The Goddesses

by Swan Huntley

“I have a favor to ask of you.”

  “Anything,” I said.

  She squeezed the banana and threw it into the sink but didn’t reach for another this time. Instead she walked around the counter and spread her arms out wide.

  “Oh, Ana.” I hugged her. I breathed in her coconut smell. Or maybe it was my coconut smell, I didn’t know. Portico writhed against my stomach.

  Ana pulled back and held my arms and sighed. “Eunice called. She officially listed the house.” A beat. “Can I move in with you?”

  “Of course,” I told her. I was elated, and then I was already imagining the conversation with Chuck—she’s dying, Chuck—and telling myself why this would be good for the boys. To meet someone who was dying—it would make them understand how fortunate they were.

  “Oh, Nan,” Ana said, her bald head catching the light. Her eyes looked like they’d already sunk deeper into her head. “You are my truest bluest friend.”

  “It’s no problem. We’d be happy to have you.”

  “Thank you,” she mouthed. She looked at the fruit. “I guess I can stop squishing these bananas now.” She chuckled, but barely, and put a tired hand on her forehead. “Sorry, sometimes I just get so angry.”

  I was soothing. “It’s okay. Squishing bananas is probably a healthy way to express anger.”

  We both chuckled at that, and then Ana hugged me again. It felt good to hold her. It felt good to be needed. In a sick way, a secret part of me might have been glad for the weight of her catastrophe. Her imminent death and all the details surrounding it made my problems seem stupid, which was a relief. Instead of feeling sad about Chuck, my mind filled up with her logistics. Would she need movers? Was this furniture hers? Where would we put Portico’s tank? Portico would have to stay inside the tank; we would have to have that conversation. And when? When was this happening?

  “When would you like to move in?” I asked her.

  Ana inhaled and exhaled deeply. “Eunice gave me two weeks,” she said. “But honestly, I don’t want to be here anymore.”

  “Let’s leave now,” I said.

  My spontaneity surprised her. “Now?”

  “Now.”

  “Now.”

  “Now!” I yelled, and then I don’t know why—to make her feel better, probably—I picked a mango off the counter and hurled it at the sink. “And we can be angry if we want to!”

  “Angry and vengeful!” Ana yelled, like this was now a therapeutic exercise we were doing. She picked up a mango and hurled it the other way.

  If there had been enough time to form a sentence in this moment, I would have said, I hope that sliding glass door is open.

  But it happened so fast.

  The mango whipped across the living room.

  After the initial whop, it sounded like ice cubes crackling in a drink as the fracture spread fast throughout the pane. The sliding glass door was now in pieces but the pieces were still in the frame. They were holding on to nothing but each other’s shapes. I waited for them to fall. I waited longer. They didn’t fall. The new prisms cast light in all directions, and it was kind of beautiful.

  •

  It only took us thirty minutes to pack Ana’s stuff. She put on her relaxing yoga music and turned it up so loud that it became energizing rather than relaxing.

  “There is a difference between needs and wants!” she boomed, tossing another Buddha figurine into her camo duffel. “I want everything, but I need almost nothing!”

  I didn’t tell her this, but I thought that Ana’s needs and wants were kind of reversed. The things she needed were the things I would have left behind. She chose the pretty things over the essentials. In the bedroom, she held up a pair of black lace panties and said, “You know what? I’m not going to wear underwear anymore,” and let them fall to the floor. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes were spinning in the light.

  I put the bananas in the trash while Ana finished packing. There was nothing to do about the broken door. After the ice cube sound had stopped, Ana had said, “Shit, Eunice is going to charge me for that.”

  Adrenaline rushed through me like a drug. The loud chanting in another language reverberated throughout the house, and I kept thinking the blast of gongs would make the glass fall, but it kept not falling, and I kept putting the bananas in the trash, and what would Chuck say and how would the boys react, and would I get a divorce? But none of this mattered because right now my hands were just moving to the beat of the music that had no rhythm, and the snake was free and writhing on the floor, and in the middle of this chaos I watched my focused hands wipe banana meat from the sink, and I was impressed they were doing that because I could barely feel them.

  Ana marched to the stereo and jabbed the power button. The silence was alarming.

  “Let’s go,” she said, her voice echoing in my head like the gongs that were no longer there. She was out of breath and sweaty and her face was the color of a wild strawberry, and I knew for sure that this was the most alive she’d been since the diagnosis.

  She grabbed Portico off the floor and put her in the tank and picked up the tank with surprising force. “I’ll carry this,” she said. “You carry the duffels.”

  The duffels were in the doorway of the bathroom. They weren’t very big. “Are you sure this is it?” I asked her.

  “Oh yeah,” she said, bouncing the tank up to get a better grip. “I’ll meet you at the car.” She started to walk away, and then she turned around. “Oh, and I left Eunice a present in the toilet.” She raised her eyebrows. “Don’t flush it.” As she walked away again she called, “Nan, do not flush it! I will know if you did!”

  I lifted the toilet seat for the same reason I drove slower past a car accident: just to see how bad it was. And then I stopped breathing because it was bad.

  I picked up the duffels. They were heavy. I had to get to the car. And then—I don’t know—my hand was reaching for the flusher.

  “Naaa-aaaan,” Ana called, and before I knew it, my hand had retreated.

  “Coming!” I said, and hauled the duffels across the living room.

  At the front door, I paused. Good-bye, house. Good-bye, Jacuzzi. Good-bye, couch. Good-bye, rainbow afghans and all the crap in life we acquire but don’t really need. I felt particularly enlightened about this last one, as if I’d reached a new understanding about the art of letting go, even though it wasn’t actually my stuff we were letting go of. Good-bye, baggage, I added with attitude, even as my body buckled under the weight of her duffels.

  Before I left I took one last look at the site of the crash. The fractured glass was still hanging on. I shut the door quietly so I wouldn’t disturb it.

  24

  The boys came home right after practice because they were still grounded. And because I had texted them: Please come home right after practice. I thought it would be easier if they had a little time to get to know Ana before Chuck threw a fit. I’d been very nice and a little manipulative about it on the phone—“It would really mean a lot to me to have her here, Chuck, and she’s dying”—but my sweetness had not charmed him.

  “How long?” he wanted to know.

  Ana and I were sitting on the couch with Portico and talking about Peter—“I bet he and his horse live up on this mountain,” she was saying—when Jed and Cam walked in.

  “Hi, boys,” I said, suddenly needing to be the perfect mother.

  “Hi,” Ana said. She’d put on the black wig with the neon pink streak because she thought they’d like her best in that one.

  Jed put his hands on his waist, which reminded me of his father. Cam just looked sad, which upset me.

  “I know, babies, I’m sorry. I rushed home this morning with breakfast, but you were gone.”

  “Yeah right,” Cam muttered.

  “I promise I did,” I said.

  “She did,” Ana confirmed, although she couldn’t have possibly known because I hadn’t told her. Still, I liked that she had come to my defense. Chuck probably wouldn’t have
done that.

  “Please be polite and say hello to our guest. This,” I said, presenting her with an open palm, “is Ana.”

  “Your mother didn’t tell me you were so handsome,” Ana said. “Are you fraternal or identical?”

  Cam sighed. They hated this question.

  “Oh, time out,” Ana said. “You hate that question.”

  That made Jed smile.

  “Sit down,” Ana said. She moved Portico to the other hand and scooted over on the couch.

  “Ana’s going to be staying with us for a while,” I said.

  “Where?” Cam wanted to know.

  “In my room.”

  Jed rubbed his eyes. “Is Dad living in the ohana now for real?”

  “Just for a little while,” I said in my most comforting tone.

  They exchanged a look. They seemed to be saying: We knew this would happen. And then Jed rolled his eyes. “Whatever. Dad sucks right now.”

  Cam, still looking at his brother, agreed. “Yeah, I’d probably kick him out, too.”

  “Sit down with us,” I said, pleading a little.

  They exchanged another look, and then they sat. Jed took the recliner, and Cam sat between Ana and me on the couch. “Mom, can you make us dinner? I’m hungry,” Jed said, not looking at me because he was transfixed by Portico, who was wrapping herself around Ana’s wrist.

  I looked at the fridge and knew it was empty. “I guess I could run to the store.”

  “We should make pasta all’Amatriciana,” Ana declared, pronouncing it with a thick Italian accent.

  “What,” Jed said with a counterfeit sneer. “You’re Italian?”

  “Me?” Ana motioned to herself. “No. Are you Italian?”

  “Maybe I am.” Jed’s head danced like Liko’s, which was unsettling.

  “We’re not Italian, are we, Mom?” Cam asked.

  “No, honey,” I said, “we’re not.” Since I didn’t know who my father was, I could have been lying. It was always easier to pretend he wasn’t an actual person with a heritage.

  Jed shifted forward. “I think we should eat your snake.”

  Ana held Portico up. “Do you think she would taste good?”

  “Sick!” Jed laughed.

  “I’m down with pasta,” Cam said.

  “Pasta all’Amatriciana is pasta with bacon,” Ana told us. I wondered if she actually wanted this or if she just knew bacon was a thing that would appeal to teenagers.

  “I could do bacon,” Jed said, too casually. I could tell he was trying to impress her.

  “I’ll run to the store,” I said, getting up. “Ana, are you okay if—”

  “We’re great.” She raised her eyebrows.

  “Okay.” I snatched my purse off the counter. Phone, phone, where was my—

  “Phone,” Ana said, holding it out for me.

  “Thanks,” I said. We were such a good team. I slipped on my flip-flops at the door. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Bye, Mom,” Cam said.

  “Bye, Mom,” Jed said, reaching out to touch Portico’s head.

  “Bye, Mom,” Ana said. As I walked away, I heard her say to Jed, “Do you want to hold her?”

  •

  I stood in line at Safeway with my teeming cart. This was the biggest shop I’d done in a long time. Bacon and four different types of pasta and the good kind of Parmesan and three packs of Red Vines for Ana and Ranch Corn Nuts for Jed (his favorite) and fruity Mentos for Cam (his favorite), plus all the essentials we’d run out of—milk, eggs, ketchup, lettuce, bananas. The bananas weren’t ripe enough to squash, but we could wait and squash them later if we felt like it.

  Sting’s “Fields of Gold” fuzzed through the speakers. The AC was almost too cold. My eyes floated to the magazine racks. Oprah in a decadent gown holding two small, clean dogs and the words: A Brand New You! I was about to pick it up, but then the line moved forward and I moved with it and no, Nan, you don’t need that magazine, and the answers probably aren’t in there anyway, and then the word Fan-tas-tic spilled out over everything.

  That familiar voice and, oh no, oh yes, it was Marcy, two people ahead of me, talking to the cashier about bags. “I love that you still provide bags here,” she said. “You’re the only ones who still do that.”

  I crouched down, maybe pretending to tie my shoe even though I was wearing flip-flops. I could see Marcy’s Tevas and her perfectly applied bland pink nail polish and the haole rot on her calves. Khakis and a tunic—that’s what she was wearing.

  “I’m cooking mahi-mahi for my husband tonight,” Marcy informed the cashier, who hadn’t asked about her dinner.

  I wanted the cashier to ignore her or grunt or say, “Who cares,” but, like every cashier in Hawaii, this one was also too nice.

  “You know what’s good? A little seaweed flakes on top,” she said, to which Marcy replied, “That is a fan-tas-tic idea, thank you.”

  As I watched her Tevas walk away, I noticed her heels weren’t cracked at all. I didn’t look at my heels to compare because I already knew how badly cracked they’d gotten. They had split into canyons.

  As I hoisted myself up in the most dignified way possible and shook out my leg because it had started to fall asleep, I imagined Brad and Marcy’s mahi-mahi dinner and knew it would be boring. Or I hoped it would be boring. After their boring dinner they would probably take a boring stroll down Ali’i and have boring sex, and maybe I could cultivate some compassion for Marcy, who didn’t even know how boring she was. And yes, I was able to cultivate some compassion, and the great thing about that was that it was not only inarguably nice; it also made me a better person.

  •

  When I got back, the twins had switched positions. Jed was next to Ana now and Cam was lying back on the recliner with Portico stretched straight down the center of his chest like a zipper on a jacket.

  “That was fast, Nan,” Ana said, impressed.

  “You call Mom Nan?” Cam asked.

  Ana smiled at me. “I do,” she said. “Is that okay?”

  Cam shrugged.

  “You’re weird,” Jed told Ana.

  “You’re weird.” Ana kicked his leg.

  “Boys, can you get the rest of the stuff out of the car, please?”

  It surprised me that I didn’t have to ask twice. They just got up. Maybe we were all being our best selves for Ana. Cam lowered Portico into the tank, which was on the coffee table for now, and followed his brother out the door.

  I set the grocery bags on the counter. “How are you feeling?” I asked her.

  “I’m okay,” she said, touching her stomach.

  “No pain?”

  She traced her collarbones all the way across, from one shoulder to the other. “Life is pain, Nan,” she said.

  “That’s what my mother used to say,” I told her.

  “What? Life is pain?”

  I scolded myself. Why are you talking about your mother, Nancy? You don’t want to be talking about her. So I didn’t tell Ana the rest of my mother’s refrain, which was “Don’t marry losers like I did.” Because every time my mother talked about the pain of life, she was referring to one of her failed relationships.

  I changed the subject. “I got you some Red Vines.”

  Ana got up off the couch—in a lively way; good—and wrapped one arm around my waist and said, “I love you, Nan.”

  Flashback to her telling me she didn’t know what love was. Obviously she’d been wrong about that. Because here she was, saying “I love you” to me, and I knew she meant it.

  •

  The four of us cooked together. Since Ana knew the recipe best, she became the head chef and told us what to do. Jed chopped the ingredients, Cam sautéed them, I cooked the pasta, and Ana set the table. She dug two candles and two Buddhas out of one of her duffel bags and set them between the plates, and then she put on some nice jazz music.

  Jed said, “Ambiance,” and I was proud of him for using a more complex word than cool, or dude, or
yeah.

  Ana went outside and came back with a dead branch. “Found art!” she exclaimed, and hung it on the nail above the table that I’d abandoned all those months ago. The four of us agreed that we had been skeptical when she’d walked in with the branch but now we could see how it was very clever.

  Jed, Cam, and I sat in our usual places, and Ana sat in Chuck’s chair. The steaming pasta looked delicious.

  Before we ate, Ana said, “Wait, let’s hold hands for a second.”

  Jed shrugged. Cam shrugged. We took each other’s hands.

  “Close your eyes.” Ana inhaled and exhaled deeply. “Breathe.”

  “What are we doing?” Jed asked.

  “Just go along with it for a second,” Ana said gently.

  I opened my eyes for just long enough to see Jed close his again.

  “What are we doing?” Ana chuckled. “That’s a great question.”

  “Yep,” Jed said.

  “What we are doing is sitting here,” Ana said, “at the dinner table. The piano music is playing. There are crickets. We smell pasta. We see the candles flickering through our eyelids.”

  A long pause. The crescendo of the piano. “In a moment, we will eat this pasta. In this moment, we are grateful for its enticing smell and its beautiful presentation in that decorative bowl. We are grateful to Mom for going to the store. We are grateful we had the energy to cook tonight. We are grateful we feel hungry; an appetite is a sign of health.” Inhale, exhale. Low, calm notes from the piano. “This is it. The moments before this and after this—those are gone. This is it, this is it. This is it. Enjoy this. Be grateful. Eat like you mean it.” Pause. I half expected her to om. She didn’t. “Buon appetito.”

  We opened our eyes.

  I looked at Ana first. Her eyes were black and glimmering. She was staring straight at me. One candle-lit tear rolled down her cheek.

  “Are you crying?” Jed chided, but underneath that he seemed alarmed.

  Ana looked at him. “Yes.” She didn’t wipe her tear. “Is that okay with you?”

  Before Jed could say more stupid things, I flooded them with information. “Ana has cancer, Jed. Cam. Ana has cancer. Okay? So she’s allowed to cry whenever she wants. She’s dying.”