The Cost of Hope (11 page)

Twenty years later, impatient and brisk, I badger him into diving back into his studies to finish his Ph.D. We are living in New York again, just blocks from Columbia. I am working and writing books. He wants to go to law school. He wants to start an import-export
company. He wants to write a novel. He wants to go to medical school.

“Why don’t you finish your Ph.D. first?” I ask, part supportively, part as a challenge, part irritated at his mercurial mind.

And so he does.

His studies go with us wherever we go. They follow us as we push the stroller down to the dinosaur playground in Riverside Park; as we move to Atlanta and throw the kids and the dog into our pool; when we move to Oregon and pitch our tent on the rainy and foggy side of Mount Rainier and build fires from damp wood. All the while he is chipping away at his degree.

Little by little the thesis takes shape, and as it does, he weaves his own years in China into a case study about the cultural barriers to foreign cooperation.

Finally, at the end of May 2001, it is finished. We are living in Portland, but Terence and I and the children fly to New York for the ceremony. We stay in the Plaza Hotel. We walk through Central Park up to Columbia University on the far Upper West Side. At noon at Columbia University he will defend his thesis and have his Ph.D. at last. At noon on the same day, about three blocks away, I am also at Columbia University, with my newsroom team as we receive a Pulitzer Prize for the work we did on the Immigration and Naturalization Service in those hectic final months of 2000. I am sitting at the table amid a happy group of journalists as Terence walks in.

I jump up.

“Meet Dr. Foley!” I cry out to the assembled group.

He pulls at the hem of his suit jacket, and curtsies.

We have lived three years in Oregon. On Sunday afternoons once a month we drive up to the Milwaukee Elks Lodge, nestled between City Auto Wholesale and a shop advertising windshields
for 50 percent off. Nothing much appears to have changed at the club since it first opened in 1956.

Terence plays here once a month with the Portland Dixieland Jazz Society. “Muskrat Rag.” “After You’ve Gone.” “Canal Street Blues.” His tuba holds down the bass line. Sometimes he sits in on string bass. Georgia and Terry eat hamburgers and chicken fingers and fries in the room with the upholstered white bar and the brown Naugahyde stools.

We hope that the bad times have passed.

Our time here is drawing to a close. Soon the whole family will be packing up and leaving again. I have been offered my own small newspaper in Lexington, Kentucky. As the Oregon summer gets older we drive out near the base of Mount Hood for the last time, to pick blueberries and raspberries and marionberries. In the car on the way home, Mount Hood looming off to our right, the four of us sing silly rounds, ending up with “Sloop John B,” weaving in and out of the melody and backup, laughing with pure pleasure when we nail the last chords.

Early in September 2001, we again prepare to move. Terence leaps at the adventure. This time it is he who will go first. He will leave two days early and get the children into school, I will stay behind to finish up my work and close up the house. He’s still not strong enough after two operations for a long walk with bags, so we arrange a wheelchair for the long trek between terminals in St. Louis. Otherwise, he is fine. He calls me, pleased, from our new home. He and the children spend the day filling the house with food. Everything is ready and they will be so glad to see me.

In the middle of the night I take a dark peek into the world that Terence must have been living in. By myself in the silent house in
Oregon, my family 2,400 miles away, no one nearby to realize I am alone, I awaken feeling as if an elephant is sitting on my chest. My arms and legs are leaden. There is a band around my heart pulling tighter and tighter. I cannot catch my breath. I call an ambulance.

A few days later, everyone will conclude that the chest pains are simply the stress of the past six months finally coming to rest in me. But thus it is that on September 11, 2001, at 9:03 a.m. EST—6:03 a.m. in Portland—Terence is in the principal’s office in Lexington, Kentucky, registering our children for school and I am lying on an emergency room gurney in the hospital where I spent so many days with Terence, as we each look up at a TV screen to see the second plane crash into the World Trade Center.

If Terence’s vision of a proper 1950s family life has a stage set, it is here in Lexington. Modest brick houses line the streets, and proper steps lead to proper front doors. The front windows look out over sidewalks and neatly trimmed shrubs and lawns. A young girl clutching a violin case passes our house every morning on her way to school. We hear children laughing over our back fence. The roots of tall oak trees push up ridges in the walks, the kind we both remember catching our roller skates on.

The house we rent until our own is ready reminds us both of the places we grew up. The kitchen has yellow appliances and a beige linoleum floor. In the living room, bookshelves flank a white-painted brick fireplace. Our bedrooms are tiny, clustered around a small center landing and a single bathroom with porcelain fixtures and white tiles. We can all hear one another breathe in the night. We play Monopoly and Life on the dining room table.

I settle in to the world of news in Kentucky. I learn about horse breeding and become obsessed with the mystery disease that makes mares miscarry and just-born foals die. Abuse of the powerful painkiller OxyContin continues its fatal sweep of eastern Kentucky. Lovely old racetracks agitate to add slot machines to compete with casinos. I try to understand the manic grip that Tubby Smith’s sixth-ranked college basketball team has on the region. There is a vague, uneasy sense of war off in the distance, heading toward us.

Lexington is only ninety miles from Cincinnati, the town of Terence’s childhood. We drive up and look at the old neighborhoods,
once genteel, then rough, now bohemian, where Kentucky and Ohio come together at the Ohio River. Terence tells the children stories of his life as a musician in the bars here. Terry is turning into a musician himself. We reluctantly let him crowd-surf his first rock concert. Georgia is becoming a rider. Every Saturday Georgia and I drive out Old Richmond Road to Champagne Run, where she coaxes forty-year-old Dan over foot-high jumps.

Terence becomes director of a new Asia Center at the University of Kentucky. His shirt pockets bulge with index cards covered with thoughts—musings on cars, politics, history; vocabulary words in Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, German, French; funny things the children have said; recipes for chili and lasagna. Nearly three years after his death I will be moving something and see an index card covered in his handwriting drop to the ground. The card is covered with ideas for the new center.

Life is good.

On Monday, May 6, 2002, I am at my desk at the
Herald-Leader
preparing for the news meeting to lay out the front page of the next day’s paper. It is a slow day. Fans are camping out waiting for
Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones
. Storms are rolling in. The phone rings. It is Terry, with panic in his voice.

“Mom, come home. Dad is sick.”

I find Terence in bed, his face flaming with fever, shaking with chills under a pile of blankets. He can barely speak.

“Terence—what’s wrong?” I’m frightened.

He looks away. “It’s a reaction to some medicine.”

“Medicine? What medicine?”

He won’t meet my eyes. “I wasn’t feeling well so I got some medicine …” He is shaking some more.

My voice rises a notch. “What’s going on? TELL me! You have to tell me.”

His teeth chatter. His face is red. Sweat is pouring off him, yet he is shaking as if it is winter. He tries one more time. “I had a cold … so I …”

Now I panic. “Terence, this is bullshit. Tell me. NOW.”

He gives in.

“The cancer is in my lungs. I have six to nine months left.”

His lungs!

What?

My fingers and toes leap with electricity, the electricity of fear.

I have felt a shock like this only once before in my life, at nineteen years old when I rode my motorbike around a blind curve straight into an oncoming car. The car hit me, the motorbike fell under the wheels, I rolled over the hood and my shock said the same thing then as it is saying now: This cannot be happening. On that winding road in France thirty years earlier, however, the shock instantly resolved into bemused acceptance: “Oh, shit. I’m going to die. What a pain.”

This time, lying on the bed beside my shaking husband, the shock does not resolve. I have been holding the fear at bay for more than a year now. With this one instant, it explodes inside me and I can barely breathe or think.

Over the next hour he pants in bed beside me. Sweat soaks the bedclothes. Little by little the story comes out.

Dr. Turner had advised scans every six months, to monitor any possible spread. I remember the first one, the previous April, and our relief when it came back clean. Without telling me, Terence had the second one here in Lexington. Alone in a radiologist’s office at St. Joseph Hospital on February 12, 2002, Terence saw the faint dusting of flecks in his lungs. Two weeks later, again alone, he had a second scan. The records from this visit call them “nodules, highly suspicious for metastasis.”

More than two months went by as he kept his secret. He went to work. He came home. We read, played games with the kids,
drank wine, had dinner with friends. He found an oncologist, met with him, planned a course of action. He said nothing to me. I suspected nothing.

Yet, with this revelation, some odd behavior becomes clear. He has been packing up things and sending them off to friends. Cameras. Books. Paintings.

“I have too much stuff,” he told me. In retrospect, the sentiment is so bizarrely improbable I wonder how it escaped me. What betrays his secret is not the illness, however. It is the medicine.

Without telling anyone, the oncologist and he together decided on a treatment. The side effects of the injection that Terence took in the morning are already kicking in.

What was he thinking?

He wanted to spare us, he explains. If the treatment succeeds, and he is cured, then we never have to know how close he has come. If—as he expects—the treatment fails, he will at least have spared us months of anguish. He even has been plotting to prepare us for the inevitable. He planned to stay at work a little later every night—without mentioning anything to us, of course—so that we would gradually get used to life going on without him.

What was he thinking?

I am exasperated, shocked, annoyed, horrified, amused, pained, incredulous.

And very, very, very touched.

Even in this, he is acting so much like himself. How could he carry this burden alone for so long?

“Did you think I would just not notice if you didn’t come home one day?” I ask him. I lie with him until, exhausted, he finally falls asleep.

In the bedroom next door, Terry is sitting quietly. Now he calls me. In an older-than-thirteen voice he asks me, “Mom, is there something you should tell me?” I make a quick assessment. He
needs to know what I know. He doesn’t deserve to hear what I fear.

“Dad’s cancer has come back. He’s got a good doctor, and we are going to do everything we can to keep him well,” I say. He is troubled but asks no more questions.

Throughout that night, I sit alone in our dark living room.

Everything has depended on Dr. Turner’s “we got it all.” I also remember him saying that if we made it a year past the surgery, chances were good we would be home free. We made it through sixteen months. Bad as the cancer is, rare and unknown as it is, everyone seemed to agree that if it was cleanly excised, we would be safe. If some particles escaped, no matter how tiny, we would be doomed.

They have escaped.

Everything is different now.

Just as in an old movie, the lightning bolt of that recognition lights up the landscape of my life. Sitting alone that night, I suddenly see everything as a negative of itself, the reverse image of the way it appeared before.

In my mind, we had tamed this cancer into an annoyance. All at once I see it for what it is—a killer. After the shock of Terence’s surgery, the future again seemed endless and any reckoning far away. Even with the cancer in our past, when I thought about our days ahead, if I thought of them at all, they still seemed like tissues, popping up to use as I pleased and discard at will. The lightning bolt reminds me of what we know but have ignored till now, that these days have a number. Now, I suddenly realize, tomorrow may be today.

Fear freezes me. For with this reverse-image picture comes a stabbing sense of anticipated loss.

In the nearly nineteen years since we collided in China, we have settled into a feisty but loving accommodation. Our fights have ends now, and our disagreements resolve. We find more to like than dislike in each other. Still, in the press of ordinary days, we spend much of the time grappling with the things that annoy, things that need fixing, things that trouble or disturb. Why can’t you pick that up? Why did you say that? Can’t you stop doing that? It is no longer the angry and aggressive battering of two strong-willed people. It is instead the mindless daily scrabbling of two harried parents.

Yet in one second, that lightning bolt shows me the things I have ignored.

It shows me what I will lose if I lose him.

All through that dark Kentucky night, as Terence lies upstairs asleep, I am awake downstairs. The future grows foggy with my fear, the past reshapes itself. As I reprise memories, I see things I have forgotten, or have never seen before.

In the middle of my memories of conflict and strife in China, I suddenly discover the memory of another dark night, when, almost paralyzed with anxiety over some recrimination from my harsh boss, I am similarly unable to sleep. Terence rises from our warm bed and, bundled in a People’s Liberation Army greatcoat, walks me around and around nearby Ritan Park until dawn when I can finally collapse, exhausted.