The Foremost Good Fortune (20 page)

Tony and the boys and I had been planning to take a train to Chengdu for the spring break in May until we had to leave early. There’s a panda preserve north of the city in Wolong that’s been destroyed in the quake. Most of the pandas in the world live in this swath of wrecked land in central southern China.

One of the mud flaps on a flatbed truck we pass reads, “Jesus is Lord.” The other says, “Driving for God.” The fourth radio story takes us back to oil because today the price of one barrel has spiked to $135. We pass a gas station near Kittery with a sign outside: “Worms and crawlers for sale cheap.” I see an old Chrysler sedan up ahead with a large digital photo of Jesus Christ laminated to the back window. “Oh,” I say to Tony. “Look at that.” The car speeds onto the highway from the right and never yields. The whole time I was in Beijing, I never saw one image of Jesus Christ.

Tony puts on his blinker and moves to the left lane to make room. The picture of Jesus takes up most of the car’s back window. “Wouldn’t see that in China,” he says, reading my mind.

When we get to the hospital, I sit down in the oncologist’s office and the first thing Dr. Holland tells me is she hopes I live at least fifty more years. This is her goal for me, she explains, and I think it’s a worthy one, but I’m surprised by her candor. It takes me a minute to realize we’re talking seriously about how many years I have left to live. I announce I’m entirely on board with her plan. But what I want to say is could we skip this because this part is too depressing.

Then Dr. Holland says we’ll solve my health problems “decade by decade.” She explains that the pathology shows I have a good chance of being alive in ten years. “That’s when your sons will graduate from high school,” she says. “That’s not so bad, is it? In fact, that’s good,” she adds.

“It is?” I ask. But the words I want to say are
What language are you speaking?
Is there some piece of the pathology report I’ve missed? The lymph nodes are clear. Alive to see the boys graduate from high school? I can reach out and touch high school. I want college. I want weddings. Grandchildren. What I learn next is that there was a third tumor hiding in the mastectomy tissue. Dr. Holland puts a good face on it—and almost tricks me into believing her. She says I’ve gotten a B today instead of an A on the story of my cancer.

I’m sitting in the small, windowless office and Dr. Holland’s face begins to spin. This is the sneaky thing cancer does—it displaces me. I believe it’s ten in the morning on a Tuesday in Boston, but then I’m cast adrift on some roiling swell of mortality. I close my eyes. Thinking of my kids helps. Last night when I tucked Aidan into bed, he reached for me and announced, “This hug will be for ten minutes.”

Chinese Blessing

Rose has sent me to Maine with a tiny brass charm in a green silk pouch. I carry it with me everywhere. On the small card inside the bag she’s written:

Susan Conley will be okay!
Susan Conley will be fine!
Susan Conley will be all right!

It’s a Chinese blessing she’s translated into English that I’m supposed to keep near me always.

At the bottom of the blessing, she’s written:

Dear Susan
,

I’ll be here in Beijing, waiting for you to come back and continue your Chinese lessons
.

Rose

You Are Here

July comes and Tony flies back to China. He writes me an e-mail when he lands in Beijing, remembering our first road trip together, when we drove eighteen hours to Baja for the weekend. We camped in the desert on a futon mattress we pulled from the back of the truck. I woke up in the sand on the first night and looked at millions of tiny stars in the sky. “Tony,” I said and grabbed his arm while he slept. I hardly knew him. But I also already knew him entirely. “Tony, where are we?”

He sat up too and stared at the Mexican sky and said slowly, “I don’t know where we are.” Then we both lay down and put our arms around each other and went back to sleep.

The next week Tony cooked Chinese noodles in his rented house in San Francisco. He loved to make dinner for crowds in his big, iron wok. He still does. That night he wore a long-sleeved blue T-shirt that had the solar system printed on it in white. The words “You Are Here” were written next to planet Earth with a small arrow. He’d worn the T-shirt to give me the answer I’d needed back in Baja.
You Are Here
. He turned to me from where he stood at the stove and smiled his calm smile, and I swear that night was when I knew I would marry him.

After Tony leaves, the boys and I move out of town to an old cottage that our family’s had for thirty years. There’s room for all of us—my parents; my sister, Erin, who comes again in August to help; my brother, John, his wife, Jenna, and their sweet baby, Lyla. This place used to be a boys’ camp in the 1800s, and the names of the campers—William St. John, Ezra Sturm, Henry Keyes—are still carved in the walls of the upstairs bedrooms.

I drive into town every day for radiation, but mostly I lie on the couch and look at the ocean. More than anything, I have missed seeing this body of water. I like to watch it change moods. The ocean to me suggests greatness. It suggests prehistoric whales and huge expanses of time. There are lobster traps out in front, and the same tall, spindly blue heron stands in the cove on one foot. You can pick blueberries from the bush while you walk to the car.

This morning the boys eat Cheerios while we look out at a big fog. The air is thick and reminds me of the worst smog in Beijing.
The Sound of Music
plays on the CD player, and Thorne sings along to every word of “Do-Re-Mi.”

“Stop, Thorne,” Aidan says. “Too loud.” He’s working hard on a drawing of a sheep.

“Why don’t you just listen to the music,” I suggest to Thorne. Then he announces out of nowhere that he’s mad at me because I’m already forty.

“I wish you were only thirty,” Thorne says with a serious face. I put down the article I’m reading about vitamins I need to boost my immune system. “You’re forty,” Thorne says again. “So that means you only have forty more years to live.”

If you only knew
, I want to say to him.
If you only had any idea of how hard I’m working to pull off the next ten
. “But I’m going to live until I’m one hundred,” I say, and smile at him, half believing myself.

“You are?” He smiles back. “Can you live until two hundred?”

I say, “Only a certain kind of tortoise from the Galápagos Islands can.” Then Aidan puts down his sheep drawing and stands up with a dreamy look on his face. Do these boys know what I would do for them? Now that the tubing is out and the corset is off, my love for them is more accessible. I do not need as much distance from them. I don’t need to take as many breaks in the room inside my head.

“Mom.” Aidan stares at me intently. “Are there invisible people who can go in and out of our bodies like the wind?”

I look him in the eye and say back equally seriously, “Aidan. I just don’t know.”

Then Tony calls to report that the pollution was so bad on Monday in Beijing he couldn’t see the Rem Koolhaas CCTV Tower from our bedroom window. It’s the new landmark skyscraper everyone is buzzing about, and on good air days it seems to be very close to our apartment.
On bad air days the smog makes everything shrouded and you wonder what everyone’s doing huddled together in a chemical soup out in the middle of the desert.

Tony explains that the government seeded the clouds for the Olympics. “They what?” I ask.

“They fabricated a rainstorm. Seeded the clouds. Shot chemical pellets up into the sky until it rained and washed the smog away.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. And last night at the opening ceremony in the Bird’s Nest the sky was clear. Clear.” He says there were more people onstage and more energy in that stadium than I could ever imagine watching on TV. Now he’s just gotten back from beach volleyball in the park across from our apartment. “The whole concession stand concept does not seem to translate here,” he says. “I was at the volleyball for five hours and all they had for sale was warm beer.”

“We looked for you on TV,” I tell him. “The boys cannot get over the fact that it’s Beijing on the screen. They keep begging to watch more.”

After we each say good-bye, the boys and I make our way to the beach. In the car, Aidan asks, “Mom, who made the first tree?”

I take a breath. I think I can tell where this conversation is going. “Remember how I told you different people believe different things? Some people think a god made the first tree. Some people believe in the science that made cells that grew into plants like the very first tree.”

“A tree god.” Aidan smiles. He’s already alchemized my words into something he can hold on to. “Maybe there’s a tree god.” What a good idea that would be.

“Yeah,” Thorne adds. “A tree god would be great!”

“But maybe”—Aidan gets serious now again—“we’ll never know for sure. Do you think we’ll ever know, Mom?”

Aidan is asking me about the mystery of the universe on Tuesday at eleven in the morning on the way to Popham Beach, and I want to be honest with him. It’s my new cancer policy. “Probably not, Aidan,” I say. “We will probably never know for absolute sure who made the first tree.”

“But, Mom,” he says, calmly now, “if you’re out somewhere and you learn the answer—like if somebody tells you who made the universe—will you come home and tell me?”

“Tell both of us!” Thorne yells. “Make sure you tell us both!”

“I will,” I say, looking in the rearview mirror. “I will make sure I do that.”

After we’ve come back from the beach and gotten the sand off our feet with the hose and eaten our hot dogs, it’s bedtime. The lights are out in the boys’ room, but the sun has just set and the orange glow comes through the curtains. I tuck Thorne in. “Are you strong?” he asks me from his bed. “Let me see your biceps.” He’s begun to be interested in people’s strength—in how physically big they are. “Let me see,” Thorne demands.

Aidan’s eyes are closed. I’m tired tonight and want to go to sleep right after the boys do. I’m missing Tony. I flex my arms and show Thorne my small muscles. “You’re strong,” he decides and sounds surprised. Then he looks me in the eye and asks me clearly, “Are you strong enough to survive?”

Whoa
, I think.
I didn’t see that one coming
.

“Yes,” I say. I feel like Thorne is willing me to live. Like he knows what the stakes are. Like he’s known all along. I look at him and I don’t flinch. “Yes,” I say again, “I’m strong enough.” Then I kiss him on the cheek and close his door and go lie down on the floor in my bedroom until I feel like I’ve stopped shaking and can stand up.

Spaceship

Last Tuesday, the day it poured rain, I drove to New Hampshire to see a traditional Chinese medicine doctor friends had told me about. Dr. Wang had a poster on the wall of the human body with the meridian points written in Chinese. She told me that after the Cultural Revolution, she was able to get out of China and eventually make it to the States. She asked me a lot of quick questions that implied she already knew the answers: “Do you get stressed often?” “Do you worry?” I’d heard this stuff before—the idea that women like me go too fast. Work too hard. That we cause our own cancers. It’s a dangerous brand of reasoning. “You must have been very run-down in the years both your boys were babies at the same time,” Dr. Wang said next.

“No more than any other woman,” I answered. “And I’m really not that stressed.” I decided I wasn’t going to make the consultation so easy for her. I wanted to tell Dr. Wang that in my house we have family meals. Play board games. I’m a freelance writer and teacher, not a corporate executive. How much stress can there be?

That was when Dr. Wang said, “Something in your life caused your immune system to fail.”
Oh, please
, I wanted to say with my voice raised.
Oh, come on
.

All of this suggested that my cancer was my own doing, and that I had not, to quote Dr. Wang, been cultivating enough chi. I was also apparently drinking too many cold beverages. “Too much ice,” she told me. “Did you know ice is bad for chi?” All my life I have searched out ice cubes, even if it meant poking around in other people’s crowded freezers.

“No, I didn’t know that,” I said and closed my eyes, trying to figure out how quickly I could get out of there.

•  •  •

Today my mother and I finally take the boys to the cancer center in Bath to see the radiation machine. We pass the Community Gun Club—a sagging green wooden shed off Route 209 with a sign out front that reads “Trapping Course. August 13–17. Talk to Dan.”

We pass the old rec center and my junior high school. “Just bring the kids in for a peek,” Dr. Godin had said last week. “That way they won’t think what you’re doing is so scary.” She’s the radiation oncologist in charge of my daily dose. She’s a cool customer and one of the most inspiring doctors on the whole team. The day I met her she looked me in the eye and said,
We have one chance to get this radiation thing right and then you go live your life
.

So here, at the halfway point in my treatment, my boys run through the front door of the center ahead of my mother and me. I poke my head down the nurses’ hall and see Rachel, one of the fabulous technicians. “The boys are here,” I say. “Is that okay?”

“Of course it’s okay.” She smiles. “I’ll be ready for you in five and we’ll bring them in.”

I will now admit that I find getting daily radiation comforting. It’s inconvenient and dehumanizing and sometimes I cry on the table for no reason. But at least I know I’m being
treated
. I’ve decided that more than anything cancer is a simple game of biological luck. I want as much luck on my side as I can garner, plus all the radiation the doctors will give me.

Which will turn out to be exactly thirty-one days of it. The boys won’t sit down in the waiting room. My mother stands in the open doorway trying to corral them. They keep hovering close to study the long cotton johnny I’ve thrown on. This one is covered in small blue flowers. “What is that thing you’re wearing, Mommy?” Thorne asks and reaches out to touch my wide sleeve. “It’s weird-looking. It’s for sick people.”