“Cancer.” Papa filled in the word Mama couldn’t bring herself to say.
I recoiled. I’d heard of cancer. People died from cancer.
“What will they do, Mama, if the lump is bad?” I felt cold and numb.
She said nothing.
Adel said, “Please tell us everything, Mama. Don’t hold anything back from us. Please.”
Mama crossed her arms as if to shield herself. “A mastectomy. Surgeons remove the entire breast and some lymph nodes from under the arm.”
I knew a little about lymph nodes from health and hygiene classes. The lymph system made white blood cells, and their job was to fight germs. Why hadn’t her white cells just attacked the cancer and destroyed it?
“Why do they take out lymph nodes?” I asked, determined to hear every detail of this terrible operation.
“To see if the cancer has metastasized.”
I didn’t know what that word meant, but I wasn’t about to ask because it was evident by the expression on Adel’s face that she did know and that it wasn’t a good thing. I was still reeling from the information about Mama having her entire breast removed because of one lump.
“But the lump might not be cancer,” I said, sounding hopeful. “It could be just a common, ordinary, everyday garden-variety lump.”
Mama nodded. “That is my hope.”
My head spun with information and words no one should have to hear. I wanted to cry but didn’t dare. It might tell Mama that I didn’t have faith that her lump was nothing at all.
Adel circled the table and crouched in front of Mama. “This can’t be happening to you. It just can’t be.” She laid her head in Mama’s lap, and Mama stroked her hair.
My sister was right. People as wonderful as my mother did not have horrible things like cancer happen to them. Mama was good and kind and loved by everyone who knew her.
“That’s what I’ve been telling myself ever since I saw Dr. Keller, but unfortunately it is happening to me. To all of us, in a way.”
“Which brings me to our next topic,” Papa said. “What’s happening to your mother is family business. I don’t want tongues wagging all over town about this. It isn’t gossip.”
“I’ll be telling people,” Mama said. “But at my own choosing.”
“But people know you went to Emory today for tests. Becky and Mrs. Johnson—”
Mama held up her hand. “You may say that the tests are inconclusive and that I will be returning to Emory midweek for more tests.”
I nodded. “All right, Mama.”
Adel pulled away, found a tissue and wiped her eyes. “I want to be there for your surgery, Mama,” she said.
“You have a job.”
“I’ll quit.”
“Well, if Adel’s going, so am I,” I said.
“Excuse me,” Papa interrupted, his face in a scowl. “Did I just hear you two sass?”
“It’s all right, Graham,” Mama said. “This is hard news for all of us. I see no harm in the girls’ coming. It might do me good to wake up and see my family around me if . . .” She paused. “Well, if the news isn’t good.”
“But it will be good news, Mama,” I said with conviction. “I know it will.”
We talked some more, but when Adel and I went upstairs, I grabbed her arm. “Adel, I don’t know what that word ‘metastasize’ means.”
“It means ‘spread.’ It means that cancer has spread into other parts of a person’s body.”
Later in my room, I lay in bed and gazed through the window, staring up at a sliver of the moon peeking from the sky. The night was silent, my room dark, the house quiet and the night air heavy with the scent of a fading summer garden. I folded my hands together and whispered, Please, God, let my mama be all right. Don’t let it be cancer. Don’t let it have already spread.
We left for Atlanta Wednesday afternoon in the rain, with Papa driving our 1972 Ford Fair-lane, Mama in the front beside him, me and Adel in the backseat. Each of us had packed a small bag because we’d be staying overnight. My teachers had all given me excused absences, and I’d told only Becky Sue about Mama’s tests and that she had to return for more. I knew Becky Sue would tell others, and I knew she suspected I wasn’t telling her everything, but to her credit, she did not pry.
Going to Atlanta was usually a fun event because Mama would take us shopping for back-to-school clothes and sometimes, time permitting, Christmas presents. We hadn’t gone this year before school started because Adel was working and I didn’t care all that much about fashion, so Mama had ordered a few things out of the Sears catalog for me.
The hospital was located on the campus of Emory University, and I stared with fascination at students walking along the sidewalks and going in and out of buildings. It did not seem possible to me that my classroom work back in Conners would prepare me to become a student at any college in only four more years. And yet that was what I had decided to do—leave home and go to college. I began to rethink my commitment and wondered if Papa would mind having two daughters working at his bank should I drop out of the college-prep program.
The entrance lobby of the hospital looked more like the formal room in an old mansion, with fancy carpets and hanging chandeliers. But once we turned the corner, everything changed and we were in sterile-looking hallways with walls painted mint green and smelling of antiseptics and pine cleaners.
We checked my mother into a private room on the fifth floor, and once she was settled in her bed, we were allowed in to see her.
“My surgeon, Dr. Willingham, will be in after supper,” Mama told us. “He’ll operate first thing in the morning.”
I wanted to see this man, the one who had permission to cut off my mother’s breast, but I was fearful that I might kick and scratch him simply because he would dare to touch her.
Mama took Papa’s hand. “You take the girls to supper and check into the hotel. I’ll be fine. Truth is, I’m a bit tired and believe I will sleep a little.”
We kissed her goodbye and Papa drove us to a Howard Johnson motel not too far from the campus, where he had reserved two rooms. Papa was in one room and Adel and I in the other; we would share a double bed. We ate in the motel restaurant, but it was plain to see that none of us had an appetite. Eating out was a rare occurrence for us, and usually enjoyed, but tonight the mashed potatoes and meat loaf stuck in my throat.
Back in the room, I watched Adel going through her nightly rituals while I sat cross-legged on the bed, hugging a pillow to my chest. We hadn’t spoken since we’d said good night to Papa, and I could not stand the sad silence any longer. “It’s not going to be cancer, is it, Adel?”
She was brushing her long black hair and her gaze caught mine in the mirror. “That’s what the operation will tell us,” she said.
“But don’t you have faith that it won’t be cancer?”
“I don’t reckon that my faith will change it one way or the other. It either is, or it isn’t. God’s already decided that.”
“Well, I don’t think it is. I think it’s just a false alarm.” I kept my tone confident because Adel’s lack of confidence scared me. And I sure didn’t want her to rile God with her lack of faith.
She turned to face me. “Grandmother died from this, Darcy. Didn’t you know?”
I stared at her, slack-jawed. “Grandmother had breast cancer?”
“She never recovered from the operation. But she was old,” Adel added hastily. “Mama’s a whole lot younger.”
I tried to remember those days before Grandmother’s funeral. I recalled her being hospitalized, but I hadn’t had a clue as to what was wrong with her. What I remembered most were my mother’s tears and the dark, ominous wreath that had hung on our front door after Grandmother had died. “Poor Grandmother,” I said.
Adel slid into the bed, reached up and flipped the switch on the bedside lamp. Out of the darkness, she said, “Doctors think it runs in families. That it can be passed along.”
If that was true, then Mama
might have been cursed from before she was born.
Adel and I lay there in the dark without touching, our backs to one another, each curled up in a ball. I felt tears fill my eyes, and I stuffed a fistful of the wadded sheet into my mouth so that I could cry quietly. It was a long time before I realized that Adel had done the same thing and that she was crying too.
We were at the hospital by seven the next morning. The nurses had already given Mama a sedative, and she was groggy. “You sleep good, Joy?” Papa asked, kissing her forehead.
“They kept . . . waking me up,” Mama said. Her speech sounded slurred. “Hi, girls. You . . . two get a good . . . night’s . . . sleep?”
We assured her we had. I asked, “How long will this operation take, Mama?”
“Dr. Willingham said about . . . an hour if the lump is . . . just . . . a lump.” Her voice floated up like petals on water.
The clock on the wall read 7:30. I held her hand.
A man swooped into the room pushing a gurney. “Morning, Mrs. Quinlin. I’m Nigel and I’m here to take you down to the OR. Ready?”
“Don’t know . . . if I’ll ever be . . . ready,” Mama sighed.
He helped her scoot onto the rolling bed, transferred her IV line and headed out the door. We walked beside the bed as he pushed it down the hall. At the elevator, Nigel said, “There’s a family waiting room down the hall. Or you can wait in her room. The surgeon will call you when she’s in recovery.”
The doors closed and the three of us stood staring in disbelief, like people watching a bus that had left them behind. “Let’s wait in her room,” Papa said.
Papa had arranged for a television to be put into Mama’s room, and the Today Show was playing. Hosts Jim Hartz and Barbara Walters were introducing newscaster Frank Blair. The anchor-man reported the latest world events, and the big story was about how President Ford had offered clemency to Vietnam War draft dodgers. Footage of helicopters and foot soldiers and fiery jungles played, then cut to video of protesters marching with antiwar signs and shouting, “Hell no! We won’t go!” as the reporter talked. Clemency meant that anyone who’d refused to fight in the war could come home again without being arrested or fined. Like my childhood games, the President was calling, “All-y, all-y, in free.”
Adel stared at the small TV screen and its images of war and I saw tears in her eyes.
“That doesn’t seem right,” Papa said, for he was watching too. “Our boys died in those jungles and over here they burned our flag and spit on all our government stands for. Now Mr. Ford says it doesn’t matter. That those cowards can skulk back home and join daily life like nothing ever happened. I’ve been to too many funerals of boys who loved their country and did their duty to think this is right.” I knew Papa’s Southern sense of justice was offended. “But what should I expect from a man who pardoned Richard Nixon?” he added with disgust.
Fascinated, I watched as dark helicopters rose over burning jungles. It was all so far away from Georgia’s red clay and my life in Conners. And from my mother lying on an operating table under a surgeon’s knife. Mama also was fighting a war. Only God could grant her clemency.
When the phone in the room finally rang, I jumped to my feet. Papa took the receiver, listened, said, “Thank you, Doctor,” and hung up. “Your mother’s in recovery and awake,” he told us. “We can go see her.”
I quickly looked at the clock and saw that almost three hours had passed since Nigel had taken Mama to the operating room. I got a sick feeling in my stomach. Three hours gone meant that the lump had not been friendly and my mother had lost her breast.
Four
The recovery room held several patients, all bedded down behind white curtains. I don’t know why I thought Mama would be the only person there and that a troop of nurses would be hovering around her bed, but that was not the case. She lay with IVs in her arm and wires that led to a machine keeping track of her heartbeat. We crowded around her bed like boats around an island searching for safe harbor before a storm. I could see a bandage at the neck of her hospital gown.
“Hi,” Mama said. “It’s all over.” Her voice sounded hoarse and her lips looked parched.
“You did fine, Joy,” Papa said.
“I know the truth,” Mama said. “I have cancer.”
“You had cancer,” I whispered. “They cut it out.”
“The surgeon said it’ll take some time before the full pathology report comes back from the lab.”
Papa leaned over and cupped her cheek. “Don’t you go worrying about it, you hear? Right now, you just rest and get your strength back. We’ll be waiting for you in your room.”
Her eyes filled with tears. “I love you all so much.”
“We love you too,” Adel said, tears running down her cheeks.
I longed to throw my arms around my mother and not let go, but the tubes and wires and her frailty overwhelmed me. I wanted to run far away from this place where pain-filled voices calling out to nurses for relief floated around the room like whispering ghosts. I wanted time to absorb the bad news, to think about this plague that had fallen on my mother so undeservedly.
“Come on, girls,” Papa said. “Let’s let your mother rest.”
I fled the recovery room ahead of the others.
On Friday morning Mama was sitting up in bed when we came to visit. Her left arm was wrapped in an Ace bandage and held up by pulleys anchored to a contraption next to her bed. “To keep the swelling down,” she told us. Long tubes were visible under her bedclothes. “Drainage tubes,” she explained. “The nurses empty them a couple times a day. And they change the bandages too.”
I saw Adel shudder, but I didn’t let on that it affected me one bit.
“I’ll be taking the girls home today. Then I’ll be coming back to stay awhile,” Papa said.
“But your job—” Mama started.
“Will be there waiting for me when this is all over,” Papa finished. “I’m the boss, remember?”
Both Adel and I protested being taken home, but Papa wouldn’t put up with it. “There is nothing for the two of you to do here. Your mother needs her rest and you both have obligations. I expect you both to stay at home and carry on life as usual. I will bring your mother home when the doctor says I can. In the meantime, I will call home every night and we can talk to one another.”
I expected Adel to persuade Papa otherwise. She had strategies for getting her way with him, but now, when I was counting on her to use her bag of tricks, she just nodded and agreed to his mandates. “We’ll keep things in order,” she said.
Out in the hall, Papa looked me in the eye and said, “Adel is in charge.”
I started to protest. Papa didn’t give me a chance.
“I don’t want your mother to worry one iota about what’s going on in her house. I expect the house to be clean, meals prepared, clothes washed and squabbling kept to a minimum. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, Papa,” I said, torn between wanting to object and knowing better.
“Say your goodbyes to your mama, and let’s get going. It’s a long drive.”
We did and it was all I could do to keep from bawling. Papa told Mama he’d see her Saturday around lunchtime and kissed her goodbye. Finally, we left Emory and headed out of Atlanta toward Conners, leaving Mama behind. It hardly seemed like a week had passed since I’d stood in the school halls talking to Becky Sue about homework and setting plans for the weekend. Just a single week gone out of September 1974, yet somehow I felt years older. And a whole lot sadder.
After breakfast on Saturday, Papa packed and left. Adel and I stood on the veranda and watched his car disappear around the corner. “Come on,” Adel said. “We’ve got chores.”
Her bossing me was starting already, and Papa not gone two minutes. “I thought I’d work in the yard,” I said politely. “You know how Mama loves her gardens, and they need tending.”
To my surprise, Adel said, “That’s a good idea. I’ll start in the house.”<
br />
The weather was cooler and the sun was shining as I walked to the garden shed and dragged out tools. I set to work pruning the butterfly bushes, Latin name Buddleia, and clipping the dead and dying clusters off the hydrangeas. I was making a mental list of what I had to do to keep the gardens beautiful until Mama could work them again when Becky Sue came around the corner of the house.
“Hey,” she said. “I waited as long as I could before coming over. How’s your mama?”
Without warning, big tears welled up in my eyes. I dropped the pruning shears and wiped them away with the sleeve of my shirt. “She has cancer, Becky Sue,” I said, not giving a minute’s thought to Papa’s admonishments about keeping family business private. Not that it was going to be easy. All of Mama’s friends from church and the garden club had been calling nonstop. Word had already gotten around town that she was at Emory.
Becky started crying too. “Oh, Darcy, I’m sorry,” she wailed. “This is terrible. Just awful.”
We walked out to the gazebo together and sat on the wooden bench swing suspended by chains from the ceiling. “She’s being real brave,” I said. “But I’m scared.”
“Course you are. My grandpa died of cancer.”
“Thank you for that information,” I said, not too kindly.
Becky slapped her hand over her mouth. “Sorry. Had no call to say that. Grandpa was old and sick for a long time. He smoked too, and that’s what probably gave him lung cancer. So he sort of brought it on himself.”
“Mama didn’t do nothing to bring breast cancer on herself.” I scuffed my old gardening shoes on the wood flooring. “It’s not fair, Becky. Not fair at all.”
“You coming to school on Monday, or going back to the hospital?”
“Papa says we have to carry on like nothing’s wrong. I don’t care a thing about school right now.” I crossed my arms in defiance but after a few minutes asked, “So what have I missed since Wednesday?”
“J.T. got into a fight behind the gym with Billy Harrold Friday after school. Seems as if Billy was flirting with Donna and J.T. took exception to it.”
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