To change the subject, to keep the terrible words from marching back and forth across her mind, Eliza said, “You have really pretty hair, you know. I bet you get out of the shower and it just dries like that, so smooth and flat.”
The occipital lobe was at the back of the brain, where you would cup somebody’s head to help them sip from a cup of water if they were sick. If they were dying.
Mary looked startled, like she hadn’t ever really thought about it. “I guess so.”
“Lucky.”
“My mother says my hair is a disaster. No body to it.”
“That’s crazy,” said Eliza. “No offense to your mother. But my hair is a disaster. Can’t do a thing with it except stick it back and hope for the best.”
That, in fact, was the subject of Lesson Number One in the letter Joanie had left for Eliza: hair.
Your hair will make you crazy but it will make others envious, and the second thing will make up for some (but not all) of the first. I had the same hair before it was ravaged by chemo. I hope you remember me with it more than you remember me without it.
I am beyond tears, Eliza. I’ve leaked them all out. My body is drying up beneath me: my lips, my skin, my organs.
Sometimes you bring me a bowl of ice chips, my darling, and they are like nectar to me.
Here’s what you do with your hair, Eliza. Nothing. When you were young I used to braid it for you. I used to take a fine-toothed comb and part it straight down the center and create order out of the chaos. When you turned eleven you didn’t want the braids anymore (my heart broke a little at that) and then you were truly at a loss. You are just now getting a handle on it. I suggest the following. Don’t try to tame it. Trims twice a year. (I’ll have Val take you, Charlie won’t be up to the task.) Always air-dry; never blow-dry. Never cut layers; never allow anyone else to cut layers. If you’re going out somewhere and you want to look especially beautiful, pile it on top of your head. Use Conair Secure Hold bobby pins in black, always buy in pack of 90. No hairspray. Let a few curls fall around your face. They will swoon.
“Oh no,” said Mary. “Your hair is beautiful, all those curls. I’d give anything.”
“You’re sweet to say that,” said Eliza, even though the terrible words were still marching.
A glioblastoma, on a scan, showed up white and glowing against the gray of the brain.
Mary laughed more sincerely. Now Eliza was glad that Mary was there, taking her mind off the awfulness a little bit. “But I guess we always want what we can’t have. Human nature.”
After a few beats Mary, looking not at Eliza but down at the navy-blue water, kicked her legs against the wharf and asked, “Are you glad you left? Like, for good?”
Eliza didn’t even have to think about that. “Oh boy, I’m so glad I left.”
Mary looked stricken, and Eliza added quickly, “I wasn’t always! It was hard, leaving. It really was.” At Brown, freshman year, first semester especially, she had been completely lost. Providence, though not a big city in anyone’s idea of big cities, seemed gigantic to Eliza. Her roommate, a sophisticated beauty named Francesca Spencer from Manhattan, was so private-school polished and chic that next to her Eliza felt like she’d grown up in a hamster cage. She worried constantly about Charlie, rattling around the little house alone. She was so strapped with college expenses that she never had any money; a sandwich from the Hole in the Wall on Thayer Street was a grand extravagance.
She got over each of those points in time, but, in fairness, she had called Russell once from the pay phone in the student union and begged him to come get her.
He had refused.
He hadn’t forgiven her. Not then. She wasn’t even sure if he’d forgiven her by now.
Mary still looked troubled, so Eliza went on. “And there’s a lot to be said for growing up in a place where everybody knows everybody—”
She stopped, because she could see Mary’s shoulders start to quiver just a bit, and then to shake in earnest, and then she was crying for real. Eliza said wretchedly, “Oh my gosh! I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean—”
Mary waved at her, as if to indicate that the crying jag was unrelated to Eliza, and gulped out, “No, it’s not…it isn’t…” before her crying began anew.
Eliza was momentarily at a loss, and then it occurred to her that to put aside one’s own worries for a moment to help somebody else with theirs was always the right move.
“Mary? You don’t have to talk to me, you barely know me, but you can. I’m a pretty good listener.”
Mary made a great heaving sound that seemed like a marriage between a cry and a swallow.
“Do you have someone to talk to, even if it’s not me?” Eliza moved closer to Mary and put her arm around her. Maybe she was out of bounds, but she was around enough teenage girls to know that you did not leave one alone and crying unless she specifically requested to be left alone. You always tried first. She waited: Mary didn’t request to be left alone. If anything, she leaned in toward Eliza, and she could have been Evie or Zoe, distraught over a recess slight or the party invitation that never came.
“It’s okay, Mary,” Eliza said firmly, even though she didn’t think anything was okay. Nothing was okay. That silly little song again: My brain controls everything, everything my body does.
She thought about all the daughters and wives and sisters and lovers who had ever waited on this wharf for someone to come in off the water. He’s sick he’s sick he’s sick. She thought about how sometimes the people you were waiting for didn’t come back at all. She felt her own eyes begin to fill, and she had to blink the tears back and take a deep breath. Beside her Mary’s crying had slowed and she said, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what…”
“No,” said Eliza. “You don’t need to apologize for a thing. Okay?”
Mary didn’t answer.
“Okay, Mary?”
“Okay.”
“I’m going home for a few days to see my family and then I’ll be back up for—well, because I have to do some stuff for my dad. But here, give me your cell phone. I’m going to punch in my number, just in case you need an ear.”
Mary hesitated.
“It’s not optional.” Eliza tried to look stern, the way she looked when her children started to walk away from the dinner table without clearing their plates.
“Okay.” Mary pulled her phone from her pocket and presented it to Eliza without looking at it. Before she found the contacts Eliza saw a text that said HEY BABE SORRY ABOUT B4.
She glanced at Mary, who was looking out at the water again. She entered herself as a contact along with her phone number and, what the heck, her email address. You never knew. By the time she looked up again she could see a skiff coming toward them, Charlie as passenger, an unfamiliar man rowing.
“Here comes my dad,” said Eliza, and her heart started thumping to the beat of tumor tumor tumor. “I can’t tell who that is rowing him in—”
“I can,” said Mary. “That’s my boyfriend, that’s Josh.”