Mistletoe Man - China Bayles 09 (22 page)

She gave me a small, tight smile. "Is that
the tone of voice you use to Brian?"

I grinned. "You bet. When I talk
tough, the kid knows he'd better toe the fine. You too. No back talk. Just
eat."

Ruby heaved a
dramatic sigh to show that she was acting under duress and picked up her
spoon—very slowly, to show that she couldn't possibly manage more than a single
mouthful.

But she did. I tidied
the counter, scrubbed the sink, and turned on the dishwasher, noticing that the
more Ruby ate, the more eagerly she went about it. By the time I was finished,
her bowl was empty and the garlic bread had disappeared. I put a plate of
cookies on the table, poured myself a cup of coffee, and sat down across from
her.

"That was very
good," I said approvingly. "Now we can talk."

"Thank
you," she said. Her color was better and she seemed more relaxed. But her
eyes were still dark and the hand that held her coffee cup trembled a little.
"I came to say I'm sorry, China. I know I've been behaving very badly the
past couple of weeks." She took a deep breath. "But maybe you haven't
noticed. You've been pretty busy."

"I've
noticed," I said. "I thought maybe you were mad at me for being so
busy. I wouldn't blame you," I added.

She sighed heavily.
"I wish that was it. It'd be a lot easier to tell you what's going
on."

I swallowed hard. What was it? Was she getting married?
Was she moving to another city? Had she killed somebody?

"So?" I said. "What the hell is
it?" "It's hell, all right." She put down her cup and looked
straight at me. "I have breast cancer, China."

Chapter
Ten

ML-l, the
galactoside-specific lectin found in mistletoe, has been used by German
researchers in controlled medical experiments with cancer patients who were
undergoing other conventional treatments, such as chemotherapy. These studies
suggest that ML-l used as a complementary treatment enhances the activity of
most immune parameters and improves the quality of life.

summarized from Ralph W. Moss
Herbs Against Cancer
Chapter 9, Mistletoes and Medicine

I felt as if all the breath had been
sucked out of me. As if the solid Texas limestone under my feet had just gaped
open. As if I were sliding down the tilted deck of the
Titanic
into
a sea as cold as death.

"Breast
cancer!" I whispered. "Oh, Ruby! Oh, no!"

"Oh, yes," Ruby said. She managed a
crooked grin. "Weird, huh? I mean, I've done everything right. Light on
the red meat, heavy on fish and chicken, five-a-day fruits and veggies, plenty
of exercise, safe sex, no cigarettes, hours of meditation, tons of positive
attitude." Her voice broke, and I could hear tears in it. "I have
enough positive attitude to make the world go round. And when I bought that new
life insurance policy last summer, I got their top rating. I could live to be a
hundred. I could be immortal. I can't have breast cancer. It's
impossible." She closed her eyes, sighed, and opened them again. She gave
weight to each word. "But it's true."

I stared at her bewildered, only
half-comprehending. "But what
...
where
...
how...." I thought of
her absence over the past few days, and my glance went to her breasts, full and
round and beautifully shaped under her green sweatshirt. Breasts I had envied,
had coveted, flat-chested as I am. "I mean, you haven't...."

"Haven't got my boob amputated yet?"
Ruby asked wryly. "Later. I mean, soon. Soon enough. But not yet."

"Then where
..."
I couldn't seem to finish my sentences,
couldn't string enough words together to ask what I needed to know. But it
didn't matter. Ruby read my mind again.

"Where have I
been? I decided I was going to go crazy if I didn't get away. Maggie picked me
up on Saturday evening. I've been staying in a cottage at St. Theresa's, trying
to get my head straight."

Of course. St. Theresa's is a
monastery in the Hill Country west of Pecan Springs. Sister Margaret Mary—our
friend Maggie Garrett, who used to own the restaurant across the street from
our shops—is one of the Sisters of the Holy Heart. They live at the monastery
and support themselves by growing the best garlic in Texas. They also offer
their guest cottages for personal retreats. I've been there before, and so has
Ruby. St. T's is a good place to go when you've got something on your mind and
you need to be quiet and alone with it.

Something like
...
breast cancer. I suddenly felt desolate and deserted, as if
Ruby had started off on a long, dangerous journey and had left me behind in a
place that was safe and comfortable but cold and terribly, terribly lonely. I
thought of all the things we had done together over the years of our
friendship, the shared pleasures, the shared pain. I thought of all the lessons
Ruby had taught me about being partners, about being sisters, and my chilly
desolation suddenly flared into a hot and bitter anger. When it came to
something really important, she hadn't cared enough to share it with me. She
hadn't given me a chance to help.

"I would have
been glad to go to St. Theresa's with you," I said. The resentful tears
began to run down my cheeks. "Why did you leave me out? For Pete's sake,
Ruby—why didn't you
tell
me?"

Ruby gave me a look
of startled compassion, intent and somber. "I'm sorry if you feel left
out," she said. Her voice seemed to be coming from a great distance.

I
was almost blinded by tears. "Well, then, why—"

"Because I needed to live with
this thing alone for a while, by myself. I had to think about what it means,
and what I ought to do. I have some big decisions to make, and I didn't want
anybody else—not even you—to bear the burden of making them."

"But
I would have been glad—"

"You're the
first to know, China," she said quietly. "I haven't told Shannon or
Amy, or even my mother. I came to you first."

I stared at her,
suddenly realizing that my tears were the self-pitying tears of a little girl
who is crying because she has to sit on the sidelines during the crucial inning
of the big game. At the same time, they were the frightened tears of an adult
woman who is terrified that she might be dragged into a game she can't win. If
Ruby could have cancer, so could I. It was my own desperate fear and vulnerability
that had brought me to tears, and I felt immediately ashamed.

I gulped. "I'm
sorry," I said. The words were so slight, so meager, that I wished I
hadn't said them. "I'm terribly sorry," I said, but that wasn't any
better. I reached across the table and took both of her hands. "What can I
do?"

"Nothing,
for now," Ruby said. "Just hold my hands."

The old schoolhouse
clock over the refrigerator ticked somberly. The water heater in the closet
gave a hissing burp as the gas came on. Howard Cosell lifted his head, sighed,
and put it down again. Ruby's hands were colder than mine.

"I'm
scared," I said finally. "Are you?"

"I'm so terrified I can hardly think,"
Ruby said thinly. "I wake up in the morning in a cold sweat. During the
day, I can't concentrate. When I go to bed at night, it's hours before I fall
asleep. And I'm angry, too." Her voice rose and she gripped my hands
passionately. "This isn't fair, damn it! Everything was so wonderful! I won
the lottery, we've just opened the tearoom, my daughters have grown into lovely
women. And now this!"

I wanted to say that
fate isn't fair, that good fortune is just that—fortunate, arbitrary,
capricious—and we don't always get to choose all the circumstances of our
lives. But the words seemed so silly that I swallowed them. Ruby didn't need to
hear my moralizing. What
could
I say?

We sat for a while,
she in her anger and fear, me in mine, desperately holding each other's hands
as if we were clinging to a life raft in an icy sea, as if there were no life
raft and all we had was each other. After a while, the questions started
rising inside me. At first I held my breath and pushed them down, not wanting
to give them voice, not wanting to hear the answers, as if the weight of the
words might swamp our fragile raft. But pushing them down made my chest hurt so
much that I couldn't breathe, and at last my need to know overcame my fear of
the truth, and they came bursting out all at once.

"Which breast?
What kind of cancer is it? Did you find a lump? What are they going to do?
When?"

"It's in my
right breast, but there's no lump," Ruby said. "You can't feel a
thing. You can only see it on the mammogram, and only if you know what you're
looking for. It looks like a bunch of teensy white specks—dead cancer cells.
The cancer is called ductal cancer in situ. DCIS."

I frowned.
In
situ
was a phrase I knew
from legal Latin. "Inside the milk duct?" I guessed.

"Right. They
won't know for sure until the surgery, but they think the cancer is
preinvasive, which means they've caught it before it's had a chance to grow
through the duct and get into the breast tissue." She gave me a lopsided
grin. "While I was at St. Theresa's, I read a couple of books. If you've
got to have breast cancer, DCIS seems like the best kind to have."

My chest suddenly didn't feel so
tight. "That's wonderful!" I exclaimed. I frowned. What was I
saying? "I don't mean wonderful," I said, biting my lip. "I
mean—"

"That's
okay." Ruby squeezed my hand. "I know what you mean. It's all
relative."

I swallowed, trying to think what I'd
read about breast cancer treatment. "So what's next? A lumpectomy, then
radiation? Then chemo?"

Ruby pulled her hands
away. "No," she said. There was a tiny white line around her mouth.
"What's next is a mastectomy."

"A mastectomy!" I gasped. "You're
not serious." Ruby leaned forward, her eyes holding mine. "That's why
I went to St. Theresa's, China. To think about this, and figure out what to do.
I've seen two oncologists. They both say that with a cancer like mine, the
surgeon would have to take a pretty big slice out of my breast to be sure to
get it all. And even with a big slice, it's not a sure thing. There'd have to
be radiation to kill any cancer cells the surgery missed."

I started to say
something, but she held up her hand. "But even with surgery and
radiation—even with all that, there's a risk of recurrence. Only one in ten,
they say, pretty good odds. But it's still a risk. On the other hand, if I have
a mastectomy and there are no problems with the lymph nodes, I won't have to
worry. With a mastectomy, the cure rate is essentially a hundred percent."

"But your .
..
breast!" For an instant, I
remembered seeing Ruby turned sideways before the mirror at her shop, gazing
at her reflection. She must have been imagining, at that very moment, what it
would be like to lose a breast. What it would look like, what it would feel
like. How much she would miss it.

Ruby gave me an ironic grin. "Yeah, my
breast. Well, it's true that I'm kind of attached to it. I've always considered
my breasts rather sexy, and it's nice that they come in pairs." She looked
down, cupped her hands under her breasts, and fitted then. Then she dropped her
hands and gave a little shrug. "But I can live without a breast. And I'm
definitely not going to keep a part of my breast if I can trade the whole damn
tiing for better odds."

"But to let them take your
breast—" I stopped, helpless. "It's so
...
so barbaric! Like something out of the Dark Ages."

Her mouth tightened.
"Cancer is barbaric. I vote that we stop lobbing satellites at Mars and
spend the money on breast cancer research." Then she lifted her chin
defiantly. "But you're wrong, China—I'm not letting them take it, I'm
telling
them
to take it. I have a choice, and I choose mastectomy." She grinned
suddenly and raised her clenched fist in a salute. "Off with the boob! On
with the rest of my fife!"

God, I admired her courage. And it was great to
hear that determined tone in her voice, and see that flash of self-assertion
and boldness and humor that I love so much. To see the old Ruby prevail, when
she might so easily have been swept away by anger and despair.