Except then it isn’t fine. And the whole normal-day charade crumples when Helen sees Anna’s father, Mr. Spark, on the bank line. Three in front of her. It’s impossible. She’s never run into Mr. Spark. Not ever. Not once. But here he is. She’s not sure what to do. Should she leave and hide in her car until he’s out of the bank?
“Well, hello, Helen.” A lifted question of surprise in Mr. Spark’s voice.
“Helen? Where’s Anna?” he says. “Didn’t you girls leave for Nantucket?”
Now the world is not ordinary. Not at all. And the utter recklessness presses down on Helen. Where’s Anna? The question echoes through her body. It feels like she’s being offered an opportunity to fess up. Where’s Anna? I’ve left your daughter. Where’s Anna? She’s having an abortion while I stand on a bank line talking with you. Where’s Anna? I wasn’t pregnant, and she was, and I was going to take care of her, and I didn’t even have the wherewithal to read that we needed cash, not a check. Is this the moment to confess? Didn’t she do that once with Rosie, go into the wooden box at Sacred Heart. “I’m not Catholic,” she whispered when the priest asked if she had sinned.
“Anna’s with Ming.” Helen marvels at how coolly she’s tossed off the lie. The lie feels so good it almost doesn’t feel like a lie. “I had to cash a check so I’d have money for our trip.”
“All you girls, everything last-minute.” Mr. Spark shakes his head. “And I think of you, Helen, as the responsible one of you kids. Jesus. Just don’t miss the ferry.”
And
It was Mikey—thank God, finally—Anna’s younger brother, on the house phone.
“Oh, Michael.” Helen took the phone into the bathroom and leaned against the shut wooden door. “It’s me, Helen. I need you here. Everyone’s drunk the hospice Kool-Aid. But you’re sane. She can’t resist you. Or Bobby.” She said it all in one great rush. Just having Michael on the phone made her feel hopeful.
“She’s not budging, Helen.”
“We made her budge before.” Helen waited. Her breath huffed loud against Michael’s silence. His too-long silence.
“Michael,” she pushed. “We did it before. Really, it was you and Bobby last time. She’d do anything for you.”
“Stop it, Helen.” His voice cut sharp, almost shouting.
But when Helen backed down—“I’m sorry”—there was an even heavier silence before Michael spoke, and then as if each word dragged a lead weight behind it.
“I tried. I pulled out all the stops. I told her I was in the middle of training for the Boston Marathon. That I had a super-demanding life. Balancing my job, training, and the family schedule. But I’d put everything on the back burner if she’d give it a go. That medicine still worked. That there were new ones.”
“And?”
“But if she said no, then I was finished. Done. I told her I wasn’t coming back.”
“And?” Helen edged around the small bathroom. Folded each bath towel in three and rehung them on the bar. She fiddled the toothbrushes so they were slotted straight. There was nothing left to tidy.
“She said neither was she. Coming back. Maybe we were both done and both of us had to make choices that were right for ourselves. She said we could say good-bye now.”
“And?”
“I’m coming this weekend, Helen. Bringing the kids. I’ll save my long runs for the dirt roads between Leverett and Montague.”
“And?” Helen leaned on the sink. Her scowl in the mirror looked unintimidating. She tried winching her brows toward menacing.
“Finally, it’s her life. I don’t have to like it. I give up. Or at least I’m trying to.”
“You give up? She just gets to choose this? What about us?”
“You tell me, Helen. What about us?”
“I don’t know, Mikey. Exactly why did you even call?”
The New Frontier
Forget remission. The new model was chronicity. The doctor said, “We are the cutting edge.” The doctor said, “By the next flare, we’ll be miles past even this novel drug. There’s always a panel of new possibilities. There’s so much we have yet to deploy. The medicines are artisanal. The horizon is far beyond trials.” The doctor said, “It’s a new frontier. It’s all moving fast. Supersonic.”
1969, Honorary Girls
Helen paints flowers in Day-Glo orange, hot pink, and lime à la Peter Max when Anna’s parents give the girls the okay to transform their attic into a clubhouse. The five girls take turns posing against walls until they each have an outline to fill with colorful swirls, peace signs. Quotes from The Giving Tree and Beatle lyrics float in puffy painted clouds. When Anna’s brothers, Bobby and Mikey, clump-clump up the narrow staircase, the girls can’t bring themselves to shout, “Keep out!” The boys flatten against an unpainted swatch of wall. “Paint us.” Who can resist Mikey’s chocolate-chip eyes? Or the way Bobby begs, “Me, too, me, too”?
“You’ll be in our girl club. But only honorary,” Anna announces after the girls huddle for their first vote.
In the House
There was only the house. Anything past the porch or, at the farthest stretch, beyond the driveway, gone. Like something half remembered. A once-upon-a-time. Gone the new pope. Gone the president’s second term. The Higgs boson, gone. Even a six-car pileup on the highway twenty miles south in Springfield. “Oh, that’s terrible,” they would have said if it had occurred to anyone in the house to turn on the news. But there was no news. The world steeply fell away. The morning news, the headline lost. No big world. Even their lives at home tapered to a few images. Just Anna.
3
Leverett, Fruit Tree
Connie stood calf-deep in the dug dirt of her side yard. This was a two-person job. She was flat-out idiotic to take it on alone. But John was at the hospital. Then he was checking in on Anna. He’d asked Connie to wait with the tree; they’d do it over the weekend. If she was worried about keeping the bare roots in the bucket, he suggested digging a shallow trench to temporarily heel in the tree. Anyway, he reminded her, there was a good chance of rain tonight, freezing rain.
But it was going in today. Had to be. She had the time. She’d been all but banished from Anna’s by Helen last night on the phone. “We’re coming up to spend the night,” Helen said. “We’d love to be alone with her.”
So Connie had nothing but time. No trench. No heeling-in. She wasn’t taking a chance of killing the tree. She needed this second pear tree for the trees to cross-pollinate and begin bearing fruit. She was getting this pear properly in the ground. And that was going to be the real trick. Not digging this serious hole. But hefting the tree, keeping it upright and not listing to one side while she filled the hole back in.
There was an impressive hill of sod loosely mounded around the hole. Her fingers were numb. She’d ditched the work gloves. Useless. They were John’s and kept slipping off. Blisters or not, she needed a grip on the spade’s T-handle. The hole needed to double in size. At the very least. The width also had to double for the root ball to fit. And really, to be realistic, wider for tree roots to establish.
The good part was that digging curbed her mind. Narrowed the straggly, ugly thoughts. She was like a one-woman chain gang of repetitive phrases that mimicked the shovel. She was pissed. She wasn’t really used to being pissed off. Not part of her emotional arsenal—hurt, guilt, insecurity, yeah, plenty of those three. She’d pretty much terraced and landscaped their yard—lilacs, dogwoods, a rose trellis, the perennial and herb gardens, and her meditation rock garden with its spiral stone paths—just managing that trio of negativity. But this morning she’d woken trembling. She actually thought she had a fever until she realized it was pissed-off fury.
She jammed the shovel. Fuck. Tossed a scatter of dirt. Fuck. Jammed again. She never cursed. Pried out a rock. Lobbed it. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Connie was a cursing fool. It worked for digging, that’s for sure. Anna w
as always a mad curser. The crassest things came out of Anna’s mouth. Shocking as it was for Connie in the first years getting to know Anna, over the years it became something she treasured. She could just see Anna’s satisfied smirk: I knew I’d drag you over to the naughty side. But how would Anna like knowing Connie was shoveling dirt to the rhythm of Fuck The Old Friends, fuck The Old Friends? God, Connie hated that smug title. And what about that smug tone in Helen’s voice last night: “Connie, can you also let the others know? The Old Friends are coming up. We’d love our time with Anna.” Then, as if that bullshit weren’t enough, there was the condescending, “I hope you know, Connie, we really appreciate everything the new friends have been doing.”
“Sure, Helen,” she’d said. “It will be good for Anna to have you with her.”
Now knee-deep in a hole, Connie had no shortage of other responses. From an emphatic phone slamming—Fuck you, Helen—to a cooler-toned jab: Actually, Helen, here’s the deal. Whatever you love and appreciate doesn’t mean anything. Anna isn’t interested in time alone with anyone, not even her own kids or brothers. So get off your high best-friend horse that says showing up here with your old-friend gang is going to brighten her day.
The blade struck, a metal vibration twingeing through her arm. It jolted up her neck. She leaned over and wedged out a small boulder. Heaved it. Struck rock again. Gardening in this valley, you really had to respect the old farmers and their stone walls.
Maybe she should simply have said, That’s twenty years of new friend, Helen. That would be twenty years of soccer carpool, riding-practice carpool, Wednesday- and Friday-morning speed walks and showing up anytime at each other’s back door when we needed a break from kids or husbands or just needed to show each other the new suede boots we’d splurged on, and then, when our kids were all off at college and we’d go out to dinners midweek, first because we were free and didn’t have to cook and then because it was actually sad not to have kids to cook for, and oh, there was weekly driving to Springfield for chemo infusions or sitting on a chair while she was in the tube for MRIs or her seeing me through foot surgery and my breast scare or any of the other every-single-day things that Anna and I did together for the last twenty years of being new fucking friends.
The sky loomed low, bruised. Weather was coming in sooner than later. Her hands were beyond numb. Stinging needles. Connie could smell the storm. A half-dug hole filled with rainwater would be useless. Great. So fuck John, too, for being right. And for that other thing he’d said while eating his morning oatmeal, raisins, and nuts. He’d looked up at Connie and said, “It’s a pear tree. Not your dear Anna. You can’t make this better.”
Connie knew too much. Always had. She was the doctor’s wife; she was Anna’s friend. Anna hadn’t been a good patient. Skipped appointments, checkups, ignored months of post-stem-cell quarantine. Infection be damned, Connie knew that Anna couldn’t abide the way friends looked wearing surgical masks. The double loyalties put Connie in an awful position. She knew that even with a high fever Anna had played two gigs. Had gone back to teaching when doctors had insisted she had no immune system. Connie forced John to make house calls and pretend he was just coming over to play Scrabble. When other friends asked her how Anna was doing, Connie had to sort through two camps of privileged information.
Connie threw down the spade. She wiped sweat from her face and felt the grime from her hands stick to her skin. Her lips had a sandy coating.
“Make it better.” That was the other thing Helen said. “Connie, I’m worried you all have too easily accepted the choice for hospice. Anna needs resistance.”
Maybe that was the thing that pissed Connie off most. As if Helen could possibly know what she, Connie, felt or accepted.
She crouched, trying to fit herself in the hole. “Fuck!” She screamed it out loud. Breathed in dirt. She closed her eyes and screamed again. She heard a car door slam, the scuffle of leaves. Probably John between patients scrambling home to help. She didn’t want his help. She squinted up to the bulked shape of a woman’s down parka. Even backlit, she knew it was Layla.
“What’s going on?” Layla worked to sound unfazed by the mud-caked sight of her. Thank God for Layla.
“Gardening.” Connie stood. She climbed, one big step, then another, out of the hole.
“Need help?”
Connie stormed past Layla and jammed the spade against the shed door. She tugged John’s gloves out of her back pocket and clapped them till there was no more dirt. Pinned them between the spade and the shed side. She dragged the bucket with the pear tree and tilted it in through the shed door.
“Need help?”
“I’ve got to wash off. Then I need help. We’re going over to Anna’s. I made her rice pudding. I want to see her today. I don’t care who’s visiting and wants time alone when Anna doesn’t give a flying fuck about being alone with any of us anymore.”
The New Friends
They watched a car turn down the driveway. What the hell? Then a second car. Twenty-four hours alone with Anna, that’s all Helen had asked. Again and again, over the phone, Helen had said how appreciative she was of Connie, of all Anna’s new friends.
“You called them new friends?” Caroline sneered. Had Helen actually used that phrase? Caroline looked like her old judgmental self.
“I don’t know. Probably.” Backing away from the window so they couldn’t be seen, Molly, Caroline, Ming, and Helen watched Marsha get out of a Jeep parked by the trash shed. Layla and Connie emerged from the other car.
“New compared to us,” Ming defended. “It’s a fact. It’s not Helen’s fault.”
They watched as the Valley women took bowls and more bags from cars. Then clustered by Layla’s van deep in animated conversation.
“I’ll tell them to leave.” Helen knew she wouldn’t tell them to leave. Caroline was right. Nothing new about the Valley friends. They’d been Anna’s everyday friends for twenty years. More than that, they were Anna’s front line. Now, that was a terrible phrase, “front line.” The whole illness-as-battle imagery—pathetic, trite. Worse, like tick medicine you’d put on a dog’s nape. Call it whatever you want, Helen had noticed the sign-up chart tacked on the wall in the kitchen. It was Layla, Connie, Marsha, A.G., Pamela. Other names Helen didn’t even recognize, who were scheduled for sleepovers midweek, when Anna’s children and brothers went home to their families and jobs. These women were here every day.
Helen would be here these twenty-four hours. Then she would drive home to Asa and the life they were beginning.
Helen opened the kitchen door and waved. “Anna’s up and festive.” Then she shouted, “It’s a party! Come join!”
Caroline slid behind Helen, resting her chin on Helen’s shoulder. “You’re a terrible bodyguard, tiger.”
Local
“Hey, beautiful.” Layla twirled a lock of Anna’s dark hair. “I see you’re happy to have your girls visiting.”
“They’ve made me feel pretty good.” Anna squinted, apologetic.
The Valley
Reuben and Anna had lived in the Valley almost twenty years. The Pioneer Valley, that seam of Massachusetts farmland that stretches along the Connecticut River, with long tobacco sheds on floodplains, then the steep uplift into wooded ravines, traprock ridges, basalt and iron, and winding, narrow roads carving through forests until opening onto hill towns with craft-goods shops and farmers’ markets. The schools were great. Friday potlucks with music. Kids catching frogs. Everyone belonged to a co-op. Everyone had gatherings. Reuben grew vegetables in raised beds, kale in hoop tunnels all year long. Anna was invited to play in a cover band. She sang in local pubs with another woman also named Anna. A bumper sticker on every car. Everyone was anti-something.
“We’ve found just the right community for us,” Anna announced to Helen after the first full year.
“Isn’t it all a little self-righteously alternative a
nd precious?” Helen countered, though when Anna said, “Well, hello, Miss Mainstream USA,” she quickly confessed she was plain old jealous. Every woman Anna met sounded ridiculously cool. Every mom in the Valley was a weaver or an herbalist or a children’s-book writer.
“You have a different walking partner every morning.” Helen couldn’t believe just how poutish she sounded. “I feel eclipsed.”
“But I show off to them by bragging about you,” Anna said. “It’s not everyone whose best friend has a painting in every major museum in the world.”
Old and New
Look, look, how the room was practically a party! Now it’s a party, Anna thinks. Draped on the arms of chairs and sofas, women in clusters, sparks of conversations. Ming and Layla. Molly and Connie, a do-si-do of her women friends. Not only her dearest Layla and Connie. There’s Marsha, Pamela, and A.G. Here’s Betsy, who, with Anna, started the middle-school math center. She’s dropped by with a card made by the art teacher and signed by all the middle-school teachers. And there’s a manila envelope stuffed with cards that students have made. Here’s Jeanie, the eighth-grade social-studies teacher, kneeling before Anna. “It’s ancient Chinese medicine,” she says, holding out a potted pink orchid. Anna watches Helen drag in the painted dining-room chairs. Connie and Caroline pass bowls of rice pudding. Extra holiday folding chairs stored in the hall closet unfold. Everyone claims she’s only staying a minute. A.G.’s positioned behind Anna on the couch, fingers tapping along Anna’s temple.
Was this actually some tribal chant issuing from A.G.?
Then Susie, the up-the-hill neighbor, arrives with a platter of warm sugar cookies. “I’ve brought your name to my church circle,” Susie says, leaning in and placing her palm on Anna’s forehead. “There’s energy in silent communal prayer.”
Before Everything Page 8