Saving Graces (2 page)

I have always loved my house. John and I had bought the lot more than twenty years earlier, when Wade was a baby and I was pregnant with Cate. It had taken every penny we had at the time to build it, but it had always been worth it. We designed it to be built in stages. It started as a simple house for a young couple with two infants and had since grown to be so much more. It had been a home brimming with teenage enthusiasm, a cradle for a family in grief, and a playroom for babies nearly twenty years apart.

It was where we had raised our two oldest children, watching them grow to young adults. There was the big kitchen, its barstools accustomed to the weight of teenage boys. There was the playroom above it that the children had decorated as a fifties diner, with old metal advertising signs on the walls. What was once the garage had been transformed into a small bedroom for our youngest children, Emma Claire, then six, and Jack, who was four. Upstairs was Cate’s room, for her visits home from college, and Wade’s room, unchanged, his book bag beside his bureau, still filled with his papers and eleventh-grade textbooks.

I heard John’s Secret Service caravan pull into the driveway, and I went to the door. He got out alone. He walked through the gate as I came through the door. His eyes, narrow and focused, filled with tears when he looked up at me, and his face, which had been set with purpose, softened. We didn’t say anything. We just held each other. The Secret Service didn’t exist; the neighbors, the house, the beautiful day all melted away. We held on and made the pact we wish we could have made to save Wade. “Nothing can happen to you,” he whispered in my ear. “Nothing is going to happen to you.”

“It will be fine. I will be fine.”

John had called Wells on the way to the house, and he didn’t think it would be fine. Wells had told him what he hadn’t told me, that it was likely breast cancer. When John asked if we should stop campaigning and take care of this right away, Wells had responded, “I don’t think that will help.” John was stricken. His good friend had just told him that nothing could help, that the cancer was too advanced to save me. Though John didn’t know it at the time, it wasn’t what Wells had meant at all. He simply meant that a few more days didn’t matter. John had to talk to another doctor—Cliff Hudis, a specialist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York who had been recommended by Peter Scher, his chief of staff—before he could be convinced that he had misunderstood. As he waited to speak to the specialist, he told me that he wanted to stop campaigning and immediately do whatever was needed to make me well. “I’ll cancel my schedule,” he said to me.

We couldn’t let that happen. Without talking to a doctor, I believed it would do no harm if I chose to wait the four days until the election to do the biopsy and begin treatment—whatever that was going to mean. I had already waited more than a week.

But there was another reason.

During the months I spent campaigning, I had gotten to know so many people around the county, and I don’t mean “know” them like I spent twenty minutes talking to them from a stage. I mean that they shared their deepest fears with me. A day didn’t pass that someone didn’t cry in my arms: their son was getting ready to leave for Iraq and they were trying to buy him body armor from the Internet, their company was moving to Korea and the place they had worked for thirty years was closing, their health insurance company had increased their premiums so much that insurance was now out of reach, Medicare premiums, gas prices, college costs, all going up when their wages were going down, and the list went on and on. I couldn’t even think about stopping or letting John stop. Those faces—the parents in Manchester, the wife in Sandusky, the father in Detroit—were with me, and they were why John and I got up each morning, week after week, month after month. We couldn’t stop. Lump or no lump, cancer or not, I had to continue to talk to as many people as possible, debate whatever issue needed debating, and do what I could for those people, and more importantly, John had to do the same. The rest we’d take care of after the election.

We could do it. It was only four more days. We had to do it. We only had four more days.

But first, there were people to tell. Cate was coming home for the concert, but before she got there, John called John Kerry, who, like my husband, was terrific. Whatever you need to do, he said. He said it to John, then he said it to me. We told him that we’d decided to keep going. John Kerry can be a great cheerleader, arm around your shoulder, flattering you and urging you on, and that is what he was that day, a sincere and compassionate cheerleader. We won’t ever forget it.

Cate was the hard one. I had called my parents and told my mother—my father had a stroke in 1990 and doesn’t talk on the phone much—that I had found a lump but that I wasn’t worried and neither should she be. I tried the same nonchalance on Cate, but—unbeknownst to me—John later told her that it was more serious than I was letting on, which was as hard for her to hear as I had feared. I didn’t know he’d done that or I wouldn’t have let her leave my side for the rest of the campaign. But she did leave. By the next morning we were in West Virginia, about to scatter across the country for the last push.

A day or two later, I was in Cincinnati. We ate a terrific breakfast at a restaurant called the Inn on Coventry. It was a wonderful local favorite, crafted of oak and chrome and vinyl and filled with customers who knew the waitresses by name. We ate and shook hands, spoke to the crew in the kitchen, and worked our way to the bright outdoors. The Secret Service detail always attracted a crowd long before people knew whom to expect, and there was the usual crowd outside the Inn. Most stood back and waved or shouted good luck, but two women came over to say hello. One had short, sparse hair growing in patches on her head; the other wore a wide scarf. They handed me a pink ribbon pin, symbolizing the fight against breast cancer. “Are you a survivor?” one of them asked me. I was caught off guard. I had done a good job of pushing thoughts of my ultrasound aside for the last few days, and now I found I didn’t know how to respond. So I just hugged each of them tightly and thanked them. For exactly what, I wasn’t yet sure.

I held it together until Election Day. That morning—November 2, 2004—I woke up alone in my hotel room in Des Moines, Iowa, and discovered blood in my urine. Nothing like that had ever happened before, and with that discovery came all of the thoughts that I had been pushing aside the four days since seeing the technician’s face. I was pretty certain I had cancer, but there was still so much I didn’t know. Like how long the lump had been there—it could have been years—or what it was doing to me on the inside. Had it metastasized? Did the blood mean it had spread? I hadn’t allowed myself to visit that possibility before, but I knew that my chances of survival were much less if the cancer had spread.
Stop thinking about this,
I told myself.
Get through this day. John and Cate and the children are at the end of this day. But what if
…My mind played out the debate back and forth as I dressed.

The knock on the door and Hargrave’s happy “Ready?” interrupted the debate. We hurried to meet Christie Vilsack, the Governor’s wife. We stopped at a local bakery and bought dozens of bagels to deliver to volunteers working get-out-the-vote drives. There was a slow cold rain as we stood on a downtown street corner thanking voters and handing out bagels. Then it was Des Moines and the Governor and a few dozen people who were once important supporters but were now even more—we had become friends during the two years I had been visiting Iowa. It seemed like the perfect way to close the campaigning—in the company of friends. By the time we got back in the car, my hair had gotten wet in the rain. I looked rough.

Of course, I was headed to a television studio to do remote television interviews. I would sit in a room with an earpiece hidden in my ear and talk to the voice in the earpiece while looking at the camera in front of me in the darkened room, and I would be on television in Reno and Las Cruces and St. Louis, wherever. It was like talking on the telephone with a camera on you, so you couldn’t scratch your nose or fool with your hair or squirm because you were tired of the same chair.

My rain-wet hair looked terrible. Typically, I did my own hair and makeup, but today, the campaign had found a young local woman to do my hair. As she worked, I tried to think of nothing—not of cancer or metastasis or what I would find out the next day at the doctor’s office in Boston. I asked her about herself, and as she talked, I watched her small pretty face. What I didn’t watch was what she was doing to my hair. By the time I did notice, it was too late. I looked awful. It would have been a darling hairdo on someone young and tiny, like she was. On me, it was dreadful. And so, bless this woman’s heart, I started to cry. Little tears at first, as I tried to say what was wrong with the style, then sobbing that stopped me from speaking at all.

“Oh my God,” was all she could say, the hairbrush frozen in midair as she looked at me, stricken.

I tried to respond but couldn’t speak through the tears. She put the brush down and struggled to speak herself. “Mrs. Edwards,” she said, tears filling her own eyes, “I’m so sorry. You don’t like it?”

I just shook my head and got out of the chair. I walked into the hall, where I knew Hargrave was waiting. When she saw the state I was in, she came over and hugged me.

“Is this not the worst hair you’ve ever seen in your life?” I asked her, pulling away.

“Oh, Elizabeth,” she said, “it’s just a little flat. We just need to pouf it up a bit.”

I started to cry harder and sank into Hargrave’s arms. “This is not about your hair,” she said, stating what I already knew. “But listen to me. You are going to be fine.”

The young woman came out into the hall and saw us both crying. Then her own tears started, as hard as ours. “I am so sorry,” she said again, her words breaking apart between the sobs. “I can’t tell you what today meant for me, Mrs. Edwards. It was such an honor to be asked to do your hair, and you’re probably about to become the wife of the vice president of the United States, and all week I couldn’t wait to meet you, and I can’t believe how much you hate your hair.”

That just made me feel worse. “I’m not upset,” I tried to say, too upset to say it. She cried harder, and I noticed others looking with embarrassment at the scene we had created in the hall. I grabbed the young woman’s hand, led her to the bathroom, and locked the door behind us.

“I’m going to tell you something,” I said to her, her hands in mine, “but it’s a secret.” I could have made up something, kept my secret from this stranger, and I thought about it, but I knew I couldn’t be convincing. And so I told this young woman the news that most people in my family still did not know. “I have breast cancer. And I am afraid, because for all I know right now, it could be even worse.” I could see both her grief and her relief that she hadn’t caused this breakdown. We cried some more and hugged each other. When our eyes finally dried, my face streaked with fresh mascara, we went back to the chair, and—with Hargrave’s instructions—she fixed my hair. Ryan came in and asked me if I needed anything. Typically I would ask for a Diet Coke and some sliced green peppers—it was nearly impossible not to gain weight on a campaign, and I was doing what I could to watch what I ate—but that worry had lost its importance. I described the mint meringue cookies they sell in large plastic tubs at Target. “See if you can find those,” I asked him. Within an hour, the entire staff and all the makeup people were full on green cookies.

When we left Iowa in the late afternoon, we thought we had won the election. Throughout the afternoon, the campaign staff was jubilant. Exit polls were showing heavily in our favor, and many pollsters were declaring Kerry-Edwards the winners. Ryan and Karen were glued to their BlackBerrys, checking their e-mail and communicating with campaign workers across the country and at the headquarters in Washington, D.C. John was spending most of the day in Florida, and we had planned to meet Cate, Emma Claire, and Jack in Boston around 8
P.M
. that night. As we flew to Boston, thinking the election was won, we were celebrating the end of the campaign, mourning the impending breakup of our traveling family, which included Brett Karpy, a young pilot who had stayed on past his scheduled vacation to see this to the end, and anticipating the ventures and challenges the electoral victory would bring. Someone opened a bottle of champagne, and we all talked of foolish things and laughed and enjoyed each other in those last naive hours. Ryan was explaining that thousands of Kerry-Edwards supporters were waiting in Boston’s Copley Square, but the people I most wanted to see would be waiting in the quiet of my hotel room. I needed to hug John and Cate and sit with Emma Claire and Jack before we went out to celebrate.