(Why was it only one bloodshot eye, and not two? And unpredictably the right eye, or the left? No one seemed to know.)
At least there was no fussing over dinner that evening, Madelena liked to say. Naomi would prepare her a small bowl of chicken broth, a small bowl of white rice, a small bowl of applesauce.
On these evenings Madelena would go to bed early. Or rather, she would shut the door to her bedroom, and Naomi might hear her speaking on the phone—(to her friend Laslov?—they spoke each day at least once, so far as Naomi knew); a murmur of words, even laughter, not quite audible.
In those months neither Madelena nor Naomi had seriously considered that Madelena might die. If Naomi had examined her naive assumptions she might have thought—My father died. My mother is dead to me. It is not possible that my grandmother will die, too.
In this way Naomi had come to love Madelena. By unmeasured degree she’d come to love her grandmother. Between them had grown a bond like a soft, clotted, delicate cobweb that has appeared in the night, unobserved. Such a bond might be easily broken but—why would you break anything so beautiful?
On the street, in the subway, Naomi exuded an air of female strength; she’d made herself into a New Yorker, sub-species young-woman-professional. With those with whom she interacted she was brisk, competent, uncomplaining; she was never (seemingly) distracted.
Her single most vulnerable time wasn’t in public but returning to the apartment building at 110 Bleecker, entering her grandmother’s apartment when no one else was there. Especially when Madelena was scheduled to be in the hospital overnight. During the second course of treatment there were six sieges of several days each of intensive twenty-four-hour chemotherapy not in the quasi-social infusion room at Sloan Kettering but in a private hospital bed on another floor.
Switching on a light in the apartment in which the large plate-glass windows floated in the night sky and in the nighttime city below winking with lights. As shadows leapt back in a mimicry of human movement she could not stop from saying, in a hopeful voice “Hello?”—but of course, there was no one.
She was not unhappy really. She could not quite recall what happy was, but she was not unhappy.
Reasoning: the chemo treatments seemed to be helping her grandmother. Despite the hair-loss, the weight-loss. Initially there had been treatments every two weeks over eight months. There had been a brief three-month period of remission. But now, a new period of relapse. And more extreme therapy. For oncologists at Sloan Kettering were inspired by the rarest of cancers, metastases (for instance) from the kidney to the colon, or from the colon to the kidney. There was less interest in “ordinary” cancers—colon, kidney, breast, bone, blood. There was revealed an intense and jealous scholarly narrowness to cancer that Naomi had not ever guessed. She had to think that her father could not have guessed, for his medical specialization was of a very different sort. How intrigued Gus would have been by the oncologists who were treating his mother! He would have liked to discuss her condition with them, and the treatment they were prescribing. Not for the first time Naomi felt all that her father was missing, being dead.
At any rate, the terrible twenty-four-hour five-day chemotherapy did appear to be working. In the last lab report from the oncologist, Madelena Kein’s bloodwork indicated that the patient was holding her own.
“‘Holding my own.’ This is a touching metaphor. It seems to mean that something, some force, is trying to wrest something, some possession of mine, from me—from out of my arms, for instance. But I am not allowing it to be wrested away—I am not passive in the face of my destiny but I am holding my own. Thank you for this good news.”
Once, these words would have been ironic, out of Madelena’s mouth. But now, Naomi knew they were sincere. And she thought how conscientious her grandmother was being, in resisting irony at such a time.
For good news, even if it may be temporary and precarious, is good news. Though a fact may be reversed with the next PET scan, or the next bloodwork, it is not less a fact because it is temporary and precarious.
“If the dead could return to life, they would rejoice in ‘life’—whatever it was. They would not be picky and quarrelsome. They would not be ironic. And so we who are alive had better rejoice in their place.”
“Yes, Lena.”
“Good! You’ve learned to call me ‘Lena.’ What next?”—Madelena laughed, delighted.
“I will learn to call Kinch ‘Kinch.’”