unwinding herself from the silver straps.
Boo knew where my mother was. The hurt of that had been sharp at first, but now it felt like a fading slap. No matter how many times I asked her, she wouldn’t tell, couldn’t tell, because she would never betray my mother. Boo kept her promises. She was the only one I knew who did, and though it made me ache inside, made my stomach turn and my eyes burn, I had to respect that.
I am grown now. I have to remind myself sometimes that all of this is inevitable, that if it hadn’t been cancer, it would have been something else. Everyone has to leave sometime, everyone dies. But at thirty, this feels like an injustice. I read the obituaries every day, looking for others like me. But almost everyone who dies here is already old. Their numbers glare at me, mocking, from the smudged pages: 93, 76, 81.
This morning Becca brings bagels and the Sunday Burlington Free Press, dividing it according to our now familiar routine. While she reads the “Living” section, I scour the lists of the newly deceased.
“I’m buying you a juicer,” she says, her finger pointing to a glossy Kmart insert. “You like carrot juice?”
“Yuck.”
“Tomato juice?” Her finger presses into the advertisement.
I shake my head, returning to the former Navy officer, 75. The grandmother of twenty-seven, 98. The retired surgeon, 81.
“You can use fruit, too. Oranges, kiwi even.” She sounds exasperated.
I look up from the obituaries. She is tapping the ad now, insistent.
“We’ll go next weekend,” I say.
“The sale ends today,” she says. “Then it goes right back to the normal price.”
“Fine,” I say. “This afternoon.”
Satisfied, she smiles and folds the advertisement carefully. “I bet you can even use pineapples. Mangoes.”
Never mind I know she hasn’t once seen a mango at the Shop-N-Save. I nod and smile anyway.
My instinct in the beginning was to fight. I laced up my gloves, stood in the ring, and imagined cancer cloaked in a tacky satin robe in the other corner. For three years, my hands have been curled into fists. But I’m tired now. I am tired and bloodied and my blows are soft. It’s because of Becca, my relentless coach, that I continue. I dream the white towel floating down into the center of the ring, but she clings to it. She is holding on to it with every bit of her strength, and her fists are stronger than mine.
But it is autumn here now, and I know I am no different than the precarious leaves, holding on to the branches of the trees outside my window. I dream myself red and gold and purple. I dream the flight from branch to sky to ground. But every time I begin to fall, Becca is there, demanding to know exactly what I think I am doing.
She believes the underdog can win the fight, that winning is as simple as persistence and faith. In my corner, she rinses my bloodied face with cool water and urges me back into the cold ring. She knows how tired I am, knows that without rest there is no way I will be able to win. She thinks that I am only taking a break, only gathering strength.
Daddy almost never came home anymore. Every night that he worked, he spent at Roxanne’s house. That was fine with me. When he was home, he just stared at the things my mother left behind. I found him once in the bathroom, holding one of her razors, the bathtub steaming with hot water and the lilac bubble soap she always used.
Before she left, my mother’s baths had been intricate rituals. I actually believed that something magical occurred each time she went into the small bathroom off the kitchen and closed the door behind her. She would leave us after dinner, while we were still cleaning our plates. My father would open another beer, Quinn would scrape whatever was left from the blue-and-white casserole dish onto his plate, and I would wonder what she was doing in there. After the dishes were done and Daddy and Quinn had retired to their respective corners of our small house, my mother would emerge in her giant red bathrobe, turbaned like a woman in a commercial.
I thought I might figure out her secrets by studying the artifacts, but there was little to go on. After she was done, I would lock myself in the bathroom as the water drained. The smell was of lilacs, even in winter. Sometimes I would close my eyes and reach into the steam; I swear I could feel the purple petals in my fingers. Along the edge of the cracked porcelain tub lay mysterious instruments, like the tools of a magician. Silver razor, clippers, tweezers. Once, I took the razor and ran it across the length of my arm. When I looked at the blade, it was full of downy hairs. I blew them off and hoped she wouldn’t know what I’d done. I was obsessed with my mother’s rituals of hand cream and pumice and perfume, because when she came out of the steamy bathroom each night, she looked like a different person. Even if Daddy had spent the whole day lying on the couch with the cool washcloth pressed against his head and a beer in his hand, after her bath, her skin glowed pink and her face looked calm. I imagined her worries swirling down the drain, like bubble soap or the sawdust that always covered our clothes.
What I loved most, though, were the bottles, the plastic containers shaped like champagne bottles, gold foil at the top, plastic corks. Inside, liquid lilacs. Every now and then I would peel a little piece of the foil off, fold it into a tiny square, and put it in my mouth. It hurt when it touched my fillings, but it was a thrilling kind of pain. I wanted my own magic ritual to take away my worries. I wanted instruments that would rid me of all of my fears. I wanted to make my world smell of lilacs, even in winter.
I would stand on the furry bath mat, still soggy from her wet feet, and look at my reflection in the mirror over the sink. I’d turn from side to side, looking for my mother’s features in my face. But I could never find them: not eyes, not nose, not throat. I looked like my father. He was me. He was my birth and my death, rendered simply in his hands and in his eyes. I could see my future in his face and hear my past in his words. Watching him staring at the empty places where my mother used to be was like staring at both the self I’d already lost and the person I would become. I was grateful, in a strange way, for Roxanne. When Daddy was away, I didn’t have to stare my own sadness in the face.
By the time winter descended, touching us at the Pond with its frigid white fingers before moving south toward the lake and on into Quimby, Daddy had stopped sleeping in their old bed. Stopped coming by except to drop off a check and, every now and then, something he thought we needed.
“Let’s take a walk,” Becca says when she finds me buried under covers on my lumpy couch watching the fourth soap opera in a row.
I grumble and burrow deeper into my nest.
“Come on,” she says, gently tugging my hand.
Bog, who has been napping on the rug next to me, stands up and stretches his front legs. He is always ready for a walk. But when I don’t budge, he looks at me and then lies back down, covering his long snout with his paw.
“It’s sunny out,” she says. “It smells like fall.”
Reluctantly, I pull myself away from the beautiful couple on TV and stand up. I am dizzy and weak and everything aches today. On days like this I wish it were over with already. On days like this it’s hard to think I was ever well.
I groan a little with the pain that accompanies the first few movements after hours of stillness. “I don’t think I’m up for it today, Beck. My back is hurting.”
“You need fresh air,” she says, exasperated.
What she doesn’t understand is how little I really do need.
At first, I listened intently to the doctors as they prescribed everything that would be required to wage this war. It’s funny how they always use the language of soldiers. They said that first I would need surgery, but that I did not need to worry. The tumor was large, but did not appear to have spread. It was in situ. Contained. But they were wrong. They would need to extract my lymph nodes. I needed radiation, I needed chemotherapy. Every week, Becca drove me from Quimby to Burlington, where I received the treatment I needed to survive. I needed to keep my