“Don’t feel bad. She and Amanda are pretty much inseparable.”
“How are you holding up? Should we pack it up and head home?” Her face had the cold translucence of ice, and with her eyebrows gone from the chemo, she looked alarmingly like a glass mask. Only her eyes—as dark a brown as David’s—still held any spark of color and life.
“No, Emme’s having such a good time, it makes me feel better just to watch. I never know how many more chances like this I’ll have,” she said matter-of-factly.
It was the very offhandedness of her remark that struck David most forcibly. He tried like hell to keep his sister’s mortality out of his thoughts, but of course he knew that the subject was never far from hers. How could it be? For over a year, she had been living under a sentence of imminent death. She had gone from one surgery to another, one treatment to another, one special protocol to another, and while there were occasional respites in her decline, the general direction was unmistakable. Remission, if it came, would not come for long.
“You know what I’ll miss most?” she said, musing aloud.
He hated this line of thought, but if she needed to express it …
“Getting to watch Emme grow up.”
Just then, her daughter whirled by, laughing, and swinging hands with Amanda.
“But you will get to see her grow up,” David said, meaning the best, even if he knew—and he knew she knew—that any reprieve was temporary. “You’re looking better all the time, and Gary tells me that this new regimen they’ve got you on has shown some real improvements. You are going to get better.”
She patted the back of his hand, still following Emme, and said, “Put your boots on, or your feet will freeze.” He finished removing the skates and pulled on his boots, which were cold as icicles inside.
“I’d give anything to make that true,” she added, and David could not help but flash again on his strange conference in the book silo with Kathryn Van Owen.
In a deliberately casual tone, he asked, “You would?”
“Would what?” she said, already having forgotten what she’d just said. The drugs made it hard for her sometimes to follow the thread of a conversation.
“Do anything to … keep on going?”
She took a deep breath and looked out across the rink at the laughing, spinning skaters.
“I never thought I’d believe that,” she said. “I always thought—as much as anybody who’s healthy ever thinks about it at all—that I’d be happy to live my life, and go peacefully, with no complaints, whenever it ended.”
She coughed, and raised a gloved hand to her colorless thin lips.
“But that’s what you think when things are fine,” she said. “That’s what you think when there’s nothing really wrong. I don’t think like that anymore.”
A note of bitterness, one he seldom heard, had crept into her voice.
“Now, I’d give anything I could—and do whatever it takes—to live. To get old and gray with Gary. To see Emme play in the all-city orchestra, and go to her high-school prom, then off to college. To find out who she falls in love with, and what she decides to do with her life. To see her become a young woman, and have children of her own. I want all of that, David, all of it,” she said, tears welling up in the corners of her eyes. “I never thought I could want anything so much. And I’m so ashamed to be so weak and angry now.”
“You have no reason to be ashamed of anything,” David said, wrapping an arm around her shoulders and hugging her tight. “You’re the bravest person I know, and you’ve got a right to be angry. You’ve been through hell.” Mrs. Van Owen’s offer—“I can promise she’ll live to a ripe old age”—rang in his head like a cracked bell.
The tears were rolling down both cheeks, and one or two of the passing skaters threw a glance their way.
“Don’t let Emme see me like this,” she murmured into his coat.
“Don’t worry. She’s way over by the concession stand with Amanda,” he assured her.
“I just needed to say it.”
“You can say anything to me, you know that. You always have.”
She sniffled a little and smiled at that.
“Remember how you told me,” he said, “back when I was in junior high, that no girl would ever go out with me if I didn’t get rid of my dandruff? Or that I was such a bad dancer, I should just sort of stand in place and shuffle my feet around?”
“I told you that?” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be—you were right. I bought shampoo, and I learned how to dance.”
She wiped her eyes on the back of her mittens and straightened up. “I wonder if this is how Mom felt, right about now?”
It was something that David had considered, too. Had their mother, who perished in the same way, felt this same anguish and frustration and—yes—fury toward the end?
“Maybe so,” David said.
Sarah just nodded.