by Susan Conley
There are thirty or so pink and purple butterflies under a bed of blue clouds. The wings of each butterfly have been carefully drawn to look like the butterflies are in midflight. “It’s so pretty, Aidan,” I say. “It must have taken a lot of work.”
We have to be at Massachusetts General Hospital at eight the next morning for pre-op. The surgery won’t start until about ten. Aidan says, “You have to choose which one you want to be during your surgery—clouds or butterflies.” He looks up at me, waiting, and I realize he’s offering me a way to escape the operating room. How does he know I need this? How has he gotten it so right?
“Which do you want to be?”
“Butterfly,” I decide almost without thinking. “I want to be a butterfly.”
“Okay.” He nods and smiles slightly, like I’ve made a good choice. He stares at the drawing for a minute longer and then points. “Now you can imagine you’re one of these butterflies in this drawing if the surgery hurts.” He pauses again. “Which butterfly do you think is the prettiest? You’ve got to pick one.”
There are so many beautiful butterflies it’s almost impossible to choose, but I point to one. “Okay.” He nods again and seems to approve. “Okay. Now this is your butterfly.” He stares at me briefly, right in the eyes. “Imagine you’re this butterfly during the surgery, okay? Then, whenever you want, you can just fly away.” He says the last part slowly, like he’s giving me the keys to the universe. Then he adds, “You just get up and fly away.” He looks at me for another second, to make sure I’ve got it, then heads to the backyard to play a game of Wiffle ball with my father and Erin and Thorne, who are waiting for him.
When I wake up after the surgery, I seem to be in a hospital bed in Boston overlooking the Charles River. I can tell I’m talking a lot; too much, probably. Lily and Electa and Tony have stopped answering, and they stare at me from the little red couch by the window. I babble about how good I feel and ask if they think I’ll be able to get up soon and take a shower. I wonder when we can have lunch. Tony says slowly, “You seem really good, Sus. I’m surprised by how good you seem.” Then I get up from the bed to go wash my face, dragging my IV pole behind me. My friend Genevieve has sent me an incredible care package with chocolates and hand cream and Swedish fish. I lie back in bed and ask Tony where the candy is.
Dr. Specht comes to check on me and I tell her I can hardly feel the pain. “That’s the morphine talking.” Dr. Specht laughs and checks my chart. “You’re all about the painkillers right now.”
After she leaves, Lily stands up from the couch and hands me a blank writing book with a pale blue cover. “It’s something I got in Italy,” she says. “Maybe for you to write in.” I look at her like she’s crazy. Because there’s nothing to write about here. Nothing worth remembering. I want to tell her I won’t be chronicling this disease. I will be forgetting the IV and the morphine and the view to the river as soon as I leave this blue hospital room.
“Just in case,” she adds. “Because writing might help. Writing might be a way to get through this.” I smile at her and put the book on the table next to the bed. I don’t want to see it again.
When the morphine wears off, the nurse gives me Percocet, which always makes me throw up, and so I do, into a bedpan Tony holds next to the bed. Then quickly the Charles River does not look as sparkling. The Boston sky seems grayer. I become quieter and take a long nap. In the morning Electa drives us to a nearby hotel, and we camp out there for two days: me and Tony and Lily and Electa and Electa’s husband, Jos, who is one of Tony’s best friends and who comes and goes, bringing take-out food. On the second night, they eat Indian curries in their laps and we watch a film on Lily’s computer about two lonely musicians in Prague who almost get together and then don’t. I am not hungry. The sound track is haunting, and I find the movie unbearably sad. I lie on the couch riding out the pain, and the film seems to be about death in the end—loneliness and death. Everyone else in the hotel room enjoys the movie, and it scares me to feel so disconnected from these people I love. I kick the Percocet in the morning. I kick all the painkillers. They’re not doing me any good. And I begin, right away, to feel more pain, but also a lot more like myself.
Now if I lie very still in my old spool bed, with my left arm propped up on a stack of pillows, I can keep the pain from spreading down my ribs. It feels like someone has burrowed a knife into my chest and armpit. The boys have gone to sleep in their beds after snuggling with me while Tony read them a chapter from The Wind in the Willows. He and I hold hands and watch TV news. There was a large earthquake in China two days after we left Beijing. The reports today say that over fifty thousand people have died in Sichuan Province. Tony says Tibetans live in that region, and he thinks the Chinese will see the earthquake as retribution for Tibetan protests this spring.
The next report is about a cyclone in Burma that has killed thousands. The footage shows flooded Burmese villages. Then the story switches back to the fallen-down schools near Chengdu, in central China. I can see parents weeping in the background and others walking the perimeter of heaps of rubble in a daze. It’s a terrible thing to watch—these people in so much private suffering. I close my eyes and wonder what Lao Wu is hearing about the earthquake. He does not have a television. He gets his news from Chinese radio. I hope he doesn’t have family in Sichuan.
Tony finally turns off the TV. I lie in the dark and stare at the ceiling. Tony falls asleep next to me, and I finger the drainage pipe under the sheets—it’s a piece of thin, plastic tubing that comes out of my skin somewhere near the middle of my rib cage. It transfers pinkish fluid from my surgery site into a small plastic bag that hangs off the corset the doctors have fastened me into. We need to get the pipe out soon.
I’m struck then by how cancer is itself a kind of cultural dislocation. I feel more removed from myself—more distanced now from the people I love than I ever did in China. And why all this sadness? My left breast is gone, and the surgeon has replaced it with a silicone implant, which is vaguely unsettling. All I feel there now is numbness. My hope is that the surgeon did all she could do. I hope she got the cancer out.
During the next week friends come. I sit on my mother’s couch and try to take in the faces of these women I love. I’ve missed them these last nine months in China. But now sometimes my connection to them feels fleeting. I see them, but I can’t really hear them. It’s as if the cancer has somehow separated me from them. I’m astonished at how much work it is to try to talk. I nod my head. I smile. But I’m not even me anymore. I’m someone different—someone with this loss. I just can’t explain it yet.
Sometimes I’m distracted now around the boys. Detached. I can’t quite get my hands on them—I can’t hug them yet because of the tube and the plastic drainage bag, and I can’t move my left arm because of the pain. I don’t feel entirely like their person anymore. Maybe I’m a different version of myself—a woman with a fake left breast pretending to be their mother. And I have to give a lot of the parenting up to the group. While I was in the hospital, the boys took to the game of Wiffle ball with even more ferocity. Now they spend hours batting and pitching with imaginary base runners and outfielders. There are so many friends who take Thorne and Aidan away for swimming and pizza and ice cream. Tony’s brother, Peter, keeps shuttling the boys to the YMCA to shoot hoops. I can’t think too much about the distance between the boys and me right now or it makes me sad.
Tuesday marks one week since my mastectomy, and I walk downtown to buy flaxseed at the health food store in Bath. I’ve read that it helps stave off cancer. I’m busy now looking for a cure. For an elixir. I’m trying to keep the sadness at bay. The walk takes ten minutes and it’s my longest since the surgery. People go in and out of the local bank and Wilson’s Drugstore, but there’s no larger white noise here, just the sound of wind and the river down below.
Beijing was so loud—the crashing of bulldozers and cranes and the screeching of truck brakes. I pass a woman I recognize on the side
walk, the mother of a friend from middle school who says she’d heard I was in China. She asks me if the Chinese people were nice to me. I smile because I never know how to answer this question; it always seems beside the point. I want to say that there are so many other things I could tell her about China.
On Wednesday, my friend Katie flies up from Brooklyn to see me. We take a slow walk down to the river. There’s an explosion of tulips and hydrangeas and trellis roses along the way. After lunch in a café, we stand under a lilac tree in my parents’ driveway and we talk about cancer and about our love for our children. And it feels like we can talk for days. Then Katie says, “I love the smell of lilacs. It’s spring to me.”
I smile and say, “Yes. That’s it.” I am so glad she’s come. I’m done talking now. Exhausted. And happy we can sit in the backyard quietly now and watch.
I’m learning that cancer tends to live in a wordless place. On Saturday, a friend of my mother’s named Judith arrives. I’ve been wearing the hospital corset for almost ten days, and it’s begun to make grooves and small sores in the skin along my rib cage. Judith has just finished her EMT shift for the Brunswick Fire Department. She has me sit on the couch so she can unzip the front flap of the corset and unpin the plastic tubing and remove the pouch attached to the tubing that holds the pink runoff. Then she begins to rub cream on my skin. She doesn’t talk, except to say that the doctors made the corset too tight. It feels good to have the thing off.
I’ve come to feel as if I’m bobbing in a lake where only people with cancer swim. It’s a big lake. My husband is sitting by my side on the floor next to the couch holding the tubing while Judith massages me. But he is not in the lake. Only people with cancer can be in the lake. So where Tony is could best be described as on the shore waiting for me to come back. Maybe he is rummaging in the forest for wood to make a fire to keep us warm. But the biggest surprise of all is still that Tony is not in the lake. That he’s never going to be able to swim in the lake. He doesn’t have cancer. The thin line between having and not having seems malleable sometimes, but for me that line is everything. It separates. I lie on the couch after Judith leaves and hold on to Tony’s hand until I feel most of the solitude wash away.
Decade by Decade
The words lymph nodes keep playing in my head. Lymph nodes. Lymph nodes. On Monday the pathology report is in, and Tony and I speed south on I-95. I’m too nervous. Tony has the radio turned up to a story about huge profits in the oil industry. The second story is about the earthquake in China. So is the third. One reporter looks at the psychological effects of the quake. Another examines the crowded refugee camps. The latest statistics say fifty-one thousand are dead. Twenty-nine thousand remain missing. Five million are homeless, and the number is sure to grow. The Chinese government has asked the world to send six million tents.
Tony and the boys and I had been planning to take a train to Chengdu for the spring break in May until we had to leave early. There’s a panda preserve north of the city in Wolong that’s been destroyed in the quake. Most of the pandas in the world live in this swath of wrecked land in central southern China.
One of the mud flaps on a flatbed truck we pass reads, “Jesus is Lord.” The other says, “Driving for God.” The fourth radio story takes us back to oil because today the price of one barrel has spiked to $135. We pass a gas station near Kittery with a sign outside: “Worms and crawlers for sale cheap.” I see an old Chrysler sedan up ahead with a large digital photo of Jesus Christ laminated to the back window. “Oh,” I say to Tony. “Look at that.” The car speeds onto the highway from the right and never yields. The whole time I was in Beijing, I never saw one image of Jesus Christ.
Tony puts on his blinker and moves to the left lane to make room. The picture of Jesus takes up most of the car’s back window. “Wouldn’t see that in China,” he says, reading my mind.
When we get to the hospital, I sit down in the oncologist’s office and the first thing Dr. Holland tells me is she hopes I live at least fifty more years. This is her goal for me, she explains, and I think it’s a worthy one, but I’m surprised by her candor. It takes me a minute to realize we’re talking seriously about how many years I have left to live. I announce I’m entirely on board with her plan. But what I want to say is could we skip this because this part is too depressing.
Then Dr. Holland says we’ll solve my health problems “decade by decade.” She explains that the pathology shows I have a good chance of being alive in ten years. “That’s when your sons will graduate from high school,” she says. “That’s not so bad, is it? In fact, that’s good,” she adds.
“It is?” I ask. But the words I want to say are What language are you speaking? Is there some piece of the pathology report I’ve missed? The lymph nodes are clear. Alive to see the boys graduate from high school? I can reach out and touch high school. I want college. I want weddings. Grandchildren. What I learn next is that there was a third tumor hiding in the mastectomy tissue. Dr. Holland puts a good face on it—and almost tricks me into believing her. She says I’ve gotten a B today instead of an A on the story of my cancer.
I’m sitting in the small, windowless office and Dr. Holland’s face begins to spin. This is the sneaky thing cancer does—it displaces me. I believe it’s ten in the morning on a Tuesday in Boston, but then I’m cast adrift on some roiling swell of mortality. I close my eyes. Thinking of my kids helps. Last night when I tucked Aidan into bed, he reached for me and announced, “This hug will be for ten minutes.”
Chinese Blessing
Rose has sent me to Maine with a tiny brass charm in a green silk pouch. I carry it with me everywhere. On the small card inside the bag she’s written:
Susan Conley will be okay!
Susan Conley will be fine!
Susan Conley will be all right!
It’s a Chinese blessing she’s translated into English that I’m supposed to keep near me always.
At the bottom of the blessing, she’s written:
Dear Susan,
I’ll be here in Beijing, waiting for you to come back and continue your Chinese lessons.
Rose
You Are Here
July comes and Tony flies back to China. He writes me an e-mail when he lands in Beijing, remembering our first road trip together, when we drove eighteen hours to Baja for the weekend. We camped in the desert on a futon mattress we pulled from the back of the truck. I woke up in the sand on the first night and looked at millions of tiny stars in the sky. “Tony,” I said and grabbed his arm while he slept. I hardly knew him. But I also already knew him entirely. “Tony, where are we?”
He sat up too and stared at the Mexican sky and said slowly, “I don’t know where we are.” Then we both lay down and put our arms around each other and went back to sleep.
The next week Tony cooked Chinese noodles in his rented house in San Francisco. He loved to make dinner for crowds in his big, iron wok. He still does. That night he wore a long-sleeved blue T-shirt that had the solar system printed on it in white. The words “You Are Here” were written next to planet Earth with a small arrow. He’d worn the T-shirt to give me the answer I’d needed back in Baja. You Are Here. He turned to me from where he stood at the stove and smiled his calm smile, and I swear that night was when I knew I would marry him.
After Tony leaves, the boys and I move out of town to an old cottage that our family’s had for thirty years. There’s room for all of us—my parents; my sister, Erin, who comes again in August to help; my brother, John, his wife, Jenna, and their sweet baby, Lyla. This place used to be a boys’ camp in the 1800s, and the names of the campers—William St. John, Ezra Sturm, Henry Keyes—are still carved in the walls of the upstairs bedrooms.
I drive into town every day for radiation, but mostly I lie on the couch and look at the ocean. More than anything, I have missed seeing this body of water. I like to watch it change moods. The ocean to me suggests greatness. It suggests prehistoric whales and huge expanses of time. There are
lobster traps out in front, and the same tall, spindly blue heron stands in the cove on one foot. You can pick blueberries from the bush while you walk to the car.
This morning the boys eat Cheerios while we look out at a big fog. The air is thick and reminds me of the worst smog in Beijing. The Sound of Music plays on the CD player, and Thorne sings along to every word of “Do-Re-Mi.”
“Stop, Thorne,” Aidan says. “Too loud.” He’s working hard on a drawing of a sheep.
“Why don’t you just listen to the music,” I suggest to Thorne. Then he announces out of nowhere that he’s mad at me because I’m already forty.
“I wish you were only thirty,” Thorne says with a serious face. I put down the article I’m reading about vitamins I need to boost my immune system. “You’re forty,” Thorne says again. “So that means you only have forty more years to live.”
If you only knew, I want to say to him. If you only had any idea of how hard I’m working to pull off the next ten. “But I’m going to live until I’m one hundred,” I say, and smile at him, half believing myself.
“You are?” He smiles back. “Can you live until two hundred?”
I say, “Only a certain kind of tortoise from the Galápagos Islands can.” Then Aidan puts down his sheep drawing and stands up with a dreamy look on his face. Do these boys know what I would do for them? Now that the tubing is out and the corset is off, my love for them is more accessible. I do not need as much distance from them. I don’t need to take as many breaks in the room inside my head.
“Mom.” Aidan stares at me intently. “Are there invisible people who can go in and out of our bodies like the wind?”
I look him in the eye and say back equally seriously, “Aidan. I just don’t know.”