There is a metallic taste in my mouth. Blood — I’ve bitten my lip, still tense even with the drugs. Maybe the sedative is wearing off. A few tears well up and I blink them away. The artist in me takes over and I see the entire horizon of my life shaded with the tone of her words.
* * *
It’s mostly our father’s fault, according to Ruth. It’s the patriarchy. Two girls. He wanted boys. I have a child, out of wedlock, as Ruth calls it — but our father is thrilled Saul has our last name. Ruth married a successful lawyer and Dad’s happy she took his last name. She always says our father views my patched-together work as entrepreneurial. She has to be the girl in the family for both of us, be overlooked for two, invisibility times two.
It’s hard to argue with her. After our father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease he took his big orange cat and seat-belted it in the passenger seat beside him. He went off for a drive and came back a bit later, saying Ruthie was hungry.
“Dad,” I said. “That’s the cat, not Ruth.”
My son giggled behind his hands, his dark brown eyes peering over his little fingertips.
“What in god’s name is the cat doing in the car?” My father unbuckled the cat.
Remarkably, the cat seemed to enjoy the outing.
It enraged Ruth. “You’re all ending up with problems, and I have to take care of you.”
Ruth’s husband is the only one who has patience with her. She had a late-term miscarriage. A stillbirth is what it was. Her husband called me that night and I drove to the city. Ruth couldn’t even look at me, she was crying so hard. “Why do you get to have a child?” That’s all she said.
“Ruth doesn’t mean it, Daisy,” her husband said as he wept. But we both know she did.
A faraway voice says my name. It’s not Ruth or her husband, but Nurse Clara telling me to hang on; she knows how disorienting it is, how upsetting. There seems to be some trouble with the equipment. She rubs my shoulder but I keep my eyes closed. I remember again that I’m drugged, which is why it’s so hard to be present.
* * *
“Time is passing,” Ruth informed me on the phone when I told her about my first test results, the ones which led to the second mammogram. And then the second mammogram, which led to this third, more invasive, drawn-out testing to see if I have cancer.
When I told my sister about the first test results I hoped it would open her eyes a little, that she would understand that I, too, have problems and that it isn’t as easy as she thinks for me to help our parents as much as I do. “It’s probably your own fault,” Ruth said instead. “From drinking too much coffee or something. You must have done something to cause this.” I could hear that Ruth was trying not to cry, anger being easier than fear and cruelty easier than vulnerability. But that didn’t mean she was going to change her view of me.
Ever since our father took a pot of coffee and poured it on a plate and was subsequently diagnosed, everything has been my fault. Now that our mother is having problems with her right eye, Ruth has turned her panic against me.
“You live closer. You’re right there, so why can’t you be their caregiver?” Ruth demands. Ruth would have made better choices if she’d been born first, she always tells me. I should have been the youngest, the reckless and irresponsible one. I’ve even robbed Ruth of her place in the family.
She thinks Saul should have been given up for adoption. His father is a loser, she’ll say when she’s upset. Your boyfriend. She never even called him my partner when he was alive. Ruth said once that it was reprehensible for us to reproduce. We had bad genes. Our genetic legacy was one of curses.
Even though our mother rarely calls Ruth for help, Ruth is totally convinced she’s doing everything on her own. “Why can’t they call you,” she says, “when there’s trouble?”
“They do. I drive over there and Saul sits in the car in his pyjamas.”
“How hard can it be to be a single parent?”
No matter how often it’s explained to her that I do as much as she does, Ruth denies it. Her husband views this as how Ruth copes with loss, through a prism of rage.
Thinking about Ruth makes me feel sick. But it could be the drugs.
* * *
It was a week before this third testing when my mother called me about her eyesight problem. I drove to my parents’ house to find that Ruth was already there. She had arrived for an unannounced visit. She’d taken a day off and come out to the country to buy some wool for her new rug-hooking hobby.
They didn’t hear me come in. I stood in the porch. Ruth was on a roll to my mother, who couldn’t get a word in: “Crazy Daisy is too indulgent, Mum, you know this. I work full-time in a real job as a physiotherapist, and I have a husband. He’s a lawyer. People depend on us. People with actual problems. Middle-aged people should be independent. What is wrong with Daisy? How can we even be related?
“Who has a baby at forty? And who mates with a loser who dies drunk and stoned in a car when his child is only three and leaves behind a mountain of online gambling debt?” In that moment in the porch, it was as though I was hearing Ruth describe someone I didn’t know, an obtuse woman who was blind to the reality of her life.
I wish I could leap out of this chair and run away and leave myself behind. But my arms and legs are numb. I can hardly move them.
* * *
A door opens. Footsteps. I wish for it to be Athena but it isn’t.
“Do you mind if he sits in?” Clara says.
It’s so cold. I open my eyes and all I can see is a bright light. I hardly slept last night. Maybe exhaustion is making time slow down. Making the past flash before my eyes.
“Do I mind if who sits in?”
My voice breaks. It’s not tears. It’s the blood in my head. I wiggle but my right breast is clamped into the machine. It is a preposterous position. My johnny gown keeps falling away and Clara tucks my ass back in. They’re trying to find the right position to crush my tit, to scan it, so they can find the spot the second mammogram had caught. The abnormality.
But locating the exact spot is proving unusually difficult.
“The medical student. Do you mind if he joins us?” Clara is kind, extra kind. She remembers when I took her family portrait. Clara thinks I’m about to cry. I might cry. I’d wanted it so badly to be Athena who walked into the room, her low voice reassuring me it would all be okay. Maybe crying would help me relax. I haven’t decided yet. It’s hard to decide anything in this position.
They know they should have checked with me earlier, not assumed. A man kneels down now. In blue scrubs and wearing thick glasses and a face mask. “I’m a medical student. Ian. Is it okay?” He sounds young.
“The more the merrier.” Spots in my eyes now. I might pass out.
Ian-the-medical-student laughs. “I see you have a sense of humour.”
My friend Athena would approve of Ian. Humour is our shield, Athena always says.
“What’s that about a shield?” Ian asks.
At first I don’t know what he’s talking about and then realize I’m so disoriented in this position I’m thinking out loud, quietly speaking Athena’s words of wisdom.
The specialist speaks. When did he come in? “Sorry we have you in this position. It’s a bit hard to get your breast in the right spot, with the suspicious area in the inside corner like it is. And your breast is small. You’re so thin.”
* * *
My mistakes hang around my neck, a garland of shame I’m sure everyone in town can see when I walk holding Saul’s hand as we take the path which cuts through the back streets to the library. There goes Crazy Daisy, they probably say. Saul wants to take laneways and alleys. He likes to lead the way. When we moved out of the city, I rented a small house on a dead-end street full of retired people who might not approve but who have enough life behind them to knit some pity in with their judgment. The house was bui
lt in the seventies, the landlord told me when he showed it to me. He was a commercial property developer and this was his only residential rental. For a particular kind of tenant, a word-of-mouth tenant, he said. It was his parents’ retirement home. He couldn’t bear to sell it now that they had passed away. He lived in a huge house across the street.
He almost wept when he said they had passed away.
The back room facing the huge lawn and garden had been his father’s study. There was a woodstove. He would leave it in for me.
Athena had recommended me. Her uncle is friends with my landlord and her recommendation was all it took. It was hard to explain my unusual work of freelance photography, art shows, and workshops. You do what you can to make a living when you have a fine arts degree.
The landlord already knew I worked for the hospital part-time. I didn’t tell him it wasn’t actually a job; it was just a grant the hospital kept getting renewed every year, for me to take portraits of mothers and their babies. He said it was noble work.
The 1970s house has not been renovated since it was built, except that my landlord replaced the windows and ripped out the orange shag carpet. But it has the original appliances and the original tile and fixtures in the bathroom. It may be a bit shabby now, dated, but no expense was spared when it was custom built, made for easy living. You lose sense of time when you walk into the porch. The world falls away. Life is gentler. The past is framed with blurry nostalgia.
Nostalgia feels like a distant luxury to me, though, suspended here in the terror of the present and what this test might reveal. It’s been so hard living as a single parent, having this little child who depends on me and me alone ever since his father died. Little Saul’s artist mother, living hand to mouth, trying to pay the bills and keep at her art, looking after her parents, keeping Ruthie at arm’s length. I suddenly realize how terrified I am of dying, how I feel I can’t even die, there are so many people depending on me.
* * *
The first mammogram had been in a cold room just down the hall. I stood there while my breast was crushed flat. Any sense of being a sexy woman was squashed along with it. They don’t tell you ahead of time what breastfeeding does to your breasts, how they dangle and seem deflated, empty sacks, the result of two years of nursing. They said breastfeeding helped reduce the risk of cancer. I thought it was insurance.
The technician and the nurse said it could very well be calcium deposits. Or scar tissue. Maybe I had banged my breast at some point in my life. The dots in the mammogram reading were like salt and pepper flecks. These weren’t as concerning, they weren’t as dense. That was reassuring. We’d do another scan and hopefully it would show nothing.
After the second abnormal results, my family doctor called me to set up the core biopsy. “It could be nothing,” she said, her face noncommittal. “The core biopsy will tell us. Remember, breast cancer is a treatable disease most of the time.”
She squeezed my shoulder. “Try to relax. Keeping doing yoga.”
But I’m sure being upside down like this is not what she meant.
* * *
The doctors here are all men and even though I can’t see their faces, their voices are kind when they speak to me, as though they know how disturbing it is that I can’t see their eyes. My sister has little time for most men.
“Look at that Brazilian soccer player,” she says. “He killed his wife and fed her to his Rottweilers and people still love him. He’s out of jail now, a team signed him, and he wants his child back.”
Somehow Ruth has still managed to find the perfect man. My brother-in-law is huge and muscular and tattooed. His voice booms when he speaks. He has a buzz cut. He was raised by his grandparents and he cries easily. He volunteers with a feral cat rescue program. He knows how to knit. He worked on lobster boats until he was in his late twenties. When he saw the men around him crippled up with arthritis by the time they were in their early fifties, he said he didn’t want to grow old before his time. He fished on weekends and went to university during the week. He read his textbooks on the boat. His uncles and cousins teased him but not very much. They were proud. He never gave up. That’s their family motto, I always think: Never Give Up.
“What a good attitude, Daisy.” One of the doctors is speaking.
I must have spoken out loud again, my brother-in-law’s adage coming out of my mouth.
* * *
Suspicious.
That’s the word they use.
It could mean nothing.
“With two mammograms indicating an abnormality, we need to find out.” It’s yet another nurse assisting the doctor. Not Clara. I can’t keep track of who is in the room anymore. At this stage it’s not a technician, although a technician is present. It’s the radiologist. He’s already explained that for a core biopsy they use the mammogram and an X-ray machine, to make sure they get the correct tissue to send to the pathologist.
“We locate the area, based on both previous sets of scans. The ones which showed the spot.”
“How are things?” the nurse asks. “We’re just going to make this a little tighter. Sorry for the discomfort. Do you feel okay?”
Then they take out my breast and sit me up. The blood rushes down. I pray for good results.
And then they move the chair again, and the machine, and clamp me back in.
I say it feels as though I’m seeing a dentist, chiropractor, and massage therapist all at the same time. They laugh.
Clara asks me if I have plans for Easter. It’s March already but there is still snow on the ground. It’s been a long winter. I’m taking a few days off. Taking my son to the city, to the pool.
* * *
Athena sent me a card in the middle of all the waiting for tests. She’s that kind of person, who still sends cards and surprise packages in the mail. You just have to learn to be in the space in-between and keep going, she wrote. You have to be in your life for your child. You can’t postpone life. Athena gets frustrated by wasted life, as she calls it. She had a double mastectomy five years ago. Her scans have all been clear. People forget, Athena says. They have scares and then cradle the moment like a newborn baby, smell the unmistakable freshness. And then they just forget.
* * *
The summer Saul was four, the summer just before his father died, he would wait in the window for his father to pick him up. He was usually late and sometimes forgot. But that one summer he remembered and was always on time. He’d pick Saul up at four o’clock and bring him back at seven, dropping him in the driveway and leaving without talking to me. I never really knew what Saul did with his father on those summer evenings. Saul would make up stories about incredible fishing trips and backwoods expeditions. I wasn’t surprised he was making them up. That is what children do when they need love, when they wish for reality to be something other than it is. I was mostly surprised I almost believed his stories. It was his longing I believed, because longing never lies. Saul would weep. I would put him in a warm bath. “There, there,” I said. “It will get better.”
The big lie.
His father died six months later.
It was the summer grief pressed in upon me in the way a watermark imprints paper, permanent and imperceptible in certain light.
* * *
The doctor is talking.
“It’s a core biopsy because we go into the core of the area of concern. We put a needle in, and then insert an even smaller needle through the tube, if you can visualize this. And then we remove a tiny strand of tissue. We repeat this quite a few times, to get enough tiny strands. Then we X-ray the strands. And we send the tissue to the pathologist.”
It’s probably three hours they’ve had me strapped in here, flipping me around for a few breaks in position. Poking at my breast. Jabbing over and over again, the extraction of the vermicelli tissues. They keep complimenting me on my composure.
Clara squeezes my hand a few
times. “How’s your neck? We tried to be careful because of your whiplash. Have a big soak in the tub with Epsom salts tonight. Do you have a ride home? You can’t drive,” she says.
“Athena is coming.” I close my eyes as they poke some more.
Then I think of the newborn photos I have taken in the child and maternity ward.
* * *
“That’s it,” Clara says, and then taps me on the shoulder. “Did you fall asleep? That would be a first.” She smiles as she looks away. I remember how she held her dead baby, so perfect and still. She wasn’t crying when we took the photos. Clara wanted the pictures. The only ones she’d have to remember her daughter by, so it wouldn’t just be in her mind’s eye.
* * *
Back in the changing area Clara bandages my breast. It’s different from when I gave birth. Saul was born a month early. It didn’t matter who saw me with my legs spread wide open, blood and amniotic fluid dripping out. Or breastfeeding, my porn star boobs, as I called them, huge and swollen, trying to get the baby to latch. It would help with his jaundice. Saul’s father came in only once that week. It was just as well. I was exhausted. The baby nursed every two hours, day and night. He went under the ultraviolet lights to help eliminate the bilirubin causing his jaundice. My breasts would leak as I reached my hand through the small opening in the incubator to stroke his little belly.
I was in a semi-private room and my roommate had lost her baby. The hospital was so overcrowded they couldn’t give her a private room. One of the maternity nurses had seen Life, a photography show I’d had at the Hardware Gallery, a small art gallery near the hospital here in Kentville. Life was a series of portraits of people in the local hospice. The maternity nurse delicately asked me about taking portraits once she found out I was the photographer who had done the show about the dying. I agreed to take the photos of the stillborn baby. It put into perspective Saul’s jaundice, even my strained relationship with his father. It can always be worse. That’s what Athena says.
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