Amy Inspired (36 page)

“I guess she was just ready to go,” Valerie said. “Jerry sounded shocked.”

Brian found me sitting on my bed in the dark, the phone silent in my lap.

“I thought you were talking to someone,” he said.

“Zoë’s mom is gone. She died this morning.”

He ran his hand over his head. He sighed. Sitting beside me, he grabbed my hand, and we were back in elementary school, sitting on the bus together, my hand safely tucked in his.

“Have you talked to her?”

“She won’t want to talk.”

We sat in silence, staring at the rug.

“She’ll need you,” he said finally.

He made me a cup of tea. I didn’t know my brother could brew tea. Marie taught him, he explained. She drank it compulsively while she studied. We sat on the roof, sometimes quiet and sometimes talking. The night was pleasantly cool. In the distance we could hear the hum of students partying. A group of freshmen walked by on the sidewalk. The boys wore pastel-colored shirts paired with plaid shorts. In their eagerness to dress well, they looked as fragile and colorful as Easter eggs.

“Has Marie ever seen a patient die?” I asked.

“She saw a kid die her second week in the clinic. He was only sixteen. She said it was real surreal. Like you knew it was happening but couldn’t quite wrap your mind around it. She’s had to see other patients go since—she doesn’t have time to get to know them, but it’s still hard. You can’t just leave the hospital and step back into ‘normal’ life.”

“Do you think it gets easier?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “A part of me hopes not.”

Brian spent one summer interning in the ER. His resilience mystified me. How could a person stand it—watching people stream in night after night, torn, bleeding, and broken?

When I asked how Marie was doing with her clinics he couldn’t say enough. He was unabashedly admiring of her skills and intelligence. Maybe my difficulty with Marie was not sibling rivalry. Maybe it was jealousy over a career as opposed to jealousy over my brother: She was becoming the scientist I could never be. I would have to come to terms with this.

We talked about their plans and dreams and even about the wedding. Brian said he’d invited Dad to the rehearsal dinner. He was apologetic about it.

“I didn’t want to invite him, but Marie said we should,” he explained.

“Is he coming?”

“I don’t know. We’ve been leaving each other voicemails all week. He’s always vague: ‘Be there if the weather permits, kiddo’ or ‘Juggling a few things, will get back to you.’ ”

“I hope he doesn’t come,” I said. “For Mom’s sake.”

“For all our sakes,” he agreed.

I leaned back in my chair and tried to spot the stars. Tonight they were hidden beneath a purple scrim of light pollution. Or the fog of caffeine blurring my vision from the inside out. Pulling the quilt I’d brought with me tighter around my body, I closed my eyes. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen my father.

The next thing I knew, Brian was gently nudging me awake. “You’d better get to bed.”

It took me a moment to remember why he was here, why we were on the porch.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Nearly three.”

“I don’t want you to leave.”

“I’ll stay the weekend,” he assured me. “C’mon. You’re exhausted.”

I slipped into bed still dressed. The tears came easily. Not so much for Fay as for Zoë—and for shame that deep down, were I to admit it, my relief overwhelmed any sorrow. You played the odds in life. Statistically there were only so many bodies that succumbed to cancer a year. I wept in gratitude to God that my loved ones weren’t the victims of chance this time around.

In the morning, while Brian was in the shower, I took
Robbins Pathology
out of his bag and searched the index. I flipped to the given page and stared at the photograph of a single breast cancer cell. The cell comprised an irregular, spherical mass, its surface riddled with interlacing strings of light like those writhing on the surface of the sun. It was aware of its power, fecund, cunning arms reaching to embrace its host.

We sent our condolences by mail. Everett and I signed our names to a card Valerie had made. I called a Chicago flower shop and asked to have an arrangement of flowers delivered to the Walker house. The florist asked what I wanted on the card.

“There’s a card?” I asked.

“Of course,” she said. “We pin it to the center of the arrangement.”

“Can I skip the card?”

“We have balloons instead.”

“This is for a funeral, not a birthday party.”

“They’re very tasteful,” the clerk said.

“I don’t want balloons.”

“You can only order one balloon.”

“I don’t want
any
balloon.”

Zoë specifically asked that none of us make the trip for the funeral. I considered calling but didn’t want to be a burden. I tried to send an e-mail.The blank computer screen proved as insurmountable as the sympathy card. In the end I gave up trying to piece together my condolences. I wrote Zoë a brief message, asking if she would want company. She wrote back saying yes. I packed a book bag and a suitcase, the book bag for overnight clothes and a toothbrush, the suitcase to hold the essays I hadn’t yet graded.

The drive to Chicago was more tedious than I remembered. For hours, the Indiana fields stretched gray to the right and left. By the time the automated tolls appeared to signal the nearness of the city, my back and eyes had begun to ache. I called Zoë to say I was ten minutes away. Three wrong turns and two hours later I called to say I was ten minutes away again. When I finally arrived she stood waiting for me on the porch.

She was pale and too thin.

“Tired?” she asked.

“I’m exhausted.”

“Well,” she said, bending down to lift my overnight bag from the trunk. Her hair stood on end, spiked and coarse and smelling of sleep. “You’re in good company.”

The house was exactly as I remembered it from the one time I had visited: old, simply furnished. Books everywhere. The photographs on the mantel sat in purposefully slanted rows, Fay smiling happily in three of the five portraits. The sameness of the house surprised me. I wanted the drinking glasses on the tables and the plants on the windowsill to acknowledge what had happened, but they just sat there oblivious, safely mired in their thingness.

Zoë led me to the kitchen. The sun had begun to set, tipping the clouds in gold, casting neon slants of orange light from the row of tall windows to the floor.

“Are you hungry? There’s macaroni and cheese, spaghetti, lasagna, spaghetti, spaghetti.” She leaned over the open refrigerator door. “Anything that could possibly be casseroled, we have.”

I chose the dish that would cause the least amount of trouble.

“I’m glad you didn’t come to the funeral,” she said, spooning the spaghetti into a bowl. “The sanctuary was packed. They said we had over four hundred people at the visitation. The line to the cemetery was long enough for some political dignitary.
I
had to comfort people.”

She spoke matter-of-factly, a newscaster giving her report. They dressed her mother in her favorite spring blouse. The bagpipers who played at the burial site performed beautifully. The people from her parents’ church were so kind.

“Everyone’s been great. We have so much food. Food and flowers. I’m sick to death of flowers.”

Thankfully, I hadn’t asked if she’d received mine. We sat together at the table while I ate. She pulled her legs up to her chest, tucking her knees inside her oversized T-shirt, which made a small hole in the upper left shoulder rip wider.

“It’s hot,” she warned after I’d already burnt my tongue and spat the noodles back onto the plate.

She shook her head. “I can’t take you anywhere.”

I was to sleep in the spare room, the space they’d allocated for the flower arrangements. The odor of decaying blossoms was suffocating.

“Sorry there’s not much room,” she said. “I told you: flowers.”

“I don’t mind,” I said.

I found my arrangement on the center of the dresser. A small bunch of white lilies, and planted in the center—exactly as I had not requested—a silver balloon that read
With Sympathy
in blue cursive.

In high school I read a book about a Jewish family that sat shiva to mourn the loss of their adult son. They covered the mirrors in black cloth, and they didn’t cook or clean or wash themselves. For seven days they had no business but grief. Visitors were to console the family, but were not to speak unless the family initiated conversation.

There were no such clear guidelines for Christian grieving. In my eagerness to project the right spirit, I’d only packed dark clothes. I’d come prepared to sit, to listen, to cry. But Zoë, like her father, dealt with grief the same way she’d dealt with the cancer itself: She worked. When I got up at seven, Jerry had already left for the local paper where he worked as assistant editor. Zoë was in her parents’ bedroom, sorting labeled boxes.

“Her clothes,” she explained. “She’d already boxed the summer ones.”

She’d known.

“Can I help at all?”

We dismantled Fay’s closets for hours, Zoë all business. These pants were to go in this bag, and those shirts were to go in this pile. The jewelry would be auctioned; anything with stains we would rip for the ragbag. She was as ruthless as she was careless. One by one I folded and bagged and boxed the precious artifacts of a mother and a wife.

“Zoë, don’t you want to keep some of these things?” I asked, hesitating to force yet another beautiful shawl into the already overstuffed bag of scarves and hats.

“For what?” Zoë asked shortly.

“You could keep a few for yourself,” I suggested gently. “Something to remember her by.”

“Dad’s selling the house. He can’t afford this place, let alone storage for me to hoard junk for some sentimental whim.”

Of course: the price tag for chronic disease. I finally connected the seemingly unrelated comments she’d been making about auctions, about the housing market, about the insufficiency of her father’s salary. He would live the rest of his life under the financial burden of his wife’s prolonged illness. I worked without saying another word.

When I returned from carrying the last box to the car, I found Zoë sitting on her mother’s bed staring at a framed photograph of her parents. They were standing on a beach, Fay in a blue dress. Their wedding day.

Zoë started when I stepped forward, as if caught doing something shameful. Then a change came over her expression; there was a glint of mischief in her eyes. “Want to see something?”

She took me to her old bedroom. It was tidy, simple: a bed, a rug, an elegant oak dresser. On the dresser sat a glass canister of cotton balls and decorative bottles of cheap lotion.

Beside the lotions sat a mannequin head.

“The wig head, for the wig of the day,” Zoë explained. She opened the closet to reveal a shelf that housed several such mannequins. Each wore a wig of real human hair. Auburn, blond, short, long, curly, straight.

“You weren’t kidding about it being an obsession,” I said.

“Somewhere along the way, she gave up trying to look like Fay and enjoyed being a new Fay every day.”