a train journey, anticipating the next stop: If you didn’t like where you got off, you just got right back on and moved to the next station. In the doctor’s office that day, she learned that not only had she been booted off the train at the worst station on the line, but that this was quite possibly her final destination.
That was almost three years ago.
So this is my mother now: Hair that’s still short and choppy since it grew back from the last round of chemo, its curl now coarse, the blond color a little too close to desperate. Bosom gone concave, ribs visible beneath. Soft hands now veiny despite the cherry-red polish designed to distract. Gaunt, frail, not soft and glimmering at all. Forty-eight years old and you’d think she was ten years older.
She’s made an effort today—the sundress, the lipstick—which is heartening. But I can’t shake the feeling that something is off. I notice a stack of paper folded into quarters and shoved into the pocket of her skirt. “Wait—you got results already? What did the doctor say?”
“Nothing,” she says. “He said nothing.”
“Bullshit.” I reach across the car and try to pluck the paper from her pocket. She smacks my hand away.
“What do you say we go get pedicures?” she says, her voice as false and sticky as a child with an aspartame lollipop.
“What do you say you tell me what those test results say?” I make another grab for them and this time my mother remains motionless as I snag the papers from her pocket, careful not to tear the pages, my heart building up to a rapid staccato because I know, already, what they say. I know from the resigned expression on my mother’s face, the faint black smudges under her eyes where mascara recently melted and was wiped away. I know because this is what life is like: Just when you think you’ve reached the end zone, you look up to realize that the goal posts were moved back while you were focused on the turf right in front of your eyes.
And so even as my eyes scuttle across the CT scan results on the pages—the inscrutable charts, the dense paragraphs of medical jargon—I already know what I am going to see. And sure enough, on the last page, there they are: the familiar gray tumors bleeding shadows across slices of my mother’s body, wrapping their amorphous fingers around her spleen, her stomach, her spine.
“I relapsed,” my mother says. “Again.”
I feel it in my own stomach then, the familiar dark spread of helplessness. “Oh God. No. No no no.”
She plucks the papers from my fingers and carefully folds them along the crease marks. “We knew this was probably going to happen,” she says softly.
“No we didn’t. The last treatment was supposed to be it, the doctor said, that’s why we…Jesus. I don’t understand….” I trail off before I finish, because this is not the point I mean to make; but my first thought is that we were sold a false bill of goods. But he said…It’s not fair, I think, like a child having a temper tantrum. I throw the transmission into park. “I’m going in to talk to the doctor. This can’t be right.”
“Don’t,” she says. “Please. I talked it through with Dr. Hawthorne, we already have a plan. He wants to try radioimmunotherapy this time. There’s a brand-new drug—I think it’s called Advextrix?—just approved by the FDA, with really promising results. Even better than the stem cell transplant. He thinks I’m a good candidate.” A soft laugh. “The upside is I won’t lose my hair this time. You won’t have to see me looking like a cue ball.”
“Oh, Mom.” I manage a wan smile. “I don’t care about what your hair looks like.”
She stares resolutely out the windshield at the cars that whiz past on Beverly Boulevard. “The drug. It’s expensive, is all. It’s not covered by my insurance plan.”
Of course it isn’t. “I’ll figure it out.”
She looks at me sideways, blinking her clotted lashes. “Each dose is about fifteen thousand dollars. I’ll need sixteen of them.”
“You don’t worry about