The bloggers have had an ongoing discussion about getting together in person sometime. Recently, someone suggested organizing a meeting to coincide with breast cancer awareness month in October, or joining forces for one of the Making Strides walks around the country, or for a march in Washington, D.C.
Kay isn’t sure whether to be disappointed or relieved that it’s never managed to get beyond the wishful thinking stage.
In real life relationships, there’s always pressure.
If her online friends met her in person, they might expect her to be something she isn’t. Or they might turn out to be something she doesn’t want them to be.
Then I’d lose everything.
That can’t happen. It’s too special—sometimes it’s the only thing that keeps her going. She loves these people and she needs them, now more than ever . . .
She pushes back her chair, stands, and gets halfway across the room before pausing to straighten a framed photo that doesn’t really need straightening.
It’s an old black and white portrait showing her parents on their wedding day, circa 1962. They were together two decades before Kay was born, then separated before her first birthday.
Her mother never forgave her for that; or for being born—which was, after all, the reason he left.
Mother never came right out and said her conception had been an accident, or that they hadn’t wanted children, or that it was Kay’s fault the love of her life had walked out, leaving her a struggling single mother.
She didn’t have to say it.
It was obvious from the way her mother looked at her, the way she treated her, the way she cried over old photos of him . . .
Especially this one.
In it, her parents are standing on the steps of a church that used to sit a few miles from this house where Kay has lived all her life, in the western suburbs of Indianapolis. She remembers when the church was torn down, about ten years ago, maybe fifteen, to make way for a now-defunct shopping plaza. Yes, at least fifteen years ago, because Mother was still alive, she had recently been diagnosed with cancer, the Indianapolis News was still the evening paper, and business was still booming in this neighborhood.
Mother tore out the short article with its side-by-side black and white photos—before and after, from brick church to pile of rubble—and showed it to Kay.
“This is where Daddy and I were married,” she said, as if Kay didn’t know; as if that man had actually been a “daddy” to her.
As old age and illness got the best of her, Mother was increasingly delusional.
“I always thought I’d have my funeral there,” she said wistfully. “Now where will it be?”
“Please don’t talk about that, Mother.”
“I have to talk about it. It’s not that far off, you know.”
Yes. Kay knew.
She stares at the picture of her parents on their wedding day over fifty years ago, looking into each other’s eyes with blatant adoration. Her mother, in dark lipstick and a puffy veil, and her father, in a dark suit with a skinny tie, are obviously madly in love.
The photo sat upstairs, framed on her mother’s bedside table, until the day she died.
All her life, Kay had hated looking at it. Yet when the time came, she couldn’t bear to throw it away.
Maybe it was better to hang onto it, she decided, as a reminder never to get too close to any man. You’d only end up alone and brokenhearted.
“The old saying is wrong. It’s not better to have loved and lost,” her mother used to rasp in her cigarette voice. “Believe me. If you don’t love, you can’t lose.”
Kay took those words to heart. In her formative years, she had casual friendships, even a date here and there . . . but managed to avoid the risks that come with real relationships. Now, when she wants companionship, she finds it online, and when she needs a creative outlet, she posts entries on her blog.
That’s how she met Meredith and BamaBelle and the others—how many years has it been now?
She used to be able to keep track of things like that. But a lot of details about the past have become fuzzy lately.
Too bad she can’t choose which memories to keep and which to let go. There are a few that persist in haunting her waking hours and dreams, and she’d give anything to banish them forever.
You left me! Why did you leave me?
I didn’t leave you, Mother! I’ve been right here by your bed!
Kay turns away from the photo and leaves the room.
Even with the windows closed, there’s a depressing chill in the air this morning, just as there was on the gloomy spring morning her mother died. Now, as then, the house is filled with rainy day shadows.
Kay forces herself to turn on lights to brighten the rooms as she goes downstairs. Meredith, a true believer in the physical healing benefits of an optimistic attitude, frequently wrote about surrounding yourself with positive energy.
In the dining room, Kay stops and turns on the old tabletop radio, tuned to the upbeat oldies station. Meredith wouldn’t want her to wallow in the gloom.
After flooding the kitchen with overhead light, she dumps her cold tea into the sink and turns on the flame to heat water for a fresh cup.
Waiting for it to boil, she reaches for the orange prescription bottle on the windowsill and shakes out the pill she takes daily to keep cancer at bay.
Meredith, whose cancer, like Kay’s, was hormone fed, was on the same chemical regimen. They used to compare notes. She never dreamed the drug had stopped working for her friend until Meredith shared the news with her privately not long ago. Her cancer was back, Meredith told her, and spreading. Her days were numbered.
Kay was stunned. She knew her upbeat friend had her share of problems. Meredith had written blog entries about her husband’s job loss, about never having enough money, that sort of thing. She always made light of her troubles. But this, she’d kept to herself.
Please don’t tell the others, Meredith wrote to her. I’m going to reach out to them one by one, here and there . . . but I’m not comfortable sharing with everyone just yet.
I won’t say anything. I promise.
Kay kept her word. She didn’t tell, and she won’t tell, not even now that Meredith is gone. Not even if it means lying, the way she did just now when she was messaging with BamaBelle.
She turns on the faucet and lets the water run, a lifelong habit.
“You never know what’s lying around in these old pipes,” Mother used to say when she was a little girl. “Don’t take a drink from the tap until you’ve washed it all away.”
“Washed all what away?”
“You know. The toxins.”
Kay wrote a blog about that once. About Mother, perpetually veiled in a cloud of cigarette smoke, wasting time worrying about negligible issues, devoting not nearly enough energy tending to the things that were actually within her control.
That post generated more comments than most; her online friends related to the irony.
Kay grabs a tall glass from the cupboard above the sink. She fills it, turns off the tap, and swallows the pill, along with a couple of ibuprofen.
She has a headache again. It happens a lot lately. In her levelheaded moments she assumes it’s probably just middle-aged eye strain, spending too much time on the computer. Maybe she needs a stronger prescription for her reading glasses.
But other times, paranoia and pessimism get the best of her and she’s sure it’s the cancer—that it’s back, spreading tumors into her brain.
After all, the preventative medication didn’t prevent cancer’s death march through Meredith’s body. It didn’t work for Mother, either, during her own brief remission, or for Whoa Nellie or countless other bloggers who had lost their battles.
Why should it be any different for her?
But if the cancer ever does return, it’s not going to ravage her until she draws her last anguished breath. No, she’ll put an end to it before that can ever happen. She has the means, tucked away upstairs in her nightstand drawer. It could all be over in a flash.
Please, please, let it have been that way for Meredith . . .
With a trembling hand, Kay sets the glass into the sink and goes back to glumly waiting for the teakettle to whistle.
The Day My Life Changed Forever
It was a Wednesday: August 24, 2005.
Rain was pouring down as I drove to the doctor’s office after dropping the kids with a sitter. I was about to get the results from a routine biopsy that had been done after a routine mammogram showed something that was probably nothing, according to my doctor.
Probably was the key word there, but I wasn’t really worried. Not even when they called me in to get the results in person.
I wasn’t worried, either, when I heard on the car radio that the tropical depression out in the Atlantic had been upgraded to a tropical storm and named Katrina. I remember that the meteorologist reported that it would likely impact the Gulf later in the weekend, and that he had that breathless anticipation of a child discussing the prospects for a white Christmas.
Looking back, I’m struck that I paid so little attention to the forecast; that I failed to interpret the gloomy weather as a harbinger of catastrophe looming out on the water, much less inside the obstetrician’s office.
—Excerpt from Landry’s blog, The Breast Cancer Diaries
Chapter 3
During the height of her cancer battle, Landry learned that sometimes going through the motions of a normal day can almost convince you that you’re living one.
So she forces herself to embark on her morning ritual: take a shower, get dressed, make the king-sized bed, and transfer the contents of the master bathroom hamper into a wicker basket.
With every task, she thinks about Meredith. What happened to her? How can she be dead?
She was so content with her life. It was obvious from every post she wrote that she loved every minute she had on earth.
So what wasn’t she saying?
After her electronic conversation with A-Okay earlier, Landry had gone back through Meredith’s blog posts for the past several months, trying to read between the lines. This time she thought she detected a bit more wistfulness than usual; perhaps a melancholy undercurrent here and there . . .
Maybe she was just seeing what she needs to see, though, in her retrospective search for rhyme and reason.
A-Okay didn’t have any details, either, and Landry couldn’t get a response from the other two bloggers she’d tried to reach.
Jaycee, who writes PC BC, lives in New York City. Elena, whose blog bears the irreverent title The Boobless Wonder, is somewhere in New England—Rhode Island, maybe, or Massachusetts? Knowing it’s an hour later on the east coast, Landry figures she must not have caught either of them before their workdays began. Elena is an elementary schoolteacher, while Jaycee . . .
What does Jaycee do, anyway?
Some kind of business—maybe finance? She travels a lot, Landry knows. But Jaycee doesn’t spend much time writing about her personal life on her blog, and was the only one of the regulars who didn’t write a post about the day she received her initial diagnosis when they all decided to share their stories a few months back. She doesn’t even post a head shot on her page, just a pink ribbon with a circle around it and a slash across it. As her blog title indicates—PC as in Politically Correct—she’s one of the more politically aware bloggers, concerned with what she calls the Cancer Industry rather than day-to-day, postdiagnosis details. She’s only been around for a year, maybe a year and a half.
Carrying the basket of dirty clothes, Landry makes her way along the upstairs hall, her mind settling on her children.
Just five minutes ago, it seems, they were toddlers: blond, blue-eyed Tucker the picture of his handsome daddy yet with his mama’s laid back demeanor; Addison resembling Landry, with her delicate features, pale green eyes, and silky dark hair, but motivated and energetic as Rob from the moment she could walk and talk.
Now Addison is going to be a high school senior and Tucker a sophomore. Soon he’ll be driving, and she’ll be off to college. Life is careening along, a blessed string of ordinary—and extraordinary—days.
Addison’s door is open. The white plantation shutters are parted so that sunlight splashes in through the windows. The quilt, in patterned shades of Caribbean sea foam, is neatly spread over the white iron bed, pillows plumped just so. A pile of magazines aligns at right angles with the edges of the nightstand, and the toiletries clustered on the bureau are precisely arranged as always. Stacked on an adjacent worktable are half a dozen compartmentalized plastic containers that hold the colored glass and metallic beads Addison uses to make jewelry.
Ambitious and goal oriented, with a lifelong flair for aesthetics, Landry’s daughter is already certain about her future: she’s planning to apply to Savannah College of Art and Design this fall, and intends to build a career in architectural or interior design.
For now, she works a few days a week in the gift shop over at the Grand Hotel. She’s off Wednesdays, but she likes to get up early anyway—unlike her brother, who just started at the hotel as a summer busboy.
Across the hall, Tucker’s door is still closed, but his alarm should be going off any minute. Not that he’ll hear it.
Landry knocks on his door, then opens it a crack. “Tucker? It’s almost time to get up.”
No response. She crosses the shadowy room, stepping over piles of clothes on the floor, and opens the shutters. Daylight falls over the mess—not just clothes, but soda cans and snack wrappers on every surface, CDs and video games lying around without their cases, stray electronics cords and chargers tangled like heaps of black and white spaghetti on the desk and floor.
“Tucker?”
No movement from the lump beneath the covers. Only a few tufts of dark hair are visible between the quilt and the pillow.
“Tucker . . . ”
“Tucker.”
“TUCKER!”
Finally, a muffled sound from her son.
Balancing the laundry basket on her hip, Landry marches over to the bed and pulls the covers away from his face. “Come on. Up.”
He throws a tanned, muscular arm across his eyes, and she notes the fuzz in his armpit and on his upper lip. Her little boy is becoming a man. A man who often acts like a little boy.
“Aw, come on, Mom,” he rumbles. His voice changed months ago, but sometimes the low pitch still catches her off guard. “My alarm didn’t even go off yet.”
“It’s about to. Get busy. This room is a mess. You have a lot to do before you leave. Get it? Got it? Good.”
That’s their thing: Get it-got-it-good. She and Tucker have been saying it to each other, usually to add a hint of lightheartedness to no-nonsense conversations, since he was a little boy. It used to make him laugh. Now he doesn’t crack a smile.
She gives him another nudge and then another, waiting until his gigantic bare feet are squarely planted on the hardwood floor before heading downstairs.
The large living room is her favorite spot in the house. White woodwork contrasts with wide-board hardwoods and walls painted a muted, mossy shade of grayish green. Couches and chairs with cushy upholstery in soothing earth tones are clustered into several seating areas: near the fireplace, facing the flat screen television, and in a cozy nook lined with bookshelves. Paned glass windows and doors line the back wall, opening onto the lower level of the double-decker porch overlooking the landscaped yard and, beyond, the hundred-year-old boardwalk and the bay.
Landry crosses into the dining room, passing the formal table they use only on holidays and the built-in cabinet
s holding china that’s been in her family for over a century.
On the wall is a gallery of family photos. Some are vintage shots of ancestors who settled around Mobile before the Civil War. Others are more recent: hers and Rob’s wedding day, the kids’ baby pictures, toddler and elementary school shots, a couple of family portraits. The four of them with her parents—one of the last snapshots before her father’s fatal heart attack a few years back. The four of them with Rob’s parents, his brother Will, and his sister Mary Leigh and her husband at their Christmas destination wedding in the Caribbean.
Landry doesn’t like to look at that one. In it, her smile is forced. So is Rob’s, and the kids’, too. Not just because they were all jet-lagged after flight delays, or because no one wanted to spend the holidays away from home, or because they weren’t crazy about Mary Leigh’s new husband, Wade—but because breast cancer had struck just a few months earlier.
At the time, she was miserable and terrified, and so were her husband and children.
She really should take down that picture. Maybe some of the others as well. Make room for new memories. Happier ones.
Landry continues on into the kitchen, with its custom-built cherry cabinetry, sleek stainless steel appliances, and slate floor. They had just finished remodeling it when she was first diagnosed, and one of the first things that popped into her head in the doctor’s office that day was that after all the renovation stress, she wouldn’t be around to enjoy the new space.
We probably shouldn’t have wasted all that extra money on the gourmet six-burner stove and double ovens, she’d thought, since no one else in the family even cooks.
She kept that regret to herself, of course, not wanting the doctor to think she was shallow.
When she later blogged about it—about the crazy thoughts that run through your mind in those first few moments when you assume you’re going to be dying of, and not living with, or after, cancer—she found out that she wasn’t alone.
Her online friends shared similar initial reactions to their diagnoses. One confessed that she was irrationally concerned about having just booked a nonrefundable timeshare; another said she rushed to cancel an expensive salon treatment, saying it felt wrong to waste time and money on hair that was just going to fall out anyway.
The Perfect Stranger Page 4