All the Things We Didn't Say (20 page)

When I got to the hospital, Stella was sitting on a hospital bed, watching television. I gasped when I saw her. I didn't even try and mask it. She looked like she'd lost about forty pounds and aged a hundred years since I'd last seen her six years earlier. The first thing she told me was that she had just watched the 2000 Summer Olympics women's triathlon. ‘I think I might do a triathlon,' she said. ‘I used to be quite the swimmer in my day.' I glanced at the old woman sleeping in the bed next to her. There was a tube in her nose and a wheelchair next to her bed. Stella rolled her eyes. ‘That's Agnes,' she whispered. ‘She's pathetic.'

The hospital gave me papers to sign, and then the doctor came to speak to me. He was so tall he had to stoop through doorways, and he had large, fingernail-shaped teeth. He said the reason Stella came in here-her car accident-was nothing. The problem, however-and he bent down to tell me this-was when she said that, as long as she was already here, she might as well mention the blood in her stool. And that she was-he twisted up his lips when he said this-‘defecating up a storm.' I had a feeling Stella would have used a more colorful word for ‘defecating'.

‘The red flags went up for me, just looking at her,' the
doctor said. ‘So I ordered a colonoscopy. I'm glad I did, considering.'

He finally told me that Stella had locally advanced colon cancer. They had taken blood samples and biopsies. God knows what they told Stella to get her to prep for the colonoscopy. The tumor was localized in her rectum, the doctor said, but perhaps not localized enough. It may have spread through the colon wall and possibly into her lymph nodes. This type of cancer was curable, but only if caught quickly. If it were up to him, he would get her in here to start treatment immediately.

I laughed. I thought of my father and this new woman, Rosemary, preparing to come back to Brooklyn. I thought of Alex, of Steven, even of Claire Ryan. They were living their own lives, simply, right now eating potato chips straight out of a bag, walking a dog, watching a baseball game, buying something on the Internet.

I drove Stella home in my rental because her car had been towed. I didn't know what to say to her; I hardly
knew
her. Halfway to her house, Stella turned to me and said, ‘That doctor of mine is cute, isn't he? Do you want me to give him your phone number?'

‘What, my number in New York?' I snapped.

‘Oh, you were dying to come,' she said, putting her hand over mine and squeezing. For a moment, I was afraid that she knew really, truly, why I was here.

Stella navigated me back to the old house on the gravelly road. I felt like I was falling into a billowing dream. The tire swing had fallen off its tether and was now lying on the ground beneath the tree. Next door was the Elkerson house. Down the street was Philip's house, but it was too dark to really see it. A buzzing glow filled my stomach-surely he wasn't still living there. I was terrified to find out-if he was, that would be disappointing, pathetic. But if he
wasn't, it would be equally disappointing, just for different reasons.

Stella opened the flimsy, rusting screen door. A strange smell wafted out-a mix of mildew and plug-in air fresheners. ‘Are you coming?' she asked me.

I stood next to the handprint my father had put in the front walk's cement. RICHARD
,
it said, in very straight, neat letters. I could have stopped the arc of what was happening. I could have called someone, a caretaker, a nurse, hospice. The little I knew of Stella, I was pretty sure it wouldn't be easy to cajole her into months of surgery and treatment-the doctors had said, for instance, that she might end up needing a colostomy bag. It wouldn't even be easy to get her to admit there was anything wrong with her. I looked up at her in the door. Stella wore a shrunken neon-blue t-shirt underneath her hooked cardigan that said DIVA in sparkly rhinestones across the chest. She mentioned she was thinking of starting a website. I pictured a dark, noxious mass inside her, sitting on top of her bowel the way a kid perches on top of a carousel horse.

I stared at my bags. I had packed enough clothes. The dogs were at a kennel called the Doggie Day Spa, the only one my father said they could go to if I had to travel anywhere, because the ratio of dogs to daycare workers was four to one. Maybe being a caretaker was inscribed into the very fiber of me, meaning that if I looked at myself under a microscope, this was exactly what each of my individual cells would say. Why else was I always finding myself in these situations? Perhaps in Cobalt, I could succeed, where elsewhere I had failed. I wasn't here because of fear or anger. I was here because of, well, scientific destiny.

In the year between then and now, Stella and I would get to know each other through our habits. I would take comfort in her banal routines: her morning hour and a half of
primping, the copious amount of sugar in her tea. I would relish the more significant moments, too. We would walk along the creek bed, cutting through Philip's old backyard-his family had moved after all, just a few years after my grandmother had died. We would stumble upon the bird graves Philip had shown me years ago. The headstones would be washed clean by rain, and the handwriting on the tiny slabs would be so hauntingly, painfully familiar. Neither Stella nor I would say anything, but we both, in our own ways, would know who'd buried most of the birds there, long before Philip was born.

I would learn that she couldn't go to bed without watching the Lottery, even though neither of us played-she simply liked the way the ping-pong balls blew around to and fro. And that she loved her dogs desperately, and gave each dog a song. She was like my father in that way, in many ways. She would tell me many stories about her husband, Skip, sometimes full of confessions, but I would never confess anything back. In the year since I came, Stella would ask only once what my dad was up to, and I would answer, ‘Oh, he's doing his thing.' She wouldn't delve further. There would be a lot of things I wouldn't ask her-if she was angry this had happened to her. If she asked why. If she was afraid. The closest we would get to a conversation about heaven was the time I found out that Stella believed the afterlife was an episode of
The Price Is Right.
Those who lived fair lives would be able to come on down the aisle and play the pricing games with Bob Barker, those who were very good got to climb up on the stage and play Plinko and the shell game and Cliff Hangers and spin the big wheel, and those who were criminals or pedophiles or sold drugs to children got to sit in the audience, waiting for the rest of eternity for Rod Roddy to call their names. When I would ask her what she thought she'd get to do in
The Price Is Right
Afterlife,
she would reply, ‘Oh, I might not be in the Showcase Showdown, but I'd definitely get to spin the wheel.'

Maybe I knew all this was coming, standing there in Stella's gravel driveway, still fresh off the plane from New York. Maybe I convinced myself that she needed me instead of admitting what I couldn't bear to think about back home. Whatever the case, I swallowed hard, lifted my bags, and threw them over my shoulder. Stella's old dogs regarded me tiredly; none of them got up. ‘I'm coming,' I said. Of course I was.

The Cobalt Wal-Mart parking lot was packed with Saturday shoppers. Samantha parked her Mercedes in one of the very back spaces to avoid any potential parking lot accident: ‘Look at the way some of these people are taking up three spaces!' she cried. ‘In an enormous pickup truck, no less!' I unfolded Stella's wheelchair from the cavernous back area and helped her into it.

The double doors swished open into a wall of gumball machines. Beyond that was the store. The vastness of the place, after the corner delis and economy of city space I'd grown up with, had been remarkably easy to get used to. As soon as we hit the cart corral, Stella struggled to stand up.

‘I'm fine,' she muttered.

‘No you're not,' I said.

‘I'm
fine
,' she said again.

‘What do you want me to do with this?' Samantha looked at the empty wheelchair.

‘Stick it by the carts,' Stella suggested.

Samantha looked suspiciously at the people ambling through the lobby. The room echoed with beeping cash registers and screaming kids. Something told me Samantha didn't
spend much time in her town's Wal-Mart. ‘Someone might take it!' she whispered.

‘We could put it back in the car,' Stella said.

‘But don't you
need
it?' I asked Stella.

Stella shrugged. ‘I need to start walking more anyway. I'm pretty sure the Jackalope Museum isn't wheelchair accessible. It's not much more than a shack.'

I gave her a weary look. ‘We might not be able to go. It depends on how long it takes to get to Cheveyo. He lives in the middle of nowhere.'

‘Near the
Amish,
' Stella stage-whispered, sinking into a seat at a snack-bar table. ‘I'm not sure it's right to be around Amish people when you're ill.'

‘Where'd you hear that?' I demanded.

‘Oh, it's around. It's everywhere. The Amish people are carcinogenic.'

I thought of the pamphlets I'd gotten in the mail about Cheveyo.
Miracle healer,
the cover of the first pamphlet said. There sat Cheveyo, a wise, hippie toad in his tie-dyed t-shirt, his face the color of a worn-out saddle. Next to him was a young woman who had cervical cancer. That was how she was described in the caption:
Cheveyo with Jane
(
31, cervical cancer
)
.
Cheveyo did something with stones. Or feathers. Animal spirits. Aromatherapy. Peace pipes. No one was very specific about his practices. ‘It's hard to describe,' said Jennifer (
59, rheumatoid arthritis
). ‘It just worked. I felt better immediately,' said Lori (
42, lupus
).

‘Cheveyo could really help you,' I told Stella, drumming my fingers on top of the laminated snack-bar table. ‘He was on
Oprah
. Remember when we watched it together? How he helped all those people?'

‘I was sleeping.'

‘Maybe she doesn't want that type of treatment,' Samantha piped up.

My whole body tensed. ‘She wants to go. We're going.'

‘Which means I need to practice walking, then.' Stella pointed vigorously at the wheelchair, as if it was the cause of all the problems.

At that exact moment, a boy next to us decided to fart very loudly. His parents barely noticed and continued eating their hot dogs. Samantha thrust her purse higher onto her shoulder, the disgust on her face apparent. She eyed the wheelchair. ‘
I'll
put it back.' She turned around and wheeled it out of the store, losing control of it for a moment or two, the front wheels lifting off the ground and the seat tilting backwards. I wondered if she'd figure out how to remove the wheels and fold it up, or if she'd just stick the whole thing in the back of her SUV intact.

Stella surveyed the store, straightening her wig. I knew she was searching for acquaintances, people who wouldn't expect to see her in a wheelchair. Her oncologist was in Pittsburgh, only an hour's drive away, but Cobalt was so insulated and separate from Pittsburgh that Stella felt like her secret was safe here. She felt like no one in Cobalt would ever guess how many times we'd gone to her doctor-first for the surgery to remove the portion of her rectum, then to prepare for the bigger surgery in her colon, then for the chemotherapy and radiation treatments, then for the various surgeries to remove more and more pieces of her colon and to probe parts of her intestines and inspect her lungs, which had suspicious spots on them, too. Then for the CT scans, more chemotherapy, experimental drug chemo pills that she could take at home. We were in the middle of radiation to shrink the tumors in her lungs, staving off the disease's possible progression to other systems, especially her brain. Her doctor warned that the various treatments Stella requested were far too aggressive for someone her age, but Stella squared her shoulders and said, ‘Bullshit. I can take it like a man.'

Stella went to great lengths to keep up as if nothing had changed. She still played euchre with her friends, a scruffy bunch of women of varying ages who had lived in Cobalt their entire lives. I tagged along, sitting in the lumpy, overstuffed, chenille chairs that seemed to live in each of their living rooms, reading a magazine or the same racy parts of the romance novel they all seemed to own. Stella told everyone I was her ‘chauffeur' because she temporarily couldn't drive-a small squabble with the police, she explained, rolling her eyes, making out like she was an outlaw.

Although she never missed a euchre day, those days were always hard on Stella; after one euchre game, as soon as we had climbed into the car and rolled out of the driveway, Stella had made me pull into the wooded part of the cul-desac so she could open up her window and vomit.

‘Why don't you just tell them?' I pleaded with her. The women had to know something was up; Stella showed up every week in those satin gloves, formal attire for a Tuesday afternoon. She declined glasses of iced tea on sweltering summer days because her treatments made her sensitive to cold drinks. At five-six-tall for a woman her age-she weighed one hundred pounds. And that was an improvement-when I'd picked her up after her car accident, her chart had said that she weighed eighty-eight. ‘Then at least they'll cut you some slack,' I had gone on. ‘Then you can lie down between hands.'

Stella wiped off her mouth with the roll of paper towels she kept in the car for exactly that kind of emergency. ‘There's no way I'm admitting that I had a bout with cancer of the ass. And anyway, this isn't because of that. It's probably from that foul food Esther always serves. Those cookies are about a million years old!'

‘They were sealed,' I argued. ‘They're from the grocery store.'

‘They taste like metal.'

‘You know what that's from.'

‘Perhaps I'm pregnant!' Stella suggested. ‘You ever think of that? This could be morning sickness.'

‘Some people don't mind sympathy from their friends.'

The street ended in a T; straight across was a steep hill that looked over downtown Cobalt. It had been dusk, and Cobalt's one bridge had been lit up, making a soft, green reflection on the river. The little houses that lined the bank looked sweet and quaint that night; you almost couldn't tell they had stability issues and peeling paint and junked-up porches.

Stella sank into her seat, looking at the view too. ‘Cobalt used to be a wonderful place to live. You might not believe it, but it really was. Your grandmother and I used to do so much shopping on that main drag when we were teenagers.'

‘It sounds like you guys were such good friends when you were younger,' I said. ‘What happened?'

‘Oh, life,' had been Stella's answer.

If it turned out the cancer took Stella, I was to handle the announcement in the papers. She didn't want me to mention anything about her illness. If pushed or struck with a burst of honesty, I could only say she died of natural causes. But if she had her way, I was to tell the Cobalt papers that she died rather fabulously. For instance: A ten-point buck had attacked her. She wrestled it to the ground but its antlers bored her through the heart. (‘Which part of the heart?' I asked. ‘The left ventricle,' Stella said quickly, as if she'd been thinking about it for a while.) Or: she was giving a phone interview on CNN and had gotten so wrapped up in her answer that she'd accidentally driven her car over a cliff. (‘An interview about what?' I asked Stella. She looked at me sternly. ‘Does it matter?' ‘I just want it to sound real,' I said. ‘Fine.' Stella stared at the television. On the History Channel,
a man in a tweed jacket was strolling among a bunch of enormous stone heads. ‘They were interviewing me about Easter Island.') Or that she went down with a sinking ship. (‘On what body of water?' I asked. ‘The Allegheny River.')

‘You go get me the wine glasses,' she instructed now. ‘It'll be like Christmas. I'll just sit here by the hot dogs and wait for my gift.'

‘Are you sure?' I asked. ‘What sorts of glasses do you want?'

‘Whatever, sweetie. Have Samantha pick it. She knows about that sort of thing.'

Stella had Christmas on the brain, lately. The night before, when we were preparing for Samantha's arrival-which amounted to, basically, cleaning the toilets, doing the dishes, going through Stella's closet to decide which robe she would wear-Stella remarked that the air seemed full of yuletide excitement. ‘It's Samantha Eve,' she proclaimed. The real Christmas holiday would be here in three months. Last year, Stella had been well enough to come with me to get a tree, and we decorated it together, pulling out old ornaments of my grandmother's that Stella had found years ago in the basement when she took over ownership of the house. It wasn't lost on me that my father's hands had probably touched each and every ornament, the glass balls and Styrofoam cones and ancient garlands. There was even an ornament of my father's young, smiling face in a heavily gilded frame. There were his eyes. There was the crooked incisor. The smattering of freckles on his forehead.
Your life will be uncomfortable and often sad
, I said to my six-year-old father's faded image.
Your daughter will run away from you. This is the first Christmas the two of you are apart.

On that Christmas Day, Stella and I exchanged gifts-among other things, she gave me a small, cloth voodoo doll that had little afflictions and hardships written across its
body, words like
paper cut
and
audit
and
depression.
I stabbed five white pins into the doll's head over the words
good hair day,
but put the black pins aside in a dish on the credenza. We watched
White Christmas
and
Holiday Inn
. She was so healthy a year ago, so whole. She'd gained back some weight, her latest CT scan had been clearer, and she wasn't on any treatment for a month. What would Christmas be this year?

Samantha swooped back through the double doors, wheelchair-less. We snaked through Wal-Mart to the Housewares section, leaving Stella behind. Samantha ran her hands over fabrics as she walked-first an entire row of plaid shirts, then pink bathrobes, then black blazers with brassy buttons.

‘I haven't been in a Wal-Mart in a long time,' she said. ‘Northglenn has these darling little shops that are much better. A woman I recently sold a house to has a knitting store in town-a
dor
able. The store, I mean. It's
so
chill in there.'

She flicked her hair over her shoulder. ‘The house I sold her was adorable, too. One of those brand-new ones Chris built-the walls totally white, everything pretty and new, nothing damaged yet. You can just put your stamp on it, you know? Make it your own, much easier than an older home.'

‘So, is it weird being back here?' I interrupted, making a turn at a vacuum-cleaner display. One of the vacuums was tipped on its side, and someone had abandoned a sixty-four-ounce plastic Coke cup on the edge of the platform.

Samantha shrugged. ‘I can hardly remember being here, it was so long ago. Oh! Do you guys have a Foreman grill?' She pointed to one on display, lifting its plastic lid.

‘We're not big grillers.'

She clunked the grill top back down. People watched her as she strutted through the store, her skin luminous and healthy, her heels tapping against the linoleum. I wondered what really happened at real-estate conferences. Did they
honestly get awards? Last year, Stella and I were leaving breakfast at Mr H's, a restaurant connected to a hotel about fifteen miles outside of Cobalt. There was a corporate award ceremony taking place in the hotel's only conference room. Stella peeked in and said that everyone was just sitting there, morose, like they were at a funeral. ‘What do you think they would do if I ran into the room and did a somersault?' she whispered giddily. ‘Do you think anyone would laugh?'

‘So is it shocking to see Stella?' I asked Samantha.

‘Do you think she would like these ones?' Samantha talked over me, holding up a box of Oneida long-stemmed wine glasses. She noticed me glancing at the price tag on the shelf. ‘I can pay, of course. It's totally my treat.'

She looked at me as if I were as poor as all the other patrons of the Cobalt Wal-Mart. For a while, I had been. A few months after coming to Cobalt, my savings had depleted down to almost nothing. I couldn't draw from anything in my father's account-it was all going to the Center. Medicare paid for Stella's hospital costs, but I'd had no idea how she paid for anything else. Finally, I'd broken down and asked her. ‘The Internet,' she told me.

She walked me to my father's old room. Inside the closet were piles of unopened boxes of toys. A lot of it was
Star Wars
paraphernalia, action figures and the X-Wing fighter and comic books and statues. ‘Ruth used to buy Richard all kinds of crap, long after he left,' Stella explained. ‘I put one of the things on eBay last year just to make some space in the closet, and some dumbass paid five hundred dollars for it. Can you imagine, for this crap?' She held up a box; inside was a Yoda figurine. ‘Now, what the hell is this thing? Why is he so hideous?'