Chapter 21
Damn, Emily immediately texted back. You’re famous now.
Nora!!! Julia texted a few minutes later. V and I are dying over you potentially dating Will the Wizard. Is this for real? Do we trust Page Six?
Yep, she responded. Dev and I are together now.
And if her heart could beat outside of her chest, suddenly she felt it right there. It pounded furiously as everything she had ever wanted, and everything she hadn’t even understood she’d wanted, enveloped her. Brooklyn-based actress! Devlin St. Claire’s girlfriend! Well, yes, yes, she was.
After they’d seen each other in New York last fall, they’d been keeping their relationship on the down-low and she hadn’t even told her sisters. They knew she’d gone out to LA last month, but they’d believed it was for work, until now.
Sorry I didn’t tell you sooner, she typed out, feeling a little guilty that they were just finding out now, alongside the rest of the world. It’s only been a few months, and it was just so new… we were waiting to see where it was going. I didn’t want to jinx it.
Bitch please, Emily responded. We all knew where it was going last May.
If you’re happy, then I’m so happy for you! Julia wrote.
I’m happy!!!!
She texted a picture of the Page Six blurb to their father too and said, Look, I’m getting some press for my upcoming movie! And this is the actor I told you about. We’re dating!
Not even a moment later, her phone rang, Dad’s number. Was he finally, finally ready to admit that maybe, just maybe, she was going to make a real career for herself, the way she had always dreamed? She was feeling both smug and happy.
“Daddy!” she said brightly as she picked up the phone. Then she inwardly chided herself for how she still immediately turned into a little girl with him.
“Nora,” he said softly. “I’m so sorry.”
She sighed and braced herself for how he was about to find fault with her.
She cleared her throat. “Page Six is a pretty big deal, Daddy. And my agent already said she was getting a ton of calls since this story broke.” Okay, technically not true.
But also, technically today was a holiday.
Stella would be getting calls. Nora would be getting attention. Next week.
“Nora,” he said again. “I have to tell you something.”
Then her heart froze, and she tried to remember how to breathe. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m sick,” he said.
“Oh no! Do you have the flu?” Dev had the flu last week and it had meant they weren’t able to spend Christmas together like they’d planned. Instead, she had, last-minute, taken the train to DC to have dinner with Julia and Veronica and Ted.
He was silent on the other end of the line for a moment. Nora could hear him breathing, and that reassured her momentarily. “There’s a malignant tumor in my lung,” he said.
The words malignant tumor sounded strange, like something foreign she had never been taught the meaning of. She repeated them once back to him, as a question, and didn’t like the way the words felt on the tip of her tongue. Then she said, “How could there be a tumor in your lung? You never smoked.”
“I don’t know,” he said quietly. It was strange to think that her father, who had always seemed to know everything, didn’t have the answer to this.
“Well, you’ll get treatment and be okay, right?” Nora asked hopefully. “There’s lots of things doctors can do these days.”
“I’m starting chemo next week,” he said. “Best case, I go into remission by the summer.”
Nora didn’t ask what the worst case was; she didn’t want to know. She couldn’t fathom knowing. “That’s good,” she said instead. “Do you need anything? How can I help?”
“No, I just wanted you to know what was going on with me, honey.” Then he paused. “I’m visiting Emily now and I saw Julia in November. It’s been a while since I’ve seen you. Maybe you pick a good weekend to fly out here. I’ll buy your plane ticket.”
It occurred to her in that moment that she was the last one he’d told, that Emily and Julia had probably already known about this for days, if not weeks.
Had Julia known when she’d been at her house for Christmas dinner last week?
If she had, she hadn’t let on in the slightest. “I’ll check my schedule and visit in the next few weeks, okay? ” Nora promised.
“Good. I can’t wait to see you.” He paused for a moment, and then he said something that really made her worried about his health. “And if you want to bring that actor boyfriend, I’d love to meet him.”
Nora called Julia as soon as she hung up with Dad. “Hello there, Page Six!” Julia said cheerfully as she answered the phone.
“When did you know about Dad?” Nora asked quietly.
“Oh, Nora.” Julia sighed. “What does it matter when I knew?”
It mattered to Nora. She’d hated being last her whole life. “Julia,” she whined. “You always do this to me. You and Emily still treat me like I’m five years old.”
“Come on, Nora, that’s not true. Dad said he wanted to talk to all of us on his own timeline. And the important thing is he’s getting treatment, and he’s going to be fine.”
Julia would never tell Nora that she had known for six weeks that something was wrong.
That Dad had mentioned it casually over Thanksgiving when he’d come to visit, that there was an upcoming biopsy.
And that she had spent most of her lunch breaks throughout December researching lung cancer at the Georgetown library.
Ever since, she’d had a sinking feeling in her stomach.
Emily hadn’t seen their dad in almost a year when he had called her out of the blue and told her he was coming to Florida between Christmas and New Year’s. He’d already bought his plane tickets. Luckily, Emily had no other plans.
Usually, he went to Julia’s house for the holidays, to spend them with his one and only granddaughter, but this year, when he called Emily, he’d told her that he wanted to start his 2011 off with sunshine. “And I want to see the ocean again,” he’d told her.
Emily hadn’t clarified that in Tampa, it was actually the gulf. Instead, she’d told him she would make up the guest room in her condo and take him to Clearwater Beach. Give him a tour of her museum.
“I’d love all that,” he’d said. “And I want to finally meet this Cecile too.”
Emily briefly wondered if Nora had given up her secret.
But when she pressed Dad on why he wanted to meet her boss, he’d only said that he always liked to know his daughters’ friends.
She supposed it was true in high school and still true now.
And she accepted that answer, whether it was the actual truth or not.
It was the only way she had maintained a good relationship with him over the years, accepting his word as good, even when deep down she didn’t believe him.
Dad told her about his diagnosis two days before New Year’s, when she took him to the beach.
They had met Cecile for lunch, and Dad had fawned over her in a way that Emily had found strangely embarrassing.
But Cecile had already texted her to say how great he was, how lucky Emily was.
Two hours later he and Emily sat next to each other in folding sand chairs, toes in the gulf, and Dad blurted it all out stoically, staring straight ahead at the water.
“What do you mean sick?” Emily asked, unable to process the gravity of it.
Dad was a tall man, who towered over all three of his daughters.
Emily’s big bones and height came from him.
But he was thin and fit and still had a full head of wiry gray hair at sixty-eight.
When she was in college, he’d been hospitalized with a bout of appendicitis, but Emily couldn’t remember any other time in her life that he wasn’t the perfect picture of health.
Still, Dad told her about his treatment, and she managed to keep herself together for the next few days, until she dropped him at the airport to fly home on January third.
Then she found herself driving straight to Cecile’s little redbrick house, as if on autopilot.
She didn’t know where else to go. Who else to talk to.
Her sisters’ text chat had been oddly silent since Nora had sent her Page Six news two days earlier.
It was unclear to her whom Dad had told first, or why he had chosen to come tell her in person and not Julia or Nora.
In hindsight, it almost felt unfair that Emily had gotten to ring in the New Year with him, watching the ball drop on TV from her couch.
That she had taken him to the beach, shared a grouper plate with him for dinner.
That she had gotten to hug him goodbye at the airport and inhale the very Dad earthy scent of him.
As the middle child, Emily wasn’t used to getting special treatment. Why now? Why her?
“It’s because you’re so calm,” Cecile said, pouring Emily a glass of Cabernet, then pouring one for herself. She moved aside a pile of picture books to sit down on the couch next to Emily, tucking her long legs underneath her. Her long hair brushed Emily’s arm, making her shiver.
“The fuck I am calm,” Emily said in response, downing a large sip of wine, hoping to erase the chill.
“Nora sounds dramatic, and I gather Julia is type A. Maybe he just needed you to take him to the beach and make him feel like everything would be okay in that soothing, practical way you have about you?”
Soothing, practical way? She shook her head. Did that really describe her? Had she done that? She wasn’t sure. “What if everything isn’t okay?” She whispered her deepest fear out loud to Cecile now, and Cecile leaned in closer, wrapping Emily in a hug.
Emily could feel the beating of Cecile’s heart, close to her own, hear it vibrating into the stillness of the moment.
Or maybe it was her own heart she was hearing, feeling.
Thumping. “I wish everything were different,” Emily heard herself saying, her own voice coming from some faraway place she couldn’t quite control.
“He’s going to be just fine,” Cecile said. “I know it.”