by Abby Maslin
That a professional career may never again be an option for TC is a reality I’m beginning to accept for myself, but it’s one I won’t unload on him right now. This isn’t the time to dampen him with cold, miserable truths. His recovery has to be about hope. Like all of us, TC is entitled to wild, impossible dreams.
“That’s a really big goal,” I observe, cognizant of how little I know about the particulars of TC’s former job. His title changed rapidly throughout the past four years, beginning first as an energy analyst, then senior analyst, and finally senior director of the something whatchamacallit department. I’d never been able to keep up, although I knew his work was energy related and often peppered with terminology such as forecasting and downward PV market. All I knew for sure was that he had big-name clients, including a few major utility companies, and spent a lot of time on Microsoft Excel, an application known to me only as the scary spreadsheet maker.
Giving a silent nod of acknowledgment to my ignorance, I move on, outwardly undeterred.
Be an energy analyst, I write inside a blue rectangle at the top of the chart paper.
“So what does an energy analyst do?” I ask TC, prepared to step fully into the role of interpreter as he searches for the complex words that describe his position. “I remember you saying you read the news a lot at work.”
He nods in excited affirmation, triggered by the memory of purpose and independence he once claimed in his everyday life. “Yup, mornings. Every morning. I read everything.”
I laugh. “Well, you couldn’t have read everything on the internet. That’s too much information. You never would have gotten anything else done. Were you reading about energy news?”
“Uh-huh. Just energy news. What’s the, uh?” He snaps his left fingers, looking at me to fill in the blank, which I could only imagine refers to some specific publication he once devoured.
“The Economist?” I guess, beginning with his favorite news magazine.
He smiles brightly. “Yes! How, how do you say it? Econ . . . econo?”
“E-con-o-mist,” I repeat slowly, emphasizing each syllable.
It’s a tongue twister, but he tries again slowly, lowering his voice so he can practice without my interference. “Econ . . . Econ . . . ,” he mutters in frustration.
Below the words I’ve already written, I jot another rectangle and write inside, Read global energy news.
After an hour we have created a full flowchart, with each of TC’s primary work duties outlined and then deconstructed into its requisite skill set; words inside of rectangles trailing to the bottom of the paper, where in tiny words we’ve mapped out multiple starting places.
Use correct letter sounds. Summarize what you’ve read. Write and speak numbers correctly.
Ringing through my mind are the lyrics to “Do-Re-Mi,” the song Julie Andrews sings in The Sound of Music as the children sit atop a grassy hillside. When you read you begin with A, B, C . . .
And this is where we will have to begin our work together: with A, B, C, with me teaching my thirty-year-old husband the alphabet, as I hold up flash cards featuring a cartoon alligator and encouragingly say, “Aaaaaaah,” in that very way you might hear it from a pediatrician holding a tongue depressor in a small child’s mouth.
Brain School will have to begin with basics.
At the end of our first day, tired but happy, we tape the flowchart to the back of the French doors that lead into the sunroom. I stare up at it, hopefully. It may be only a road map toward TC’s career, but it is a launching point for returning him to himself—a necessary step if we are ever to find our way back to each other.
CHAPTER 16
January 2013
On a cold afternoon in late January, the house quiet while TC naps, I pick up my mom’s cell phone off the kitchen counter as she folds laundry in the next room.
In what should be a quick glance to check the time, a most cryptic text from her friend Karen stares back at me from the tiny digital screen: Kate, don’t forget to let me know as soon as you get the test results.
Frozen, phone in hand, I stand rereading the words as I try to temper my own nosy instincts. The need to know everything right away has always been an unflattering quality of mine, often leading me into business that’s not rightfully my own. But ambiguity is not something that suits me well either. I’d much rather news be given to me straight, without filter or sugarcoating, than let my overimaginative mind be swept away by awful possibilities.
Test results? What kind of test results could Karen be referring to? My mom is burned-out from the drama of the past several months, but she hasn’t seemed sick. At sixty-two years old, she is still energetic, youthful, even. But that’s Kate. Rarely does she appear to be slowed down or visibly fatigued by life. Sometimes we like to joke that she has an acquired case of geriatric ADHD. Her enthusiasm causes her to bounce from topic to topic, idea to idea. She is the Tigger to my dad’s plodding, lost-in-thought Pooh Bear.
All of this leads me to believe there is a reasonable, worry-free explanation behind Karen’s text, but as often happens after one tragedy, the mind can’t help but await the next catastrophic blow.
After a moment of thought, I decide to approach her, gently and with trepidation.
“Mom,” I begin, my voice unsteady, as I walk out of the kitchen and place the cell phone in her hand. “I’m really sorry. You had a message on your phone that I didn’t mean to read, but I did. What’s going on?”
She is sitting at the dining room table, mid-fold, holding up a pair of Jack’s little blue sweatpants. In that same way that used to signify a lead-up to a reprimand, she closes her eyes, sighs, and exhales deeply. Standing before her, I feel very much the apprehensive and ashamed child.
“Abby, I didn’t want you to read that,” she says, a hint of sternness in her voice. “You have enough going on already.”
“I know,” I admit, then quickly lie. “I can handle it, though. What’s going on?”
The problem is cancer. A week later my mom’s doctor confirms breast cancer nodules in her right breast, encouraging her to decide on an immediate plan for removing the tissue and ridding her body of all remaining cancerous cells.
“I call this garden-variety breast cancer,” the surgeon comments, as I sit beside my mother at her next appointment. I’m not sure if “garden-variety” is meant to be a comforting diagnosis, but cancer of any variety is still cancer, and like other breast cancers, it still requires an aggressive treatment plan.
My overworked mind, already trying to handle life without an able-bodied husband, now tries to imagine life without a mother. I’m tempted to stomp my foot and refuse the possibility entirely, like a small child. The way I told myself over and over that I could never go on without TC is the way I now feel about my mother. She is the grounding and stabilizing force in our lives out here in the country, the only other person in my day-to-day life who understands what it means to go from being a wife to being a caregiver.
In frank, practical terms, there is another reason I need my mother. Without her, there is no one to take care of my father. There is no TC-and-Abby team anymore, and I alone don’t have the capacity to keep my father alive. Everything would fall to Bethany, and I don’t want my sister spending the glorious last days of her youth the way I am. She’s already in way over her head, trying to figure out how best to support us all while still holding down a job.
Without my mother, nothing stays afloat. The whole ship sinks, and everyone goes down with it.
* * *
“Mom,” I tell her, once the cancer is confirmed and her double mastectomy scheduled, “I’m here, and you’ve got me for whatever you need.”
For the first time maybe ever, she does not refuse my offer.
I will relinquish some of my Brain School duties and try to balance the demands of TC’s recovery with my mother’s health. Nikki, the mothe
r of TC’s best friend from high school, has been more than willing to come work with TC a few times a week anyway. I know I can entrust some of this work to her. Nikki’s a former special education teacher who knows fluent sign language. She’s been working with TC on mastering a few signs, hoping to give him a communication alternative during those difficult moments in which he cannot find the words.
With Bethany consumed by a big case at work, I buckle down for a bumpy few weeks, trying very hard to numb myself from this latest setback. God, the universe, or whoever is in control is sending me a very clear message: life is an unpredictable ride. We’re all just trying to stay alive. And the way it’s looking these days, my immediate family is trying harder than most.
TC, for his part, stays out of my way, demanding very little as I rally myself around my mom. He asks for nothing but also offers nothing in return—no recognition, understanding, or emotional support to lean on as I process the news. He is not withholding his love out of cruelty. He simply no longer has the capacity for that level of awareness.
Instead, I go to my two-year-old. I spend an extra minute kneeling by the tub, lathering Jack’s hair at night. I pull him into my lap as we watch The Muppet Movie for the eighty-fifth time. His warm hugs and bedtime requests for “more books” elicit the only smiles I have to offer. Whatever is still soft in me belongs entirely to him.
* * *
During those weeks a dream awakens me in the middle of the night: it is late at night and I am working in an open garage when a group of young men drives by and slows down their car. Someone in the back seat rolls down his window and lifts up his gun. He looks at me, offers a slow smile, and begins shooting. I look up from whatever I’m working on just as the bullets penetrate my body. I fall to the garage floor, bleeding out instantly on the gray concrete. The man who smiled gets out of the car and stands over me with his gun. I can’t talk, but I’m trying to form words. In my mind, I’m not asking him for help. I’m begging him to shoot me again, to finish what he’s started. Instead, he watches as the life drains slowly from my body, my capacities diminished one by one until I am paralyzed, unable to move or talk. A prisoner of my own trapped thoughts, lying in a pool of my own blood.
“That’s enough!” he shouts to his accomplices, still in the car. Enough, he means, to ensure I’ll be permanently disabled. Not dead.
I sit straight up in bed, my skin moist with cold sweat. It doesn’t take a professional to translate what my unconscious mind is trying to work out. It’s easy to identify the parallels of my dream to TC’s injury: violated by young men, left to die, but made disabled instead. I’ve lost count of the many people who insist how lucky we are that TC didn’t die that day, but I’m starting to question the difference between death and the loss of one’s life. TC is alive, but none of us are engaged in living again. We’re barely hanging on, our extraordinary relationship reduced to hand gestures and sentence fragments. This is not a marriage, I think in my most unhappy moments. It’s a mercy agreement. I will stay with TC, support him however I can, and do so without asking anything in return. Those are the terms. I just don’t know how long I can live by them.
My anxiety is beginning to get the better of me. I am trying to reconcile my mom’s cancer with all the blows we’ve already suffered. She is all too aware of this family’s scarcity of sympathy, and she makes it a point to thank me profusely each time I accompany her to the doctor. Like me, my mom has no husband to support her. My dad shows minimal concern for his wife’s diagnosis—a fake, broad grin stretched permanently across his face.
“How you feeling, Dad?” I ask on the rare occasions I can muster the effort.
“Feeling good. Yup, really good,” he insists, just as he has for years.
It’s the question that leads nowhere. My dad has felt “great” tied to hospital beds with tubes up his nose. He’s been “really good” in near-coma states when he can’t even recognize me as his daughter. I’m pretty certain that “fine” is the only answer his autopilot brain has memorized.
So when I ask, “Are you worried about Mom?” he nods his head just as enthusiastically.
“Oh yeah, but she’ll be OK, honey,” he insists, drawing his certainty from a pot of mush.
My friends back in the city remark, “I don’t know how you’re managing all this with a kid, Abby,” and all I can do is reply with a shake of my head.
“Trust me. The two-year-old is the easiest part,” I insist. And it’s true. Jack is the remaining ray of sun in my life, one of the few reminders that life is still happening to us. I am so saturated in grayscale I must remind myself time and time again that I am not among the ill. I’m still perfectly healthy. Even if my dreams are trying to convince me otherwise.
After tucking in Jack at night, I take a hot bath, analyzing my body for any signs that sickness is coming for me next. I give myself breast exams, convinced I can feel a lump or a shooting pain that alternates from right to left breast. Eventually, I make a mammogram appointment for myself, eliciting curious looks from the receptionist and the technician, who can’t reason why a healthy, thirty-year-old woman would subject herself to such an unnecessary test. As I wait for the results from the BRCA blood test (which identifies the breast cancer gene), my doctor assures me my mammogram is normal.
“You just have fibrocystic breasts,” she informs me. A fancy word for lumpy.
I take my lumpy breasts and my negative blood test back home and try to put to bed any remaining anxieties about my health.
When I arrive, I look in the mirror. I don’t know why it’s hard to admit that after everything, every moment of suffering, I am still young and lovely. It’s not in my nature to regularly compliment myself, but as I take a closer look, I see that it’s true. I am lovely, I think. I am young. There is still life in this body, begging to be lived.
It’s the good news and the bad news in one terribly complex package. That I am vibrant but that the circumstances of my life won’t allow me to enjoy it. That I am young but that I may very well spend the rest of my life lonely.
There is a fine line between caregiving and self-abuse on which I think I might be teetering. I don’t want to give away my one precious life, but I don’t know how to fulfill my duties, my loyalty to the person I love most, without losing myself in the process.
It’s an impossible love. And I am desperate to save us both.
* * *
TC has only just begun to dream again himself. For months his consciousness entered a black hole as he slept, and he’s managed to tell me that he’s missed his dreams.
“There’s noth-nothing anymore,” he lamented. “I just sleep so . . . hard.”
Dreaming has always been important to TC. Before we started dating, he kept a dream journal. When we began dating, I begged him relentlessly to read it.
“Please, TC!” I’d whine. It was a test, of course, to see how far into his inner mind he would grant me permission. If there were deep dark secrets or ex-girlfriends his mind still lingered over, I wanted to know. I wanted access to every part of his life—an indication that I was welcome to stay forever. Because I knew from the moment I met him, that’s what I wanted.
Now I have more access to his unconscious mind than I ever imagined and I’m finding these days it is mostly preoccupied with language. In the middle of the night, he bolts upright and scrambles for the journal next to his bed.
“The words!” he says one night, gasping. “The words are coming back!”
He describes his dream: words falling from the sky and lining up on top of one another. People’s names suddenly flooding into consciousness. Fearful that his rediscoveries might slip away, he clamors for his journal, scribbling down every word he can remember.
Moments like this are magical and powerful, as if his recovery has been granted an infusion of divinity. I’ve seen it in Brain School, a spontaneous eruption of language that gushes like a
waterfall.
“Do you remember that movie we saw at the E Street Cinema?” he asked me spontaneously one day, with nearly perfect enunciation and smoothness.
I stared at him, floored.
But most of the time, recovery is gritty and raw—watching TC fumble with one hand at his dress shirt buttons, or waiting outside the men’s restroom, worried that he’s fallen inside. He’ll point to the letter A and struggle for fifteen minutes just to make the sound or grimace as he tries to recall his own birthday. I know I’m not supposed to rush to his assistance every time. The only way to rebuild his skills is through practice. But it’s never easy.
Physically, he’s made great gains since leaving the hospital. The scars on his head continue to heal, disguised for the most part by his genetic gift of full, thick hair, though his forehead remains slightly dented where his skull piece was removed and then reattached. Dr. Kalhorn assures us that we can correct this later by injecting fat grafts under the skin. For now, there is too much going on to worry about small cosmetic procedures. Southern Maryland is home to a large navy base, its population largely composed of military families. When we’re in public, I expect most people who notice TC’s injuries will assume he’s a recovering veteran. And I’m happy to let them believe this. It’s less uncomfortable than revealing the truth.
TC’s walking has also improved markedly. He relies on the cane only as a last resort, allowing us to get out of the house more often and run errands together. Still, a quick trip to Target or the grocery store is a mental and physical feat for TC. His brain is relearning to contend with crowds, uneven pavement, and background noise, all of which act as significant obstacles to his focus.
His right arm and hand have regained some gross movement, but nothing so precise as would allow him to flip through the pages of a book or to tie his shoes. Most of the time he seems contentedly unaware that the right half of his body exists. If I tap him on the right shoulder, he’s not likely to respond. Nor will he turn to look at me if I sit to his right.