“She’d do it to get your mother started, of course. And it always worked. ‘See?’ Addie would say. ‘That’s what scientists do. Make so-called impartial observations and then let the rest of the world go to hell with them, segregating schools, dropping bombs, dumping chemicals all over rice paddies.’ ”
Scarlet shimmies out of the sleeping bag she’d kept wrapped around her legs; the sun is growing brighter, reaching in to warm the porch. “She’d say things like that even back then, even that early on?” she asks.
“Oh, sure. I was always glad Karl wasn’t around to hear her, working up steam and maligning everybody from Einstein to Oppenheimer. Never mind that the whole thing started with our completely distorting scientific terms to suit our own ends. K-selected species are just animals that mature later and care more intensely for their young because they have to compete more for resources. ‘K’ and ‘r’ are just mathematical symbols that zoologists use to talk about animal populations. As far as I know, they’ve got nothing to do with how many children a human mother decides to have.”
Cora smiles, a little sheepishly. “I’m amazed I still remember that,” she says. “See how well your father taught me? Anyway, understand that we were just joking around back then. We’d all be laughing the whole time—even Addie. Back then.”
“Right,” Scarlet says. “That was the difference, wasn’t it?”
Eventually Addie didn’t find it funny anymore. Scarlet too can remember her mother’s raging against what she called k-selected humans acting like r-selected beasts, squandering resources, sending their young off to die in wars. Tom had always hated it when she’d used scientific theory like that. Turning science into sociology, he called it.
“Tom has always said that scientists are far more optimistic than artists,” she says, remembering her parents’ endless debates. “He’s certainly more of an optimist than Addie was, which I guess isn’t saying that much. More optimistic than I am too—as he’s always reminding me. ‘Poets, painters, musicians, all of them—artists are horrible cynics beneath that pretty facade,’ he says.”
“And what do you say when he says things like that?” Cora asks. She is staring pointedly at Scarlet.
“Oh, I usually just agree with him.” Scarlet feels tired of this conversation suddenly, unnerved by Cora’s curiosity. Actually, I think I may be more of a cynic than even Addie was, she considers saying, but doesn’t. And that frightens me, now.
“You know,” she says instead, maybe just to change the subject, maybe because of all the questions she herself has now, “all those conversations and jokes about k-selected species always kind of puzzled me. Maybe this was just a kid’s egotism, but it always seemed like those remarks were somehow about me. About the fact that Addie and Tom didn’t have more children, about how everyone assumed I was dying for a brother or sister. And I didn’t really see why. Or was I missing something?”
Cora looks puzzled. Understandably, Scarlet thinks; she knows she’s being vague. She takes a breath and tries again. “I guess I’m asking if there was more going on there. More than Addie’s personal quest to save the planet, I mean—you know, doing her part to stem the tide of overpopulation.” She pauses again, but still there is no response from Cora.
“Okay. Here’s what I’m asking. Did Addie want another child, maybe? Or, maybe I’m asking this: Did having me make her decide she really didn’t want more children? Was it all too much somehow? Was there some kind of secret I never got to hear about?” Scarlet stares at Cora now, forcing herself to stop, to hold back from revealing more than she’s ready to reveal. She tries to decipher the look on Cora’s face. Is it changing subtly? Is there some hint of realization there behind her furrowed brow?
After a moment Cora shakes her head slowly. “No, no,” she says. “No secrets that I know of.” She continues to stare at Scarlet, her eyes full of other unasked questions. “You know, everyone just always thought you were supposed to have at least two, so I suppose we always talked about it because we were just curious or something. And Addie had her blue days, just like all of us did—home all day with a cranky baby, no adult conversations for weeks at a time, that kind of thing. But she never showed any signs of regret, Scarlet.” Her voice is tender now, and Scarlet feels, suddenly, embarrassed by her questions, by the silly self-involvement Cora must be hearing there.
“No, no. I didn’t really mean regret,” she says. “I’m not exactly sure what I mean. It’s just, well, all that k-selected species stuff, all the ‘singleton’ jokes and whatnot. I just was curious about it, I guess. I know I’m not being clear. . . .”
“Well, who is right now, right? What’s being clear got to do with Addie’s dying? Was she being clear, giving up on treatment like that and—” Cora stops herself, takes a sip of coffee and looks out the window for a moment. She turns back to Scarlet and tries to smile. “Anyway, you didn’t seem to suffer for being an only child. There was your friend Peter, and then our boys . . .”
Her voice catches, and suddenly Scarlet wonders why she’s doing this to Cora, insisting on this topic of mothers and children. “Yes, right,” she says, then tries to steer things to safer ground. “Just thinking about the only-child thing to avoid other thoughts, I suppose. Or, well, I don’t know why. It’s funny what these last days with Addie have brought up. Apart from all the big stuff, I mean.”
“Yes, it is funny. It’s funny what we found ourselves talking about. I mean really, under normal conditions when do we ever wonder about what female dogs think about their own reproduction, or lack of it?” Cora looks down at Lucy, trailing her fingers along the dog’s soft white belly. “But that’s what you talk about. Things like that, things that seem so silly and irrelevant—and then you realize they really aren’t.” She folds her paper then and starts to tidy the table, a brisk habit Scarlet recognizes. She braces herself for what will come next.
“Addie worried, you know, that she might have somehow turned you away from marrying, or from having children,” Cora says when she’s wiped away a tiny trail of milk. “She ended up in tears that night we talked—well, of course we all did. Lou kind of fell apart . . . you know how she feels about her girls now, so convinced they blame her for everything.”
How, Scarlet is wondering, does Cora always know what she’s really thinking? She has done this for years now, greeting Scarlet at the breakfast table, after those long drives and a few hours’ sleep, with a fresh pot of coffee and, before long, a seemingly innocent and indirect observation that was meant really as a pointed question.
But Addie has been dead for only seven hours, and Scarlet has slept for maybe three. Though she was sidling up to the topic herself only moments before, she’s just not ready, she thinks now, to launch into things like Addie’s fears for her. Or what Addie’s life might have taught her about love or marriage or having a child. She can’t ask the questions she needs to ask, and she can’t answer Cora’s questions either. Not now.
So instead she asks Cora something else, though here too she’s afraid of where her answer could take them. “And what did you cry about, Cora, that night with Lou and Addie?”
Cora looks at Scarlet intently for another long moment. Then she waves her hand in front of her face and shifts her gaze to the window. “Not what you’d think, Scarlet,” she says. “I cried because beautiful young girls grow up, and grow old. Isn’t that silly? I look at my granddaughters now, and they take my breath away. Bobby’s girls are eight and five now. Can you believe that?”
Scarlet raises her eyebrows, feigning surprise, though in fact she’s well aware of Cora’s granddaughters’ ages.
“They remind me of you,” Cora goes on. “Of course they’re younger than you were when you started coming here with Addie and Tom, but already Lindsey, at least, makes me think of you. She’s long and lean like you were, with that same wild, long hair. I love just watching her walk, just like I used to love watching you. Young girls are like colts really. Silent and watchful, and restless, un
der that calm on the surface. Restless and ready to break free.
“And that night I thought, for the first time—can you believe this?—I thought, My Lord, we were like that too, and it seems like it was just yesterday, and now Addie is here in my house, on this huge hospital bed in the middle of my studio, and she’s dying. And I thought, How can this be? We were so young, so happy, tramping through the woods and riding horses and kissing our boyfriends in the moonlight. And then suddenly Addie seemed to leap ahead of us—well, I mean she was always so passionate and intense, but then boom, she was doing this very, very grown-up thing, falling in love with Tom and moving in with him. And then before we knew it we were all doing it—getting married, having families, buying homes, all of it—buried in work, and debt, and caring for children. . . .”
Her voice breaks ever so slightly, and she pauses. Scarlet reaches for her hand, but Cora only lets her hold it for a moment before she pulls it away and goes on. “And through all of that, all those things that seemed to wear the rest of us out, Addie stayed as passionate as ever. Oh, I know she had her low periods. But she never lost all that hellfire and fury that seemed to be burning inside her, keeping her going.”
“Remember when Lou told her she should have been a Southern Baptist preacher?” Scarlet says, and they laugh at the memory, briefly, before Cora grows serious. She is quiet, looking out the window again. Morning light like this isn’t kind to anyone, but Cora’s face has grown lovelier with age; its lines reveal depth, resolve, but there’s a softness there too, and it never goes away. Addie had the same softness, Scarlet realizes suddenly, and it hits her like a stabbing pain. It was just hard to see it sometimes.
“You know,” Cora says, “it stunned me to look at Addie over these last few weeks, to see all that passion drained from her face. It seemed like she finally wasn’t interested in fighting anymore. I still can’t decide whether to call that peace, whatever it was she felt at the end. I can’t bear to think that she felt resigned, or defeated somehow. Not Addie.”
When she says this, both women begin to cry quietly. “I think it was peace,” Scarlet says, her voice a hoarse whisper that she can barely hear herself. She isn’t sure of this at all. But if it wasn’t peace, she thinks, maybe it was still something good, something close to peace, something as close to peace as was possible for Addie. And far, very far from resignation—of that Scarlet is certain, based on Addie’s last request. But she promised Addie, when she made that request two weeks ago, not to burden Cora or Lou with this information.
And so she clears her throat to say it again, without necessarily believing it, because she wants Cora to believe it: “I think she’d found a kind of peace, Cora. Resignation wasn’t really in her repertoire, you know?”
There’s a pause then, a heavy one—a quiet between them that, Scarlet knows, Cora would like her to fill with news of what was said, late last night, when Cora and Lou left Tom and Scarlet with Addie. But she isn’t ready to relive those last hours that feel, now, like she must have dreamed them. She would like, for just a little while, to pretend that Addie’s just asleep—that it wasn’t her body they wrapped up and carried down the street a few hours ago, then fussed over ridiculously, as if about her comfort, as they laid her out on the cot.
When they’d gotten her to the restaurant cooler, there, inexplicably, had been Dustin, ready with a plastic sheet and bags filled with dry ice—an “extra precaution,” he’d said, in case they needed extra time. He helped Tom and Scarlet position the bags below Addie’s head and back, at the sides of her legs, her feet. Scarlet shakes her head at the memory: Could she have dreamed it? Had they really laid out her mother’s dead body in a walk-in cooler just hours ago? And were they really going to move that body, and somehow bury it on their own, a few short hours from now?
She is not ready for this, not ready for what will come next, not ready for all the questions, not ready for the full wave of Cora’s sadness, much less her own. So Scarlet is relieved and surprisingly grateful when—conveniently, miraculously—the sound of an old handsaw grinding through wood rises from the lawn below the screened porch, and she and Cora both turn to look out the window at Dustin, back at work on the coffin he is making for Addie.
“Who is that guy?” Scarlet blurts out, her voice rising above the saw’s steady hum, and they both laugh, silly with relief. But Scarlet also hears the petulance in her voice. She hears it because she’s felt it—petulant, overlooked, hurt—for a good part of the last twenty years.
Who is that guy? It’s a rhetorical question really. Earnest, idealistic young people like Dustin have been trailing in her mother’s wake for years, ever since she started staging her own forms of protest in the face of overdevelopment and loss of habitat—camping out on the sites of planned subdivisions and shopping malls, erecting angry art installations in response to things like pesticide use and declining populations of birds.
Addie has been a darling of radical environmentalist types since she hid out to avoid arrest in connection with a supposed act of ecoterrorism sixteen years ago. She caught on with the art world too, after her run-in with a conservative senator eight years ago. Then, when her cancer returned last year, the news quickly found its way into the publications and listservs and chat rooms favored by both those groups.
She would have nothing to do with traditional treatment this time, she said. No chemotherapy, nothing. Despite the time it might buy her. No more battling the cells exploding everywhere inside her, growing fast and furious—her own internal suburban sprawl.
“There are too many toxins inside me already,” she said, her voice clear and steady as a bell, that day in her oncologist’s office eight months ago. “I’m finished.” And with that she stood and walked out the door, leaving Tom and Scarlet to thank the good doctor for his suggestion of another round of full-scale chemotherapy and shake their heads no. No, no—they wouldn’t be trying to persuade her. Not this time. No.
Thirteen years before, they’d sat together in the same office, between the rounds of chemotherapy and the radiation. Addie—pale and slim and bald, looking younger than her forty-five years—was a striking presence; it shocked Scarlet to realize that the oncologist seemed almost afraid of her.
Addie’s dark eyes flashed, but that time she said nothing as the doctor urged her to “cover all the bases”—radiation next, followed by hormone therapy: a daily tamoxifen pill for the next five years.
Tom took her hand and kissed both her cheeks. “I know you hate this, Addie. But please, love, let’s try it. Please.”
“ ‘Let’s’?” she snapped. “ ‘Let us try it ’? Who exactly is us?”
And then, Scarlet couldn’t help herself: She started to cry. No, to sob. The chemotherapy had already made Addie so sick. Scarlet and Tom had insisted on that, refusing to listen when Addie had proposed looking into alternative therapies first. But what were they supposed to do, Scarlet had asked herself then. Sit back and watch her die?
Addie could never bear to see Scarlet cry. Past the age of four or five, she’d seldom done it in her mother’s presence.
“I’m sorry,” Scarlet whimpered, reaching into her bag for tissues. “I’m sorry, Addie.” She couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Addie looked at Scarlet and opened her mouth as if to say something, then closed it again.
“All right,” she said, her voice hoarse. Tired. “Yes, all right.” She started gathering her things—her bag, the book she was reading, her jacket. “I’ll do whatever you say. We’ll call to schedule it. Right now I’m tired. I need to go home.”
And Scarlet and Tom walked out behind her, after wordless handshakes with the doctor.
And she had the radiation therapy, and took the tamoxifen.
And now they all know that in some cases additional hormones—so-called adjuvant therapy—eventually lead to changes in the uterine wall. The place where Addie’s cancer showed up next.
Oh, but Addie, Scarlet imagined saying to her, so many
times: We were only doing what we thought was right. Just a few big bombs to blast that overdevelopment in your tissues. Then a pill a day to stanch those strip malls and Wal-Marts and drive-through pharmacies in your lymph nodes. It all seemed so sensible at the time.
And then she imagined Addie’s response: Right. Kind of like Hiroshima.
They did talk briefly about the tamoxifen two weeks ago, the last time Scarlet visited before these last few days of gathering again in Cider Cove for Addie’s imminent death. “I don’t blame you for that,” Addie said to Scarlet and Tom then. “I’ve made my own decisions, all along. I took the damn pill each morning. No one held a gun to my head. I just filled a goddamn glass of water and swallowed the stupid thing. Of course I wanted to fight it then, of course I was going to do what they told me to do. It’s all as simple as that, isn’t it? You can’t think of anything else to do. You assume they know what’s best. You follow instructions.”
“And then you die,” Tom said. And they all laughed.
“Right. No surprises there,” Addie said through her laughter. And then she coughed, painfully.
“And now I’ve made this choice,” she went on when the coughing subsided. “And I ask you, please, to honor it. And not out of guilt. Simply out of your love for me.” That was when she told them where she wanted to be buried.
But guilt and love aren’t so easily separated, Addie. Another thing Scarlet considered saying, but didn’t.
Both Cora and Lou knew, early on, that Addie had refused to consider any treatment this time around. Lou fought valiantly, via an endless stream of phone calls, to persuade Addie, then Tom, then Scarlet, to try to change her mind. “Stupid, misguided, namby-pamby environmentalist bullshit,” were her exact words, her parting shot at Scarlet at the end of their last phone call. Followed by this: “You’re letting her commit suicide, Scarlet. I hope you can live with that.” It was clear she’d had quite a lot to drink.
In Hovering Flight Page 5