Holding On (Hooking Up) (16 page)

Isamu, salt of the earth that he was, approached the nurse’s station every half hour on the dot, inquiring politely about the wellbeing of Ms. DiCarlo, but he was sent back to his seat every single time without any answers.

Afternoon was fading and turning into dusk and we were still at the hospital, waiting without answers. I’d been receiving texts from Ryan but I had nothing new to tell him. The last one I sent said simply, “Please come. I need you.” The waiting was excruciating and Benjie was getting very cranky due to missing his nap.

I glanced up when the doors opened and saw Ryan stride in, still in uniform. I stood awkwardly and waddled over to him. He opened his arms and ushered me back to the bank of seats.

“No news?”

“No, nothing. I didn’t even know she was sick. I don’t know what’s going on. They won’t tell me anything. Apparently I’m not on her health care proxy or her HIPAA list.” I held his hand tightly, insanely glad he was here. Now that Ryan was with me, I felt safe letting my concern truly show. Before he arrived, I tried to keep it together for Benjie. Now my nerves were showing and the baby was kicking up a storm inside me, almost like he or she felt my anxiety and echoed it.

Isamu looked at me and then at Benjie, who was climbing his dad’s leg and riding up and down on it, and said, “I will take Benjamin home. He can help me feed Eenie, Meeny, and Miney.”

Benjie protested loudly and was quickly shushed by the cranky old man and his prune-faced wife, the nurse at the triage desk and the security guard watching the doorway. Ryan smiled and said, “Thank you.”

“No problem. Come, Grandson. We will leave and let your parents wait for Grandmother.”

We exchanged kisses and Isamu dragged a whiny Benjie away.

Minutes later, a nurse stepped out from the bowels of the restricted treatment area and motioned for us. We stood quickly and were escorted to a conference room off the emergency wing. We sat and looked at each other in trepidation. Something serious was going on. I clutched his hand under the table.  I’d been in the medical field a long time now, and whenever a doctor pulls the family aside, it’s never good.

We rose as Dr. Flynn, the same emergency room doctor who treated Mom when we were here in the summer, came in.

“My, you’ve grown,” he said with a smile, noting my enormous belly.

“Yes, I’m about eight months along now.”

“Please have a seat.” He motioned to the chairs on one side of the table and we all sat together.

“Mr. and Mrs. Ashford, I’m afraid I don’t have good news for you today. But I want you to stay calm, Mrs. Ashford, especially in your condition. Your mother told me about your preeclampsia and she was quite worried about you. She insisted I only talk to you about what happened today if you feel you’re able to handle it. Do you understand?”

I murmured my assent, clutching Ryan’s arm and huddling close to him. 

“I’m sorry to tell you that your mother has gastric cancer, stage 4. That means the cancer has breached the mucosal layer of the stomach and entered her pancreas as well as lymph nodes in the stomach region. Unfortunately, her condition seems to be progressing at a rapid rate.”

The word cancer was a huge shock. My body wanted to rebel, to make the doctor take it back, but I knew I needed to compose myself if I wanted any more information. I took a deep breath and forced myself to remain calm and keep my tone even. “Ok. So, what’s the next step? Chemo? Radiation? Surgery? What can we do to get her better?”

“Mrs. Ashford, it’s not that simple. Her condition is very serious and there’s nothing more we can do to treat her cancer. She isn’t responding to the known courses of treatment. I’m afraid the chemotherapy is no longer working.”

“But you have to be able to do something. Can’t we send her to a specialist or something?” My mouth went dry and my heart started pounding. They had to be wrong. Of course there was something they could do, wasn’t there?

“Mrs. Ashford, I’m so sorry, but I’m afraid her chances aren’t good, at this point less than five percent. The cancerous cells have metastasized and the treatments we use to shrink the cells are no longer effective. At this time, we can only do our best to keep her comfortable while she gets her affairs in order.”

Those words chilled me. Keep her comfortable. Get her affairs in order. They kept people who were dying comfortable. Those who needed to get their affairs in order usually needed to do it quickly, before they ran out of time.

But she wasn’t dying, not my mom. She couldn’t be. We didn’t have enough time. We’d only just found each other.  It wasn’t fair. No, this couldn’t be happening. They had to be wrong. They had to be mistaken.

“There’s some mistake, right? What do you mean ‘less than five percent’? What are you saying?” Even though I’d promised, my voice rose nearly an octave, and I could hear the panic lacing it. This wasn’t happening. It just couldn’t be.

“Mrs. Ashford, I’m terribly sorry. We’re going to try a few different treatments to try to slow the progress, but at most we can only give her another few months.”

I rested my head on the table and closed my eyes, unable to take this in, unable to comprehend what I was being told. Ryan nudged me gently; the doctor was speaking to me, but all I heard was a roar in my ears. Everything stopped. The hospital sounds that had been so loud and disjointed in my ears were suddenly silenced. The nasal voices paging doctors to various places had been put on mute. The beeping of the machines keeping people alive had been squelched.

She couldn’t have cancer. Not her. Not my family, the only real family I had, save the child in my stomach.

“Do you have any questions?”

I shook my head, feeling as though I was in a haze. Nothing felt real. I wanted to go to sleep and wake up from what had started out as a great day and ended up as a nightmare. But I wasn’t dreaming. I was wide-awake and I couldn’t just blink this away.

“Mrs. Ashford, I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this. The best thing to do at this point is to try to be with her as much as you can, and enjoy the time you have together. She’s been asking for you. She’s in room five, if you’d like to go see her.”

I nodded woodenly and stood up. I turned and left the room in a haze, not even thanking the doctor or saying goodbye. Ryan murmured something to Dr. Flynn, too low for me to hear, and followed me out into the hallway and into Mom’s room.

She appeared sallow, exhausted, but she still had a smile for me when I entered the room. Was I imagining the yellow tinge of her skin? Why did she suddenly look so ill? Did she look that way just yesterday? And if so, why didn’t I see it?

She held out a hand and I stepped to the side of the bed to take it. Her skin almost felt papery and very fragile.

She cleared her throat and said huskily, “Catie, Doctor Flynn says I’m free to go. Let’s get out of here, ok?”

“Ok, but when we get back to our place, we’re going to talk.”

She nodded. “Alright.”

I retrieved a wheelchair from the hallway and Ryan and I carefully loaded her into it and pushed her down the hall toward the exit. We put her in the car and drove to our house without asking her where she wanted to go.

When we arrived, Ryan picked her up and placed her gently on our couch. It was dark, and I busied myself turning on lights and putting on a pot of the jasmine tea she liked so much. I bustled around, picking up random stuff and putting it down someplace else. I felt the need to keep my hands, my mind busy, but I couldn’t avoid talking to her forever.

Ryan stopped me in mid-stride to tell me he was going to go get Benjie from Isamu’s house. I nodded and took a deep breath. I couldn’t put it off any longer. Once Benjie got home, we’d lose our chance to talk privately, freely. I walked back into the living room and sat down in a comfortable leather recliner adjacent to the couch.

“You weren’t going to tell me, were you?”

“I didn’t want you to worry. It’s my job to worry about you.”

“Oh, yeah, like you did the whole time I was growing up,” I spat, then cringed at the way I was punishing her.

“That’s not fair,” she said quietly.

She was right, but I couldn’t admit it. I was too angry at her. “Neither is this. I can’t lose you now. I just found you. You can’t leave me.”

“Catie, I’ll never leave you, not willingly.”

“But you still will,” I said flatly.

“Let’s not talk about that right now.”

I stood up and railed at her. “Why not? When were you going to tell me? The day you died? The day of your funeral?”

“I was planning on telling you. I was just working on how.”

“Well, making me call 911 and race to the hospital was a creative way to do it.” I stormed around the room, furious, and it occurred to me that I didn’t really know
who
I was mad at. Mom? Doctor Flynn? Myself? God?

“Catie, sit down, please. Think about the baby. You’re supposed to be resting.”

I sat and faced her, wondering at her ability to be more concerned about me than she was about herself. And I was being such a brat, I didn’t deserve her concern. She looked at me with tired, loving eyes and my anger dissolved into sadness, deep sadness for what could be and what never would.

“I’m sorry,” I offered contritely, reaching for her hand and clasping it within my own. Her skin suddenly felt so brittle to me, her hand so delicate and fragile. I didn’t dare squeeze it for fear I’d hurt her. Why hadn’t I noticed any of this before? Had she been deteriorating this whole time, right before my eyes? Had I really been so wrapped up in my own feelings that I hadn’t really looked at her?

“Me, too, sweetie. I’m so sorry about all of this.”

“Mom, you’re staying with me. We have an extra room here in the new house, and I’m going to take care of you. I’m a physical therapist. I’m going to take great care of you and we’ll beat this thing. We’ll show them.”

She gave me a somber smile. “Alright, sweetie. Alright.”

She held out her arms and reclined back on the couch. I willingly lay down next to her and she wrapped her arms around me. We stayed this way on the couch for a while, just breathing together, thinking.

After a while, she spoke.

“I’ll hold on for as long as I can.”

“Promise?’

“Promise.”

Chapter 19

Mom moved in lock, stock, and barrel the next day. Ryan’s coworkers, after just moving Mom into her apartment less than a year ago, smilingly repeated the process. And they were so gentle with her, so absolutely sweet and caring, I had to wipe tears from my eyes for most of the day. It was a testament to the spell my mother could weave. She captivated everyone she met with the warmth and life in her violet eyes, with her smile that could light a thousand candles.

But my beautiful, vivacious mother seemed to be fading by the day. Was it our imagination that she was weaker, or was it just that the knowledge of her condition had suddenly made every ache and pain and health complaint all the more obvious? I didn’t know, but either way it disturbed me. She was in pain. I saw it, though she tried to hide it. She’d cover a wince in a smile, or gasp and pretend she was about to yawn or say something. She shuffled more than walked and I wondered what the hell had happened to the good health she seemed to enjoy a mere few months before and how the hell I had missed seeing her decline when it was so obvious now that she was ill.

I exhausted myself by Googling gastric cancer for hours every night. I found myself on various cancer support chat boards, talking with survivors and the families of those whose battle had been lost. Everything I read seemed to indicate a grim outcome for people whose cancer was as advanced as hers was. I tried to hold onto hope, but it was extremely difficult.

Over the next few days, I found myself staring off into space, unable, or unwilling, to deal with what life had handed her. She was young, having just turned forty-seven at the end of October, and she should have her whole life still ahead of her. Forty was the new thirty, wasn’t it? She shouldn’t look so ill; shouldn’t have new, bigger white streaks appear so quickly in her dark, wavy hair; shouldn’t suddenly lose most of the flesh in her face and look at me with eyes that appeared sunken into her skull.

I was so angry. With her, with God, even with Shelly and Keith. Had they still been in my life, I wouldn’t have ever met my real mother. I never would have known she existed and I wouldn’t be going through this agony now. If Gran had been a more supportive parental figure to me, I wouldn’t have felt the need to reach out to a stranger, birth mother or not. And then I got mad at myself for even having those thoughts and spending time thinking about what her death meant to me when she was the one dying.

I struggled to get through each day. I felt like I’d been buried under a large pile of sand, and try as I might, I couldn’t claw my way up and out. I was being crushed by the weight of sorrow that rested so heavy on my shoulders. It was all I could do to put one foot in front of the other and move, to try to get through my day.

And Mom’s illness wasn’t the only thing I had to combat. Since the day I called 911, Benjie had started behaving badly. He was argumentative, difficult at home and at school. His teacher suggested therapy and we willingly scheduled visits with the school counselor. She reported to us weekly and let us know how confused he was and how upset he was that his Grammy wasn’t able to spend the time with him she did before. He made mention of his mother and even said once or twice that he’d like to go stay with her, which hurt Ryan deeply. The therapist assured us it wasn’t because of anything we’d done, but was rather because he sensed the tension and sadness that permeated our once-happy home. He longed to go back to some sort of normalcy, even if the situation at his mom’s house was less than ideal. At least he knew her and what to expect. We had many fights about it, and Benjie withdrew even further every time we told him no. He’d even given us a scare by attempting to run away. He’d laid down in his bed at naptime and waited until I’d fallen asleep, then left our new house and started down the road toward Isamu’s place. I’d woken up and torn the place apart looking for him when I realized he was gone. I placed a frantic 911 call and every officer in Pittston hit the streets, looking for our lost boy. Danny finally found him about four blocks from home, and when he was delivered back to us, he explained he wanted to go live with Isamu so he could be happy again. Apparently, our home had become a depressing place filled with sickness and sorrow instead of holiday cheer.