When I get back inside, Noah comes over to me and holds out his arms, and we finally dance.
I put my head on his shoulder, and I say, “Are you feeling a little better? Did you get something to eat?” This is probably a very wifely thing to say, and I realize he’s probably resenting the hell out of it.
“Yes,” he says in a weary voice. “Yes, I’m better. I ate some protein.”
I feel so careful around him. “Good. And you were singing a lot, you and Whipple. That must have been okay, right?”
Then who knows what makes me brave enough to say this—maybe it’s all the alcohol I’ve had, or Blix’s words, or the fact that I’m feeling disconnected from reality—but I say the scary thing: “What’s next, do you think?”
“I dunno. The honeymoon?”
“Okay,” I say. “What about tonight?”
“What do you mean? Tonight we’re going to the hotel and we’re going to have great sex and sleep late. Like newlyweds.”
There are some other things I want to know. Like, is he going to be my husband? And am I really his wife? Are those words we can use? He puts his arms around me and we slow dance to another song, and then they turn the lights on, and I see that Noah’s eyes have no light in them. The air around him is a muddy beige I’ve never noticed before.
So I guess my first miracle will have to be to try to light him back up.
FIVE
BLIX
It’s a week after the wedding and I’m back home now. My tumor wakes me up before sunrise. It is thrumming right below the surface of my skin, like something alive, running under its own power.
Hi, love, it says. What shall we do today?
“Sweetheart,” I say to it. “I was hoping for just a little more sleep this morning. Would you very much mind if we did that—and then later we can talk and do whatever you want.”
The tumor hardly ever goes for this kind of reasoning. And why should it? It knows I’m at its mercy. I’ve made friends with it because I don’t believe in that whole battle metaphor for disease. You always read about that in obituaries, you know—“So and so battled cancer for five years” or worse, “He lost his battle with cancer.” I do not believe cancer appreciates that kind of thinking. And anyway, I’ve made nice with trouble my whole life, and I’ve noticed that what happens is that problems just curl right up like declawed kittens and nestle at your feet and fall asleep. Later, you look down, and they’ve wandered off somewhere. You bid them a fond farewell and get back to what you wanted to do in the first place.
In the interest of friendliness, I have given my tumor a name: Cassandra. She was the prophet nobody believed.
I turn over in the bed and listen to Houndy softly snoring beside me, his grizzled, beautiful face tipped toward mine. I lie there in the grayness of dawn and watch him breathe in and out and feel the magic of the city waking up. After a long time, the sun comes up for real, and a long time after that, the 6:43 bus comes wheeling around the corner and hits the pothole at its usual breakneck speed, causing the metal chassis to complain and screech as it always does. The windowpanes shudder. Somewhere, if I listen, there’s a siren starting up.
An early summer morning in Brooklyn. The heat is already pressing against the window. I close my eyes and stretch. Cassandra, satisfied that I’m awake, goes back to whatever she was doing before she felt the call to wake me up. Sometimes she is as silent and worn out as time, and sometimes she’s a rascally kindergartener wanting only to thump against something living.
I place my hand against her, and sing her a little song in my head.
Call me crazy, but the day I named her Cassandra, I also started giving her nice things to wear. Some days, when she is fierce and hot, I picture her in a hard hat, and other days—like maybe today—I think of her in a lacy dress and invite her for tea. I tell her to imagine she has been given the most delicate and beautiful of my china cups, the one I hang on the hook over the stove.
“I will not forsake you,” I say to Cassandra. “I know you came for a reason, even though I’ll be goddamned if I can figure out what that is.”
Last week, when I got back from the wedding, on a day when I was nearly doubled over in pain, I gave myself a huge reward for making it through and to celebrate meeting Marnie. I told Houndy and Lola that I’d found the person I’d been waiting for all my life, the someone I probably knew from many other lifetimes, and who was my spiritual daughter. And then I painted the refrigerator bright turquoise. I was so proud of myself for not letting anyone in my family know that I am dying that I had to paint the refrigerator as my own little reward.
Houndy—sweet old family-oriented Houndy—thinks I should just tell my family about the mass. “Why not?” he says. “Don’t they deserve to know? Maybe they’d want to be nicer to you.”
Ha! My family wouldn’t want to be nicer to me. They’d want me locked up in some hospital, treating Cassandra with needles and knives and making me talk to doctors, people who would speak to me in that condescending, medical way, people with clipboards and appointment books and computers. Office assistants who would speak too loudly in my presence, as if Cassandra had somehow interfered with my ability to hear.
No thank you. I went to the doctor and got my diagnosis, which I will not dignify by using its medical terminology, because to say the words makes it feel fatal and incurable, and I refuse to go with that. Except I will say this: I got up from the examination table, and put my clothes back on, thank you very much, and I tore up the pieces of paper they gave me—the treatment plan—and I walked out. And I will not go back.
If Cassandra leaves my body—and she may, it could still happen—it will be of her own volition, and this will be the reason: our work together is done. I don’t want to die, but neither am I afraid. I won’t use chemotherapy or put poison into my body. I won’t suffer. Instead, I have taken energy drinks and done chants; I have consulted a shaman in an African village online; I have buried talismans and sowed seeds and performed yoga poses at midnight under a full moon. I have danced and primal screamed and practiced laughing out loud and had massages and acupuncture. And Reiki.
And by the look of things, Cassandra is thriving. So you know what that means? It means it’s the way things are supposed to be.
So I am going to die. Most natural thing in the world to have happen. Life ends.
And I’m okay with that. It’s just a change of address, really. It doesn’t have to be awful.
I sigh, kick off the sheets because I’m suddenly hot, and then I close my eyes and tune in to the conversation the pigeons are having on the windowsill. They always sound like they’re on the verge of figuring everything out.
Later, I get up and go to what Houndy calls my crazy-ass kitchen to make tea. Funny, these old Brooklyn brownstones. This one has a parquet floor that once was probably grand but which now slopes down to the outside wall. It’s a floor with personality, all pocked and scarred from a century of footsteps and bootheels and water leaks and even worse grievances than those. And a high tin ceiling with a glaring fluorescent ring of light in its yellowed center—a light I never turn on because it’s harsh. It promotes ugliness, that light. Instead, I’ve put lamps all around. Warm, yellowish light to give softness.
Houndy says we could get the floor made level and maybe have the stairs replaced in the front of the house, get the roof fixed. He’s a do-something kind of guy, not one to sit around and watch the metal rust. Finally I had to say to him that I am all about slowing down all that striving. I just want to enjoy the sun coming through the cracks near the windows. I am tired of making so much effort.
He doesn’t take much convincing to see the point of things I say, and that’s why I let him come and live here and sleep in my bed next to me. We never got married because I’ve finally learned that if you have to bring the law into your personal relationships, then you’re doing it wrong. And both Houndy and I have done it wrong plenty of times before. So we’ve just been skating along together for
twenty-plus years.
We met right after his son died, when Houndy was in such a bad way, in such grief he couldn’t even catch himself any lobsters anymore. Lobsters just walked on by his traps and got in other people’s traps, and Houndy was so battered by life he didn’t even care all that much except he was going to starve to death. So somebody told him to come see me, and I chanted some words of power summoning the forces of plenty, and put my hands on his heart—and after that lobsters started standing in line to get in his traps.
He brought me some one night to show me my spell had worked, and we stayed up late and ate lobsters and drank some homemade wine I had, and then—I don’t know how it got started—we found ourselves dancing, and of course, dancing is the gateway drug to kissing, and somehow that night Houndy brought the laughter back into my eyes. And maybe I did us a little love spell that has always stood me in good stead when I’ve needed it. So here we are, two decades later: me doing my words of power and finding love for people when I can and him bringing me his old craggy Brooklyn self and his scratchy chin and his happy snoring. And lobsters.
And in the mornings I fix him poached eggs and salmon and make him smoothies that have plenty of antioxidants, and bread that I’ve baked, filled with seeds and sprouts. And then we sit outside in the sun on the roof and listen to the city moving beneath us and feel the energy of life. Well, I do. Houndy sits next to me and smiles like he’s the Buddha or something, even though I don’t think he has a spiritual cell in his body. Maybe that’s why the universe sent him to me: we’re counterbalanced. The universe always likes things to have a balance to them.
A door slams upstairs, and the building’s day begins.
Voices on the stairs: “Did you get your lunch from the countertop . . . and did you get a pencil? And since it’s the last day of school, you won’t have aftercare, so you’ll come home on the bus, and then . . . well, you and I will call each other. Right?”
“I’ll call you every week.”
“No, every day. Sammy, promise me. Every day!”
And then, there are two sets of footsteps clomping downstairs—Jessica’s sandals carefully slapping on the wood and Sammy’s exuberant sneakers—and Sammy knocks his scooter against my door as he passes just like he always does. It’s supposedly an accident, and Jessica says she tries to get him not to do it, but I always tell her I don’t mind. It’s our ritual. Sammy is leaving for the day, and he wants me to see him out.
I jump up and go to the back door and throw it open, and there he is in the hall, the sweetest boy, ten years old with his yellow hair sticking up, and his pale, fair skin practically see-through in the light from my kitchen windows, peering at the world through those adorable giant round glasses he loves. And he’s grinning at me.
“SamMEE!” I say, and we do a fist bump, which is hard because of the scooter he’s carrying and the outsized New York Mets backpack he’s wearing. Jessica’s next to him with her harried morning face, and as usual she’s juggling her cup of coffee, her bag, the car keys, and her one thousand worries, and at any moment she could drop any of it except the worries.
But today she also looks like she’s about to burst into tears. Not only is it Sammy’s last day of school—but for the very first time, his dad, whom Jessica hates in the way you can only hate somebody you once loved beyond reason, is going to take Sammy upstate to stay with him and his mysterious new girlfriend—whom Jessica had never even seen—for a whole month. The court said this had to happen, and Jessica fought it for as long as humanly possible, but now today is the day. When she got the news, she asked me if there was any way Houndy and I could hand Sammy over to the ex, since she didn’t think she could do it without falling apart. So we’re going to.
Sammy says, “Blix! Blix! Guess what! Did you know that when I come back from my dad’s I’m gonna know how to play the drums?”
“What? You’re going to be even more amazing than you already are?” I say, high-fiving him three more times. “You’re going to play the drums?”
He rocks back on his heels and grins at me and nods. “I’m going to drummer camp.”
Jessica rolls her eyes. “Yeah, well, we’ll see. Andrew makes a lot of promises he can’t keep.”
“Moooommmm,” says Sammy. “He’s gonna do it!”
“Let’s hope so,” says Jessica grimly. Poor thing, she is a woman who has been given more than she thought she could handle, including a cheating husband and a boy who is sort of quirky. She’s always twisting her rings around and around on her hands and looking worried. I’m always beaming love toward her, and watching as she gets bombarded with all the little love particles, but so far none of them seem to have landed in a permanent way. I think she’s kind of enjoying being furious with her ex for now, if you want to know the truth. It’s hard to make room for love when anger still feels so good.
“So, Sammy my boy,” I say, “Houndy and I will meet you at the bus stop outside and then we’ll all hang out here to wait for your dad.”
“Wait. Mama’s not going to stay with me?”
“No, babycakes. Today you get me and Houndy and some chocolate chip cookies.”
He turns to Jessica with his tiny, serious eyes. “Is it because you’re too sad to say good-bye to me?”
She has one of those faces that shows every single one of her thoughts marching across, and now she has about fifty-seven thoughts at once, most of them tragic. “I-I have to work late today, so I thought Blix could meet up with your daddy instead.” She fiddles with her keys, wipes at her eyes, gets busy shuffling her bag over to her other shoulder.
“It’s okay,” says Sammy. He tucks his hand into hers. “I know. You’re too sad to see my daddy take me. But it’s going to be okay, Mama.”
You see? This is when I want to rush in, slather them with love.
“I just—I want you to go off and be happy,” she says. “But—”
No, I think. I send her a STOP message. Don’t say the next part, that you don’t want him to love his daddy and the new girlfriend more than he loves you.
She clears her throat, and our eyes meet. She’s about to cry. So I go over and hug her and him both, mostly so I can block her from saying that she’s terrified that Sammy’s not going to want to come back to her. That the drum lessons and the novelty of attention from his father and his dad’s girlfriend are going to make him want to stay away forever. That she’s afraid her world with him, the world of homework and sadness and the grind of school, can never measure up to a month in the Berkshires. With a lake and a drum camp.
Ah, love. Why does it have to get all convoluted? I’ve been eighty-five years on this planet, and I still think the universe could have worked out a better system than this stumbling mess we find ourselves in.
I kiss Sammy on the top of his delicious little head and tell him I’ll see him later; I squeeze Jessica’s arm—and then they’re off, but first she turns and gives me a look, a tearful look that says all is lost.
All is not lost, I beam to her.
I’m always beaming love messages and light over to Jessica, but Lola, next door, who is keeping score, says that Jessica’s negative vibes are so far winning against my efforts. Lola jokingly claims to have an Excel spreadsheet on what she calls my Human Being Projects and that she can tell me just how all of them are going on any given date. The numbers would show, she says, that my Jessica Project might be a little bit lacking in success, which doesn’t mean a thing, of course, because, as I’ve explained to Lola, everything can reverse in an instant when the vibes change.
And if you want to know the truth, my Lola Project might need some tending, too. She’s been a widow forever, which she claims is fine, but I happen to know that, with just a tiny bit of courage, she could be having the time of her life and could love again. I keep calling for the universe to send her love, doing little love spells here and there when I think of them. But Lola—she can’t see it.
So I have Jessica and Lola . . . and now I also have Mar
nie.
And oh yes, then there’s Patrick.
Houndy comes into the kitchen, scratching his huge, round belly and smiling. “Is that our boy off to school already?”
“Yep, and today’s the day he’s going away for a month to see his dad.”
“Oh, no! I’ve got to tell him good-bye!”
“You’ll see him later. We’re—”
But Houndy’s already bounding off, going out the back door and down the stairs, and I hear him reach Sammy and Jessica, and hear them all talking at once. And then after a bit, he comes clomping back up the stairs, winded as hell, with Lola following him, wearing her lavender housedress and carrying a cardboard tray of cups filled with iced coffee that she goes and buys every morning even though it makes no sense at all. We can make our own coffee. But that’s Lola; she’s been my best friend forever, in this life and probably about five lives before this one, if you believe in that sort of thing and I do, so I don’t question her. I start throwing fruit into the blender to make us our daily kale-strawberry smoothies, and Lola gets out the frying pan to fix the eggs for the mushroom omelet that we’ll take up onto the roof. We all have our jobs to do to get breakfast going.
“By the way,” says Houndy while he’s collecting the plates and silverware. “I told Jessica she might as well come up after work. Have a glass of wine so she just doesn’t go home and cry herself to sleep. That girl—she always looks like she’s going to fall apart.”
The phone rings just then, and it’s Patrick. The phone seems to ring in an altogether different tone when it’s him.
He lives in the basement apartment—the one that’s almost completely underground, which he claims suits him perfectly—and he’s calling to find out if a package was delivered for him yesterday. I tell him no but invite him up for eggs and mushrooms anyway. He’s an introvert of the highest order, and so he hesitates and says he might come, only first he’s got to write all the symptoms of all the diseases that have ever been recorded and invent a computer program that will cure Alzheimer’s, so he’ll probably be busy for a while getting that done.
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