Daughters for a Time

by Handford, Jennifer

  “He was tough on me throughout my childhood. Trying to make me a man. By the time I left home, what I felt for him was far from worship. I swore I’d be nothing like him. I had had enough. I married your mom, a loving woman. I thought that she’d be the antidote to my childhood. Then along came you girls. Never in a million years did I think that a farm boy from West Virginia like me would fall so in love with daughters. I did, though. I loved holding you, bathing you. Those were happy times. When you girls were little, you two looked at me like I hung the moon. God damn, I remember how that felt, the way you girls would hang on me, crawl on me. There was a lot of love in our house back then.” Larry stopped, looked up at Maura, and sighed.

  “Then, hell, I don’t know what happened. Your mother was busy at work, volunteering at your schools. Then you girls got older and there was no telling either of you a damn thing. You were both so smart; you seemed to have everything figured out. The more independent you all became, the more I felt my own father judging me for not having more control over my family. I guess a part of me was still trying to win my old man’s approval. Shaking him off was harder than I’d thought. You know the rest. I found other ways to make myself feel big again.”

  Larry stood, walked to the edge of the playground, reached down for a stone, and then threw it into the trees.

  I stared at Maura, held Sam’s hands in mine. So there it was—Larry’s soliloquy. His explanation of why he is the way he is. A childhood that undid him. His failed attempts to stitch himself back together.

  I stood, walked to him, patted his shoulder. “I’m glad you’re here now.”

  A week later, only days before Claire was scheduled to start chemo, she was rushed back to the hospital. Ross called to say that her kidneys were failing. Acute renal failure was what the doctor had called it. With failing kidneys, she was no longer eligible to take chemotherapy.

  “I’ll give her one of mine,” I said immediately.

  “It doesn’t work that way,” Ross explained. “Her body isn’t strong enough to take a transplant.”

  “There must be some other option.”

  “We’ll talk to the doctor in a little while.”

  “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

  “Tell me,” Tim said when I hung up.

  “I don’t know!” I said, throwing my hands in the air. “Either the doctors are idiots or Ross got the information wrong. According to him, she can’t have chemo because her kidneys aren’t strong enough. But then he said that they won’t let her have a kidney transplant because she’s not strong enough.”

  “Helen,” Tim said, reaching for me.

  “No!” I said. “Someone is wrong. Something’s not right. They can’t take away all of her options. It’s time to get her to Hopkins,” I said emphatically. “Time for some doctors who actually have a plan.”

  “Helen, she’s sick,” Tim said.

  “She’s weak because she’s not eating!” I said, my voice buckling. “You know how she’s been lately. She needs a cheeseburger and a chocolate milk shake.”

  Tim reached for me and pulled me in. I began to calm until I felt his chest heave. I looked up at the tears streaming down his face.

  I pushed away from him. “Stop it!” I said. “I have a feeling that the doctors are wrong about her kidneys. I mean, Mom didn’t have the kidney problem.”

  “Helen.”

  “I’ve got to go.”

  “I’ll be here with Sam. If Ross needs me to come get Maura, just have him call,” he said, turning away and wiping his face with the sleeve of his sweatshirt.

  The ER was reasonably quiet when I arrived. I had called Larry from the car and he was waiting for me in the lobby.

  We tiptoed into Claire’s room in case she was asleep, but she was wide awake, staring at the muted television.

  “How are you, Claire?” Larry asked.

  “It seems that my kidneys are failing,” Claire said.

  “Take mine,” he said.

  “She’s already had multiple offers,” I said. “Apparently, we all want to give her our kidneys.”

  “If only it were that easy,” Claire said, smirking as if it were funny.

  “So,” I said to Claire, “what’s the plan? What are we going to do now?”

  Claire just looked at me with raised eyebrows and lips pressed tightly together. For the first time ever, my sister did not have a way out.

  For the next four weeks, Claire underwent dialysis. Davis and Delia came up from North Carolina to help with Sam, and Martha came up from Charlottesville to help with Maura. Ross took Claire to dialysis most days, but on the days when I took her, Larry would come, too. Each visit, the icy distance that separated Claire and Larry thawed a little more. Each loosened, opened up, gave a little. More and more, I saw Claire smile in spite of herself. Punishing Larry for his crimes of the past no longer seemed relevant to her.

  In the midst of Claire’s forgiveness, Larry opened up, filled the hours talking about the old days, stories from when we were little, the games we played, Christmases, and birthdays. For our part, Claire and I brought out photo albums from when we were little, back when we were still a family. We’d laugh and cry over photos of ourselves, so small and young. Then Claire and I took turns sharing photo albums that covered the period that Larry had missed: our graduations, Claire’s wedding, Maura’s birth, Sam’s adoption. It hurt him, I could tell, to see these moments that he had missed, but nonetheless, he wanted to keep looking. He wanted to fill in the blanks.

  Once, when there was a break in the conversation, Claire closed the album and set it aside. “I need to clear the air,” she said. “Maybe it’s more…clear my conscience.”

  “About what?” I asked.

  “There’s no easy way to say this,” Claire said.

  “You have cancer,” I said simply. “What can you possibly say that’s worse than that?”

  “You don’t know this, Helen,” she started, then stopped, looking at Larry. “Larry wanted to come back. After Mom died. He tried. I asked him not to.”

  “He did come back,” I said, remembering how Larry would occasionally stop by to bring the child-support check—at least for a while, it seemed.

  “You’re not getting what I’m saying,” Claire said. “He wanted to come back and live with us. He wanted to move into the house. Be our father again.”

  “Is this true?” I looked to Larry for confirmation.

  His mouth pulled to the side.

  “We’d all been so hurt losing Mom,” Claire said, “it never occurred to me that we could have helped each other.”

  “We had just lost our mother,” I said. “Why would we want to lose our father, too?”

  “I was twenty-one years old,” Claire stammered. “After the years of taking care of Mom, I felt grown up. I didn’t need a father. And I was still furious that he’d left us in the lurch when Mom was sick. You had just turned fifteen, and while maybe I could have conceded that a father figure would have been good for you, I was equally convinced that we were better going it alone. I felt like we all needed to get on with our lives. I thought letting Larry back in would just be dredging up the past. I had no way of knowing whether he would be good for you. How could I trust that he would be? What evidence did I have to support it? What would it have meant if you came to rely on him during your teenage years, and then he left again?”

  Larry stood, walked to Claire’s bedside, and placed his hand on her shoulder.

  “It didn’t matter,” I said. “I screwed up those years on my own, without anyone’s help.”

  “I’m sorry,” Claire said fiercely. “I should have taken the chance. I should have let you be part of the decision. You were capable of more than I gave you credit for.”

  “Why didn’t you come back anyway?” I asked Larry. “What made you listen to Claire?”

  Larry gave Claire’s shoulder a squeeze and then stepped back, leaned against the wall, shook his head. “That’s a tough question, Hele
n,” he said. “I had no legal right to you. Your sister was your guardian, for one. Two, she made valid arguments. She asked me point-blank, ‘Can you promise you’ll stay? Can you guarantee that you’ll never leave again?’ The fact was, I never thought that I’d leave in the first place, abandon my family like that, run from my responsibilities, with your mother sick and all. Goddamn, I wouldn’t have thought that about myself in a million years! But I did it. So could I make a promise, give her a guarantee? No, I couldn’t. I understood why that wasn’t good enough.”

  Larry returned to Claire’s bedside, placed a gentle hand on top of hers. “Claire did a hell of a job dealing with everything. We have no right questioning the decisions she made on your behalf.”

  Claire’s body softened immeasurably. When was the last time that she had someone advocating on her behalf, a parent parenting her?

  “Hindsight’s twenty-twenty,” he said. “And there isn’t a damn thing any of us can do about the past now. No one has more regrets than I do, but we’re here together now. Let’s not let that get away from us.”

  Chapter Twenty

  A week later, Claire was released from the hospital and was back home, on the doctors’ theory that she would do just as well there as she would in the hospital. According to the doctors, we were in the same spot with Claire as we had been with our mother for many months: trying to keep her comfortable, strong, and alive, while the doctors considered all, or any, remaining options. They called it “palliative care”—helpful but not curative. I nodded as they spoke, but there was still a part of me that wanted to cry foul. She’ll get better! You’ll see. In my mind, it was truly unfathomable that Claire was terminally ill. The numbers didn’t add up; the dissonance was too great. How could Claire die when she had a daughter to raise and I still needed her in my own selfish ways? The numbers were against her, but Claire always came out on top. I was willing to bet the house on Claire versus a 10 percent survival rate.

  Claire had asked me to pick up Maura, so when I got to her house, I set Sam on the rug in the family room next to her big cousin to watch Nick Jr. on television. Ross was in the kitchen on a phone call. I waved hello to him, pointed at the girls so that he knew to keep an eye on them, and headed up the stairs to check on Claire.

  Her bedroom door was closed. I eased it open just an inch, and there I saw Claire, dressed casually in jeans and a sweater, on her knees next to her bed. Her hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail, thick strands framing her face. Her rosary beads were dripping through her fingers, and she was so mindful she didn’t even hear me. I watched her as she worked the beads, fingering each one as a treasured jewel. How did a person like Claire—strong willed, ironclad in her convictions—get such a childlike faith that brought her to her knees each day? Gently, I pulled the door closed and left her alone. It was so obvious that her faith wasn’t the memorized version that I’d learned through years of attending CCD to make Mom happy, but rather, the penetrating, every-ounce-of-her-being kind. And for the millionth time in my life, even as Claire battled tragedy, I was envious of what my sister was made of.

  Downstairs, I went into the kitchen with Ross.

  “How are you doing?” I asked him, once he’d finished his call.

  “Crappy,” he said. His every emotion had rendered itself down to anger. He looked like he could take down a gang of thugs, one-handed. I eyed the cracked wood of the pantry door. I was willing to guess that his fist fit perfectly in the dent. Not that I could blame him.

  “She looks good today,” I said cheerfully.

  “She’s dying,” Ross seethed through clenched teeth. “It doesn’t matter how she looks.”

  “You don’t know that,” I snapped back.

  “What are you missing, Helen?” Ross shook his head at me.

  “I’m not missing anything,” I said. “I’m believing in Claire. She’s worked hard her entire life and it’s always landed her on top.”

  “Hard work’s not going to beat the cancer,” Ross said, walking past me and heading out to the back deck, where I watched him pick up a stick and hurl it into the yard.

  Other than Claire, who planned for every contingency, no one had said what Ross had just said. No one had said—explicitly—that Claire was dying. Leaving it unsaid was what gave us hope. Saying it was just mean-spirited.

  “I’m going to go check on her,” I said to no one, furious at Ross’s disloyalty. I buckled Sam into her bouncy chair for safekeeping and then marched up Claire’s stairs and into her room.

  “Oh, good. You’re here,” Claire said, holding a tablet in her lap. “I need to talk to you about something.”

  “What?” I said impatiently.

  She blinked at me. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing, Claire. What is it? What do you want to talk about now?”

  I didn’t know what Claire was going to say and I didn’t want to know! I was so sick of serious conversations! In the past month, just in case, Claire had gone over her will with me, item by item. If Claire died and something happened to Ross, Tim and I would become Maura’s guardians. Claire had shown me a cautionary letter she’d written to Maura: Always wear your seatbelt! Never walk to your car alone! Always jog with a partner! Never forget how much I love you! She’d gone through her jewelry, her artwork, the contents of her desk and dresser. She’d discussed funeral arrangements, cemetery plots, and the possibility of a memorial service—open casket versus closed. Closed, of course, for Maura’s sake. What the hell was she going to bring up now?

  “We can talk another time,” Claire said.

  “No, I’m fine,” I said. “Sorry. What is it?”

  “Well,” she said. “It’s a gift. I want to give something to you.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” I wondered if she wanted to give me last year’s wardrobe, her never-ending attempt to get me to wear khakis and twin sets.

  “This might sound weird,” she said. “But I want to give you my eggs, if you want them.”

  “Your eggs?” Because I was trained as a chef, my mind went to her refrigerator, wondering why she was mentally cleaning out the fridge.

  “My eggs,” Claire said, pointing to the area below her abdomen. “Before I had the surgery, just in case they needed to do a full hysterectomy, like they did, I asked them to freeze my eggs. My right ovary was no good—full of cancer—but my left ovary was clean. It was the only thing that was clean. They aspirated, cleaned, and froze the eggs that were inside. At the time, I was hoping that they’d be preserved for me and Ross, in case we were able to try again. But it looks like my chances are up. If you ever wanted to try to make a baby with my eggs, I would be honored.”

  “You want to give me your eggs?” I asked incredulously.

  “Yes.”

  “That means that you’re giving up? Throwing in the towel?”

  “Helen, I’m doing everything they tell me to do. But if it’s not enough…”

  “I can’t believe you’re going to quit!” I yelled. “You’ve never quit before in your life. And now, now, you’re giving up?” My knees buckled and I sat on the edge of her bed. “How can there not be any fight left in you?” I demanded. “People beat cancer all of the time.”

  Claire looked at me, her brow furrowed as if to remind me that, yes, that might be true, but people die from cancer all of the time, too.

  Later that day, at home, I sat at the table with Sam and Maura. Sam was strapped into her high chair, smearing finger paint on her tray, and Maura was painting with too-wet watercolors, soaking her page with a swirl of a sunset. For lunch, I fixed the girls seashell pasta with butter and parmesan. Afterward, I set Sam in her crib for a nap and Maura in front of the television to watch a Disney movie.

  On the edge of my bed, I pulled open the drawer of the side table. I placed the twenty-page report in my lap—our home study, the comprehensive examination written by Dr. Elle Reese in the months leading up to the adoption. I opened the first page. It read:

  Tim and Helen Franc
is are a loving couple who wish more than anything to adopt a daughter from China. They live in a comfortable home in northwest Washington, DC, in a neighborhood lined with trees and mature landscaping. The Francises would like two children. Mrs. Francis has a sister with whom she is especially close. She feels that the sister relationship is a vital one, one that she would like to pass on to her adopted daughter. The Francises plan to spend some quality time with their first daughter before applying to adopt a second one.

  I closed the home study, squeezed my eyes shut, and lay back onto the bed. Claire, I whispered, please.

  The next month, Claire was back in the hospital. Her lungs were filled with fluid. After I dropped Maura at school, Sam and I pulled into the hospital parking lot to find that Larry’s LeSabre was already there. As I rounded the corner to enter Claire’s room, I stopped short and peeked in. Larry was sitting at Claire’s bedside, holding her hand and weeping. I pulled myself back out into the hallway, glued my back against the wall, held Sam tightly against my chest. I breathed and processed the image that I had just witnessed, a father coming home.

  The next day, I kneeled in a pew at St. Mary’s. I lifted my face from my hands and looked up at the Jesus statue. What was it that Mom saw, that Claire saw, as they sat in these pews, that I wasn’t able to see? Why did they hold the faith so tenderly, so reverently, when I only saw the evidence that pointed in the direction of no God?

  Jesus, God, Mary—any of you? I wanted to scream. Help me! I looked again at the Jesus statue, studied the nails in his palms, the stain of blood, his upward gaze. A shiver snaked around my neck and down my arms. That’s it! The missing piece. A miracle! That’s what could happen. That was what was left.

  Please, God. Please. I prayed to God to intervene on Claire’s behalf, to save my sister. After communion, I kneeled down again and said the prayers that tumbled easily out of my mouth: the Lord’s Prayer, the Glory Be, and the Apostles’ Creed. A gentle calm pulsed through my body—the hope that help was on the way. And then, for good measure, I said a decade of Hail Marys, because if anyone understood the fierce love of a mother, it was the Holy Queen herself.