What We Have (27 page)

My mother was listless, eyes flicking on his as if she were trying to read a book in a foreign language.

I asked Dr. Brenner why the side effects had been so bad.

He explained she’d gotten an infection—not unusual, it happens. “We’re going to hold off on the second course of chemotherapy until she’s stronger,” he said, tapping with his pencil on her chart.

“What do you mean, ‘hold off ’?” I asked.

“We just want to wait awhile,” he said. “We’ll see how soon this infection clears up, then make a decision about when to resume.”

I stared at him. How could we stop? We needed everything we had to throw at the cancer cells! If we stopped—

He sensed my worry. “This can happen,” he told me. He was being nice. “The best thing is for Mom to get a little stronger, then we’ll start it up again.” I knew it was irrational, but I hated that he called her “Mom.” It seemed so awful already, her being here, wearing this dreadful hospital gown, in this ugly room with no privacy, when it was Friday and everyone was flying in and her birthday was on Sunday. Her favorite day of the year. At the very least he could give her back her pronoun.
Your
mom. That would be better.

The good news was, the fever was down. She could stop with the antibiotics, he said.

A nurse came in, there was a general flutter around my mother’s bed, unhooking her IV, taking away the bags of fluid. The work was all in the details now, cleaning, propping, swabbing, getting her ready to be discharged.

I hated the idea of delaying round two. Cancer Calendar was rearranging itself in front of us again, days evaporating, weeks being erased. I felt like the big picture was being lost, like something was being pulled out from under us. I followed Dr. Brenner out to the hallway.

I was afraid they were giving up on her.

“Isn’t there something else she can try in the meantime? Something less toxic?” I asked.

The look that he gave me was hard to describe. It was a mixture of patience, sadness, and ineffable fatigue, and briefly—just for a second or two—I wondered what it must be like to be Dr. Brenner, with those little boys at home, having to deal with so much suffering every day. I pictured a door opening, one of the boys calling out.
Dad! How was your day?

He explained that once my mother was stronger—he gave her back her pronoun this time—she could get a drug called Neupogen that would boost her white cells. It was expensive, but worth it. Until then, any form of chemotherapy would be too dangerous. She was just too weak.

“It’s her birthday on Sunday,” I told him. It seemed faintly ridiculous, saying this, but I kept going. “She made a special dinner. The whole family’s coming in tonight.”

What I didn’t say, what I couldn’t describe, was the feeling of my mother’s birthday. How it always was. Sitting outside, the grass dewy against our bare feet, sparklers singeing our fingers. The arcs of light they made—Jenny and Rachel dancing with them out in the grass. The smell of coals burning down to ash. “It’s a big deal to her, her birthday,” I added lamely.

Dr. Brenner nodded, taking in this information.

“Let’s get her home, then,” he said.

So we did.

LATER, LOOKING BACK, I SOMETIMES
played a terrible game with myself, trying to decide which good-bye was hardest. There were so many of them, layered on top of each other, and each seemed more difficult than the others. It was like listening to music that reached a crescendo only to build and build until you were certain you couldn’t bear it anymore.

The hard thing about saying good-bye on July Fourth was that we didn’t have fixed plans to see one another again until Labor Day. And even then, we weren’t sure Julie and Jon would be able to make it. So much depended on everything else—when Julie had the baby; when my mother’s blood counts went back up so she could start chemo again. I was planning to come out when she was ready for the second round of F-U, but when would that be? Even the trip over Labor Day seemed tenuous—would Julie and Jon be able to come? Would my mother be well enough to make it happen? Julie, starting her eighth month now, wouldn’t be allowed to fly again until after the baby came. Sunday afternoon before she and Jon left for the airport, my mother clung to her. Against Julie’s pregnant girth, she looked as tiny and shrunken as a child. Both of them were wet-faced when they pulled apart.

No tickets booked. No chemo schedule. No firm plan of what came next.

When it was our time to leave, my mother pulled herself together.

“Don’t worry, Mellie,” she told me, patting me on the arm as Jacques and I loaded up the rental car, getting ready to head to the airport a few hours later. “The minute Dr. Brenner gives me the all clear, we’ll get those tickets sorted out and you and Sacha will come back.”

So far, though, we were all in a holding pattern, like circling in a plane before you get cleared for landing. Her blood counts were still too low for more F-U.

Back in Newton with Sacha, I resumed cycles of my own. Walking with Sacha and Bacchus in endless loops. Circling in the car with Sandi, looking at houses. Calling my mother, waiting for her to be able to talk, calling her back. Cycles eclipsed other cycles. Orbiting back and forth from the house to my new office, pushing Sacha in her stroller. Calling Annie to talk about what I’d be teaching in the fall. Waiting for something to change.

 

MID-JULY, I STARTED RUNNING AGAIN.
Around the same time, Sacha stopped nursing.

I don’t remember which came first, the end of breastfeeding or the beginning of running, but somehow, in those weeks after the Fourth of July, I started to become aware of my body again. My veins, how blue they looked on my wrists. The way my fingers moved when I typed. How good coffee smelled in the morning. The nap of things against my fingers—cardboard, rose petals. Flowers sprang up in the garden of the House with the Green Shag, weedy but lovely: tiger lilies. Coneflowers. Flowers of midsummer. Hot and humid as it was outside, I was suddenly ravenous for the out-of-doors. When Jacques came home from work each night, I’d run upstairs, peeling clothes off as I went—T-shirt, shorts—and grab my running clothes out of the bottom drawer of the dresser we shared. I’d take Bacchus with me and we’d bound out the front door, banging the screen door behind us, tearing down Middlesex Road and over the bridge to the reservoir. I could feel energy and nerves and something else coursing through my veins, and I wanted—needed—to run. By the time we hit the path around the water we were going full stride, he and I. Bacchus wasn’t very well trained, but if I ran fast enough, he left the squirrels and other dogs alone and more or less stayed with me, and because I needed to focus on him, I’d run without music, listening to the sound of footfalls, of his panting, of my own breath quickening and slowing. It had been eighteen months or more since I’d run, and for the first few times, my chest ached and my breath was ragged, but I pushed through, ignoring the muggy heat and the cyclones of tiny midges that swarmed near the water. I’d run for half an hour, forty minutes, sometimes even fifty, then I’d fall back through the door, sweaty and winded, my face red, my clothes sticking to me, and Sacha would look at me with bright, curious eyes.
Who are you?
her expression seemed to say,
and where’s the mother I know?

Running, I was free of thinking or worrying. It was the only time I wasn’t anxious or angry. For that stretch every day, I could just
be
, swallowed up by motion and exertion. Running, I had a body again—legs that ached, calf muscles that tightened when I ran up the trails into the woods. Eyes that swam with tears.

Then I’d come back and take Sacha from Jacques, and bit by bit we’d slip back into being ourselves again. Except that little by little I noticed Sacha wasn’t interested in nursing anymore. She’d try and I’d try, but there was a subtle change; she’d fidget, lose interest, and before I knew it, we were down to twice a day—first thing in the morning, last thing at night. Then, only once a day, and not always even that.

Once I read a column in the newspaper called “Last Things,” by a woman who wrote features about being a parent. We make such a big thing out of every first, she wrote. First smile, first step, first word. Why don’t we record last things? She was trying to remember the last time she’d carried her daughter (now eight or nine years old) down the stairs. I remembered that column and I could feel Sacha’s interest in nursing slipping away and I promised myself I wouldn’t let that happen: I’d know when the last time came.

But I didn’t. Sometime over those last weeks of July it just stopped, with no fanfare or recognition. One morning I got up late, and Jacques gave Sacha a bottle; one night I stayed up late, working on my book, and he gave her a bottle again; or I was on the phone with Julie, or with my mother; one night Annie called and we talked for hours—and somehow, it had been a day, then two days, and Sacha wasn’t nursing anymore. A last thing, and I had missed it.

“It’s probably time,” Julie said, when I called to tell her. “Seven months—that’s about right, isn’t it?” She was deep into the baby books, getting ready.

I wasn’t sure. There wasn’t a timeline for this in
What to Expect
. It’s easier to chart out the beginnings of things, I suppose, than the ends of them. I looked at Sacha, whose laser focus was now beamed on crawling. It was hard to put into words how peculiar it felt, watching the efforts she made, shooting away from me. Our drive to separate seems so much stronger at times than our drive to connect. Or maybe, separating, we just need to find new ways to come together.

 

WHEN I WASN’T RUNNING OR
talking on the phone to my mother or calling Julie to see how she was feeling—the baby was just weeks away now—most of July I spent looking for child care.

Here is how I pictured the person we would eventually hire to help take care of Sacha in the fall:

She’d be younger than me, more energetic, less moody. Less bound by day-to-day details (laundry, plane tickets), more willing to get down on the floor and play with Sacha. Like a devoted niece I never knew I had.

When I described this hypothetical person—usually to Julie, on the phone—it was mostly in terms of binaries: Playful, yet responsible. Firm, yet flexible.

“Sounds like an ad for paper towels,” Julie said.

My mother—feeling pretty much the same, thanks, and still hoping for good news about her blood counts—called every afternoon to weigh in with her own adjectives. Energetic. Organized. (Did this surprise us?) Careful. This is
Sacha
you’re trusting someone with, she reminded me, in case I’d forgotten.

Truthfully, the only person my mother could imagine leaving Sacha with, other than my sisters or me, was her.

Jacques took an afternoon off work so we could meet with Eileen Diamond, the owner of the agency in Newton Centre we’d been sent to by Annie’s older sister, who always knew where to go for things like this.

“Listen, if DeeDee recommends this place, it’ll be great,” Annie told me, when she called me back with the number. DeeDee lived in an imposing house in Brookline and ran her life like a small corporation. She was the one who’d sent me to Dr. Millis, Annie reminded me.

“Right,” I said, remembering Dr. Millis’s brisk, no-nonsense tone, her cold hands. Maybe I should’ve listened to Jacques, and run our own ad in the classifieds.

“ ‘ Diamond’ can’t be her real name,” Jacques said, maneuvering our car into a parking space in front of Centre Nannies.

Real or adopted, the name fit. Everything about Eileen was sharp and faceted—she was tall and angular, wearing chunky metal jewelry. She looked like she was in her late forties, her own children off for the summer volunteering somewhere in Central America. Pictures of them were propped up on her desk facing outward, at dramatic angles.

Eileen brought us seltzer and glossy brochures and wriggled her fingers unconvincingly in Sacha’s direction, the whole time explaining to us how the agency worked. We would pay a (hefty) deposit, take a cluster of file folders home with us, and start selecting candidates who looked promising—“it’s all about
fit
,” Eileen reminded us. The agency ran clearance checks on everything from candidates’ psychological stability to driving records. We could choose up to five people to interview at a time. Once we’d settled on someone, we’d meet again and draw up a yearlong contract. If the person didn’t work out, we’d get some money back, as well as a “replacement nanny.”

It all sounded so contractual to me—like mail-ordering a bride. On the other hand, how did I think this was going to happen? Did I think I was going to meet a babysitter on the train?

“Now,” Eileen said, getting down to business. She peered at Sacha, who was chewing the corner of the brochure. “Were you thinking of live-in, or out?”

“Out,” we said in unison, then glanced at each other, embarrassed by how quickly we’d answered. And how loud our voices were.