by Wendy Wunder
EIGHT
McMANSION LIVING WASN’T ALL BAD. THE NEXT DAY, AFTER SLEEPING with seven down pillows of different shapes and sizes beneath matching sheets in a room to herself that was perfectly climate-controlled to seventy-two degrees, Cam awoke feeling energized. Ready to face what Lily had in store.
She made her way groggily down the staircase made of shellacked split logs covered in the center with chartreuse carpeting. Lily’s mom, Kathy, greeted Cam in the kitchen. She was southern. Like Gone with the Wind southern. She had a fake blonde bob, fake boobs, and fake fingernails.
“Good mawnin’, Cayum,” Kathy said. She wasn’t as dumb as she sounded with the accent. Weird how an accent could make you seem dumb. Cam didn’t have one because her mom’s Jersey accent was tempered by the Florida one, and it all sort of morphed into a nonaccent. “What kin we git you for breakfast?”
Cam looked around the kitchen, with its requisite cherry cabinets, stainless-steel appliances, granite countertops, and huge center island for prep work. The window behind the sink looked out onto the morning lake, which was steaming with foggy wisps like a hot cup of tea. They probably had every breakfast food imaginable, except for what Cam really wanted: Lucky Charms.
As long as breakfast doesn’t involve pineapple, thought Cam. Last night Lily’s mom had set out a Polynesian (as interpreted by a North Carolina caterer) spread, heavy on the pineapple.
“Is this authentic?” Kathy had asked.
“I wouldn’t know,” said Alicia. “I’m from a big Italian family in New Jersey.”
Everyone laughed. Their families were close, but they had only ever talked about the cancer. It had consumed their lives and their interactions. Blood counts, new trials, breakthroughs, symptoms, and ways to get more energy, more life.
Neuroblastoma was a baby cancer. Something happened to the baby nerve cells before they became mature nerve cells and they started growing out of control, creating tumors around the liver and then spreading to the bones or kidneys or anywhere, really. Ninety-nine percent of cases happened in babies. And most people, when they got it as babies, could survive it. With babies, it had even been known to spontaneously, miraculously, disappear. It was a different story if you got it when you were older. Chances of survival were pretty slim.
“Cayum. I wanted to talk to you for a minute, honey,” said Kathy, pouring herself another cup of coffee.
More cancer talk, thought Cam. “Do you have any Lucky Charms?” she interrupted, trying to cut Kathy off at the pass. “I could go for some Lucky Charms.”
“We might, honey. Check the pantry.”
The walk-in pantry was almost as big as the one at the restaurant, with shelves and shelves of cans and dried goods organized by sundry. Cam looked at “cereal row,” and as she’d expected, everything was organic and fibrous. No wonder Lily was getting so skinny. She grabbed a green box of Enviro-Pops from the shelf and reentered the kitchen. “You could feed a village with that pantry,” she said.
“Yes, I guess we should take some of that to the food bank. Listen, Cam—”
“You didn’t have any Lucky Charms,” Cam interrupted, “but I found these,” she said, shaking the box. “Forty percent less sugar and no trans fat.”
“Great. Cayum. Listen, there’s a new study we found out about, and Malcolm pulled some strings, and we got Lily into it. It’s pretty expensive, but we’d be happy to foot the bill if you wanted to try it with Lily. It’s in Chicago, and we got in because we know someone who knows someone.”
Cam let herself be distracted for a second by the red dart of a cardinal flying past the kitchen windows behind Kathy. “My mom knew Madonna once,” she said. She settled on a stool at the center island and pressed her bony elbows into the granite.
“Um. Really, sugar?”
It wasn’t that giving up on western medicine didn’t frighten Cam. Western medicine was her life. Her whole identity had become wrapped up in leukocytes and lymphocytes and neuroblasts and metastasis, chemo, radiation, surgery, procedures. And none of it mattered. The entire trillion-dollar cancer industry and all of its machinery, Cam now realized, was for naught. All the pain it caused. All the bone-marrow transplants. For naught. The war on cancer, like any war, was useless except for its ability to stimulate the economy. Drugs were being sold. Doctors were getting paid. Pharmaceutical companies were getting rich. Cam had become collateral damage in the war on cancer. And she was done with all of it. She was throwing in la toalla.
“Don’t think Madonna could pull any strings, though,” Cam concluded.
“So, what do you think, sugar?”
“Kathy, I think that is very nice of you. Really. But I don’t think that’s my path.”
“Since when do you have a ‘path’?” Alicia asked, appearing in the doorway of the kitchen. She leaned against the doorjamb in her pajamas and kimono and held her cup of coffee in both hands. Her face was chiseled into the stern, serious, and yet slightly amused countenance of a disappointed mother that Cam rarely saw because she rarely did anything wrong.
“Since now. We’re going to Crazy Town in Maine, remember? That’s our strategy, since we don’t know someone who knows someone.”
“Don’t you think we should at least try it?” Alicia said. “It’s medicine, Campbell.” She swept a long curly strand of hair out of her red-rimmed morning eyes.
Cam wavered for a second. Trying was usually better than not trying. But not in this case. The road trip was changing her a bit. Now that they’d gotten the momentum going, she wanted to finish what they’d started.
“A’ohe I pau ka ’ike I ka halau ho’okahi,” she said. It was a popular hula adage that meant: All knowledge is not contained in only one school. “No more trials, Mom.”
All the last trial had done was diminish her immune system to the point where she got shingles (a seventy-year-old-man disease) and yeast infections all over her body, including her tongue. She couldn’t close her mouth for three days. The “science” of these trials just didn’t add up. You didn’t demolish someone’s immune system to make her healthy. Promise, Maine, made just as much sense. Cam grabbed a banana and made her way out of the kitchen.
Lily crashed into her. She was bounding into the kitchen dressed in some child-size Daisy Dukes and a calico halter, asking her mom if she’d finished packing the picnic basket.
“You let your mom pack the picnic basket?” Cam asked.
“That’s the last of it,” said Kathy, as she put the Brie and apricots into the basket.
“Thanks, Mama.” Lily gave her mom a squeeze. Lily was kind of a spoiled brat, but she somehow made it an endearing part of her personality. Finally she turned around to look at Cam. “You’re wearing that?” she asked. Cam was still in the oversize, off-the-shoulder FRANKIE SAYS RELAX T-shirt that she wore to bed.
“I just woke up,” said Cam. “It seems a little early for a picnic.”
“Ryan has to be somewhere this afternoon. Come on! Get dressed.”
Back in the guest room, Cam muttered to herself as she put her cargo pants back on and topped them with a plain black tank top. She combed her hand through her hair, and that was it. She was not going to try to impress anyone.
She was contemplating whether or not to even wear earrings when she heard a horn blaring from the driveway. She grabbed her biker bag, ran outside, and was mortified to find an idling yellow Hummer.
“Come on!” Lily said as she pulled Cam by the hand toward the enormous vehicle.
“God, Lily. Don’t you think J. C. would drive a Prius?”
“Don’t be such a buzzkill.”
“I’m sorry I’m so reluctant to destroy the planet with my Humvee. I should be more of a sport.”
“Campbell!” Lily dismissed her friend and then literally skipped toward the truck, the picnic basket banging against her legs. Cam had to help her open the monstrous door.
“Where’s Andrew?” Lily asked as she glanced at the empty backseat.
“Lacrosse,�
� said Ryan.
“Is he coming?” Lily persisted.
“Nope.”
“Ry-an. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It’s not a big deal, Lil. Come on,” Ryan said.
“At least let me go get a book or something to entertain myself,” Cam begged. She tried to turn back toward the house, but Lily pushed Cam’s skinny butt into the backseat.
Ryan had curly red hair, ivory skin, and freckles. He was, in fact, a tiny bit pimply, but nothing too repulsive. Everything about him seemed new, nascent, hairless, like he’d just hatched from some alien egg and arrived onto planet Adulthood. Everything except his voice. He had a deep, booming actor’s voice, and when he said, “Cam, it’s nice to finally meet you,” Cam could see how Lily could let herself get sucked in. Even so, she wished she had just stayed home and gone to the movies with her mom and Perry.
At the park they climbed to one of eastern North Carolina’s few hills. Cam mourned the loss of her quadricep muscles with each tiring step, but the air was cool and just refreshing enough to fuel her and to bring some color to Lily’s cheeks. They got to the overlook, a cliff with a view of the entire “lake,” which was mostly a man-made reservoir of sorts, an Army Corps of Engineers marvel, a flooded soybean field. Still, it was beautiful with the sun sparkling off of it and the clear voices of the loons and boaters echoing all the way up to them at the top of the hill.
Ryan spread out the checkered blanket and insisted on a little prayer before helping Lily set out the food. He made sure she ate something before he would touch a morsel.
“You have to eat, Lily. Come on,” he said, creating for her a perfect bite of cracker with pimento cheese and a slice of pickle, Lily’s favorite snack.
He had been chivalrous and entertaining during the entire hike, lugging all of their stuff and starting friendly, small-talk conversations. He must have taken the same southern etiquette classes at the “club” that Lily had growing up, which made them a good couple, Cam guessed.
Lily took one bite and then covered her nose and mouth with a napkin. In seconds the napkin was bright with Lily’s blood. A nosebleed. “Shit!” said Lily.
“Squeeze it.” Cam reached over to hand Lily a cloth napkin and searched through the cooler for an ice pack. She helped Lily tilt her head back and pressed the ice pack to the bridge of Lily’s nose. Even Lily’s front teeth were red with blood. “Is this happening a lot?” Cam asked. Aside from Lily’s frail appearance, this was the first sign Cam had seen that Lily was not totally in remission.
“Yeah. It’s my new thing.”
“Nice. Well, I had a seizure in the dollar store parking lot, if that makes you feel any better.”
“Awesome,” said Lily. “I’ll be right back.” She made her way to the cabin of outhouses that was about a hundred yards behind them in the woods. “You two get to know each other,” she said, still holding her nose.
Cam sat down on the blanket and washed the blood off of her hands with some water from the water bottle. She and Ryan stared out at the lake. “So.” Cam was still feeling a little fidgety. “I’m to get to know you,” she said as if she were in a Jane Austen novel.
“What do you want to know?” Ryan asked.
“Honestly?”
“I’m an open book,” he said.
“I want to know your intentions,” Cam said, keeping with the Jane Austen vocabulary.
“Intentions?”
A sibilant breeze whispered its way through the pine needles overhead, and in the distance Cam could hear the knocking of a woodpecker.
“Yeah. Like with Lily. She thinks you love her,” said Cam. Ryan sat up straight and crossed his legs. Probably feeling shifty at the mention of the word love.
“I intend to enjoy whatever time we have left,” he said, grabbing a nectarine from the basket.
“What about the other chick?” Cam asked.
“What about her?”
“Are you breaking up with her?”
Ryan stared out at the lake, threw the nectarine up into the air, caught it, and took a sloppy bite. With his mouth still full of nectarine—What happened to the etiquette, thought Cam—he turned to Cam with a steely-eyed stare and said, “Now what would be the point of that?”
“Of what?” Lily startled them. A tiny smear of dried blood still tattooed her forearm, but there was otherwise no sign of the nosebleed.
Ryan got up and walked away.
“What’s with him?” Lily asked.
“No idea,” said Cam.
At dinner that night, after Cam made the mistake of eating off of her “charger plate,” Perry read out loud the embarrassing list of miracles she’d recorded so far in her notebook from Izanagi. Only Perry could find miracles on I-95.
Arguments could be made for some of the more elusive items on the list, like #3 Alicia hasn’t lost her patience since Atlanta, or #7 McDonald’s French fries. But when she started listing things like gas engines and cranes under The Miracle of Transportation, Cam had to draw the line.
“That’s technology, Perry, not a miracle. Anything that can be studied under the guise of an -ology is disqualified as a miracle.”
“What about angelology or unicornology?” Perry asked.
“Or theology.” Lily’s dad, Malcolm, smirked. He had a broad, handsome, clean-shaven face that was just on the verge of being jowly.
“I give up,” Cam said.
“So Cam, how was your date with Andrew?” Kathy winked. In this family, everything awkward was laid out in the open at the dinner table, like the poor chicken carcass that sat cold, naked, and ashamed as the wind whistled through its bones.
“He stood me up, actually,” Cam said, taking a huge bite of corn on the cob so that people would stop asking her questions.
“He had lacrosse,” Lily threw out quickly, meeting her mother’s accusatory stare with her own.
“Well, what did you think of Ryan, then?” Kathy continued.
Cam knew she was cooked. “He’s really nice,” she said carefully.
It was difficult for her to quell the compulsion to tell the truth, and when she did manage to tamp it down, it was obvious to everyone that she was lying. That’s what they must teach in those etiquette classes, thought Cam. Etiquette is really just politely lying to people’s faces. She wished she could do it now.
“Uh-oh,” said Malcolm. His face was rosy, and Cam suspected he’d had too many chardonnays. “If she says he was ‘interesting,’ we know she hated him.”
“He was interesting, though,” Cam insisted, knowing she was fighting a losing battle. “And polite.”
“Ohhh, Lily,” Malcolm joked, shaking his big head back and forth. “She doesn’t like him one bit.”
“I never said that,” Cam insisted. “I like him, Lily. He has a great voice.”
“Okay,” Kathy interrupted. “Who wants peach pie?”
Everyone was silent for a moment. Alicia stood up, clearing some plates. “I’ll help you with dessert.”
As the moms swept into the kitchen, Lily gestured at Cam with a stern look on her face. Upstairs, she seemed to be saying.
“But I like peach pie,” Cam said out loud.
“Then take yours in my bedroom.”
Cam followed Lily up the stairs, balancing her triangle of pie on a saucer and dreading the inquiry she knew was coming.
“Why don’t you like him, Cam?”
“I do like him! I said he was great,” Cam insisted.
“No, you said he was nice and interesting and had a good voice—which, coming from you, means that you hate his guts.”
“Lily, I only talked to him for ten minutes. How could I possibly hate his guts?”
Lily stared into Cam’s eyes, trying to ferret out the truth. Finally, she gave up and let her face relax into a smile. “I just want you two to like each other.”
“Okay,” Cam said. “Want to work on the graphic-novel-slash-screenplay? I brought it with me.” Cam rose excitedly and pulled it out of h
er suitcase.
“Sure,” said Lily. “Let me just say good night to Ryan. Five minutes. I promise.” She slipped out the door and headed down the hall.
But as five minutes stretched into half an hour, Cam slid their project back into its envelope, suddenly painfully aware of how immature it seemed. Writing a comic book. It seemed like the geekiest thing in the universe. Only an extreme social outcast or a ten-year-old would ever dream of attempting it.
Cam was alone except for Lily’s bright-haired troll doll collection. They kept staring at her, and she cringed in embarrassment. She covered her head with her pillow and willed herself to sleep.
The next morning, Cam went to wake Lily up to say good-bye. Lily’s bedroom was white. Lily white. All white except for one huge magenta painting of an abstract gladiola on the far wall. The white was intended to ease tension, according to Lily’s therapist, who made her paint over the black walls previously spray-painted with the purple names of Lily’s favorite bands. The white stressed Cam out, though. What if you accidentally spilled something? It was too much pressure.
Lily was buried under her puffy white cloud of a comforter. She was so tiny, the lumps of her body under the blanket were barely perceptible. Cam jumped on the bed to say good-bye.
“I’m leaving,” she said.
Lily just giggled beneath the covers.
“Why is that funny?”
“Hold on,” said Lily, and when she popped her head out from under the comforter, Cam realized that Lily was on the phone. “I’ll be with you in a minute, Cam,” she said, and she swept the back of her hand at Cam like a little broom before sinking under the covers to resume giggling.
That sounded so cold. With you in a minute. And the hand broom? Cam was tired of being swept away. She was leaving and had no idea when she’d see Lily again. They never used to speak that way to each other. With you in a minute.
On her way out the door, Cam noticed an oxygen tank standing next to Lily’s clear plastic desk. Two white picture frames sat on the desk staring at each other. One was of Lily and Cam, sitting on a hospital bed at St. Jude’s with their arms around each other. Their bald heads knocked together as they smiled for the camera. Before she knew what she was doing, Cam grabbed it and stuck it inside her hoodie. Then she went out and closed the door.