All You Could Ask For: A Novel (22 page)

Finally, he says to me: “Brooke, I’ll say this to you as directly as I can and I hope you’ll excuse my language but this is the best way I can think of to explain this: the time to shit or get off the pot is now. Not in a few years or even a few months. The best way to affect the behavior of this disease, to minimize the chance of it coming back, is to have what we call adjuvant radiation for the breast and adjuvant chemo for the rest of you. The chemo will be directed at any microscopic cells we currently cannot see, with the goal of preventing them from ever becoming an issue.”

It is at that point that I tell him I need to go home. It is just too much right now. I understand what he is saying and I will come back soon, as soon as he wants, but right now I cannot talk about it anymore. And, to my surprise, he is not judgmental, he does not scold or browbeat me. There is understanding in his face, in his tone, and he calls in a nurse and instructs her to make time for tomorrow, regardless of what else needs to be postponed.

So that was today.

Tomorrow I go back. Tonight I have a babysitter downstairs with the kids. I called and asked her to spend the night, told her I think I have the flu. I wish I did. I never thought I’d wish that, but right now the flu sounds so good, so normal. I feel so far away from normal. I have no idea when I can expect to feel normal again. I want so badly to feel normal. I’ve never wanted anything more. I want yesterday, and most of today.

Can anyone here tell me how to get that?

Person2Person

From: Samantha R.

To: Brooke B.

BreastCancerForum.org

Hello Brooke, my name is Samantha.

I’m from Greenwich too. I graduated from Greenwich Academy in 2001, did you go to GA? (Could this be a more awkward introduction? I’m sorry, this is my first person-to-person.)

My situation is a little different from yours. Actually, my whole life is different from yours—I don’t have a husband or children, and I guess it’s no guarantee that I will ever have either one. What I will be having is a double mastectomy next week. My doctor says I can still have kids; the only tangible effect of my surgery will be that I won’t be able to breast-feed, and that seems like a small thing to me now. I imagine it might not seem so small if I ever get there, but right now I’m really not thinking that far ahead. I’m just focused on today, for the time being, maybe tomorrow, not much past that.

I’m not writing to you because of our shared hometown. That may be the reason I was first drawn to your entry yesterday, among the hundreds of others, but it is not the reason I read it over and over, so many times I think I could recite it from memory. It is not the reason I feel I know you, even though we’ve never met. It is not the reason I am reaching out to you now. I am actually writing to say thank you, because you made me realize the refrigerator had stopped humming. And, as it turns out, that was the single most important thing that has happened to me through this whole ordeal.

You see, I am a crier. I mean,
pathetic
. The way most people behave at the end of the movie
Old Yeller
is the way I often react to television commercials. I have been known to weep after seeing a Subaru ad. I know it’s pathetic, but I can’t help it.

Which is why it is so interesting that I didn’t even notice that I never cried over my diagnosis. I mean, I bawl over a mom choosing her breakfast cereal, but I did not shed a tear when a doctor said to me: “Samantha, you have cancer.” I didn’t cry that day, and I hadn’t cried since. Not a single, solitary time.

Until last night.

As I said, I first opened your entry because of the hometown. It was probably the fiftieth post I have read since I joined the discussion last week. All of them have moved me, inspired me, made me feel less alone. They have done what I believe we are all here to do. But none of them did for me what yours did. You made me cry, and I thank you for that.

I read John Irving too. I have just about every one of his books, and when you quoted Franny saying she wanted yesterday and most of today, I remembered it. And I remembered her. And I realized that she was exactly right, and so were you. That’s what I want, too. It’s what we all want, to wake up and have it be yesterday, before all the tests and doctors and decisions. I want to remember what I worried about yesterday. Whatever it was, I would so welcome it today.

I got into bed with my laptop and read your words over and over, and I started to cry. And suddenly it was like that moment when the refrigerator stops humming, and you realize you didn’t even know the sound was there until it was gone. That’s how it felt. I hadn’t even realized I hadn’t cried until you made me. So I sat there, acutely aware of the silence that replaced the hum, and I cried really hard, by myself, sitting upright on my bed with your letter on the screen in front of me. I didn’t have tissues or anything but I didn’t even care, I just let the tears fall wherever they wanted.

I feel much more myself now than I did before. It isn’t quite like yesterday or most of today, but it’s better than it was, and I feel like it’s going to get even better still, maybe as soon as tomorrow. I feel I have you to thank for that, at least partly, because I needed to realize the refrigerator was humming and it took your letter to point it out.

Please do not feel an obligation to write me back. I know how much you have on your mind right now, you may not have time or need for a pen pal. I just wanted you to know, even if it’s just a voice deep in the wilderness, that your words were read and they made a difference.

I will be following however much of your story you choose to share in the weeks ahead, and please know that I am rooting for the heroine in your story from the bottom of my heart.

Love,

Samantha from Greenwich

Brooke B.

BreastCancerForum.org

Greenwich, Conn

Date joined: 9/30/2011

The following morning I was lounging in a hot bath.

The water was super hot, as hot as I could stand it. I love baths, have since I was a girl, but I seldom indulge anymore; showers are so much more efficient. But this was not a morning for worrying about things like that. This was a time to reflect, and to
feel
, though I wasn’t quite sure I could. I’d been numb for days, increasingly so, worst of all in the last few hours. I awoke today devoid of any emotion, any feeling. I wanted to see if I could feel the hot water, and I could, but only a little. Not the way it is meant to be felt. More like the way orange juice tastes right after you brush your teeth: you can tell it’s there, but everything that makes it special is missing.

I surprised myself by sleeping soundly. I hadn’t expected to sleep at all, but last night I slept hard and long, waking with drool on my pillow. The babysitter spent the night and she’d handle the kids this morning and get them off to school. There was a part of me that wanted desperately to be downstairs with them, pouring milk over cereal, packing snacks into backpacks, giving goofy hugs and smiles and kisses. Mornings are the best time of day for children, before they have had their energy sapped by the rigors of their day. Mornings are the time when they have the most time and love for their mom. But the first wrinkled nose I saw at the bottom of the stairs was liable to send me into a fit of hysterics I could never control. Right now, perhaps it was better to be numb. Better to sample the hot water, see if I could feel that, and do it alone. There will be other mornings in the kitchen. There may never be another morning quite like this one.

As I dipped my toe in the bath, I realized that not only did I sleep last night but I dreamed as well, which is also unusual. I hardly ever dream anymore; as I say to Scott sometimes, I don’t have to dream. I already have everything I want when I’m awake.

But now, as I settled into the scalding water, pausing here and there as my body grew accustomed to the heat—feeling it, but only a little—I was thinking of the dream I had. And, when I finally submerged myself completely, holding my breath, clasping my fingers over my nose, I could see it all behind my closed eyes.

It began at the foot of my stairs, in the entryway from the garage. I was myself but as a young girl, thirteen years old, and I was with my grandmother, after whom I was named and who died when I was that age. I loved my Grammy desperately, and still sometimes feel sad that she never saw the house I live in today. Grammy would have loved it. It is decorated, to the most painstaking detail, the way Grammy would have done had she been alive. I realized now, in a way I never consciously had before, that in nearly every decision I make I consider how Grammy would have reacted. I realized this in the tub, with my head underwater. But not in the dream. In the dream I was thirteen years old, taking Grammy on a tour of a house she did not live long enough to see.

We stopped every two or three steps. There was no detail we ignored, no square inch that was not explained. The mirrors hanging on the walls at the landing of the back staircase, the sequential photos of the children in the rear hallway, the painting Scott bought from a street artist in Paris for less than a dollar. The cabinetry and the cookware and the wineglasses and the breakfast stools, the rug in the main entry, the furniture in the living room, the desk with the inkwell in the office. The runner on the main stairs, the chandelier above the great room, the painted colors of the children’s walls, the linens in the master bedroom. In my dream I proudly explained it all, as a docent might when giving a tour in a museum. And in the tub, I was realizing that every one of the choices had been made with Grammy’s silent approval. And it made my eyes fill with tears, just for a moment, even with my head beneath the water, because I realized it meant Grammy was still with me in a way I hadn’t been aware of.

The best part of the dream was showing Grammy all the pictures on the wall that separates the kids’ bedrooms: my courtship with Scott, my wedding, where the “something old” was Grammy’s diamond brooch, and then all the photos of the children, both of them named in her honor: Grammy’s middle name was Megan, her last name was Jarret, hence Jared. Had I done that on purpose? Megan I had, I knew that, but I couldn’t remember about Jared. All I could recall was saying to Scott: “All my life I have loved the name Jared.” And so it was. In the dream I had told Grammy the boy was named for her. And now, in the bath, for the very first time, I realized it was true.

The dream ended with Grammy smiling warmly, exactly as I most love to remember her, with the smell of her cookies somehow wafting in the air, and her saying: “I am so pleased that your life has turned out this way.”

And me, at thirteen, replying: “Me too. If I had seen all these pictures when I was this age I would have thought that I was going to have the best life of anyone in the world.”

“You do, darling,” Grammy said, in the last of the dream I could remember. “You have all you could ask for.”

I sit up in the tub and let the water rush through my hair, and I scrub my face hard with my palms. I am more awake now, though I still don’t feel very much. And I still think that’s probably for the best. I glance at the clock on the face of the radio my husband listens to while he shaves. The kids had gone to school by now. It is almost time to go see the doctor, but I desperately want to stay in the tub a few more minutes. I couldn’t possibly bring myself to rush. And so I lie back and let my head drift beneath the water again, and that is when I realize that it hasn’t once occurred to me through this entire ordeal that Grammy, my mother’s mother, died young from cancer.

I am going to be late for my appointment. I am writing now when I should already be there, and I am the sort of person who is never late for anything. But somehow today that doesn’t much seem to matter. It isn’t the proper thing to do to make them wait, but today that doesn’t feel as though it makes as much difference as it should.

Person2Person

From: Samantha R.

To: Brooke B.

BreastCancerForum.org

Hi, Brooke, I am writing to you from room 324A at Greenwich Hospital, the same building where I was born and where you may have been as well. I’ve been thinking a lot about that this week, sort of a circle of life, which sounds cheesy but in my mind is a good deal more profound than that.

I spent a lot of time in this hospital as a girl. Not for any horrible reasons; my father was president of the board of trustees. I must have gone to a hundred fund-raising events with him. I remember some of them really well, mostly the Christmases. They always had wonderful events around the holidays, with tinsel and reindeer and visits from Santa. When I got older I was allowed to go to the grown-up functions, dinner dances in fancy dresses, with floral arrangements on the tables and live bands playing standards like “It Had to Be You.” The first time I ever slow-danced with a boy was in this hospital, at one of those parties. I was sort of a tomboy then, an athlete, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to clothes or my hair, and I didn’t pay a lot of attention to boys, either, maybe because I thought they wouldn’t pay a lot of attention to me. And then, when I was fourteen, I was here, at a dinner dance, and my father was away from the table, drinking scotch and talking business, and I was peeling the frosting off a piece of chocolate cake, when Andrew Marks came to the table. He was two years ahead of me in school and handsome and athletic and smart, captain of the basketball team
and
the debate team, which is a dream combination if you ask me. His father was the chief of pediatrics, so I had seen Andrew at many hospital functions over the years but had never really spoken to him. I didn’t think he even knew who I was.

Then, suddenly, he was standing over me. I don’t know how long he was there. People were always milling around at those things, and I was fixated on getting as much of the frosting as I could off the cake. But finally I realized someone was standing over my shoulder, and when I turned I could tell Andrew didn’t recognize me.

“Hello, my name is Andrew Marks,” he said stiffly and formally, as though he had taken classes in the proper etiquette for asking a young lady to dance and this was his first stab at it. “Would you like to dance?”