And it was. At home, Katie and Jill were at the kitchen table going through the big binders of sample invitations, and Atlas was on the floor chewing on Tupperware. Ethan and I sat down and started looking through invitations too. Then we all switched to wedding dresses. Then it was towards dinnertime, and I didn’t feel like cooking, and Jason called and offered to drive up with Lucas and lunch leftovers from the restaurant, and Peter knocked on the door with iced coffees all around plus Sprites for him and Katie, and Daniel did not call, and Atlas went to bed without a fuss, and everything was okay.
Then the phone rang, and it was my mom, and my grandmother was in the hospital.
“Okay okay okay,” I repeated again, over and over, all the way north, though this time it was less a tentative observation of the situation and more a fervent prayer. My mother, reflecting on my sleepless week grading, begged me to wait until morning to come up.
“There is no point in coming now,” she said. “She’s fine. She’s sleeping. She won’t even know you’re here.”
“But you will,” I said.
“You haven’t even showered since we ran,” said Ethan. “You haven’t even eaten. You should eat something.”
“I am never going to be hungry again,” I said.
All the way up—okay okay okay okay. Night drives have that quality to them anyway, lend themselves to bisyllabic mantras as miles tick past, as two axles follow each other over seams in the asphalt, over lane dividers and road reflectors, as evenly spaced streetlights illuminate one stretch of road after another and alternate bright with darkness as if half the time you’re only guessing where you are, where you’re going. Light dark hump bump okay okay okay. She had not collapsed, so that was good. She had not stopped breathing or suffered heart failure, been rushed in a wailing ambulance, been rescued from a crowded restaurant or resuscitated on the floor of some public place by a stranger. She would have hated any of that. She had been to the doctor Monday. He had called this afternoon and suggested she check into the hospital for some tests. She had calmly driven herself over, checked herself in, called my mother once she was roomed and begowned. This made my mother insane and was classically my grandmother, so that boded well for everything being okay okay okay. But it seemed to me, the more I drove, that when the doctor called with test results and instead of giving them asked you to check yourself into the hospital for more, things were rarely okay.
I got there. I found my parents. I cried. They cried. Then, almost immediately, the doctor came out. It was like that Far Side cartoon where the owner is yelling at the dog, telling her what she’s done wrong and how frustrated he is and what will happen if she does it again, but all the dog hears is “blah blah Ginger blah blah blah blah.” I was that dog. The doctor said a great many things, and he said them kindly and patiently, but the only one I heard was “cancer.”
After the doctor, after my parents went downstairs to find some coffee, I went into my grandmother’s room where indeed she was asleep. Under covers tucked tightly around hospital gown and bracelet, she looked . . . old. It was this setting finally which insisted I realize how different she was than the picture I carried of her in my mind, a picture no doubt formed in childhood, a twenty-plus-year-old composite much larger, more colorful, more robust than the woman whose sleeping hand I held, whose face was sunken and pale as her sheets, whose brow was wrinkled, whose tiny form barely moved the blankets around it. How long had she looked like this? How had no one noticed? She had always been old—grandmothers are old by definition—but I was certain that word didn’t mean this. I stroked her hand and whispered—though without her hearing aids, she had long since stopped being able to hear anything that wasn’t shouted at her—“okay okay okay okay okay.”
I called home. Jill picked up on the first ring.
“Is everything okay?”
“Nothing is okay.”
“What’s going on?”
“She has cancer.” A rustling as this information was relayed to Katie and whoever else was still there.
“Oh Janey, I’m so sorry. What else did they say?”
“About what?”
“You know, how she is.”
“She has cancer,” I repeated.
“I know, sweetie. That’s terrible. Did they say what happens next?”
“Next?”
“Is it operable? Is it treatable? Will she have surgery or radiation or chemo or what?”
“I don’t know.” This must have been what else the doctor was saying. The good news, the hopeful part if there were any.
“Let me talk.” Katie. Then more rustling with the phone.
“Oh Janey, I’m so sorry. Is she okay?” she said. “We’ll do whatever we can. Is there anything you need? Peter and I could run some clothes up to you tomorrow. We could just come sit with you?”
“No, my folks are here. I’ll borrow some clothes from my mom. It will be fine. I’ll be home soon—I have to teach Monday morning.”
“We can cover your class for you,” Katie said, “or whatever you need. We’ll pray for your grandma,” she added, and this seemed, honestly, like the best idea I’d heard in days, maybe weeks.
Five minutes later, my phone rang. It was Ethan.
“Oh Janey, I’m so sorry.” Everyone was sorry.
“That was fast.”
“I asked them to call me when they heard from you. I didn’t want to bug you, but I was worried. Are you okay?”
Was I okay? Was I? No one had asked this of me yet, not even me, and since the answer was so unambiguously, totally, screamingly NO, I immediately started crying again. Jill would have pestered me with questions. (Are you freaking out? What happened? What are you thinking? What changed?) Katie would have rambled until she turned blue just to distract us both. But Ethan just waited and was quiet with me. When I was done, he said very quietly, “My grandmother lived for years with cancer. Lots of them.” And he told me many things about new treatments and really good drugs, how advanced medicine was treating this disease, how she didn’t suffer, wasn’t in pain. It was comforting that there were things to realistically hope for, things to be done. And it was more so just listening to him tell me about them softly over the phone.
“What will you do now?” he asked.
“Go back to my folks’. Try to sleep. Come back in the morning.”
“Maybe you’ll call me later? Chat a little more before bed? Might help you sleep.”
“It’ll be late.”
“There’s no one here to wake up.”
“Except for you.”
“Except for me,” he admitted, “but that’s okay. I don’t mind.”
Twenty-eight
The next morning when my parents and I got to the hospital ten minutes in advance of visiting hours bearing flowers, cream sodas, salt and vinegar potato chips, cheese sandwiches, and chocolate covered pretzels—my grandmother’s favorites—Katie and Atlas were already in the waiting area, Atlas sound asleep against Katie, Katie sound asleep, head back against the wall behind her, mouth wide open. I laughed out loud, waking Atlas, whose face lit up when he saw me, who reached out his little arms to me to be picked up. But in the half beat I took to savor that moment, I lost the opportunity. Too slow. Already, my mom had scooped him up and was kissing his cheeks, his belly, the bottoms of his feet. He was laughing and squealing and reaching for her mouth, wriggly and pink and overjoyed. Katie roused more slowly.