What We Have (18 page)

What about her? Who’d been there for my mother when she’d had Sara? And then, two years later, when she’d had me?

In every baby picture we have, my mother is alone. Lifting up Sara, laughing. Pushing me on a swing. Digging in the sand with Julie in Charlevoix. Of course, my father must have been there, taking the pictures. But a lot of the time, it must have felt like that for her. Time alone with us. Time missing Sylvia.

 

I USED TO THINK OF
Sylvia’s death as a single event: September 1953. She died the second week of what should have been my mother’s sophomore year of college, except my mother, knowing how sick she was, had taken the fall term off. The father had been out of the picture the whole time, and all the details were left to her. She was nineteen. With my father’s help, she organized a small funeral in Chicago, and two months later she and my father got married in one of the function rooms at the Drake Hotel. My mother wore a calf-length, pale blue dress and a pearl bracelet. She looked so ethereal in the photographs in the wedding album: a little like Audrey Hepburn, slender necked, with a wistful, unfocused smile. We loved looking at those pictures. We’d sit on the couch in the living room and my mother would turn the pages carefully for us, so we wouldn’t get fingerprints on the photos. We pored over the pictures of the three-tiered cake, the corsages. We anatomized every last detail of my mother’s dress, her hair, her white gloves. But even as children, we could tell there was something off in those pictures. A stilted, melancholy air.

“Why didn’t you wear a real wedding dress? A long, white one?” Julie asked once.

My mother looked vague. “Oh . . . ,” she said, offhand. You could tell she was thinking about the best answer. “I didn’t really want that. My mother had just died.” She shrugged, remembering. “I was still in mourning. I wasn’t really in the mood for a big traditional wedding.”

We couldn’t fathom that. Julie’s favorite doll came out of the box already wearing a wedding dress, complete with a veil and white pointy shoes. The dress seemed glued to her. The bride doll wore it all the time, even when we used her as a prop in Reptile Rodeo out on our driveway with our neighbors’ pet lizards.

Julie patted my mother on her arm, concerned. No wedding dress? None of us could grasp the gravity of such an error.

There were so many things we never asked. Who helped her find the dress she did wear, the pretty blue one? Who helped her pick out the fancy cake, with the icing beads and the real flowers?

We saw some of what was missing. The white dress, the veil. But we didn’t see the biggest absence in the picture: the emptiness next to my mother where Sylvia should have been.

MIDNIGHT, EARLY MAY. JACQUES WAS
working in the study we shared. Sacha was asleep, and I was sitting up in bed, reading a monograph on early modern horoscopes. I’ve always been a night owl. I love that stretch of night when everyone else is asleep, the whole world is quiet, and for once, you can actually think. It’s the time of day cut loose from logistics, schedules, planning.

The word
horoscope
literally means “to watch the hour.” In theory, if you study the hour when you were born, something will be revealed both about your character and about events to come. Auspicious and inauspicious days. I lay back, thinking about what it meant to see ahead. What if you really could see the future, if the hour you were born told you something that mattered? Would that be a good thing? I’m not much of a horoscope person, although I’ve always liked the descriptions of Taurus—earthbound, stubborn. Fond of security and luxury fabrics.

In my own way, I’ve always been an hour watcher. Back then, I loved trying to imagine where we’d be in ten months or ten years. It was the closest I could get to time travel. What would Sacha be like when she was almost ten? Would we ever find a house? Would I like my new department?

When would we have another baby?

Even now, knowing we had our hands full, I was starting to dream about a second child. I couldn’t imagine Sacha growing up without a sister or brother. May, my birthday month, pushed the hands forward to another position on the clock. I was turning thirty-three. Another step closer to thirty-five, my looming deadline. At the back of my mind, I’d been trying to forget about our family history. I hadn’t been back to the Farber yet. I needed to make an appointment, needed to start mapping out what came next.

Maybe once we’d found a house . . . Once I’d settled into teaching . . .

Sacha was too young—only five months old. I was still nursing. But I didn’t want to wait forever, either. If we wanted to have another baby before I turned thirty-five . . .

I started counting backward again. In order to have a baby next summer—

I hadn’t realized how tired I was. I still had my old nursing bra on and I needed to take a shower, but I felt like I couldn’t move. I was reaching up to shuck the bra off, moving slowly, when my finger grazed my breast and I felt something.
That’s weird
, I thought.

My finger went back, zeroed right in. If my breast was a clock, what I was feeling was at two o’clock, near the nipple. A small hard lump.

A cold feeling spread through my stomach. I felt literally sick—the room spun.
No way
. There was no way this was possible.

I sat straight up, flicked on the overhead light. I took both hands and pressed experimentally on my breast, probing, trying to stay calm. There. Right in the same spot—small, about the size of a pea. A definite lump.

I lay back down, shaken, eyes on the ceiling. It’s probably nothing, I told myself, all the while thinking,
Something! It’s something!

It was punishment for greed, I told myself, a terrible taste in my mouth. For trying to plan a second baby. Why couldn’t I be happy with what we had? Why did I have to tempt the gods by always wanting more?

I knew my breasts by heart. My sisters and I had grown up in the era when girls’ locker rooms were plastered with laminated drawings demonstrating how to examine yourself once a month. Usually the instructions showed a cartoon-drawn, circular breast made up of different colored rings, like the targets we shot at in archery at summer camp. Red, yellow, blue. You were supposed to examine yourself in the shower or lying back on your bed, inching your fingers carefully around each section. I could have told you at any given day what each part of each breast felt like. Even nursing, I knew every little change. This lump was utterly unknown: an enemy invader.

I pushed aside my book, hauled myself out of bed, and padded into the next room, looking for Jacques. He was sitting at the desk in his boxer shorts, intent on a stack of papers. My heart was pounding.

When I’m really worried, I don’t go in for small talk. “Can you feel this?” I asked him, grabbing his hand and pushing his index finger in the direction of the lump.

He was in the middle of looking over a deferred tax form. This wasn’t what he’d expected, 12:20 on a Sunday night.

Jacques knows me. He let me guide his finger around until I zeroed in on the right place. I could see his face change expression as he registered it under his finger. “There?” he asked, pushing a little. It didn’t hurt, exactly. It just felt funny.

I nodded, my mouth dry. “What do you think it is?” I demanded. Expecting him to answer. I’m not sure why what he said mattered so much to me: Jacques can take a computer apart and put it together again, but he doesn’t know the first thing about anything medical. He deliberately avoids reading articles about diseases. Don’t look for trouble, is the approach he favors, and the odds are, trouble will stay away.

“I’m sure it’s some kind of breastfeeding thing,” he said. “Doesn’t that happen when you’re nursing? With all those hormones?”

“Then why hasn’t it happened before?” I shot back accusingly. I wanted him to reassure me, but I was ready to attack any reassurance he offered. “I’ve been nursing for five months!”

“I wouldn’t worry,” Jacques said, turning back to the tax form. “But if it bothers you, why not have somebody check it out?”

I stared at him. He sounded so rational, but the minute he suggested that I “check it out,” I started picturing worst-case scenarios: biopsies, bad news, toxic regimens. Cancer everywhere.

He hadn’t reassured me at all. He’d told me I needed to have this checked out! The message was clear: He was worried. I was in trouble.

I thought about my mother’s tumor, and my mouth went dry.

Inauspicious day
. My personal terror alert shot from high to very high. I didn’t sleep much that night. I kept tossing and turning, trying not to jab my finger back in the general direction of the lump, which by five AM I was sure had gotten bigger. I was damp and sweaty and miserable, furious with myself for being so panicky, but unable to stop worrying, and by the time Sacha started whimpering from the next room, I was a mess.

I spent all Monday morning calling around, trying to find a doctor who could see me. I called my old doctor in the high-risk ovarian group—I was late making an appointment to see him, the gods were punishing me!—but his nurse said he had left the practice, and I should call back another time to make an appointment with one of his partners. Panicked, I called Annie, who knew me well enough to drop what she was doing and get out her Rolodex. By that afternoon I’d gotten an appointment with her sister DeeDee’s gynecologist, a lovely, slightly faded older woman, Dr. Millis, who ushered me into her office with a no-nonsense air. I brought Sacha with me in her carrier, and Dr. Millis made a funny, clucking sound at her, the way older women sometimes do when they want to show how much they remember about being around babies. I lay back on the examining table, gown on, bra off, and she slipped the gown apart, probing. Her hands were cold and methodical. “Yes, I see,” she said after a moment, pressing the lump firmly. She pushed at it for a long moment, frowning. “When did you say you first noticed this?”

When did I say
. She sounded faintly accusing.

“Yesterday,” I said. “Actually, last night.”

“You didn’t waste any time coming in,” she commented, still feeling. I was on my back, arms behind my head, staring up at the ceiling. She was palpating my breast, gauging, assessing. Two hands: one, the physician’s. One, the disease.

“OK,” she told me. “You can sit up, put your gown back on.”

She looked at me, then over at Sacha. “I think,” she said slowly, “that what we’re feeling is most likely a cyst, very common in nursing mothers. But—”

My heart sank.
But
.
This is it, this is it
. I gripped the sides of the table.

“—given, as you’ve told me, that your mother has had breast cancer, and given that we’re in Boston, with the best of the best available to us, I’d like to have my colleague Dr. Henneker have a look at you. He’s a surgical oncologist at the Brigham, and he’ll be able to suggest what he thinks makes most sense. Either we do a biopsy, or we watch and wait.” She pushed her glasses up, matter-of-fact. “He’ll be the best judge. Stop at the checkout desk on your way out,” she added, with a last wink for Sacha. “They’ll get you set up to see him.” She scribbled something unintelligible on a slip of paper and handed it to me.

I tried not to fall apart as I got dressed, picking up Sacha’s carrier. My mind was racing. Biopsy. She said “biopsy,” right? And
oncologist
. She definitely said “oncologist.” Sacha was smacking at the toys dangling from the handle of her carrier. She was making the little syllable sounds I loved. I was already ten steps ahead of Dr. Millis, imagining myself sick, hairless, dying, abandoning Sacha and Jacques. No chance for a second baby. No future left. I barely remember getting out to the parking garage, finding my car, snapping Sacha’s carrier into its frame in the backseat, driving home.

When Annie called, I actually burst into tears.

“It’s going to be fine,” she said with complete conviction, and I remembered why I loved her. “Trust me. You’ll be there with your ugly shag for a long, long time.”

I could barely eat dinner that night. I couldn’t sleep.

“The doctor said,” Jacques reminded me, “it’s probably nothing. Probably just a cyst. Right?”

I ignored him. I got out my old
Merck Manual
, the one I used to look things up whenever I felt anything out of the ordinary. The book was tatty from overuse. Several pages were dog-eared:
Brain, tumors in. Esophagus, cancer of. Melanoma. Uterine cancer.
Some pages were coming loose from overuse. “Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Jacques admonished me. He hated it when the
Merck Manual
came out.

He hadn’t seen the look Dr. Millis had given me. The way she wrote so quickly, so gravely on her little pad.

Exasperated, Jacques rolled over, getting into his I-need-to-go-to-sleep-and-you’re-driving-me-insane position. I had no intention of sleeping yet. I turned on my bedside lamp and opened the
Merck Manual
to the index. With one finger, I rolled down to the entry for
Breasts. Cancer of. Cysts in
.
Cancer of
came first, and had a much longer entry.