As Close as Sisters (3 page)

“I was bored with the scene in Rome,” Aurora told me with a sigh only the truly privileged could emit. “I got here Monday.”

So the towel in the bathroom
was
damp. I wondered why her rucksack was in my old bedroom rather than hers, and why she’d been sleeping in my bed without any sheets, but I didn’t ask. I found it interesting that Aurora had been here five days and there was no more evidence of her presence in the house than a damp towel and a tiny bag. No car. Who knows how she got here? (Probably hitchhiked. She did it all the time. So far, no Dean Koontz crazies have kidnapped her and held her underground in a beer barrel.) She was rich, but no one would ever know it. She was a vagabond. She rented out warehouses for studios, slept in hotels or on people’s couches. No fancy cars. Few jewels. No property. I had no clue what she did with her money.

“Bored with the scene in Rome,” I repeated, walking over to the sink to open the window over it. The kitchen was stifling. I wondered how she’d stayed in the house for five days with the windows closed and the air-conditioning off, but I didn’t ask that, either. I was too preoccupied with the Rome pronouncement.

I’ve never been to Rome; I’ll never go. We talked about taking a trip to Italy, together, the four us, but it never happened. It never will happen now, will it? I opened my arms wide, gesturing wildly with my final words, trying to understand her. “You were
bored
with Rome?”

“I needed time alone. To think. I’ve got a new project simmering.” She tapped her temple and then downed the rest of the beer. “A commissioned work. An enormous chandelier piece. For the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.” She wrinkled her pert nose. “Or maybe it’s Chicago. I don’t remember what my agent said.”

Aurora is an internationally celebrated sculptor. I mean she’s
big,
like cover of
Juxtapoz
magazine big. Her medium is metal, her tool of trade an oxyacetylene torch. She works in her studio in hot pants, a leather apron, and a welding mask that looks like a medieval torture device. Or some kind of crazy sex game mask. She creates enormous sculptures of mixed metals to stand in reception areas of corporate buildings and in parks. Her work amazes me and scares me a little. It’s beautiful and brilliant, but defies interpretation by my pea-sized librarian’s brain.

“You’ve been sleeping here all week?” I asked. “You should have called me. Mia and Maura have already been down here with their father for two weeks. I’ve been sitting at home watching eight seasons of
Dexter
. I could have come sooner.”

She didn’t answer me. She’s like that. She just doesn’t answer questions she doesn’t want to. She also hangs up without saying good-bye and goes to bed without a good night. I like to think it’s the artsy dreamer in her; my mother says she’s just plain rude. Can’t remember if I said this—Mom doesn’t like Aurora. Never has. When we were sixteen, Aurora was arrested for smoking weed in a Dunkin’ Donuts while drinking a latte. Not even in the bathroom. Right at the table. My mother decided I shouldn’t associate with Aurora anymore. She tried to forbid me to see her. It didn’t work.

I’m doing it again. Digressing.

“You just get here?” Aurora opened the cabinet under the sink and tossed the empty bottle into a bucket. It clinked against other bottles. Beer for sure. Probably a gin bottle, if she’s been here since Monday. “Stuff in your car?” she asked.

“Yeah. You mind getting it?” I plopped down on a kitchen stool, chest tight. I took a couple of deep breaths. “I’ve got groceries and wine. I’ll make you dinner,” I called after her, but she was already on her way out the door.

Aurora carried everything in. She put away the groceries and lined up the bottles of wine on the counter near the refrigerator. Our makeshift bar since the days when we had to acquire our alcohol illegally. She even took the pillows I brought from home and the black nylon case with my nebulizer to the bedroom. She grabbed a quick shower upstairs, but she was down in ten minutes. Speed showering; she couldn’t possibly have shaved.

Aurora didn’t let me do anything but open a bottle of pinot grigio and pour a glass for each of us. We chatted while she made a veggie stir-fry. At first, we talked about unimportant stuff. Not
unimportant,
exactly. Everything is important to me now. But the stuff that isn’t emotionally charged. Even though we’re best friends, more than best friends, it always takes a little while, after we’ve been apart, to get warmed up.

Aurora didn’t mention my cancer while she’d chopped vegetables, and I didn’t bring it up. It was nice. Almost as if I didn’t have cancer. At least for a few minutes. We talked about how my girls did in school this year, and I showed her their junior prom pictures on my iPhone. Aurora told me about a Portuguese sculptor she dated in Rome. I learned that his name was Fortunato and that he’d had a big wang. Her word, not mine.

When the stir-fry was ready, we carried the plates, our glasses, and the bottle of wine (we were on our second glass by then) out onto the front porch. There was a cool breeze coming in off the ocean; there almost always was. I sat in a big Adirondack chair. My Adirondack. There were four of them lined along the front porch, one for each of us. Mine was bright green. Aurora’s was white.

She refilled our glasses, and we both sat back to enjoy our dinner: asparagus, snow peas, hearts of palm, mushrooms, and zucchini, all in a thickened peppery vegetable broth.

“Lilly texted earlier. She’ll be here by noon tomorrow,” I said.

“She driving over alone”—Aurora stabbed a mushroom with the tines of her fork—“or is
he
bringing her?”

He,
meaning her husband. They’ve been married nine years, but Aurora doesn’t like Matthew any better now than when we met him. She finds him stuffy and boring. Aurora thinks he stifles Lilly. That he keeps her from reaching her full potential. I disagree. Not all of us can be famous, globe-trotting artists sleeping with the Fortunatos of the world. Some of us have to be librarians, cops, and in Lilly’s case, optometrists. I like Matt. He’s good to her. A hell of a lot better to her than her first husband was.

“I assume she’s driving over herself.” Lilly lived in Annapolis. She and Matt, also an optometrist (they met at a convention), have an upscale office there. “And Janine will be here right after work tomorrow. No later than six, she said.”

While we’re all equally close, I’m the
administrator
of the group. I’m the one who keeps everyone connected with texts, e-mails, and phone calls. I always make the arrangements when we get together. I coordinate arrival and departure times. I make the dinner reservations and settle minor disputes.

Aurora set down her plate and reached for her glass. She’d barely touched her food. “We can talk about it if you want. Get the clumsiness out of the way.”

I looked up from my plate, having no idea what she was talking about . . . for a second. Then I smiled. “You’re a funny one.”

She looked at me from over the rim of her glass, tipped it, and drank. She was wearing a tight white T-shirt with something in Italian on it (I don’t speak Italian. I can manage a little conversational
Español,
but that’s it. I was always going to learn to speak Italian. Once I finished my doctorate in library science. Once Mia and Maura were older. Guess I put it off too long.) and a pair of baggy men’s athletic shorts. Her hair was still damp from her shower, her face bare of makeup.

“So you want to talk about it or not?” she prodded. “You don’t have to. We’re going to have to rehash it all tomorrow night. But I thought you might—”

“Want to take a
dry run?
Is that what you’re asking me?” I’ve set my plate aside. I thought I was hungry, but after a few bites, I wasn’t. The new medication did that to me. She drew her knees up to her chest. “Now who’s the funny one?” She gazed out over the dunes. She looked so serious.

Together, we watched the waves tumble in, one after the other. The tide was coming in. From the waterline on the beach, in relationship to the little picket fence in the dunes, I guessed that high tide would be in another two hours. Nine-ish. I made a mental note. I marked my days here at the beach house by the rise and fall of the tides.

I remembered, from a family vacation in Hatteras, my dad showing me a tide chart. I was nine or ten. He explained how the gravitational attraction of the moon caused the ocean to bulge toward the moon and how, on the other side of the world, it was doing the same thing. There are twelve hours and twenty-five minutes between each high tide. It would be low tide around three tomorrow.

My gaze caught Aurora’s. She was watching me now. Waiting.

“We don’t have to talk about it,” I said. But I realized that I did want to. Maybe I
did
need a dry run. Tomorrow night would be the first time we’d all been together since the death knell officially began. Last summer we’d all been so hopeful. We thought I just had a measly little case of thyroid cancer in my thyroid.

Tomorrow there would be tears. A flood of tears . . . hugs all around . . . several times. Maybe I needed to tell the story without the tears. This was something else I can always count on with Aurora; she wouldn’t dissolve. I couldn’t decide if that was because she was such a selfish person or such an unselfish person. Could you be both?

Aurora sat back to listen.

“Not a lot to say.” I feel like I’ve told this story a million times. “After I had my thyroid removed, we thought I might be in the clear. I wasn’t. The cancer cells drifted into my lungs,” I explained. They say it that way.
Drifted.
Like it wasn’t an assault.

I was quiet for a minute. So was Aurora. I went on. “It’s thyroid cancer, but in my lungs. The scans look crazy. Little starbursts of tumors, filling my lungs.” I took a sip of wine. “That’s what’s making it hard for me to breathe. The tumors are filling up the space where air should go. There’s no cure. No treatment. Eventually the tumors will fill my lungs and then . . . then they’ll kill me,” I added matter-of-factly.

“What about the nuclear radiation pill you took when it was in your throat?” she asked.

I shook my head. “A no-go. Thyroid cancer cells are, apparently, tricky. They know how to morph or something. I still don’t quite understand.” I raised my hand and let it fall. “The cancer cells are somehow different now that they’re in my lungs. The nuclear stuff can’t find them, so it can’t stick to them, so it can’t kill them.”

“Fuckers,” Aurora muttered.

I smiled.

“So now?”

“So now, the doctors will make me
comfortable
until I die.” I exhaled, looking into my nearly empty glass. Aurora gave me a refill. We were both quiet. Another thing I’ve always loved about Aurora. She doesn’t feel the need to constantly talk.

I swirled my wine and watched it form a tidal pool in my glass. I sipped it. I was waiting for the question
How long?
How long do you have to live? How long before I need a dress for your funeral?

But Aurora didn’t ask. She just gazed out at the ocean. She probably already had an appropriate black dress.

I took a deep breath and relaxed in my chair. The sun wouldn’t set for more than an hour, but it was well behind us now and the sky was darkening.

After what seemed like a very long time, Aurora said, “I’d take it from you if I could.” Again she was quiet. Then, “Your cancer.”

My eyes felt scratchy behind the lids. I’m not a crier. What tears I had, I tell people, I’ve already cried. As if we’re born with a certain number of tears in our eyes, like eggs in our ovaries. Maybe I was just afraid that if I started crying now, I’d never stop. I didn’t want to live out the rest of my days, however many there were, crying.

“I’d die for you,” Aurora said. “I’d do it. I wish I
could
do it,” she added softly.

“I know.”

My mother said the same thing when I told her that I was terminal. She cried buckets. She said it wasn’t fair that she was old and useless and I was still young, with children to raise. But there was something different about Aurora’s tone when she told me that. It was as if . . . she was more than willing to die, that she . . . I don’t know . . . she really wanted to. Which made no sense. She had a perfect life: famous, rich . . . and then there was Fortunato and his wang.

I realized my thoughts weren’t making sense. It was probably the wine. I was feeling tipsy. The combination of the wine and the meds. I was most definitely not supposed to have three glasses.

I looked at Aurora. She seemed so sad.

This was one of the most difficult things for me about having cancer. I felt as if I were making so many people sad. Hurting so many people. Me, I got to die. They—those I love—have to stay. They have to carry my death with them for many years to come.

“I . . . haven’t told anyone this,” I heard myself say. “But . . . I’m taking part in a drug trial.”

She shifted her attention to me again.

“At UPenn.” I set my glass down. “They’re hoping the drug will slow the growth of the tumors. Maybe even reduce their size.”

Aurora unfolded her long legs and stood, holding a finger up, telling me to hold that thought.

She was back in two minutes with another bottle of wine and the corkscrew. “So the doctors have had good luck with this drug?”

I shook my head. “It’s a drug
trial,
meaning the doctors are basically taking a wild stab in the dark and need some human guinea pigs.” I stopped and started again. “Not exactly. The whole process for creating a drug and getting it approved by the FDA is very complicated and takes years. There’s been some evidence—in lab rats probably—that this drug I’m taking might have an effect on this type of cancer growth.”

“So it might work?” she asked.

“Someday. For someone. I know it’s too late for me, but I agreed to be a part of the study because I like the idea of possibly helping someone else, someday.”