Mrs. Everything (58 page)

But Shelley surprised her. “No,” she said. She put her hand on Jo’s shoulder, and Bethie saw Lila roll her eyes. “No, I think you need to tell her now.”

“What’s happening?” asked Lila. It came out like
Wuss happnin.
Bethie watched as Jo smoothed her short hair, quickly touching her fingertips to each earring and then her chest.

“Well,” she said. “It turns out I’ve got a little touch of breast cancer.”

Lila didn’t say anything, but her eyes got big. Bethie took her sister’s hand. Shelley started talking about upcoming appointments, chemotherapy and radiation and long-term survival rates. Harold said, “We’re all here for you, Jo,” and Bethie said, “Anything you need,” and Lila, finally, in a small broken voice, said, “Oh, Mom.” When Jo stretched her arms open, Lila closed her eyes and leaned against her, resting her head on her mother’s shoulder.

PART

  seven

2016

Jo

T
he Avondale fitness trail had been demolished in 2012, the trees cut down and the path paved over to make way for a neighborhood of McMansions, each one bigger than the last, but in Jo’s dream, she was running on it again, underneath the canopy of the oaks and elms and silver maples that flaunted their abundance of glowing-green leaves. She could smell the cedar chips under her sneakers, could feel her heart pounding, pushing oxygen-rich blood to her muscles, and she could hear her own breath, steady as she ran. Jogging around a corner, the trees gave way to a clearing, and Jo could hear a baby crying, even though she was alone on the path. The cries swelled, then receded, then grew again, but no matter which way she turned or how fast she went, Jo could never manage to find the baby, or give it comfort.
It means something
, she thought as she opened her eyes.

Shelley was sitting in the seat beside her, the in-flight magazine open in her lap. When Jo sat up, Shelley took her hand.

“Hi,” Shelley whispered.

“These drugs are amazing,” Jo whispered back.

“I’m glad you think so.” She reached over and adjusted the silk scarf Jo wore over her head, tucking in the edges without meeting Jo’s eyes. Shelley hadn’t been happy about Jo’s decision to stop treatment. They’d had what was, by far, the worst fight of their relationship about it.
There’s an experimental protocol they’re doing at the Menninger Clinic . . . or we could try Avastin again. No
, Jo had said. The first time she’d been diagnosed, after a mastectomy, the exhausting, nauseating rounds of radiation and chemotherapy had left her bald and eyelash-less and so weak she could barely stand up long enough to fry an egg. She’d had ten years, ten good years, and she had no desire to go through that again, especially when the doctors told her that treatment might buy her maybe another year, but no more than that. She wanted to be comfortable; she wanted to say goodbye while she was clearheaded. She’d had wonderful years with Shelley, her partner, the love of her life; she’d done her best with her girls. It would have to be enough.

“Please fasten your seat belts as we begin our final descent into Atlanta,” the pilot said. Jo closed her eyes. Around the time that the fitness trail had been demolished, Blue Hill Farm had been completely redone, converted into a five-star bed-and-breakfast, a place that had been booked solid as soon as it had opened, where you had to call six months in advance to get a room. Bethie had worked some magic so they could all stay there together. Jo didn’t like to think about what it must have cost her sister to buy out the place, and get the customers who’d made their reservations to agree to leave.
Let me worry about it
, Bethie had said, and Jo had agreed to let her sister take care of everything, from coordinating with Jo’s doctors and arranging nursing care to buying first-class tickets to Atlanta for Jo and Shelley and the girls. She’d wanted to hire a private jet, but there Jo had drawn the line. All she wanted was to see her girls, all together, once more before she went—and Bethie had promised that she’d try.

*  *  *

A plush limousine that seemed to glide over the highway took them forty-five miles from the airport to the farm. Jo was directed to the living room, where, once upon a time, Bethie had gone crawling, naked, through a vaginal canal made of pillows. They’d transformed it into a bedroom, complete with a hospital bed that could be raised or lowered at the touch of a button and a side table for Jo’s medications, the bottles arrayed on an antique silver tray. A miniature refrigerator in the corner held the emergency pack: a shot of morphine, for breakthrough pain; a shot of Haldol, in case she began to hallucinate. There were DNR posters taped to the door, to the end of her bed, and to the wall above her.
Can’t be too careful
, the hospice nurse who’d met her there had said, adding grimly that there were always paramedics who wanted to rush in and be heroes.

Jo napped as soon as she was lying down and woke in the late afternoon. With her back propped up by pillows, she could look through the windows, out at the rolling fields, the grass a green so rich and deep it almost glowed.

“We used to grow the best dope out there,” Bethie said. When Jo laughed, Bethie touched her hand. On the television, Hillary Clinton, in a sapphire-blue pantsuit, was chatting with supporters before turning, giving a practiced wave, and climbing the steps to her plane. “Preparations are under way for the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, where Hillary Clinton will make history, becoming the first female presidential nominee from a major party,” the news anchor said.

“Can you believe it?” Bethie asked. “Did you ever think we’d see the day?”

“Now she just has to win,” said Shelley, knocking on wood, and Jo waved her hand, knowing that Hillary was practically a lock, feeling sad only that she wouldn’t be alive to see it.

Bethie was holding a pot of lotion, Blue Hill Farm’s latest product line, a rich cream scented with lavender grown a few hundred yards away. “How about a hand massage?” Gratefully, Jo let her sister put a dollop of lotion into the center of her palms and
spread it up her wrists and over her fingers, rubbing gently. She let her eyes drift shut, thinking that during these last few weeks she had been more moisturized than she’d been in all her life. Someone was always offering to rub her hands, her calves, her feet. She could feel the pain, down deep, but it was muffled and distant, far away, for now.

“Mom.”

Kim was first, of course. Kim was always early; Kim hated people who were late.
It’s disrespectful
, she’d say. Jo opened her eyes and smiled.

“Hi, honey.” She hoped that she didn’t look awful. She’d lost weight, and her hair again, of course, but she was wearing a light-blue linen tunic and, under her blankets, a pair of loose pale-gray pants. She’d insisted on real clothes, not a hospital gown, and had even allowed Shelley to smooth foundation on her face and brush some color on her cheeks and lips, and she’d hoped she looked all right, but she could see the truth in Kim’s startled expression, the way her eyes had briefly widened with shock. There was a couch on one side of the hospital bed, a daybed on the other. Jo had imagined the girls and Bethie sitting there, reading to Jo, sometimes talking or telling her stories, the way she’d told them stories when they were girls.

Kim came over and stood by the side of the bed. “How are you feeling?”

“Not bad, considering. How are you?” Jo looked at her daughter’s face, searching for signs of tension or sadness, the way Kim would press her lips together tightly, like there were words she didn’t want to let out. Kim’s daughters were behind her, Flora, tall and lanky, with her spill of honey-blond hair and the lips that she kept closed over her braces, and solid, dark-eyed, curly-haired Leonie. Soon, Flora would have her bat mitzvah, and Jo wouldn’t be there. Jo inhaled slowly, trying to think of all the time she’d had with her granddaughters, and not everything that she’d miss.

Kim and Matt had gotten divorced when the girls were
six and three years old. “I can’t be the kind of wife he wants,” Kim had said when she’d showed up on Jo’s doorstep with her suitcase and her girls. Jo got the story in pieces, learning that Kim had planned on going back to work full-time after Leonie started full-day nursery school. Matt had wanted her to stay home. “He wanted to take care of me. And I feel awful, because that was what I wanted when we got married. A man who’d take care of me. A man who’d never leave. And a life where I’d never have to worry about money.” Jo had nodded, keeping quiet, thinking about how Kim must have chosen in reaction to her own parents’ divorce. Matt, unlike Dave, would never leave her, and he certainly wouldn’t leave her scrambling for money, living in a condo with flimsy walls and fraying carpet, paying for her kids’ education with loans while he whooped it up with her neighbor. “But I don’t want that anymore,” Kim said. Kim had cried, and Jo had comforted her, had told her that she was a wonderful mother to her daughters, that people changed, and sometimes, marriages did not survive those changes, in spite of everyone’s best intentions. “You’re allowed to want to use your education,” Jo said. “You’re allowed to want to be more than a mother.”

So Kim had gone back to work, first at the U.S. attorney’s office and then as a public defender for young women, frequently young mothers, who’d gotten lengthy sentences selling or even just possessing quantities of pot that wouldn’t have gotten a white kid anything more than a warning. Kim had needed Jo, and Jo was happy to be needed. For years, she would spend a few nights each week in New York City, where Kim had moved to be closer to work and to her sisters. Jo and Shelley helped with the cooking and cleaning and shopping. They’d become pros at riding the subway, escorting the girls to swim team and Hebrew school and cooking classes. Kim worked and struggled and stretched herself thin, the way all working mothers did. She felt guilty for enjoying her job, and she felt guilty when she missed some milestone, or when Jo and Shelley had to attend a choir concert or a parent-
teacher conference or a doctor’s visit in her stead.
You’re doing the best you can
, Jo would tell her, over and over, and refrain from pointing out that Matt never seemed to torment himself when he was golfing the first time Flora rode her bike on her own, or reading the paper during Leonie’s first successful dive into the deep end. Women had made progress—Jo only had to look as far as the television set to see it—but she wondered whether they would ever not try to have it all and do it all and do all of it flawlessly. Would the day ever come when simply doing your best would be enough? Her generation hadn’t managed it, and neither had her daughters. Maybe Flora and Leonie and their classmates and cousins would be the lucky ones.

“We lost ourselves,” she said. Her voice sounded sludgy and slow, and she must have fallen asleep, because the slant of light on her quilt had shifted. Flora and Leonie had disappeared, and Kim was the one at her bedside.

“What did you say, Mom?”

Jo’s eyes prickled with tears, and her face flushed with the effort of remembering. Oh, there was so little time left, and so much more that she wanted to say! “We lose ourselves,” she repeated, forming each word with care, “but we find our way back.” Wasn’t that the story of her life? Wasn’t that the story of Bethie’s? You make the wrong choices, you make mistakes, you disappear for a decade, you marry the wrong man. You get hurt. You lose sight of who you are, or of who you want to be, and then you remember, and if you’re lucky you have sisters or friends who remind you when you forget your best intentions. You come back to yourself, again and again. You try, and fail, and try again, and fail again. She understood why Kim had married Matt, and why she’d left him. She understood how Melissa had failed Lila, and how Lila had hurt Missy. Try and fail and try again.

She held her daughter’s hand and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, Bethie had taken Shelley’s place in the chair next to her bed, a cup of tea that smelled of grass and lemon balm was steaming on the table, and Melissa was standing in the doorway.

“Hi,” Jo said, pushing herself upright. Melissa looked awful, pale and drawn and tired. “What’s wrong?”

Melissa looked weary, the way she had for years. Lester Shaub’s fall had followed the pattern set by many of his fellow moguls, captains of industry, and CEOs. It had happened gradually, then all at once. A whisper here, a rumor there, and then one of the authors had filed a lawsuit, the HR director’s records had been subpoenaed, and it turned out that, over the years, there’d been dozens of allegations, ranging from unwanted touches and kisses to rape. Lester, it emerged, also had instituted what the gossips delighted in calling a blow-jobs-for-blurbs policy, which explained why so many female authors’ debut novels came ornamented with praise by one or another of Lester’s stable of elderly literary giants, encomiums that turned out to have been written by Lester himself.

Through it all, Missy had stood by him, the staunch defender, the loyal soldier. “That isn’t the Lester I know,” she would say, telling reporters that Lester had never been inappropriate with her, pointing out the ranks of female authors he’d discovered and published and promoted. “Just because it wasn’t happening to you doesn’t mean it wasn’t happening,” one reporter had said, and Missy, shrugging, had said, “All I can tell you is what I know. Look, everyone’s out there shouting, ‘Believe women.’ Well, I’m a woman, too.” Jo had never mentioned Lila’s story to Missy. The year of Lester’s professional demise, she’d let others host the holidays, happy to have Kim at her in-laws’ and Missy with friends and Lila wherever Lila went, while she and Shelley traveled to Vermont in the fall and Mexico in December. Better to eat apples and honey by themselves and tortillas instead of latkes than to have to listen to Lila say
I told you so
while Missy hung her head or shot back, “At least I have a job.”