Sister's Choice (31 page)

Kendra rarely admitted to weakness. She had little need, since she was one of the most self-assured people Jamie had ever met. In her career, she had questioned presidents and mass murderers, ferreted out secrets despite enormous roadblocks and stood up for stories her editors had insisted she abandon. More than once she had risked her safety to find the truth.

So Kendra’s courage was unquestioned. But in this new emotional realm of parenting, a realm of many potential false steps and mistakes, a realm neither she nor Jamie had been raised to inhabit, she was frightened. Jamie knew how much it had cost her sister to tell her that and to admit she would need Jamie’s help. And the fact that she
had
told her was the final proof that she viewed Jamie as an equal, someone to be trusted completely.

With that last thought playing in her mind, Jamie moved quietly into the kitchen to make herself a cup of warm cider.

She was sitting at the table with only a night-light and the cider for company when Grace came in. Jamie didn’t say anything, assuming Grace would speak first. But Grace said nothing and passed right by the table.

“Grace?” Jamie asked.

Grace whirled and narrowed her eyes. “Oh, I didn’t see you, dear. I guess I was so busy thinking about what I was going to drink.”

Jamie almost let it go, but she couldn’t. Grace hadn’t missed seeing her because she was thinking. She hadn’t seen Jamie because the light in the kitchen was low. Grace hadn’t been able to make out Jamie’s outline in the darkness.

“How bad are your eyes?” Jamie asked.

Grace sighed. “Really quite bad, I’m afraid.”

Jamie got to her feet. “Why don’t you sit and I’ll get you something to drink?”

“Oh, you don’t have to worry. This didn’t happen yesterday. It’s been a gradual process. I know where everything is. That’s one reason I came back here, you know. Everything in this house is an old friend. What I can’t see clearly, I can remember. If I lose my sight entirely, I won’t be at a complete loss here. I’ll still be able to get around.”

Jamie remembered the spills, the stumbles, and wondered how she could have missed the signs. She had been so wrapped up in her own life that she had failed to note the obvious.

“Are you keeping this a secret?”

Grace opened the refrigerator and her hand went to the milk. Jamie realized now that Grace’s refrigerator and the chest freezer were superbly organized. There was a place for everything, and whatever the item was, it was returned to exactly the same place. Milk on the right, beside the half-gallon jug of cider, exactly where Grace’s hand was resting now.

Grace shut the door and took the carton of milk to the stove. She reached for one of the pans hanging on a Peg-board to the right. Always on the same peg.

“Sandra suspects my sight is failing. Cash does, too, I imagine. I’m not sure they realize quite how badly or rapidly, though. But they will soon enough.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be. There’s hope that a new treatment I’m trying will stop the downward progress. Right now, I can still see quite a bit when the light’s good. I can see bright colors especially, and with a strong magnifier, I can still see well enough to work on my quilts.”

Jamie remembered the magnifier Grace always wore around her neck when she was sewing. She had simply assumed it made the tiny detail work easier, but now she realized Grace didn’t work with tiny details. She worked with bold colors, three-dimensional objects that she could feel and place on her art quilts accordingly and large patterns. And when she embroidered words on a quilt top, she called the topsy-turvy alphabet “folk art.”

“I manage quite well,” Grace said, “although there have been a few spectacularly strange meals in this house when spices or herbs were moved around by mistake. Since then I’ve learned to sniff everything and cook by taste. I highly recommend it.”

“I don’t know how you’ve managed so well that nobody’s really caught on. You’re a marvel.”

“I intend to be a marvel until the day I die.”

“Did your quilts begin to change as your eyesight got worse?”

As the milk heated, Grace leaned against the stove. “Yes, and that was a bonus. Before that, I tried to do what everyone else was doing. When I no longer could, I had to improvise. And only then did I begin to find myself as an artist.” She laughed a little. “Although maybe if I could see my quilts more clearly I would be appalled.”

“You would be proud. They’re beautiful.”

“Even Helen Henry told me the sunflower isn’t as bad as she expected and might have a redeeming feature or two.”

Jamie laughed, but the sound felt odd in her throat, as if she had just laughed at the most serious point in a sermon.

“Don’t go all sentimental on me. I highly recommend adversity, dear. It’s underrated.”

Jamie’s breath caught, and the sound that emerged was too much like a moan. “Oh, Grace.”

Grace might be losing her sight, but there was nothing wrong with her hearing. She turned off the burner and came over to the table, taking the seat closest to Jamie’s.

“It’s probably time to tell me what’s going on.” Grace felt for and took Jamie’s hand. If Jamie hadn’t known what she now did about Grace’s sight, she wouldn’t even have noticed the way Grace’s hand glided across the table to find hers.

“I’m okay,” Jamie said. “Things are okay.”

“No, they aren’t. And don’t tell me I’m imagining this. Something happened in Michigan. You’re a beautiful, grown-up woman, and you don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to. But I do need to be sure you aren’t hiding something you need to talk about. And I’m afraid my mind has gone to all sorts of dark possibilities.”

Maybe if Grace hadn’t shared the truth about her failing eyesight, Jamie could have lied again and repeated her reassurances. But Grace had been honest with her, and she knew she owed her the same.

“I have breast cancer. I found the lump while I was in Michigan the first time and went to see my gynecologist. She’s a good friend. She was able to make things happen quickly. They did the appropriate tests and discovered it was malignant. So Suz gave me the options. Of course she skipped right over my favorite, pretending that nothing was happening and the tests were a mistake.”

“And you didn’t tell anybody here?”

“I couldn’t! Kendra worried about everything remotely connected to me or the babies right from the moment we did the transfer. I thought she would get over it, but she hasn’t. Everything concerns her. She wants these babies so much, she’s sure they’re going to be taken from her.”

Grace didn’t argue. “I know. She and I have talked. It wasn’t an easy decision to let you go ahead. But that must mean you’ve made decisions about your health alone?” She paused. “You
have
made decisions?”

“If I wasn’t pregnant, lumpectomy would have been the preferred treatment of choice. They would remove the tumor, then begin a regimen of radiation. But radiation is out of the question during pregnancy, and ending this pregnancy was never an option.”

“I would have expected them to recommend it.”

“No, at least in that, Suz—my doctor—and the statistics agreed with me. Instead she consulted with an oncologist, a surgeon and a radiologist, and they proposed I have a modified radical mastectomy followed—if needed—by a type of chemotherapy that would most likely not harm the babies.” Jamie paused. “Grace, ‘most likely’ were not words I wanted associated with this pregnancy.”

“Would they have made that suggestion if it wasn’t wise?”

“What information they have about the drugs is promising. Based on everything that’s known so far, they seem safe during pregnancy. But there are no long-term studies yet. Suz had to warn me about that. And I had to decide if I was willing to gamble the future health of Kendra’s children on phrases like ‘most likely’ and ‘seem safe.’”

There was no point in explaining every step in her decision-making now. After the diagnosis, she had gone back to First Step to consider her options and do her own research on Tara’s computer. And what she had learned about chemotherapy had frightened her, not the side effects or the effect on her body, but that its stated purpose was to inhibit the growth of cells. And what was pregnancy other than one body nurturing the growth of another tiny body’s cells?

She’d found and devoured stories of women like herself who had been diagnosed during pregnancy, had chemo and gone on to have healthy babies and a remission of their cancer. Each one was different. None of the situations exactly mirrored her own. They were good mothers, good women, who had done the research, spoken at length to specialists and made the right decision based on their personal situation. They had gambled that having the chemo and improving the chance that they would live to raise their own children was the answer for them.

But what was the answer for her?

“So I was left with these choices,” she told Grace. “I could have a mastectomy, a surgery I would never be able to keep from Kendra and Isaac. Then I could either have the chemo—if the results from the surgery suggested I needed it—and hope the twins wouldn’t be harmed, or delay it until after the twins are born.”

“Apparently that’s not what you chose?”

“No. My second choice? I could have a lumpectomy, with a shorter time under anesthesia, which was better for the babies, delay radiation until after the birth, then submit to whatever further treatment the doctors feel is warranted at that stage. And I could do that surgery in Michigan, without telling anybody here what’s going on, and continue with the pregnancy as if nothing had happened. So that’s what I did. Later, if the cancer returns, I can have a mastectomy.”

“What about your doctor here?”

“I swore her to silence today.”

Grace tilted her head in question. “Something tells me your decision wasn’t the one your doctor favored.”

“No, she didn’t. They sometimes delay radiation after a lumpectomy for as long as six weeks, but that means I should be starting it just after the beginning of the new year. I’ll be pushing two months beyond that. Suz is afraid the potential of upstaging—that’s the cancer moving to the next stage—will be greater. Stray cells could metastasize while I wait.”

“She knows that for certain? They have studies that prove if you wait until after the delivery, you’ll be at a much greater risk?”

“No, it depends on the length of the delay, the changes in my breasts during pregnancy, the size of the tumor, what if any lymph nodes are involved. Suz said all those things could affect the outcome. But it’s still a guessing game. She just believed I was gambling with my future.”

Jamie rested her hands over her belly and glanced down. The babies were moving inside her. “But she was asking me to gamble with theirs.”

Now she cut straight to the ending. “Having the lumpectomy wasn’t the best option for
me.
I know that. I’m not kidding myself. Waiting for further treatment’s not the best way to go. But with everything else, it was the only way I was willing to do it.”

“And you didn’t feel you could consult your family?”

“What if they wanted me to do whatever it took to safeguard my own health?” She paused, then held up her hand as Grace started to speak. “And what if they didn’t?”

Grace shook her head.

Jamie had hardly slept after she learned the diagnosis and the alternatives. And the more fatigued she’d grown, the more certain she had become that she could not involve Kendra and Isaac in this decision.

“There’s nothing Kendra or Isaac can say that will be right. Whatever they say will stand between us forever. I don’t want them to know what’s going on. We’re just starting to become a real family. But it’s all so…so fragile. I just can’t take a chance now, and I
won’t
take a chance with the health of these babies.”

“Have you thought about Hannah and Alison? What if the delay in radiation and maybe chemo means the cancer metastasizes?”

“I asked Suz that question. She said she couldn’t tell me what might happen. But she wants me to ask Dr. Raille to induce labor the moment she feels the twins are viable. That could make a difference. I could start treatment right away—weeks earlier, maybe, than if I waited. But these are
twins.
Their birth weight is going to be lower as is. I’m not willing to take risks with their health.”

“And to that she said?”

Jamie, what cross are you trying to die on?

The words still rang in Jamie’s ears. She looked down at the table and shook her head.

Grace touched her hand. “Such an awful burden for someone so young.”

“It could be a lot worse. The surgery went as well as could be expected. The tumor was almost two centimeters, meaning it was still a stage one. The margins were clear, and the cancer itself isn’t among the most aggressive types. That’s a piece of luck, since most often cancers in women my age are. A sampling of the axillary lymph nodes didn’t show any indication it had spread. If I had been able to undergo radiation as required, my prognosis would be excellent. As it is, I’m hopeful my decision to wait is only going to make it slightly less favorable.”

Grace was quiet for a long time. Then she squeezed Jamie’s hand. “I might have done the same thing.”

“Do you mean that?”

“Faced with what you’ve been faced with? Yes, I think I might well have.”

Having someone understand and even commiserate was more than Jamie had hoped for. “I can’t tell you what that means to me,” she said, gripping Grace’s hand so Grace wouldn’t remove it. “I thought you would tell me I was wrong, just like the doctors did.”

“Right and wrong are words nobody should use in this situation. With so many unknowns, you did what you thought was best. I only wish you had told your sister and let her help you decide.”

“I couldn’t.”

“I know. You didn’t want to hear what choices she would make for you.”

Jamie wasn’t surprised Grace understood so well. Grace knew what it was like to wonder if she was making the right decisions about her life, and to wonder if she would ever know for certain. Grace knew how hard it was to trust the people who were supposed to love you.