He takes me gingerly in his arms as if we are awkward teenagers. My back spasms, but I wiggle closer to him until I can put my head on his chest and hear his heart beating.
Downstairs, the boys gaze at a screen on the old futon in the playroom. We will figure out what to do about them soon enough. They probably already know what’s up and are waiting for us to figure out how to say it. Their very existence is the one dark piece I cannot get right within all this. I can let go of a lot of things: plans, friends, career goals, places in the world I want to see, maybe even the love of my life. But I cannot figure out how to let go of mothering them.
So maybe I don’t try to figure it out. Maybe I just aim to get the couch right: strong bones, high-quality leather, something earthy and animal and real. A surface that knows something of what it was to be alive, that warms to our touch and cools in our absence.
Also: an expansive bench that fits all of us. Something that will hold us through everything that lies ahead—the loving, collapsing, and nuzzling. The dying, the grieving.
I know my thoughts have probably diverged from whatever John is thinking about in the near dark of our bedroom. He is silent. Maybe he is dozing.
Buying a sofa online, like many of life’s biggest decisions, takes research and trust, but mostly trust. As I lie here—John’s chest rising and falling under my cheek—I’m going to have to believe that regardless of clinical trials and future wives and free shipping, I’ll know it when I find the right one.
5. Bright Spots
About the kids, my therapist says: “Okay fine, maybe they won’t be okay. Maybe they’ll be complete fuckups. Let’s talk that out a little. Let’s imagine that scenario. Give me some really good details.”
“Jail,” I say. “Sitting in Bojangles’ by themselves on Thanksgiving trying to score heroin. Them telling John to go fuck himself over the phone and then hanging up. Them telling each other to go fuck themselves.”
“That’s good,” smiles my therapist. “No problem going to the dark place for you.”
Then he says, “But maybe they’ll be more than okay. Maybe they’ll be amazing. I know many people who went through loss at a young age who became extraordinary adults. Maybe they’ll write award-winning movie scripts for a groundbreaking dark comedy inspired by the loss of their mother when they were children and win Oscars. Just picture them on the stage, holding that trophy.”
I love this game. John is clapping loudly in the front row, a French actress on his arm. The boys clink their Oscars and point them at John. Then they toast toward heaven. “For Mom!” they say.
A retired rabbi—the friend of a friend—writes me an email out of the blue about how he lost his mother when he was nine years old. In the message, he lists all the things he remembers about his mom and all the ways she remains in his life: her favorite flower, the books she read him, her sense of humor. “She is far from a hole in my life. She is an enormous presence that can never be replaced.” His words are a gift that I pull out some nights and let swirl through the room, brush over my skin like a tincture.
*
Now that the cancer has spread, I am scanned every six to eight weeks. Sometimes I think about things I could do in six to eight weeks: gestate a baby through half a trimester, master conversational Italian, achieve rock-hard abs, binge-watch Game of Thrones, hike the Camino de Santiago. Instead: it’s a wink, a blink, a flicker; one long exhale and a breath drawn in; John’s hand running down my back, his lips brushing my neck; the length of the camp session where we met.
Tita comes with me to each new set of scans, and she knows the routine as well as I do: loose clothes; no bras, no zippers; drink lots of fluids. The receptionist loves to banter. The volunteer concierge is hard of hearing. Carla, the tech who takes patients back to the changing room, loves to talk about Jesus and the power of prayer. Sometimes she’ll stop in the middle of what she is doing and sing “Amazing Grace.” Tita and I aren’t sure whether to sing along. We clap. “Thank you so much,” I say. “That was beautiful.” I hear her humming it back in the tech station. They draw blood and then inject me with radioactive dye for the bone scan, contrast dye for the CT. Tita waits in the changing room while I have my CT, but they let her come sit with me in the room while I have the bone scan. The tech operates the scanner from the adjacent control room.
For the bone scan, there is a large monitor in the room with you as you move through the machine—feet bound with an elastic band, arms wrapped in a straightjacket, warm blanket to keep you calm. Tita also gets a warm blanket, because it keeps her calm, too. The scan takes about twenty minutes, and as you emerge from the machine, the monitor lights up with your skeleton in real time, moving from the skull down the shoulders and spine and hips, and finally the legs and feet.
From where Tita sits, she has a better view of the screen than I do. We try to talk about other things: child care, her half-written novel, her root canal saga, her friend Tony’s mom’s upcoming surgery, the short story collection we’re reading for book club, but we often end up staring at the screen. It’s like watching a teacher grade your test in front of you. It’s like watching live feed of the plane that you are flying in land while you’re in it.
“At first I was thinking you definitely had vagina cancer but now I think it was just the radioactive stuff in your bladder,” says Tita from her chair as the machine works its way along my abdomen during my most recent scan. “It’s totally different from the other bright spots.”
We examine the patch of concentrated light. Over the last six months—three or four scans, we have decided we are both savant bone-scan readers—clearly a second-career option. We’ve seen new tumors light up in my spine, my hips, my shoulder. We’ve predicted them all.
“Phew,” I say. “Vagina cancer would be serious salt in the wound.”
Tita’s right: When John and I go see Dr. Cavanaugh for the results the next day, it turns out that indeed I am free of vagina cancer. More bright spots on the skeleton, though. Those, I do not seem to be able to avoid at all. Scapula, pelvis, sternum.
Bright spots, dark screen. The term “bright spot” takes on a whole new meaning, more like the opposite of silver lining: danger, bone pain, progression. More radiation. More pain medicine. More tests. Strange topsy-turvy cancer stuff: With scans, you long for a darkened screen, a blacked-out skeletal city, a subdivision of foreclosed bones. Not one lit room to be found, not one headlamp on the road, not one fireplace smoldering, not one reading lamp brightening a page of dinosaurs in an upstairs bunk bed, not one single birthday candle awaiting its wish.
No sign of life, no sign of anything about to begin.
“I heard you talking about your botched root canal,” the tech said to Tita when he stepped back into the room after my last scan. “You should definitely go on antibiotics. Those things can be deadly. Hope you both have a great afternoon.”
6. Vigipirate