by Junot Díaz
The thought of pity (and in some cases, perhaps pleasure) from her family and friends induced the hot spurt of terror that returned her to action. She applied and was admitted to art school and earned not only her degree in design but the love of her department head, twelve years older than she was, but trim and sweet-natured with a warm, wry delivery. Thea always pulls it off. That was said of her. Which she publicly disputed but in her heart believed. She had slacked off a bit but the stars or Whoever was running the show was on her side. Then, wanting children, with a man who wanted them too, she managed that as well. Two boys, after age thirty. After two abortions weighing on her with their nasty irony.
Money had been a problem. And the swamp of early motherhood—pee and baby powder. But when Nate was twelve, old enough to watch Dylan after school the two or three days Dad taught (God bless academia), she was hired by a firm that built hotels all over Europe. It was better than fine. There was getting away and there was returning, pleasure and love, novelty and security. Her luck continued, no longer luck, even, but a blessing from on high. A superstitious person might have worried.
The night everything changed was her second in London. It was early September but chilly with rain. They’d viewed a site near Hampstead where a new Wyndham might go up. The English countryside looked stowed away and orderly, even when wet. In her poly-lined raincoat she was warm and dry. Later that day came the fun of drinks with Edward, their UK project manager, a man slightly younger than she was. He liked her mind, he said, and the shape of her nose, which some had deemed too prominent. At forty-three, it was pleasant to be desired. He had a nifty accent, a disconcertingly direct gaze, a ponderous but dry sense of humor. His ex-wife, Martha, had abandoned him for an MP. Not that he’d have preferred, he said, to have been replaced by an unemployed chimney sweep.
Thea liked Edward. If they slept together, Allan would never have to know. But in the fullness of her contentment she decided against. Before Allan, she’d had sex in what felt like a lifetime of variations. She loved Allan in bed, warm and generous as elsewhere. After the shared bill was paid, Edward invited her to his room. “In our next life,” she said, and kissed his cheek, feeling not only attractive but a good person to boot. There was a line in the Old Testament: A woman’s virtue is beyond rubies.
Alone in her queen-size hotel bed, she was reading Anna Karenina, a book she’d always wanted to read but till now hadn’t had time for, when Allan called. They’d talked last night, emailed this afternoon. She didn’t expect to hear from him till tomorrow. She felt a pulse of love for her husband, unlike Anna for poor Karenin. “Dahling,” she said with the local articulation, “I’m frightfully glad to hear your voice.” She felt giddy and free, while across the pond it was work time. Allan would be sitting out the end of his office hour (Tues., Thurs.: 4–5 p.m.). “I like your voice,” she said. It was low and reverberant, surprising in a man of only average size, sexy coming out of the dark during a slide lecture. “Guess what I’m thinking?” She smiled into the phone. “When I get back I’m going to jump your bones.” It was an idiom from her pre-Allan days, one he disliked. She cackled. “So, what’s new on Park Place? Did Dylan finish his science project? Is Nate practicing his Torah portion?” Nate’s bar mitzvah was scheduled for December. They’d just sent out the invitations. Nate had seemed pretty blasé. “Are you there, Allan?”
He coughed. In the long-distance silence her heart sped up. “Allan? What?”
He spoke shakily at first but soon gathered control. Nate was in the hospital. There was something in his abdomen, a mass of some sort. He went on but she absorbed no more. Dylan at the Rosenthals, Allan with Nate at Children’s Memorial. What was a mass, exactly? She pictured peas; grapes. You have a walnut-sized mass in your left breast. Were they always compared to foods?
“It’s the size of a football,” he said.
He was angry with her for being gone, she thought. He was angry with her for not noticing that something was wrong with their son. She was angry with herself. What had she missed?
Later they would learn what they had overlooked: the swell of belly under Nate’s loose shirts, his occasional shortness of breath, that he sometimes walked on his toes instead of his whole foot. None of the Five Warning Signs. There was some possibly hopeful news. Gail Elkin, the attending, thought the tumor was a Burkitt’s, fast growing and thus sensitive to treatment. Rapidly dividing cells invited zapping. There were more tests but they would probably start chemo in the morning. A Burkitt’s was a tumor of choice, so to speak, 90 percent survival at five years.
Allan sounded calm now and incredibly knowledgeable. She was shaking at the thought of Nate in the mortal 10 percent. She was used to being in the 10 percent group, along with other gifted children receiving extra work in math or art. She looked around the room though she didn’t know what she was looking for. She had to go home. She had to call American Airlines. Or was it Continental? Shit, Wyndham had arranged it. She breathed in quick pants. Where was the printout? “Hold on,” he told her. “I’m walking the phone back to Nate’s room. He wants to talk to you.”
She swallowed ferociously in order to speak to Nate without tears in her voice. But he was cheerful. The hospital was an interesting novelty. A nurse’s aide, Kwan Lin, had played chess with him, and she wasn’t that bad. He’d told Kwan Lin about the force of gravity, which was a property of every object that had any mass and created attraction between them. Everything has mass, he said, even a tiny hair! There’s a pull between us and between everything.
Mass? She laughed so as not to cry at the pushy little word, suddenly ubiquitous, remembering how Nate had looked when she kissed him goodbye on Sunday morning, so tall she didn’t have to bend. His round cheeks, sturdy legs, dark hair curling over his ears. He needed a haircut. “You sound like yourself,” she whispered. “I love yourself.”
Hanging up, she thought of Edward with self-loathing and terror. As if a mere idea, the glimmer of an adulterous thought, could become a cancerous mass inside her firstborn. She ransacked her purse and found her boarding-pass stub (British Airways) and, pleading her case, secured a flight back the next morning. And how to live through the night?
Both of her parents were dead, of different (she thought with a shudder) forms of cancer. She had friends she could have called. But Laura Beth was visiting her in-laws and Melissa, dear, smart, and scrupulous, had no children of her own and might feel awkward. There were Allan’s parents, still mentally intact in Boca Raton.
She called her sister, who now worked in human resources at her husband’s company. It turned out to be a mistake. Gaby started crying. Thea was furious at her sister’s tears. That the mother had to comfort the aunt. He wasn’t dead. “I’m hanging up, Gaby.”
Lying alone in the unfamiliar bed, she wrapped her arms and legs around the rock-hard hotel pillow and tried to extract affection. She tried to teleport wellness to her son, not that she believed in such things. She pondered the mystery of Gaby’s healthy children, and of Gaby herself who in high school had had thin orange hair and nervous boyfriends. In Highland Park her life was routinized; at any moment of the day Thea could pretty much guess where she’d be and even the attitude she’d be presenting (helpful, interested). Sister-in-a-bag? But it was suddenly clear to Thea that not just now but always Gaby had been the happier person. As kids in the hot backseat of a car on the way to visit ancient relatives, Gaby would fall contentedly asleep while Thea stared out the window, rethinking what had happened yesterday and what might happen later that day, and what to do to make things turn out as she wished.
The next day, Tuesday, was September 11, 2001, but the calamity of what would be called for years afterward 9/11, of the collapsed towers and three thousand dead, was lost on Thea, wandering through Heathrow like a sleepwalker. Her flight was canceled, there were no plans to reschedule. Hours later back at the hotel she called Allan, teeth chattering with frustration and bewildered fright.
His news didn’t help. Natha
n’s tumor wasn’t a Burkitt’s, but that was all they knew. Until they knew what it was they couldn’t treat it. In the meantime, seven a.m. Chicago time, Nate was about to have a needle inserted in his back to drain one of his effused lungs. He would get local anesthesia but it would hurt, and he wanted to talk to her on the phone during the procedure. Allan’s voice tried to be soothing. Could she handle it?
“What’s with his lung?” she said. “I thought it was his abdomen—”
“Try to be calm, honey. For his sake.”
“Oh, please!”
She could feign calm. She had been calm telling her supervisor this morning why she was leaving—the Queen of Calm, he’ll be in the hospital till they find out what’s wrong, we’re being hopeful. She thought of Allan walking the phone back to Nate’s room and reminded herself how sturdy Nate was, he and Dylan both. They’d scrape their knees on cement, get knocked around on some ball field, and then screech and return to the fray. At the sound of Nate’s voice, tears sprang to her eyes but she quickly gathered herself. “Hey, kiddo.”
“Just talk, that’s all,” Nate said. “Keep talking.”
Of course she could do that. “I’m coming home as soon as I can, at least by Friday, boy-o, and here’s something to think about. What do you want me to bring you from England? How about a soccer jersey? Manchester Monkeys or something? Mollusks? Mall rats?!” She giggled frantically, it was hard to get the tone appropriately light, but she knew not to stop. “I’ll tell you about the meeting yesterday. There was this zoning, historic-London person, garden party, old family, blue-blood type, she kept nixing anything that made our project a tiny bit distinctive. Regulation height, roof slope, that’s it. Windows have to look just so. Choice of three products for facing, I know these details don’t mean much but you get the general picture?” She mimicked the woman’s BBC accent: “In our small arena we try to maintain continuity. Respect for the past. Like we Americans were yokels. Hicks!” Nate uttered what sounded like a whimper. “What, honey?”
“It was just cold on my back, the cotton or whatever—keep talking, Mom!”
She swallowed fast. “I talked to Aunt Gaby last night, she’s going to come down to see you, with Cousin Emma? Maybe Ava too. I’ll be home Friday, did I just say that?”
“I don’t know, Mom. But here’s what I want from England, a Red Hot Chili Peppers CD. With their autograph. Do you think you can get it, dude?”
Then in a patch of silence, in which she was thinking how to get hold of this group, the Chili Peppers—she had to write the name down so she wouldn’t forget—and wondering if other twelve-year-olds called their moms dude—she heard a scream. She dropped the phone, dropped to her knees, clambered for it. “Honey? I’m here, Nate, love—”
Half a minute later he was marveling, “That was the worst pain I ever felt.” She was weeping; she couldn’t hide it. “Mom, what’s the matter?”
“You’re so brave,” she whispered. Then, before another sob blossomed, “Let me talk to Dad, okay?”
That night the group from the Chicago office went out to a pub. They didn’t know about Nate, she didn’t want to tell them, nor did she want to be with them without their knowing. So she arranged another solo dinner with Edward. He no longer attracted her, on the short side, round face, thinning hair; Allan’s was graying but full. But he listened while she told him the facts of Nate’s illness and tried to describe her state of mind, and he seemed to feel for her. His sister’s boy had had leukemia at two, and at six now he was doing fine. Thank you, Edward. He loved cricket and fifties-era Hollywood movies, and his ordinariness was bubble wrap for her sore mind, separating her in London from the terrors of Chicago. He didn’t have children and didn’t think he wanted them. He wasn’t sure he’d ever get married again. Once was enough (after Martha). By the time their plates were removed Thea was certain that even if she were single, he was no one to spend her life with. Despite his crisp consonants and former marriage he seemed not quite formed, a lad.
He had the tact or decency not to re-instigate their flirtation, but that night, unable to sleep, she put on her robe, padded down the softly lit hall to his room, and knocked on his door. It was two a.m. Sex was rushed, awkward, but her own room yawned with confusion and terror. She put her arms around Edward, breathed his unfamiliar set of odors, slept and woke and slept. The next day she avoided him, and that night instead of staying at the hotel he went home to Brighton where he had a house. On Friday she flew home.
Naturally in Chicago she rarely thought about Edward. The night with him was a mere episode, a piece of craziness or weakness that arose from her fear—utterly wrong and shameful, but negligible in light of what was going on at Children’s Memorial. Nate underwent test after test, until—it took a full week—the doctors determined that the tumor was a PNET, a primitive neuroectodermal tumor, an atypical form of Ewing’s sarcoma that afflicted fewer than four hundred children every year in the United States. Good: they knew what it was. Bad: it was aggressive. Unlike Burkitt’s, it responded sluggishly to chemotherapy. Survival at two years, 30 percent.
Thea and Allan sat on a hard couch in a small private room while Gail Elkin relayed the numbers. Another doctor was there as well, a lanky, youngish Fellow in pediatric oncology; he provided a positive spin. Each case was different, each child different; in cancers this rare, obviously stats were unreliable. Good cop, bad cop. That the numbers were much worse than those for Burkitt’s Thea understood, but her mind resisted further conjecture. She held Allan’s hand. She was glad Nate wasn’t there.
Nate received only the name for his tumor and the illusion of choice as to protocol, both of which had been first described to his parents. It came down, essentially, to two grades of chemo, regular or heavy-duty. Elkin, a small, clear-eyed woman of about forty with, no doubt, many other patients to see, was terse and unambiguous. The more aggressive regimen offered a better chance for a cure but the side effects were worse. His hair would fall out. He might suffer, among other things, nausea, diarrhea, mouth sores, anemia, and damage to kidneys, bladder, and heart. In the end it could kill him. The Fellow tried to change the emphasis. There were ways to protect a patient from each of these problems. They would take good care of Nate.
Nate had set down the joke book he was reading. He lay back against his pillow, pleasurably awed with the power he had to determine the course of his life. To Thea, the choice seemed a crapshoot. Like choosing the door behind which you’d find either a princess to marry or a tiger to tear you to pieces—or worse, since in Nate’s case, there could be tigers behind both doors. But Nate kept his eyes on Dr. Elkin, gravely and without fear, liking the idea of a challenge or maybe just the word “aggressive.” Go for the gold! Allan made a fist, Nate did too, and they knocked them together, males signaling solidarity. Thea asked question after question, forgetting the answers, delaying the onset of whatever would happen. Her heart pounded as if she were working incredibly hard, although it was clear to her that there was nothing she could do.
Gaby drove down to the hospital that evening with a Dave Barry book for Nate, his preferred bedtime reading since his hospitalization. Thea felt the pull of their sisterhood, a blood camaraderie in the face of external threat. Perhaps—though it took positive thinking much too far—the ultimate effect of Nate’s illness would be to warm and deepen their kinship. Their father, who had mistrusted any bond not based on blood, would press them to call each other. There were no other siblings.
Waiting for the elevator at the end of visiting hours, Thea was sufficiently warmed by her sister’s kindness to Nate to ask about her children. Her daughter Emma would be going into high school. Emma was smart and ambitious, recommended for AP math and biology, Gaby said. “Following in her aunt’s footsteps.”
“I hope not,” said Thea with mock horror that had an underlay of real horror. Still, she genuinely liked the idea of her niece excelling in high school as she had. She liked the absence of her familiar surge of envy. She put her arm
s around her sister. They held each other murmuring encouragements.
“You’re postponing the bar mitzvah, right?” said Gaby. “I’ll help you make the phone calls. In fact I’ll do it all for you, just give me the list.”
“Thank you,” said Thea.
Gaby took a deep breath. “I’m so afraid,” she said, “we’re going to lose him.”
It took a moment for Thea to take in her sister’s words. Her brain shrank in the cave of her skull. “Where does this insight come from?”
Gaby looked confused.
Then the elevator door opened. Inside, a girl was strapped into an elaborate wheelchair, her mother beside her. The little girl’s head kept jerking, and the mother put tender hands on her daughter’s cheeks and held her head, looking straight into her eyes. “It’s okay, Lizzie. We’ll get you your Baclofen.” The sisters rode down without speaking while the woman murmured to her daughter, a hum in which Thea labored to separate her rage from her fear and to isolate both emotions from her response to the woman with the damaged child. Lizzie. Elizabeth. She hadn’t brought her coat and the spring night was cool but she walked Gaby to her car. She had to swallow many times in order to speak, and her voice was wire-thin. “How could you say that to me?”
“Say what?” Gaby shook her head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“Where did you get it, all your medical expertise?”
“Please, I don’t want you to be—” Gaby looked at her. “You’re freezing, let’s go inside at least.”