“Okay. It says this drug here can cause sterility.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means…it means that you may not be able to have babies when you grow up. Sterility, you know, like sterile.”
“Is that bad?”
“Well, it is if you want to have kids, but hey, you don’t need to think about that right now. Look, that’s the worst thing listed here. Your chemo won’t like, make you deaf or blind or anything awful like that.”
But from then on, every time Ainslie arrived at the oncology clinic for another round of chemo, she thought about that word—sterility. She had to push it down and try to focus her thoughts in a positive direction. They told her to imagine chemo moving through her body like a video game character blasting away cancer cells. One time, she had asked to see what her cancer looked like. Her pathologist had been thrilled to show her, had adjusted the microscope eyepieces until the cells were large and like gobs of purple Jell-O stuck together. It was hard to hold her head still enough to keep the focus, but she’d stared through that microscope for a really long time. The cells didn’t move like she had expected because they were dead. The pathologist gave her color printouts of the strange river of cells and she always tried to focus on those cells and mentally blast them away with her imaginary chemo weapons. It helped to know what the enemy looked like.
Once when it was her father’s turn to take her for her chemo clinic visit, her father had put aside his sports magazine and stared at her.
Lying back in a lounger sipping a grape soda, Ainslie had met his gaze and said, “What?”
“You know, baby,” he said, “we’ll always wonder, your mother and I, whether we did or didn’t do something that caused this to happen to you. I mean, we’re sorry if we did. We didn’t know. We still don’t.”
“It’s not your fault, Daddy,” she told him. “It’s not anybody’s fault. It’s just a stupid thing that happened.”
His face shifted in a strange way when Ainslie told him her disease was developed before she was even born, that it wasn’t anything they’d done.
“How do you know this?” he asked her.
She’d shrugged as if it was something everybody knew.
All he’d said after that was, “Does your mother know?”
Ainslie said, “Yeah. But she doesn’t believe it.”
She was always sick for a couple of days after a chemo treatment, then she’d buck up and things would be good for a while before she had to go back and do it all over again. Her parents tried to keep everything as normal as possible. Her dad went to work and Sloan went to school. Her home-school teacher brought homework and Ainslie tried to keep up with the rest of the third grade. Afternoons were all about television and video games. Late in the day the mail would come, and there would be a few cool cards or another package from her grandparents in New Jersey.
It was in these lonely afternoons, before Sloan came home from school, that Ainslie felt sad. She would look at where her animal tanks had been and miss her little pets. The stupid doctors had made her parents get rid of all of her animals because of germs. That had been the worst part of being sick. Ainslie loved her hermit crab. She’d had Mr. Crabs for more than three years, and he had moved shells so many times that she finally lost count. Ainslie had watched his pink, squishy body trying out new shells. He was shy when he was naked, and he’d creep out, his eye stalks searching for safety, then he’d streak to another shell. Ainslie’s mother said Mr. Crabs was modest. It was a good thing her crab didn’t have cancer because you couldn’t be modest if you had to have your butt stuck up in the air for all the nurses and doctors and student doctors at the hospital to see. She had cried and begged to keep her old crab, so her parents had moved him into Sloan’s room until Ainslie could have him back.
A couple of times during her alone time, Ainslie had considered actually writing in the journal the counselor had given her. He’d said it would help her deal with her feelings to write down her thoughts or draw pictures about how she felt. But Ainslie didn’t like to write, and she couldn’t draw nearly as well as Sloan. She’d scribbled a few things down, but something told her that if she wrote anything too personal, her mother would surely peek. So Ainslie just shared her problems with Sloan when she was around. Sloan always seemed to know how to make things better somehow. She wasn’t like adults.
The adults were always full of advice—think positively, imagine video games, write in your journal. They were always bringing her stuffed animals and flowers and cards. Always in her face about something, but they always had that sad, almost creepy look.
At least Sloan was cool. She never said everything was going to be okay like the adults did. She just acted normal. That was one of the things about being sick, everybody acted weird around you. But Sloan just said that being sick sucked.
And it did suck. It was the biggest, most stupid sucky thing that could happen.
It sucked to have your animals taken away because of germs. It sucked that your hair fell out and your face swelled until you looked like a cartoon character. It sucked that you were constantly getting stuck with needles and poked until you just wanted to scream at people to leave you alone. It sucked to feel bad all the time and there was nothing you could do about it.
Being sick should be like school. You go for a certain number of days and do what you have to do and you get a report card and everybody says you did great and then it’s all over and you get a summer vacation. But being sick wasn’t like that. There didn’t seem to be any end.
CHAPTER 8
Pleasure Pain
Emmett glanced over at Lauren in the passenger seat. Lines had started at the corners of her eyes, and the skin on her neck seemed tight. He noticed when she walked out to the car tonight that she was thinner; her soft round hips had dwindled until her dress hung straight down her sides. She had been quiet for the fifteen minutes it took them to drive south to Lafayette Isle.
“Sure you want to go?” he asked as they approached the guard hut.
“We have to do something normal again,” she said.
Emmett pulled the car up to the security gate. A guard stepped out with a clipboard. Emmett lowered the window and sticky, moss-flavored air invaded the cool of the car, a first wave of summer in March.
“Evening, sir,” the guard said as he leaned down to eye level.
“We’re here for the Wannamaker party. Sullivan,” Emmett said.
The guard smiled and motioned him on. “Have a nice time.”
“I can’t believe it’s so hot already,” he said to Lauren as the window slid up.
“You know it’ll cool off again before summer sets in.”
“I just hope it doesn’t trick the trees into blooming early and then freeze them out like last year.”
The smooth drive wound through dense coastal forest, land that had been owned by the Vanderbilts. Most of Georgetown County had been owned by Vanderbilts at one time, but this island had been sold and developed into a community, although still private. They drove across small causeways, and Emmett pointed out a gator languid on the bank of the salt marsh, only his tail dipping into the water. Egrets perched in craggy trees, stark white against the growing dark. They passed golf cart crossings, stables, and two pools. Giant houses became more tightly spaced, although all had a guarded measure of privacy.
They parked down the road from the Wannamakers’ colossal Lowcountry home and walked past an easy million dollars worth of SUVs and sedans pulled onto manicured lawns. A dozen golf carts were clustered next to the house, neighbors who had cruised over, their early cocktails melting in drink holders. Twenty-six steps led up to a wide verandah that wrapped the pale blue house. Beach music and