He studies me for a minute and then nods. “I’ll just be in here if you need me,” he says, gesturing down the hall to his office, and I fight the sarcastic rebuke lying on my tongue. Where else would you be? I sigh. I know it’s not him I’m irritated with.
Once I hear the office door close, I settle in on our couch, prop my laptop on the sofa’s arm, and open it. Out of habit, I check my email first.
Subject: Wednesday
Hi Hon,
Haven’t heard from you this week. Did you get the cat pictures? Aunt Joey forwarded them. I thought they were funny! Also, don’t buy anymore apple juice. Full of arsenic! Poison!! It was on the Today Show. Mixxy misses you! Left a dead bird on the porch this morning. Just a house sparrow! Nothing exciting. Have to run to work!! Hugs to Jack.
Love,
Mom
If I had to describe my mom in a couple of sentences, it would be these: she misuses exclamation points. She still wears pants with pleats. And she spends a lot of her time with a pair of worn binoculars around her neck spying on feathered creatures in her backyard and then logging the species she finds on eBird, an online birding community founded by researchers at Cornell that Jack made the mistake of telling her about one Thanksgiving. She tends to overstate to strangers how much she’s contributing to science.
And she cries. A lot. When I was growing up, most of her crying was done in her room; a solitary activity that she thought she was concealing from me. “Daisy-bear,” she’d say, emerging from her room with bloated eyes and a fake, ill-fitting grin that looked affixed to her face like a pair of false eyelashes. I often wondered if her makeup drawer had a collection of smiles lying next to the tubes of drugstore lipsticks and eye shadow palettes.
But now she cries in the great wide open—and not just when she’s sad.
Progress, says the therapist in me. She’s conquering her decades-long battle with depression, embracing life and all its messy emotions. But the daughter in me cringes—both at the overly expressive demonstration and my selfish and secret desire that she take it back behind closed doors.
I hit reply and then stare at the cursor blinking perpendicularly on the white screen. It was a reflex, but I obviously can’t respond. What, I’m going to tell her my cancer is back via email? Oh, and give Mixxy my love.
And it reminds me, the first time I had cancer I learned that there’s only one thing that’s worse than actually having cancer, and that’s having to tell people you have cancer. Never mind close family members, like a mother who will weep so uncontrollably that you think she may pass out from the effort of it.
But it’s the acquaintances, the people who are in your life by circumstance—coworkers, neighbors, your hairstylist—that are the worst to break the news to. The pity is a given. But then comes the advice. And it always starts with “my great-aunt Ethel” or “my best friend’s husband’s cousin”—because everybody knows somebody with cancer. And then you have to sit through their Lots of Cancer story and all the treatments they underwent. Everyone’s a sudden expert. And it’s exhausting.
My cell phone abruptly comes to life on the coffee table, jarring me from my thoughts.
Kayleigh. It’s the umpteenth time she’s called this week and I know I can’t put her off any longer.
“Daisy,” she hisses into my ear when I pick up. “Where have you been?”
I hold the phone closer to my ear, straining to hear her. “Why are you whispering?”
“I’m in the arts and crafts closet,” she says. I picture her huddling among shelves of Popsicle sticks and canisters of tempera paint in primary colors and plastic-handled safety scissors. And then as if imagining it has transported me back into elementary school, I start to faintly hear children’s voices singing.
“Are the kids still there?”
“Yeah,” she whispers. “Pamela’s doing circle time. I told her I had a papier-mâché emergency.”
“What’s wrong?”
“With the papier-mâché ? Nothing, it’s fine.”
“No, with you. Why are you calling in the middle of a school day?”
“Oh. Right. Harrison came by. The school. I think he’s stalking me.”
I don’t say anything, trying to remember who Harrison is.
“The nineteen-year-old? Basketball player?” Kayleigh prompts.
“Oh, Jesus. Of course he’s stalking you. You’re a cougar who stole his virginity.”
“He was not a virgin!” She pauses, and I know she’s chewing on a nail. A nervous tic she’s had as long as I’ve known her. “I don’t think. Anyway, where have you been? And what happened at the doctor? I’ve been trying to call you all week.”
The normality of our conversation had sucked me into an alternate universe for a brief second. A pre-second-round-of-cancer universe where I could breathe without a steel plate pressing down on my chest. But her question pops the bubble and I thud back down to my reality.
I tell her what happened at the doctor.
“Holy fuck,” she breathes.
“Yeah,” I say. It’s something I’ve always liked about Kayleigh: her honest brevity.
AFTER I HANG up, I turn back to my computer and open Google.
I type: stage IV breast cancer.
My throat closes when the first page I click on reiterates what Dr. Saunders has already told me: There is no cure.
Hearing it was numbing; seeing it’s a vicious punch to the gut.
I move on. According to WebMD, chemo and radiation are options but have better success in early stage IV, when the cancer has spread to only one place outside of the breast. I count up the body parts my tumors have spread to. Brain, lungs, bone, liver. Four.
Then a link grabs my eye. A New York Times story about a woman who has lived for seventeen years with stage IV breast cancer. Hope surges. I click the link and scan the article. Her cancer had spread only to her bones. And hormone therapy worked. My triple-negative breast cancer doesn’t respond to hormone therapy. Hope recedes.
I spend the rest of the day surfing the tangled web of Internet breast cancer information. I read really personal blogs of people who are dying. I tear up when I notice that the date on the last entry of my favorite one is more than two years ago. I pore over miracle stories where people claim to be cured by vitamin C infusions, hyperbaric oxygen tanks, a diet of Chinese pearl barley. I take notes on those, so I can ask Dr. Saunders about them. I sift through hundreds of medical journal articles and ongoing clinical trials.
By nightfall, my back is stiff, my eyes are bleary, and I am emotionally overwhelmed. There’s so much cancer research that I could spend ten years reading it, and it would be the equivalent of taking one step in a marathon. I laugh at my arrogance. Thousands of scientists have dedicated their lives to finding cures, saving lives. And I thought that after a little Google research, the answer to my predicament would just pop up? Oh, this is what’s going to fix you. This is the answer.
I know Jack has been making the same futile effort. When he wasn’t on the phone with Dr. Ling or his fellow vet students, trying to vicariously catch up on what he’d missed that day, or checking in on Rocky, I heard him click-clacking away at his computer in the study.
As I close my laptop and slide it onto the coffee table, I hear Jack coming down the hall. His footsteps stop at the door. I look up.
“Permission to enter?”
“Granted,” I say, stretching my arms overhead.
He sits next to me on the couch and reaches down for my calves, swings my legs up into his lap so he can rub my sock-clad feet. I let out a little moan and lay my head on the cushion behind me, closing my eyes.
“Have you eaten dinner?” he asks.
I shake my head no.
“Guess you don’t want soup.”
I snort with laughter, open my eyes. The parentheses that bookend his mouth deepen, and all I can think is: I love his face. A study came out a few years ago citing symmetry as the defining factor in attractiveness. The researc
hers examined and measured the mugs of the celebrities in a magazine’s Most Beautiful People issue. The one thing they had in common? Facial symmetry. Jack doesn’t have that. His right eye is slightly bigger than his left. When he’s inquisitive, he can only cock his left eyebrow. He can’t grow a full beard. The one time he tried, patches of hair on his face just didn’t come in, making it look like he had a stroke when he was shaving. Then there’s his off-kilter bite. But all of these imperfections add up to something magnetic. Jack’s face is quietly disarming. And even though I’ve studied every inch of it over the years we’ve been together—memorized every line, freckle, and flaw—it still has the ability to warm me like the sun; I bask in its glow.
“Why do you put up with me?” I ask, lifting my head off the cushion and burying it in his chest.
“The snorting,” he says, squeezing me to him. “It’s terrifyingly sexy.”
LATER , WHEN JACK is out walking Benny, I know that it’s time; I’ve put it off for long enough.
I pick up my cell phone and instead of scrolling to her name, I punch out each number that I know by heart, my finger’s staccato bringing me closer to the one conversation I’ve been dreading to have.
She picks up on the first ring.
“Mom?” I say.
“Daisy-bear!” she says. “The most amazing thing just happened. This hawk—huge! must have been a broad-winged or maybe a Ferruginous? I couldn’t be sure—landed on the fence post in the backyard. Looked right at me. I tried to get my camera but it flew away right as I went to snap it. Most beautiful wingspan. So I guess, yeah, probably a broad-winged.”
I nod, even though she can’t see me, and then I take a deep breath and tell her about the cancer. How it’s back. And that it’s everywhere.
She’s silent for so long that I wonder if I’ve lost the connection, but right when I start to take the phone away from my ear to check, I hear her demand “Where, everywhere?” as if I am somehow responsible for the cancer’s placement.
I tell her.
“That’s not possible!” her voice says, an octave higher and on the precipice of hysterics. I lower my tone to counterbalance. She peppers me with questions and I answer them, trying to focus on the positive. “Right now, it’s asymptomatic so at least I feel good!” and “Dr. Saunders really thinks this clinical trial might work!”
But nothing I say can stop the tidal wave of emotion that I’ve unleashed.
So eventually I stop talking and clutch my phone so tightly my knuckles get sore while I wait.
And wait.
And wait some more.
For my mom to stop crying.
seven
“YOU REALLY FEEL fine? No headaches? No noticeable lack of energy?”
Jack and I are sitting across from a thin black man in a lab coat who doesn’t look much older than us, in an office across town from Dr. Saunders’—but may as well be in the room next to his, as similar as they are. The light reflects off his shiny bald head and his thick lips part while he stares at the results of my second PET scan and MRI. He doesn’t even attempt to hide his bewilderment as he looks up at me.
I shake my head no. He mimics the movement, like we’re playing that acting class mirror game, and continues to scrutinize me as if I’m some medical miracle. Maybe I am. Maybe I’ll be the first person to surpass the expected survival rate for Lots of Cancer. Maybe my tumors will form some kind of symbiotic relationship, instead of a parasitic one, and we’ll all live happily ever after.
He tries again. “No pain or discomfort of any kind?”
He’s so incredulous that I start to second-guess myself. Have I felt any pain, and I just can’t remember it? Or I chalked it up to something else? And then I remember a special I saw years ago on Discovery about a girl who didn’t feel pain. She could put her hand on a hot stove, and leave it there, the skin searing and blistering, but she didn’t feel a thing.
Maybe I have that, I think.
And then I remember slamming my hand in the car door when I was five, and the excruciating pop when I rolled my ankle in high school and the white open sores on my throat during chemo and the two toenails that fell completely off and the headache just two days ago on the floor of my kitchen. I do feel pain.
“Is that a good sign? That she doesn’t have symptoms?” Jack asks.
“It doesn’t mean her condition is any less serious, if that’s what you’re asking. And it’s kind of unfortunate—she might have come in months ago if an unusual pain had prompted her to seek medical advice.”
“So what do you recommend? Chemo? Radiation?”
He looks at Jack. “Frankly?” And then pauses, as if he really expects Jack to respond, “Yes, please be frank.”
I almost laugh at the near Abbott and Costello of it all.
“I think it would be a waste of time. There’s just . . . too much of it.”
He then asks if we’ve looked into supportive care, and gives us a card with the number for hospice services and a pamphlet titled “Coping with Terminal Cancer.”
In the Zagat of doctors, this guy would have zero stars.
AT HOME, JACK throws his keys onto the kitchen counter. They skid across the laminate and stop just inches before the sink drop-off. He walks to the fridge and yanks open the door. Grabs the cranberry juice, takes three gulps directly from the bottle, sets it in an open space in the door that’s strictly just for sauces and salad dressings, and slams the door closed.
He’s mad. It happens so rarely that I just watch him, like he’s a curiosity—the three-headed lady or the alligator boy in a traveling state fair. I once asked him if he ever got furious, ever worked up to the point of throwing something or growling with rage. He shrugged. “I’m from the Midwest.”
His back remains toward me, his hand still resting on the fridge door. I gently pick up his keys and place them on the hook by the door.
We stand there in silence, not moving, like kids who have just been touched in a game of freeze tag.
And then Jack speaks: “That doctor was an idiot.” His voice is gruff, worn.
I nod, even though he can’t see me.
The silence is back and it hangs in the air between us. A privacy curtain to hide our true thoughts.
Jack breaks it again. “I’ll be in the office,” he says, but the word “office” cracks in the middle in a way that makes my breath catch.
I nod again, even though he still can’t see me.
He leaves the room and I wait until I hear his footsteps retreat down the hall, the door to his office closed. Then I walk over to the refrigerator, open the door, and move the cranberry juice back to the top shelf where it belongs.
AFTER REARRANGING EVERY item in the fridge and tossing my bad impulse purchases into the trash, I sit at our tiny kitchen table for two. I drum my fingers on the glass surface, leaving smudge marks that I’ll just have to buff out later. Good, I think. It will give me something to do.
And that’s when it dawns on me that for the first time in my life, I don’t have anything to do; I don’t have a plan. The first time I had breast cancer, everything moved so quickly. There was a sense of urgency—we caught it, let’s cut it out, chemo it, radiate it, get rid of it. Go! Go! Go! I barely had time to think, process what was happening. Now, there’s too much time. And what’s happening is not something I want to contemplate.
I know there are decisions to be made, but no one is pressuring me to make them. And I realize it’s because my choices are rather like asking someone on death row if they’d like to die by firing squad or electric chair. That’s effectively what the second-opinion doctor said today. You can have chemo and radiation and die. Or, you could just die.
Now, the way Dr. Saunders was pushing the clinical trial is making more sense. He was giving me a third option—the only one where dying didn’t have to be an immediate side effect.
Dying.
A laugh bubbles out of the side of my mouth. Is that what I’m doing? The very idea seems ludi
crous. Dying is for old people and orphaned children in Africa with distended bellies and dads who get struck down by cars when they’re on their bicycles in the wrong intersection at the wrong time of the day. It’s not for twenty-seven-year-old women who just got married and want to have babies and feel fit and healthy and not even in a little bit of pain. I feel like I’m at a restaurant and the waiter has brought me the wrong dish. Dying? No, there’s obviously some mistake. I didn’t order that.
But I can’t send it back. And now I’m looking at four months or six months or one year, and what am I supposed to do with that?
On our fourth date, Jack and I went to Barnes & Noble and slowly browsed the shelves, petting each other’s arms like only two people who are first falling in love do. We played a silly game where we would take turns picking up a random book and then reading the first line of it—or making up one of our own. Then the other person had to guess if it was real or not. While playing, we stumbled on a book called If: Questions for the Game of Life. Sitting in the middle of an aisle, we fired questions at each other for hours. Stuff like: If you had to get rid of one limb, which would you choose? (Jack: left leg. Me: left arm.) If you could only eat one thing every day for the rest of your life, what would it be? (Jack: his mom’s chili spaghetti. Me: guacamole.)
But the one that I can’t stop thinking about, even though I can’t remember who actually asked the question: If you knew you were going to die in one month, what would you do? I said something like: pack a suitcase, book a transatlantic flight, rent a house on the Amalfi Coast, and stuff my face with loads of authentic Italian pasta and wine.
Now all I can think is: how naively ambitious of me. I’m a little embarrassed by that self-assured twenty-one-year-old who didn’t let the prospect of death get her down. She’ll just carpe diem! over a bottle of red until she draws her last breath. Silly girl. What did she know?
But there is something I admire about her: at least she had a plan.
ON FRIDAY, THE structural engineer who comes to inspect the hump in our den doesn’t have much better news.
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