“Sorry,” muttered Solly, but he was already distracted by the import of that.
“I’m afraid it did come back positive,” she said. “A fairly common cancer of the blood. ‘Hematological malignancy,’ they said. We don’t have the staging on it yet, but we should know soon and I don’t want you to get too worried just yet. OK? It’s not necessarily a dire prognosis, depending on the staging, of course, whether it’s metastasized—it doesn’t have too low a five-year survival rate. More than half of all patients pull through. Maybe even three-quarters, we’ll see. So your father’s chances aren’t so bad.”
Luisa squeezed Solly’s hand, her dark eyes glittering. Solly and I looked at each other steadily.
“Do they have a treatment plan yet?” asked Solly.
“There will probably be chemo,” said my mother. “Possibly radiation, possibly surgery. I’ll share all of that with you as soon as I know more, dear.”
“Blood cancer,” I said, after a silence. I’d begun to feel uneasy—beyond even the facts of the case I felt a creeping apprehension. “That’s where . . . isn’t that . . .”
“It’s where the white blood cells divide faster than normal cells, or live longer than they’re supposed to,” said my mother. “He has at least a couple of primary tumors, which they tell me is a common presentation. With this kind of a lymphoma.”
AFTER WE HUNG UP I told Solly what Ned had said to me before: lymphoma. I described it to him before he left for Luisa’s place for the night, right before I took out my laptop and began typing this.
But he shrugged it off as though the detail either wasn’t accurate or wasn’t relevant. Our father has a disease, our father has a potentially terminal illness of the kind we all fear for the insidious poison of its medicine, the emaciation of bodies, shedding of hair, desiccating of bones and aging of skin. That was all Solly had room for, and I can’t blame him.
And our father will have to endure all that without ever understanding his illness. He’ll be like a child throughout the suffering, confused and blinking as my mother herds him gently on.
I think of those scenes to come and I also think of my father when we were young and he was middle-aged instead of old—how he read us stories using different voices, some deep, some squeaky, here a quaking mouse, here a growling lion. I think of how he carried us on his shoulders—“so you can pretend to be giants.”
He had so much dignity back then, but he was willing to cast it off to entertain his children. He tickled us until we grew out of being tickled, he made corny jokes until we grew out of those too.
Now I feel an ache of remorse when I think how we stopped laughing at his jokes. I would laugh so hard, if I could have a do-over. I can see that to Solly we’re only losing my father now, where to me we lost him some time ago—or maybe it’s fairer to say that Solly seems to be able to lose him twice, while for me once was all I could do.
Still Ned’s casual assertion a few weeks ago, his matter-of-fact statement that my father would get sick with lymphoma—which at that time I assumed was just a fictional element of the so-called narrative—vibrates so hard I almost get a headache. I’ve actually been taking painkillers when the thought of it starts to make my temples send out their thin flashes of pain.
But Ned’s foreknowledge vies with the diagnosis for my attention and I can’t let it go. It may be coincidence—or maybe it’s information gleaned from surveillance. Could he be surveilling them as well as me, tracking my father’s diagnosis? Observed by Ned or his consultants, did my mother find out weeks ago and only tell us now? And what use would it be for Ned to spy on my parents anymore, when he already has my cooperation, when I’ve already done what he wanted me to do?
I’m going to ask my mother tomorrow when she heard the diagnosis. I’ll reassure her that it’s not a problem if she decided to delay telling us—we understand completely. But I need to know when she heard.
YESTERDAY, she said.
And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech . . . And the Lord said, Behold: The people is one, and they have all one language . . . and now nothing will be restrained from them . . . Let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. —Genesis 11:1–7
I HAVE IT—I have it here on my desktop, a written record.