“How old are you, anyway?” she said.
“Thirty-two.”
“Well, I thought you'd be older,” she repeated in the no-nonsense tone of a person who said just what she was thinking. In that way, she was kin to Faye. I wondered if that was something you grew to as you aged. Like you didn't have anything to lose. Or maybe it came from being a born and bred northerner and not having to come at everything sideways.
“You're not from around here,” she said, more statement than question.
“Richmond,” I said. “Virginia.” I'd never thought of myself as having an accent, but since I'd moved up North, it seemed everyone commented on it.
The living room was small, seriously overheated, and smelled so strongly of wet dog and wood ash, I had to smother a sneeze. While Nona closed the door, I took a quick look around. I swear I'd seen more furniture in a phone booth. The ex-wife must have picked the place clean. A faded plaid couch, the kind you could tell was scratchy without even touching it, faced the fireplace and was flanked by a scarred pine rocker. The Cape Cod Times was spread out on a wooden lobster trap that served as a coffee table. One section of the paper was folded open to a partially completed crossword. The only interesting object in the entire room was a seascape hanging above the mantel, an oil in delicate shades of gray and blue with a dory that surfaced from the fog only after I had been considering it for a minute or two.
“The kitchen's in here,” Nona said, pulling my attention back. We passed by a closed door through which seeped the sound of a television. Nona slowed a step but did not stop. “I just made a pot of coffee, or there are tea bags if you prefer,” she said. “And there's soda in the refrigerator. You just feel free to help yourself to anything.”
I looked over at the closed door, assumed that Luke lay behind it. At our last team meeting, Faye and Ginny had told me that he was militantly private and had agreed to accept only a limited amount of help from hospice. Translated, that meant my role there was to provide support for Nona, who had moved up from Well-fleet to care for him exactly one month back. Until two weeks ago, Luke had resisted having hospice involved in any way at all, but when his doctor gave him an ultimatum—hospice or a nursing home—he had surrendered. At first, he only allowed visits from the nurse and from the health aide who assisted with his bath and personal needs, but after the social worker spoke with him, he agreed to my inclusion on the team. “It's more for your mother than for you,” the social worker told him. “She hasn't been out of the house in days. A volunteer will provide her with some necessary respite and support.” According to Faye, Luke's exact words of acquiescence were “As long as I don't have to have anything to do with her. I don't want some goddamned, recycling do-gooder wringing her hands over me.” It was a sentiment I certainly understood and had no trouble respecting.
We had been told that the central tenet of hospice care was that since the dying have so little control over their lives, the hospice team was, whenever possible, to grant them autonomy in decision making during this end-of-life period. “We meet people where they are, not where we want them to be,” Faye had told me. Still, the more I learned about Luke Ryder, the more surprised I was that Faye hadn't assigned a man to the case. Someone older and experienced, like Bert, a retired FBI agent who has been volunteering for eleven years. But Faye said, “Trust me. I never make a mistake. You're the one.”
“Is Luke in there?” I asked Nona.
“Yes. But they've told you that he doesn't want to be disturbed, didn't they?”
“Yes. They were clear about that.”
Outside, a horn tooted. Three short beeps.
“Well, here's my ride,” Nona said. She looked over at the closed door, serious second thoughts plain on her face. “Is there anything else you need to know?”
“Nothing,” I said, all false confidence.
“It's hard to leave him,” she said.
For an instant, I swear I nearly told her to stay. Instead, I said, “Take as long as you like. I have all day. Really.”
“Well, I won't be gone long,” she said. “An hour at the most.”
“Don't worry,” I said, regretting the words instantly. Don't worry. To a woman whose son was dying.
“He has a bell. Did they tell you that?”
I nodded. It was in my notes.
“He'll ring it if he needs anything.” She hung back at the door, as if still trying to determine if I could be trusted.
“Go,” I said. “He'll be fine. I promise.”
I watched from the window as the car pulled away. I was surprised by a jolt of anxiety—it had been months since I'd had an attack—and felt the telltale prickly flush of heat flooding my body. I closed my eyes and reminded myself to breathe—Deep Breath. Deep Breath. Deep Breath—repeating the mantra until the flash of panic gradually began to subside. I told myself anyone would be a bit nervous under the circ*mstances. I told myself I would be fine.
THE WALL thermostat read seventy-six degrees, but it felt like a sauna. How anyone could stand it was beyond me. I was tempted to lower it but held back. For all I knew, Luke required this kind of heat, although there wasn't anything about it in his file. I stripped down to my T-shirt.
I hadn't thought to bring along a book, and even if I had, I was too nerved up to read. Back in the kitchen, I poured a cup of coffee, so strong it was nearly solid, the last thing on Earth I needed, then I stood by a window and stared out at the backyard. In that first, quick glance, I counted fourteen bird feeders. They were everywhere: hanging from trees, attached to posts, affixed to the windowsill, like some miniature Audubon sanctuary. I busied myself by trying to identify the different varieties as birds swooped in and out. Goldfinch, winter drab feathers already turning yellow. Chickadees. Blue jays. And a gray crested bird that I couldn't name. I'd never been much of a bird person.
I turned away, scanned the room. My gaze settled on a picture of a stunning brunette in a blue bikini that was stuck on the refrigerator with a magnetic plastic frame. Women like that always made me feel too short, my copper hair too bright. Was this the ex? The daughter? A girlfriend? I found myself humming a fragment of the Johnny Lee tune about searching for wrongheaded love.
While I poked around, I kept alert for the sound of his bell, slightly anxious about whether I'd be able to hear it over the voice of the television sports announcer coming from the other room. I sipped the coffee, bitter, and felt… What? Let down? This was so not what I expected.
DURING TRAINING, Faye told us the role of the volunteer was to provide emotional support and practical help to the patients and their families. Errands, chores, anything they needed. Read to them if they wanted. Take them for a ride. Play games. Scrabble was a popular choice. Take your cues from the patient and his family, she had suggested. Be willing to listen. There was one entire training session dedicated to effective communication and reflective listening. As I hear it, you… Could it be that you're feeling… As I think about what you say, it occurs to me you're feeling… We had performed role-playing exercises and had practiced how to talk without preaching, judging, sympathizing, excusing, or advising. Beth, a retired kindergarten teacher, couldn't understand why we shouldn't be allowed to offer advice. “Because,” Faye said, “without your meaning to, it can convey a certain arrogance. It tells the person they don't really understand the situation, but that you do.”
Sitting in the basem*nt room where we'd met for training during the winter, it had sounded easier. Of course, if my sister, Ashley, had been here, she'd do more than give advice. Ten minutes through the front door and she would have aired out the house, turned down the heat, and informed the man hiding behind the closed door that he should take his pride down a notch or two and accept help when it was offered. But I wasn't my sister. Besides, although I wanted to meet Luke, to sit by his bed and have a chance to tell him that I understood what he was going through, I couldn't help but sympathize with his desire for privacy. Like I said, I'd been there myself.
I explored the
kitchen, taking care not to be heard, although I was fairly certain nothing would penetrate the wall of sound generated by the television. I opened a cupboard door, found several medicine vials, a box of Cream of Wheat, and a crateload of Ensure. The adjoining cabinet was stocked with packages of prepared foods. The inexpensive kind. Macaroni and cheese. Scalloped potatoes. Ramen noodles. Cans of corned beef hash and chicken noodle soup. One thing the hospice staff had been specific about during our training was the necessity of establishing boundaries, both emotional and practical. Volunteers, we'd been told, were never to invade the privacy of the patient or the family and never under any circ*mstances to snoop around a patient's home. But I was curious. Plus, I'd never been strong on following procedures. (Every time a flight attendant told me to fasten my seat belt, I wanted to unbuckle it as soon as he walked away. My one-month therapist asked me if I thought I had a problem with authority. Who doesn't? I'd asked. Really.)
I wandered into the bathroom and poked around the contents of the medicine chest. Toothpaste. Tube of hemorrhoid cream. Electric razor. Antacids. A generic pain reliever and a bottle of vitamins months past the expiration date. Nothing out of the ordinary. Hardly worth the trouble of breaking a rule.
We had been given surprisingly few rules. Volunteers weren't supposed to stay overnight. Things like that. Mostly it was guidelines. The thing the staff was really emphatic about was that wewere not allowed to give any medications to a patient. No exceptions. No matter what. Shouldn't be any problem with that one. It was hard to give drugs to an invisible man.
BACK IN the hall, I checked out a gallery of photos in metal frames. A studio shot of a little girl in a sundress with blond hair falling in waves to her hips. (What I wouldn't have given to get my hands on that hair.) The same girl—older—in cap and gown, holding a diploma, hair now bleached nearly white. Not smiling. I assumed this was the daughter—Paige—and, recalling the file notations, tried to read signs of bad attitude in the girl's face, but all I saw was the smooth palette of youth, not unlike that of dozens of my high school students who had 'tude to spare. Next was a black-and-white photo of a man standing at the ocean's edge, knee-deep in the surf. The blond girl, no older than twelve in this picture, stood close at his side, her face alight with joy and tilted up toward his. He was darkly handsome in the snag-your-breath-beneath-your-ribs kind of way that I always associated with Irish men. At that moment, I felt a shock of connection that even today I can recall as vividly as if it were yesterday. I know you.
I stood there a while longer, trying to understand this flash of recognition, this sense of knowing, but I couldn't get a handle on it. Finally, I moved on to another shot. In this one, the dark-haired man stood by a truck, a black Lab at his side. I lifted the photo off the hook and crossed to the kitchen window, where I could get a better look. I recognized the truck as the Dodge in the drive, a new model, so clearly the picture had been taken recently. The man looked well over six feet, tall enough so he could step into the cab without the least effort. Well, no radar needed to signal danger with him. Love on the loose and hearts on the run. His hair was as black as the retriever's. I'd felt hair like that—coarse but not wiry—had held it between my fingers. (Black—true black—remains to this day my favorite hair color. It holds and reflects light like no other shade.) He looked incredibly fit. Even in the picture, you could see that. I glanced over at the closed door, tried to imagine him lying in a bed on the other side. It seemed impossible to believe that the vital man in the photo could be sick, dying. But when had life ever been fair? I had been fourteen when my father died. And twenty-seven when I got cancer.
I replaced the photo on the wall, then stepped closer to the door, stopped short when the floor creaked beneath my feet, strained to hear some sound other than the television. Should I knock? Call his name? Check to see that he was okay? Was he all right? My mouth grew dry. Oh God, I thought. What if he wasn't? My heartbeat accelerated, a caffeine-overdose-like symptom that sometimes foreshadowed a spell of anxiety. I inhaled deliberately, slowed my breath. I closed my eyes, steadied myself, wished I were back at the cottage, busy at my worktable fashioning a piece of jewelry. At that precise moment, I would have given anything if I could have gone back and altered the events that had brought me to that room.
two
IF. When we were much younger, Ashley and I used to play a game in which we rolled life backward, an exercise we found simultaneously thrilling and terrifying. If Mama's boyfriend hadn't gotten a burst appendix, Ashley would start, she would have gone to dinner with him that night. On cue, I would chime in: And if she were having dinner with her beau—our mama's word—she wouldn't have gone off to the movies by herself. Ashley would pick up the story: And if Daddy hadn't taken a new job and moved to her town, he would already have friends and wouldn't be alone on a Saturday night. Taking turns, we would continue the tale to its end. How if our daddy hadn't been standing right behind our mama at the box office and she hadn't forgotten to cash her check from the day care center where she worked and if he hadn't insisted on paying for her ticket and if she hadn't said yes but only if he would let her pay him back, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, a litany we knew by heart—how if one of these things hadn't happened exactly as it had, neither of us would have been born. It absolutely unnerved us to think how one incident changed, one particular break in a chain of events—an appendix not burst, a new job offer not accepted, a check already cashed— just the smallest act altered and neither of us would be alive. That was the part that was so scary and remained so even after we'd grown up: The arbitrariness of history. The fragile strand that was cause and effect. If.
AS I STOOD in Luke Ryder's house and stared at his closed door, I found myself unraveling the strand of circ*mstances that had carried me to that moment. If I hadn't broken up with Steve (not exactly the shock of the millennium; broke up with a guy, broke up with a guy, broke up with a guy, was the major theme of my love-in-all-the-wrong-places-with-all-the-wrong-men life) and if my job hadn't been eliminated (arts were always the first to go; God forbid any school budget cut should affect sports) and if I hadn't needed to escape the too-heavy weight of Lily's concern for me and my own long history of disappointing her, I would not have moved to the family's cottage on Cape Cod for a year while I tried to sort things out. I'd thought that maybe, in a different setting, I would manage to let go of the fear and the sense of vulnerability that had settled on me since I'd gotten ill and I'd be able to look to the future. As my grandma said, I'd been given a new chance at life. A lot of people didn't have that opportunity. So here I was on Cape Cod. What was it called? A geographic cure? Well, cures come in all manner of guises. I was taking my first steps in a new life direction as yet undefined. I didn't know exactly where I was going, but I was eager to begin the journey.
FIVE YEARS earlier, on the day following my twenty-seventh birthday, doctors discovered a tumor on my brain. “It can't be,” I said to the neurosurgeon, even as I stared at the brain scan. Just the previous week, I had run a ten-K and then gone out and partied like a wild woman. Of course, we are never prepared for the things that rush into our lives uninvited. You think life is settled, and then it isn't.
There had been no warning. The few symptoms I had experienced I'd discounted as ordinary side effects of modern life. Who didn't have an occasional headache? Who didn't get a bit rundown? Yes, I'd been tired that winter and had had headaches from time to time, but I was working hard—a full-time job, two craft shows to prepare jewelry for, my running club—and I put the fatigue and headaches down to stress. On the worst days, I'd swallow three Advils or pop a couple of Aleves and try to forget about it.
By spring, the headaches had become so chronic that I mentioned them to the examining physician during the physical routinely required by my health insurance provider. He didn't seem overly concerned. He suggested I try some stress-reduction techniques and said to check back if they persisted. And even when my eyelid seemed to be a tiny bit droopy, this chan
ge seemed minor. Nothing dramatic. No pain. We have an amazing capacity to explain things away. Until we can't.
When Lily noticed the slight asymmetry in my face, she insisted on calling my uncle Brent, my daddy's brother and a pediatrician. He questioned me closely and suggested a few tests. Just to rule everything out. Later I learned he had suspected Bell's palsy.
But it wasn't palsy or MS, or the half dozen other things they tested for and eliminated. It was a growth on my brain. Schwan-noma. A laughable name for a tumor. It sounded like a disease you'd get from riding a bike. Or something Woody Allen would make up. It proved to be malignant.
NOW, AFTER an operation to root out the tumor, weeks of radiation, months of recovery, and years of moving on, I truly believed the nightmare was in the past. At my checkup last summer, I had been given a clean bill of health. I had passed the all-important five-year cancer-free mark. I was determined to be hopeful. Possibilities lay ahead. Opportunities I hadn't allowed myself to consider until I had the all-clear checkup. Still, I would catch others looking at me as if I might at any minute have a seizure. Friends, faculty members, students, the boyfriend du jour. Although once they learned of my history, most men proved gun-shy.
“I'm fine,” I'd tell Lily when I was overtired and my eyelid drooped and worry clouded her face. And I was fine. I was running again. A half marathon last summer. My hair had grown back and was nearly as long as it had been before I started radiation, except for the spot behind my ear the size of a half-dollar where it had receded a bit. But when my position at school was phased out and my latest romance blew up, I saw that I had been treading water. I saw a chance to really start over.
At first, Lily tried to dissuade me, but eventually she gave in. “If you're bound and determined to go off,” she said, “why don't you take the Cape house? We haven't rented it in years, so it's just sitting empty.”
“Hell,” Ashley said, adding her ten cents, “she might as well. She's already gone through all the eligible men in Richmond.”
