People Who Knew Me (16 page)

I went to her side, leaned in so close to her that my cheek grazed hers. This was the only way to hear her.

“Shhh—” she said.

“What?” I said.

The first “What?” was always patient, kind, understanding. The second was embarrassed. The third was frustrated.

By the fourth attempt, I understood that she was saying, “Shelf,” that she wanted me to clear the books we had and replace them with the reindeer and sleigh. I obliged because, really, what other choice is there with a sick person?

I transported the books to our bedroom closet, stacked them beside a pile of her shoes. When I came back, she was pointing at the fattest of the Santas.

I spent an hour like that—being directed around my own home by a woman who couldn't speak. There was no need for it to be an hour. Drew was taking his sweet time. I knew that because it was exactly what I would have done. It was why I wanted to be the one to pick up the food. I eyed my running shoes by the door. The second Drew walked in, I would be gone, around the block before he could ask if I wanted him to put the pizza box in the oven to keep it warm.

She bent forward toward the coffee table, as slow as the Tin Man in need of a squirt of oil. Her destination was obvious: a plate of sugar cookies with red and green sprinkles on them. Drew had bought them yesterday. His mom's favorite, he said. We were constantly trying to fatten her up, to no avail.

I set the plate on her lap to save us both the agonizing time it would have taken for her to obtain a cookie on her own. While she nibbled on one, I went to my running shoes, sat on the floor, laced them up. I was ready.

When I turned around, she was blue. That fast. Her eyes were big and frightened, her hands slowly moving to grasp her neck. In a ridiculous display of irony, she was choking.

Before I was sure I knew what I was doing, I was behind her, my fists pulling into her stomach, right below her ribs. She was so thin that I feared breaking her completely.

Then, just as Nancy had promised, a partially dissolved piece of cookie flew out of her mouth and she gasped for air the way people do when they've been underwater too long. The blue left her face and the pink returned. She told me
Thank you
with her eyes, though she wouldn't manage the actual words for several minutes.

And I hugged her. I was either relieved she hadn't died, plain and simple, or I was relieved that I wasn't the reason she died.

Just then, Drew walked in. It was as if he'd been waiting outside the door for this situation to resolve itself.

“Where the hell were you?” I asked. I pushed him in the chest, like teenage boys do when they start fights.

He looked dumbfounded. “What happened?”

“She fucking choked,” I said. The adrenaline was still pulsing through me. I'd never before been so aware of the size of my veins, of their capacity.

He went to his mom, knelt down on one knee, met her eyes with his.

“Are you okay?” he asked her.

She nodded weakly.

“She's okay because Nancy happened to show me the fucking Heimlich maneuver the other day.”

“Who's Nancy?” he asked.

In that instant, we both realized there were secrets we were keeping from each other. Things had changed between us.

“A friend,” I said. “It doesn't matter.”

He brought his mom's ever-present water glass to her lips. She sipped carefully.

“She can't eat food on her own anymore,” I said. I was yelling still, the adrenaline making it impossible to lower my voice.

He got up, came to me, put his hands on my shoulders, like a fireman calming the owner of a burning house.

“You're just scared, okay?” he said.

“Calm down,” he said.

“Deep breaths,” he said.

I wanted to punch him in the face. I could feel my nostrils flaring, the way boxers' do in those fights you have to pay to watch on TV. He gripped my shoulders harder.

“She needs to move out,” I said.

“You need to hire someone to take care of her,” I said.

“We need our life back,” I said.

I'd said these things before, but always in the confines of our bedroom, our situation room, our war room; never in front of her. He looked away from me, to her. Her feelings mattered more than mine. It was a truth I'd known for a while, now proven.

His mom curled her finger, beckoning him. He went to her, leaned in to hear whatever she said. It took him two attempts—“What?” “What?”—before he understood.

“She's sorry,” he said.

He looked at me like I was the enemy, like I had lodged the cookie in her throat.

“She's just scared, Ma,” he told her.

I grabbed Bruce's leash off its hook, the leather in my hand an immediate relaxer, the way a stuffed animal is for a toddler afraid of the dark.

“I'm going for a run.”

*   *   *

Bruce and I ran to Knickerbocker, where the taco shop used to be. A brightly lit Go-Go Juice was in its place. I lingered outside, watched people come and go with their tall Styrofoam cups. Most of them were in gym clothes—spandex, sweats. I needed to call Nancy. The only other time I'd called her was before our first official coffee shop meeting, to confirm it was actually happening. There was an unspoken understanding that we weren't that kind of friends. We went about our lives during the week and confided in each other like soul mates on Thursdays. That was it. I went to the pay phone at the end of the block anyway, and dialed. It rang three times before she picked up.

“I had to use the Heimlich,” I said.

There was a long pause.

“Oh, crap,” she said finally.

“He doesn't understand. I can't do this anymore.”

“I know,” she said, instead of something motivational like,
Yes, you can
.

I lowered my chin to my chest, stared at the cement with old pieces of gum melted into it, part of it now.

“Do you want to come over?” she asked. “I have my own choking hazard, of course, but we can talk it out. You can sleep on the couch. My ex used to say it was very comfortable.”

“No, no,” I said. That wasn't why I had called. I didn't really know why I had called.

“Em,” she said, “you're going to have to make a choice. You're going to have to wait it out or leave.”

Wait it out
. I wished she would stop fucking saying that. My face was hot. Why did those have to be my only options—wait it out or leave?

“I'm sorry,” she said, as if reading my mind, “this isn't the time. Look, come over if you want.”

“No, really, it's fine,” I said. “I don't know why I called.”

Bruce licked my leg, wagged his tail.

“I know it sucks,” she said. “You okay?”

“Yep,” I said. It was a blatant lie, but neither of us was willing or able to poke at it.

“Okay, well, see you Thursday?”

“Sure,” I said, though I didn't think I would. I wasn't sure if Nancy and I having this horrible situation in common was a comfort anymore. For some reason, I'd thought the two of us would come up with some way to make it all better. That was proving to be a childish fantasy. Nancy was older, but not wiser. She was just as helpless as I was.

“Call if you need to,” she said.

“Okay,” I said, knowing I wouldn't.

I knelt down to Bruce and kissed his wet nose. I envied his ignorance. We walked back past the Go-Go Juice and then I broke into a sprint all the way home.

 

FOURTEEN

Chemo isn't as bad as I feared. I go to an infusion center, where about twenty other cancer-stricken people sit in chairs, hooked up to poison that is supposed to make them well. Most occupy themselves with their phones and iPads. Some go old school and read actual books or knit. Nurses bring juice and blankets to us with the pleasant politeness of flight attendants:
Can I offer you a warm towel?
There are even call buttons on the arms of our chairs.

They've got me on a regimen of Adriamycin and Cytoxan—AC, Dr. Richter calls it. She says only about fifteen percent of people with my type of cancer—my rare, brutal, obnoxious kind of cancer—have a complete response to this regimen, but there are other things we can try if I'm not in that fifteen percent. They implanted this thing called a port under my skin, up near my collarbone, so I can easily be “plugged in” to the tube that delivers the chemo. Actually, before the chemo comes rushing into my veins, they give me a bag of Zofran to keep me from puking. I guess it works because I haven't actually puked yet. I just feel like I'm going to—very similar to how I felt when I was pregnant and how I felt the time Claire and I took a boat across the channel to Catalina. The Adriamycin comes first. It's bright red like Hawaiian Punch. Then comes the Cytoxan, clear. It doesn't hurt when it's happening. The problems all start when I go home.

The fatigue is heavy-feeling, like I'm walking around with a sack of rocks on my shoulders. The nausea comes and goes. There are sores in my mouth. I tongue them when I'm anxious. They kill whatever appetite survives the nausea. I've lost five pounds off my already slim frame. Some days, I take a couple handfuls of pills just to function. There's Zofran for the nausea, then laxatives and stool softeners for the constipation caused by Zofran. Oh, and I have to take Neupogen to keep my white blood cell count high so I don't get an infection that my body is too tired to fight. Neupogen causes bone pain—a pain I'd never known before, like an ache deep below the muscles. I take Vicodin for the bone pain. Vicodin makes me sick to my stomach. You see how it goes.

I've put off telling Al. I've gone to work like normal. Sometimes, if I stand too long, I get dizzy and the I'm-going-to-barf feeling intensifies, so I sit on a stool behind the counter. I don't want to call in sick. It's only here, at the bar, when I can be in complete denial that this cancer thing is happening to me. But I'm in my second month of chemo now and my hair is starting to fall out. I wake up in the morning and find sections of it on my pillow, arranged as neatly as Claire's first hair clipping in her baby book. I have to tell Al.

“Can I talk to you?” I say. It's a Thursday, toward the end of my shift. The bar is quiet. Arnie is on his way to drunk, mumbling to himself in the corner.

“What's up?” Al says. He's bent down, counting beer bottles in the mini-fridge.

“Well, I just wanted to warn you that I'll be bald soon,” I say.

He stands up, slow and creaky. I can tell he already knows what I mean.

“No,” he says, flatly and decidedly, as if he is God and he has determined that this is not real.

I nod.

“That's bullshit,” he says. As if cancer is a speeding ticket when you're only going five miles per hour over the limit.

“That's what I've been telling myself, too, but it doesn't seem to make it go away.”

I smile, for his benefit. If I'm not mistaken, his eyes look a little watery.

“I plan to keep working. I'm doing chemo and it's going fine so far, and—”

“You can take time off if you need to,” he says. “Paid leave or whatever the hell.”

I want to hug him, but his upper lip is stiff and it's obvious he wants to keep it that way.

“You don't need to do that,” I say. “I want to come in.”

“Fine, then,” he says. There's edge in his voice. A bar patron listening in would think he's mad at me.

“You wouldn't know how to do the accounting if I left,” I say, trying to be jokey. I've come to manage the books for the bar. I'm good at it, thanks to my last professional years as Emily Morris. Al says every year that he wants to retire and he expects me to take over. He keeps working, though.

“Insurance's taking care of everything?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say. “I don't know what I'd do without it. Thank you.”

As promised, Al got a health plan through the bar after I'd worked a year. He takes a nominal fee out of my paycheck for it. The one time I asked how much he has to pay for the plan, he waved me off and said, “It's a write-off for the bar, doesn't matter.” Al, the businessman. The plan can't be cheap because it does, in fact, cover my chemo.

“I'm going to be okay,” I say. It's a possible lie that I keep telling.

“Of course you are, damn it.”

*   *   *

When I clog the shower with enough hair to require extra-strength Drano, I tell Claire it's time. We've talked about this in advance, planned that she will shave my head for me. The idea isn't an original one: make yourself bald before cancer does. You have to exert control when you can.

Claire takes out her phone, snaps my requested “before” photo. I want to be able to remember who I was with hair.

“What if I cut you?” she asks.

I'm sitting on the deck in our backyard, the almost-rotted-through deck that JT has never bothered to replace. She's standing over me, razor in hand. My head is covered with way too much shaving cream.

“You won't cut me,” I say. “We got the fancy razors, remember?”

Claire doesn't even shave her legs yet, a fact she reminded me of when we went to the pharmacy to buy the razors. The hair on her legs is still light and sparse. I should show her how, just so she knows. There's so much I have to teach her.

“Are you sure?”

“I'm sure,” I say. “You want to practice on my arm?”

She nods and we cover my arm in a similarly overabundant amount of shaving cream. She approaches it tentatively, carefully, and starts making a path through the cream with the razor.

“You're not even touching my arm,” I say with a laugh.

It's sweet, this gentleness. I guide her hand with mine, show her how much pressure to use. After five minutes, my arm is bare and shiny. I wipe the leftover shaving cream on my shirt.