The terrain around the scar seems to be treacherous in some stretches, flat in others, with a fine ridge that slopes through the shallow crater of my right chest. The skin puckers near the incision in folds that remind me of my nipple after nursing: the baby’s head lolling back, the skin of the breast newly pliable and soft. There is no scar tissue there—just a thin strand that disappears into the freckles of my chest like a line of thought that bears forgetting.
“Cut these words, and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive,” says Emerson of the Frenchman’s writing style. Montaigne the surgeon: He probes and dissects and biopsies the thought. Chops and stains the slide, retrieves the microscope from the shelf. Montaigne the pathologist. “The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences,” says Emerson.
My remaining breast looks as ridiculous there as I imagined it would. Vesuvius rumbling over burned Pompeii. “Death everywhere mingles with and is blended into our lives,” Montaigne writes in his forties. “Decline foreshadows its hour and intrudes into our onward course itself. I have portraits of my appearance at twenty-five and thirty-five; if I compare them with the present what a difference! How much farther is my present image from these than from my dying!”
I have recently turned thirty-eight. The hair that pokes through my scalp is white. I am pale from the opiates, from recovering indoors. I cannot yet lift my arm. I am a ghost of myself at thirty-five, at twenty-five. How much farther? Montaigne’s famous motto: Que sais-je? What do I know? I trace the scar again with my finger. Unattached to outcome, I try saying out loud in front of the mirror.
*
We have called in hospice for my mom.
It’s strange, because hospice is one of those words that when you say it people’s faces fall. It is a word that evokes last breaths and hushed voices. But the more I think about it, the more I’m struck by what a beautiful word it is—hospice. It is hushed, especially at the end. But it’s comfortable and competent sounding, too. A French word with Latin roots—very close to hospital but with so much more serenity due to those S sounds. (You see, I am growing increasingly fond of the letter S.)
It used to mean a rest house for travelers—for pilgrims. And is there anything more welcome to a weary pilgrim than rest?
*
Some more surveyor’s notes:
I get the full pathology back from the mastectomy. They have found the two tumors they expected in there—along with eight centimeters of noninvasive cancer in the ducts. The sentinel nodes are negative and the margins are clear although only clear by a tenth of a millimeter. The tumors have not shrunk in any measurable way, so unfortunately the verdict on the chemo is that it just wasn’t that effective.
Dr. Cavanaugh wants to do further pathology and consult with her colleagues for input on my case. From there I suppose we’ll get a sense of the new landscape and what to expect as we pace about in the tall grass.
Tracing my fingers again and again over the scar, I’ve realized that something is familiar. It isn’t a Superman S—or a question mark, or even a river. It’s a path—a path I know pretty well. It’s the one that starts in the weedy cove down by the boathouse, weaves its way past the cat briar and beach roses, and starts to climb up the hill through grass thick with berries and ticks and poison ivy, curving gently this way and that up the bluff to the house where I can see just now my mother is gliding out of sight, stepping from the southwest porch in through the sliding door.
13. Party Sampler
On nights when John and I can get a sitter we often gather in Tita and Drew’s writing shed in their backyard with a playmate of ice and some handles of liquor and a party sampler of Pepperidge Farm cookies and John deejays us through eighties and nineties dance grooves on his cell phone and we pretend we are childless. Tita and Drew have their kids asleep in the house on the baby monitor.
Both of them are writing professors, and this semester Drew is teaching a class of freshmen who he swears hate him.
“I lose them a little more every time I open my mouth,” he tells us. “I told them that before they could be writers they had to go out and get their hearts broken a little bit. They looked back at me with what I can only call disgust and pity.”
“We are disgusting and pitiful,” I say. “And broken. We are so broken we count as the adults now.”
John, who hates to dance, pulls me to my feet when “Take My Breath Away,” starts playing and sways me in his arms. Tita and Drew do the same. We are laughing. We are tired. We are drunk.
“Take me to bed or lose me forever,” says John. My back aches, my chest hurts, and the old chemo nausea is rising in my chest. “Show me the way home,” I say.
14. The Toll Collector
Benny turns six. Last year’s passions: cats, baseball, Lionel Messi, outboard engines. This year: tollbooths, windmills, livestock, and black holes. He’s a tough kid to shop for. The recommended picks on our Amazon account look like we are planning to survive some sort of road-trip apocalypse.
During one of the several candle-extinguishing ceremonies, Benny whispers to me that his birthday wish is that he could be a tollbooth operator when he gets older and that my breast would grow back someday without any cancer in it.
I hope for both of these things as well (kid with a job, no more cancer)—and neither of them (a less exhaust-filled job, no mutant body parts). But I’m glad these are his wishes. They are a very Benny version of what I would have wished for if they were my candles—the same wish I make every year: that everyone I love will find what makes them happy and that the universe will keep them safe.
*
John arranges a birthday surprise visit to the tollbooth in the parking garage where he works. Carl, the parking attendant, hoists Benny up into the seat and shows him the register.
“This is where you put all the money people give you, huh?” says Benny—giant grin, swiveling in the seat. Carl has a clip-on fan in the booth and a couple of books—the Bible, a Danielle Steel paperback. Carl has told John that the Bible belonged to his father, who fought with General Patton in World War II. “Every battle Patton was in my dad was there, too, with the Bible in his pocket keeping him safe.”
“You know I don’t get to keep any of that money, right, little man?” Carl says to Benny.
“Yes,” says Benny solemnly. “I’ve heard that.”
Carl shows him how to operate the lever that lifts the arm of the tollbooth. “That’s how the magic works.”
“I just cannot believe I am only six and I have already sat in a real, live tollbooth,” says Benny as we drive away.
Days later John tells me that every time Carl sees him now he laughs and shakes his head. “Didn’t know I was such a celebrity!”
One day he says, “Your wife sure likes to keep her hair real short.”
“Yeah,” says John. “Chemo.”
Carl says, “I was worried you were gonna say that, so I’ve been praying for her every day just in case.” From then on, he tells John I’m in his prayers every time he pushes the magic lever to raise the arm, every time John passes through.
15. Nowhere