And then he just hung up. I stared at the receiver, the dial tone like a siren. I tried to call back. The phone rang and rang, but no one answered. Something hit me, then: everything he said, especially his retorts, seemed like it’d been rehearsed, like he’d traced it over and over in his brain, committing them to memory, knowing that if he didn’t get them out quickly and word-for-word, he wouldn’t be able to say anything at all. I had never heard him speak so eloquently or succinctly about his feelings, especially if they might hurt someone else. Usually, he stumbled, backtracked, realized what he was trying to get out much, much later.
It made me feel both proud and horrible at the same time. He had, it seemed, truly turned a corner. But at the same time, it also meant my father had possibly sat in this new therapist’s office and discussed how certain people in his life were preventing him from growing as a person. Maybe he’d prepared for when he would break the news, make his feelings known.
An unidentifiable feeling fluttered deep, but I didn’t allow it to surface. I’ll make dinner, I thought, standing up. I opened the fridge. Eggs. No cheese or butter. Grapes, a wilted head of lettuce. Some milk and some Diet Coke. When I looked around, the apartment was the same as it was just minutes ago, before I’d answered the phone. The bedspread still rumpled. The dogs still muddy. I breathed carbon dioxide out, plants sucked it back in. Everything I took for granted still acted as it should. Almost everything.
I thought about my father and this new woman, coming back to the apartment. Maybe he’d carry her over the threshold, stamping happily down the hallway to his old bedroom. I’d begun sleeping in his giant bed, the twinkling skyline as my nightlight. I was glad for my father, that the darkness around him had lightened, but I wasn’t particularly glad for myself. The emotion was sore and embarrassing. I no longer had any idea what my place was. I couldn’t bear to think of climbing into my old bed, pulling up the heavy pink quilt I’d always secretly hated.
And then there was the phone call I received a few days later, when coming home from work. A woman identified herself as a nurse from St Geraldine’s hospital in Wrightsville, Pennsylvania. She said that Stella Rogers had been in a car accident. Could I come by the hospital and pick her up? Stella was fine, but she wasn’t in any condition to drive.
I started laughing. I told them I was in Brooklyn, New York-perhaps they could call someone who lived closer? The nurse on the phone said that I was Miss Rogers’s in-case-of-emergency contact-the only in-case-of-emergency contact. Stella had demanded they call me.
I was looking for an excuse to leave. I packed some things and took a cab to LaGuardia. The next flight to Pittsburgh was on American. I walked up to the counter and bought a ticket. The plane was boarding in a half-hour.
When I got to the hospital, Stella was sitting on a hospital bed, watching television. I gasped when I saw her. I didn’t even try and mask it. She looked like she’d lost about forty pounds and aged a hundred years since I’d last seen her six years earlier. The first thing she told me was that she had just watched the 2000 Summer Olympics women’s triathlon. ‘I think I might do a triathlon,’ she said. ‘I used to be quite the swimmer in my day.’ I glanced at the old woman sleeping in the bed next to her. There was a tube in her nose and a wheelchair next to her bed. Stella rolled her eyes. ‘That’s Agnes,’ she whispered. ‘She’s pathetic.’
The hospital gave me papers to sign, and then the doctor came to speak to me. He was so tall he had to stoop through doorways, and he had large, fingernail-shaped teeth. He said the reason Stella came in here-her car accident-was nothing. The problem, however-and he bent down to tell me this-was when she said that, as long as she was already here, she might as well mention the blood in her stool. And that she was-he twisted up his lips when he said this-‘defecating up a storm.’ I had a feeling Stella would have used a more colorful word for ‘defecating’.
‘The red flags went up for me, just looking at her,’ the doctor said. ‘So I ordered a colonoscopy. I’m glad I did, considering.’
He finally told me that Stella had locally advanced colon cancer. They had taken blood samples and biopsies. God knows what they told Stella to get her to prep for the colonoscopy. The tumor was localized in her rectum, the doctor said, but perhaps not localized enough. It may have spread through the colon wall and possibly into her lymph nodes. This type of cancer was curable, but only if caught quickly. If it were up to him, he would get her in here to start treatment immediately.
I laughed. I thought of my father and this new woman, Rosemary, preparing to come back to Brooklyn. I thought of Alex, of Steven, even of Claire Ryan. They were living their own lives, simply, right now eating potato chips straight out of a bag, walking a dog, watching a baseball game, buying something on the Internet.
I drove Stella home in my rental because her car had been towed. I didn’t know what to say to her; I hardly knew her. Halfway to her house, Stella turned to me and said, ‘That doctor of mine is cute, isn’t he? Do you want me to give him your phone number?’
‘What, my number in New York?’ I snapped.