by Ka Hancock
“Just sign it, Lucy,” Mickey said sharply, then apologized for his tone.
He asked more questions and I heard Roland Matthews answer most of them, but I couldn’t process what he was saying. I remember Mickey kissing me, and I wanted to cling to him, to beg him to take me home. I remember him reassuring me, but he spoke with a voice that was too shaky to trust. I was taken to another room, where I undressed and got into a gown. A girl who looked no older than twelve came in and drew three vials of blood, after which someone else came in to start an IV. I was cold, and when I was secured on a gurney, someone else covered me with a warm blanket, but I don’t think the person spoke to me. Then I was wheeled into an operating room, where I rubbed my stomach until I went under.
It was my first thought when I came out of the fog, but my hand was too heavy to move to my belly. The familiar voice of a kind woman nudged me closer to consciousness. It was the nurse who’d plied me with crackers the last time I was here. “My baby?” I managed to ask.
“We monitored the heartbeat throughout your surgery. Everything appears to be fine with the baby.” She offered me ice chips. I looked at her then, my expression urging her on. What about me? Does everything appear fine with me as well? She looked away, and a terrible heaviness settled over me as she injected something into my IV.
I woke up sometime later, alone in a pretty room. My head was still heavy with medication, but I was able to look toward the hall, where I thought I heard Mickey’s voice. It took a moment for him to come into focus, but there he was with Lily and Priscilla. Ron was there, too, and Dr. Matthews. Mickey’s back was to me and he kept pulling his hand out of his pocket to rub his neck. He did that when he was anxious. When Lily patted him on the shoulder, I saw both his hands go to his face. Priscilla was pushing tears away as she listened to the doctor. Ron must have sensed my gaze because he turned and peered into the room at me. When his eyes met mine, I saw no soft news there. We stared at each other for a weighty moment, then he dropped his attention to the floor.
My little family blurred as the tears came. I thought of my mother and the calm way she had accepted the terrible news she received, and suddenly I was furious at her. I had been scouring the sink, swirling designs in the gritty suds, when the phone rang. My mother, who’d been washing the windowpanes on the back door, pulled off her yellow rubber glove to answer it. It was Charlotte. I’d stopped scrubbing but didn’t dare look up at Mom. Not even when she said, “We’ll be there in fifteen minutes.” My mother had had several different tests done that past week and the results were back. Now we were going to Charlotte’s office on a Saturday. My mom let the yellow glove drop as she hung up the phone. Then she turned to me and said, “Well, that’s that, then.” I remember how slowly she walked up the stairs. I remember how I couldn’t do anything but stare at that lifeless rubber glove sitting on the floor.
I closed my eyes, distancing myself from the reality of my situation. With excruciating effort, I found my belly with my limp hand and kneaded the firm bulge I could feel beneath my gown.
Later—I don’t know how much later—I simply refused to respond to Mickey or anyone else when they tried to coax me awake. I wasn’t ready for what waited on the other side of sleep, so I stayed there, locked in pretense, for as long as I could. When finally I ventured a peek through the slit of my eyelids, I found Mickey staring into the distance through wet eyes, and my heart seized. I couldn’t watch him go through this hell with me again. I was not strong enough. And neither was he.
It was nighttime and the room was dark except for the fluorescent light coming from the hall. There were distant voices—a nurse on the phone ordering dinner for a new admission, visitors in the next room discussing bowling scores, someone wanting a drink. But in my room, the silence was deafening.
“Mic?” I croaked.
He leaned over and rubbed my ear. “Hey, beautiful. I thought you were going to sleep forever. I was getting worried.” He stood up and kissed me gently on the lips. He looked beaten up, but he forced a thin, transparent smile that I knew came with great effort.
“I had a dream,” I said.
Mickey laced his long fingers into mine.
“I dreamed the doctor found bad news.”
The tears in Mickey’s eyes threatened to fall on my face as he loomed above me. He sniffed and pushed back the blanket. Then he got on the bed beside me and pulled me into his arms. I felt him shudder.
“Tell me, Mic,” I whispered.
It took Mickey a long time to respond, and his silence seemed confirmation enough. Finally, he spoke. “I didn’t understand everything he told us, but I do know he found a mass. And it’s—” Mickey swallowed a sob. “It’s spread to your lung, Lu.”
His words rolled over me, crushing me. A mass? Spread? Lung . . . My tears made no noise, but they soaked Mickey’s shirt as he held on to me.
Much later that night Roland Matthews came into my room. Mickey had finally gone home to shower, and it seemed no accident the weary doctor found me alone. He looked at me for a long moment, and a sad knowing passed between us in that silence. When he started to speak, his words had a practiced, but not unkind, ring to them. He had excised a small portion of a mass approximately six centimeters in size. It was atypical and flat and had attached itself to my chest wall, far enough behind the breast for it to elude a mammogram’s detection until it had grown to this size. The fullness and discomfort I’d experienced were symptoms identical to the pregnancy-induced changes that were naturally occurring, and this further allowed its escape from medical scrutiny. In short, Roland Matthews told me the perfect set of circumstances had allowed this mass to develop and flourish. And spread.
I realized, in that moment, that the most overwhelming word in the English language is not cancer, as I had long supposed, but metastasis. Metastasis. That horrid word ripped through my brain like shards of glass, slicing patches of hopelessness along its path. The word stopped time as Dr. Matthews offered up his discourse on pathological markers and advanced staging, not to mention the unnecessary litany of my laboratory values. Strangely, my blood work, which had been followed so closely for so long, showed no rise in my CA scores. But today they did find the marker that made the diagnosis of metastasis to the lung a certainty. This, he said, explained my annoying little cough.
It was a lot to take in, and as the doctor babbled, I simply retreated inside myself until the rush in my head drowned out his voice. I did, however, hear him when he presented my treatment options—a brutal regimen of radiation and chemotherapy. The atypical tumor in my breast was inoperable, and the best we could hope for was to shrink it from within. He had excised what he could for the purposes of pathology, but even a radical mastectomy wouldn’t totally capture the lesion. He explained something about the proximity of the tumor to my lung that made it sound almost as though he were describing a single tumor from which growth was taking place in two areas. Roland Matthews informed me that his colleague would be by tomorrow to further evaluate me, then apologized unnecessarily for the lesion in my lung being outside of his area of expertise. He finished, “I’m sure Dr. Gladstone will agree that we need to begin aggressive chemotherapy and radiation as soon as possible.”
I stared at this man as he politely delivered this devastation without emotion. He didn’t seem to notice that his rhetoric bounced off me, fully unabsorbed. It didn’t matter. I’d heard it all before. I knew it from when I was a girl hearing it all explained to my mother. I’d heard it again seven years ago when I was diagnosed the first time. But no matter how I tried, I could not comprehend the timing. Not now. Not when I was pregnant. Why not last year? Or six months from now?
“No! I won’t do it!” I shouted, fully aware of how childish my protests sounded.
He breathed out a heavy sigh and wasn’t able to look directly at me when he said, “Naturally, we’ll do all we can to achieve the most positive outcome.”
“What about my baby?” I asked through clenched teeth.
/>
He was silent for an eviscerating moment, then finally he met my eyes. “I’m ordering a therapeutic termination, Lucy. You have advanced-stage breast cancer with metastasis to the lung. The prognosis is poor. But it’s nil without pronounced and aggressive treatment beginning immediately. If it goes well, perhaps a baby can come later.”
“No. No.” My voice was barely recognizable as my own.
“I’m sorry, Lucy.”
When there was nothing else to say, the doctor left me to digest all that he’d told me.
Despite my fury, I teetered on the brink of panic. But before I could fully give in to it, my father’s words wrapped around me as tangibly as an embrace. Once again, I was five years old and he was kneeling at my bedside, his soft breath on my face. I heard the same gravity in his voice, accepted his logic with the same unquestioning trust. Death is not the end, Lulu, and it doesn’t hurt. And if you’re not afraid, you can watch for it and be ready. . . .
But I was afraid.
The wall of my fury crashed down then and emotion gushed out of me. Loud, obnoxious sobs that prompted a passing nurse to check on me. I cried long enough to wear myself out, long enough that it took a while for my heart to stop pounding.
When it did, I imagined my father’s gentle, calming hand on my head, and the thought of him so near cradled my sorrow. As my breathing grew quiet, I canvassed the room slowly with teary, swollen eyes but found no comely visitor lurking anywhere. Good. Good. Surely she knew she was not welcome here tonight.
seventeen
AUGUST 9, 2011
There’s a deadness about me, I’m slow to move, heavy and paralyzed. Maybe it’s the calm before the storm. Maybe it’s sanity—maybe this is how normal men, stable men, are able to absorb their crises. It wasn’t like this last time. Last time when they said that dreaded word, an electric fear shot through me and pretty much stayed put until it was over. This was a suffocating weight. I could think all the terrible thoughts; I could process all the terrible information. I just couldn’t reach the emotion that was supposed to go with the news of the day. I could think how cruel this timing was, how obscene fate was to choose now, when a baby was in the works, when we were bursting with happiness. I could think these thoughts, but they just floated on top of the deadness and never sank in. Maybe the deadness was a blessing because I couldn’t reach the pain through it, only the words. Stage 4. Inoperable. Metastasis. Poor prognosis. Situation grave. Abortion. Abortion. Abortion. Lucy would abort our daughter. Then chemo. Radiation. Surgery. After all this, she might recover. He said it was a long shot. But a shot we had to take, right? This was a hostage situation; if we followed the rules and did exactly what we were told, there was a chance, a slim chance, he’d said, that Lucy could get better again. And then who knew, maybe we’d be in line for another baby that was never supposed to be.
Maybe. But probably not.
All these thoughts floated through me as I dismantled the crib in our living room.
Living in a small town, among people who have always known you and cared about you, there is no such thing as a secret. It started when Elaine Withers noticed Jan and Lily crying in a corner booth at Damian’s. It continued when Mickey gave Jared the barest explanation for not coming to work. When Ron delivered the inlaid mahogany sideboard Muriel Piper had bought at Ghosts, she grilled him until he broke down and told her everything. From there, the news of my condition turned into a mushroom cloud of scuttlebutt.
By the time Mickey brought me home, a mere two days after my surgery, my living room was empty of a crib, but filled with flowers from well-wishers. Lainy Withers had left soup on my stove and Jan had covered my bed with a new comforter. Diana Dunleavy had left a bundle of bestsellers tied together with raffia on my porch, and Nathan Nash had dropped off DVDs of the Lord of the Rings trilogy for nine hours of diversion. There were notes and cards and sweet messages on my machine. Priscilla even moved onto the boat to work from her laptop and cell phone so she could watch over me. I sat on the couch and did not move. Mickey must have kissed me a hundred times that day. He kissed my hand, my head, my cheek, my wrist. Always followed by the sound declaration that everything would be okay.
But he lied. How could everything be okay when we were losing our baby? He wouldn’t talk about her. And he wouldn’t let me talk about her.
As my friends and family surrounded me with tender consideration, Mickey grew moody and frightened . . . and desperate. He hadn’t slept much, but then neither had I, and this of course led to edginess in both of us. One night we had a terrible fight that we both knew was really just a loud and nasty expression of all the things that were breaking our hearts. But it didn’t stop us. It was late when Mickey stomped out in his running gear, and I hate to admit it, but, after the screen door had bounced against the wooden frame for the final time, I was relieved beyond words.
As I sat in the dim light and let the silence cushion me, I felt my daughter softly roll over—the feeling as natural as the gentle turn of a wrist. I felt her and I thought I’d never known pain like this. It was unbearable what I was facing, what we were facing. We had fallen in love with her. And now . . .
I thought back on a night years ago when I didn’t die. I think I was supposed to—cancer was dangling me over my grave, and I believe everyone was steeled for it. Dr. Barbee, though she wasn’t attending me on oncology, was there taking care of my family. I know she had prepared Mickey. Lily. But then I didn’t die. The body’s miraculous healing resources can only be explained as God’s hat tricks, and for some reason He changed His mind. It took a long time to recover from my attempted murder by cancer. But tonight, I almost wish I hadn’t because then I wouldn’t be facing the loss of the most precious thing in our lives.
I loved this baby with my whole heart. And I loved Mickey with a whole other heart, and tonight both of them were breaking.
More than an hour later, Mickey finally came home. He looked wounded and in pain. “Oh, baby,” I said as I walked over to him. He put his arms around me, and mine came around his waist. It was so nice for a moment. But before I knew what was happening, Mickey was kissing me with an alarming urgency, rough and hungry and insistent. Suddenly he was holding me so tight it hurt. I tried to pull out of his grasp, but he held tighter. “Stop,” I said into his mouth. “Stop it, Mickey. Stop!” I shouted as I pushed him away. “Jeez, what are you doing?” I said, rubbing my bruised mouth.
Mickey ground the heels of his palms into his eyes as a terrible groan erupted from his throat. I watched him for a minute. I watched him writhe and swear and cry, his pain tangible. Finally, he looked at me through tortured eyes and took a step toward me.
I backed away. “Don’t. Don’t.”
He stopped, injured.
“Can you just stop making this so awful?” I said. “What are you doing?”
“Lucy, I can’t lose you. I can’t. I don’t know how to be without you,” he whimpered.
I slumped against the wall feeling as if every one of my bones was melting. “Well you might have to lose me, Mickey,” I said meanly. “That’s the reality, and we have to face it. But it’s not going to happen tonight. Right now, can’t I just need you?” I cried. “I’m sorry, but I don’t want to have to take care of you right now. I’m tired, Mickey. And if you can’t just stand up straight for one minute and let me lean on you, then what the hell are you good for?”
His beautiful face folded in on itself and my heart cramped at his pain, but I couldn’t take back my words. After a moment of silence, Mickey rubbed the horrid expression of fear off his face and replaced it with a look of forced calm. He took a deep, shaky breath and nodded. He didn’t say anything, and I don’t know what he did after that because I went upstairs.
I always tried to give Mickey’s roller-coaster moods a wide berth, but right now I was at a loss. I couldn’t do anything but get out of his way while he did battle with himself. His mental illness was braided with his natural impatience, and right now everything wa
s colored by his anger and fear and unavoidable grief. He erupted at random moments without provocation, then was quick to apologize. I just let it all fall around me unanswered because I knew hiding under all that was a man desperately trying to be strong. I gave him an A for effort. I always do.
Over and over, he promised it would be okay. But that was Mickey’s way. In a crisis he always scoped out the one thing he could grab on to; the one sure thing that, would, in his mind, fix whatever was broken. Last time I had cancer it was my treatment. Mickey placed all his hope in the massive doses of chemotherapy I was drowning in. He held my hand and watched the rise and fall of my T cells like a frenzied day trader. In the end, they did not let him down.
This time he glommed onto the abortion that had been scheduled for next Tuesday. That would fix everything, he knew it. Without a pregnancy to contend with, every conceivable anticancer strategy could again be safely executed, and of course I’d recover. He survived this solution by making himself forget how much he already loved our daughter.
As for me, every time the thought formed in my head, I went numb. There had to be another way. How could I lose this baby and not lose myself? I had no idea, so I opted for avoidance. I didn’t dare look even an hour into my future because I knew I would then be an hour closer to what was waiting for me. When I started to feel overwhelmed by it all, I would find myself protectively stroking the bump that was expanding my midsection. But then Mickey would lift my hand away and lace his fingers safely—and firmly—into mine.
I passed the time mechanically, refusing to process what was happening. People came and went, called and said nice things, showered me with affection and encouragement. I made my face do all that was expected of it. My voice instinctively found the words needed to soften the discomfort of those around me. None of them seemed to recognize the charade. But I could only keep it up until we pulled into the parking lot of the abortion clinic. Of course that wasn’t what it was called. It had a more palatable name: The Montrose Center for Women’s Health. But when Mickey came around the car and opened my door, the reality of what was happening hit me like the face of the devil, and I couldn’t get out.