Souvenir

by Therese Fowler

  She looked at him, at his face in this last moment of innocence, and said, “It’s not what you think. I have a disease called ALS. It’s fatal.”

  He blinked and stepped back as if someone had pushed him. “Come again?”

  “You’ll know it as Lou Gehrig’s disease,” she said.

  “Meg…” he said, hands raised as if in supplication, as if saying, how could you let this happen?

  “I know,” she shrugged, feeling as if she was a lousy actor reciting her lines. They’d feel truer if she sang them in operatic alto, soprano, perhaps; then the music would fit the tragedy playing out in their life.

  He said, “Lou Gehrig’s—? I don’t remember—What…what does this mean, exactly?”

  What did it mean, exactly? She still didn’t know. She stuck to the script. “It’s a debilitating neuromuscular disease. I was diagnosed Friday by a specialist in Orlando—I didn’t have meetings, I had tests.”

  Brian rubbed his face with both hands, then dropped his hands at his sides. “Jesus, Meg…. Are you sure? I mean, you look fine.” Hesquinted at her as if the signs must be present but were just out of focus for him.

  She felt herself shrinking, guilty for hiding things so well. In her doctor voice, she said, “I know, but already, my right arm’s hardly functional, the hand is weak. I’m having trouble with my leg. It’s just a matter of time before you’ll hear it when I speak. How much time? That, I can’t tell you. Right now seems to be what’s called an acceleration period; things are…they’re going downhill pretty fast right now. An accurate prognosis is difficult—every case is a little different.”

  She was tired of hearing the words as she spoke them, the same ones she’d read and heard and told too many times already. The thought of saying them again to her sisters, and again to her father, and again to her daughter—God, it exhausted her, the burden of just thinking about repeating this litany.

  Brian studied the polished tips of his black oxfords. She felt sorry for him; ever after he would be associated with her story. People would whisper it to one another at parties and picnics, He’s the one whose wife, the doctor, had Lou Gehrig’s. Worse, he would have to figure out how to manage all the details of his life and Savannah’s—though her guess was that he would shift that duty to his mother, who would probably be delighted to have him depending on her again.

  He looked up and shook his head. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “We’ll talk more later, all right? Go to work, try not to dwell. I know, it’s impossible, but try. I’ll tell my sisters…before they leave. Not tonight, okay? So don’t bring it up. But once we know Dad’s through the surgery fine, then I’ll tell them.”

  “Savannah—?”

  “I told her I have a nerve problem. She can’t know it’s incurable. Not yet. I just…I need to get her through her birthday at least.”

  “What about treatment? They must have something—”

  “Nope,” she said, and he flinched a little.

  “Are you going to have to be in the hospital, or…?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “Most people handle it with home care, and hospice.” She thought of Lana Mathews, all but motionless. Waiting.

  “I know you can’t say exactly, but…how long do you think?” He wouldn’t look at her.

  She went to him, took his chilled hands in hers. “No idea,” she said. “But probably not more than a few months.” The knot of his tie was slightly crooked; she left it.

  “I don’t believe this…”

  “Go to work,” she said, releasing him. “Nothing’s going to happen today.”

  AFTER BRIAN LEFT, MEG MADE A POT OF TEA AND TOOK IT TO THE DEN. SHE opened the windows to let in the moist morning air, bring the outside in to her, then began calling her patients to inform them personally that, due to health reasons, she was referring them to other physicians. She left messages for most, spoke to a few without divulging details, and in about an hour had reached everyone whose records were active. Others would learn of the changes the next time they called for appointments. After the last call, she hung up the phone and said, “Well, okay. That’s done.”

  How surprising it was to feel so little about this particular ending, to be able to let go of Allison Ramsey and Candace Banner and Jill Jabronski, for example, without feeling traumatized. She cared for these pregnant women, for all her patients, and yet, when it came down to determining priorities, cutting the string was astonishingly easy.

  She took up her journal and wrote:

  May 3, 2006

  Let me tell you a little something about dying in middle age. First, I feel cheated for one main reason: because I owe you more than I’ve given you so far. Not the material things—my time. I owe you more time, and it makes me sick when I look back and think of all the days I worked late when I could’ve been home with you watching the Discovery channel or hearing you practice a new song. The weekends when I delivered babies instead of baking your favorite pumpkin-raisin cookies or riding with you at Grandma and Grandpa’s. I always imagined we’d have more time when you were older, done with school. I’d cut back my practice and we’d travel together. Or maybe you’d join the Peace Corps and I’d come visit you at your posts, donate some of my skills too. You’d entertain us all by playing songs and singing; everyone would sing along; we’d teach the local children the words, leave them with something that could endure famine or disease or heartache.

  If only I had a song for you.

  Forty

  ALTHOUGH MEG HAD TO WORK HARD TO HIDE THE EVIDENCE OF HER ILLNESS for now, Wednesday night felt better to her than old times. She and all three of her sisters sat together on the patio, drinking wine and laughing about the trials of motherhood. Beth couldn’t relate fully, but she had her own tales to tell, of college students and their transparent attempts to lie their way out of assignments or low test grades. “They think I was never nineteen, and that I don’t understand the Internet and all the electronic gadgets. Do I look that ancient?”

  “At thirty?” Kara laughed. “You’re just a baby yourself! The ink on your last diploma is hardly dry!”

  “I do have tiny lines around my eyes—see?” She leaned forward, but Meg, sitting at her left, saw only smooth skin. No lines, and no freckles either; Beth looked more like their mother, like the Jansens, creamy-skinned Southerners whose way-back ancestors were Scandinavian. Her hair was dark like Savannah’s, but straight, and cut in an engaging chin-length bob that made her brown eyes stand out.

  “I don’t see any lines,” Meg said. “It’s all those letters after your name that make you seem so different from your students—Doctor Powell.”

  “Perhaps, Doctor Hamilton.” Beth laughed. “If only my letters meant I could do some good, like you. I feel like all I do is grade bad essays and sit through excruciatingly long faculty arguments—I mean, meetings.”

  “Can you spell that?” Kara teased.

  “What, meetings?” Beth asked.

  “Excruciatingly.”

  “I can’t even say it,” Julianne said. “Is it a real word?”

  Kara said, “And I thought my vocabulary was limited.” She poked Julianne, who sat at her left. “If you’d finished school, you might know the big words.”

  Julianne tossed her long hair, red-gold like Meg’s, and said, “I got my GED. Anyway, what difference? I’m raising children, not correcting essays.”

  Kara, the only one of them who’d gotten the full red of their father’s hair, held up her hand, four fingers extended. “Can you count? This is how many kids I have, but I don’t use that as an excuse for being uneducated. Pick up a book once in a while, why don’t you?”

  “If you weren’t sitting around reading so much, maybe you’d be a size six like me,” Julianne said, grinning her Cheshire cat grin. She’d always deviled Kara, who didn’t have Meg’s oldest-sister authority and wasn’t close enough to her in age to be a pal.

  “Marilyn Monroe was my size,” Kara said. She stuck out
her tongue.

  “Now, children,” Meg said, interceding as she’d always done. “Play nicely. Jules, grab that box, behind you there. Dad gave me some old photos of us. I thought you guys might want to divide them up.”

  “You’ve already taken out the ones you want?” Beth asked, and Meg realized she’d nearly slipped up, dropped a clue about her illness before she was ready to tell them.

  “Right, I did. Only a few, though, of just me.”

  Julianne opened the box and pulled out a messy stack of photographs, various sizes, some with thick paper backing, some with rounded corners, most of them cloudy or faded or creased. “Is there any system to these?”

  “No,” Meg said. “Apparently Mom just stuffed them in.”

  The women all leaned in and began sorting through the photos.

  Beth held one up to Meg. “How about this? You and Carson…”—she read the date on the back—“in ’84.”

  “His high school graduation,” Meg said, taking it with her left hand. Her right thumb, she found, was twitching and wouldn’t quit; she pressed it under her leg to keep her sisters from noticing. “They had that big picnic out by their lake.”

  “I remember that,” Kara said, looking over Meg’s shoulder. “Look at your hair! Definitely an ’80s ’do.”

  Meg remembered the effort she’d put into getting her straight hair to stay in the upswept, ratted style. “It took a whole can of hair spray for just the bangs.”

  “Yeah, and then you ruined it by swimming.”

  Beth said, “Carson looks so pleased with himself.”

  “We’d just finished getting him moved into that shed we redid.” His smile was in anticipation of their plans for later that night: she would sneak out of her house and join him in his new place, to make love for the first time. She was smiling in the photo too, though with less obvious anticipation—because her mother was taking the picture and she didn’t want to look overeager. Carson had an excuse, it being his graduation day.

  Beth leaned back. “So what happened with you two anyway? You seemed like such a sure thing, and then it was just over. I felt like he’d moved away or died or something. I never saw him anymore. It was weird.”

  “You know what happened,” Julianne said. “She dumped him for Brian.”

  “Obviously,” Beth said. “But I’m asking why. Until then, Carson was like part of the family. I don’t remember you guys fighting or anything.”

  Meg put the photo down. She could tell them the truth, now that none of it mattered, but why bother? She didn’t want them feeling responsible in any way, or guilty. She didn’t want them to think less of their parents. Always the protective oldest child—that wasn’t going to change.

  “We didn’t fight,” she said. “We just…went in different directions.”

  “Because he wanted to be a musician,” Julianne offered, “and you wanted to stick close to home and be a doctor. Right?”

  “Something like that,” Meg said, drawing sharp looks from Kara and Beth. Kara would remember that neither her career choice nor Carson’s would come until later. Beth just seemed able to smell a lie. Her sisters didn’t call her out on it, though, and she was grateful. There was no other lie she could tell with more conviction. For Beth’s sake, she added, “Brian had a lot to offer, and back then I thought that made a difference.”

  “Money,” Beth said, shaking her head. “Sometimes you’re better off without it.”

  “How can you say that?” Julianne protested. “Look around! Wouldn’t you love to live like this?” Her place in Quebec was a late-sixties split-level with only one bathroom.

  Beth shrugged. “Only if it came incidentally. I’d rather be happy.”

  “Oh, happy,” Julianne said. “Which is why you’re still single. Your ideals are too high. Nobody stays truly happy.”

  Kara said, “Not so! I’m happy—Todd too. Wouldn’t change a thing about our life—except to move back here.”

  “You married for love,” Beth said. “You’re the only one who did it right. So far.”

  “Are you saying I don’t love Chad?” Julianne protested, fickle as she’d always been. She hated to be wrong, hated to lose ground to any of them.

  Beth smirked. “You married him because you were knocked up. You knew him for what? Three months before the wedding?”

  “Four,” Julianne corrected.

  Meg pulled out another photo, one of the four of them all lined up and dressed for Easter in flouncy dresses and tights and white patent-leather shoes. Julianne was hardly old enough to stand up on her own. “Here,” Meg said, passing the photo to Beth in an effort to get them all onto a new tack. “Remember this? Grandma Alice was still alive; she came down and took us shopping for these outfits and made us go to church.”

  Beth gave her a look that said she knew exactly what Meg was doing, then looked at the photo. “No, I don’t remember this at all. Look at us, so clean and pretty—an alternate reality. Nice if that could’ve been real, huh?”

  Meg nodded. She understood the appeal of an alternate reality all too well.

  Forty-one

  THURSDAY NIGHT, AFTER BEING AT THE HOSPITAL WITH THEIR FATHER MOST of the day, Meg and her sisters sat out on the patio again, drinking wine and telling stories as they’d done the night before. It was as if their combined memories, the energy of them together in one place, created a time machine. One moment they were giving Julianne, at a year old, her first riding lesson on their crabby Shetland, Guinevere. Another moment they were riding the spinning Mad Hatter ride at Disney World, screaming when Kara threw up her blue cotton candy. All anyone had to do was say, “Remember when…” and off they’d go. Meg soaked up the camaraderie and marveled at how their memories didn’t always match. Beth, for instance, couldn’t recall them ever owning a mare named Bride, while Kara not only recalled the mare but could remember in vivid detail watching their mother pick splinters out of Meg’s back and painting the whole raw site with iodine.

  Brian came out to the patio to say he was taking Savannah and Rachel for ice cream—the plan they’d arranged, so Meg would be alone with her sisters. Meg poured more wine then, and when they were all relaxed—for what better time was there?—she edged into the subject of her illness by asking if any of them thought they might be coming to Florida to live anytime soon. Writing to Savannah in the journal was helping to lessen her anxieties about how Savannah would manage—not to mention helping her feel like she had more control over things in general—but ideally, one of her sisters would be able to move back and help look out for both Savannah and their father.

  Meg knew already that Kara wanted to return, but in the way she’d always done when they were girls, she set up the question so as not to exclude anyone’s possibly secret or remote interest in moving. Then there would be no protests of “Why did you just assume only Kara wanted to move? I’ve been thinking of it for ages.” Julianne in particular always insisted on a level playing field, forever needing to be considered equal to the rest of them.

  Kara spoke up first, saying that Todd was agreeable to the move, but it wouldn’t be before he had his twenty years in—three more to go. That led to a discussion of how disruptive it might be to move Keiffer and Evan from the high school they’d be in, and Kara’s reluctant conclusion that they might have to wait until all the boys were graduated, to be fair. Julianne, though her kids were younger, was in a similar predicament—not that Chad had any interest in moving to the states. Beth’s answer was the one that surprised her: Beth said she was looking for a change after a dozen years of California living.

  “I’m tired of fog,” Beth laughed. “Besides, one of us should give Meg a hand with Dad. I can find work just about anywhere…and I miss Florida, and who knows how long Dad’ll be around?”

  That was the segue Meg needed. She said, “Right. Life is so unpredictable. His health—or any of ours—could decline without much warning. Take me, for instance,” she said, and then spit out the bitter words once again: A
LS. Fatal. Unpredictable. Paralysis. Life support.

  They were dumbstruck.

  She held her breath, watching her sisters’ shocked faces while they tried to make sense of what she’d just said. Then, Julianne began to wail, breaking the tension in her characteristic melodramatic way.

  Kara vowed to move to Florida immediately with or without Todd, and Beth came and wrapped her arms around Meg. For the first time since Lowenstein had released the ALS worm into her mind, she gave herself over to grief. She put her head against Beth’s shoulder and cried.

  After they’d all wiped their eyes and noses, Beth asked what she meant to do with the time she had left; leave it to Beth to be straightforward.

  “Clean out my office,” Meg said, “see my lawyer—get things in order, I guess.”

  Kara frowned and shook her head. “No, come on—what are you going to do? Like, ‘I’ve always wanted to…’ you know, fill in the blank: see Niagara Falls. Skydive. Sleep with Antonio Banderas. Like that.”

  Meg looked at them, their expectant faces, without knowing how to answer. She’d done so much in her life, been so many places, shared so many joys. There was little she lacked. Finally she said, “I’m going to talk with my daughter, every day.” Her only other wish was beyond her reach.

  SHE REPEATED THE SCENE IN MINIATURE WITH HER FATHER FRIDAY MORNING while her sisters waited outside his room, ready to offer postannouncement support. He stared at her, then coughed in a futile effort to keep back tears. “Don’t waste any time, Meggie,” he said.

  Too late. She bit her lip hard to keep the words back.

  “That’s good advice, Dad, thanks,” she managed.

  She left the room recalling a placard posted in the coffee shop near her practice. She’d read it many times—a Shakespeare quote, and didn’t he have the wisdom of the ages? “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.”