She quickly lifted the receiver, hoping as always.
Not Rene. Not Jake. Fred.
“I thought you better know Angie’s back in Saint Sebastian,” he said. Something in his voice. Bitterness? No. Fear?
“Alcohol again?” Mary asked. She knew the answer.
Only thought she knew.
“Cancer,” Fred said flatly. “They removed some polyps or something from her cervix that turned out to be malignant.”
Mary’s insides went cold. This was completely out of left field, the place this kind of news always seemed to come from. “What? Whoa? Are you telling me my mother’s got cervical cancer?”
“I’m afraid that’s what it is, Mary.”
“I’m driving down there,” she said, as distant as if the woman in the mirror had spoken, the other Mary who didn’t have to feel.
“Now, Mary, there ain’t much point in that. Angie might even be asleep by the time you get here. I think they gave her a sedative or something.”
“I’m leaving right now, Fred.”
He sighed. “Room four-oh-five, Mary.”
She hung up, feeling dizzy, and grabbed her blue windbreaker from the closet, hearing the wire hanger ping against the floor. Then she walked directly out the door without bothering to turn off the lights or the music.
Cancer. The dreadful word. She didn’t want to say it, or even to have it unsaid and crawling around in her mind.
With a rush of guilt, she realized her sense of impending doom was for herself, not Angie. Loneliness was gathering around her like a cold fog, affording only glimpses of a terrifying future.
Selfish! she admonished herself.
As she descended the creaking stairs, she repeated Angie’s name softly, each utterance rending her heart. “Angie, Angie. Mother.”
A terrible apprehension had taken form in her breast, an organic, destructive engine racing and fueled by fear.
She couldn’t stop trembling.
33
Though visiting hours were over, the nurse on duty allowed Mary into Angie’s room.
Angie wasn’t asleep. Her eyes were half closed, but she was propped up in bed, and when Mary entered she smiled at her.
The room was almost exactly like the one Angie had been in for detoxification two months ago-same drab, institutional green walls, same black vinyl chair near the bed, same blood-pressure testing equipment and mysterious, many-dialed gadgetry mounted on the wall. But the other room had smelled of iodine, and this one had a musty scent about it, as if rain had blown in through an open window days ago and nothing had quite dried out.
On the windowsill was a small wilted flower arrangement, probably from the gift shop in the lobby. Fred’s scrawled signature was visible on the card, but Fred seemed to be nowhere around.
Mary sat down in the black chair, hearing it sigh as the cushion was compressed. “So. When’d you find out about this, Angie?”
“About a week ago. One of Doctor Keshna’s tests picked up something was wrong, then I came in and had more tests. After they removed some polyps from my cervix they did a biopsy and it came up positive. I didn’t mention it to you ’cause there was no sense you knowing. Nothing to be done anyways.”
“Nothing to be done? What’s that mean?” Mary asked, with a mingling of anger and fear.
“Means my blood’s spread the cancer and I gotta go through this chemotherapy business.”
“So what do the doctors say? Will chemotherapy do it? Will that cure you?”
“They say it might. I’ll be in here a few days, to start treatment, then it’ll be outpatient stuff till a few weeks pass. They tell me I’ll get weak then and probably have to check in and stay for a while. I tell you, Mary, I’m lucky; thank God for Blue Cross/Blue Shield.”
Mary stared at her. She’d known people who’d undergone chemotherapy. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. Cervical cancer. Oh, Christ! You might be dying, Mother, and your reaction is to thank God for your insurance.
“Don’t take all this too hard,” Angie said. “I told you I got great medical coverage, and it might be nothing.”
“Nothing? Cancer?”
“Don’t say it, Mary. I don’t like hearing the word.”
“I sure as hell don’t like saying it.” Mary wiped her eyes, which had welled with tears the second time that evening. These tears stung. “Dr. Keshna taking care of you?”
“No, not her specialty. Brainton’s my doctor. Yuppie type, looks about twenty-two. Cervical cancer’s his game.” Angie shook her head weakly. “You know, this didn’t have a damned thing to do with my drinking. Ain’t that ironic?”
“That’s supposed to be a comfort?”
“Worth drinking to.”
“I’m gonna talk to Dr. Brainton.”
“Go ahead, Mary. Maybe you can convince him I’m well and they’ll tell me to go home.”
“Don’t be so fucking sarcastic!”
Angie, very tired from whatever they’d given her, sighed long and loud and let her head drop to the side on the fluffed white pillow. She smiled resignedly and not with her eyes. “I was furious, too, when I first found out. Couldn’t be happening to me. Just ain’t goddamn fair…”
“Angie, chemotherapy has a lotta side effects, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, I’ll feel like shit for a spell. Hair’ll likely fall out, that kinda thing.” She was quiet for a while.
Mary heard people pass in the hall, soles shuffling. A woman laughed. How dare she!
“Duke went quick, didn’t he?” Angie said with an edge of envy and maybe resentment. “Saw the other car coming and suffered about two seconds, if he was sober enough to know what was happening at all. He was always lucky, the bastard.”
“Lucky when he married.”
“Ha! Tell you, Mary, I was gonna leave your father. Finally gonna take you and go. Then came the accident.” Her voice wavered and weakened, like a radio signal fading.
“Sure you were, Angie.”
“You don’ know…”
Mary waited for her to finish what she’d started to say. “Angie?”
Her mother was asleep. An old, old woman whose lips fluttered when she exhaled. Her soul might escape her like a feather.
Mary stood up from the chair. Angie was right; she was furious. At cancer, at herself, even at poor Angie. At fate. At the charlatans who assured people there was a reason for things. The parish priest she hadn’t seen in years. The nuns who’d taught her in the sweat-and-varnish purgatory of Saint Elizabeth’s. She paced from one side of the room to the other, faster and faster, whirling at each end of her short journey to prevent herself from striding into the wall. Stay mad, you won’t be afraid.
Finally she stood still, staring at Angie and listening to her faint snoring. Then she left the green, musty room and asked at the nurses’ station if she could talk to Dr. Brainton.
The doctor, she was told, had left for the day and wouldn’t be back until ten o’clock tomorrow morning. Mary thought of asking for his home number, but she knew the nurses would refuse, angels of mercy protecting a god. It wouldn’t be right, or informative, to try calling the doctor at home anyway; she’d no doubt get only his answering service.
She rode the elevator down to the lobby, walked through a maze of halls to Detox, and asked to see Dr. Keshna. Then she waited in one of the molded plastic chairs by the table laden with dog-eared copies of Time and Newsweek. A newspaper was folded sloppily in one of the chairs; did it contain something on the murdered dancers?
“You always seem to be on duty,” Mary said, when Dr. Keshna, in a rumpled green surgical gown, had pushed through the wide swinging doors and was standing calmly before her.
Dr. Keshna nodded solemnly, as if yes indeed she did live at the hospital.
“I’ve been upstairs visiting my mother.”
“How is she?”
“Well, other than a little cancer, she’s okay.”
Dr. Keshna had obviously dealt with shocked and angry relatives who were themselves stunned by whatever microbe had attacked their loved ones. She said nothing. Her large dark eyes were kind and knowing. Mary wondered if the doctor was what Hindus called an “old soul,” one who’d been reincarnated countless times and acquired a residue of wisdom.