I walked around the playpen to the far side of the ward, where Melissa sat in one of the La-Z-Boy-style recliners, facing a row of windows. Her long dark wig, which she curled into soft waves, was a startling contrast to her parchment-pale skin and rose-painted lips. But it was her eyes—enormous, with irises like green sea glass, fringed by long black lashes—that made her face impossible to forget. An IV bag hung above her, drip-dropping poison into her tattooed arms. She clapped her hands together and smiled when she spotted me. “Suleika!” she said with a slight lisp. We didn’t hug, abiding by the strict no-contact rule between immunocompromised patients. “It’s cool here, right?” she said. “There’s a lot of light.”
I settled into the recliner next to her, and when lunchtime came, we ordered the star-shaped peanut butter and jelly sandwiches—Melissa said they were her favorite item on the kids’ menu. We looked out the windows as we ate, and I asked her dozens of questions, wanting to know everything about my mysterious new hospital buddy. Melissa told me about how she was born in Ireland, where her dad, a musician, was from, but had grown up in a small town in New Hampshire. She told me about learning to play the drums in her early teenage years and about the short-lived all-girl indie rock band she started called Mystic Spiral. After graduating from art school, Melissa had moved to Brooklyn, where she’d spent five years working as an assistant to Francesco Clemente, a famous contemporary painter.
“Twenty ten was a good year for me,” Melissa said, her eyes filled with longing. She had a boyfriend and a buzzing social life, and her paintings were beginning to show in galleries. Then, one night, she met up with a friend for drinks in Williamsburg, and in the dark of the bar her friend had accidentally squashed her foot with the steel leg of a stool. At first, Melissa thought she had suffered a sprain, but weeks later the pain was still there, and a hard knobby bump had appeared on the top of her foot. Melissa, who at the time didn’t have insurance, had finally found a sliding-scale clinic, and an X-ray showed a crushed third metatarsal bone. It also showed that the lump wasn’t just swelling but an abnormal mass. A biopsy revealed the mass was malignant, and that the cancer had already spread to her pelvic lymph nodes and knee. “You don’t get cancer from a barstool, obviously,” Melissa said. “If my friend hadn’t squashed my foot in that exact location, I probably wouldn’t have discovered the cancer. Pretty wild, right?”
After the diagnosis, Melissa had no choice but to move back to New Hampshire to live with her parents. She began an intensive regimen of chemo and when her hair started to fall out, she locked herself in the bathroom and shaved her head with clippers. Afterward, her mom drove her to a salon in Boston to be fitted for a wig that looked identical to her inky black locks streaked with chestnut highlights. That same night, she put it on, boarded a train back to New York, and went to a party in Bushwick. “I showed my friends the wig and then jumped right into the backyard swimming pool,” she told me with an irreverent smirk. That was Melissa: effervescent and fun-loving, quick to laugh and always smiling, even in the grimmest of circumstances. In her presence, things brightened and opened up.
This was Melissa’s second time in treatment. She had undergone seventeen cycles of chemo and multiple surgeries the first time, and at the end of that, her scans came back clear. But only a year and a half after her diagnosis, her cancer was back, and she’d decided to transfer her care to Sloan Kettering, where more treatment options were available. When she got the news of the relapse, she was devastated and she sat down on her parents’ porch and opened her sketchbook. She had previously worked with oil paints on large canvases but the fumes now made her sick, so she began to experiment with watercolors and made her first in a series of haunting paintings, entitled Self-Portrait with Mask. “I like the uncertainty and the happy accidents that you get with watercolors. I like how you don’t have total control, like life,” she told me. “Maybe you could come over sometime and I could paint your portrait?”
I nodded eagerly. Melissa was someone I would have hung out with before my diagnosis, and I was thrilled to have made a new friend who was also trying to find ways to creatively engage with illness. We were both forging unlikely careers: Melissa painted self-portraits from bed; I wrote self-portraits from bed. Watercolors and words were the drugs we preferred for our pain. We were learning that sometimes the only way to endure suffering is to transform it into art.
* * *
—
Melissa and I soon became inseparable. We kept each other company during chemo. We spent afternoons scouring thrift stores for matching leather jackets and new threads that fit our skeletal frames. In the evenings, we hung out at her apartment in Brooklyn, which overlooked McGolrick Park and was decorated with a baffling collection of knickknacks: a taxidermied two-headed duckling sent to her by one of her many suitors, a beautiful glass bong, a wooden crate filled with dozens of pill bottles and paintbrushes, and a giant corkboard on one wall, where she’d tacked hospital bracelets, photographs of friends, old plane tickets, and past career accolades. To ward off the nausea she smoked pot constantly and when she got the munchies fixed us bowls of ice cream. She let me borrow one of her wigs and gave me makeup tutorials, teaching me how to pencil in my eyebrows and paste thick rows of fake eyelashes where mine had fallen out. Melissa loved to dance, and when we had the energy, we would blast Thriller on the speakers and twirl around the living room, whipping our wigs around to the beat until we collapsed on the couch.
One topic that came up a lot during our endless chats was love. Finding love during a prolonged illness—let alone holding on to that love—was daunting. Sometimes, it could seem straight-up impossible. I was one of the rare young adult patients whose significant other had stuck around during treatment. “Hold on to him,” Melissa would often say. “You don’t know how lucky you are.” A few months after her diagnosis, her longtime boyfriend had dumped her, moved to the West Coast, and promptly fallen into a new relationship with a much younger woman. “A world-class asshole,” Melissa said.
But the topic we liked to talk about more than any other was all the places we would travel once we were better. We planned itineraries to faraway lands. Melissa dreamed of palm trees and spice markets, rickshaws and elephants. I imagined myself reporting from some distant locale, or speeding down the California coast in a beat-up convertible. People often described cancer as a journey. But we didn’t want to go on some bullshit “cancer journey”—we wanted to go on a real journey, one that would rocket us from the cancer ward’s sounds, smells, and sad plastic plants, and plunge us into the reckless lives we wished we were living.
Two skinny girls, all elbows and knees, protruding cheekbones, and buzzed heads full of desperate dreams for the future—any future, as long as we could be there.
* * *
—
Later that winter, a few months after we met, Melissa found out that her cancer had spread to her lungs. She responded by buying a plane ticket to India. “Less bucket list, more fuck-it list,” she explained, sitting at her kitchen table as she sucked on a joint. While surfing the Internet, she had discovered A Fresh Chapter, a nonprofit that offers trips abroad and volunteer opportunities for cancer survivors with the intent of helping them find new meaning and direction after treatment. “India has always been my dream—the colors, the culture, make me want to paint,” Melissa said. “Cancer has taken so much from me and I need this. I just want to feel inspired again.”
My eyes widened with concern as I thought about her going to a country where even healthy travelers are known to get sick. “But what if you come down with a neutropenic fever?” I asked. “What if you need to be hospitalized while you’re there?”
“What’s the worst that can happen?” she replied. “Suleika, for the first time, I feel like I’m going to die. I am going to die from this fucking disease.”
We sat very still, a heavy silence thickening the air around us.
Too sick to travel anywhere outside of a fifty-mile radius of the hospital, let alone join her in India, I cheered Melissa on from my bed when she left that March, living vicariously through the photographs and the updates she sent me by text every couple of days. For two glorious weeks, Melissa wasn’t a cancer patient—she got to be Melissa the Artist who taught drawing and painting classes through a volunteer program at an elementary school in Delhi. She stopped at the Lotus Temple and said a heartfelt prayer. In one of the many outdoor markets, she came across gorgeous hand-painted marionettes and bought so many she needed a second suitcase to bring them home. The highlight of her trip was a visit to the Taj Mahal, which was more beautiful than anything she had ever seen. Traveling to India, she had eluded for a brief moment the specter of her own mortality. One day I picked up my phone and saw a message from her that said, I’ve never felt more alive.
* * *
—
Meanwhile, in New York, the city had been knocked flat by a blizzard. Great swaths of snow fell from the sky, padding the sidewalks and trees and buildings in a heavy blanket of white, soon tracked with shoe prints but still lovely. I closed the drapes, but the streetlamps refracted off the snow, basking the apartment in a watery blue light. Will had inherited an old television from a friend, and he’d set it up on a card table so that we could watch movies in bed. It was a Sunday night and we lounged side by side, me with a heating pad on my stomach, him with a can of beer that he drained in long gulps.
When Will stood up to grab another beer, I resisted the urge to tell him to slow down, not wanting to further irk him or become the kind of nagging girlfriend who might appear in a sitcom. Something was weighing on him, but I was afraid to ask what it was because I was pretty sure the answer had to do with me. Lately, when he returned from work, he seemed restless and frustrated. He would sigh if I asked him to walk the dog or to run an errand, and he made little reproachful comments about how he wished he had more time to himself or to hang out with friends. I hated how much I needed from him, and it was humiliating to ask someone for help when you had the sense they didn’t really want to give it. After I fell asleep, I would sometimes hear the furtive closing of a door, and I would get up to discover that he had left for a walk or to go watch a game at the sports bar next door. I’d lie awake, waiting for him to return, waiting for the sun to rise, waiting out the tension that had slowly infiltrated our relationship like mold.
“We need more help,” Will would say again and again. Tasked with the role of boyfriend, caregiver, and normal twentysomething trying to figure out who he was and what he wanted to do with his life, Will was overwhelmed, buckling under the weight of his many responsibilities. He never said it outright, but it was clear that he was getting fed up with the limitations and demands my health placed upon us.
“So, a couple of people from work are going to a music festival in Texas tomorrow,” Will told me when he returned from the kitchen with his beer. “I was thinking of maybe buying a last-minute plane ticket and joining them for a couple of days.” His tone was casual, but his face was tensely composed.
“I have chemo this week and surgery on Friday.” I was getting a port to replace the catheter I had ripped from my chest. “I need you here.” The desperation in my tone made me cringe.
“I know, I know, and I’m sorry,” Will said, “but I really need a break. And maybe, while I’m there, I can do some writing of my own.”
I wanted to be the graceful leukemic starlet who told him, Take as many breaks as you want, you deserve it, have a wonderful trip, my love, but there is a spiritual exhaustion that comes with maintaining this kind of charade after a while. As a patient, there was pressure to perform, to be someone who suffers well, to act with heroism, and to put on a stoic façade all the time. But that night, I didn’t have it in me to listen to how hard my illness was on Will—how badly he needed a break when I didn’t have the option of taking a break from this body, from this disease, from this life of ours.
“Why do you take breaks in the moments when I need you most?” I asked, although the question was mostly rhetorical.
“There’s always something going wrong with you,” Will said. “When is it ever a good time?”
My vision shuddered in and out of focus, like the beginning of a violent migraine. Without realizing what I was doing, I reached for a handblown glass globe filled with white sand that I kept on the windowsill next to our bed. Will’s mom had bought it at a museum gift shop during her last visit. The glass, streaked pink and lavender and tangerine, reminded her of the sunsets in Santa Barbara, and she had given it to me as a stand-in until I was well enough to travel and see them for myself. Palming the globe in my right hand, I admired the iridescent swirl of sand inside. Then, I lifted it high above my head and chucked it as hard as I could across the room. I’m a terrible shot and the globe missed Will by about five feet—it didn’t even reach the far wall of our tiny apartment but instead plummeted and exploded on the floor, broken glass and sand flying everywhere. The floor was weirdly sparkling, as if it had been dusted with glitter. I felt a sweet, flashing release as I took in the mess, the fury in my core loosening.
“What the hell?” Will spluttered, his mouth dropping open in shock.
“This is my hell,” I bawled back.
I got up from bed, shards of glass crunching beneath my slippers, and went to the bathroom, slamming the door shut. I bent over the sink and splashed my face with cold water and looked in the mirror. I looked horrible—because I was horrible, I thought, with a nauseating swell of shame. Along with the chemo, an ugliness was coursing through my veins. Small violences. Swallowed resentment. Buried humiliations. Displaced fury. And a marrow-deep weariness at a situation that had dragged on far longer than either of us could bear. These were the things that infected the growing distance between Will and me. These were the things I could talk about with Melissa, who understood better than anyone the bifurcation of personality that can happen when you’re sick—how illness heightens the good and the bad, unveiling new parts of yourself you wish you hadn’t known were there; how illness can bring you down to your most savage self.
But to try to explain this to Will seemed impossible. So I slipped out of the bathroom, and without a word, we got into bed. Through the thin drapes, I could see the snow still falling. I had gone too far and wished I could take back what I’d done. I tried to say I’m sorry, but he was already asleep.
Early the next morning Will bought a last-minute plane ticket, packed a bag, and left for Texas.
20
A MOTLEY CREW
MELISSA WAS THE most beautiful woman I had ever seen up close, and I wasn’t the only one to think so. With her silver snakeskin clogs, her tattoos, and her older-woman sophistication, she quickly became the glamorous pied piper of the pediatric cancer ward. Several of the teenage boys had developed debilitating crushes on her, their cheeks reddening whenever they dragged their IV poles past.
One of them was Johnny, the same boy I had chatted with online while undergoing my transplant. He was a skinny, good-looking kid from Michigan, with an olive complexion and eyes like chocolate. His freshman year of college had been cut short by a leukemia diagnosis. Now he lived at the Ronald McDonald House, the pediatric equivalent of the Hope Lodge, where sick kids and their parents who came from far away had the option of living for next to nothing. Johnny’s mother, a pious Colombian woman with a heavy accent, accompanied him everywhere he went, but when he was with Melissa and me, he would banish her to the waiting room, saying, “Mo-om, can’t you see I’m trying to hang out with my friends?” Johnny had quickly developed a crush on Melissa and wanted desperately for us to think he was cool—he loved to talk about the fraternity he had briefly joined, the wild keg parties, the girls. We didn’t necessarily buy his tales, which often sounded exaggerated and hard to believe, but he was earnest and sweet and we came to love him like a little brother.
Another of Melissa’s fans was a young man named Max Ritvo. He was a poet, in his senior year at Yale. He split his time between his dorm room in New Haven and an apartment that his family had rented for him in a posh building with marble floors and a white-gloved elevator attendant a few blocks north of the hospital. Like most everyone else at Sloan Kettering, Max was as bald and pale as a boiled egg, but he stood out from the other patients with his thrift-store kimono, tortoiseshell spectacles, and a tattoo of a bird inked onto the side of his skull. Max, like Melissa, had Ewing sarcoma, which he’d been in treatment for on and off since the age of sixteen. He was brilliant and funny, with a brain that spouted aphorisms and metaphors so strange and vivid they made us pause mid-conversation to laugh. Max described morphine withdrawal as feeling like “a sobbing window pane having hammers and acid taken to it.” Scan anxiety was like “eating a pizza and not being sure if those are pepper flakes or small red mites.” Losing his virginity in a hospital bed was like “having sex on a lumpy raft in the middle of a sea of antiseptic.” His phrases so perfectly encapsulated our very particular sufferings that I often found myself scribbling them on scraps of paper, tucking them into the back pocket of my jeans for safekeeping.
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