As luck would have it, her double mastectomy was scheduled on the day of the Breast Cancer Awareness Walk for the Cure. Who schedules a double mastectomy for a weekend? Her doctors said they got more time to work, a quiet environment, it was better this way.
Naturally, York was blocked off. Throngs along the sidewalk made it all but impossible to cross over toward the hospital. After coming up from the subway, she had to hail a cab, which was forced into a long, circuitous route.
In years to come, every year when she had to come in for her annual tests — which were best done to the exact day — she’d have the same problem. She’d come to hate that damn walk.
But the surgery got everything, and, knock on wood, the cancer did not return.
I would search every cloud
THE WOMAN AT the door to the loft was cheery. Dirty blond hair, streaked with gray, cascaded down beyond her shoulders, overwhelming a face that was at once hard, and gentle, and pretty. Greeting Oliver, her eyes glowed with the kind of peace and clarity that, Alice knew, came from profound daily meditation. Most likely, Oliver would declare that same glow a sign of psychotic insanity (each privately admitting that both possibilities could be correct). Specializing in massage, trauma therapy, and holistic healing, based somewhere in the Northeast, Sparrow had been recommended to Tilda as having achieved amazing results with cancer patients, and had come to the city after Tilda’s letters of unabashed pleading. Consecutive sessions during the early days of Alice’s consolidation had been relaxing enough to leave Alice in a state of excitement and bliss. That was before her arm had reclotted, creating the quarantine.
As if she were viewing the scene through a thin haze, Alice watched Sparrow bow slightly to Oliver, and tell him the arrangement had worked out perfectly, she’d gotten his message, hopped on the 9 train, and just walked over. It was such a gorgeous evening. Now Sparrow handed over a bouquet.
The gaffe registered: a healer unaware that fresh flowers could compromise an immune system. Precisely the kind of thing that would get Oliver mocking Sparrow’s legitimacy, Alice knew. But Oliver thanked her, asked if she could leave them outside. Speaking simultaneously to Sparrow and — Alice could tell — for her benefit, he said he knew how rough discharge days were, and he’d wanted to take care of Alice when she got home. Alice recognized the irony to his politesse, the hurt beneath his enthusiasm. But by then Sparrow had reached her, and was leaning in, all coconut oils and Eastern spices; Alice accepted the warmth of her embrace with as much appreciation as she could muster.
“It’s time,” Sparrow said. “Ready to begin?”
Alice blinked a few times, her eyes twinkling with kindness. Seconds passed before she gripped the edge of her sewing table. Forearm shaking, she pushed off, by which time Sparrow had managed to ease beneath Alice’s pits, and was lifting with her.
The bedroom purifier soon shifted into second gear; a compact disc broadcast the chirping birds and babbling brooks and wind rustling through trees that constituted an Amazonian rainforest; votive candles were lit; incense sticks burned. Alice lay facedown, her head resting on a side. She was asked to close her eyes.
Sparrow lifted Alice’s right foot off the bed and raised it. Hands that were hard and compact, powerful as a boxer’s, gently pushed Alice’s leg backward, testing. Sparrow similarly tested each of Alice’s limbs and joints, found the limits of their flexibility. She ran her fingers down Alice’s spine, kneaded the space between Alice’s shoulder blades with closed, hard fists, her knuckles pressing. Raised indentations along Alice’s back revealed the outline of her rib cage; Sparrow’s fingers made soothing runs. She scooted and sat at the base of Alice’s back, her weight pleasant on Alice. She pressed along Alice’s scalp, finding those points along the bottom ridge where the neck gave way to skull. Through a delicious veil of sleep, Alice vaguely heard the healer: “You have a brave and strong body. What a boon and friend this body is to you.”
—
If Alice died in her sleep, the way he figured it, Tilda would have to come and hustle the baby away, out to her apartment; although, if Tilda wasn’t answering her beeper, or couldn’t get downtown quickly, then it fell to Oliver’s cousin and his wife to jet over. This had all been arranged. Alice’s mom, if she was still in town, was a possibility, but Oliver assumed she’d be a wreck. He kept Tilda’s beeper number at the ready, and had purchased a second clunky Motorola — one just like his — for Jonathan. Smaller and lighter and slightly better looking than those bricks from the eighties, the phones weren’t going to win any kind of design contest, in fact were basically repulsive; people on the street universally gave Oliver shit looks when he used his, which was doubly humiliating, because reception was never better than spotty, anyway. But there was comfort in the theory that Oliver and his cousin — again, in theory — always could reach one another, that in a crisis he’d get ahold of someone. Only afterward would he contact a coroner. That was his plan. This way the baby would be protected: no chance the deepest part of her mind would get imprinted by the sight of Mommy being zippered.
Two in the morning. Alice and the child long asleep. Oliver imagined how it could go — the dilemma of simultaneously caring for what he imagined as Alice in emergency, spasming, in pain, body panicked and out of control, plus an infant. Game theory demanded Oliver plan for the worst. Meaning Doe awakening, sensing the chaos, then bawling her little head off. Similarly assume Tilda would be uptown, doing whatever the hell she did for rent, maybe plying some poor schlub with alcohol so she could drag him back to her lair. Figure Jonathan and his wife having complicated plans and important arrangements from which all kinds of disentangling would be required. Meaning Oliver had to plan for a good half an hour spent handling this crisis alone. Alice wouldn’t be able to wait for the cavalry, would need help immediately — so Oliver was going to make sure each desktop had an instruction file, just in case the Brow might be at a terminal. Oliver was going to ask anyone who’d be around the apartment semiregularly to familiarize themselves with the instructions (they wouldn’t; still he’d ask). He’d already been assured that select waiters at Florent had been through their share of AIDS tragedies and were more than capable in a crisis situation, Florent would even come himself if need be. Worst-case scenario, something happens at three in the morning, one of the transvestite hookers from the corner could take Doe into the bedroom; Oliver could put him or her on a retainer, have the pre-op hang with the baby, just watching, keeping Doe mollified and oblivious while paramedics attended to Alice in the main room. Shit might get stolen, but so be it; Oliver had to make sure the child did not scar from the sight of Mommy flailing and foaming, let alone the paramedics strapping Mommy onto a stretcher, carrying her away.