Half a year later, after another string of bad nights, there is another name, another therapist, recommended by some other friend. This one is different, calls himself a Harm Reduction Counselor, which is another way of saying someone who helps you plan your alcohol and drug use, to get it under control. I go to this person once. He is a very attractive man in his early forties with a chic apartment-like office in Chelsea. We make an elaborate plan — this number of drinks a night, that number of times I will smoke crack a month — and I’m excited that my drinking and drug use are now doctor approved. Within a week I exceed the limits we’ve established and then miss the second appointment because of staying up all night the night before. I never return.
Months later: another rough morning, another name from a friend of Noah’s. This time it’s Gary, and he’s gentle and sweet and his office is a few blocks from the agency. Gary asks why I have come to see him and I tell him. He pokes around about the childhood stuff, we talk about the peeing, the hard father, the frightened mother. How they met when he was a pilot for TWA and she was a young, pretty stewardess. When we get to the part about my father, he asks what my mother said at the dinner table when things got rough. I describe how cruel he was to her, how poor she was growing up in Youngstown, how much younger she is than my father, how her own father died when she was a teenager. He says, Fine fine fine, but what did she say? Where was she?
Amazing, the power of three words. These will open up such a can of worms. I will sit there and think about all the sessions with Dr. Dave, when I went through, blow by blow, how my father was during that time — how he sounded, what he said — and realize that we never talked about her. Not once. She was one of us, I think, and maybe even say. He was awful to her. Criticized her cooking, her clothes, her intelligence, her interests, her friends. Just as he did with me and with Kim and, to a lesser extent, Lisa and Sean. But I can’t remember my mother beyond this shared circumstance. Can’t remember her saying anything to me about my problem. Acknowledging it, even. Can’t remember a word of comfort or concern about any of it. Broken legs, yes. Mean teachers, you bet. But this, never. Nor can I even see her at those dinner tables when guests were over, when my father would get tipsy and begin his taunting and threatening. It’s as if that whole corridor of my growing up held only me and my father, and while it happened in the same rooms, with everyone else, no one else saw or heard what was going on. I suddenly feel very tired.
About six months later my mother calls to say that her mammogram has come back with bad news, that her cancer has returned and she’s going to Boston for more tests. I have called her only rarely over the past months. The sessions with Gary are like removing all the photographs of my mother from the family album and replacing them with someone who resembles her but is clearly someone else, someone I am only now beginning to see. She has been confused and hurt by my spare contact, as we used to speak several times a week. She complains to Kim, and Kim asks me what’s going on. I tell her it’s been incredibly busy at work.
After the call about the bad mammogram, I am in touch more. It takes a few weeks, but the seriousness of what’s going on sinks in. Soon she is scheduled for surgery and the doctors tell us that it’s a long shot that they’ll be able to remove all of the cancer, and, if they do, an even longer shot that it won’t return, even after an aggressive course of chemotherapy.
Kim and I go over our mother’s finances. There are piles of credit-card bills, and she’s still digging out from the mountain of legal fees that came with divorcing my father a few years before. It has been a long and messy divorce, and at one point she asks me to fly up to New Hampshire, where they are living, to testify in court on her behalf — to uphold a restraining order against my father. I fly up, though before I do, the judge says I don’t have to, that he will uphold the restraining order without my testimony. I’m relieved but still feel ashamed as I see my father, briefly and without words, in the lobby of the courthouse.
Insurance is covering most of my mother’s treatment, but there are ancillary bills adding up and she hasn’t been able to paint any of the murals or portraits she’s been commissioned to paint, which is how she supports herself; nor will she be able to for a long time after the surgery. We talk seriously about what our roles will need to be, financially, and I pretend I am not worried and that money has begun to flow into the agency. My family thinks of me as a success, and I don’t want to tarnish that image. Kim tells me that our mother has decided I should be executor of her will and that papers to that effect will need to be signed. She may not make it, Kim says, and the words just hang there.
This is the spring of 2001. My mother’s surgery is in May, and I fly to Boston. Kim has been there all week with my little sister, Lisa, who lives nearby. Sean is now nineteen and sullenly haunts the halls and rooms around the hospital. The surgery is successful and when we’re allowed to go in and see her, our mother appears half her usual size and weight — withered and weak and swimming in the hospital gown that falls off her shoulders. I have not seen her for months, and as she speaks, her eyes tear and it seems that her words are too difficult to craft and propel into the world. When I go to the hall and call Noah, I break down and start cying, out of control and awkwardly. Everything — the business, the late nights, the worry about money, the feeling of not being able to live this life I’ve constructed — seems overwhelming, and now suddenly my mother, whom I haven’t spoken to for more than a few minutes at a time over the last six months and who looks like she’s dying and I’ve messed it all up and won’t be able to make it right. Through the shaky phone line Noah tells me not to worry, that everything will be okay. I eventually stop sobbing, and as we say good-bye it feels as if he is very far away.
We sit in the hospital room with my mother while she sleeps and whisper as the nurses come in and out and fuss with the tubes and charts around her. Her surgeon, a tall, dark-haired man in his forties with a heavy five-o’clock shadow, comes in and tells us that there were complications with the reconstruction and that they may have to go back in in a few days, but the surgery to remove the cancer and the lymph nodes went very well. I think about the fact that this guy stood over my mother all day and had her life in his hands. My job, the agency, and all my worries shrivel next to this superhero and, not for the first time that day, I feel ashamed.
The day in the hospital ticks by, and at some point, there is a rustle at the door and, miraculously, it’s Noah, smiling, holding bags filled with food from Dean & Deluca. After our phone call he booked a flight and came as soon as he could. It feels as if the floor of the world that had fallen away when I walked into the hospital has suddenly returned. Noah hugs me and I hang on to him for as long as I can.
My mother will move back to her small new house in Connecticut, the one she bought after her divorce, which sits in a field in a small town next to the small town where I grew up. Her many friends will drive her to her chemo and radiation treatments, back and forth to Boston when she needs to see her doctors there, bring her meals round the clock for months, and feed her dog, and slowly, very slowly, she will transform from the pale, bruised waif we saw in the hospital bed back to her cherubic, healthy self. Her hair will return, thinner than before, but when five years pass and she is, as the doctors say, in the clear, you will not be able to tell how close she came to death. She and I will see each other and speak often in the first year of her recovery. My mother blameless and wounded is someone I am comfortable with, and the way we are with each other resembles the way we were when I was an adolescent and even after — attentive, sympathetic, encouraging. But as she gets healthier and returns to her life, I will call less and less, limit my visits to Christmas, and, as before, drift away.