Val delivered them an obscene amount of food that neither one of them was going to touch. Eliza’s stomach rolled over once, twice, three times. The Fisherman’s Breakfast comprised two eggs any style, a giant pancake, two pieces of French toast, and two pieces of bacon. Charlie made no move toward his fork. Eliza gamely took up the maple syrup and squirted some on the pancake and the top piece of French toast.
“Is this about the insurance?” she asked. “Because you know Rob and I can cover it, whatever it costs—”
He watched her for a moment and then said, “It’s got nothing to do with insurance.”
“But you don’t give up. You’re tougher than this. I know you are.” Charlie Sargent was tough with a capital T. Ten years earlier, when a few guys from a nearby harbor were cutting traps in Little Harbor’s waters, Charlie had tracked the guys down and knocked them from here to Southwest Harbor, all by himself, no backup. If they’d come back he would have done it again, whatever it took. But they never came back.
Just two years ago, when there was talk of heroin coming in over the water from Canada, Charlie and some of the other fishermen had said, Not in our harbor, asshole, found the guy responsible, and paid him a middle-of-the-night visit that they never talked about. The guy went packing.
Charlie had put his beautiful wife in the ground. When they threw the first shovelful of dirt on Joanie’s grave and Eliza couldn’t even see through the tears—she was crying with those giant, gulping sobs, crying so hard Val handed her tissue after tissue after tissue and she’d soaked through all of them—Charlie had gripped Eliza’s free hand and looked stoically ahead, blinking hard but never crying.
He was tough!
When Eliza was seventeen, Charlie threw his back out one night and hauled the next day as though nothing was wrong. He came home that evening—regular time, no earlier than usual—pale and shaking. Later his sternman told another captain that Charlie had vomited twice over the gunwale from the pain, but every single one of his traps in that day’s rotation was properly tended and rebaited and sent back down, and then he went back out and did it all again the next day.
Charlie Sargent was the toughest of the tough.
“You’re tough enough to beat this thing,” she added. Then she cringed, hearing herself say that: it was such a nonmedical, vague, and ultimately ineffective way to approach the situation. And also it wasn’t true. Tough didn’t really have a part to play in this scenario. Glioblastomas were universally fatal, no matter who you were.
And even so, even knowing all of this, there was still that part of her that said, Fight, Dad. That said, Don’t give up. That said, You might be the one to beat the odds, why not, why shouldn’t it be you? That was the daughter part of her, not the medical part of her, of course. The medical part of her knew better. But the daughter part had a louder voice.
“I know they can’t take out the tumor, Eliza. They told me that already, in Ellsworth. You know what they also told me? That if they tried, there’s a good chance I’d end up blind.”
“Not necessarily,” she said, although she knew it was true; since the tumor was in the occipital area of the brain, blindness was a very likely outcome of surgery.
“You ever met a blind lobsterman?”
“Dad—”
“Did you?”
“Maybe not,” she said.
“Course you haven’t. ’Cause there ain’t any.”
“But there’s chemo, radiation, clinical trials. What are your other options, Dad? Are you just going to sit around and let this happen to you?” She tried not to let her voice rise to a hysterical level, but it was hard.
Charlie talked over her and waved his fork for emphasis.
“I don’t need to go to some upscale doctor in Boston to find out this thing is going to kill me. I know that already. Something bad happens, some emergency, I can drive myself to Ellsworth and see a doctor there.”
“You can’t drive if you have double vision. You can’t drive if all of the straight lines have gone wavy on you! Or if you can’t see out of the right side of both of your eyes.”
Charlie considered that. “Fair enough. Val’ll drive me.”
“You are so exasperating, Dad!”
He shrugged and cut into his pancake and said, “I’ve been called worse. I expect I’ll be called worse again before I die. Now you listen to me, Eliza, and you listen good. I watched your mother fight through cancer. I watched her waste away right in front of my eyes. I watched her lips crack and her hair fall out and her appetite leave her. I watched her until she didn’t recognize me and she didn’t recognize you and she didn’t know what the hell she was doing anymore on God’s green earth. I don’t want to put you through watching me fight. I don’t want to put myself through the fighting, neither. I don’t.”
That’s when she lost it—never mind the Brooklynites, never mind Val, never mind the pimpled teenager who washed dishes for Val, never mind any of it. The tears came and she let them slide down her face like rain down a window. She didn’t care. She wiped a big glob of snot with a napkin that already had maple syrup on it and she didn’t care about that either. She cried like a little girl and between sobs she said, “I can’t lose you too. It’s not fair, Dad. It’s not fair. I need you. It’s not fair. I’ll be all alone.”
Charlie put down his fork and reached for her hand and covered it with his own bigger, calloused one, and he said, “You don’t need me anymore.”
“Yes I do! I do!”
“You’ve got your own family, Rob and the girls.”
“I do need you. You’ve got grandkids. They love you. They need you. We can’t lose you.”
“You’re losing me anyway, Eliza.”
“Stop it, Dad. Don’t say that. You’re not allowed to say that.”
“It’s true, honey. And I’d rather not have my body all stove up by a bunch of doctors down in Boston into the bargain. Just take it how I’m saying it. Take me at my word.”
Charlie Sargent’s word was solid gold, everyone knew that. He asked anyone in town to take him at his word and they’d do it without a second thought and normally Eliza would too, but this time she couldn’t. She wouldn’t! Eliza stared hard at the cat wearing spectacles on the Brooklyn T-shirt. “No,” she said. “I won’t. I won’t let you just give up. I don’t accept that. I’m sorry, but I don’t. I’m not leaving here without you.”
Charlie picked his fork back up and filled it with food that never made it to his mouth. “Well, then,” he said, “I guess you’re not leaving.”
19
LITTLE HARBOR, MAINE
Eliza
“Hey, Eliza. You up for hauling with me tomorrow?” That had been Russell, on the phone.
She’d thought that he’d been joking. Hilarious. Tell me another. She’d said, “I’m sure that would be entertaining for you, Russell, but my dad has an appointment to get his stitches removed, so I’m afraid I’m not available.”
“I know about the appointment. Val can take him, I already asked her. I need a sternman for tomorrow, just for tomorrow.”