Appearances

by Sondra Helene

  “Now taking bets,” Jake’s brother announced. “I say the baby will be a boy and he’ll be born at seven eighteen.”

  I looked at my watch. It was already six o’clock. Eyeing the pastrami, I opted for the healthier turkey instead and prayed that Jake’s brother would be right. My nerves were already shot.

  Richard arrived at six thirty, forlorn and tired. Outside the maternity ward, he plopped onto a beige leather sofa. His expression made it clear that he was there for one reason and one reason only: out of obligation.

  “You’ll love this, Richard. We’re taking bets,” I said. “One, when do you think the baby will be born, and two, what sex will it be? I say nine p.m., girl. Your turn.”

  “Earlier than that,” Jake’s uncle interrupted from an adjacent couch. “Quarter after eight, boy.”

  “I don’t like any of this,” my father said. “Just let the baby be healthy.”

  Richard leaned over to me and said, “This is absurd. What if it takes all night? I have to work tomorrow, you know.” But day in, day out, there would always be work. I wanted my husband to share in our family’s excitement.

  “You really want to go? Now?” I asked him, my heart thumping.

  “No reason to be here yet,” he said. “Come home with me. Come back in the morning.”

  “I’m staying until at least nine,” I said loudly, trying to draw the others in. “What about my bet?” I giggled and smiled at Jake’s uncle, inviting him into this impossible conversation, trying to turn Richard’s rudeness into a joke. Everyone had a chuckle over my quip—everyone except for Richard, who folded his Burberry trench coat over his arm and left.

  In the end, I lost the bet, narrowly, on one count—timing— and returned home just three hours after Richard. Brooke was born at eight pounds and healthy, my parents’ first grandchild, marking the new generation of our family. Richard was asleep when I entered the bedroom.

  “Hey,” I whispered loudly, “it’s a girl! We have a niece named Brooke!”

  My husband barely stirred. I shook his arm, wanting him to wake and acknowledge this new person in our family. I shook so hard that there can be only one explanation for his lack of response: Richard was feigning sleep.

  The next day was our anniversary. When Richard came home with flowers and surprised me with a dinner reservation at our favorite restaurant, I told him I was too tired to go out.

  Of course, when it was our own child, it was a different story. A year later, during my own pregnancy, Richard was completely attentive to my needs. And even though he already had a child, he never undermined my excitement to be a mother for the first time. My husband accompanied me on my first prenatal appointment and, to my surprise, bought all the pregnancy books he could find. When he handed them over, however, there was a catch. “No crowd at the hospital,” Richard said, a new ultimatum.

  “What do you mean? No family? I want my family there. Your sisters, too.”

  “No—nothing like when Brooke was born.”

  “It’s not like we interrupted anything sitting on the couches, eating turkey and pastrami. Elizabeth was busy giving birth.”

  “Those sandwiches were awful.”

  “Look, Elizabeth loved having us there, supporting her. I want that.”

  “And I want my privacy.”

  “And I want my family,” I insisted.

  “I’m your family,” Richard said. He had a point.

  At the hospital when Alexandra was born, Richard greeted my parents and sister warmly enough—nothing could have kept them away—but he was fiercely protective of me and of our new daughter. At first he wouldn’t let anyone enter our room, holding them off for a full hour until I had showered, applied makeup, and pulled on the silky reception robe that I had bought for the occasion. I relished having everyone there. I needed to share my joy with Elizabeth. I wanted my parents to hold and cradle their new granddaughter, whom we named Alexandra, the brave protector of man, a future daddy’s girl.

  My brother, David, flew in from New York, and Richard’s sisters visited, brimming with pride over the Freeman family’s first baby in fourteen years. When Auntie Gloria arrived, she was thrilled that I had given birth to a healthy baby girl. Harri son was away at his mother’s in Pennsylvania, but he would be home again soon and we would begin our new phase together as a blended family, in which I intended to have more power.

  I loved being a mom and felt more purpose than I ever had. Caring for a baby made intuitive sense to me. My parents visited us at home to cuddle and fawn over Alexandra. Elizabeth and Jake came frequently with Brooke, now two; they soon shared the news that Elizabeth was pregnant. David, then childless, flew up from New York on some weekends to spoil his new niece. After exchanging the briefest of greetings with our family guests, Richard would seclude himself in the master bedroom to pore over the Sunday Globe while I entertained everyone downstairs.

  “Why don’t you join us?” I asked when I went up to check on him during one such visit. “What’s wrong?”

  “You’ll just ignore me. I’m staying right here, where what I want counts.”

  “I didn’t realize I was ignoring you,” I said. “When I try to bring you into the conversation, you barely speak.”

  “I’m not interested in what your mother had for dinner last night.”

  Elizabeth began to remark that she felt more comfortable coming over if Richard wasn’t there. “Look, he doesn’t like me,” she said. “We ran into each other at the Dunkie’s in Newton Center, and it was like we were strangers. He barely said hello. What’d I ever do to him?” At the time, I had tried to talk Elizabeth out of her opinion that Richard didn’t like her or our family, but I was actually beginning to believe it.

  “Your sister doesn’t care about me; she only cares about you,” Richard said matter-of-factly when I confronted him about not greeting Elizabeth. My parents and siblings eventually only visited on days when Richard played eighteen holes of golf. After the initial shock of the conflict wore off, I began to resent my husband’s feelings, and I admit I took Richard’s rejection of my sister personally. Elizabeth was part of me. I resented having to choose between my sister and my husband. I resented Richard for making me.

  With Alexandra to care for, I cut back on my hours at Beth Israel to work part-time with patients in home care. And when the last of those clients no longer needed my therapy, I didn’t seek others. I spent most days with Elizabeth and Brooke and Elizabeth’s new daughter, Lauren, or with other friends who had toddlers.

  A few years later, when Harrison left for college and Richard missed having the camaraderie of his son at home, he began to verbalize his strong distaste for my family and my allegiance to Elizabeth. He also began limiting his participation in my extended family to large gatherings, and that weighted every holiday, birthday party, and social event with expectation. Getting together became stressful; resentment took root on both sides. Small hurts and snubs between my family and Richard had officially started a cold war.

  Chapter Five

  As soon as Elizabeth’s MRI shows cancer, we waste no time in scheduling an oncology consult at Beth Israel, consistently ranked as one of the best hospitals in the United States. Luckily, I know whom to call to get in with Dr. Berg, the oncology director. All these years later, I still volunteer at Beth Israel after that first job treating stroke patients like Barbara. Now I’m involved with the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Cen- ter Friends, a fund-raising arm of the hospital; I just finished a two-year term as president.

  Within two days, Elizabeth, Jake, and I step from the elevator onto the hospital’s eleventh floor. Elizabeth and I wear matching pale blue cashmere sweaters that we bought separately at Bloomingdale’s. We didn’t plan to wear the same sweater today, but it doesn’t surprise me. Already we are twinned in this crisis.

  The coded medical language of the faxed report—“right lower-extremity paresthesia, multiple T1 hypointense and T2 hyperintense bone marrow lesions” —becomes only mo
re real when we stand before the large sign that reads SHAPIRO CANCER CENTER. The nurse takes Elizabeth for a CT scan, leaving Jake and me in the waiting room, where I can’t concentrate enough to read even a celebrity magazine. I cross and uncross my legs. I consider that someone else’s report was mixed up with Elizabeth’s. I begin making bargains with God. Even doctors make mistakes, I hope. Elizabeth never smoked, and she exercises five times a week. She buys organic groceries, eats her five fruits and vegetables. For Pete’s sake, she broils, rather than fries! How could someone like my sister be diagnosed with cancer at forty-three?

  Jake, a real estate guy, takes out his BlackBerry, pretending that there could be more important things to do. He’s built relationships with national chains over the years and locates them to New England, scouting out a decrepit gas station on a corner lot, making an offer on the property, and leasing to a corporate chain. The franchisees like Jake because he’s fast at numbers, decisions, and getting the job done. Although locals will try to stop his projects, Jake convinces the community that they will benefit from a big-box store or national supermarket chain, even if the trade-off is traffic. “Think of your property values,” he tells them. “Through the roof!” Jake knows how to scale his projects but still turn a profit for the deal to make sense. He’s tough, aggressive, and charming.

  Jake turns his wrist to look at his watch. “Ten thirty,” he says. “What the fuck has happened to us?”

  I ignore my brother-in-law’s question and grab Vogue, flipping pages. Sitting at Shapiro already feels like an eternity. I have always tried to protect my sister, and now I imagine her, alone, in the cavern of a hulking piece of CT machinery. I am at an utter loss.

  When Elizabeth was born, I was three. My mother came home from the hospital and handed me her warm bundle while I was seated on the couch. Everyone who crowded the house in those days—my two sets of grandparents (Bubbee and Zadi, Nana and Papa), Auntie Gloria, Auntie Hannah, uncles, and neighbors from up and down the street—emphasized my responsibility as the big sister. Now that I’m grown, I realize it was just something to say to make the firstborn child feel special when the new baby was getting all the attention. But at the age of three, I took it very seriously and watched over Baby Elizabeth. That early impulse—and an awful knot in my stomach—only deepened as my sister grew into a toddler who suffered a bump on her elbow or a scraped knee, then into a little kid with a cold or the flu or a fever. Not that Elizabeth was ever a sickly kid, but when we both had the chicken pox, I was the one not able to sleep, listening to the rhythm of her breath on the other side of our nightstand.

  The nurse calls, “Gordon,” and Jake and I practically sprint into the scan room. No windows, dark except for a white-blue light in the corner.

  Elizabeth sits on a metal table, wearing a light blue johnny. The whites of her eyes are large and liquid. The interpreting oncologist, reported to be one of the best at Beth Israel, closes the door, scratching his trim white beard. I actually know this particular doctor from my fund-raising work, and I remember him as a brilliant, down-to-earth gentleman who is easy to talk to. I can’t ignore the irony that I’ve raised money for this very center. Although I knew it was important at the time, I realize only now that I did it pityingly and without empathy, naively not thinking that cancer could touch me.

  Dr. Berg squints behind his glasses. The skin on his cheeks tightens and pulls. I take shallow breaths like a panting dog, waiting to hear the verdict. I want Dr. Berg to tell my sister and me that we can continue our lives, carpooling our children, walking at the reservoir, sharing our hopes and secrets, supporting each other in hard times. We’re supposed to do this through all of life’s changes, keep each other company as our children leave for college, interview for their first jobs, and get married, like we have. Despite the struggles I have in my marriage, it’s how we are and how we want our children to be.

  The doctor speaks softly, as if he doesn’t want us to hear the bad news. He studies the film, and the words that come out of his mouth sound strange, like those on the fax.

  “I’m sorry,” Dr. Berg says. “Tumors have metastasized to the sacrum and hip area. A questionable spot on the liver.”

  I grab Elizabeth’s hand and squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. From her mouth comes the high-pitched, frantic screaming of a wounded animal: “No! No! No!” Only when a nurse appears and places her hands on my sister’s shoulders does Elizabeth calm down to a daze.

  “My kids,” she says, shaking her head back and forth.

  Holding Elizabeth’s hand, I feel a tremor travel through her body, like a zipper opening. Jake’s face is drawn, pained. He paces the room before crouching in the corner to stare at his BlackBerry, unable to figure out how to use the force of his personality to fix this situation.

  “We’ll need more tests,” the doctor says. He places a hand on Elizabeth’s back, her complexion now flushed with what appears to be a combination of panic and sorrow.

  The doctor prescribes Decadron, a powerful steroid. He says that it will begin shrinking the tumors in her hip and lessen her pain. He tells us to see a radiology oncologist, Nathan Gold. “He’s who I’d see if it were for my own family,” Dr. Berg says, and offers to set up the appointment himself.

  I’m having trouble breathing. I feel as if I must leave the room, that it’s too small for my rage. But I stay and see Elizabeth’s mind racing, sizing up the situation. My energetic younger sister, who’s fiercely private, must be collapsing inside. I guide her off the table and hug her, trying to absorb her sobs.

  I shepherd Elizabeth out of the room to get her clothes and see Jake approach Dr. Berg. I know Jake—he always wants the bottom line. He likes his bad news the way he likes his vodka: straight up. I hear him whisper, “She’ll be lucky to have five years, right?”

  I glance at Elizabeth, whose attention seems focused on putting one foot in front of the other. When I’m sure she doesn’t hear Jake’s questions, I’m relieved. At least I can protect her from that. In five years, Elizabeth won’t even be fifty. Brooke will be in college and Lauren about to graduate high school.

  Dressed, Elizabeth walks ahead of me toward the elevator, holding a tissue to her nose. I wait for the doctor, who has followed us outside, wanting an answer to Jake’s awful question, despite my fears. Dr. Berg closes his eyes, but not before I see the look he tries to hide. He’s seen other fortysomething women with metastatic cancer; he must know what all of this means. He nods his head, slowly. “Yes,” he says to Jake’s question, by which he must mean lucky to have five years.

  I stop short. That didn’t sound like a five-year yes. I wonder what that yes really meant. Two years? Five months?

  Walking the hospital corridors to the garage, I keep my arms around Elizabeth, her shoulders slumped, her head down. People hooked to IVs are wheeling by, and doctors pass us in white coats.

  “You’re going to be okay,” I say to Elizabeth, trying to believe it myself. “We don’t even know what type of cancer it is. They have so many different treatments now,” I say, speaking as if mere wishes can come true. I hug my sister and kiss her forehead like I did when she was a little girl.

  Elizabeth looks as if she wants to believe me, scanning my face for the hope I’m desperately trying to inject into my words. “What does this all mean?” she asks.

  “We have to find out what type of cancer it is,” I say, fixing our next step.

  Elizabeth stands taller, back straightening, her shoulders squaring. “Sis, one thing’s for sure: it don’t sound good.”

  I study Elizabeth, considering all she stands to lose in the prime of her life as a young wife and mother. If she dies, her children’s and our parents’ lives will never be the same. I will lose my only sister and best friend—over forty years of us. We’ve been each other’s maids of honor. She’s the first person I call with good news. No one but Elizabeth notices when my hair gets trimmed a quarter inch, not even Richard. My first reaction to this tragedy is to feel desperately lonely
.

  We trudge to the car and return to the Gordons’. I sit in the back of Jake’s Range Rover as he maneuvers through traffic on Beacon Street. No one speaks. We are spent.

  “Thank God you’re here,” Jake says unexpectedly, meeting my eye in the rearview. He has said curiously little to Elizabeth. But just as I was the first person to know he was going to propose, I am the one with them now. Looking out the Range Rover’s window, I notice men and women walking together, laughing with friends. What used to seem normal already feels foreign.

  We pull up beside the Gordons’ colonial in Weston. When they bought this house on a corner lot, just like one of Jake’s franchises, he loved the idea that they could live in the leafy suburbs but be downtown in minutes via the Mass Pike. Elizabeth loves making her surroundings beautiful, so when it came to decor, she chose a designer with talent and a solid reputation. Elizabeth’s home has always been her sanctuary, full of comfort, nurturing, and love. Entertaining enlivens her. She serves homemade food from our grandmother’s recipes on her fine bone china, with authentically elegant style.

  As Jake’s business grew, he encouraged Elizabeth to enjoy spending. Slowly they redid the entire house. Carrara marble replaced worn tiles to make the bathrooms look like they belong in a luxury hotel. Elizabeth had the oak floors stained black. Her master bedroom sports an off-white carpet with a handcut crystal chandelier, showcasing a curvaceous headboard, and a built-in armoire—not for clothes, but for a widescreen TV. For the bed: three-hundred-thread-count, champagnecolored linens and a bedspread heavy against the floor with extra material. Last month, Elizabeth finally finished the kitchen with shiny white cabinets, black granite counters, and a mirrored backsplash. In her marriage and mine, luxury means love, and Elizabeth’s new home represents the love-filled life she has made for herself and her family. Before, I wished only for Richard to see her in that light. Now, all of that has changed. All I want is for Elizabeth’s cancer to disappear.