by Melody Grace
After watching the way Hope slipped away, I knew I couldn’t go the same, but still, my mom wouldn’t quit. There was always another trial to submit for, always another round of tests. She would have hooked me up for an infinite round of chemo if she’d had her way, eking out another precious day through sheer force of will. Maybe she thought that if she fought hard enough for the both of us, she could magic a cure into being, that if I could hang on another month, another year, it would make a difference. Those were the fights that crushed me, trying to work up the courage to leave. I couldn’t make her see that existence wasn’t enough for me, not when I was running out of time. I needed a life, however short, but she could only see the cruel trade-off: four good months, or eight bad ones, to her, more was the only chance we would get.
But today, there was no mention of the bitter equations, or the time I was wasting here with every passing day away from the hospital bed. She steered me briskly through the city, our arms laden with crisp paper bags, until we could barely make it back up the stairs to the attic, we were so weighed down.
“I like you in the blue,” Mom announced as I unlocked the door and unloaded our bounty on the table. “And that green sweater brings out your eyes. You should wear it for dinner tonight.”
I nodded and sank wearily into a chair. I was getting tired more easily, and my autumn of late-night bicycle rides seemed like a distant memory now, the way my lungs burned after a single staircase and my head pounded, that background of static pain. Mom’s eyes flickered with concern, but she didn’t say anything, just found the package with my new teakettle and bustled for the kitchen, setting it on to boil. She looked around. “It’s a cute place. Reminds me of my first apartment, out of college. Me and three girls in a fourth-floor walk-up.” Her face softened in a nostalgic smile. “There was never enough hot water, but we would throw pizza parties every Friday night, and the whole building would stop by.”
“Tessa’s really nice,” I offered. Every morsel of my life here felt like a test, as if I was displaying for her each new item in the palm of my hands, wanting to reassure her, but craving her approval all the same. “I hang out with her and her friends sometimes; we go to the college bars, or just grab a meal together. They’re all in college, but it’s not like I’m an outsider or anything.”
“Does she know?”
I shook my head slowly.
“Don’t you think she should?” Mom pressed. “In case something happens again?”
“What could she do?” I countered. “You know, there’s nothing.”
“She could keep an eye on your meds,” Mom said, looking anxious again. “Tell the paramedics what you’re on, and how they can—”
“Mom!” I stopped her, sighing. “I can’t ask that. It’s not her responsibility to take care of me. Nobody can do that.”
“I can.”
There it was again. My heart twisted, seeing the sorrow on her face. Nineteen years she’d kept careful watch, and it still wasn’t enough to protect me. If this had been a predator on the city street she would have stared him down, thrown her body in the path of a moving vehicle to protect me from impact. But this was a poison snaking in my skull, and she couldn’t take the pain away if she tried.
“I’m sorry.”
I don’t know how many times I’d said it, but I meant it, every time. Sorry for my broken, wretched brain, for her wrecked dreams, for the sleepless, tearful nights and the endless, angry days, sorry that the child she’d wanted so badly had brought nothing but grief in the end. I loved her with all my heart, I wanted her to be happy, but I knew that because of me, she never would be. Every moment I lived, she waited for the end, and when one day it would come, she would never be happy again.
She would have to bury me, soon, and nothing I could do would ever make that OK.
The kettle whistled. She made our drinks, then walked over to my bedroom doorway. “You’re painting again.”
There was a note of wistful pride in her voice.
“I can’t stop,” I replied, wrapping my hands around the heavy porcelain mug.
“You care about him a lot, don’t you.”
It wasn’t a question. I knew she was seeing the sketches of Theo, all my sleepless nights consumed with the line of his body.
I swallowed. “I love him.”
The words were a whisper, but still, I was proud I even had the courage to say them aloud. It felt like a rebellion, to even stake a claim to love at all, in the face of everything. Love was a luxury, but at the same time, it felt as necessary as air. “It’s my last chance.” I tried to make her see. “I know it’s not much, but it’s all I want. Please, Mom. Can’t you let me have this?”
Mom looked across the room at me. “This shouldn’t be all you get,” she said, and I could see the heartbreak in her eyes. “Can’t we sit down with this doctor, at least? Look at the scans. Boston has some of the best cancer treatment programs in the country. Maybe there’s something new, we haven’t tried just yet. A drug trial, something experimental—”
“Mom!” I cut her off. “Please. We’ve tried everything. Can’t you just let me be, so I can make peace with this?”
She shook her head, abrupt. “No. There’s always something. Can’t you just try, a little longer, for me?”
“I don’t have much longer,” I whispered.
“But a few months, hiding it like a secret . . . I wanted so much more for you—”
Her voice cracked, split wide with grief, and then all that determination in the world couldn’t keep her tears at bay. I watched her unravel right there in front of me, and I realized to my horror, it was the first time.
The only time she’d ever let me see her cry.
“Mom.” I went to her, and wrapped my arms around her tightly, but it wasn’t enough to keep her grief inside. She sobbed against me, those ragged hiccupping cries of someone fighting a losing battle to swallow it back, hold it down, keep it together just once more, just this time. “Mom, it’s OK.”
My words were useless, of course they were. There was nothing OK about this, the torn-up remnants of a future we both clung to with both hands; a sheer rock face with only one way down. So we held each other tight there by the windows, as the city kept up a stream of neon flowing into the night; a thousand tiny charges of electricity racing out through the distant grid. My mother wept, and I did too, not for myself, but for everything I was taking from her.
It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. But it was all we had together, the raw sobs binding us as much as blood. What we wouldn’t have given to take the other’s weight away.
How are you supposed to make sense of this world when death cuts through it, uncaring?
“OK,” I murmured into her hair, my cheeks wet. “We can meet with Doctor Benson. It won’t make a difference, but . . .”
It was the least I could do for her. Parting gifts to ripple in the endless sea of her grief. To me, it felt like screaming into a hurricane, but her sobs eased. “Thank you.” She pulled away, dabbing at red eyes. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I shouldn’t be laying all this on you.”
I gave a hollow smile. “What, so we should still be talking about my split ends?”
She wiped my tears away with her thumbs, cradling my face between her hands. “I’m so proud of you.”
I looked away, flushing. “I haven’t done anything.”
“You have. This. Being here. We were wrong to try and keep you. I just . . .” Her face slipped again. “I just wanted to keep you safe.”
Isn’t that all a parent wants for their child? I guess I would never know.
So I leaned forward instead and kissed her forehead, as if she were the baby for a moment, needing comfort the way I did, those long dark stretches with the nightlight on and a pillow fort built to ward of evil spirits.
“You did, Mom,” I whispered. “You got me this far.”
Neither of us said what we both were thinking.
This far, but no further. No further.
Chapter Twenty-One
We met my dad at the hospital that same evening. When it came to grenades like my tumor, they don’t like to wait around. I lay in the MRI chamber in my new green sweater, my hair brushed out and mascara on my lashes, ready for us to dash across the city in time to make dinner with Theo back at their hotel.
“OK, Claire,” Benson’s voice came through the loudspeaker from where he was stationed in the observation room. “I’ll need you to stay completely still.”
I knew the drill. I’d made this voyage a hundred times, sliding smooth into the belly of the spaceship as the lights danced around me.
“We’re starting now, it won’t be long.”
The whir came, and it began: the magnetic pulses gripping through my body, assembling a map to the constellations hidden behind my skull. When I was younger, it was easy to panic, trapped there like a coffin, but now, it felt like a dream. I drifted, trying hard not to think what this was costing, the endless tally of expenses that blossomed and bloomed with every new hospital trip. Cancer didn’t just eat into our bodies, it ravaged our family’s bank accounts, too. Insurance fought every last charge and test, like they were bitter exes splitting an unwanted restaurant bill. I was lucky, I know; my father had a bulletproof policy, and my mom made it her full-time job to hold them to account, but Hope’s parents went bankrupt long before her final decline. Her bills were paid through the end by a haphazard assortment of charities and loans, and it kills me to think of them now, still making monthly payments on their only daughter’s death.
“Good job, Claire. We’re all set.”
They were finished before I knew it, sliding me out of the chamber and back into the yellow fluorescent lights of the hospital room. I sat up too fast, and had to grip the platform as my head spun and the lights burst, stardust behind my eyes.
“Sweetheart?” My mom opened the door and was beside me in an instant, but I didn’t take her hand. I slid down and stood on my own two feet, waiting until the lurch slipped away before I gave her a smile.
“I’m fine,” I said, and it stuck me just how feeble those words could be, in this room, in this place, with the evidence forming on a screen in the next room.
She smoothed my hair down. “You look lovely. I told you the green was your color.”
“We can’t be late,” I said, pleading.
“I know. Plenty of time.”
We met Doctor Benson in a spare office I knew could never belong to him. He was all neat caution and a pressed white shirt, looking smart and spotless even at this late hour. He glanced around, disgruntled, as we picked our way around stacks of files and books, finding a place to perch.
“Apologies, the conference room is closed. Flooding.”
“That’s fine. We’ve seen worse.” My father was upbeat, gamely shifting a box of supplies off a chair for my mother to sit. I found a spot in the corner, between a half-dead ficus plant and a pile of files three-foot deep. Dust lay in a thin film over the top, dented with fingerprints, and I wondered about the lives bound up between the covers.
“So, I was able to visualize the full mass.” Doctor Benson didn’t even try to sit behind the desk; he leaned against it instead, holding the familiar rubber-banded files that my parents must have shipped in from Texas. “The good news is, Claire’s motor functions and vision are still relatively unaffected,” he began. “Which is no small thing, considering the late stage and extent of the growth.”
Yay me, not yet blind.
“However, I’m concerned about her pain levels, and I’d like to start her on a targeted pain relief program as those symptoms escalate. We are seeing growth in the mass compared to her last scans, but I understand, that was to be expected.”
My father cleared his throat. “And the speed of the growth . . .?”
“Is still what your last doctor discussed,” Benson finished, with a resigned nod. “There’s definite acceleration,.” He showed us the overlay of the films, how the dark traces of my tumor were snaking on through the pale matter of my brain. Shadows looming, storm clouds racing closer.
I turned away, watching the snow fall lightly outside the windows. My parents kept quizzing him, but I already knew the answers. I’d heard them a dozen times over; there would be no changing them now. Still, my mom reached to squeeze my hand and ask, “Now that you’ve been able see it up close, do you have any other ideas for treatment? Anything at all?”
Doctor Benson paused to glance at me. “I thought the decision had been made to focus on end-of-life care.”
“It has,” I answered for them, but Mom couldn’t stay silent. She pulled a crumpled sheaf of printouts from her purse.
“I’ve been researching, and an experimental trial was just approved at Johns Hopkins. And there’s a new treatment, a surgical protocol that you’ve been testing here—”
“Mom,” I tried to interrupt, but she pressed on.
“I was talking with a woman whose kid is in the first test group, she says this is specifically for tumors like Claire’s.”
Benson looked reluctant. “The FDA approved human trials last month, and we have begun a limited test group, it’s true. But this is very early in the process,” he added. “We’re still refining the process, and I’m not sure, given that Claire has already decided to end treatment—”
“What he means is, it hasn’t worked yet.” I cut him off bluntly. “I’m right, aren’t I?” I was being harsh, but I’d spent years listening to men just like him extolling the possibilities of their new, different trial. I could read between the lines, see the truth lingering, resigned in his dark eyes. “Has anyone even made it through the surgery alive?”
A pause.
“We’ve had limited success,” he admitted. “But we have learned some valuable data to refine the approach.”
“How limited?” I challenged him.
“Of our initial test cohort of ten, we’ve seen positive outcomes in two patients.”
“And the others?”
“They didn’t make it through the surgery.”
Two out of ten. Eight trips to the morgue. That should have been enough for my parents. Even in all their wild longing, they couldn’t argue with odds like that. But instead of accepting the math, Mom just squeezed my hand again. “Would Claire be candidate?” she asked, and the naked hope in her voice made me ache.
“Please, don’t,” I begged quietly. “You heard him. It doesn’t work.”
“It did for two of them,” she corrected me. “And this is how it goes. They fail, and try again. If they’ve learned from the first round of surgeries . . . the chances for the next round are better.”
Her voice quavered; she wanted so desperately to believe, but I was numb to it now. We heard this all the time. Experimental drugs, new radical treatments. Those were the watchwords of the cancer wards, the prayer every broken parent and pleading wife and weeping child offered up to the gods of science. And sometimes, those prayers were answered. Spliced gene therapies, targeted auto-immune programs—they made new advances every year. The brightest minds in the country were waging war on cancers like mine, pouring billions of dollars and every ounce of their limitless imaginations to the campaign. It sounded so determined: we would win the fight, one day. But they weren’t the foot soldiers, gasping in the trenches; they weren’t the ones bruised and bloody in the firing line.
We were the body bags returning home from war.
“Claire does fit our profile,” Doctor Benson admitted. “But it’s an aggressive treatment, and given the risks involved and her preferences . . .”
“I’m not interested.” I said it loudly and got to my feet. “Thank you for taking the time,” I told him. “Mom, Dad? We have dinner, remember?”
Slowly, they followed, shaking the doctor’s hand, offering thanks, wishing him a happy holidays.
“I’m here if you need anything,” he told me. “If you have another incident, have the intern on call page me. And like I said, you’ll need
regular check-ins to manage the pain as things become more advanced.”
I nodded. “I’ve still got some time, though.”
“Yes.” He gave me a faint smile. “Yes, you do.”
My mother didn’t speak until we were in the cab, the lights of Boston blurring bright outside the windows as the snow fell thickly, and I sank deeper into the folds of my new winter coat.
“If you’ll just think about it,” she started, but this time it was my father who cut her off.
“Susan, we agreed.”
“But this is something new,” she protested. “And all the research says it could be the next frontier of treatment.”
“In ten years, maybe,” I told her, trying to stay calm. “But this is the first real trial. It’ll be five, ten rounds before they even start to get it right. You know how this works,” I added, pleading. Just when I thought I’d gotten through to her. Just when I thought we could possibly find peace. “Don’t do this, not now. I have a few months left, good months. Would you rather I died on the operating table tomorrow instead?”
“But if the surgery worked,” my mom protested again, not hearing my stark words. “You heard him, two of them saw positive results.”
“Two!” I exclaimed. “Two people, that’s what you want me to risk everything for? Some long-shot, last-ditch fantasy drug they’ve barely begun to test? You’d really have me walk in there next week and have the surgery, with odds like that?”
She couldn’t reply. The cab driver kept his eyes fixed forward, focused on the wet road.
“I’ve made my choice,” I said, determined.
“To give up.”
“No,” I said quietly, as the city sped by, neon glittering in a shattered snowdrift, great brownstones and office blocks standing watch over us all. “To live. The way Hope never got to do.”
I felt her tense beside me, felt the venom in her words even before they made it out of her lips. “Sometimes I wish you’d never met that girl. All this trouble, over one damn list.”
I set my jaw and gazed out of the window. I didn’t expect her to understand, but it wasn’t just about the list anymore. Back in September, it had seemed like a statement of promise: me going out into the world to taste those precious moments she’d left unfulfilled. But now, with those new shadows looming on my scans, I thought of the last few entries with a new chill.