The Lavender Hour (3 page)

Sitting in the basement room where we'd met for training during the winter, it had sounded easier. Of course, if my sister, Ashley,
had been here, she'd do more than give advice. Ten minutes through the front door and she would have aired out the house, turned down the heat, and informed the man hiding behind the closed door that he should take his pride down a notch or two and accept help when it was offered. But I wasn't my sister. Besides, although I wanted to meet Luke, to sit by his bed and have a chance to tell him that I understood what he was going through, I couldn't help but sympathize with his desire for privacy. Like I said, I'd been there myself.

I explored the kitchen, taking care not to be heard, although I was fairly certain nothing would penetrate the wall of sound generated by the television. I opened a cupboard door, found several medicine vials, a box of Cream of Wheat, and a crateload of Ensure. The adjoining cabinet was stocked with packages of prepared foods. The inexpensive kind. Macaroni and cheese. Scalloped potatoes. Ramen noodles. Cans of corned beef hash and chicken noodle soup. One thing the hospice staff had been specific about during our training was the necessity of establishing boundaries, both emotional and practical. Volunteers, we'd been told, were never to invade the privacy of the patient or the family and never under any circumstances to snoop around a patient's home. But I was curious. Plus, I'd never been strong on following procedures. (Every time a flight attendant told me to fasten my seat belt, I wanted to unbuckle it as soon as he walked away. My one-month therapist asked me if I thought I had a problem with authority. Who doesn't? I'd asked. Really.)

I wandered into the bathroom and poked around the contents of the medicine chest. Toothpaste. Tube of hemorrhoid cream. Electric razor. Antacids. A generic pain reliever and a bottle of vitamins months past the expiration date. Nothing out of the ordinary. Hardly worth the trouble of breaking a rule.

We had been given surprisingly few rules. Volunteers weren't supposed to stay overnight. Things like that. Mostly it was guidelines. The thing the staff was really emphatic about was that we
were not allowed to give any medications to a patient. No exceptions. No matter what. Shouldn't be any problem with that one. It was hard to give drugs to an invisible man.

B
ACK IN
the hall, I checked out a gallery of photos in metal frames. A studio shot of a little girl in a sundress with blond hair falling in waves to her hips. (What I wouldn't have given to get my hands on that hair.) The same girl—older—in cap and gown, holding a diploma, hair now bleached nearly white. Not smiling. I assumed this was the daughter—Paige—and, recalling the file notations, tried to read signs of bad attitude in the girl's face, but all I saw was the smooth palette of youth, not unlike that of dozens of my high school students who had 'tude to spare. Next was a black-and-white photo of a man standing at the ocean's edge, knee-deep in the surf. The blond girl, no older than twelve in this picture, stood close at his side, her face alight with joy and tilted up toward his. He was darkly handsome in the snag-your-breath-beneath-your-ribs kind of way that I always associated with Irish men. At that moment, I felt a shock of connection that even today I can recall as vividly as if it were yesterday. I know you.

I stood there a while longer, trying to understand this flash of recognition, this sense of knowing, but I couldn't get a handle on it. Finally, I moved on to another shot. In this one, the dark-haired man stood by a truck, a black Lab at his side. I lifted the photo off the hook and crossed to the kitchen window, where I could get a better look. I recognized the truck as the Dodge in the drive, a new model, so clearly the picture had been taken recently. The man looked well over six feet, tall enough so he could step into the cab without the least effort. Well, no radar needed to signal danger with him. Love on the loose and hearts on the run. His hair was as black as the retriever's. I'd felt hair like that—coarse but not wiry—had held it between my fingers. (Black—true black—remains to this day my favorite hair color. It holds and reflects light like no other shade.) He looked incredibly fit. Even in the picture, you could see that. I
glanced over at the closed door, tried to imagine him lying in a bed on the other side. It seemed impossible to believe that the vital man in the photo could be sick, dying. But when had life ever been fair? I had been fourteen when my father died. And twenty-seven when I got cancer.

I replaced the photo on the wall, then stepped closer to the door, stopped short when the floor creaked beneath my feet, strained to hear some sound other than the television. Should I knock? Call his name? Check to see that he was okay? Was he all right? My mouth grew dry. Oh God, I thought. What if he wasn't? My heartbeat accelerated, a caffeine-overdose-like symptom that sometimes foreshadowed a spell of anxiety. I inhaled deliberately, slowed my breath. I closed my eyes, steadied myself, wished I were back at the cottage, busy at my worktable fashioning a piece of jewelry. At that precise moment, I would have given anything if I could have gone back and altered the events that had brought me to that room.

I
F.
When we were much younger, Ashley and I used to play a game in which we rolled life backward, an exercise we found simultaneously thrilling and terrifying. If Mama's boyfriend hadn't gotten a burst appendix, Ashley would start, she would have gone to dinner with him that night. On cue, I would chime in: And if she were having dinner with her beau—our mama's word—she wouldn't have gone off to the movies by herself. Ashley would pick up the story: And if Daddy hadn't taken a new job and moved to her town, he would already have friends and wouldn't be alone on a Saturday night. Taking turns, we would continue the tale to its end. How if our daddy hadn't been standing right behind our mama at the box office and she hadn't forgotten to cash her check from the day care center where she worked and if he hadn't insisted on paying for her ticket and if she hadn't said yes but only if he would let her pay him back, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, a litany we knew by heart—how if one of these things hadn't happened exactly as it had, neither of us would have been born. It absolutely unnerved us to think how one incident changed, one particular break in a chain of events—an appendix not burst, a new job offer not accepted, a check already cashed— just the smallest act altered and neither of us would be alive. That was the part that was so scary and remained so even after we'd grown up: The arbitrariness of history. The fragile strand that was cause and effect. If.

A
S I STOOD
in Luke Ryder's house and stared at his closed door, I found myself unraveling the strand of circumstances that had carried me to that moment. If I hadn't broken up with Steve (not exactly the shock of the millennium; broke up with a guy, broke up with a guy, broke up with a guy, was the major theme of my love-in-all-the-wrong-places-with-all-the-wrong-men life) and if my job hadn't been eliminated (arts were always the first to go; God forbid any school budget cut should affect sports) and if I hadn't needed to escape the too-heavy weight of Lily's concern for me and my own long history of disappointing her, I would not have moved to the family's cottage on Cape Cod for a year while I tried to sort things out. I'd thought that maybe, in a different setting, I would manage to let go of the fear and the sense of vulnerability that had settled on me since I'd gotten ill and I'd be able to look to the future. As my grandma said, I'd been given a new chance at life. A lot of people didn't have that opportunity. So here I was on Cape Cod. What was it called? A geographic cure? Well, cures come in all manner of guises. I was taking my first steps in a new life direction as yet undefined. I didn't know exactly where I was going, but I was eager to begin the journey.

F
IVE YEARS
earlier, on the day following my twenty-seventh birthday, doctors discovered a tumor on my brain. “It can't be,” I said to the neurosurgeon, even as I stared at the brain scan. Just the previous week, I had run a ten-K and then gone out and partied like a wild woman. Of course, we are never prepared for the things that rush into our lives uninvited. You think life is settled, and then it isn't.

There had been no warning. The few symptoms I had experienced I'd discounted as ordinary side effects of modern life. Who didn't have an occasional headache? Who didn't get a bit rundown? Yes, I'd been tired that winter and had had headaches from time to time, but I was working hard—a full-time job, two craft
shows to prepare jewelry for, my running club—and I put the fatigue and headaches down to stress. On the worst days, I'd swallow three Advils or pop a couple of Aleves and try to forget about it.

By spring, the headaches had become so chronic that I mentioned them to the examining physician during the physical routinely required by my health insurance provider. He didn't seem overly concerned. He suggested I try some stress-reduction techniques and said to check back if they persisted. And even when my eyelid seemed to be a tiny bit droopy, this change seemed minor. Nothing dramatic. No pain. We have an amazing capacity to explain things away. Until we can't.

When Lily noticed the slight asymmetry in my face, she insisted on calling my uncle Brent, my daddy's brother and a pediatrician. He questioned me closely and suggested a few tests. Just to rule everything out. Later I learned he had suspected Bell's palsy.

But it wasn't palsy or MS, or the half dozen other things they tested for and eliminated. It was a growth on my brain. Schwan-noma. A laughable name for a tumor. It sounded like a disease you'd get from riding a bike. Or something Woody Allen would make up. It proved to be malignant.

N
OW, AFTER
an operation to root out the tumor, weeks of radiation, months of recovery, and years of moving on, I truly believed the nightmare was in the past. At my checkup last summer, I had been given a clean bill of health. I had passed the all-important five-year cancer-free mark. I was determined to be hopeful. Possibilities lay ahead. Opportunities I hadn't allowed myself to consider until I had the all-clear checkup. Still, I would catch others looking at me as if I might at any minute have a seizure. Friends, faculty members, students, the boyfriend du jour. Although once they learned of my history, most men proved gun-shy.

“I'm fine,” I'd tell Lily when I was overtired and my eyelid drooped and worry clouded her face. And I was fine. I was running again. A half marathon last summer. My hair had grown back and
was nearly as long as it had been before I started radiation, except for the spot behind my ear the size of a half-dollar where it had receded a bit. But when my position at school was phased out and my latest romance blew up, I saw that I had been treading water. I saw a chance to really start over.

At first, Lily tried to dissuade me, but eventually she gave in. “If you're bound and determined to go off,” she said, “why don't you take the Cape house? We haven't rented it in years, so it's just sitting empty.”

“Hell,” Ashley said, adding her ten cents, “she might as well. She's already gone through all the eligible men in Richmond.”

I accepted Lily's offer, and from there, in the perilous cause-and-effect way, one thing led to another, and before a week had passed, I'd packed up my bobbins and worktable and the other supplies I needed for jewelry making—a side business I used to augment my teaching—and reckless for change, I set off for Cape Cod.

Synchronicity. Domino effect.

Almost immediately, Faye Wilson, a neighbor and an old friend of my daddy's family, stopped by to see how I was doing, and within days, I found myself with a surrogate family, which was how I happened to be driving with Faye one rainy day that October on my way to hear a speech by Dr. Bernie Siegel, an oncologist who lectured on mind-body connection. Faye was the volunteer coordinator for Bayberry Hospice of Cape Cod, the event's sponsor, and she'd talked me into taking her extra ticket, saying I needed to get out more. Of course, when I heard that, my heartbeat accelerated. I wondered if Lily had broken her promise and told Faye about my tumor.

In the hotel conference room where the event was held, I remember wondering what Siegel could tell me that I hadn't already lived through. “Diseases can be our spiritual flat tires,”he said early on in his speech. “Disruptions in our lives that seem to be disastrous at the time but end by redirecting our lives in a meaningful way.” Spoken like a person who has never had cancer, I thought, and
began to drift away. But halfway through, as if some part of my mind had been on alert, listening for it, one sentence penetrated my consciousness. I waited until we were back in the car before I turned to Faye. “Do you think it's true, what he said?” I asked.

“What's that?”

“That we learn how to live from the dying? I mean, it sounds good—We learn how to live from the dying—but is it true? Do you think we really can?”

Faye concentrated on driving. “What we learn from the dying,” she said after a minute or two, “is the one thing we want to forget.”

“What's that?”

Faye turned toward me. “That we're all going to die.”

Again I wondered if Lily had betrayed my need for privacy. Ashley always accused me of being a drama queen, but, thrust into the center of a real soap opera story line, I discovered I had a limited tolerance for the attention. When I'd first been diagnosed, I had tried to keep it on a need-to-know basis, and one of the appealing things about moving to the Cape had been that no one there knew about my history. I could feel normal again.

“The dying can teach us how to die, Jessie,” Faye was saying. “Maybe that serves as a model for how to live. What do you think?”

“I don't know. I'm not so sure watching someone die can give us what we need most.”

“Which is?”

“Which is a sign that danger lies ahead, that it is barreling down the track and heading straight for us.”

“And you'd like a signal?”

Well, yeah. Who wouldn't want some indication, something to give us warning so we weren't blindsided by fate. “Something.”