Summer of Joy (25 page)

I’ll write again soon. They’re getting out the Scrabble board and I know I can beat them all, even brilliant Robert, if we don’t let Wes use Jupiterian words. Maybe I’ll get the letters to spell out “apoplectic.” Nope, that won’t work. Too many letters. But there’s always the chance for “quiz” on a triple letter score.

Jocie smiled as she closed her notebook and stuck her pen down in the wire coil. 1965 lay out in front of her ready and waiting.

30

A
drienne sat in her usual spot in the doctor’s waiting room. It was anybody’s chair, really. First come, first served. But nobody else wanted it this morning in front of the window with the sun streaming through. The April sunshine was warm. Nearly hot now.

She needed the sunshine on her back. Not just for the warmth although that too was good. Ever since the surgery, she stayed chilled. But even more she needed the light. She could feel the darkness reaching for her, so she clung to the light, gathered it around her the way an old woman might pull a shawl close against the chill.

An old woman. That’s how she felt. Old. Each time she came into this office they drained more of her life away. They’d taken her breast. They’d hollowed out the muscles under her arm. They’d said it was her only hope. To take it all. To turn her into an invalid, a sorry shadow of the woman she’d been. Her skin had gone pale and translucent like fine bone china. She’d let Francine chop her hair off short since her arm was still so weak. It was devilishly hard to style hair with one hand. Her eyes that once could fasten on any man and get an appreciative look in return had lost their flash and were circled by dark shadows.

She didn’t look in mirrors anymore. She’d gotten rid of every mirror in the apartment except the one above the bathroom sink. She only used it to make sure her hair wasn’t sticking up in odd angles or to put on her makeup. She didn’t know why she bothered. The makeup couldn’t cover the truth that the surgery had given age the chance to catch up with her and even tack on extra years. But the lipstick and makeup made it easier for other people to look at her. It didn’t hide the truth, but it let people pretend it did.

So she stayed away from mirrors, but every now and again she wouldn’t look away fast enough and would catch her reflection in a window or in one of the mirrors at Francine’s house. And then she’d wonder who that person reflecting back at her could be. Certainly not her. Not Adrienne Mason. She’d been a lot of things in her life, but she’d never been ugly.

Of course, what was it her mother used to tell her back when she was a teenager? That there were all kinds of ways of being ugly. And beauty was only skin deep. Adrienne had told her that was the reason a girl needed to take such good care of her skin. That good looks took a girl places, and Adrienne intended to go places.

Eventually she’d figured out it took more than looks. It took nerve too. Nerve to just get in the car and drive away from her old life to find a new life. That nerve had carried her all the way to California. But now her looks were gone and her nerve seemed to be leaking out of all those holes they had punched in her when she had let them cut off her breast.

Francine lied to her and told her she didn’t look that bad. Dear Francine. She’d sat with Adrienne in the hospital after the surgery, cried for her when the bandages had come off and revealed the hideous scar on her chest, pushed her to do the arm exercises, even slipped her part of her tip money to help Adrienne pay her rent.

The last couple of weeks Francine’s husband had started giving her grief. Said she might as well move in with Adrienne since she was over at her apartment so much. He hadn’t had much use for Adrienne ever since she told him to take a hike when he’d hit on her at that party for Francine’s thirty-fifth birthday last year. He was a bona fide bum, but even so, Francine loved the bozo. Adrienne didn’t want her cancer to be the reason he split.

Bad enough that it had made Eddie split. She’d known it would happen. From the moment the doctor had said the C-word, she’d known it was just a matter of time. Eddie had actually stuck with her longer than she’d thought he would. Hadn’t left until after the surgery. After they’d mutilated her, smiling all the while and telling her that with a properly fitted prosthesis, she’d be good as new. Once it healed. Once she could lift her hand back over her head. Once she stopped worrying about the way the scar on her chest looked. Once she regained her appetite for food. Good as new.

Eddie couldn’t wait till then. He had good as new, better than new, hitting on him at the club every night. He didn’t have to come home to a one-breasted old woman who could barely summon a smile most days.

Francine said Adrienne should say good riddance, that Eddie couldn’t have loved her very much to desert her at a time like this. And of course Francine was right. Eddie hadn’t loved her very much. Eddie didn’t love the pretty young thing he was with now. Eddie loved Eddie. Adrienne knew that. Had always known that. The trouble was, Adrienne also loved Eddie.

Who could explain love? She sometimes thought about that in the middle of the night when her arm was aching and she couldn’t sleep. David had claimed to love her all those years ago, but he’d loved his God more. She’d met many men who had claimed to love her since then. Maybe some of them had. She’d pretended to love some of them back, but until Eddie, it had just been a game she’d played.

Love. Eddie had changed her. Love had changed her. Made her willing to forgive the unforgivable. Made her forget her pride. Pierced the hard shell that had made her invulnerable over so many years. And even while she was hurting, while her heart was breaking, she wasn’t sorry she had loved Eddie. Still loved Eddie.

Love was a mystery. Unexplainable. Unreasonable. Made no sense. There could be no sensible reason to explain why she loved a baby clear across the country she’d never even seen except in pictures. She hadn’t properly loved his mother. Yet she loved that little baby in the pictures.

In the night when the darkness threatened to overtake her in spite of the lamps she left burning all the time, she would hold a picture of Tabitha’s baby and stare at his little round face until it seemed to almost lift off the photo and come alive. He was getting bigger, but his eyes hadn’t changed. They were her eyes peering up at her. It didn’t matter that the color wasn’t the same. The eyes were. She recognized them. She’d stare at the picture until she dozed off or the darkness gave way to the morning sun.

“Adrienne Brooke.” The nurse held open the swinging door with her plump shoulder while she waited for Adrienne to stand up and venture forward. They hadn’t changed the name on her file even though Adrienne had told them she didn’t use the name Brooke. They’d said it would be too confusing to have a different name on her insurance card and her file. Now Adrienne was glad they hadn’t. She could turn into someone else while she was in the doctor’s office. Someone who had very little to do with the real Adrienne Mason.

She didn’t bother ignoring the first call of her name as she’d been wont to do when she first started coming to this doctor’s office. Still, as she stood up she left the sunshine with reluctance. She wished she could gather handfuls of it to stuff in her pockets to carry back into the sterile room awaiting her beyond the swinging door.

The nurse’s name was Candace. She was married, had two little boys, Joshua and John. Good Bible names. She sometimes showed Adrienne pictures and laughed about the naughty things they did. The little boys had big smiles and shining eyes full of mischief, and once or twice, Adrienne had considered bringing one of the pictures of Stephen to show the nurse. Trading cute for cute. But she hadn’t. She might have to explain how she’d never actually seen Stephen. How she might never see him.

Candace chatted cheerfully about the weather as she led the way down the hall past closed doors with other thick files in clear bins on the doors. She stopped beside the scales. “Let’s see how your weight’s doing. You should be rebounding after the surgery by now.” The nurse waited for Adrienne to step up on the scales.

Adrienne shoved her hands hard into her pockets as if that would help the pointer go up higher. Barely over a hundred. Fashionably thin. That starving look that was so popular with models.

Candace made a tsking noise with her tongue as she wrote down the number on Adrienne’s chart. “You’ve lost two more pounds. You have to eat, Adrienne. Your body can’t fight without fuel.”

“I haven’t had an appetite.” She didn’t know why she bothered making excuses to the nurse. She’d have to say it all again for the doctor. Dr. Mike. She knew his last name. Rollingsworth. But he said she should call him Dr. Mike. That they were in this fight together and so should be on a first-name basis while they were battling the enemy.

Today he was supposed to tell her which side was winning. They’d done blood tests, every kind of test to tell if carving her left side down to her rib bones had done the job and gotten the cancer before it had a chance to escape to another place in her body.

A radical mastectomy. Radical. She used to imagine being radical while she was back in Hollyhill. Radically different. Radically wild. The word had seemed exotic and desirable then. Not now. Not when paired with mastectomy.

Candace went away to fetch another patient and left Adrienne sitting on the examining table in the paper gown. White, of course, just like the rest of the room. Once she’d hit her shoe against the wall to make a scuff mark just because she couldn’t stand the unending white. The next time she was in that room, the mark had been cleaned off the wall or painted over.

Adrienne shivered. She was cold to her roots. If only she had that sunshine in her pockets to warm her as she waited for Dr. Mike’s news. She yearned for good news. The yearning was like a bubble inside her growing bigger with each breath until it was pushing so hard against her heart that she knew something was bound to burst. Either her heart or the bubble.

Dr. Mike was smiling when he came in the room, but it wasn’t the right smile. She’d come to know him too well in the months since Christmas. He was still good-looking. Vibrantly young. Seeming to get younger every week while she was aging years.

“And so, Adrienne, how have you been feeling this week?” He took a quick look down at her chart. “You’d been having trouble with nausea. Perhaps stress related. Is the nausea better?”

She looked at him and wanted to ask how nausea could be better, but he wouldn’t understand, and it did no good for her to pretend she didn’t know what he meant. “Not yet,” she said. If she’d had anything in her stomach, she could have emptied it out on his pristine white doctor’s coat to prove it.

“It will be,” he said as if he could control the universe and her stomach. He sat down on the stool with rollers and stared down at her chart. “The weight’s still going down, I see.”

“Heck of a diet plan you guys have,” she said.

“It’s good you can still crack a joke.” He smiled, but it was a small smile, an almost sad smile.

She tried to hold on to her smile in return, but it drained away when the bubble burst inside her. The truth was in his eyes.

“So we didn’t beat it?” She didn’t know why she said “we.” She was the one who was still harboring a killer inside her. Not him.

He stood up and adjusted his stethoscope. “Let’s do the examination first. Then we’ll talk.”

As if it mattered whether she had her shirt on when he told her she was going to die. She let him poke and prod on her and took the deep breaths he ordered as he listened to her heart rattling around loosely in her chest now that the bubble of hope had burst inside her.

Later she let herself into her apartment. First, the same as every time she came in the door, her eyes went to the spot on the wall where Eddie’s guitar had hung as if she expected the guitar to be back. The nail was still there in the wall. Still as empty as she felt inside.

She flicked on every light and lamp in the apartment on her way to the kitchen. Francine had been there, brought her some soup before she went to work at the restaurant. She’d left a note on top of a stack of mail on the table.

She needed something all right. Another twenty years. Dr. Mike hadn’t promised her another twenty months. He hadn’t promised anything even when, sitting there with her fake breast poking out her shirt properly, she’d pushed him. “How long?”

“That’s impossible to say,” he’d said, no longer avoiding her eyes. She wouldn’t have been surprised if he had reached over and taken her hand. No doubt delivering unwanted news was something he had to do often in those cold, sterile rooms. The fact was, most women died of breast cancer when it was as advanced as hers had been. He’d told her that early on when he’d talked her into letting him hack off her breast as her only hope of survival. Perhaps it would have been better to die as a whole woman.

He kept looking straight at her as he went on. “Every case is different. Sometimes even when the surgery doesn’t eradicate the cancer, it still goes into remission for a while.”

“Miracles happen,” she said. She hadn’t expected him to take her seriously. She entertained no illusions about miracles.