my right side, like wind picking up momentum in an alley. Will I ever get used to it? Will I always notice every little thing?
When Dr. Ferrell had called with the biopsy results, I knew what he was going to say. “It’s cancer, isn’t it?” I said quietly, watching as the bacon I’d just turned popped and sizzled in the cast-iron pan. He said yes, and that he was sorry. He didn’t ask how I knew; maybe he assumed my fate was sealed because of my mother. He suggested a date for the surgery and advised me to wean the baby completely beforehand. But I still had a little milk. This morning I crept into the nursery and cradled the baby until his mouth opened and started to burrow, even sleeping, even blind. I opened my shirt and guided him on. I cupped his feet with my right hand to keep him from kicking against my dressing, and closed my eyes. In a few minutes my breast was flat, the skin almost papery. He cried loudly when I pulled him off, cried as I burped him, cried in his crib while I went downstairs to get him a bottle, my shirt still unbuttoned. My son, it seems, would miss my right breast more than anyone else. Was that what I wanted? To know someone would?
Theo brought me home from the hospital and propped pillows all around me, as if to compensate, somehow, for my own new lack of padding. He made a point of looking me straight in the eye, whenever he spoke, trying to train his eyes to not look at my body. I tell you this so you’ll know he was trying. He stayed home from the office, working in the study, on that first day, and when it became clear I would need help beyond that, hired a nurse for a week to feed and diaper the baby, make Emma supper and give her a bath. What else could he do? My family couldn’t help—my mother was half mad in the nursing home, and Aunt Caro was traveling overseas. It was both thoughtful and necessary to have another person there, but I became dangerously accustomed to it. The day after the nurse left, I clanged around the kitchen angrily, furious at lids that didn’t fit pots, at the vague smears of butter and jelly Theo had left on his breakfast plate. The baby was still sleeping but I’d woken up Emma.
“Stop it!”
She called from behind me and I sighed as I whisked the eggs. Who spoke in this rough way? Where had she soaked it up—at the nursery school I paid for? At the playground I’d fought so hard to keep in her life?
“What did you say?”
“I can’t sleep,” she pouted as she covered her ears with her hands. “That baby always cries and you’re making noise.”
There was a moment when her voice turned into Theo’s. Throaty and ugly, a man in her mouth. Was that who Emma was, Theo’s darkest thoughts and deeds embodied? I imagined he felt exactly the same way and was so polite he didn’t dare speak of it. I breathed deeply and kept my voice calm.
“You’re not supposed to sleep, Emma,” I sighed. “It’s morning.”
I poured orange juice into her favorite plastic cup, an orange bottom with a yellow lid, and handed it to her before I went back to scrambling eggs. When I turned around, she picked it up and I swear she brought it up to her lips, a centimeter away, which is why I didn’t see it coming.
The cup could have hit anywhere else and hurt less. Her aim was true, almost straight to the heart: direct to the right breast. I shrieked and collapsed; it hurt so much, so instantaneously, I gagged, nearly vomiting on my own feet.
Emma’s hands covered her mouth, her eyes open in surprise.
“Why did you do that, Emma? Why?”
“I was trying to throw it in the sink,” she said. “I didn’t mean it.”
“Okay, Emma,” I sighed and pulled myself upright. But it wasn’t okay, because I confess, part of me didn’t believe her.
August 3, 1967
MY MOTHER IS NOT DELUSIONAL, just asleep, although sometimes that can be the same thing. She thrashes as I stand above her, repeating the word “no” as she shakes her whole body along with her head. I put the bundle of roses at the foot of her bed, freeing my hands to hold hers.
“Mom,” I say gently. “It’s okay.”
“No,” she