The Cost of Hope (6 page)

One day I am getting lunch in the cafeteria at
The Wall Street Journal
when, much to my amazement, I spot him filling his tray.

“What are you doing here?” I ask. “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”

“I am,” he says. “I work here.”

My jaw drops.

Without telling me, he has reinvented himself yet again, this time as a radio journalist. A few months earlier, discouraged by yet another “unqualified” response, this time for a Hong Kong–based job, he dashes off a “résumé” and sends it back. “This qualified enough for you?” is his curt message to the rejecter. Of course he never hears back. Then, on a whim, he takes the same résumé and sends it to a few places just at random. At the
Journal
it lands on the desk of someone with a sense of humor and an eye for writing.

Here is the résumé he submits:

One of the many jobs in Terence’s past was radio announcer. He has a beautiful, deep, resonant bass and a newsreel pronunciation. He is a fast, clever, witty writer. He gets the job. We work there together for months before anyone even realizes we are related.

Five years go by. I write one book, then another. We are still good parents—at opposite ends of the spectrum. I crawl on my belly like a snake, peeking around corners to make Terry laugh; Terence sits him on his knee and reads “Rumpelstiltskin.” I plop a naked boy in the bath with tubs of finger paint and let him decorate himself and the walls; Terence creates artful Halloween costumes out of nothing. A Batman cape and mask. A Robin Hood, with a loden green doublet, a peaked cap, and a quiver, all sewn with a needle and thread. I buy OshKosh and corduroys and sneakers. Terence dresses him like Little Lord Fauntleroy, in sailor suits, short pants and knee socks, polished shoes and clip-on bow ties. I make us go camping. He makes us go to church. I cook wild stir-fries and curries. He makes us sit down every night to eat them. We hold hands. We say grace.

“Your idea of a family is like a 1950s cigarette ad,” I complain. Dad in a tie, with the paper. Me in a housedress, with knitting. The little boy in short pants on the braided rug, running his toy cars up and down as the news comes over the radio.

“You were raised by savages,” he says.

He fills the house with Christmas. Every person we have ever met is invited. We move our furniture into the hall. Guests cram so tightly in that they are forced to make conversation with strangers. Terence cooks and bakes. Lasagna. Christmas cookies. Chili. Pumpkin bread. Spice cake. He feeds two hundred people and has leftovers. The smell of mulled wine curls through with the scent of cinnamon and cloves. One Christmas week bad weather strands me in Los Angeles, unable to make it home for
the party. Guests arrive, ask after me. “She’s in the bathroom,” Terence tells each one. Hours go by. “Is she sick?” they ask.

We go to marriage counseling. We trip over each other’s voices trying to explain our conflicts. The counselor speaks in a soothing professional voice and suggests an exercise. Why don’t we go home, sit down in the middle of the living room floor, and take turns giving each other back rubs, as a way of building trust—

We simultaneously explode in indignation.

“I read that in
Ladies’ Home Journal
,” I say, accusingly.

“Buddy, touching each other is not one of our problems,” says Terence.

Out on the sidewalk, we storm wordlessly side by side. A thought suddenly occurs to me. Perhaps I am making HIM as miserable as he is making ME. It is the first time this thought has occurred to me. I reach for his hand. He takes it.

We find the cancer by accident, on Sunday, November 5, 2000, in the emergency room of Providence St. Vincent Medical Center in Portland, Oregon. We don’t recognize it when we see it. We are looking for something else when we find it, the source of a long-standing pain in Terence’s gut. When the doctors point out the cancer we try to ignore them. We consider it a nuisance. A distraction from what we think is the real illness that has been bedeviling him.

We live in Portland now, having arrived here from New York via Atlanta. Terence was born for adventure. When we walk the streets of New York, he points up at bay windows. “I want to live there,” he says. After dinner in Chinatown, he points up at an apartment above the teeming streets. “Let’s move there.”

So when, after nearly a decade in New York, the
Journal
offers in 1995 to make me a manager in Atlanta, I hesitate. He does not. I have always been a reporter, in charge of no one but myself. Now that will change. It scares me.

“You’re going to be somebody, Toots,” he says. “I’ve told you that all along.”

He is ready to go long before I am.

“My idea of fun,” he says, “is moving to a different place every year. I love new places. I love learning new things. I love meeting
new people.” So off we go, and I become not just bossy but a boss, for the first time in my life.

In New York, Terence stands out for his dignified, Midwestern formality. In Atlanta, for his bohemian eccentricity. In our new suburban world of cul-de-sacs and swimming pools and center-hall colonials, regional sales managers, silver Lexuses and black SUVs, he buys a twenty-year-old Volvo, with two hundred thousand miles on it. One morning the entire front crashes to the ground, stopping traffic in both directions for fifteen minutes. Our neighbors hire gardeners to edge their front lawns. Terence plants pumpkins and sunflowers in ours; had I not become hysterical, he would have planted corn.

I fret that I am not like the other women, who have embroidered sweaters for every season, nice hair and nails and tidy homes. He is smug that he is not like the other men. At brunch, I watch from the kitchen as Terence and a tall man in khakis and a polo shirt—a district manager for some company making some thing—sit side by side in the family room.

“Play much golf?” our neighbor asks.

“No,” says Terence.

They finger their drinks in silence. If the man is stupid enough not to recognize the importance of Sarajevo, or of Atget and Margaret Bourke-White, or Bix Beiderbecke, or the problems of translating four-character Chinese sayings into English … well, Terence can’t help him.

Terence goes to work at CNN, creating historical and political context for news stories online. He rails at his twenty-eight-year-old colleagues who can’t tell a flattop from a battleship, or who can’t place Turkey on a map—and don’t seem to care. Our own small neighborhood is filled with children. Evan. Michael. Tessa. Leah. Louis. Lawton. Terence throws himself into coaching at the Baptist church down the street. I join them after work, my heels
sinking in the soft earth. He sends away for official coaching manuals. He and Terry do endless grounders and pop-ups in the front yard.

Our new home is three times bigger than anything we have lived in before—four bedrooms, a two-car garage, a finished basement, and a storage area. He fills them all. Before the year is out we cannot use the garage for a garage. We cannot use the basement for a playroom. We cannot use the laundry room for laundry without lifting stacks of newspapers waiting to be clipped off the tops of the machines. One day I slip and the whole edifice collapses, instantly forming papier-mâché with laundry water and detergent. I lie down on the kitchen floor and begin to cry. “I can’t take it. I can’t take it,” I sob over and over again. He is frightened. The papers are gone by morning.

The Olympics come and go. A backpack bomber kills a bystander; a security guard is falsely charged. The Unabomber is arrested and Dolly the sheep is cloned. Yet by Terry’s eighth birthday we still do not have the little girl we want. We turn back to China, where the one-child policy is swelling orphanages around the country with girls—perfect in every way, except for their sex. We write essays. Get recommendations. Ink our fingers at the local police station. A social worker visits our home to check us for suitability.

More than a year later, in January of 1998, the fax arrives in the middle of the night with a thumbnail photo of a sad-eyed child with a ragged haircut. Terry, Terence, and I set off for China in February 1998 to pick up little Liu Yue, who will be renamed Georgia Anne Bennett Foley.

She is nearly four years old, a southern girl, from Wuhan, China’s equivalent of Atlanta. It is immediately clear to Terence and me that, a little more than a decade since we left, the China that we knew is fading into the past, and a new, glittery China is
emerging. Wuhan is a midsize city of 7.6 million. There are cars on the street. Lots of cars. We stock up our hotel room with juice boxes and cartons of milk that we buy at the supermarket. There is even a shiny new department store downtown. Georgia’s Chinese is fluent, if heavily accented. Terence and I want her to keep her language, so we speak to her only in Chinese.

She has other ideas. Barely two weeks after she comes home, she flies around Terry’s Little League practice with the other kids.

“Frenchyfry shlushy. Frenchyfry shlushy,” she chants. It gets her the junk food she wants. Terence stubbornly continues to speak to her in Chinese, but she just as stubbornly puts her hands over her ears and refuses to listen.

By June 1998, I have been with
The Wall Street Journal
for twenty-three years. I am forty-six years old, and I am being offered an excellent job in Oregon by Sandra Rowe, a woman I admire, and will come to love. Yet again I am afraid. His answer to all my objections is the same. “You are going to be somebody, Toots. It’s about time you started.” I close my eyes and jump.

The plan is for me to go on ahead. Terence will stay behind to close up the house. When school ends, Terry and Georgia will fly to Oregon with Anja, their longtime babysitter. They are nervous. Terry has never flown without us; Georgia has been on a plane only once in her life. Terence hits on an idea. “Give them something to take care of,” he says. “It will help them forget about themselves.” We buy a taffy-colored gerbil and a small traveling case. Caramel has never flown before, Terence tells them. They must help him be brave. Off they go, across the country, carefully tending the gerbil through boarding, landing, a plane change. As soon as they arrive, and I meet them at the plane, our first call is to Daddy, to let him know that Caramel has landed and is going to be very happy in his new home.

And for two and a half years, we are.

• • •

By the time the emergency room doctors discover the cancer, Terence and I have been married for more than thirteen years. Georgia is now six, and Terry has just turned twelve. Our family has a life together in Oregon.

With the discovery of the cancer, you might suppose we feel: This is where our whole life changes. This is where everything becomes different. But it isn’t like that at all. As soon as we discover it, it becomes an afterthought, a nuisance, a distraction from another more demanding illness and everything else going on in our lives. The doctors call it a “shadow.”

On the morning of our discovery, the house is filled with not-quite-adolescent boys, celebrating Terry’s twelfth birthday. We’d let them set up a tent in the family room the night before, stowed everything breakable, given them all pillows and flashlights, and let them romp through the house. Terence hadn’t been feeling well for several weeks. Still, he is pummeling boys with pillows and fending off their attacks as he videotapes the mayhem. By 11:00 a.m. I am rousting bleary-eyed boys, filling them with pancakes, and shipping them home one by one as parents arrive. Terence is nowhere to be found.

I find him on our bed doubled over in pain. I’m scared. He’s trying not to moan. I call our family doctor, who orders us to the emergency room right away. When the last boy is picked up, I bundle Terence and the two kids into the car and head across town. We pack bags of toys for both children, preparing for a long wait at the emergency room.

Instead, when the triage nurse takes his name, age, and symptoms, Terence is whisked past the waiting room filled with other patients right into a curtained alcove. That alarms me even more.
What do they know that we don’t? Not wanting to frighten the children, Terence has clenched his jaw all the way to the hospital, but once the kids are installed out in the cheerful large outer waiting area with their X-Men and Barbies, the pain breaks through. On the emergency gurney, he curls into a fetal position and keens in pain. He is wheeled off for a scan almost immediately.

After reading the scan, the attending doctor is vaguely reassuring. Something is clearly wrong with his intestines, but there doesn’t appear to be any immediate danger. Almost as an aside, however, he mentions that on the scan a “shadow” has appeared on Terence’s kidney. “You are going to want to get that looked at,” he says in a very casual tone.

Terence and I are both annoyed. Why is he even talking about a shadow? Who cares about a shadow? His kidneys aren’t the problem. It’s his intestines. He is in such pain from his gut he can scarcely breathe. He is admitted to the hospital directly from the emergency room with a diagnosis of severe ulcerative colitis.

Pain.

It is the thing I recall most clearly from the next five weeks. Terence in pain. He is white with pain, curled up from pain, almost completely consumed with pain. No food. No water. Nothing by mouth, says the chart on his bed. They pump him full of steroids to reduce the inflammation in his colon. Every morning I come by hoping to catch a doctor; every evening I bring the children by with a handmade card, or one of their toys. The children and I eat dinner in the hospital every night. Chili. Meatloaf. Grilled chicken from the cafeteria. Terry plays Christmas carols on a grand piano in the dining room. Georgia learns to work the soft-ice-cream machine. Upstairs, Terence lies half-crazed with the pain. He loses sixty pounds.