“Please, Mom?” You’d started swimming at the JCC when you were just a few months old, for a Mommy and Me swim class. And we’d kept it up, for the most part—swim lessons in the spring and fall, swimming during the free swim sessions on Sunday, swimming on vacation in Florida, in Puerto Rico. Both of us together, not just you. Remember that sweet Russian teacher, Tanya, and the way she kept her meaty arms around you and said, kick, kick, and it sounded like “keek”?
“Please get in?” It was strange for you to be in the water and me to stand on the side; you didn’t like it. You so rarely said “please” of your own accord. So I maneuvered in, kept my head above water. The water felt warm and calming against my agitated skin. We splashed around for a little while, and I just stood there in the shallow end. But soon enough you were bored.
“Shark, Mom!”
“Honey, I can’t.”
“Please, Mom! Just a little?” Do you remember shark, Jake? You’d doggie paddle, and I’d swim after you deep in the water, as stealthily as I could, and then, just as I got close to your legs, I’d jump up and yell, “Shark!” and you’d either race away or get tickled, depending on how fast we both moved.
“Please?”
But I just couldn’t play shark with you in my wig, and you were disappointed and didn’t understand why, and I almost told you it was my hair, but I think just as I was about to speak, you understood and you didn’t want to understand, so instead I stood with you in the water and let the chlorine splash at the two-thousand-dollar wig (Allison insisted) and decided not to care until the burning in my eyes became too much. “I think we should go now, Mom,” you said. “You look tired.” I was tired, I suppose, but also felt the edges of the fabric of my life in my fingers.
It was such a pleasure to watch you swim, Jake—it was then and still is. You’re so good at it, a natural, a fish. Are you still swimming? I hope so—it’s very good exercise, light on the knees, and it builds those kind of broad shoulders that make men seem more powerful, like they can carry the entire world.
Dr. Steiner told me I would eventually need more surgeries for a variety of reasons (mixed news), only he couldn’t tell me exactly when I’d need those surgeries, nor could he tell me what exactly for. The possibilities were endless and horrifying. And all this could happen while I felt like I was still in remission, and all this could mean that the cancer was back, and that it was more virulent, and that it might still be best, all things considered, to figure out how to buy a gun.
Remarkably, the year after the debulking went pretty well. But this past March I checked in with Steiner and the other nebbishy members of his practice, who chalked up my (highly relative) good fortune to youth and decent health, the fact that I had never been a heavy drinker or a smoker, that vanity had caused me to keep my weight in check via a grown-up apportionment of clean diet and hard exercise. I was doing so well, in fact, that when I suggested to Steiner (and the social workers and Dr. Susan) I wanted to spend a few months in Seattle with my sister, as long as I was in remission, he didn’t blink. They did patch me in with a few doctors at Hutch, just in case, but overall everyone seemed to think it was a very nice idea for me to have this time with family, and with you. I could get my scans. I would be sure to take naps.
But then, of course, from the second we landed at Sea-Tac, I’d been nauseated, tired. The pain in my side came and went and came back. I was never more than a room away from my codeine. And it had become impossible to hide all this, and insane to try to lie. Allison dragged me to the Hutchinson Center, and she would not let me become the worst version of myself, the version who begged to be left alone to die.
“You promised me at least four years, Karen,” she said to me this morning, forcing me out of bed. “I’m not letting you go any sooner.”
And so I’m sitting here typing away on my iPad waiting to be told the results of this morning’s PET scan, which will tell me what’s happening inside me and whether the cancer has spread sooner or farther than they thought, and whether I have indeed already spent my final months in Seattle, and you’re at camp right now, and here’s the doctor, and soon I’ll know more. Soon I’ll tell you more. In front of me I see my sister’s anxious face, Steiner’s mixed-news face. I feel the thorns on the potted plant in the corner of the room. I am sitting, even though I feel like I can’t sit.
I was really hoping I’d be able to finish this book for you, Jakey. Please let there be enough time at least to let me finish this book.
SO FOR A few hours I thought about editing out the above paragraphs because they make me look histrionic, don’t they? I don’t want you to remember me as histrionic, the sort of person who would rather shoot herself than go through any more chemo. Chemo really isn’t as bad as all that—I mean, yes of course it’s bad, but it’s only bad for a little while, and then after you can sit in bed and watch dumb movies and feel pleasantly sorry for yourself. Or perhaps it was because this morning’s news was “good” that I felt so chirpy. Our test results came back: the cancer hadn’t metastasized. Instead, the pain was being caused by a partial bowel obstruction—scar tissue that was dragging on my intestine and causing intermittent agony. Dr. Horchow, my Seattle doc, thought we could and should operate on this—the operation was, in his words, “no big deal” and would increase my quality of life, such as it was. I, on the other hand, had no interest in getting sliced open again and did not wish to subject my poor intestine to any more ignominy than it had already suffered. Plus, I was terrified of a colostomy bag. Anyway, the surgery for one obstruction could cause another: a pointless surgical catch-22.
But then the pain came in wretched waves and I reconsidered.
Drs. Horchow and Wang at the Hutch Center here in Seattle were very well regarded, just like Dr. Steiner, and they had all been in consultation with one another, Steiner and his minions from the East Coast team, Wang and Horchow from the West, and they had agreed that considering my relatively good prognosis (So young! So healthy—sort of!) and the increasing level of pain, I should have probably just gone ahead and had the surgery in Seattle, where I’d be looked after by family, where you would be distracted, where all the pine trees and fresh water would certainly aid my recovery or, at the very least, give me something new to look at.
But I didn’t want to have another surgery. I didn’t care what they said: when they opened me up I didn’t know what they’d find, and I didn’t want to know. I wanted to keep the illusion that I could keep going like this. I wanted to order pizza and eat it on the floor. I wanted to look at my lustrous wig and pretend to see my own hair.
6
On July 3, Allie decided we needed to visit Dad before the holiday. She was right, of course: on the small chance our father could remember us, he had to be wondering where we’d been hiding.
As I’ve said, you would have liked my folks—they were really terrific grandparents, much more joyful than they were when I was a kid. Although even when we were little, they had their happy moments. My dad, for instance, got great pleasure out of sharing his work with me, showing off the textbooks he used in college classrooms. The dissertation he never finished was about the eastern European wars of the twentieth century; my suspicion is he found the subject too endlessly fascinating to ever stop writing about it. He kept a beat-up map of Ottoman-era Europe on our dining table and referred to it as often as people in other families might have referred to the TV Guide.
Upstairs in our Long Island duplex, my grandparents were big into Reagan, kept a glossy framed picture of him by their fridge. Meanwhile, downstairs, my mother tilted liberal, and my grandparents’ Republican leanings drove her crazy. Caught in the middle, my dad explained to me why his parents believed what they believed, the horn blasts of history: World War II, Stalin, the annexation of Hungary, Soviet breadlines, the way that Reagan seemed, to people like my grandparents, the embodiment of moral clarity. And though I didn’t know it then, my father’s lectures in front of a beat-up map, drawing pencil lines in grea
t arcs across Eastern Europe—I think those moments were what first got me interested in politics. My dad taught me that political power matters more than even financial power. That people with political power make history for every other person in the world.
I owed my dad a lot—I probably owed him my career. I couldn’t believe how rarely I came see him.
“He really doesn’t know the difference,” Allison said.
He was sitting up in bed when we got there. Olga, the lovely nurse Allie paid to sit by his side, was immersed in something on her iPad. “Oh, there you are!” She looked up as though she’d been expecting us. “We were just talking about you!”
God, we were the worst. “You were?”
“I was showing Mr. Gil pictures from his albums, right, Mr. Gil?” In a broad bookcase by his window were nothing but photo albums and Olga’s romance novels. “We especially like to look at the ones from your high school graduation, Karen. Mr. Gil loves those.”
“Hi, Dad,” Allie said, kissing him; I did the same. He was sitting up straight, wearing blue-striped pajamas, looked clean, smelled clean, like baby shampoo. He’d been shaved recently. He was thin, with watery red-rimmed eyes and a prominent Adam’s apple, and hair that remained luxurious and thick, white and combed back in the style he’d worn since he was twenty. He followed our voices with his head but didn’t make eye contact. Occasionally he licked his dry lips. His hands were cracked, lizardy. Allie picked up some balm from his nightstand table and began to massage them, which he let her do, unresponsive.
“Has he said anything recently?” I asked. I didn’t even know where to stand. The room was so small, just one extra chair for Olga. I leaned awkwardly against a wall.
“Not much,” she said. “You’ve been quiet today, right, Mr. Gil?”
My father looked at her, moved his head, an indiscriminate gesture.
Olga smiled. “Some days, he says something, but most days not a word.”
Jacob, the truth: this was why I didn’t come. I didn’t have the foggiest idea what to say to my dad. I had no language. I would never have been able to sit here and show him photo albums and explain to him which person was his wife, which was his mother. How could Olga do it when he so rarely said anything back? Was she some sort of dementia savant? Was she just wired totally differently than I was? (Although maybe it was easier to do this for someone else’s father. Maybe, were it her own, she’d never be able to sit there all day and remind him of his past.)
I’m telling you, Jake, my dad was not always like this. When you were born, he was still the warm, comforting, loquacious father I grew up with. When Dave and I broke up, when Dave kicked me out that morning—there were so many hours left in the day and I didn’t know what to do with any of them. How would I get through that day, much less the rest of my life? I went home, showered, wanted a drink and knew I couldn’t have one; I was two months pregnant. I called my father. He was at my apartment within an hour. He’d brought me flowers.
“What am I going to do?” Because he was there, I allowed myself to become inconsolable. While I wept he put the flowers in a jar, put some water in the jar.
“They’re pretty, aren’t they?”
They were pretty. Daisies.
Then he sat down next to me on the couch and I sort of cuddled against him like when I was little, like when I thought his very presence made me safe. I cried for just about forever. “So this is what you’re going to do,” he said when I had tired myself out. “You’re going to put on something nice.”
I nodded out of weariness.
“And then we’re going to go have a bite to eat.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“You have to eat,” he said. “For the baby.”
I sniffled, nodded again.
“And then we’re going to the movies.”
“I can’t go to the movies.”
“You have to go.”
“I can’t,” I said, but he shook his head at me. I could. “What are we going to see?”
“I have no idea, something funny. Or exciting. And then we’ll go out for dessert. And then tomorrow you’ll go to work.”
“But what am I going to do after work tomorrow?” I was a loose thread away from crying again.
“You’ll call me.” He pulled a flower from the jar and handed it to me. “We’ll do something together.”
Because my father had given me a plan, I had to follow that plan. I put on something nice. We went for Chinese food, then out to see Snakes on a Plane, and the next night, as promised, we went for dinner again and then to see the new James Bond. And then the next day I had to head back to Maryland and was pretty busy throughout the rest of the campaign, and then you were born, and then—and then my dad was still there for me. In that room. Dancing with you in his arms.
For as long as he could have been he was there for me. Why had I not been here for him?
“Daddy,” I said. I took out a photo album and made room for myself by his side on the bed. I showed him pictures of us when we were kids—remember this? Grandpa and Grandma? Remember the trip to Virginia Beach? The Catskills? Allie took out her phone and showed him recent pictures of our kids, you and Dustin being silly together, Cammy pretending to push Ross into the lake. And it did seem to me he was able to follow our chatter and all the pictures, even though he didn’t say a word.
After about fifteen minutes, he started to close his eyes.
“I think he needs his rest,” Olga said. “This was very exciting to see your girls, wasn’t it, Mr. Gil?”
Allie leaned down to kiss his soft cheek. “Here,” Olga said, picking up her iPad. “I’ll take a picture of you together and later on we can talk about your visit.” Allie and I stood next to our father with our arms around him and smiled when Olga said smile, but when we looked at the picture our father’s eyes were closed; it turned out he was already asleep.
WE RETURNED FROM Bellevue to a surprising moment of domestic instability. Ross and Bruce were going at it over Ross’s ability to make his own choices regarding his own future. Camilla met us at the door. “I’d avoid the kitchen if I were you.”
A long, strangled “I’m eighteen, you asshole,” echoed from down the hall.
Allie dropped her purse and went charging like a fullback, Camilla and I following from a nervous distance. “What the hell is happening?”
In the sprawling kitchen, Ross was standing, fully extended, red with anger. Bruce was sitting at the counter, both hands wrapped around a coffee mug, somber but unagitated. In all the years I’d been visiting Allie, in all my time in Seattle, I had never heard anybody call anyone else an asshole. In fact, their life had always seemed one of almost comical tranquillity.
“Would someone tell me what the hell is going on?”
“I am eighteen years old,” Ross growled. Had he really grown so much overnight? I’d never seen him so big, so broad. “I can vote. I can drive. I can work. I can make my own decisions.”
Bruce’s face remained placid, but he was clutching that cup for dear life.
“Is this about Mumbai?” Allie asked.
“You are not going to go hang out in India for a year,” Bruce said, icy calm. “You’re starting college. That’s it. I’m not having this discussion anymore with you. I am finished.”
“Jesus Christ, if college is so important to you, I’ll fucking go to college in India,” Ross said. “Okay? Is that okay by you?”
“How is that going to happen, exactly?” Bruce said. “And if you curse at me one more time, Ross, every privilege I’ve ever granted you—”
“You’re on the fucking board of Columbia University! You can get me in somewhere!”
“Ross, what did I just say to you?”
“Do you think I can’t handle it? Is that the problem? You think I’m stupid?”
“Oh Jesus Christ,” Bruce said, finally releasing his coffee cup so he could bury his forehead in his hand.
“Then what. The. Fuck.”
&nb
sp; “Ross!” Allie said, and Bruce stood up and suddenly lost it, yelled at Ross to get the hell out of this room, out of his life, he was a spoiled shit, a stupid child, and suddenly the two of them were barking at each other like wild dogs, and I couldn’t help but notice how much bigger Ross was than Bruce, especially when he was in his face. And then Allie was behind her son trying to pull him away from her husband, not that they’d come to blows, but I guess they could have come to blows, and that’s when I looked down and saw you standing next to me, your eyes wide like quarters.
“Mom?” you said, reaching for my hand.
“It’s okay, sweetie,” I said.
“Is it?”
“Sure. They’ll get over it in a little while.”
But you’d never seen a father act like this toward his own son before.
I hoped you were paying careful attention.
BY THE NEXT morning, however, all seemed relatively calm; Allie and Bruce and the kids headed off to the float plane without any mention of yesterday’s scene. “All good?” I whispered to Allie on her way out the door, and she made a sort of what-can-you-do gesture, but she looked tired.
I myself had been up half the night with worry, although a Xanax did eventually knock me out. The plan for the day was simple: at eleven, you and I would go to Tully’s Coffee by the Pike Place Market and we would seat ourselves in a corner booth. Your father would meet us there. We’d stay for one hour. If all went well, we could go to the park for one more hour. Then you and I would get into the Hyundai and drive to Anacortes and make it there for the five o’clock ferry. We’d be at the house in Friday Harbor in time for cocktails. This was nonnegotiable. The cocktails.
After my sister and her family left, we trooped upstairs to the kitchen for breakfast, where you found the wrapped Playmobil pirate ship on the table. “What? It’s not even my birthday!”
“Well, almost,” I said. Your birthday was in six months.
Our Short History Page 9