it, do I? Make everything crystal clear? A public service announcement about my illness? Sometimes I swear I could slap you, Colleen McGreevy.”
“That’s what friends are for, dear.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to seem—I’ve always been positive, kept my problems to myself. That’s how I am. How I get along.” She turned to Kate. “But now they want me to tell you, and since I’ve been called out like this, I guess I have to.”
“I’d like to help you, if I can. It’s your turn, that’s all. You don’t have to take it if you don’t want to,” Kate said.
“But I do, I do. It’s just that I’m afraid.” Oona fell silent.
The women wondered if they’d done the right thing, pushing her that way.
“No, it’s all right. It really is,” Oona continued. “You can probably guess already. We talk too much about some things, not enough about others. That’s the way with women, isn’t it? Me more than any of us….” She paused. “I had cancer. I lost my breasts. That’s why there’s no point in making me anything but knickers. There’s nothing to hold up anymore. I’m flat as the Australian Outback.”
Colleen squeezed her hand.
“Let me see the lingerie,” Kate said gently, thinking of her mother, how thin her body had become, like a child’s, the contours and curves wasted away. There hadn’t been anything Kate could do for her in the end other than hold her hand—but she could help Oona in this one small way. “I’m sure that there’s something we can do to make you feel beautiful again,” she told her.
Oona didn’t reply. She pulled the bra from her bag, balled it up in her hands, and quickly passed it to Kate.
“No wonder you don’t want to wear this.” Kate held it up. “It’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Terrible, isn’t it?” Oona sighed with a sad smile. “A right old booby prize.”
They laughed, perhaps a bit harder than necessary.
“The saleswoman could have done better than this—she should have,” Kate said with a shake of her head.
“Maybe she would have if I’d stayed longer, but I wanted to get out of there as fast as I could,” Oona said. “I thought nothing would be worse than going to the wig shop. I was wrong. At least the wig was temporary. My hair grew back. But I can’t grow new breasts. Not real ones, anyway.”
“Padraig loves you. Anyone can see that,” Bernie said.
“I’m afraid I’ll scare him.” Oona stood in front of the mirror, traced the lines on her chest, no more mounds of flesh, no nipples. Padraig had loved her breasts. The Alps, he called them, for their size and majesty, even after the children and the nursing and the passage of time made them droop. She hadn’t realized she was grieving for her breasts—the denial, the anger, the sadness. She hadn’t reached the point of acceptance. She didn’t know when she would. There were worse things, of course. So many worse things. And yet—
She’d gone to Dublin for the procedure. Her son knew a doctor in there, David Corcoran, the best in his field. But the scars remained. Some days, Oona thought they were the great rivers of the world. The Yangtze, the Danube, the Nile. Others, the wise visages of elderly women, with wrinkled eyes and mouths. The woman she was becoming with each passing day. She didn’t tell anyone, fearing they’d send her in for a psych consult, though, truth be told, there were days when she thought she’d lost her mind too. “Padraig wants to help,” she said. “I don’t know what to tell him. I just want things to be as they were before.”
“You’re more than your breasts,” Colleen said.
“In my head, I know that,” Oona replied. “But it’s so strange and ugly. There’s no getting around that. It takes getting used to. Even for me. But there are some good things: I’ve always wanted curly hair, and look at it now. After the chemo, it grew back in ringlets. I can squeeze through smaller spaces, wear the clothes they make for those stick-thin models, though I’m too old for the styles now.” She had a slender figure, it was true.
“You’ve always had grand legs,” Bernie said.
“So I think, in time, everything will be okay,” Oona said. “I have to get accustomed to it, is all. We both have to get accustomed to it. At first, it was as if when the doctor took my breasts away, he took something else