The Fate of Mice (29 page)

God’s too busy watching television, I thought, but I didn’t say that. Antsy was the one watching television, and if there was a God, he probably didn’t like Antsy any better than I did. So I just said, “She’s home. She’s home now. She’s come home to get better. It’s going to be all right, Mandy.”

But when I saw her—lying in bed upstairs, with Mandy’s oldest girl feeding her soup and the younger ones standing there looking scared—I knew it wasn’t going to be all right, and that getting better wasn’t what Cindy had come home for. She looked like the Christ hanging in that church, the same way I always pictured Hank looking in the jungle, the way my father had looked at the end: like somebody who’s dying by inches and can’t even think of what to hope for anymore, except for the pain to be over.

That was the beginning of the darkest time I’ve ever known. Mandy kept saying that Cindy was going to get better, she was, of course she was, she had to, and even when Cindy got worse instead, Mandy wouldn’t take her to a doctor. I think she knew the truth, deep down, and was afraid to hear it from someone else. I was over there as much as I could, helping to take care of Cindy, but most of the time I’m not sure she knew where she was or who we were, or who she was herself. And finally even Mandy had to see that, and she took Cindy to the doctor and the doctor said Cindy should go into the hospital right away, right now, and Mandy said nonsense and took Cindy home again. And she screamed at me when I said the doctor was right. And in the meantime the girls had gotten more and more sullen and angry and confused, and the oldest one’s boyfriend had gotten killed on his motorcycle, and the youngest one had started staying out way too late and getting bad grades in school. And it seemed to me like Mandy’d gotten her heart back only to have it broken again, for good this time, and maybe her mind too. I was afraid for her.

I was afraid for myself. A few days after Cindy came back I’d started having belly pains and the runs, and I told myself it was just the excitement, just worry and stress, it would get better in a little while. It didn’t, though. It got a little worse each day, and each day I got a little more scared, because intestinal cancer was what had killed my father, and this was how it had started. I was afraid to go to the doctor and I was afraid not to go to the doctor, and I was too embarrassed to talk to anybody except Mandy about it. Too many times when I’ve been sick, even with a cold, people have blamed me for it, because I’m overweight. I don’t know if those extra fifty pounds are my fault or not, but being sick isn’t. Mandy knows that.

But I couldn’t talk to Mandy, because she had too many problems of her own, and I knew she was counting on having me there, and how could I tell her I was afraid I might be going away too? Half the time she was so distracted she couldn’t understand what you were saying even if it was about something simple, like buying milk. How could I tell her I was afraid I had cancer?

I couldn’t. And if I couldn’t talk to her I couldn’t talk to anybody, and that hurt almost as much as my belly did. I lay awake for hours at night, worrying, and I looked worse and worse all the time, more and more exhausted, and nobody at Mandy’s house even noticed. All of them were looking more and more exhausted too, and I guess it was silly of me to feel like they didn’t care about me anymore, but that’s how I felt anyway.

The morning after Mandy refused to put Cindy in the hospital, I woke up and thought, I’d better go to the doctor today. Don’t ask why I decided to do it then: because Mandy’s pig-headedness made me see my own, maybe, or because the pain had woken me up in the middle of the night—that had never happened before—or because there was so little hope left that what did it matter? I’d already decided I had cancer. What could the doctor say that would be any worse than that? He’d just be telling me what I already knew.

So I called the doctor’s office and told them what was going on and made an emergency appointment—they were mad at me for making them find a space that day, you could tell—and I closed the store for a few hours and went over there. It was Dr. Gallingway, the same one who’d treated my father. I’d never much liked him, but he was the best doctor around for that kind of thing. The nurse came and asked me a bunch of questions and took a bunch of blood and had me get undressed and get into one of those ridiculous paper gowns, and then Dr. G. came in.

“You’ve let yourself go,” he said, looking at me. “You used to be an attractive woman, Cece.”

You see what I mean? No “hello, Cece, how are you, what are you doing these days?” Just an insult, and then he starts lecturing me on how I have to watch my diet, I’m ruining my health the way I live—as if he has any idea how I live when he hasn’t even seen me for ten years—and I’m already at risk for cancer because of my family history. As if I didn’t know that.

I just sat there and looked at him. Later I thought of lots of things I should have said—“You’ve let yourself go, Dr. Gallingway. You used to have manners. You used to have hair.”—but naturally none of that occurred to me when it would have been useful. I just sat there feeling ashamed, and when he finally wound down I said, “Well, I guess the question’s whether you want to make any money off my unhealthy lifestyle or not. Because if you don’t stop talking to me that way I’m walking out of here.”

Dr. Gallingway shut up, goggling at me like his stethoscope had just demanded a raise, and I swallowed hard and told him why I was there. When I was done he shook his head and said, “You shouldn’t have waited so long to come in. First thing tomorrow morning I want you to go over to the hospital for an upper
GI.”

“Sounds like a soldier,” I said. It was supposed to be a joke, even though when I said it I thought of Hank, dying in the jungle somewhere.

He didn’t laugh. He looked at me and said, “It stands for
gastrointestinal,”
a little more slowly than he’d been talking before.

“I know,” I told him. You pronounce that very well, Dr. Gallingway.

How many years of medical school did it take for you to learn such a long word? I thought about saying that, I swear, but I’m glad I didn’t. It was like Mandy’s saying she wanted Genevieve to die: one of those mean things you’ll probably regret later, when it’s too late.

I remembered when my father had his upper
GI
. He’d called it Upper Guts, Inner, because he couldn’t remember all those syllables. I teased him about it, on the way to the test. I think that was the last time Dad and I laughed about anything, because when they did the test they saw something growing in there, and they told me they had to keep him in the hospital and then they told me they had to operate and then they told me it was cancer. I drove home from Dr. Gallingway’s office wishing I could just die in my sleep.

The upper
GI
was at eight in the morning in a room that looked like the inside of a rocketship, all metal and huge machines. I’m not a morning person, especially when I’m not allowed to have my coffee and donut, especially when I haven’t gotten any sleep because I spent all night crying, and I never much liked science fiction movies. The last one I saw
was Alien
, and I didn’t exactly want to think about that right now, with my own gut feeling just like something was about to come busting out of my belly. I sat there in another smock—cotton, this time, and at least they’d let me keep my underwear on—hoping the doctor who did the test wouldn’t have too many tentacles and wouldn’t look at me he like he thought I did. At least I’d never met him before, so he couldn’t tell me I used to be an attractive woman.

When he came in I saw that he was real young and handsome, and wearing, I swear, a collar that made him look just like a priest. Later he told me that it was a lead shield to protect his neck from radiation, but when I first saw him it didn’t incline me to be friendly. I hadn’t been too impressed with doctors and priests lately, and here was somebody who looked like both.

He smiled at me and held out his hand and said, “Good morning, Ms. Yodel. I’m Dr. Stephenson,” and I thought, well, at least he has manners. He asked me how I was feeling and I told him, and I told him about Dad, and I thought, well, here comes the lecture.

He didn’t lecture me, though. He just looked serious and said, “I’m sorry. You must be very frightened,” which made me feel better right away, because I hadn’t been able to tell anybody about being scared, not even Mandy, and you’d think Dr. Gallingway could have said something nice like that, with all the money I was paying him, but of course he didn’t. Then Dr. Stephenson said, “Your symptoms could be caused by a lot of other things, you know.”

Well, I didn’t know that. Dr. Gallingway sure hadn’t bothered to say anything like that. So I decided I liked Dr. Stephenson, even if he did look like a priest. He knew his job was to make people feel better, not worse. You’d think every doctor would know that—and every priest, for that matter—but as far as I could tell, not too many of them had figured it out. It made the entire world seem a little bit friendlier, meeting someone like that. The way I felt then, it was almost worth having to have the upper
GI
.

“So what we’re going to do,” he said, “is have you drink a glass of this barium”—he held up this big paper cup of white stuff, looked like one of Mandy’s vanilla milk shakes, with a big plastic straw in it—“and I’m going to watch it on the fluoroscope, this screen over here, as it travels down your esophagus into your stomach and your small intestines. The barium tastes chalky, kind of like Mylanta, and the test doesn’t hurt. It’s boring, more than anything, because it takes a long time. Sometimes I’ll have you roll over onto your sides and onto your stomach, so I can see things more clearly on the screen, and during part of the test I’ll have to press on your abdomen with that balloon paddle over there.” He pointed at this weird plastic and rubber thing hanging on the wall, looked like a plastic tennis racket with a rubber middle, had a bulb dangling from it, like one of the ones they use to inflate blood pressure cuffs. “That’s to make the barium move around to the places I want to look at. Do you have any questions, before we start?”

“Yes,” I said. “Barium’s radioactive, right? How do I get it out of me?” I was worried that even if the barium didn’t find any cancer, it could cause cancer if it stayed in there.

He nodded and said, “It comes out the way anything else you eat comes out, and the barium’s not all that radioactive, actually. After you leave here, make sure to drink a lot of fluids for the rest of the day, to flush the barium out of your system. Prune juice is good; it moves things along.”

“How about coffee?” I said.

He laughed. “That’s fine. That moves things along too.”

The test wasn’t bad, really. It was interesting even at the beginning, because I could look at the screen, so I could watch the barium traveling down my throat and into my stomach. It looked just like those pictures of the inside of the body you see in books, only in black and white. The barium was white in the cup, but on the screen the barium was black and my innards were white, like a negative.

Dr. Stephenson said my throat looked fine and my stomach looked fine, and we’d have to wait awhile for the barium to move through the small intestine. I should move around, he said. I’d have wanted to move around anyway, because it was cold in there. So he went away for a while and I walked around and read the labels on the machines and wondered how my father had felt, pacing in a little room like this, in the last minutes when he didn’t know yet that something was growing in his gut.

So I’d gotten myself pretty scared again by the time Dr. Stephenson came back, especially since the pain was acting up. He took the balloon paddle off the wall and had me lie down again, and I craned my head back so I could see the screen, and he turned on the machine. And the face of Jesus stared out at me from the fluoroscope, just the same way he looked on that cross in Mandy’s church, like
he
was in so much pain he could hardly stand it.

“Oh my God,” I said. “Look at that!”

“What’s wrong?” said Dr. Stephenson. He didn’t act like he’d noticed anything, and I thought maybe I was crazy. When I looked at the screen again I could see that Jesus’ face was made up of all the curls and folds of my gut, but it still looked like Jesus’ face, with the thorny crown and everything. It was just like one of those pictures you see on the cover of the
National Enquirer:
Jesus in somebody’s fingerprints, the Devil in somebody’s cornflakes, Elvis everyplace. I always thought all that stuff was nonsense, even worse than Instant Miracle Cures, and here it was happening to me.

“Doesn’t that,” I said, “doesn’t it look to you like, well, like a face?” I didn’t want to say whose face. Dr. Stephenson would think I was a religious fanatic.

He cocked his head sideways and squinted at it and said, “Why, so it does. I see what you mean. Isn’t that interesting. I’m going to press on your stomach with the balloon now, Ms. Yodel.” And he did, and I watched Jesus’ face kind of roll around on the screen. He must have been seasick in there. He looked about as green as I felt. And Dr. Stephenson worked away with his balloon and told me about how flu-oroscope images are like Rorschach blots—you can see anything in them if you look hard enough. Once he did an upper
GI
on a little boy who swore he saw Big Bird.

The place where Dr. Stephenson was pressing now made Jesus’ mouth open and close, like he was trying to say something. “Get me out of here,” probably. And I wondered how he’d gotten in there to begin with and then I realized, of course: it was that stupid biscuit, the one I’d eaten by mistake when I went to church with Mandy. The pain had started right after that, come to think of it. So there must have been something to its being Christ’s body, although if that was true I didn’t see how Catholics walked around without bellyaches all the time. Maybe it didn’t hurt, if you were Catholic. Maybe that’s why you weren’t supposed to eat the biscuit unless you were. I mean, you’d think they’d
tell
people something like that, honestly, there should be a Surgeon General’s warning. Here I was, I’d been in pain for months, I’d thought I was dying, I was paying all this money for this upper
GI—
which wasn’t cheap, believe me—and the whole time the problem was nothing but a piece of stale biscuit.