In the Middle of All This (2 page)

“Hello?” his sister said.

“Hey,” he said. “It's me. Is this a bad time?”

“Nope. I'm just sitting here waiting for Richard to get back from a course.”

“Oh, right.” He hadn't wanted to sound disapproving. He had wanted to tell her something of the battlefield and the flat tires, but as soon as he heard her voice he knew it was the wrong story.

“Now, now. It's good for him. It's good for us. Here, check this out. This is something he brought home last night.”

“Okay,” Martin said reluctantly. “Go ahead.”

“Say you're interviewing for a job, and you get the job, and they're excited and you're excited and you agree to terms, and then a few days later the offer letter comes, and there's an extra zero on the salary—it's ten times what it's supposed to be. What do you think?”

“What do I think?” Martin laughed.

“Let me finish. Do you think: A) They've made a mistake and I should call them; B) They've made a mistake but I'll lie low and see if somehow that mistake can continue to happen; or C) They've changed their mind and decided that this is really what I'm worth.”

“Ten times the salary?
What I'm worth?
Be serious.”

“But don't you see?” She caught her breath. “That's exactly it. What if you could believe in C? What if you could start looking at yourself and the way you relate to the world in terms of C? What then? That's what the Epiphany courses are really all about.”

“Interesting,” Martin said. Though there was only one word he could associate with C, and he couldn't utter that.

“Don't dismiss it. Don't you dare dismiss it—”

“I'm not.”

“I know, I know. Just keep an open mind for me, okay?”

“Are you in a lot of pain?” Martin asked gently.

“Can't you hear it?” She sighed. “Mom's on me again about chemo, and I give her back whatever she gives me, so really our conversations these days are all poison.”

“I wish you guys would—”

“It's really stressful,” Elizabeth said. “I don't need the stress. Then Martha called, and I had to take her on, too. You're the only one who doesn't give me grief.”

“I do.”

“Well, it's the good grief, then. Or I don't notice it. Anyway, Richard's only gone till nine. When you coming over again?”

He looked at the clock. He really should get to work. “I just got back last week,” he said.

“But that was without the wife and kids. I want you all. Aren't I terrible?”

“No,”
he said.

“Sounds like you have to run.”

“I guess I do.”

“Thanks for the call. And kiss those kids of yours from me. And don't forget to send pictures. Or a video of them. I'd love a video.”

“I will, I will.”

“Bye,” she said. “I've got to run, too.”

“Bye.”

He hung up the phone and shut his eyes. Sometimes he thought he was getting used to it, and sometimes he thought he had exhausted whatever he could feel about it, and sometimes he felt continuously rattled. He'd just been there, for chrissakes, and she was already asking him to bring the whole clan. An angry squeak jumped from somewhere in the house, and he looked at the front door before realizing it wasn't that.

“Up!” Max was screeching from the living room. “Up!
Get me!
”

Over dinner, which she had shopped hours for on too many different high streets, she began to notice an ache beyond the ache that she had recognized before, in the flank, in the pelvis. She rustled against it in the chair. Still there. Goddamn.

“What is it?” Richard said.

“Nothing,” she lied. “Isn't this tofu excellent?”

“Oh, sure.” But he stared at her. “Something new?”

“Maybe.”

He pushed out from the table and stood behind her, touched thumbs to her shoulders, the circle of her neck. “Do you want to lie down?”

“A walk, I think.”

They tied on their shoes and stepped into the empty street, the sun fallen, the dark cold. She headed them toward the park.

“I don't know that I want to walk very far,” he said quietly, pushing his glasses up his nose and then taking her hand.

“I know.” He had his evening meditation still. They walked and she winced, and by the end of the block she was wincing with every step.

“This is kind of sudden,” she said.

“Maybe it will go away.”

“It's sort of under the old one.”

“Right.”

“I can't even visualize the old one.”

“Maybe it's nothing.”

“Maybe.”

“I hate that word,” he said.

They walked along the fringe of the park under the lamplight, hearing a jangle of dog collar, the landing of a stick in the tall grass.
Oscar
, someone called.
Oscar
. The dog retreated into the deep dark. “Good evening,” a man said from inside a falafel and ice-cream truck with an illuminated giant clown's face on top. “Something sweet for you this evening?” Elizabeth wanted to love their little neighborhood, the blunt, tightly packed houses; the barren black park; the high street with its dumpy, quirky, patched-up stores; the red letter boxes with their beretlike tops; the barred tube stop. A couple of years—not her favorite segment of time to think in—and maybe this could be like an outlying Hampstead. Martin kept telling her how much he liked it, but Martin was a nice liar. Martha, when she visited, scrubbed the floors and toilets, and then, because she had no idea what else to do for her, insisted on taking Elizabeth out for tea.

“What are you thinking about?” Richard nudged her.

She turned them around. “My brother and sister.”

“Those kids,” Richard joked.

There was so little kidlike about them. Martha at forty-four had six squawking children and Martin drank so much that his personality was beginning to change. They hadn't played sports like she had, although Martin had tried; he'd just never been good. She used to wrestle him on the kitchen linoleum, and even when he finally got bigger he couldn't beat her. Martha had the back room, over the garage. Her bathroom smelled of Avon. Elizabeth was the athlete, she was the health nut, she was the exerciser. Stop it, she muttered. Stop it.

They were nearing home. Richard gave up her hand so he could unlock the door. She punched in the code on the burglar alarm. He tiptoed up to the meditation room. The house, with all its leather and tile and marble and chrome, its recessed pin lighting against the London gray and cold, and its feng shui fabrics, ticked on.

In the kitchen—forty thousand pounds to renovate—she pulled out the day's third bag of vits and popped them three or four at a time—some stone colored, some orange-translucent, some capsules, some tablets, some round, one nearly square—until she'd done all fifty. Her blood work, Sparks said, was extraordinary. It's just that the spots didn't go away. One hundred and fifty pills a day and hormones and tinctures and herbs and teas, and still she had all those tumors. Why couldn't she just blast them out of her system? “A real accomplishment,” Martin had tried to exult on the phone after yesterday's results. “If I could have prayed for anything nine months ago,” Richard reminded her last night, “it would be for it to be the same.” It was. She wasn't.

Everybody had to die. If she could have twenty more years, then it would be okay. Maybe even ten. She was eleven months past diagnosis.

Get out of your head, she thought. Just get out of your head. Get out now.

At least there was God. At least God was everywhere. At least when you opened your eyes every morning, there was the burnished dresser and the mango-colored window dressing and Richard pressing his glasses on and peering at you in that cryptic, warm way of his, as if to say, I know you, don't I, and I love you—yes, that's right. He could go into that narrow room with the two-thousand-quid Turkish carpet and the incense and the picture of Muyamaya, and he could will himself into an absolute clarity and purity. He'd said, when they'd first met,
You mean, you don't mind?
Of course not, she'd said. And from there on she'd joined his yoga group, traveling to retreats in California and in upstate New York and—when they moved to London—in Bridgetown. So much stillness you knew yourself. A different way to be inside your head. Not this American panic.

She listened for him. It had been only ten minutes. Sometimes she grew so impatient to have him back that she was tempted to set the microwave timer, but she couldn't bear to watch the time tick down anymore. And if she couldn't freeze it, then she'd expand it, she'd take the moment between each heartbeat and get inside of it and swell its engorged walls and make it tell her and show her everything she needed to know and see, and make it let her touch everything she needed to feel—to know it, to occupy it, to make it yours. Never to let it go because then it couldn't let you go. All this—as Martin would say—New Age shit, but without sounding terrible. Like he said all this work shit or all this love shit or all this family shit or all this medical shit.

She lay on the sofa under the new pain, feeling the terror, laid out under nothing. Passing. Passed. The pain was a tear along the brittle handle of her pelvis. The pain was a crack in the plate. If only the pain was all in her head. The way the bone scan would expose it.
Elizabeth
, Sparks would say,
Elizabeth, we're sorry but it's spread to the pelvis
. Sometimes she wished she'd never known, sometimes she wished she could always know, have scans once a day to help her track it, let her see that what she did was working. She needed to believe that she could know by the way she did what she was doing, but it was hard. It was hard not to feel it spreading, moving on to parts she hadn't even needed to be aware that she had, devouring her as it made room for itself. Why couldn't she believe?

“Sweetie?”

It was Richard, his face red, standing in the doorway.

“What?”

“What is it? You called,” he stammered. “You called out.”

“I did?” Now she was blushing, feeling inside to see if there was an answer.

“Oh yes.” He stared at her. “You okay?”

“Sure,” she said. “Sure.”

He stood over her. “You're practically out of breath.”

“Well.” So it still hurt. Not a big deal. Just a little pain. Oh sure.

He sat beside her on the sofa. “You know the door's thick up there. I guess you must have screamed. Been screaming. Whatever.”

“Okay,” she said. “I mean,” and she heard herself panting, “I'm okay.”

“Do you want anything?”

“No,” she said fiercely.

He touched the neckline of her blouse, held her hand. “You're soaked anyway. Maybe a bath with some salts.”

“Yeah.” You could lose what little hold you had on yourself so easily; its strength was less than tissue or thread. It was nothing. “Okay. I could do that.”

“You want some help?”

“No.” She swallowed to make sure she could say all the words. “You go finish. I'll be fine.”

He stood, waiting.

“Go on,” she said.

He looked at her sheepishly. “All right, then.”

She shut her eyes to the sound of him padding up the stairs, clicking the thick door shut in the tiny room. He'd face the near wall, the one with the photograph, bend to his knees, descend to the carpet, glance once at the picture, bow his head, and rebegin. It's good that you already meditate, Sparks had told her. It will help. But that was after she'd said that nothing could cure her. It would help in the not helping. Sometimes she'd get on the tube and she'd look at all those people, the artsy university students and the schlubby civil servants and the buttoned-up corporate aggressors (one of whom she used to be) and think, we're all going to die. What did it matter? All of us. Soon. Sooner than probably anybody admits. In a transfer of records between one clinic and another, Sparks's notes fell into her hands.
Elizabeth makes it quite clear she doesn't want to talk about prognosis
. She'd shrieked when she read that. That was not it at all. She'd heard the prognosis once, and now and forever after she'd have to get past it and not rely on it, because then it was down to choosing which shoes to be buried in, how much money to parcel off for her nieces' and nephews' college.
You need to get your affairs in order
. If only you could keep it all in chaos, then maybe you weren't allowed to die. Once Richard had come home unexpectedly and caught her wallowing in the pages of her will, and he'd quickly, forcefully, silently shook his head, as if to say, Don't give up. You can't give up.

“We can do hormones,” Sparks had told her the very first meeting, ticking off each item with her long, sleek fingers. “We can do drugs. We can take alternative measures. But at the end of the day”—she shook her head—“there's not much we can really do.”

“Well, all that is something,” Elizabeth had said.

“Yes, it's something,” Sparks forced herself to agree.

“I am positive,” Elizabeth said.

“Good.” Sparks nodded. “That's good.”

The student in Lauren's office wanted to register for a course that was long filled. Lauren dutifully tapped out an e-mail on his behalf, sent it, and sat staring at the screen, waiting to see if the return would be instant. The end-of-registration add/drop window slowly closed itself over the cables and in the corridors. They had twenty minutes left.

“I really need to get into this course,” the advisee said, his face red and puffed. “It's why I came here.”

It was David Lazlo's multimedia freshman seminar on the Civil War. Slide shows, films, radio plays, transcripts, diaries. It had been filled since June. It was forever filled.

“How much longer?” he whined. “My parents are waiting for me in my room.”