A Friend of the Family

by Lauren Grodstein

  “What are you talking about?”

  “She’ll keep him stuck where he is,” I said. “She has no sense of purpose, no goals, no nothing. Flits from jewelry to goats to God knows what. Spent the years she should have spent in college in a mental institution. A mental institution!” I felt my jaw tighten. “They were kissing at my own father’s unveiling and you think this is just a little flirtation?”

  “Peter, control yourself.” We were approaching traffic on the Deegan, near Yankee Stadium and the grim shells of old warehouses, eighteen-wheelers in front of us and on every side.

  “Why, Elaine?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why can’t he just enroll in school, date someone his own age, get a goddamn degree, get a job, get a life? Is that so hard? What have we done wrong that he thinks the rules don’t apply to him? That he thinks he can just swan around Round Hill with someone like Laura Stern and not go back to school and not get a real job and not get a life and that’s okay?”

  “What have we done wrong?” She sighed heavily. “Are you really asking me that?”

  “Why is it that everyone else’s kid goes to college and our kid is spending all his time with a baby murderer?”

  “Peter, stop it!” We were at a complete standstill now, trucks walling us in. “Please, stop it. You’re losing all perspective.”

  “What kind of perspective would you like me to have?”

  “Peter,” she said, reaching across the seat to take my left hand, unknot it gently from my right one. “Pete, come on,” she said. “Laura is a distraction for Alec for the next few months. He’s lonely. She’s company for him. That’s all. Stop overreacting, please.”

  “He wouldn’t be lonely if he went back to school like a normal person.”

  “He is a normal person.”

  “He’s at an age, Elaine—he’s at an age where decisions he makes now impact the rest of his life. When I was his age, I was applying to medical school. You and I were engaged. I was building a life. I wasn’t living like a teenager in my parents’ garage.”

  “Your parents didn’t have a garage.”

  I shot her a look.

  “Honey, come on, try to relax.” I shot her another look, but I was feeling an uncomfortable tightness in my chest, and my dad’s MI came quickly to mind. I decided to try to listen to my wife; I took a deep breath, let it out through pursed lips. As we moved across the bridge, Manhattan receding behind us, the Ravel turned to Chopin. I tried to fill my head with the music, tried to drown out the image of the two of them kissing in the restaurant, kissing casually, as though they’d been kissing their entire lives. But it was useless.

  “I just can’t let him lose control of his life, Elaine. He’s our only son. He’s our only chance to …” The George Washington Bridge now, enormous gray twists of cable, a huge American flag hanging above us. Then the Palisades. Snow receding into the hawthorns.

  “To what?”

  Naked branches and dark green pines lining the sides of the road. Along the shoulder, a small female deer. Our only chance to ensure a legacy for ourselves. To ensure future happy generations. To make up for all the kids we didn’t have.

  “To what, Pete?” she asked again.

  “To get it right.”

  “Oh, honey, I promise.” She kept my left hand in her right one as she drove. “I promise you, we already got it right.”

  My wife had spent our marriage trusting in me; at that moment I should have trusted her. Instead, I stared out the window at the route I’d memorized years before, the deer, the trees, the school, the street signs, trying to figure out what would be required of me if I was going to rescue my son.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  SIX YEARS AGO, a Tuesday morning, Elaine found a smallish lump on her left breast while she was trying on a new sports bra at Macy’s. She let it sit for a week, hoping it would go away, and sometimes it did seem to disappear for a few hours, only to reemerge when her panicky fingers did a more invasive probe. The following Tuesday, a visit to Rhonda Nighly, a biopsy, and a diagnosis: stage 2 B invasive ductal carcinoma, unaffected lymph nodes. The prognosis, considering everything, wasn’t terribly bad. Rhonda asked her to come in as soon as she got the test results, but Elaine had a class to teach at ten and was able, somehow, to expound upon the Wife of Bath at Bergen State while Rhonda Nighly’s office manager logged her results into a patient database. I met her at the oncology office that afternoon, listened to the news, asked Rhonda everything I remembered about ductal carcinoma from medical school, and kept my arm tight around Elaine’s shoulder.

  “The prognosis?”

  “We’ll have surgery, chemo, probably six to eight rounds. The cancer is hormone-receptive, so we’ll start her on Tamoxifen. Nothing too radical.”

  “And then?”

  “We caught this relatively early, Pete.” What was with all the “we”? Elaine caught it, Elaine would have surgery, Elaine would suffer through chemo alone. The best we could do was to guide her and do our best to hide our superstitions or doubts. And perhaps it was this folksy “we” that did it, or perhaps it was just my own panic, but for all my pride in my collegial workplace, when it came time to schedule Elaine’s surgery, without even blinking I asked Rhonda Nighly to send us to Columbia.

  “Columbia?” she said. “But wouldn’t you rather have her right here? Elaine, wouldn’t you rather be here?”

  Elaine looked at me as trustingly as a deer. “You’d rather have me at Columbia, Pete?”

  There was no reason the more-than-competent surgeons at Round Hill couldn’t have handled the job, but I explained to everyone that, if the ladies had no objections, I was more comfortable doing it somewhere less familiar, that if God forbid something went wrong … although, truth be told, that wasn’t it. Like so many Round Hillers who needed nephrectomies or partial thyroidectomies or scheduled C-sections, I wanted the name-brand New York City Ivy League teaching hospital for my wife and her extremely routine surgery. I wanted docs I looked up to. I didn’t want to feel like one of the smartest guys in the room.

  “You know, Columbia has terrific outcomes.”

  Rhonda shrugged at me—I wasn’t making any real sense—and said she’d refer us to an oncological surgeon across the river. Was I sure I didn’t want to go with Charlie Joffe? She’d worked with Joffe for years, liked him, trusted him; he did beautiful reconstruction work. I’d seen Joffe get looped on Coke-and-whiskeys at the annual hospital holiday bash. No way were his bloated hands going to slice into my wife.

  So Elaine and I checked into the massive surgical ward on 168th Street on a gloomy Wednesday in May, 7 a.m. Just getting to the hospital was a nightmare, with traffic on the George Washington Bridge and double-parkers crowding my entire way to the garage. Dominican music blaring already on the street corners, kids dressed in Catholic school uniforms lining up at bus stops, and the demented partisans of the New York State Psychiatric Institute wandering the corner of Haven and 170th with their mouths wide open and their eyes half-closed. We were listening to the classical station and Elaine held her left hand against her right breast, the one they weren’t going to touch. She hadn’t eaten in twenty-four hours, as per Rhonda Nighly’s instructions and her own nervous stomach. For some reason, I’d been ravenous and snuck two grilled cheese sandwiches and a leftover piece of brisket in the middle of the night, well after Elaine had fallen asleep.

  My folks were staying with Alec, who was probably old enough to stay by himself and had in fact begged to do so, but we wouldn’t hear of it. I’d be home again that night, but we wanted them to be there when he got back from school; we wanted them to make him dinner, to help him remember that today was like any other day. Or to drive him in after the surgery if he wanted to come and just be at the hospital. My father was still an able enough driver and, in light of the seriousness of the day’s events, would even splurge on a parking garage. He’d been hospitalized himself twice for arthroscopies and cardiac stents, and was wonderfully optim
istic about the whole thing.

  “Don’t worry, kid,” he said to Alec on the phone. “Your mom will be wearing a bikini again by the summer.”

  “Grandpa, that’s disgusting.”

  “Your mother in a bikini?” My father chuckled. “She’s got a lovely figure, your mother. But don’t tell your dad I noticed. He’s likely to get jealous.”

  “Grandpa, seriously, that’s gross.”

  As for Elaine’s parents, we would tell them about the surgery when the whole thing was over. Everyone preferred it that way, especially Elaine.

  So we checked into the hospital, which was both familiar to me, with its endless hallways and gurneys and smells of chlorine, and unfamiliar, too, so sprawling and busy. At Round Hill, medicine was practiced with a dignified hush; at Columbia Presbyterian, the Broadway hum swelled into the corridors, and the shouting and laughing and gossiping and beeping filled every corner until we were shown to Elaine’s room, where everything was suddenly very quiet.

  “Well,” I said. I was carrying her overnight duffel. The day before, I’d gone out and bought her a new robe, the most expensive one I could find. I put the duffel down next to the bed and wondered where I could buy a dozen roses around here. “You’ll be great, honey. And in a matter of hours this will all be over.”

  “I know,” she said, still holding her right breast.

  The tech who’d led us to the room slipped away. Soon we would meet various nurses and the surgeon, and Rhonda Nighly promised she’d stop by, but for now we were alone. Elaine was supposed to put on her backless, buttless hospital gown. She took her hand from her breast, slowly unbuttoned her nice white shirt.

  “Do you want anything?”

  “No,” she said. “What would I want?”

  “Really? Nothing?” (Although what could I get her? She was not allowed to eat or drink, we’d packed three weeks’ worth of paperbacks and Peoples into her duffel.) She smiled wryly at me and finished unbuttoning her blouse.

  “You know what I want? No cancer,” she said. “That’s what I want.”

  “And that’s what you shall have, my dear.”

  She smiled weakly at my gallantry and folded her shirt neatly on top of the bed. She slid out of her pants, then unfastened her bra, and although I knew it wasn’t possible, I could swear I could see it glowing right underneath her skin, the quarter-sized mass of rapidly dividing cells in the milk ducts underneath and just to the right of her left nipple.

  “Here,” I said. “Let’s get you into that dress.” I unfolded the paper gown and helped Elaine slide into it. “You look great.”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “No, really,” I said.

  “Well, I won’t look so great tomorrow.”

  “Of course you will,” I said. I tied the ribbons on the back of her gown and then stood behind her and kept my arms around her, buried my head in her soft blondish hair, kissed her there.

  “Pete, if anything happens—”

  “Nothing will happen—”

  “Just don’t let Alec forget me, all right?”

  “Elaine, this is routine surgery.” We’d been so good this whole time. I couldn’t let her descend into lachrymose panic now. I couldn’t stand it. “The surgery can’t kill you.”

  “You don’t know what they’ll find.”

  “They’ve done a million tests. They know exactly what they’ll find.” Which wasn’t exactly true—even the most common cancers could be a festival of nasty surprises — but still, I’d seen the MRIs, seen the tumor in its three-dimensional glory, and agreed with Rhonda Nighly that the thing looked beautifully contained for the moment.

  “Can you just let me say this, please? I know you don’t want to hear it, but I need you to let me say it.”

  I tightened my arms around her. “Okay.”

  “Okay,” she said, and for a second it felt as if she’d forgotten what she wanted to say, and the tension in the room disappeared, but then she spoke up again. “I want you to tell Alec all about me.”

  “Elaine—”

  “I want him to remember who I am, the things about me that made me different. What made me special. Not just that I was his mother but also, you know, the person I was.”

  I let out my breath heavily. “Okay.”

  “What will you tell him?”

  “What makes you special,” I said. I refused to use the past tense.

  “Like what?”

  Did she really want to do this? I tightened my hold on her. “You’re a wonderful mother. You love him. You’re kind.”

  “Be more specific.”

  “You grew up in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.”

  “What else?”

  What else? “You know how to pronounce Middle English. You have a great sense of humor. You can do the Sunday crossword in pen. You don’t like raisins.” I put my chin on her head.

  “Keep going.”

  “You always know where all the lost things are in the house. It’s like you have radar. You have a beautiful singing voice.”

  “That’s good,” Elaine said. “Tell him all that stuff.”

  “He knows it already.”

  “But don’t let him forget it,” she said. “I wanted to … I was going to write him some letters — one of the chat rooms was talking about that, writing letters to your kids for each of the major events in their lives, graduations, weddings, birth of their own kids, you know.” Her voice was even. I had squeezed my eyes shut. “But I couldn’t do it. It just felt so stilted. And pessimistic. Because most of me is sure I’ll make it—”

  “Elaine, of course—”

  “Pete, please,” she said. She so rarely cut me off. I kept my eyes shut. “But just because you never know. Because surgery can be unpredictable, right? Because we don’t know exactly what will happen. I need you to promise me you’ll keep me alive for him. You’ll remind him about the person I was.”

  “I will.”

  And I held her like that until Rhonda came into the room, with her firm handshake and her cheerful laugh, and we swept away the lachrymose mood with a reassuring mix of medical jargon and upbeat predictions, and then the gurney came and took Elaine away and I wandered up and down 168th Street, afraid to go too far away but also unable to stay too close to the operating room.

  At 2:40, when my cell phone rang, she was still in surgery. “I want to come,” Alec said. “Tell me how to find you guys.”

  “No, look, I don’t know how long it will be, and when she comes out of surgery she’ll be—”

  “I want to come,” he said. “Grandpa said he’d drive me. I’ll be there when she gets out. It’s right over the bridge, right? How do we get there?”

  He was fifteen and full of conviction, and I was too exhausted to put up a decent fight. What were those good reasons to keep him away? I’d forgotten.

  “Take the Hundred Seventy-eighth Street exit off the bridge and make a right onto Fort Washington. She’s in the Milstein Pavilion. There are signs. Call me when you get to the lobby and I’ll meet you there.”

  “Okay,” Alec said, stoic, determined. “See you soon.” And because he meant business, he clicked off without saying good-bye.

  I met him and my folks twenty-two minutes later; my father must have done eighty on the Palisades.

  “How is she?” my mother asked. She and Alec were about the same height back then and had the same dark brown eyes and pointy chins. They both wore their anxiety by turning fierce, aggressive. My father, on the other hand, liked to turn every worrisome event into a party and headed to the gift shop to buy balloons.

  “I’m sure she’s fine,” I said. “The surgery takes a while because they’re doing reconstruction at the same time.”

  “Should they be doing that?” my mother asked. “Maybe they could just take out the tumor, finish her up another time?”

  “Mom.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “If we can minimize the times she has to go under anesth
esia, that’s a good thing.”

  Alec was standing bug-eyed, straight-backed, his hands tight at his sides. I watched him clench and unclench his fists.

  “But everything’s looking really great. The doctor came out a while ago to let me know everything was great.” This was untrue. I had yet to hear a peep from the surgical team, and about ten minutes before Alec arrived I’d almost grabbed some scrubs and wormed in there myself to find out what the fuck was going on. I figured out too late that the problem with doing this at Columbia was that nobody knew who I was. This should have been evident from the start, but I must not have been thinking.

  “What about that doctor over there?” My mother pointed. “Maybe he can tell us something?”

  “Do you even know who that doctor is, Ma? Do you even know what he does?”

  “He can tell us who to ask.”

  “I know who to ask.” We were still standing in the too-bright lobby of the Milstein Pavilion, wheelchairs derbying past us. “C’mon,” I said. “Let’s go up.”

  “We’re not staying,” my mother said. My father had just returned with the balloons. “C’mon, Hesh, give Pete the balloons. We’re leaving.”

  “You sure?”

  “We’ll be at home, sweetheart, if you need us. Only a fifteen-minute drive away.”

  “I’ll call you,” I said, suddenly grateful. She knew I didn’t want her around and spared me having to tell her so. “I’ll let you know how it all turns out.”

  “Hug her for us,” my mother said, and my father pressed his circus-colored balloon ribbons into Alec’s hand and kissed us both, and then the two of them threaded their way out of the pavilion, my father with his arm around my mother’s waist. If you’d asked me how much longer I thought he had to live, I would have told you twenty years.

  “C’mon, Dad,” Alec said, holding the balloons tightly. “Let’s go up.”

  We loitered outside the surgical ward silently for another two hours, in a windowless waiting room littered with coffee cups, terrible magazines, a television whose channels were impossible to change blaring soap operas. Alec made a decent show of reading a three-month-old U.S. News and World Report, but I couldn’t fake it and kept jumping up and down as though my springs were wound too tight, which they were. I knew the specifics of her surgery, though. I’d discussed them with Rhonda several times, once or twice meandering through oncology in the hospital at odd hours, knowing she’d be there, then cornering her to ask about Elaine’s Bloom-Richardson score, her lymph nodes. I’d even plunked my cafeteria tray next to Charlie Joffe’s once — rejected Charlie Joffe, who was good enough not to question my decision to send Elaine to Columbia and instead overstayed his lunch break drawing me little diagrams on napkins. Elaine would be perfectly fine. If they couldn’t handle the reconstruction postmastectomy, they’d simply put it aside for another day.