Positively Beautiful (28 page)

“I know, Rinnie, I know,” she says. “It's the easiest thing in the world to hurt the ones we love, even if we don't mean to.”

“I'm here now,” I say. “I'm here now.”

Some people are orally fixated. I'm pretty sure Mr. Jarad is hands-fixated. He has to be doing something with his hands, whether tossing a baseball, playing with his wedding ring, or cleaning his fingernails with a penknife. That's what he's doing today. I saw a real psychiatrist over the summer but when school started two months ago, I told Mom I would rather see Mr. Jarad. Sure, his sports stories are cheesy, but somehow I'm more comfortable with him.

“Mom finished radiation yesterday! She is d-o-n-e. Done, done, done. I'm so happy for her, because let me tell you, the radiation department was
way
more depressing than the chemo department.” I swallow hard, because it
was
depressing. I don't know whether it was normal or not, but two or three of the people in the waiting room were quite literally dying. They were only doing radiation to shrink the tumors that were causing them pain in the last few months of their lives. It was
weird yesterday to sit in the waiting room looking out the window at the hundreds of pink ducks floating around the pond outside in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month and know that the people sitting beside me might not live to see the end of the year. “But anyway. Mom. Yeah, she has follow-up visits and stuff over the next couple of months, but everything looks great and wow, that feels good, you know?” It's hard not to focus on Mr. Jarad's knife; at any moment it looks like it might slip and jam under his nail.

“Hey, that's great,” he says, looking up. “I know that must be a relief. How's school? Last week you said Ms. Garrison asked you to be on the e-zine again. What'd you decide?”

I grimace. “It's just not my thing. Besides, I'm trying to get my GPA up. Last year was pretty disastrous. But I got a B in physics over the summer, which was pretty good with everything I had going on with Mom's treatment and all, so I just need to stay on it.” No friends and no flying makes Erin a very studious girl. “All in all … everything is going
really well
.”

Mr. Jarad has a particularly stubborn piece of dirt, and he concentrates on that for a while after I stop talking. I start fidgeting. Sure, this is getting me out of chemistry, but I'm ready to get on with my life. I'm tired of
talking
about it so much.

“You still having the anxiety attacks and nightmares?” Mr. Jarad asks after a minute.

“Well, sure, the past six months haven't exactly been stellar, you know. I mean, who wouldn't have nightmares, right? Right? But I got through it,
we
got through it. And now that
Mom's going to be fine, I'm just glad it's over, that she's better, because I don't think I could do it again. I mean, I
never-never-never
want to go through that again.”

“There's this guy,” Mr. Jarad says, and I mentally groan.
Here we go.

“And he's first round pick and he's really good. Everybody knows he's going to be a Hall of Famer. And his first season, he gets hit real hard. I mean, it gave him a concussion, and you're like, so what? Football players get hit all the time. But this guy, something happened to him. He couldn't get back into the game after that. It was like it knocked the confidence out of him or something. He would get out there, but he was scared the whole time. He would fumble the ball, and he couldn't make a throw to save his life because he was worried about getting hit again. He ended up retiring after the end of his first season, and the last I heard, he was selling insurance. Everybody said he should have come back and tried another season, but he just gave up.”

“Isn't that nice,” I say, and then, “I mean, what's your point? That I'm never going to, what, be normal again, because of what happened to me and my mom? Or because I lost my dad? I'm fine. I really am. That's what I've been telling you. Sure, I went a little crazy, but I
handled
it, I'm
handling
it, I did what I needed to do, and now it's over.” I'm breathing hard now, because I really don't want to hear any more.

“That guy didn't take enough time to work through it all. Just because something is over, doesn't mean it's over in your head. Give yourself some time, Erin.”

“I'm
fine
.” But the words come out hard and angry.

He nods. He doesn't look convinced.

When I get home from school, Mom is blow-drying her breast, or at least the spot where her left breast
used
to be. I've gotten accustomed to the sight of it, the dark scar running across where her breast was and the heartbreaking flatness of that side of her chest. She's still thinking about whether or not she wants to reconstruct the breast. She could have gotten it done right after the mastectomy, but decided it was too much to do all at once. I can't imagine
not
doing it, but she says she has nobody to impress and she isn't sure she wants to go through the pain and trouble.

“You know you really oughta use some suntan lotion,” I joke over the hum of the hair dryer as I walk into the bathroom. Her chest is bright pink, with a few places peeling, exactly as if she'd gotten a good sunburn. Of course, she hadn't, it's from the radiation. She's got tiny, blue dot tattoos across her chest to help the radiation people know where to zap her. “And I always said I'd never get a tattoo!” she said when she came home with them.

“If I could just stay here like this all day, I'd be fine,” she says now, waving the hair dryer back and forth over her chest. “Wow, that feels good.” She has it set on Cool and it's one of the only things that has brought her relief over the past couple of weeks of radiation.

“So when can you start wearing deodorant again?” I ask,
eyeing the crystal deodorant on the counter, the one Jill sent. That was one of the biggest complaints Mom had about radiation. The treatment itself wasn't too bad. She'd gone in Monday through Friday before work, and it only took twenty or thirty minutes. But she started in the middle of the summer and was horrified to find out she couldn't wear regular deodorant during the month and a half of treatment. August plus Georgia minus deodorant equals a very stinky Mom.

“Soon, I hope,” she says, wrinkling her nose. “It got to where I felt like I had to apologize to the radiation techs every time I went in. I smell
funky
.”

“But it's over,” I say. “How great is that? It's all over.”

She puts down the hair dryer and tousles my hair. “Erin, I wanted to tell you … I know this summer was hard on you. But I'm so proud of you. You've been a big help to me through all of this, and I really appreciate it.”

“Super-Erin, that's me,” I say. “I'm just so sorry I ran away like that. I still feel so stupid. If I had any idea how much trouble I'd get into, and … Stew … I just didn't know. I wasn't thinking.”

Mom picks up a bottle of lotion and begins slathering it on her chest. She had always been sort of modest before she got cancer, but I guess she feels like there's no point to it anymore. “I swear I feel like a
Playboy
centerfold, so many people have seen my breasts!”
s
he told me at one point.

“Have you talked to Stew yet?” she asks.

I sigh. “As far as Stew's concerned, I'm worse than the devil. He hates my guts.”

“No he doesn't,” Mom says. “He's just angry, and you can't blame him for that. He'll come around. Your dad always said he was a good man.”

So come to find out, Stew not only knew
of
my dad, but he was
friends
with him. They met in Iraq, where Dad was flying missions in Desert Storm; Stew was a maintenance-crew chief and they connected when they realized they had both grown up near Atlanta. That's how Stew knew who I was way back when I started lessons. The flying world is evidently very small. Stew, being Stew, hadn't bothered to divulge that little nugget of information.

“What about Trina, have you talked to her?”

“What is this, a who's-who list of those-who-refuse-to-acknowledge-Erin's-very-existence?” I ask. “Plenty of people are still talking to me. Actually, I'm the closest I've ever been to popular this year.” I made national news, and it's amazing what that will do for your social status. “It's all good.
I'm
all good. Okay? Don't worry about me.”

“It's hard for me not to worry,” she says. She winces, and turns the hair dryer back on. “I'm a mother. And somehow I don't think you are really dealing with it all.”

“You and Mr. Jarad both,” I mutter.

“What?” she shouts.

“I'm going out!” I say. “See? It's Friday night, and I'm going out.”

I head to the airport, which is probably not exactly what Mom thought when I said I was going out, but there's still plenty I'm not telling Mom.

She doesn't know I'm positive for the breast cancer gene. There just never seemed to be the right time to tell her. She's been on this big treatment roller coaster, and I didn't want to take her attention off what she needed to do to get better. I suppose I could tell her now, but it seems like a secret either becomes too big to keep to yourself or wound so tight and small that it's too hard to unravel.

I pull into the small airport. It's closed for the evening, and there's only one car in the parking lot, Stew's clunker. As much time as he spends on his planes, you'd think he'd take better care of his car.

I check my phone, and Jason has left a text: Where r u?

Airport, I text, but he doesn't reply. He texted me this
morning, saying he had something to tell me tonight, to make sure I answered when he called. My heart triple-jumps a little, because maybe he's going to tell me he changed his mind, that he thinks we should date after all. But the phone stays silent.

Tweety Bird is in the same place she's been all summer. Parked beside the hangar, forgotten and sad in the golden October light, still listing to the side because of the strut I bent when I landed in the field. They shipped her back on a tractor-trailer a few weeks after I returned from Florida. I keep waiting for them to start fixing her, but as far as I can tell, no one's touched her. I don't know if it's because she's too damaged to fix or because of the ongoing investigation of my accident. If I'd known how seriously everyone was going to take me flying away, I would have jumped in my car instead. Of course, I
wasn't
thinking straight, but I didn't know Stew would get in trouble. I never would have done it if I'd known he could lose his instructor's license. He hasn't lost it yet, but he's under investigation because he let me solo.

Nobody was real happy with what I did, least of all the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration. I talked to several different investigators, but my explanation for flying away didn't make sense even to me, so how could I explain it to someone else? They pulled my medical certificate, which means I can't fly, and required me to get a psychiatric evaluation while they continue their investigation. I didn't make the appointment for the evaluation until after my mom rang the chemo bell in August. And even then it took me a while to work up the nerve to make the call, knowing that what I said could determine whether I ever got my pilot's license. The talking
and battery of tests with the FAA-certified doctors was just as bad as I expected. I'm not sure I did very well at all, I was so nervous.

But it was done, and all I can do is wait to see what the FAA decides. They say it could be months. So we're waiting, me and Tweety Bird, waiting to know whether we'll be able to fly again.

Stew is messing with one of the planes, conspicuously ignoring me.
Yes, Stew, I know you hate me.

I pull out my phone and get on one of the BRCA websites. I've been doing this a lot lately, coming to the airport to read about other women's battles with BRCA and cancer. I've gotten used to the benign-sounding abbreviations that mean terrible things. “BC” is breast cancer, “BPM” is a bilateral prophylactic mastectomy, when you take off both breasts before you even have cancer. “Ooph” is an oophorectomy, the removal of one's ovaries. And “surveillance” is what they call it when you go every six months to get felt up by a breast doctor, to take a test to monitor for ovarian cancer, and a lot of times, get biopsy after biopsy when suspicious shadows show up on mammograms. When you have the BRCA gene mutation, you might not have cancer, but they treat you like you do.

I guess I think if I read other people's stories enough, maybe I'll figure out what to do.

So far, it isn't working.

I don't want to cut off my breasts.