Best,
Dr. Samuel Ling
The blood in my veins runs cold. When was Jack going to tell me this? But I know the answer before I even formulated the question in my head: he wasn’t. I sigh. Part of me is touched. I know Jack thinks he’s doing a Nice Thing. A Husband Thing. That he thinks being with me at my surgery is more important than graduating. But it’s not. And the rest of me is annoyed that Jack has made this executive decision without telling me. That the Lots of Cancer is ruining one more thing and I have no control over it.
I email Dr. Walden and then go into our bedroom to pick up Jack’s socks and make the bed. And then I notice the accumulation of Benny’s hair rolling like tumbleweeds across the hardwood and I get out the broom. And then the mop. And then I can’t stop cleaning. I wash the baseboards and scrub the bathroom grout with a toothbrush and spray every mirror and window in the house with vinegar and water and do four loads of laundry. And in the silence of my dusting and washing and scrubbing, my irritation at Jack rises.
I’ve only asked him for one thing—one thing!—since my Lots of Cancer diagnosis. I want him to graduate on time. To not let the sacrifices we’ve made—I’ve made—go to waste. And he can’t give me that? Worse, he’s lying to me, telling me Ling will understand, allowing me to believe that he will still graduate in a few weeks. What, was he hoping I’d just die before then and would never know?
But you’re having brain surgery, a small voice pipes up. And Jack just wants to be with you.
I tell that voice to shut up and forge forward with my anger because Jack’s with Pamela and her Pantene hair and I’m alone with wrinkled fingers and a bucket of bleach water that I’m now crying into. I lie down on the half-wet floor and let the tears roll off my cheeks, tickling my earlobes before they drop into the hair sprawled out behind my head.
I stare at the ceiling in the hallway and practice breathing until the floor dries and my face dries and my heart hardens a little bit more.
WHEN JACK COMES home that evening, I’m sitting on the couch waiting for him, calm and collected. Before he can open his mouth to say hi, I tell him that I found the email from Ling and that he can’t come with me to the surgery.
His face goes stony.
“You have to graduate,” I say.
“I will,” he says.
Oh. I lean back. I didn’t expect it to be that easy.
Then, he adds: “In December. Or next May.”
“No!” I sit back up. “Don’t you get it? I won’t be here in December or next May.”
He shakes his head. “You don’t know that—”
I cut him off. “I do know that. And you do, too. You just don’t want to admit it.” I take a deep breath and fix him with a pointed stare. “Jack. I’m dy—”
“I know you’re dying!” he thunders, and I feel as though I’ve been slapped across the face.
Everything goes still. Even Benny sits like a statue at Jack’s feet, no longer whining to be petted or acknowledged.
And in the hollow silence that follows, I’m surprised to find not only did I expect Jack to deny it, I wanted him to deny it. Because maybe Jack believing I was going to live was the only thing that was keeping me alive.
His voice is raspy and quiet when he speaks again: “Sue me if I want to be there for you while you do it.”
It’s so sincere and he looks so broken, like a marionette without its puppeteer, that I waver. So what if he doesn’t graduate on time? I shake my head. No. He has to. And I have to be there to see it. And though I’ve sat in this conviction for months, it’s only now that I really begin to understand why. Because everything in our life the past seven years has revolved around and been hurtling toward this one moment.
We’ll spend more time together when Jack graduates.
We’ll go on vacation when Jack graduates.
We’ll have babies when Jack graduates.
And I have to know that all those moments we didn’t share, that all the time we didn’t spend together—that it meant something. We were working toward a goal, and I need to check it off my list.
But I don’t know how to explain that to Jack. So I just repeat what I’ve already told him, with as much conviction as I can muster.
“I don’t need you to be at the surgery,” I say through gritted teeth. “I need you to graduate.”
He shakes his head and opens his mouth and I know in the split second before he speaks what’s coming—the inevitable push back, the beginning of hours of circular conversation this will turn into before someone finally caves. The anticipation of it exhausts me, and I have the overwhelming urge to end it before it begins.
“Daisy, I—”
“I don’t want you there!” I yell. The harsh words cut Jack off as sharply as a guillotine blade.
It’s mean. I know it’s mean as soon as I say it. But I also know, in the moment after it leaves my mouth, that it’s true. I don’t want Jack at the surgery, not just because it will keep him from graduating, but because I don’t want him to see me woozy and gauzy and brittle. I want him to remember me—the real me. The pretty me. The strong, capable me. The me that he fell in love with.
But again, I don’t know how to explain it. How to give voice to the insecurities that have blossomed in my once confident brain, seemingly overnight. How to admit how deeply inadequate I’ve felt next to Pamela’s aliveness.
So I wait for Jack to break the sharp silence, but he just stares at me. I search his eyes for an emotion, expecting to see pain, defiance, or even defeat, but what I find is more terrifying. There’s nothing. His eyes are empty, as he offers a simple nod and palms his keys and leaves the house without saying a word.
I’ve won.
But when I lean back into the sofa and turn on the TV and wait for the feeling of triumph to wash over me, it never comes.
twenty-two
THAT NIGHT, I lay awake in bed straining to hear Jack’s car pull up out front, the key in the door, but before I do, night overtakes me. And when I wake up the next morning, he’s not there.
I walk into the kitchen, rubbing sleep out of my eyes, half expecting to see Jack sitting on the counter in his boxers, slurping a bowl of Froot Loops, but the room is empty.
I stand in the doorway, stunned by his absence.
Where is Jack? Why didn’t he come home?
It’s so unlike him, I think fleetingly that my brain tumor is to blame. Surely he called last night to tell me about a squirrel or a skunk or a sparrow that he needed to nurse every two hours and wouldn’t be coming home, and I just don’t remember. I check my phone, but his number doesn’t appear in my call log.
I set it down on the counter and let the full weight of what I’ve done settle on my shoulders. My words from last night haunt me on repeat in my brain:
I don’t want you there.
I don’t want you there.
I don’t want you there.
But I know what Jack heard was: I don’t want you.
And I know it was the last straw. That I’ve pushed him away so thoroughly that he’s out of my grasp, like the moon or the stars.
Still, I spend an hour packing, refolding T-shirts, taking a pair of shoes out, only to put it back five minutes later. I know I’m drawing it out, expecting him to come home at any second, laughing that he fell asleep on his desk right in the middle of working late. Ha-ha-ha! Can you believe it? But when I finally close my suitcase, I shut the lid on my hope.
WHEN I GET to my mom’s house that afternoon, she’s still at work. I let myself in the front door, drop my suitcase in my old bedroom, and walk into the den to lie on the couch. And remember throwing myself onto this sofa in tears the day Simon Wu turned down my request to go to the school dance and crying until nightfall. By the time Mom got home, my eyes were red and swollen, but when she asked me what was wrong, I mumbled nothing and sulked off to bed. Now, as I pull a blanket over my legs, suddenly exhausted, I wish I had confided in her.
What feels like secon
ds later, I wake up in the dark to a hand smoothing my face.
“Mom?”
“Yeah,” she whispers.
I sit up mildly confused until I remember where I am and why. I squint at Mom’s face in the dark and see that it’s eye level with mine and I realize that she had been holding my head in her lap.
“Why didn’t you wake me?”
“You have a big day tomorrow,” she says in a way that makes it sound like I have a prom or my first job interview—not major surgery. “I wanted you to rest.”
“What time is it?”
“Around ten, I think.”
I sit up even straighter and wonder if Jack called while I was sleeping. But I know without checking that he didn’t, and the truth weighs heavy on my heart. I want to lay back down.
“Come here,” Mom says.
And though I haven’t willingly laid on my mom in years, I’m overwhelmed by the urge to wrap myself back in her arms. To be held. To be loved. I’m like a neglected houseplant that’s just been offered water. It’s impossible to resist. I lay my head on her chest and curl my knees up tighter, pushing them against her stomach as if I’m trying to crawl back into her womb.
Be reborn.
Get a mulligan.
Then I wonder, if I knew it would turn out the same, would I want to do it all over again? This life. This body. This Lots of Cancer.
I think of Jack.
And realize I knew the answer before I had fully thought the question: Yes. I would.
Mom squeezes me closer and sighs into my hair. I know she’s crying again. And normally I would stiffen, or ignore it, or make a joke, but I’m just too tired to do any of those things. So I squeeze her back and let her cry.
DR . NELSON BRAUNSTEIN is a diminutive man with a large nose and intelligent eyes. And he makes removing my tumor sound as easy as plucking a splinter out of my thumb.
“It’s really in an ideal position,” he says, pointing to the black-and-white film of my brain hanging on a wall-mounted light box. And I wonder if I should say thank you. If I should take responsibility for this portion of my cancer being so considerate in its placement.
He says I’ll need to have one more MRI that afternoon and fill out some paperwork and then be at the hospital bright and early the next morning to get checked in and prepped and then he shakes my hand, as if we’ve just struck a bargain, but I’m not sure what my end of the deal is. “Get your rest tonight,” he says with a grin. “See you tomorrow.”
“Well,” Mom says after he leaves. “He was efficient.”
Then we sit in the sterile room in silence until a woman named Sheila enters with a stack of papers and I sign my name and address and social security number and insurance information on a thousand different papers while she drones on about what each one means.
“And this,” she says, holding up the final paper while I massage a cramp out of my hand, “is your medical directive, which just states your preferences about end-of-life care in the event of cardiac death or a coma during or as a result of the surgery.”
I stare at her. My preferences?
I force a chuckle. “Um . . . I prefer not to have cardiac death or coma be a result of the surgery.”
She offers a courtesy laugh in return and then holds out the paper for me to take.
I shy away from it, the word “death” growing bolder and larger until it threatens to overtake every other word on the page, like a beauty queen who refuses to share the spotlight.
I could die. I mean, I knew I could die—know I’m dying—but this surgery could actually be the thing that kills me. Tomorrow.
I feel my lungs tighten, panic gripping them with its steely fist, and I suddenly understand what Jack meant when he said, “This is brain surgery.”
It’s the complete opposite of what people mean when they say It’s not brain surgery.
Because this actually is. Brain. Surgery.
And I could die.
THE NEXT MORNING, I’m surprisingly calm as I lay in a hospital bed hooked up to an IV, clad in nothing but a hospital gown and my Jockey briefs. Which is probably because of the Xanax I’ve been eating like jelly beans since Sheila gave me one shortly following my panic attack while signing the medical directive yesterday, and then sent me home with five more to “take as needed.”
“You’re OK?” Mom asks me for what feels like the thirty-fifth time.
“Never better,” I say. And then I laugh. And I know I sound a little crazy, which makes me laugh some more.
Then Sheila comes in and announces that it’s time to “take a ride,” which I gather means she’s going to wheel me to surgery. “Are you ready?” she says with a bright smile.
I look from her face to my mom and then back to Sheila, because I swear she asked if I was ready to die, and I’m wondering why no one else thinks that was an entirely inappropriate question.
“No,” I say, the effects of the Xanax suddenly dissipating. “No, I’m not.”
Shelia’s smile turns into a frown and Mom steps forward.
“Daisy?”
“Mom,” I say, desperately studying her familiar face—the lines that I’ve watched emerge over the years; the kind, sad eyes; the mole on her cheek that she’s always called her “supermodel mark”—just in case I don’t ever see it again. But as much as I love my mom, I know it’s not her face I want to see. And even though I told Jack not to come, all but forced him to stay home, I have the sudden hope that he’ll come bursting through the door like a hero in a romantic comedy, to hold me one last time in his long arms.
“Jack,” I say. “I need Jack.” And I know in that instant that it’s true.
Mom nods and digs into her jeans for her tiny cell phone. She takes her glasses from their perch on her head and slides them over her eyes, squinting at the buttons to dial my husband’s number. Then she hands it to me.
I put it up to my ear and it’s already ringing.
Please pick up.
By the fourth ring, I’m all but casting spells to entice him to answer. Pick up the phone, Jack.
And then he does.
“Daisy?” he says, his breath strained, as if he ran to get the phone.
“Jack,” I say, but my husband’s name catches in my throat. And we sit there on opposite ends of the line, listening to each other breathe. Sheila touches me on the shoulder, and I know I have to go, but I don’t want to hang up. To not hear him breathe.
“Do you need me?” he asks.
Yes.
“Do you want me to come down there?” His voice is steady, calm, but it’s underlined with traces of anger. And even though I usually hate when Jack is angry with me, I’m relieved to hear it. It means he still cares. “I’ll leave right now.”
I grip the phone tighter. There’s nothing I’d rather see than his face, but it’s too late. I’m already headed into surgery and it would be pointless for him to miss clinic—to not graduate—just to sit in the hospital when I can’t look at him.
“No,” I say. “No. Stay there. I just wanted to . . .”
The nurse taps me again. My mom steps forward.
“Daisy,” she says as she reaches for the phone.
“I love you,” I say in a rush of words, even though it feels so inadequate. I once heard that Inuits had sixteen words for love, and I suddenly wish that at some point I had memorized them all, just for this moment. “Jack, I love you.”
I wait for his response. His automatic return of my affections that used to be as natural as the sun following the moon.
I love you.
I love you, too.
But all I hear is silence.
“Jack?” I ask.
I hear a deep, ragged breath from his end of the phone, and then: “I love you, too.” But his voice is no longer steady and calm. No longer Jack. It’s fractured. Broken. Split. Maybe he, too, has realized the gravity of my situation. That I could die. That this surgery could kill me. That this could be the last time we speak.
Or maybe, just maybe, it’s his emotions that are fractured. Broken. Split.
Not all directed toward me.
I listen to him inhale and exhale one more time, and then hand the phone to my mom. I close my eyes and choose to focus on Jack’s words, and not the way he said them.
He loves me, too.
For now, it’s enough.
I turn to the nurse. “I’m ready.”
twenty-three
I WAKE UP.
I squint my eyes at a bright light and hear a groan, which I soon realize is coming from me, and I remember that I’m in a hospital and that I had brain surgery.
And I woke up.
As I silently cheer myself for this accomplishment, my mom’s face comes into view. “Honey?”
I open my mouth to speak, but my mouth is dry. She holds a cup of water up to it and I gratefully take a sip.
“How do you feel?”
I try to nod to indicate that I’m OK, but my head feels heavy and I move my hand up to it, gingerly touching the turban of gauze I’m wearing.
And then I remember Jack and his fractured voice, and realize that I’m not OK. I have so much I need to say to him. So much I regret. So much I wish I could do over. And I just hope I’m not too late.
As if reading my mind, Mom speaks again. “I called Jack to let him know it went well. He said to call later if you feel up to it.”
“He did?” I push the words out of my raspy throat.
She nods. “I’ll go get the nurse and let her know that you’re up.”
“OK,” I say, closing my eyes and drifting back to sleep.
I’M NOT SURE what time it is when I wake up again, but my mom’s steady breathing and the shadows that fall across the room indicate that it’s night.
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