45
Fifty-Five Fruit Street, Boston, Mass.
She tells them not to come. She wants them to come, but she always tells them not to. Pete has to drive her, of course, but there’s no reason Kylie and Marty have to be there.
As ex-husbands go, Marty is pretty high up there.
They wait outside in the family room.
The family room is fine. There’s a TV tuned to CNN and a stack of National Geographics going back to the 1960s. There’s a view of Boston Harbor. You can just see the USS Constitution.
She’s glad they aren’t in here to watch her gasp in pain when the nurse accesses the port or to see her when the poisons flow and the shivering begins and the nausea makes the room spin.
Chemo is a little death that you invite in in order to keep the big death waiting outside on the porch.
When the humiliation and the agony are done, they wheel her into the recovery room and they smile at her. Hugs from Kylie and Pete. Marty talking a mile a minute.
That’s what you need. Family. Friends. Support.
Dr. Reed is happy with her treatment. And her prognosis is good. And the trajectory is pointing to the upper right of the chart.
But the terrible secret truth is that she isn’t doing well.
Her body is failing.
She’s getting weaker.
And she knows it isn’t the cancer that’s consuming her. That isn’t the big C.
Not the cancer.
It.
The Chain.
46
A family has just finished moving into a house in Bethesda, Maryland. It’s been a long day but now the delivery guys are gone and all the boxes are inside.
The family are posing for a photo outside their new home. A happy family in sunlit suburbs. Imagine an early-1990s version of Robert Bechtle’s painting ’61 Pontiac, except the kids are the same age. Twins. The husband, Tom Fitzpatrick, is a small, trim, dark-haired man in a white shirt and thin black tie. He looks rather like the first Darrin on Bewitched. He seems harmless enough. His new wife, Cheryl, is pregnant. She has long, straight golden hair and bangs that hover a couple of inches above her pretty brown eyes. Without straining the analogy, you could say that she has a bit of a Samantha Stephens vibe.
The little boy, Moonbeam, is now called Oliver. A chubby, harmless-looking kid with maybe a slightly eerie unblinking intensity about him. The girl, Mushroom, is called Margaret. She too does the eerie unblinking thing, but you don’t notice as much with her curly red hair and perpetual-motion antics. If Tom were one for taking his kids to head doctors, Margaret would probably be on Ritalin, but Tom is not one for doctors. He’s old-fashioned like that. “You don’t need a pill for every ill,” his father says.
Two days after they move in, they hold a housewarming party and invite all the neighbors. There are congressional aides living on this street, employees of the State Department, the Treasury Department.
There are three parties taking place in the house at the same time that night. There is the party where the men are getting to know one another. Tom comes off OK. He seems like a square, boring kind of a guy with his GI Joe hair and pocket protector and fridge full of Coors Light.
There’s the women’s party. Cheryl seems pretty and dull and maybe a bit simple. Cheryl is a typical suburban mom who had her own dreams but who has given them up to be a supportive wife. Cheryl wanted to be a baker like her grandfather.
And then there’s the kids’ party taking place in the TV room. The kids’ party is the most interesting. The boys are dissecting the record collection and declaring it lame: John Denver, Linda Ronstadt, Juice Newton, the Carpenters. The girls are spilling the family secrets. Ted’s dad is a drunk who is having an affair with his secretary. Mary’s mom crashed her car two years ago and killed a woman on a bicycle. Janine’s mom thinks the neighborhood has gone straight to hell now that an Indian family has moved in.
As the party continues well past the kids’ bedtimes, Oliver is informed that the Jets and the Giants both suck but the Giants suck more because they’re in the same division as the Redskins.
Oliver says that he doesn’t even really like football. A ten-year-old boy named Zachary tells Oliver that he is a little queer who smells. Zachary also informs him that his mom looks like a whore.
Oliver calmly tells the boy that his mom is dead. His mom was murdered and her body was mutilated and then burned in a fire.
Zach looks pale. He looks even paler a minute after Margaret dares him to drink half a can of beer she found. Zachary chugs the can and says he has drunk beer before. That might be the case, but not beer laced with a teaspoon of ipecac syrup.
Zach begins projectile vomiting, and this effectively puts an end to the party.
47
She stares at the computer screen. A blank page, a winking cursor.
It’s a frosty December morning, an hour from high tide. The tidal basin is filled with wintering geese and eider.
She takes a deep breath and types: Lecture 2: Introduction to Existentialism. The existentialists believed that our lives are an attempt to impose meaning on an existence where there is no meaning. For them this world is an ouroboros—a serpent that eats itself. Patterns repeat. There is no progress. Civilization is a rope bridge dangling over an abyss.
She shakes her head. Wrong tone. She clicks Delete and watches her hard work vanish in an instant.
Kylie comes downstairs in her new red coat. She looks happy today. She, like her mother, is getting good at faking happy. A little turned-up-corner-of-the-mouth smile and a phony lilt to the voice. But the eyes tell a different story.
She’d been having a lot of stomach cramps lately. The doctors haven’t found anything. They say it’s probably stress. Stress that doubles her up in pain and gives her nightmares and causes her to wet the bed.
She puts a brave face on it, but Rachel knows.
“Can we go?” Kylie asks.
“Sure. This isn’t working anyway,” Rachel says and shuts the laptop.
“Just give me five minutes to shower and we can head out,” Pete says.
“We probably shouldn’t be late,” Kylie replies.
“If he says five minutes, he means five minutes,” Rachel says. On a planet filled with unreliable men—fathers who desert their families, husbands who run off with younger women—Pete is someone who won’t let you down. Still, she isn’t going to allow an addict to share a house with her daughter, so she makes sure that Pete is religiously following his methadone program. He is, and shoring up his responsible-provider street cred, he has taken a security-guard gig to pay off his sudden massive credit-card debt.
Exactly five minutes later they are in the Volvo traveling into town. They park at the Starbucks, and Rachel hugs a hot tea in a window seat while Kylie and Pete go off to get a few things.
It’s a busy Saturday morning, and Newburyport is full of locals and tourists. Marty is picking them up soon with his new girlfriend. Of course he has a new girlfriend. The plan B at last. But rather than rendezvousing on Plum Island, they are meeting in the safer, more neutral Starbucks in Newburyport.
As soon as Kylie is out of sight, Rachel takes her phone and checks the app for the GPS tracker in Kylie’s shoes. Yup, there she is, walking up High Street and turning left to go into the Tannery. Every child of every parent is a hostage to fortune, but not every parent has been reminded of this so vividly.