I watch my kids taking it all in—seeing me among my other kind. They are not the only children in the waiting room—school is closed across the state—and I see them all scanning the room for each other with urgency, like we look for channel markers in the fog.
When I tell Marie, my radiation therapist, that Dr. Rosenblum had said it would be okay if my kids came and took a peek at the machine, I mistake her skeptical eyebrows for being inhospitable. “Sure, if that’s what you want.”
When we get back in the linear accelerator room, she starts to explain to the kids how everything works. “Your mom lies in there,” she is saying. “We keep the lights off so they don’t mess with the radiation.”
I notice Benny won’t stand all the way inside the room and that he keeps glancing at the oversize radiation symbol on the twelve-inch-thick door. Somehow I hadn’t noticed the sign or the thickness of the door before. It’s like the opposite of a nuclear fallout shelter, keeping the damage within.
Marie turns on the enormous machine to show how its monster arm can rotate to both take X-rays and deliver the radiation beams. The floor opens up beneath it to accommodate its massive orbit around the radiation board, and I see Freddy’s body visibly stiffen.
To be honest, I hadn’t realized that all this time during my treatments the floor had been opening beneath me like some Tony Stark–designed doorway to hell, and I sort of wish I’d kept it that way.
“I’m ready to go now,” says Freddy firmly. Fearless Freddy. Freddy who injects himself with his own insulin shots, Freddy who goes downstairs alone at night to get a glass of water, Freddy who marches into the bathroom when his brother spies a stink bug and dispatches it into the toilet with his bare hands, Freddy who sat for close to an hour on the corner of the bed where my mom’s body lay, stroking her legs the day after she died.
“I’m done, too,” said Benny.
In the hallway, we step aside as two techs angle a hospital bed around the corner. Under a mountain of white blankets, only a face showing. I cannot tell if the face is male or female, old or young. Only that the face is not well. Only tears leaking out of the closed eyes.
Neither of the kids have a single question for the techs. They usually live for the question portion of everything. Last summer when we visited Thomas Jefferson’s lesser-known house, Poplar Forest, the tour guide ran late fielding questions from my kids: Did Jefferson have a dog? Did he die of cancer? Did he like to go camping? Do people enjoy being president? Last year, at the open house for kindergarten, Benny raised his hand in front of the entire parent-student population when the principal asked if there were any questions and said into the microphone, “Um, so what are you supposed to do if you’re just really nervous about starting kindergarten?”
But here in the radiation chamber: silence.
That night at dinner my dad asks them what they thought of the trip to Duke.
“It was completely terrifying,” says Freddy matter-of-factly.
“I hated it,” says Benny. “I wish I hadn’t seen it.”
“It was pretty intimidating,” John admits. “I guess I just hadn’t realized.”
My dad and I look at each other. “Whoops! I guess I just damaged everyone for life a little,” I say.
“Yikes,” says my dad. “Sounds intense.”
But then the next morning: We are bumbling through our regular routine—me checking homework sheets while I drink coffee on the couch before getting myself dressed for radiation, John knotting his tie and packing lunch boxes, the kids shuffling into their shoes and coats—both boys come sit with me.
“Good luck at radiation today, Mom!” says Benny, rubbing my head. “I hope you’re not scared, but if you are you can hug MacDuff when you get home.”
Sometimes I think Benny conjured MacDuff from one of his recipes.
Freddy gives me a hug. “Guess what, Mom—I think I’ve finally figured out what I want to be when I grow up. A writer!”
19. Level 00
Chris has a painful new nodule on his kidney, and he’s started looking more and more yellow. Margie’s husband won’t eat. The loud, nervous woman who is always on her cell phone has half her head shaved today. “Yeah, I’m downstairs on Level 00,” she is saying, “you know, with the nukes.” The man I sit next to when I get called back to the gowned area is so hugely tall that his gown looks like a blue napkin barely covering his naked thighs.
“You got you a nice tan going,” Marie says as she readies the machine and examines my chest and my mastectomy scar. It’s my twenty-seventh treatment of thirty. The skin is torched, even though it never feels like it’s burning during the treatments. “Looks like that part of you has been to Hawaii.”
“Aloha,” I say when we’re done, floating out of the nuke room in my gown, back toward the changing rooms.
“Aloha!” the techs call, the three of them clustered in the hallway in their scrubs, two of them waving slowly like my cruise ship was just pushing off, Marie looking past me, beckoning the tall man back from the gowned area.
You see the same people every day and then suddenly you stop seeing them. You never know if they finished treatment or if it was something else. We ask around after each other but no one ever knows for sure. “Sorry—HIPAA,” the techs say.
*
“I’m so tired of this place,” I text to Ginny one morning from Level 00. “I’m not in the mood. You know how it takes a certain amount of energy to just be at the cancer center? I don’t have that today. I don’t even feel like making eye contact with anyone.”
“I would love it if you would just lose it,” Ginny texts back. “Stand up on a table and tell everyone to go fuck themselves. Even the volunteer with the warm blankets and the dude playing the piano.”
I scowl a little at the piano player who is playing the Cheers theme song when I go to fill up my water bottle. Immediately I feel better.
“How is Larry’s appetite today?” I have the energy to ask Margie when I get back to my seat in the waiting room.
20. Its Very Nature
“Let us make good use of our time,” writes Montaigne in his final essay. “We still have so much of it that remains idle and ill-used.”
He would not approve of how I have taken to sleeping in, how I spend the evening browsing seventy-two pages of ankle boots on Zappos, how I obsess over hair styles in magazines my sprouts and I are years from achieving.
Montaigne, the aging man, on life: “I am making myself ready to lose it, without regret, but as a thing that is lost by its very nature.”
Me, some nights, tucking the boys into their beds, singing an old camp song my mom used to sing: “Mmm, I want to linger here / Mmm, a little longer here / Mmm, a little longer here with you.”
STAGE FOUR
1. Darkest Day