“Who’s that?” she whispered to Carol as they prepared a cubicle for the next patient. Jason pushed his patient’s stretcher into the recovery room with the girl leading the way. Harley’s eyes went to her breasts immediately. They were large, round and animated, even in scrubs.
“Tiffany. Who else,” Carol replied with attitude. “She started last week.” Harley wondered if she’d worked in Jason’s room everyday since her hire.
“Ah, Tiffany,” Harley said, trying not to be envious. Jason and Tiffany stood by the bedside, filling in paperwork. They seemed a little too cozy for Harley, but she wouldn’t confront him. He couldn’t quit his job because a Barbie Doll had the same assignment as he did. After he finished giving report to the recovery room nurse, she thought he might seek her out to see how her day was going, but he walked out of the room without even looking her way.
The omission on his part was innocent; they’d never hung around each other in the past, did they? Finally, he nodded in her direction, mouthing how are you? with his eyebrows in question marks. His attention gave her a thrill, and rather than comfort her, it scared her. Why had her expectations of her husband changed so drastically?
That night as she undressed, she felt strong enough to look at her wound. Following her usual routine, she took a shower without looking in the mirror. But when she got out, she changed her normal procedure and stood at her sink. A mirror ran the length of the wall, and as she prepared to examine her body for the first time post-surgery, she began by looking at the survivor. Trying to look at her breast as she would her arm or her nose was impossible; breasts were icons of worship. Women went to great lengths to make them larger and perkier. After a certain age, they gladly submitted to torture to keep their breasts safe by having a yearly mammogram. Gradually, she moved her eyes across to the other side, the affected side. It wasn’t as bad as she feared.
Andy did a nice job; left behind, a slender pink thread traveling from the right side of her sternum diagonally across her chest to almost her side. She disliked referring to it as a wound or a scar, chest was probably more appropriate, but so androgynous. She wanted a word that would describe where my breast used to be.
Later that night, she told Jason about looking and surviving the experience. She hated that she didn’t have a word for what was left behind.
“Are you ready to show me your booby?” he whispered. She put her hand to her mouth and giggled. Jason loved her; he’d been serious when she needed it, and jovial when she longed for it, after everything she’d gone through. Continuing to try to keep akin to her lead, he must have felt she needed levity right then. And by referring to what was still there, it took the focus off what was missing.
“Booby?” she asked, shy.
“You know. I haven’t seen it for a while.”
“I guess I can show you,” she said, nervous, frightened. She knew him well. His response now had more power than she should allow it to have, but he was her husband. Jason’s reaction could make it or break it for her. They stood apart from each other and she reached up to unbutton her pajama top. She pulled her left arm out first, carefully guiding her right arm out of the sleeve, gently because it was still sore from the lymph node dissection. He didn’t’ reach out to help her, watching her undress. It was an act of his will, letting her do it alone.
“Unhooking my bra is still a little tough,” she said, reaching behind. She let the straps fall down her arms, the right cup weighted down by the prosthesis fell to her waist. Harley watched Jason’s eyes, his facial muscles stiffening as his eyes stayed focused on the right side of her chest, where a nice round breast used to be. Flushed, the color worked its way up his neck and over his cheekbones, his black hair shining, one lock over his forehead giving him the appearance of a young boy. He grasped the bra and threw it on the bed, falling to his knees; he buried his face in her midriff. His body began to shake and she knew then, he was brokenhearted.
That night, they made love again for the first time in weeks, and Harley let him kiss the place where there was once a breast.
The approaching holidays coincided with the end of chemo and radiation for Harley. She’d completed one round of chemo shortly after surgery, and then the pathology report on her lymph nodes revealed that the drugs didn’t have the effect hoped for, they started her on another, grueling round. Scheduling treatments around her job, she worked Monday and Wednesday, had her treatment on Thursday, and recovered during the long weekend. No matter how badly she felt, she remembered the effort her parents took to keep their home life normal for her and her sisters, so she always got up, dressed and put on make up. Moping around in a robe and her bald head sounded appealing, but she fought the urge.
Wearing the selection of outlandish wigs her friends and family brought her – pink afros and long glamour wigs, braids and mohawks, her girls loved it, and it made her feel better knowing the wigs brought them joy. Tina crocheted and knit her an extensive wardrobe of caps – flapper caps, cloches, and hats adorned with flowers, beads and gems. Over exaggerating make-up application, she secretly thought she looked like a demented rock star.
Finally, the treatments were completed. By the spring, she had a full head of hair and life was getting back to normal.
Chapter 8
Two Years Later
Harley prepared for a wonderful summer down the Jersey shore. The family cottage in Sea Isle City would be the scene of Devon’s sixth birthday party. After work on that July Friday, Harley stopped by the store and got a sheet cake for forty people. When Jason saw it, he frowned. “How many people are coming to this thing?”
“Your family, of course, and my mom and sisters and their kids. It’ll be fun. You’ll see.”
“It’s not fun I’m worried about. That cake is huge.”
“Ha! I plan on eating a good portion of it,” Harley replied, laughing. It was a joke among the Joneses that the big sheet cakes were enough for forty average people or fourteen Joneses.
“How do you feel about your mother driving up by herself again?” Jason asked. “She was just here two weeks ago for Bennie’s graduation party.” He didn’t want to go to Delaware to bring her up but would if it was what Harley required of him.
“She’ll be fine. It’s only a three-hour drive and she’s staying over. It’ll be great to see her.”
Harley avoided leaving her family now for any length of time, so the overnight visits she used to enjoy, packing up her car for a long weekend alone with her mother no longer happened. If the whole family couldn’t get away to visit her, Maryanne came up to Harley. Melissa and Kelly could come too, making new memories at Harley’s house.
Subconsciously, Harley knew what she was doing; she was ensuring that her girls had plenty of fun times to rehash after she was gone. Getting through two years without a recurrence was a reason to celebrate. But Harley felt like she was holding her breath all the time lately, waiting for something to happen.
Before long, that feeling of impending doom segued to reality when she really couldn’t catch her breath. While preparing Bennie’s graduation party two weeks earlier, Harley didn’t even notice she was having difficulty getting air, standing at the shore house kitchen counter assembling a lasagna.
“You sound like a choo choo train,” Jason teased. “Were you running laps?” She giggled, reaching for the mozzarella. The gravity of what he’d said hit them at the same time seconds later. Grabbing his arm, she fell against him.
“Oh my God,” she whispered, gasping for breath. He led her over to a chair.
“Sit down. Don’t do anything for a few minutes. It might just be exertion.”
“I haven’t done anything but put a lasagna together,” she said, scared. He put his hand on the back of her neck and sat next to her.
“Slow deep breaths,” he said. The starvation for breath stopped, but pinpricks of fear ran up and down her arms. “You’d better make an appointment to see the oncologist Monday.
But he was out of town for a
week. “You can see the person who’s covering for him if this is an emergency,” Fern said.
“It’s not really an emergency,” Harley said, making light of it. After that episode, it hadn’t happened again. Like walking on eggshells, she was careful not to exert herself for the rest of the weekend. “I had sort of a breathing issue on Saturday, that’s all. I’m not sure what brought it on.”
“Well, if it happens again, go around to the emergency room,” Fern said. “Don’t mess around with your breathing.”
“I was down at the shore,” Harley said.
“There are hospitals down there, too,” Fern said. Harley could hear rustling around of paper.
“Can you come in next Monday? It’ll be his first day back so God only knows what this office will look like.”
“Monday’s fine,” Harley said.
“If you have a problem before then, like I said, go to thee emergency room.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Harley said.
All of her fears about leaving Jason and the girls resurfaced. “You can’t be sure the cancer is back until you have the scans,” Jason said that night after dinner, trying and failing at reasoning with her.
“It’s a realistic concern,” Harley replied. “We need to plan accordingly. The truth is, you could get bumped off tomorrow, god forbid, and I’d be up shit creek because I don’t even know what the passwords to your computer are. You pay everything online. What am I supposed to do? Wait until they shut the electricity off to find out what our account number is?”
“Point taken,” he said. “We can work on that right now. Get a paper and pen and sit here while I go through bills.” For the next hour, Jason gave her due dates and account numbers and passwords and Harley jotted everything down.
“I’ll make a spread sheet of this later,” he said, sticking the paper in the scanner. “Do you feel better?”
“No,” she answered. “But thanks for trying.”
On the following Monday, Fern from Doctor Michaels office called before Harley’s appointment. “He wants to save you from coming in today. You need to have repeat scans and blood work. Can you have those done this week? I can set up appointments so you can do it while you’re in town for work.” Harley thought about it for a second.
“Yes, that’s fine. Thank you.” She gave Fern the days she’d be at work.
“I hope I can get everything scheduled on those three days,” Fern replied.
Happily, Fern came through. Harley would have a PET scan, a chest X-Ray, blood work, and a mammogram on her left breast. The PET scan was scheduled for Friday, giving Harley the entire weekend to make herself sick with worry. But Jeremy Michaels was too kind to let her wait. He called the radiologist and requested a verbal report.
That night, after dinner, she was joking with her girls around the diner table when the phone rang. Jason answered it.
“Harley,” he called from the hallway. “You have a call.” She finished her conversation with the girls before walking to the phone. Jason was standing as stiff as a statute, holding the phone out for her to take.
“Who is it?” she asked, frowning.
“Doctor Michaels.” Harley’s heart banged in her chest, taking the phone.
“This is Harley,” she said, hesitating.
“Hi Harley, I didn’t want you waiting around all weekend for a report.”
“Thank you,” she replied.
“Your blood work looks okay. You’re still slightly anemic.” He paused, and it made Harley crazy as she could hear him shuffling through papers.
“Your chest X-Ray has an infiltrate in the left lung. It could be a touch of pneumonia, which could explain the shortness of breath. Have you had anymore episodes?”
“No. Pneumonia I can live with,” she said. “What about the PET scan?”
“The PET scan shows a hot spot on your liver, which we know about. There’s a new, tiny spot on your lung. To be safe I think the wise thing to do is another round of chemotherapy. Get rid of it now, before it causes trouble.”
“Ugh. I thought I might be done with all of that.” The doctor said he’d line up everything for Monday. She was to rest up in the meantime.
While Harley chatted with the oncologist, choosing her words carefully so as not to upset Jason, he held onto the wall, fighting the sensation that he was sliding down into an abyss. Smart and well read, Jason understood what the deeper meaning of Harley’s benign chat with the oncologist was. His wife was fighting for her life. Leaning over, he looked down the dark hallway into the brightly lit kitchen, at his family, his four, beautiful daughters, the youngest dealing cards to the other. He could hear Angie instruct Devon.
“Give Mom and Dad their hands.” As Harley said goodbye to the doctor, Jason took a deep breath, trying to pull it together.
“That sounded ominous,” he said, decided pussyfooting around was not going to work from this moment forward.
Harley sighed. “It’s not a big deal. There’s a spot on my lung, might be pneumonia, which is why I’m short of breath. Another is, you know.”
Her lungs? Jason thought. Now we are going to worry about her lungs? Thanks. Channeling his anger at God helped Jason deal with the emotional upheaval. Staying calm for Harley and the girls was priority.
“He’s calling in a script for antibiotics to the drugstore. Do you want to take a ride?”
“Tell the girls we’re going out to pick up ice cream,” Jason said. Harley went into the kitchen, leaving Jason to stew in the hallway.
“Get chocolate syrup!” Bennie yelled, the others adding their requests.
Jason was at the door, motioning for Harley to hurry. She could tell he was agitated, the news as upsetting to him as it was to her. He put his hand on her back and rushed her into the garage, opening her door and waiting until she got in.
“Go ahead,” he said, waiting to start the car. “What else did he say?”
“He thinks more chemotherapy is necessary, just to ward off something bigger. I start it Monday.”
“Oh, Jesus God!” Jason shouted, banging the steering wheel. “I’m sorry! This is not what I expected.” She patted his hand.
“I know,” she said. “Me, either. Let’s just take it day by day again. I was getting complacent.”
Shuddering, she thought of the house they’d looked at down at the shore, near Fran and Joe’s place, almost buying it, forgetting it would take two incomes to support it.
He leaned forward to put the key in the ignition. “I was, too,” he said, sniffing. “Trusting God and all that shit.”
Harley cringed, Jason using God’s name and cursing in the same sentence. Trusting God. Where did that even come into play now? Trusting Him to heal her? To make sure the girls would be okay after she was gone? Trusting Him to care for starving children in Africa? Babies with cancer? Why did she think she was more important than they were?
“I have to believe God loves me, Jason. This isn’t fair, but there’s so much we don’t understand.”
“I know all that,” he replied, tears on his cheeks. “But what if it’s a crock? We’ll die and there will be nothing.” He couldn’t control it, knowing his outburst was probably making it much worse for Harley but finding it impossible to control.
“Okay, say it is a crock. This is it, there’s no afterlife, no heaven. I’d better make the best of it now. You, too. We should have been living like Thoreau. Or hippies.” He laughed through his tears, pulling the car into the drugstore parking lot.
“I’ll go in,” she said looking over at his tear stained face and red eyes. “You’re a mess.”
He agreed, watching her get out and walk away. He didn’t want Harley to die. It had nothing to do with fear of being alone to raise the girls. Life without his beautiful wife was unimaginable. They’d spent the greater part of everyday together for most of their adult life, working together. Knowing she was just a few feet away from him at work made his job easier. They rarely had a cross word for each other and had saile
d through life until this.
Waving a small bag at him, Harley got back into the car. “Now you have to go to Wawa for ice cream.”
“Me and my big mouth,” he answered.
The next morning, before breakfast Harley told the girls what the doctor said, deciding to be upfront about everything, sparing the scarier details. She didn’t mention lungs, just that she needed more chemotherapy. General silence took over the breakfast table; Jason broke the ice by leaving for a tennis game with Andy Forman. Accepting Jason would probably go into detail about the metastases with Andy, Harley let it go. Having a tough enough time with what was happening to their life, if he needed to share it with a friend, at least it was her surgeon.
Cooking oatmeal for Tina and eggs for Angie with Devon clinging to her, Harley concentrated on keeping her emotions intact while she stood at the stove. Bennie poured coffee for everyone.
“I decided to stay here for school in the fall,” she said. Harley stopped turning eggs and turned the heat off.
“What are you talking about? You’re going to Columbia and that’s that. Everything’s ready. And paid for.”
“Mom, I want to be here with you. Let’s not argue about it,” she said, stirring creamer into her coffee.
“Bennie, they offered you more money than any other school. That’s not something you pass up lightly.”
Bennie thought, it is if your mother is dying. She had access to the same internet sites Harley did, read the statistics, listened to what Harley revealed. More chemo meant more cancer.
“Sorry, Mom, my mind’s made up. I’m not leaving you.” Harley stared ahead, anger with the disruption in her children’s lives growing faster than the fear that she might die sooner than originally thought. It wasn’t fair.
“Where are you going to go? You have to start school in the fall whether it’s in New York or closer to home. You need to keep the momentum going from high school.”
A Touch of Passion (boxed set romance bundle) Page 93