“Just got a text from work,” Jenna announced. “They want me to write the Motion to Dismiss.” She wasn’t pretending to be happy. She genuinely loved her job, and the prospect of more work on a weekend didn’t dampen her spirits one bit.
So the moment church was over, one friend fled to her apologetic, maybe-boyfriend, and the other to her fast paced, lucrative career. I was by myself in the parking lot, facing a day of puttering around the house. I couldn’t paint, as it was the Sabbath and, unlike Jenna, I didn’t have any projects that just couldn’t wait because some corporation was in danger of losing a big case. As all of the other cars pulled out and drove off, I felt this was a metaphor for my life. Everyone was moving on, except me. I was left behind, standing at the curb.
“You okay, Eliza?”
I turned to see Len coming out of the building, a notebook under one arm and a courier bag slung over his shoulder. As always, his PDA was in his hand. Just before the door swung shut behind him, his housemate, Chris, caught it and shouldered his way through. “Frogger marathon at our house,” he said to me. “You should come.” He kept on walking right past, though. It wasn’t a real invitation.
Nerds had a weird sense of humor.
Len came over to stand next to me and looked as if he wasn’t sure I’d let him stay there. Chris got in his car and zipped away out of the nearly empty parking lot. The day was dead quiet, not even much of a breeze.
“You really going to play Frogger all afternoon?” I asked.
“No. He’s mad because I beat his high score.”
“Here.” I dug in my purse and produced the Winnie the Pooh DVD.
Len glanced at it. “Thanks.” He reached out to take it.
I didn’t let go. “Unless you still want to come over and watch it?”
“Okay.”
And that began our ritual. Whenever I was lonely, I could call on Len and he’d be there with a DVD in hand. Or sometimes we went out to the movies, or occasionally I’d show up at his house and he’d microwave me a burrito. And then I’d kiss him and sign myself up for another couple of weeks of dating. His kisses were addictive, though, like hard candy out of a dish. Each one good enough that you kept going back for more and the next thing you know, the dish was empty, even though you hadn’t planned to eat that many.
With Len, I emptied and refilled that dish over, and over, and over. I don’t know what made me feel worse, the fact that I used the guy, or the fact that all those months of using him didn’t cause me to miss a better option. There just wasn’t a better option.
I blinked away these memories and stared at the painting I’d just done. The park looked drenched in sunshine. In the distance, dreaming spires jutted up from the trees, giving the merest suggestion of the ornate stone building beneath the canopy. My aunt sat with her knees to her chin and faced away from the viewer, so she was little more than an oval of shyness. Lounging opposite her was Paul. The expression on his face told the viewer that the woman he beheld was gorgeous beyond imagination. He saw her intelligence and her courage, and he was captivated. I could read a thousand emotions in that face, which acted as a mirror for my aunt.
This painting was good. It was better than good. It was better than I could normally do with a ton of pre-planning. For once, I’d just sat down and painted and the final product looked better than I’d envisioned.
I was definitely turning a corner! I was becoming a better painter. Or perhaps my aunt’s stories were finally giving my work the spark it had always lacked. I’d worked for years on channeling my emotions into my art, but hadn’t noticed that the well of emotion had gone dry. It was filling up again and this brought new color and life to my art.
I wanted to cling to these positive memories of love and Nora’s youth. I hoped against hope that tomorrow or the next day wouldn’t sour these for me.
Before I went to bed that night, I knelt for a long time in prayer. I begged the Lord to spare my aunt and to strengthen me to deal with whatever was to come, if sparing her wasn’t in His plans. It was the kind of prayer that left me feeling wrung out, but at peace for the moment. It let me get myself to sleep.
I got to St. John’s early the next morning. A woman with freckles across her nose and strawberry blond hair stood at the nurses’ station, flipping through files with a cheery smile on her face.
“Hi,” I said to her.
“Yes?” The smile widened and crinkled her button nose. Her eyes were hazel behind strawberry blond lashes.
“I’m Nora Chesterton’s niece. Eliza.”
“Hi. She’s not awake yet.”
“Has the doctor been by to discuss her scans with her?”
“Give me a second.” She rummaged through the stack of files on the counter, then cast about until she spied another stack. A moment later she tugged my aunt’s file loose and flipped it open. She frowned. “Right.”
I braced myself. Was her cancer stage two? Three?
“The oncologist would like to speak with you.”
“With me?”
“Yes. Hang on. I’ll ring him.”
“Well, I’m going to go see my aunt. He can find me in her room.”
“She’s still asleep, though.”
I’d heard her before. With a nod, I moved on past the nurses’ station to my aunt’s room. Nora’s eyelashes fluttered when I walked in, but otherwise she didn’t stir. Her breathing was still slow and deep. Her throat just barely scraped a soft snore every time she inhaled.
Breakfast was set out next to her bed on the rolling table and her jeans were draped over the other chair in the room.
I tugged the clean clothes I’d brought her out of my bag and laid them down on the edge of the bed, then flipped open my sketchbook and started on a sketch of Christ’s suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane. I needed to get back to the kind of work that paid the bills. This was a subject I sketched a lot, because it was so hard to convey. It was literally the worst suffering anyone had ever felt in all of human history.
So I never did a sketch of his face or his whole figure close up. I’d done a picture of his hands, gripping the rough surface of a boulder. One of his back, his head so far down it was out of sight and his hunched posture conveying all. I’d done one of a teardrop that showed the reflection of the sleeping Apostles who should have been there for the Savior, but had dozed off.
This time I sketched a rough outline of the garden at night, with Christ’s figure down in the corner. Sort of like the Fall of Icarus, a momentous event that passed almost unseen. The Apostles were asleep and oblivious, and the nighttime sky was endless and eternal above it all.
Much about this event was shrouded even in the scriptures, given the only witnesses slept through it. There was, however, a passage in the Doctrine and Covenants, a revelation given to Joseph Smith by the Savior himself.
For behold, I, God, have suffered these things for all, that they might not suffer if they would repent;
But if they would not repent they must suffer even as I;
Which suffering caused myself, even God, the greatest of all, to tremble because of pain, and to bleed at every pore, and to suffer both body and spirit—and would that I might not drink the bitter cup, and shrink—
Nevertheless, glory be to the Father, and I partook and finished my preparations unto the children of men.
In that moment, the story went, Christ had felt all the pain any human had ever felt. He’d felt the pain of my mother’s cancer, the heartbreak of my brothers-in-law and nieces and nephews when they lost their wives and mothers, the sensation of reality ripping to shreds I felt every time I lost someone I loved. And these pains were such a small fraction of the whole, they would be to His pain as a pinprick to being flayed alive.
I set up each part of the sketch with precision, making use of every space. The sky had to look endless and the stars distant in order to enlarge the world and make Christ even smaller in comparison. The Apostles were out cold, dead to the world and at peace, which was a
stark contrast to the angles of pain that the Savior felt. The garden was quiet and contained dark shadows, corners where anything could lurk. This made Christ more vulnerable as he sat without guards, wracked with pain.
The over all picture wasn’t coming together like I wanted. I planned to do the final version in acrylics, but even without the vivid colors, I could see that something wasn’t right. The magic that had happened last night was not happening again like I hoped it would.
“Ahem.”
I twisted around in my chair. A man with south Asian features and a white doctor’s coat stood in the doorway. His hair was streaked with gray and his nose had a Roman kink in it. His eyes were a light honey brown that peered at me with curiosity.
A glance over my shoulder confirmed that my aunt was still asleep. “Should I wake her?”
“Are you...” He glanced at the file. “Eliza Dunmar?”
“Yeah.”
“Why don’t you and I talk?” He looked at my open sketchbook with interest. “You draw?”
“I’m a professional artist.”
“Oh, right.” He raised both eyebrows in that expression I knew all too well, a mix of “that’s impressive” and “really? Do you actually make money doing that?”
I looked away from him to hide my irritation as I flipped my sketchbook shut. He stayed where he was in the doorway, which I took to mean that I needed to get up and follow him somewhere. Sure enough, when I got to my feet, he stepped back and gestured that I should precede him into the hallway.
“Just to the office down here,” he said. He pointed to an open door near the nurses’ station, which belonged to a small box of a room with a utilitarian metal desk with particleboard top. A dusty computer whirred away and displayed a screensaver of swimming tropical fish.
“I’m Dr. Singh, by the way.” He pulled out a plastic chair for me and snagged a rolling stool for himself. The door swung shut with a nudge from his heel. “I wanted to go over what we found in the MRI.” He extracted the silver disk of a CD from its cardboard sleeve and inserted it into the computer’s drive.
I braced myself. MRIs always squicked me out. They looked like the person had been sliced thin, mounted on a slide, and photographed in black and white. This image was of my aunt’s intestines, mostly.
“The womb is here.” He indicated a black, hollow area with his finger. “One ovary there.” That was a grayish bump that could’ve been anything. “No ovary here, but what looks like a tumor mass here.” He pointed to another bump. “What concerns me is that I think this might be another tumor here, and I’d like a better image of this.” He pointed to more gray lumps. “This is rather close to the lymph nodes. I take it you know what that means?”
“Um, yes.” Lymph nodes formed a network throughout the body. If cancer got into them, it had a free ride throughout the system. “I’ve seen that happen before, multiple times.”
“Yes, I saw the family history. I’d like to get more images,” he said, “but I hear your aunt is being quite stubborn.”
“I’ll talk to her.”
“How has she been lately? Does she complain about aches or anything of that sort?”
“She just sleeps all the time and barely eats.”
At that the doctor frowned.
“What?” I asked.
“Those are symptoms of late stage cancer. Do you think that she knows this? That she’s avoided treatment for that reason?”
“She’s scared of hospitals. Negative associations.”
“From her own past hospitalizations?”
“No, from family dying.”
“That’s interesting that you say that. If you look here-” he pointed to some squiggles on the MRI that meant nothing to me “-you’ll see she’s had surgery before. I’d like to know what that was, but it’s not in her British medical history. Neither is the broken arm she had-”
“What? She just broke her arm.”
“For at least the second time.” He tipped an x-ray out of a large folder, snapped it open expertly, and tucked it into the top clamp of a light panel on the wall. It showed both bones in the forearm snapped in a clean break. “There,” he said, pointing to a whitish line up towards the elbow. “An old break.”
“How old?”
“As it isn’t in her medical history either, I don’t know. We don’t have records that date back to her time in America.”
I rubbed my temples.
“Are you sure her behavior isn’t because she wants to avoid cancer treatment? Not medical treatment in general, but cancer treatment in particular?”
“Would an x-ray of her arm really show cancer?” I asked.
“Fair point. But maybe she’s wanted to avoid all medical care once she developed cancer symptoms.”
I didn’t want that to be true. “I’ll talk to her.”
“All right, but I need to discuss one thing more with you. Just briefly. I’m able to show you her medical records because she authorized it.”
“Right.”
“In her living will. You are her agent, and if we determine she’s incompetent to make her own decisions, you then make the decisions.”
“Whoa, what?”
“I wasn’t sure if you knew that or not. You should be aware of it.”
“Okay...”
“This a first for you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, right. You probably want to meet with her solicitor to discuss anything else that might be relevant. Her Will, perhaps?”
I had that feeling again, that all the air was being sucked out of the room and I was about to explode with stress. I did my best to relax.
“Would you like the solicitor’s contact details?”
“Yes, please.”
He jotted them down on a sheet of paper, which he passed to me, then flipped my aunt’s file shut and got to his feet. I followed his white coat back out of the room and down the hall to Nora’s room. She was still asleep, but this time, rather than be silent, I went up to her, put a hand on her shoulder and said, “Aunt Nora?”
Her eyelids fluttered. She wasn’t in a deep sleep.
“Wake up,” I said. “The doctor needs to talk to you.”
She stretched and inhaled, then rolled onto her side and opened one eye.
“Hey,” I said. “Morning.” I went around to her breakfast tray, opened the little carton of milk, and sniffed it. The cardboard surface was still cool enough to bead with moisture and there was no sour smell, so I poured it over her cornflakes and peeled the lid off her juice.
“Ms. Chesterton,” said Dr. Singh. He sat down in the chair beside her bed. “We need some more scans.”
“No.”
“I’m afraid I will have to insist.”
“No.” Her look was stubborn, not the set-jaw kind of stubborn, but the impassive “I can wait for eternity and never change” kind of stubborn.
I pushed her breakfast tray into place over her bed. “Aunt Nora, how long have you had cancer?”
“Excuse me?”
“Please.”
“What makes you ask that?”
“Because you won’t even let people x-ray your arm. Do you think it’s spread that far?”
Her eyes popped wide with surprise, and then her chest shook with a breathless laugh. “Oh, honey. No. I just don’t like x-rays or scans or any of that garbage.”
“Why not?”
She sat up and dug her spoon into her cereal. Slowly she chewed, crunch, crunch, crunch.
“Aunt Nora. Why not?”
“Because I don’t like the nasty machines and being in the hospital.”
“But, you’ve been in the hospital before.”
“Says who?”
“Says the surgical scar on your stomach,” the doctor replied.
“Mind your own business! I’m not getting any more scans. Forget about it.” Nora didn’t even turn to look at him.
“Aunt Nora-”
“There is nothing you can paint that will ma
ke a difference. So don’t even suggest it.”
“Um okay.”
“Get out. Get out now!”
I blinked in surprise.
“Ms. Chesterton,” said the doctor.
“And you too. Get out!”
He didn’t argue, just turned and left.
I took one last look at Nora, at her face crumpled with anger, and did the same. My hands shook so bad that I wrung them to try to massage the shakes away. Nora never shouted at me.
I dug the piece of paper with Nora’s lawyer’s details on it out of my pocket and dialed the number.
“Hello?” said a prim, female voice.
“Hi, my name’s Eliza Dunmar. I’m-”
“Nora Chesterton’s niece?”
“Yes. I was wondering if I could come in to speak with you?”
“How’s your aunt?”
“She’s in the hospital, so-”
“Is it serious?”
“We don’t know yet. Maybe.”
“You should come speak to me, yes. Sorry, my secretary’s off at an appointment and I need to figure out how the calendar works.” She laughed. “I look like a right fool here. Ah, there we go. I can fit you in tomorrow after five. Would you be able to come by then?”
“Is it possible to do it sooner?”
“What’s happened?”
“I have some questions about her living will.”
“Ah... well... right. Today at five?”
“Thank you so much.”
“I’ll see you then, Ms. Dunmar.”
Helena Grayson, Solicitor, worked out of an office above a corner store, an Asian grocer. I pressed the gold tone buzzer and was admitted through a narrow door that opened on a flight of stairs. The door at the top was half open and indirect sunlight shone through the gap.
I jogged up the stairs and slipped through the door into a reception area. A heavyset woman with graying blonde hair stood by the front desk, dunking a teabag into a steaming mug. “Ah, hello,” she said with a warm, but tired smile. “You must be Eliza.”
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