by Sarah Price
Her parents lived in Florida, and she was estranged from her siblings, one of whom lived in New York City and the other, a struggling actor, in Los Angeles. It had been years since Frances had talked to either one of them. When her parents had lived in town, neither her sister nor her brother had done much more than call them, and that was only when they needed something, usually money. It irritated Frances how little respect they showed to the two people who had not only raised them and sent them to college (or, in the case of her brother, offered to send him—he refused but suggested they could fund his efforts in Los Angeles instead) but also never once turned them away when they needed financial assistance. It also bothered Frances that she worked endless hours to create that perfect balance in her life and had never once asked for a handout. Yet it was her, not her sister and certainly not her brother, who called and visited their parents on a regular basis and remained a concerned fixture in their lives.
“OK, OK,” Charlotte conceded. “But you need to keep me in the loop, Fran. Not like the last few times.”
The past. Always the past. Frances pressed her lips together and looked away. Just because they’d been friends for so long didn’t mean she had to share everything with Charlotte, did it? Of course, Charlotte always had an intuitive way of sensing when things were out of sync. Perhaps that was both the best and worst part of having a best friend: they often knew more about you than you knew about yourself.
“I’ve never hidden anything from you, have I?”
Charlotte raised an eyebrow and gave Frances one of those looks that burned through her. “Really?”
“Really.”
“Well, I suppose that’s true, to some degree,” Charlotte said, tapping her well-manicured fingers against the tabletop. “You might tell me everything; you just don’t volunteer everything. It’s like squeezing water out of a rock to get information from you.”
“There are some things that should be kept private.”
“That’s your mother talking.”
“No.” But Frances leaned toward the possibility that Charlotte might be correct. It wasn’t just that her mother did things in a certain way; it was that her mother did things so perfectly. Was there anything really wrong with trying to mimic her example?
Despite the serious nature of the conversation, Charlotte laughed. “When are you going to cut the umbilical cord and become your own person? You need to realize that your mother’s way doesn’t have to be your way.” Charlotte’s dark eyes started to soften. “Anyway, there’s no privacy between us. We’re sisters, remember? Or, at least, closer than any sister either one of us ever had.”
At this comment Frances smiled. “Against all odds, right?”
Lifting her glass up, Charlotte held it out toward her friend in a mock cheer. “You got that right, sis!” She took a long sip and set the glass back down on the table. “Who would have thought that my ex-husband would have brought us together after he dated your sister?” Another laugh. “I don’t know whether I should thank her or curse her for not having married him. She dodged that bullet.”
Frances had never liked Gary. He was controlling, manipulative, and clearly unfaithful. At one point he had cheated on her sister with Charlotte and later cheated on Charlotte with her sister.
“She may have,” Frances admitted slowly, “but at your expense, though.”
Giving a casual shrug of her shoulders, Charlotte seemed unaffected. “Perhaps, but at least we found each other.”
For a moment she remained silent. Frances watched as Charlotte seemed to ponder something, and knew that whatever it was, it wouldn’t remain a secret for long. Her eyes drifted over Charlotte’s shoulder to a woman who was walking behind a German shepherd with a leather harness. The dog stopped at the curb by the traffic light, waiting patiently for the light to change from green to red so that it could lead the woman across the street. Although it was a common sight in their town, it struck her differently today for some reason.
Morristown was home to the Seeing Eye, a nonprofit organization that bred and trained dogs for the legally blind. Carrie was always begging her parents to foster one of the puppies until it was ready to be trained and then paired with a blind person. They had finally agreed that, when Carrie turned sixteen and could handle the responsibility, they would take in a puppy. That’s just going to have to wait now. I guess everyone has problems. Why should I be any different?
“We’ve been friends now for almost fifteen years, right?” Charlotte said wistfully.
Frances turned her attention back to her friend. “That’s about right. Just after Andy was born.”
“And I’ve been divorced for . . .” She squinted her eyes as she mentally calculated in her head. “Six years?”
“It was five years ago.”
“That’s it?” Her eyes opened and she stared at Frances. “Wow. Feels like a lot longer!”
That did not surprise Frances. Her friend’s marriage had ended even before it began. Gary had been nothing short of a control freak narcissist since long before they said “I do.” The only problem had been that, while Charlotte had stood by her vows, Gary had not. Over and over again, until his cavorting could no longer be ignored. Fortunately, they hadn’t had any children. Unfortunately, they had amassed quite a lot of assets: properties, investments, even cars. Or so Charlotte had thought. The divorce had been messy and had dragged on far too long for anyone to make much sense of anything, especially with the way the judicial system worked, or as Charlotte would say, didn’t work. What her experience had taught Frances was that “until death do us part” looked far easier than the alternative.
“But it took four years to finalize it,” Charlotte said in a flat voice. “Don’t forget that he left me with nothing. Sold the investments, bankrupted the properties, and ruined my car that night.”
“What’s your point?”
“They’re bastards.” She gazed at Frances. “All of them. Don’t forget it. We can sugarcoat it, paint over it, pretend that things are peachy keen. But deep down, they’re all the same, Fran. Unless, of course, you are one of the lucky ones who develops a thick skin and two blind eyes.”
Her words sent a chill through Frances. She felt the fine hair on her arms tingle, so she rubbed them, hating the way her skin puckered into tiny goose bumps under her fingers.
“You aren’t telling Nicholas for a reason.” Her matter-of-fact tone said more than her words. “And that will come back to haunt you, Frances. Remember when you stopped taking birth control pills and didn’t tell him?”
Frances bit her lower lip.
“Do I need to remind you how he reacted when he found out?”
She shook her head. That was a memory she wanted to forget and had worked hard, every day, to make certain that he, too, forgot.
“Do you really want to go through that again?” Charlotte raised an eyebrow. “Eventually all secrets are discovered, Fran. And this one is right up there with you hiding your pregnancy.”
Lifting her chin, Frances refused to break Charlotte’s gaze. Charlotte might be tough and may have suffered through more than Frances could ever imagine, but she knew that holding it together was sometimes just as hard, if not harder, than fighting to escape.
“I have no idea what you are talking about,” she lied. “Nicholas wasn’t that upset when he found out about Carrie.”
Charlotte averted her eyes. “You can pretend that your skin is thicker than most, but you are not impenetrable. I was there when it happened, Frances. I lived through it with you. And trust me, if you don’t confront the mistakes of your past, you won’t be able to move forward into the future,” she said. “A cancer-free future, mind you.”
The conversation ended abruptly—thankfully, as far as Frances was concerned—when the waiter came over to see how they were doing. Like always, the tension from the conversation quickly dissipated. After glancing at her watch, Charlotte asked for the check.
“I have to show a house in an hour,” she said apologetic
ally. “But we are not finished with this conversation.” She handed the waiter her credit card and waited for him to leave. “When is your next appointment?”
“Tomorrow,” Frances answered. “I’m meeting with this Dr. Graham on James Street at nine. He’s going to discuss the biopsy results with me then.”
Charlotte frowned. “Biopsy? That sounds serious.”
“It . . . it wasn’t pleasant.” Her admission felt like the first step in a twelve-step program. The fresh memory of lying on that examination table, her face to the institutional green wall as she cried from the pain, both physical and psychological, would haunt her forever. Out of all the things that she’d been through in her life, having a long needle shoved into the side of her breast ranked high on the list. “But, hopefully, everything will be fine. I mean . . .” She paused and finally sipped her chardonnay, which was, unfortunately, no longer chilled. “I had that cyst a few years ago, remember? It was in the same spot, so I’m sure that’s just what it is.” She looked over the top of her wineglass at her friend. “Right?”
Never one to mince words or play pretend in the midst of a crisis, Charlotte responded with a simple shrug of her shoulders. “I’m around tomorrow if you need to talk,” she said as she signed the credit card receipt and shoved the waiter’s pen in her purse.
Tomorrow. Frances gave Charlotte a quick hug good-bye and watched her walk down the sidewalk. She lifted her wineglass to her lips, choosing to sit and finish it rather than hurry home to the chaos that undoubtedly awaited her.
CHAPTER 4
As Frances sat, waiting, on the same table as she had on Wednesday, she felt depressed. An inevitable feeling of déjà vu had overtaken her when she stepped into Dr. Graham’s examination room just a few minutes earlier. This time, however, she did not wear a pink paper gown. For a second she wondered why she had not been escorted into the doctor’s office. Isn’t that where patients are told the test came back negative?
Dr. Graham knocked, then entered the room, pausing to shut the door behind him. When he turned around, Frances was stunned. There was absolutely nothing she could read from his blank expression. No fear. No hope. No apology.
Instead, he met her eyes and simply said, “The biopsy results came back positive.” No greeting, no inquiry as to how she was doing. He merely jumped right into the thick of things and got down to business. This, too, was something Frances figured was a learned behavior, from a man who most likely had said those exact words hundreds of times over the course of his career. She could only imagine that his experience had taught him the direct approach was the best course of action when delivering bad news.
“Of course.” That was all she offered in response. She had expected to hear those words, spent the past few days preparing herself for this news. For some reason, she wasn’t surprised, and she didn’t feel a tightening in her chest. It was as if something switched inside of her and, suddenly, she was on autopilot.
Since Dr. Graham didn’t sugarcoat his words, she wasn’t going to sugarcoat hers, either. Despite the fact that she had hoped for a better outcome, she had prepared herself for the worst.
He raised an eyebrow at her response. “Of course?”
She nodded her head, adding, “I anticipated that.” She paused, thinking for a minute. “Maybe I already knew you’d say that since Wednesday. There was a look on your face. In fact, I bet you already knew, too, didn’t you?”
He didn’t respond to her question. She suspected that her reaction was unusual and caught him off guard. That, too, she expected. After all, she imagined that most of his patients, upon hearing We found cancer cells, did not surrender to the verdict without a fight. But she had already accepted the inevitable, long before she actually heard the words.
She felt nothing. And that was a change from the daily stress and panic that she felt.
With a tinge of curiosity, she watched Dr. Graham’s reaction, but he was very adept at masking his emotions. Perhaps he was wondering how she could react with such composure, not with tears or bargaining or even disbelief. The answer was simple: time was of the essence. The longer patients fought the diagnosis or waited for second opinions, the longer it took to begin treatment. And Frances knew that too much of a delay could make treatment more complicated and less efficient. Without immediate intervention, a patient’s condition could reach a more critical stage.
Complete acceptance was an important element of the healing and recovery process. It took a healthy mind for a sick body to regenerate.
“Even though it doesn’t run in my family,” she said in a flat voice, “I’d like to run a genetic test for my daughter’s sake.”
He nodded his head. “That’s the BRCA test. We can arrange for that.”
For a moment she sat there, realizing that everything she thought she knew about her future had just changed. And while a thousand questions slowly began swirling around inside of her head, she knew she must stay focused. She’d have time to digest this news later.
But there was one question that she needed answered.
“Dr. Graham, how far along is it?” She braced herself for the answer.
He gave her a look, his eyes full of empathy for her unspoken fears. “I don’t know, Frances. Not yet.”
She nodded in understanding, even though she didn’t understand. How could a doctor state that she had cancer but not know what stage it was? The staging of the tumor would determine not just the possible treatment but the outcome. “Could you at least speculate?”
He sighed and crossed his arms over his chest. “Just from speculating, from the size of the lump on the initial ultrasound, it appears to be stage two. Until we remove lymph nodes, we won’t be able to officially stage it. However, there were definitive cancer cells in the tissue. Malignant cancer cells.”
Malignant cancer cells. Something that Frances had never expected to hear, even after the biopsy and the two restless nights that followed two very unproductive days. Cancer. Such an ugly word. A word that changed lives as much as a new baby or divorce did. However, cancer was uninvited, more like the latter than the former. Nobody was ever excited about either one of them.
For a while she didn’t know how to respond. The memory of the painful biopsy quickly faded away as the fear of what lay ahead presented her with a new challenge. Would there be surgeries? Chemotherapy? Radiation? Would it go into remission? What if it returned?
She felt that all-too-familiar tightening in her chest and knew that she’d need to take a Xanax when she got home. Suddenly, all the things that had felt so important, such as making certain Andy didn’t wrestle with the dogs in the living room or monitoring Carrie with her obsessive texting and tweeting, to her very own fixation regarding the lights being turned off in the entire house before bedtime, no longer mattered. Even Nicholas’s constant late nights and MIA weekends didn’t matter. Instead, she could think of only one thing: fighting this unfair verdict.
“I’ve always been healthy, Dr. Graham,” she said at last. “Taken care of my body.”
He stood in front of her, an empathetic look on his face. She couldn’t help but wonder if this was a practiced response on his part: waiting for the patient to process such unfortunate and unwanted information. Certainly he must have said those same words—There were definitive cancer cells—to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of women over the past few years and obviously knew the importance of giving the patient time to process the news before discussing treatment options.
Time. It was a small gift, so she took what she could of it.
“I . . . I have two children, and I volunteer at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. My kids have activities. My son plays football. My daughter, Carrie, likes ballet.” Her hands trembled, and she slid them under her thighs so he couldn’t see them shaking. If Frances was modest about her body, she had learned long ago to keep her emotions in reserve, an emollient that seemed to help thwart disappointment over the years.
As she sat there, she realized
that there was an invader in her core, an unwelcome guest who’d snuck into her life and was threatening to steal her chance of achieving the perfectly manicured balance that was expected of her. And even if she hadn’t yet achieved it, she knew that her children needed her. Her house needed her. She had been the pillar sustaining her family, perhaps not financially, but at least on the home front. Without her, things would inevitably crumble. Food wouldn’t get ordered. Dry cleaning wouldn’t get picked up. Children would miss after-school activities. Family vacations wouldn’t get planned. That was her role, the one that she had accepted after the birth of her firstborn, even if Nicholas had not been thrilled about shouldering the brunt of the financial responsibilities.
“And my husband . . . he has a job. An important job. And he hates going to doctors. There has to be some sort of a mistake. There isn’t any way that I can have cancer.” She paused, removing her hands and nervously placing them onto her lap. Her wall of fortitude was cracking. She willed her hands to stop shaking while fighting the urge to cry. Shedding tears was something she simply did not do. Crying would not make the diagnosis change. Instead, she took a deep breath and met the doctor’s concerned gaze. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . .”
Dr. Graham gave her a compassionate smile. “It’s a lot to process. This disease makes people emotional. An apology is not necessary.”
Frances straightened her shoulders, grateful that she had caught herself before she lost it completely. “I want you to understand that you are treating me, the person, not just the disease.”
“Mrs. Snyder . . .”
She held up one of her hands, which, mercifully, had stopped shaking. “My family is busy. Work. School. Sports. So this needs to be as minimally invasive as possible for their lives. I don’t want to distract them. I can’t be a burden to them.”
“I understand how you feel . . .”
“No!” Then, taking a deep breath, she slowly counted to ten. Her coping mechanism. Losing control was also something that she rarely did. It was unproductive and a bad example for her children. She’d learned to control those impulses, just like her mother had. In a much calmer tone, she said, “No, you don’t understand how I feel. You aren’t me.”