* * *
JOSIE WAS BARELY out of sight when a doctor appeared beside me.
“You’re the fireman?” he asked, looking me over.
“I’m the fireman,” I said, looking him over right back.
“She told me about you.”
He had a couple of black nose hairs poking down out of his right nostril. “What happened?” I asked, staring at them.
“Fairly common, in her situation,” he said. “I’m surprised it hasn’t happened before.”
I looked up. “You mean the eye? The blindness?”
“It was an occipital seizure,” he confirmed. “That explains the hallucinations and the blurred vision afterward. Also the headache. All very common with this region.”
Hallucinations? Blurred vision? “I don’t understand how blindness in an eye could cause seizures.”
He frowned at me. “It’s not the eye causing the seizures. It’s the tumor.”
I stopped breathing.
Didn’t breathe, didn’t blink.
The tumor?
The doc walked me over to a computer station in the hallway and pulled up her CT-scan images on the screen. He circled a white area inside my mother’s skull about the size of a Ping-Pong ball with his pen—as if anyone with eyes could miss it. He motioned for me to lean in. If he had any qualms about doctor-patient confidentiality, or the fact that she clearly had not told her daughter the fireman about the situation inside her skull, he did not mention them.
“Holy shit,” I said, and I realized I was having the same feeling I’d had back at the station when Josie had called. Not clarity, but the opposite.
He nodded. “It’s a doozie.”
I didn’t know what to say. But I felt like I should have something to say. Professionally, anyway. I scanned through my knowledge of types of brain tumors. “Glioblastoma?” I finally asked.
He shook his head. “It’s not primary. It’s secondary. A melanoma recurrence many years later. But it’s large enough now to impact the brain.”
Wait—she’d had a melanoma? Hospitals mixed up charts all the time. Maybe this doc was thinking of another old lady with a homemade calico eye patch.
“Is it malignant?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” the doctor said. He looked almost excited about it. And I got that. When you see these things all the time, sometimes the people behind them start to seem like a whole different story.
I shifted back a little.
“I’d say she has a few months,” the doctor said, still staring at the screen. “A year at the most.”
I felt a sudden collapse in my chest. A year at the most.
The doctor glanced over at me, read my face, and seemed to remember he was talking to a human. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess she hadn’t told you.”
“She had not told me,” I confirmed, keeping my eyes on the films in front of me, like I was studying them. Which I wasn’t.
It seemed impossibly rude that he hadn’t bothered to trim his nose hairs before delivering information like that—as if it were just some ordinary moment in some ordinary day.
The doc stared at the films alongside me, but I got the feeling he wasn’t studying them, either.
I felt sorry for him, in a way. He never expected, popping in, that he’d be delivering this kind of news to an unsuspecting family member. I knew what it felt like, how it jolted the system. I knew how you had to gird yourself for it—go in fully armored. It was always the moments you didn’t expect that haunted you the most.
I’d given bad news to hundreds of people over the years. Sometimes they collapsed to the floor. Sometimes they screamed, or erupted into sobs. Sometimes they went eerily silent. One woman had slapped me across the face.
For a second, I thought more about what that doctor must have been feeling in that moment than what I was.
Until he said, “Well. The good news is, she seems to be otherwise healthy. As far as we can tell.”
I felt sorry for him right then, trying to come up with some good news. But I felt sorrier for me. Because there really was no good news.
* * *
THE DOCTOR WENT into the room after that, but I stayed in the hallway. I don’t remember saying good-bye to him, or thank you, or whatever I must have said. I just remember the most searing feeling of cognitive dissonance. A total stranger, with one unexpected sentence, had just irrevocably changed the story of my life.
On the way into the hospital, I’d thought I might ask for an X-ray, but now my ankle was forgotten. I’d worry about it later, if it didn’t get better. It was all I could do to soak the news in. My brain couldn’t understand it. It was like a white fog inside my head where the comprehension should be.
A year at the most.
She’d known this whole time. She’d known, and she hadn’t told me.
I felt my knees start to tremble, and because I wasn’t ready to face her, I found a sitting area in the hallway. My brain didn’t understand, but my body did.
Why hadn’t I tried harder? Why hadn’t I demanded to look at that eye? All the clues clicked into place, and I felt like an idiot for not having put it all together sooner. I had seen all the pieces, but I had refused to assemble them.
Maybe I hadn’t wanted to. Things were different sometimes when the heart was involved.
But now I knew. There was no way to unknow.
I needed the details. I needed charts and histories and information. I wanted to see all her films, get the records of the surgery. I wanted to gather it all up and spread it out on the dining table like a code that I could read just right—better, smarter, than anybody else—and crack for her. I needed to know what was going on. How could I help her if I didn’t have the full story? But maybe not even she had the full story.
I noticed, the way you might with a patient, that my breathing was accelerated.
Some part of me understood that she was beyond help. That doctor had not said, Get her into surgery, stat! He hadn’t talked about any treatments at all. If this were something that could be cured—they would be trying to cure it right now. The fact that we were crocheting baby blankets for preemies at the hospital instead of going there for radiation treatments seemed to confirm that there weren’t any treatments left.
It all made sense now.
How thin she was. How vague she’d been on all the details. The goofy collection of eye patches. This was why she’d called me here. This was why she’d asked me to give up my entire life. This was what we’d been doing all this time.
We were saying good-bye.
Why hadn’t she told me? It seemed so unfair—that I hadn’t been informed.
I might not have done anything differently. But I might have thought about things differently. I might not have wasted so much time.
It filled me with panic. We were running out of time! What was she doing sitting around in the garden and making soup and crocheting blankets with a deadline like this? There had to be something more important for her to do with her time than watch ’80s rom-coms. Weren’t there people to see? Conversations to have? Travel?
Or maybe she just wanted to sit in the garden and breathe.
Complicated—always so complicated with Diana.
I don’t know how long I sat out in that hallway with my head in my hands. An hour? Two? All I knew was, once I went into her room and saw her again, knowing what I knew now, it would be real. And I didn’t want it to be real.
I stalled as long as I could. I stalled so long that when I finally forced myself through her door, she was asleep for the night. The lights were all dimmed, and the room was shadowy. I could make out the bruise on her forehead easily—it was almost black—but I didn’t get too close. I didn’t want to wake her.
Also, she wasn’t wearing her eye patch. It was the first time since I’d arrived that I could see her face, unobstructed. Would I have been able to tell, if I’d seen? Maybe. I could see that the eye itself was a bit distended. But otherwise, there she was.
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My mother. Exactly the same as always—and totally different.
I lowered myself into the visitor’s chair beside her, held very still, and watched her sleeping face. I tried to imagine a world without Diana in it, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.
How had I wasted so much time? How had I let one disappointment shape the course of our relationship? More than that, why had I decided to blame her for everything that happened with Heath Thompson? Stupid. And wrong. Why hadn’t I tried harder to see things clearly? Ten years I’d simmered in my own self-righteousness, holding my grudge against her as if the only way to win was to stay mad the longest.
As if there had ever been anything to win.
As if you don’t always lose by definition when you push the people who love you away.
All she’d wanted was forgiveness. And I had flat-out refused to give it to her.
I will always remember that moment of my life—that night in the hospital, crouched in a chair in my mother’s gray room, groping my way through the news of her death sentence, feeling it all, but completely numb at the same time.
I see it frozen in time, as if it’s a painting.
In the memory, it’s not my adult self, in my Lillian uniform with my crutches, that I see in that chair. It’s me as a child, wearing my favorite nightgown from when I was about eight—the one with ruffles and little hearts. I’m barefoot, with those soft, chubby feet children have. My hair is long, and my mother has just brushed it before bed. And then I stand up in the painting and walk out of my place. I crawl into the hospital bed beside her, suddenly as small and lost as I’d ever been, trembling, gasping for air, seeing it all, every implication of everything I’d just learned, and at the same time, blinded by a fog of incomprehension.
I wedge myself between her and the railing.
I press against her soft warmth.
And I beg her with everything I’ve got not to leave me.
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING, when my mother opened her eyes, I was standing by her bed, assessing her bruise.
She met my eyes. Then she said, “Oh, sweetheart. They told you.”
I nodded, trying to stand up taller—as if that might make me braver.
She held out her hand to me.
I took it. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.
“I just wanted to have some fun while we could.” She gave me a smile. “This kind of news can be so depressing.”
I gulped a little unexpected laugh.
“I just wanted to see you,” she said, squeezing my hand. “I just wanted a little taste of how it used to be before … I knew Wallace was dying when I married him. But sometimes I wish I hadn’t known. It’s so hard to feel happy and sad at the same time.”
Suddenly, I felt for her. For the first time ever, I looked at that moment when she drove away through her eyes—and with her heart. What must it have felt like to give up her husband and child for a man she knew she would also have to lose?
It must have been agony in every direction.
For the first time, I understood. In all the times I’d remembered that story, I’d experienced every single part of it from my own perspective, standing in my own sixteen-year-old shoes. Now, for the first time, I saw it unfold from a new angle. Hers.
And it changed the story.
I felt a wash of forgiveness through my body.
Now it was me, suddenly, who wanted forgiveness.
“I’m sorry I was so angry at you for so long,” I said then.
She was ready for it. She patted me, like, Nonsense. “You were a kid. Sometimes it’s easier to be angry.”
“I was so stupid. I blamed you for things that weren’t your fault.”
“You were standing up for yourself. That’s a good thing.”
I hadn’t thought of it that way.
She went on. “You thought I had rejected you, so you rejected me harder. It was very sensible, really. Self-protection. I admired it.”
“But it was more complicated than that.”
“You did what you needed to do to be okay. I always believed you’d come back to me. I just ran out of time to wait.”
“I get it now, I think,” I said. “I get what you said about love being powerful.”
She nodded. “I bet you do.”
I rubbed my eyes. “I wasted so much time.”
She squeezed my hand again. “That’s just the human condition, sweetheart. We’re always doomed to waste our time.”
My brain was circling around, trying to put all the new information together. “That’s it, then? You’re not doing any treatments?”
“Did the doctor show you the brain scans?”
I nodded.
She gave me a look like, Well, there’s your answer.
“I don’t know what to do now.”
“Just be here,” she said. “Just be nearby.”
More tears from me.
“It’s okay. It’s better in a way,” she said. “We aren’t meant to last forever. I wouldn’t have wanted to spend my last year getting cut up and drugged. I’d much rather be in the garden. Or painting pottery. Or walking by the ocean.”
Of course, you can’t argue with walking by the ocean, but when the end result of that is dying, it sounds a little less ideal.
“There’s nothing else to try? Nothing even experimental?”
“There was some experiment I could have joined, but I declined. It sounded awful.”
I sat up. “What? Really? What was it?”
“Some new drug. Some clinical trial. I said no.”
“What? Why would you say no?”
“I don’t want to take any more drugs. I’ve had enough medical intervention for a lifetime.”
“But it’s just medicine.”
“With gruesome side effects. The least gory of which is ‘fatal skin infection.’”
“I’m just saying, what if it worked?”
“What if it didn’t? And then I’m killed by my own skin?”
“At least that way, there’s a chance.”
“Not one worth taking.”
In that moment, it seemed like she wasn’t trying. “You have to try it! Call them back! Tell them you’ve changed your mind! You can’t be a quitter. You have to keep fighting!”
She shook her head, infuriatingly calm. “I am fighting. In my own way.”
“How?” I said. “How are you fighting?”
She looked me straight on. “I’ve been meditating three times a day since my last checkup.”
“Meditating? You’re fighting recurrent melanoma with meditation?”
“I think it’s working,” she said.
“What’s working?”
“I should have had many more seizures by now, in fact. That’s a very promising sign.”
“What are you talking about?”
My mom gave me a smile. “When I first got the prognosis, I read everything I possibly could about it—like you do.”
I nodded.
“And one of the articles I read was about a French woman with basically my same situation who had managed to halt the growth of her tumor through creative visualization.”
I shook my head. “What did she visualize?”
“She mediated three times a day, and she very specifically imagined a hard shell growing around her tumor—so hard that it was compressed inside and couldn’t get any bigger.”
I made a conscious effort not to roll my eyes.
“It worked,” Diana said. “She’d been going downhill rapidly—but then her decline slowed, then stopped entirely. She didn’t die for another seven years, and that was in a car crash. Totally unrelated! When they autopsied her tumor, guess what they found?”
“What?”
“A shell. A hard shell around it. And it hadn’t grown at all.”
I shook my head. “That’s urban legend. That can’t be real.”
“It is real. It’s documented.”
“You can’t just imagine
a tumor away!”
“Maybe not,” she said. “But there’s certainly no harm in trying.”
Twenty-three
AND SO WE went home. And made supper. And sat in the garden while the sun went down. There was nothing else to do.
It hit me in strange waves. There were moments when I felt gutted, and moments when I felt almost normal; moments when I felt at peace with Diana’s acceptance, and moments when I felt panicked to do something; moments when I felt like somehow, when all was said and done, everything would be okay, and moments when it seemed like nothing would ever be okay again.
Remember when I was all about trying to keep my life from getting destabilized?
Yeah, that whole concept got shot to hell.
I had four days before my next shift. Four days to figure out how to face the rest of my life. So I just helped Diana weed her garden, and I helped her make supper. We looked through old photo albums and sang Christmas carols, even though it wasn’t Christmas. She showed me her old diaries and old portfolios from art school. She walked me through her jewelry box and tried to educate me about which long-gone relatives had owned which rings and necklaces and charm bracelets. We drank a lot of coffee and made a lot of tea. We made sure not to miss the sunsets.
I tried, with at least partial success, to savor the time we had left. That was the goal, anyway—to enjoy her living presence near me and not fixate so much on the sorrow to come that I forgot to pay attention. To learn to make the best of things. As fast as I could.
Every night that week, after supper, the rookie showed up at the front door, wanting to check on us, or do something for us, or help.
But I wouldn’t answer it.
He came anyway, though, and left tubs of scones and muffins and cookies for comfort.
We brought them in later and arranged them on the kitchen table. But I couldn’t eat.
Finally, on the last night before our next shift, he knocked—and kept knocking.
“Me again,” he said, when I finally opened the door.
He’d been texting me, too—to see how my mom was, and how my ankle was, and how I was doing about the brick. He’d left a few messages. But I hadn’t answered anything.
Things You Save in a Fire Page 21