“So you didn’t pass out and have a bunch of fluid pumped out of your lungs?”
“I fainted, probably because I hadn’t eaten anything. And the fluid—baby, you know I had that awful cough. And yes, you were right, I should have listened to you and taken more of that medicine.” She smiles at me. I fold my arms across my chest. She sighs again.
“I’d think you’d be happy. I’m finally ready to leave. We’ll go somewhere new and all you have to do is—”
“They said something about cancer.”
“Of course they did. That’s how doctors are, baby. If they said everything was fine, how on earth would they stay in business?”
“He said they were going to run some other tests. What were they?”
She leans in toward me. “If we stay here much longer,” she whispers, “they’re going to figure out we don’t have insurance. And that is not—”
“They already know.”
“They know?”
“Don’t worry. It’s taken care of. I called Dennis.”
“What?” Her voice rises, becomes sharp. “Why did you do that? What on earth were you thinking? Danielle, you know better than to—”
“Am I interrupting?” The doctor has arrived, and his question isn’t really a question, is just a way for him to announce that he’s here and ready to talk to us.
“Of course not,” my mother says. She smiles at the doctor, but her eyes stay sharp and disappointed, focused on me.
The doctor starts talking. At first it’s okay because he repeats what I already know. The passing out, which my mother sighs through. The fluid in the lungs, and how it looked a little odd. That’s what the doctor says. “A little odd.”
I wait for Mom to say something, but she’s staring at the awful green curtain the doctor has pulled all the way closed, a strange pinched look on her face.
That’s when I know she has cancer. Before the doctor even says it’s “a possibility,” I know. And worse, I know Mom knows too. I sit down, stumble back onto a hard orange plastic chair.
The doctor keeps talking. He shows us pictures of Mom’s lungs. He shows us a dark spot, a shadow. He says, “We need to run more tests, find out exactly what we’re dealing with. We’re going to admit you.” He’s talking to Mom but she isn’t looking at him, is still staring at the curtain. The doctor doesn’t seem surprised, just turns and starts talking to me.
“It’s best to be as aggressive as possible when it comes to this sort of thing,” he says, and points at the picture of Mom’s lungs again, tapping two fingers against the shadow as if I’ve somehow forgotten it’s there. “We won’t know anything for sure until we’ve done more tests, but this, along with the results of the blood work we’ve run, indicates that time—”
“Thank you,” Mom says, and her smile is radiant, beautiful enough to convince anyone of anything. “But is all this necessary for a little spot? I mean, really.”
The doctor just looks at her.
Mom’s smile fades. “It’s not just a spot.” She picks up a magazine and starts reading. The doctor looks at her for a moment more and then turns back to me.
“We’re going to do the very best we can. We’ll send someone down to move your mother up to a room shortly.”
It’s cancer. After two days that word becomes my whole world. Two days, Mom sitting silent in a hospital room and looking at me like I’ve let her down. Two days, and I sleep in uncomfortable chairs, go home when I’m told to, and come back as soon as I can. Two days, and the doctor says a lot of words I don’t know and that Mom doesn’t ask any questions about. Two days, and at the end of them someone says something to me as I stumble down the hall trying to remember where the vending machines are and wondering what metastasized means.
“Excuse me,” I hear, and turn around to see the doctor looking at me.
“Might I have a word with you?” he says, and before I can say anything he starts talking. He tells me Mom seems uninterested in what’s happening to her. He says this occasionally occurs and he certainly understands, but that time is very important here.
He says, “Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“No,” I say, and then he tells me.
Mom’s cancer has spread. The spot on her lung is from the spreading. She needs treatment right away. Aggressive treatment. Chemotherapy. “I want to get started immediately,” the doctor says, “but she won’t consent to anything. She needs to agree to this. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I say, because now I do.
I go back to Mom’s room. She glances at me when I come in, then goes back to reading magazines. Today she’s reading a cooking magazine. I sit down on her bed, turn so I am facing her.
“I just talked to the doctor.”
She keeps reading her magazine.
“Do you want to know what he said?”
She puts the magazine down. “Do you know what I hate most about this place? I hate how everyone talks to me. The nurses, the doctors. You. How am I feeling? Do I need anything? Do I have any questions? Do I understand what’s going on? Let me ask you a question. Do you think this place has anything I could ever be interested in? Do you think I want to sit here day after day after day? Do you?”
I shake my head, suddenly close to tears.
“Oh baby,” she says. “Don’t look like that. I just want to get out of here. I want you to stop rushing around writing checks every thirty seconds. I want to be in the car with the wind in my hair and the radio on. I don’t—” I hear her take a deep breath, hear the slight rattling sound of it. “I don’t want this.”
“You need to…” I don’t know how to say this. “The doctor says—”
“I know. I need chemotherapy. But to stay here? To sit here day after day with tests and tubes and this?” She gestured around the room.
“What if we go somewhere else?” Her eyes light up and I continue. “There must be other hospitals, better ones. I’ll find out and we’ll pick one, go there.”
The light in her eyes dims. “Another hospital.”
“A better one.”
She laughs a laugh that isn’t one at all. “Then you’ll be writing checks every fifteen seconds.”
I look down at the bed. “We have money.” I try to keep my voice even but she knows me. Of course she does.
“It’s for the future. Not for me to sit here and read crappy magazines and eat even crappier food in a place where a room with a view gets you—” She looks out the window. “A Dumpster.” She laughs, for real this time. “That just figures, doesn’t it?”
I look at her. “Why won’t you do this?”
“Because,” she says angrily, and then stops. She reaches out and cups my chin in one hand. Her fingers are cool. I close my eyes.
“Please,” I say.
She is silent for a long time. I feel her fingers drop away from my chin and squeeze my eyes closed harder, like I did when I was young and would lie in bed waiting for her to come home.
“All right,” she says quietly, and I open my eyes.
32
I call Greg that night. I don’t know why but I do, stand outside the front door and unfold the piece of paper with his name scrawled across it. It’s only when he answers the phone sounding like he’s asleep that I realize how late it is, that it’s dark, late-at-night dark. I can see the stars. I hadn’t even noticed them.
“You’re asleep,” I say, and then feel stupid for stating the obvious. “Never mind. This was—I shouldn’t have called you. I’m sorry.”
“Dani?”
“Yeah.”
“I thought it was you.” He sounds a little more awake now. “Where are you?”
“At the house. Mom’s asleep and I’m…I just thought I’d call. At”—I squint at a window, catch a glimpse of the clock by the television—“four in the morning. I didn’t realize it’s so late. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. Let me just—ow!” I hear the sound of something falling. “Um, pretend you didn’t
hear that.”
“Are you all right?”
“Fine. I just—I fell out of bed.”
I laugh and can practically hear him smile over the phone when he says, “I should have known that would cheer you up.”
“Well, it was pretty funny…wait a second. How did you know it was me?”
“You didn’t say hello, just started talking. Very you. Plus I would know your voice anywhere.”
I don’t know what to say to that. It turns out I don’t have to say anything because he says, “I’ll see you soon, okay?”
“Okay.”
After I hang up I go back inside to check on Mom. She’s asleep. She looks…she looks like she always does. But then, as I’m leaving her room, I see the bottles of pills the doctor prescribed on her dresser. He wasn’t happy when I told him I was going to take her somewhere else, started talking about time again, but from somewhere deep inside, from a place I didn’t know I had, I found this voice. A strong voice, a sure one.
I told him I understood, but that I had to think of my mother first. I asked him questions, all the ones I’d wanted to before and hadn’t. I asked about other places: other hospitals, other doctors. He told me things, gave me numbers to call. He shook my hand when I got up to leave. He said he wished me all the best. I believed him.
I arranged for Mom to be released. I tried to talk about our options on the way home. She said she was tired and that we’d have to talk later. I made phone calls while she slept. When she woke up, she said she was going out for a while.
“Are you coming back?”
She looked at me. She looked at the lists I’d written. She looked out the window at the car, at the driveway leading to the road.
“Yes,” she said, quietly, and I believed her.
She came back but still didn’t want to talk. “I’m tired,” she said again. “I’m so tired.” It was then I realized what she’d done, where she’d been.
She’d been to the houses. She’d gone and looked at them, dreamed of what was inside. She had to do it because they’re her world, her life. She’d gone because she needs them.
“We’ll talk in the morning,” I said, and pretended I didn’t see the sorrow on her face.
After that I just sat. I sat downstairs, in the dark, and then I went outside and called Greg. I know why I called him.
I want to see him.
I’m still thinking about that when he shows up. I watch his car come down the driveway. The lights make my eyes hurt. He turns them off and everything is dark again. I hear him get out of the car. I sit on the steps. I hear him walking toward me.
“Hey,” he says, and I see him right in front of me, a dark shape against a backdrop of night sky and sea. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
He sits down next to me. “Is that your way of saying you just wanted to see how I look at four thirty in the morning?”
I glance over at him and he’s grinning. I see the flash of his teeth. There are a lot of things I could say, but I just tell him the truth.
“I—I wanted to see you.”
“That’s good, ’cause I wanted to see you too. I’ve been wondering how you are. And how’s your mom? I heard about the—I heard she had to go to the hospital.”
I tell him everything. He doesn’t say a word, just listens, and when I’m done talking we sit there, silent, for a long while.
“How do you feel?” he asks when the sun is starting to rise, coloring the bottom of the sky brilliant, impossible colors.
“Angry. Scared. She doesn’t seem to care. Not about anything the doctor said, not about treatment, not about—not about anything.”
“Maybe she’s scared too.”
“She’s never scared.”
“Everyone gets scared.” He looks at me. “Watch, I’m going to get scared right now. You ready? You sure? Okay.” He takes a deep breath. “Pretty much anywhere you go, they’re always looking for cops.”
“Being able to get a job anywhere is scary? Why would that—?”
He moves toward me, closing the space between us. “Dani,” he says quietly, and I realize what he meant.
“Oh. But you and me, we aren’t—haven’t—”
He smiles. “I know. I’m just saying. Just…putting it out there. A possibility because I—” He clears his throat. “You know, we’re not so different, you and I.”
“What?”
“I suppose I should be happy I’ve gotten you back to questions.” He bumps his shoulder against mine. “I just—I think we have a lot in common.”
“You and me?”
“No, the other two people sitting here.”
“You’re a cop.”
“Yep.”
“I’m a…”
“I know.”
I look down at the ground. “It’s all I know. And being something else, doing something else, I don’t know how—I can’t—”
“You can do anything.”
No one has ever said anything like that to me before, and looking at him I think that maybe, just maybe, he could be right. Maybe I can. “Why did you say that?”
“Because I believe it. And because I really like you. There, I said it. I really like you. I want to get to know you.”
“Me?”
He gives me a look.
“But why?”
“Because when I first saw you I thought—no, I knew—you were special. Because I still think that every time I look at you. Because I think you’re smart and funny and brave. But most of all”—he grins at me—“because I like questions.”
“But I steal things.”
“So stop.”
“It’s not—it’s not like that. Not that easy.”
“Yeah,” he says, “it is. You’re not doing it now, are you?” I laugh and he says, “See? Not so hard.”
“But people like me—”
He leans toward me, and whatever I thought I was going to say dries up and flies away, lost in his eyes. In what I see in them.
“Dani,” he says, and then he kisses me.
He kisses me and I kiss him back and when we separate I feel like the whole world has tilted sideways. I feel like I’m seeing it for the very first time.
I smile at him, and watch as he smiles back.
“You know who you are,” he says. “You just have to believe it.”
33
For the first time ever, I pick where we go. Where we are. Mom didn’t want to choose or even think about it. She just shook her head when I asked and then closed her eyes. I listed choices anyway. She didn’t respond. She was pretending to be asleep but in a few minutes she actually was. She tires easily these days, though she won’t admit it.
We could have flown but Mom wanted to drive. It was the only thing she asked for, the only thing she said when I told her where we were going. I had to buy maps, which I knew how to do, and then I had to get my license. That I didn’t know how to do. I’d only ever had ones that didn’t belong to me.
I went in expecting to wait in line, sit for an awful picture, and then walk back out. It turned out there’s a test. It was the first one I’ve ever taken. I passed and left with my very own driver’s license. It’s strange to look down and see my name, my real name, on it.
I know a lot about cancer now. I know what metastasized means; I know what the drugs Mom takes are supposed to do. I know a shadow on a lung can mean nothing or it can mean a doctor looking at the floor and then looking at you, sorrow on his face.
The doctor mostly talks to me when the two of us are in his office, probably because I ask a lot of questions but maybe because I write the checks that pay him. Mom makes him laugh though, and she’s the one who found out he has two kids in boarding school, that they both need braces, and that every summer he takes his entire family to an island off the coast of Georgia. She asked me to buy her a map of Georgia the other day and I did, watched her look at it while she sat through chemo.
“It’s not that far away,” she sai
d, and turned the map so I could see it, her fingers marking the island. Both of us pretended we didn’t notice the IV dug deep into her arm, the tube coming out of it. “A day’s drive.”
“And a boat ride.”
Mom laughed and then folded the map, handed it to me. “You hold on to it.”
I have. I am. I keep it by the window next to the plant I bought last week. I’ve never had a plant before. It’s not a dog, but I figure it’s best to start slowly.
Mom is staying in a hotel. It’s really nice, the kind of place we always stayed in when things were going well. She has a big room, a beautiful view, a maid coming in and turning down the beds every night. When I told her I was going to find a place of my own she looked at me like I was crazy and gestured around the room. “You have a place.”
“A real place.”
Mom turned away from me, stared out the window. “This is real.”
I took a deep breath. “I want to do this.”
She was silent for a long time, and then she turned and looked at me.
“Baby,” she finally said, “don’t expect me to come with you.”
I hadn’t, but it still hurt when she said it.
One of the nurses who works chemo helped me find my apartment. Her brother was moving to Kansas and needed to sublet his place. She told me that when I was looking through the classifieds, wrote her brother’s phone number down on top of the paper after she hooked Mom’s IV into place. I sat with the paper folded in my lap after she walked off, looking down at it and listening to the slow harsh sound of Mom breathing.
“You should call.”
I looked up. Mom was staring at her IV.
“I can wait.”
Mom looked at me. “Someone who wants to sublet won’t ask questions like a landlord will. No credit check, no background check…”
I got up and made the call. When I came back Mom was reading a magazine. She handed it to me. “Quiz me.”
I did. She was an “all or nothing kind of gal.” She smiled when I told her that. The nurse came by and said the IV was looking good.