and Rachel were somber and reticent, shy with my mother, sneaking furtive glances at her eyebrows, thinned to self-conscious question marks of hair above her pink-rimmed eyes. We were all determined to have fun and we were, but in a self-conscious, look-how-much-fun-we’re-having kind of way, anxious not to fuss over her, and fussing just the same—wasn’t she cold under that air-conditioning vent, did she want a sweater, we could just ask them to lower the AC a little, was she sure she couldn’t try just a little sword-fish, it wasn’t local but it was delicious, and so on, each of us locked in an anxious solicitude we couldn’t shake.
Then came the day at our old beach.
It took an effort to get all of us there because the “best beach” was near the old rooming house, blocks from the condos, down a precipitous set of steps, the wood rotted, difficult to manage in the best of times and now was definitely not the best of times. Up at the top, staring down at the crescent of sand, I remembered every other time I’d stood up here, looking down: six or seven or eight years old, my feet cold from the damp gritty sand, my bathing suit clinging to me, the pail’s plastic handle digging into my palm with the freight of our booty: mounds of pale gray Petoskey stones. Now Jenny and Rachel were inching their way down, and I could see their pale feet clenching and recoiling, their thin shoulder blades pulling back like wings as they hunched and stooped and scrambled, and I was just behind them, Sacha warm and sticky in my arms.
Sara and Geoff had one hamper between them, Julie had Maddy in a Snugli, Jacques had the towels and the beach chairs, and Jon and my father were helping my mother balance, each of them holding one side of her as they inched their way down the stairs, pausing when she needed to catch her breath. We weren’t completely sure what was causing this breathlessness, whether it was anemia from the cancer or her ribs constricting her lungs, but even so, she made it down, and there it was: the little oval of beach winnowed away by time and tide, but still there, pungent and glowing. Jacques set up the folding chairs facing the lighthouse, and we took things out of the ungainly black-and-white hamper. Same hamper, same beach. It was almost like we were little again, crouching here and staring out at the lake.
My mother used to tell us if we looked hard enough we could see Chicago on the opposite side, but we could never see anything but lake as far as we looked, the Beaver Islander trudging slowly across the horizon with its burden of tourists. Sara was teaching Jenny and Rachel how to find Petoskey stones, with their octagonal crenulations. It took patience. You had to walk slowly, stooping down just at the point where the waves lapped the stones and darkened them, and between the shiny dark greens and the quartzes and the opalescent whites; if you were lucky you’d find one, gazing up at you like a magic eye with its octagons of fossil veins.
Julie laughed, watching them. “Remember how we used to paint the ones we found with clear nail polish so they’d look like the ones they sold in town?”
I remembered. You couldn’t see the fossil lines when the stones were dry. The polish, we thought, would preserve the lines forever.
A family scene. Three generations. Blue water, white boats, the sun still hot. Now and then a cool breeze raised gooseflesh on our arms, and you could smell the slightest whiff of autumn in the air.
It was a good day. It had taken enormous effort, but we’d done it. We’d had lunch, kidded around, Jacques and Jon were throwing a football back and forth, in an aren’t-we-like-the-Kennedys kind of way, all bluff and boyish humor. And there was a nice sense of being, just for this little while, free from worrying about anything having to do with the body, with being hungry or tired or hurting, with being too hot or too cold or needing to go to the bathroom. . . . Even my mother seemed relatively comfortable, at least for the moment. We were actually all, stupefyingly enough, OK, and then—
Which one of us asked about the F-U? Was it because, woven into one another’s lives as we were, we were even in that sunlit moment imagining the next step, the next visit, the effort, the plans, the coming back? We were each of us so tied to what was coming next: school starting for Jenny and Rachel; the semester of teaching about to begin for me; Maddy’s first sets of shots. Like anchors, tethering us to the and-then-and-then-and-then of next month, and the month that followed.
In any event, someone asked, “When’s the next round of F-U?” Simple question. Could be answered with a date, or a number: two weeks from Tuesday, for example. Or, we’re not sure yet, we’re waiting to see how the blood counts look.
But that wasn’t how it went. My mother, lying back in her folding chaise, her Jackie O glasses on, said—casually, as if she’d just remembered something she’d forgotten to mention, something insignificant, maybe, like a change in plans for where we were eating that night, but it wasn’t that, it was something else—“Actually, I’m done with the F-U.”
Silence. The loud horn of the Beaver Islander.
“What?” I asked cautiously, like I didn’t want to break something fragile. It was funny how this happened, how someone said something and for a minute you literally didn’t understand. Then you did, and the lack of understanding opened up into something worse.
She was stopping the chemo.
Why? What did she mean?
“Does Dr. Brenner want you to try something less toxic?”
She shook her head. I could see the veins on the side of her neck. She was so thin, it hurt to look at her.
Here’s how we were sitting when she told us this: my father to one side, my sisters and I to the other. Jacques, Geoff, and Jon had moved farther down the beach, a pantomime of throwing and catching. We couldn’t see the ball. Julie was nursing Maddy, trying to keep her screened with a tent of towel. Sacha was asleep in her backpack, which we had opened up and jammed upright in the sand. Head wobbling to one side, mouth open, a rivulet of drool forming at one corner of her lips. Jenny and Rachel, squatting on thin haunches, were yards away, out of earshot, poking at an emerald fringe of seaweed.
“No,” my mother said with a gentle shrug, “no, we’re just going to take it as it comes, that’s all. No more poison.” She was looking out at the horizon, at the Beaver Islander, at the place where we couldn’t (whatever she said) see Chicago.
“So,” Julie said, feeling her way. “You’re saying—”
My father put his hand over my mother’s. They’d talked all this through, I realized; they were telling us something that had already been decided.
“Girls,” my mother said, and in that collective noun I imagined the hundreds of moments, back when we were girls and she was Mom, calling upstairs to tell us dinner was ready or urging us to hurry because we were running late for school. A hundred memories crowded one another: I was lying on the floor of Sara’s bedroom, watching her pick snails off the wall of her aquarium, we must have been late for something because my mother was calling us, irate, Girls!, or we were in the mudroom kicking our boots off and one sailed across the kitchen, leaving an arc of slush across her perfect floor; she was furious with us (Girls), or withholding, or folding herself up in her reading chair with a frown; or she was holding up a thermometer with a puzzled glare, assessing our illnesses—she hated us being sick; or she was braking behind some crazy driver (to her they were all crazy) and her arm flew up instinctively, across the space in the passenger’s seat where one of us either was or ought to have been sitting. Girls. Only now, of course, we were no longer girls. Sara was here with Jenny and Rachel; I was with Sacha; Julie, with Maddy. Or if we were girls we were girls only to her, and a lump began forming in my throat, as half comprehending what she was trying to tell us, I realized that inside of her there was still our girlhood. When she went, that went. When Sacha woke up and opened her cat-gray eyes and blinked herself back into consciousness and looked around for me, she saw something else, someone in the process of becoming the person
she’d one day think of as her mother, but no girl. Never a girl.
The girls were going.
“I don’t want to spend the time I have left that way,” my mother said, not looking at any of us. My father still had his hand on hers. They were in cahoots—they had planned this.
“It was awful, taking that stuff. Having that poison drip into me.” My mother shook her head. “It made me so much sicker . . . and Dr. Brenner says . . .” She took a deep breath. “He says for me, it isn’t helping.” She lifted her shoulders. They were so thin. A month ago she weighed ninety-two pounds, and my father threw out their scale. “Not much quality of life after all, I’m afraid. Not in my case.”
Julie started to sob. Her shoulders heaved, and I could see Maddy trembling against her with the motion. Julie understood before I did: My mother was telling us it was over. She was giving up. I barely heard the rest of what she and my father were saying, the importance of having time left with dignity, with her faculties intact, with some chance of enjoying—this was the phrase they both used, as if they’d scripted it—“the time we have left.”
Time left with dignity. Terminal Time. This was like no time I knew. It was time that was finite—Isn’t all time finite, aren’t we all mortal, my mother was saying. Yes. But this was different. This was time cut off from hope. With nothing left to try, not even the fiction this could work.
I wanted to argue her back into sense. There were other things, experimental things. Hadn’t Dr. Brenner said that, when I was there with her at the clinic earlier that month? If the F-U didn’t work?
Yes, my mother said, patient, using her teaching voice. But if the F-U only got a “limited response,” the chance of the next level of drugs working was slim. Dr. Brenner had told her that. And by this point she was so weak from the F-U, or from the cancer, or both, that he was worried she couldn’t tolerate anything stronger.