Chapter 29
29
Abe
The next morning, you want to keep remembering.
I ask you if you want to skip this part.
Some of it, you say. Some of it cannot be left out.
You remember, in the beginning, the pain like being hunted. It sought you out, held you down. It came in the night or in the morning. Some days, it stayed all day long. Sometimes, it felt like there was a grenade, heavy and metal, in you. Like it might blow and blow you up from your middle, from the inside out. There were two nodes, swollen and sore, in your groin. Was that them?
You remember, some days, wondering if you had any blood left in you. How you weren’t already emptied out, and merely snakeskin now, or a dry old pipe.
You remember, too, how the weirdest part about getting sick was how it made you feel closer to your mother. You were suddenly in her shoes, her dress, were her even, decades and decades later. You could look in the mirror and see her see you. How are you feeling today? you’d ask. Same as me? Same as you. I miss you.
Stage IIIC2, they said. They didn’t have language like that for your mother, you’re sure. Or odds.
And you remember how hard it was, in the beginning, to be sick but also to be sick without me. You didn’t tell me for an entire month. By then, I’d already told you about Alice in the Park. I’d ruined things. Ruined everything. I’m not trying to be dramatic. You were never dramatic. You never even screamed.
You shake your head. You purse your lips.
I didn’t deserve to know, is the truth of it. You remember you couldn’t bear my kindness. Tenderness is a question of giving up, you say. You just wanted to hold on.
And about Alice: you remember that it wasn’t so much that you wanted to get back at me as you wanted me to take it back. Could I just not have. Could you just not have known.
Still, you remember that if not for illness, and illness then, maybe we wouldn’t have been all right.
We take a break. I feed you buttered toast with your favorite jam. We made it together: strawberry peach. You have two bites. I finish the rest and wipe your mouth. I ask you if you want to listen to music. You say yes. But as soon as it’s on—Paul Simon—I see your eyes squinch. I turn it off, shake out your blankets, hold your feet and hum to you instead. I want to beg you to forget what I did, and how I did it. It was so long ago now, but sadness carves deeper than happiness, doesn’t it? That’s what they say. Maybe it’s true. But also, I remember you dancing to Buena Vista Social Club in our kitchen in an apron and socks, tomato soup on the stove. I remember that better than I remember almost anything else.
And doesn’t that mean something?
You remember moving to the hotel, after I told you, for two weeks: white sheets, views of Central Park, French fries in bed. You wanted to do everything without me. Without Max. Without the guilt. More of it. Though that was impossible, wasn’t it? You just wanted it more possible, you say.
You remember going to your first doctor’s appointment alone. Is there someone who can come get you? they asked. You remember racing home, knowing I’d be picking up Max from school, and scouring my office for evidence of her. Her underwear. Her notes in my books. You remember wanting to know, and also the opposite of that.
You never found anything. I tell you, there was nothing to find.
You remember how, in the beginning, the angst was equally distributed between two things—Alice and sickness—and how odd that was. You’d remember one and forget the other. You’d forget the other and the first one would float to the surface like a body. Hers. Yours. One was fatal. The other just felt like that.
You remember on the day you told me about the cancer it was not because you wanted to but because you had to. You couldn’t carry the groceries up the stairs, zipper your coat, brush the back of your hair. You asked me to help you. We were standing in the bathroom; I was working through a snarl, and you said, I have it. As my mother had it. That is why I’m like this.
I remember, after that, it wasn’t you but me who reached for the wall—and how that made perfect sense, ridiculously. Truly.
You remember, in the beginning, niceties or maybe delusion. How we both said we were sure you’d be okay. Were we bound together by fear or hope or both, in the beginning? We were looking at each other in the bathroom mirror. Maybe you were looking past me at something else. Maybe you were looking at your mother, or your healthy self, or at Alice. I can only hope not.
You remember blue chairs in the doctor’s office, wearing a cap, ice, burning, a nurse who kept saying she couldn’t believe how young you were, and how good it was that you’d already had a child. You remember ginger ale and applesauce, needles, pink and white pills in tiny green cups. You remember not eating because you couldn’t go to the bathroom, not going to the bathroom because you weren’t eating. You remember trying to walk across the Park to your appointment and getting so tired that you had to flag down a horse-drawn carriage. He took you all the way east and between the buildings too, outside of the Park. And you told him. Killed my wife, he said. Hers was in the colon. He didn’t know.
You remember getting very thin very quickly and that despite all the sirens and horns, waiting for a cab on Central Park West, you heard the ding when your ring fell off. You remember you wore it around your neck, after that, and despite everything.
When was it—months later?—that you let me carry you and tuck you in on the sofa so you could nap? I’ll never forget it. It was the first time you let me touch you, really touch you, again. You were silk across my arms. I remember Max, in the corner, watching. He was holding a cup of juice and also a blue truck. For once, he didn’t spill it or slam anything. For once, he didn’t say something. Or ask. He just stood there. I remember how small he was, shoulders, feet, nose.
You remember we didn’t tell him. Neither did my mother. She, too, felt like it was a bad idea—and said as much, though she so rarely forced an opinion. He’ll be better off, she said. He was just five or six, and there was already so much distance between you two. But he knew. Of course he knew. It defined everything.
You remember when you were sick, he gave you a wider berth, but also, he made less noise. At night, he would ask to keep the lights on, to sleep with all his cars and books in the sheets. He would ask what was wrong with you and I would tell him nothing. You were just tired. I stayed with him until he was asleep and then peeled a truck wheel off his cheek. It had left a mark.
You remember that for the next two years, Max was taken care of by me, by my mother, by me, by my mother. You were asleep, you were staring out the window, you were on the toilet, dreaming of your own mother, rubbing your back. Sometimes, Bea would come over and it was the only time I’d hear you laugh. You and her in there, alone. She brought you a TV table so you could watercolor in bed. And you did, every now and again. You’d ask me to give the watercolors to Max and I always did. He kept them in a pile.
I wish you’d seen how Max rose to the occasion for us. But also, it feels cruel to tell you. And useless. Was it in reverence of you or me or because he was afraid? Not of his mortality but of how much we could all take. I remember he’d play chess with my father at their apartment. My mother taught him to make stews, do laundry, be a shark at blackjack, and also canasta. Not all kids can muster; that is what I want to say.
What I am saying is that everyone gave.
It was then, no surprise, that my father sold the business. He gave us money. Just like that. And it helped. We can both acknowledge that. All of us can. He didn’t ask me, didn’t have to. He just knew.
You remember sometimes wondering what that time would have been like without the cancer, without Alice. You and Max. You and me. What would we have done in the afternoons? On the weekends? There was nothing simple. Nothing obvious, you say. Everything was compromised because everything was broken.
You remember sometimes wondering if it was the art or the depression or the sickness that drove me to Alice. There is no way to know, you say. But I’d like to. What would have helped? What should I have done differently? In this moment, your voice is changed. You sound like a young girl. It cracks me open. I am yolk, on the floor.
Oh, Jane, I say. I cover my face. I don’t know how to tell you that there has never been fault between us. Or at least never anything specific. You were. I was. We have always just been water, slipping through holes.