The Instant When Everything is Perfect (25 page)

“No. I’m sick of that story. My story—“

She stops, shaking her head again. She reaches into her bag, pulling out an assortment of paperback novels and holding them out like a fan. “Pick, Mom. Pick your story.”

Sally’s veins pinch and burn, the crackle of the drug inside her starting to flare into fire. She reaches out her left hand and taps the dullest book cover, something brown and green and indistinct.

“This one. This is the story I want to hear.”

Mia laughs. “Strange pick.
A Hole in the Heart
. Can you take it?”

Sally nods, knowing she’s had a hole in her heart for a long time, since David died, and all her organs and flesh and muscle and bone have learned to live with it.

Closing her eyes, Sally nods and then leans back on the recliner. Soon, there is the lull of Mia’s voice, the story of a girl in her mind, and then nothing but the crackle of drug, the noise of the hospital, and then nothing.

On the way home in the car, Sally turns to Mia. “I’m going to Scotland. In five months.”

Mia keeps her eyes on the road, but her mouth opens and then shuts. Quickly, she glances at Sally and then focuses on the traffic in front of her. Unlike Nydia, Mia is a careful driver, a safe mother driver, her hands locked at ten and two, the positions Sally remembers screaming about one day in the old Buick Sportswagon after Mia tried to make a U-turn using one loose hand.

“Scotland? On a tour? Who’s going with you? Nydia? Marlene from the bridge group?”

“No. I’m going with Dick.” Sally stares straight ahead at the traffic, but then says, “He’s a good man. He—he’s encouraging.”

Again, Mia’s mouth opens and closes, but she doesn’t glance at Sally this time. Seconds pass. Outside the car, traffic presses in, flows out, moves along. The sky is the color of new blueberries.

“Good,” Mia says finally. “Okay. But are you sure?”

“Yes. It’s not as if—you know, I don’t really know if he, well, wants to go to another level.” Sally feels flushed, her heart beating under her missing breast. “I’m not sure if he wants me that way. But we get along so well. He’s been wonderful during all this.”

“He has.” Mia turns right and merges into oncoming traffic. “I like him a lot, Mom.”

“So,” Sally says. “When this is over. When I’ve had a month off and can eat again and my butt doesn’t look like a skillet, Dick and I going to take a tour.
Historic Celtic Sites
. Denair Parvati at the Triple A set it all up. I’ve paid my deposit. A month, with a week in Ireland to boot.”

“Oh. Wow. Okay.” Mia gives her a quick look. “It will be fun.”

Sally sits back, suddenly feeling empty. What was she expecting? A fight? Not from Mia, surely. That will come later, with Katherine. Maybe it’s that the trip doesn’t sound like enough, not yet. It doesn’t sound like as much life as Sally wants. A tour to Scotland. So what? People go on tours all the time. She turns her head to look at the group of people on the corner waiting for the light to change. She really wants to go; she really wants to be with Dick. So what is it that she’s looking for? What does she imagine? What does she want?

The crosswalk flashes its green man, and Sally suddenly she sees herself lifting her blouse, showing her scars to someone other than Dr. Jacobs, someone other than Dr. Groszmann. She’s showing them to Dick, and the look on his face is not what she imagines.

“Well,” Sally says loudly. Mia almost flinches. “How about a quick milk shake. You know how I love them. Strike while the iron is hot, while I still feel like eating. The nurse said about day three I will feel ill.”
Feel like dying
is what she heard under the nurse’s words. Well, Sally has already felt like dying, but she has her blue pill now—the one Mia snuck into her daily regime that changed things—and she won’t give it up.

“Okay,” Mia says, making a right onto Main Street. “A milk shake. Even though I shouldn’t.”

Mia shrugs, and Sally leans over and puts her hand on Mia’s warm thigh.

“You’re lovely,” she says, wanting to add
joyful, giggling, round, as beautiful as a wet warm baby.
But lovely seems enough. Mia smiles and drives on, taking them toward something sweet.

In the time before the nausea, Sally cleans her house. She digs through the back of the guest room closet, finding old Christmas wrapping paper and warranties for appliances that she’s long ago given to the Goodwill. When she moved from the Monte Veda house to her condo, she kept some board games, imagining that she’d need to have something to do with Lucien and Harper as well as Matt and Mike when they visited. But none of the boys were interested in Scrabble or Monopoly or Life, asking Sally to go down to the video store instead to rent movies. So now she pulls the games out of the closet and stacks them on top of David’s old puzzles.

After Nydia offers and then takes Sally’s donations to the Goodwill drop box, Sally goes through her photos. The last year she put any photos in an album was the year after David died. For one year, she pretended, and there are the girls in birthday hats and at swim meets and at Girl Scout meetings. For all the world—the world that would have looked at Sally’s albums—the family seems normal, intact, complete. After all, it could have been David behind the camera, clicking away.

Sally drives down to Longs Drugs and buys five large photo albums. For hours, she sorts the pictures by year, trying to construct a chronological narrative, and then, slowly, she slips the photos in the albums, pressing down on the sticky plastic, trapping the images forever.

On the Sunday following her chemo, Sally feels the drug open its fist and grab her stomach. Her head begins to pound, her body feels light, weightless, nothing, like one of the dust bunnies under her bed. She moves only from her bed to the living room couch, slumping against the arm rest.

Then she seems to sink, falling into each and very cell, her insides heavy. She wants to lift out of her body before the throbbing, aching dullness gets worse; she needs to get out of her own body. She remembers feeling this need for escape during her labor with Mia, pulling on the nurse’s arm and saying, “I need to go home. Now.”

There’s a yap at her door and then a knock. When she doesn’t answer it right away, Dick rings the bell once, and then again. Sally pushes herself up, and opens the door, knowing that if she doesn’t answer, he’ll call 911 or Mia. Or worse, Katherine, asking for expert instructions.

Dick steps back when she opens the door, and Sally wonders for a second if her hair has fallen out all at once or if she looks crazed with pain and fear. But then she realizes he moved back only so she could push open the screen door.

“How are you doing?” he says, stepping inside and taking off Mitzie’s leash. The dog jumps on the couch and curls up in a tight dog body circle.

Sally smoothes her hair, adjusts her robe as she stands before him, feeling messy and unkempt. Dick watches her, his eyes wide, waiting for an answer.

“I’m not doing too well today. Maybe I overdid things the past couple of days. I’ve been cleaning.” She motions to the couch, and they both sit down.

“You can’t do everything at once. You need to get well first. This is only your first round, Sal Gal.”

She shrugs and pushes her robe away from her chest, her body warm and clammy. “I don’t think I’m going to do well with chemo.”

“It’s hard, that I know,” he says, and Sally thinks of Ellen. He does know. Dick slaps his knee lightly. “But it can be done, and you’ve the spark to get through.”

“It—this will sound strange.”

“What?” He moves a little closer to her.

“Chemotherapy tastes funny.”

Dick smiles, and then tilts his head back and laughs. Sally can’t help but smile as well, even though there’s some kind of metal taste in her mouth. Metal, or something cold, hard, unnatural.

“Only you,” he says.

Sally shrugs. “I just wish it were over.”

“Sally,” he says, patting her knee. “Give it time.”

“I know my hair will fall out. That seems like the worst indignity.”

He nods. “It does happen.”

“I’ve lost my breasts,” she reminds him.

“I know.” He blushes, drops his gaze, and pats Mitzie’s back.

“Have you ever seen what it looks like?” Sally says. Of course he knows what illness looks like, having lived through the years with his wife. But Sally’s scars? Her mastectomy deformity? He’s probably never seen anything like it.

Dick shakes his head and looks out the window. She can see his pulse beating on the side of his neck.

She is shaking with something like fear, but it feels different, like electricity in her body, an energy that is pushing away the dull throb of ache in her stomach.

“Can I show you?” She knows that Scotland might vanish, just like that, a puff of dream snuffed out by truth.

Dick runs his hands on Mitzie’s body. Sally expects to see his thighs flex as he stands, pushes away from her couch, her living room, her. She hears what he will say, his, “Now, I think that’s a crazy thing to ask me. I’m going to go now. I’ll show myself out.”

The back of Sally’s neck tenses, and when she brings her hands to her robe to close up the neck, he looks at her and holds out a hand as if to stop her.

“Yes.”

Sally wants to ask him if he’s sure; if he really can stand the scars on her chest; if he ever wanted to see her naked in the first place. But if she asks him anything, she won’t show him. And in a way, she’s never really looked at the scars herself. Of course, she’s taken a shower and cleaned herself with soap and water and dried herself off with a towel. Every morning, she puts on her camisole or her cotton shell, pulling fabric over her chest, trying to ignore the two mean pale eyebrows of scar where her breasts used to be. But she’s never
really
looked, in the way that looking means seeing, means understanding.

She pushes back her robe, letting it fall behind her. Then she slowly unbuttons her nightgown, her fingers shaking as she maneuvers the small white buttons through the holes. One, two, three, four, five, and then there is enough room to push her shoulders through the opening. Shoulders, chest, and then scars. With her eyes closed, she holds her body out to him.

The living room air licks cold on her skin, the prick of chill running along the lines of her just-healed incisions. In her body, her heart has taken over, drowning out all her other organs, the rush and pound of blood in her ears and throat and stomach and groin.

And then something happens, something that has never happened. As she sits, trying to hold herself still, the shaking in her body threatening to spill her to the floor, she feels Dick’s quiet fingers touching the diagonal line of puckered flesh where her left breast used to be.

She keeps her eyes closed, unable to believe what she feels is real. But he runs one finger and then two back along the scar and then he does the same on her right scar, back and forth, as light as a moth.

Swallowing, Sally slowly opens her eyes and there he is, leaning forward, his eyes on her chest, his face not sad, not disgusted. Interested. Compassionate. Calm.

He looks up at her, nods, carefully places his full palm on the middle of her chest in between her incisions. “It’s going to be all right,” he says. “You’re . . . It’s you.”

She doesn’t believe that her incisions or her operation are her, and she doesn’t think that anything will be all right because it never has been before. But this moment is all right. And maybe, Sally thinks, as she leans against Dick’s shoulder and lets him button up her nightgown, she can pretend that the next moment will be all right and then the next. Maybe, if she’s lucky, she can fake her way into next week when this intense chemical sickness and pain will disappear.



The nausea is like nothing she’s ever felt before, not when she was pregnant, not when she caught the stomach flu that year Dahlia brought it home from fifth grade camp. It is worse that food poisoning, except she doesn’t have diarrhea. Her whole body feels the need to expel, to purge, to release everything inside her at once. If she could, she’d pull her guts out with a string and leave them on the bathroom floor, ridding herself of the parts that hurt.

She kneels by the toilet, Mia’s right hand holding her shoulder, her left hand her forehead.

“Mom, let me bring a basin to your room. You need to be in bed.”

Sally shakes her head. The only thing that feels good besides Mia’s touch is the cool, white tile under her knees. Then she throws up again, but there is nothing to throw up, her gag empty and croaking.

She waits, gags again, and then she slumps back onto Mia. Mia’s body is shaking, and Sally realizes that her daughter is crying. She thinks to pat Mia’s thigh, but she can’t move her hand.

“I thought Dr. Gupta gave you something to stop the nausea,” Mia says, her voice full of confusion. “It shouldn’t be like this. How can it be like this for four months?”