Ann McDonald choked
back an embarrassing hoot. She turned to her friend, wide-eyed, and ignored
passive frowns in a gathering of the self-possessed. Stéphanie’s stage whisper,
like her personality, belied the assault. It left you with an incomprehensible
reaction to a mangled pile of wounded disposition. Ann never got used to the
shock every jeremiad landed on the unsuspecting receiver.
Moving closer to her
agitated friend, Ann asked quietly: “Do you want to leave?”
Stéphanie Gayle stared
eerily from her good eye and nodded. The black eye patch, a recent change, was
off putting.
“You sure?” Ann
whispered conspiratorially. “The snacks might not be out yet.”
After a decade long
friendship Ann finally understood Stéphanie’s incentive. She ripped through
life indisputably brave. Only, she tore holes in her own fabric, and then
punched the life out of the passenger side air bag. It was suicide by degrees.
In a light-filled, simply yet elegantly appointed room overseen by
contemplative bronze statues, its walls hung with small yellow flags and
turquoise valances above pristine altars, and crowded with seekers of
enlightenment perched cross-legged and straight-backed on dark blue pillows set
across a polished blonde wood floor, hearing her say fucking brain tumor
made it seem somehow deliciously profane.
They left the room of
devotees before the mallet struck the singing bowl, before another whiney
testament to an unfulfilled life could be uttered by anyone else in the room
unhappy in love, work, money and whatever else impeded their noble path.
Ann bowed hurriedly.
Stéphanie barreled past to the empty reception area. Acolytes had placed bowls
of beige comfort dip on long cloth-covered folding tables. Grapes—purple and
green—filled brightly colored plastic bowls. Yellow and white cheese cubes were
stacked on paper plates alongside baskets of low-sodium chips and gluten-free
crackers.
Food, notably free
food, halted Stéphanie’s furious exit. She ignored the hummus and expertly
filled stick-less bindles with crackers and cheese and grapes. She gathered up
the corners of the bulging paper napkins and shoved them into her commodious
handbag. They passed the fish bowl of donations Stéphanie had ostentatiously
overlooked upon arrival. Ignoring the scrutiny of a student volunteer, Ann
dropped a generous wad of bills she could hardly afford.
Oppressive heat
stunned them at street level. The drift of jasmine off slender joss sticks gave
way to the sour, sweat-stained remains of the day.
Ann reconsidered their
escape from the air-conditioned loft. They stood for a moment on a quieter
midtown street of faceless loft buildings and silhouetted skyscrapers that left
the pavement scored with lengthening shadows. Their bare arms were already
skimmed with sweat. Ann looked up the block toward Sixth Avenue, unsure.
They’d dodged a
bullet. Again. Though they had some things in common, Ann was aware of her
friend’s quirks. Their differences were lodged like detritus in the turns of a
fast moving river.
Stephanie’s parents
had gifted their daughter with a flawless fawn complexion and charcoal colored
hair that curled into soft ringlets now veined with silver. She had her
mother’s animated inquisitive eyes, a flair for unusual jewelry. She was
blessed with her mother’s gap toothed smile; small, perfectly white teeth
marked with that tiny dark door to her soul men longed to go through, ignoring
the obvious consequences that had kept Stéphanie single.
She was a graduate of
a liberal arts college sprung from a decidedly white hamlet nestled above the
Hudson River. College life had been her challenge, she being the only black
student in her class. She rose to it and in addition to her academic and
professional achievements she’d expanded her personal war with the world.
Turmoil was borne from
a childhood of misplaced responsibility and implied deprivation. Her mother was
a dark-skinned beauty both elegant and distant and who rarely stepped beyond
her world of creative eccentrics. She was adamantly black; Nina Simone black.
The company of artists, musicians, politicians and judges whom she dazzled
reflected that. For her entire life, Stéphanie’s mother managed a capricious
reality. When forced to, she fell back on substitute teaching in the public
schools. Sales of her art funded her travels, her jewelry, and a dash in any
direction away from motherhood until she’d had to rely on her daughter’s
generosity in the years before she died.
From what Ann knew,
Stéphanie’s father had fully deserted them when Stéphanie had just turned
eight. After years on the road as a musician, with only sporadic touchdowns to
their upper west side apartment in Manhattan, he’d finally bolted. He
returned with his sax to Paris, to an urbane world of jazz and French women who
reflected his upbringing and divined his needs. They replaced the alabaster
arms of a patrician mother who had tucked him in at night as a boy, and then
left his snowy bed linen, his freshly ironed embroidered pillow, and his downy
cheek scented with her perfume. He’d abandoned his irrevocably aggrieved
daughter to her younger brother who’d paid for her daytime rages and tearful
nightmares while their child-like mother enlivened her circle and left
mothering to Stéphanie.
Ann was a good ten
years older than Stéphanie, but Ann was married long and happily to a working
musician. In Stéphanie’s words: “A bit too married.” An only child, her
upbringing had none of the drama of her friend’s story. Her parents had lived
weary indifferent lives in pointless persistence. Her education was obligatory
as it would be for the financially challenged who had a blinkered worldview and
just were not that interested in Ann’s future. Her mother had struggled with
depression and the shame of it that since might have been elevated to some
acceptability by a named disorder like bi-polar or manic-depressive. Her father
escaped through the back door alcoholics think will give them a way out.
Ann left Astoria where
she’d grown up in the projects. She’d formed a habit of journal keeping she
would sometimes let lapse but would never break. What she saw in the mirror was
of her own making until she’d reached the age when a daughter is fundamentally
recast in her mother’s image. Hers was the mongrel mix of German and Irish
women, with a waist that thickened of its own accord, whose fair skin sunburned
too quickly, whose blonde-gone-brown hair was graying slightly and, at her
husband’s insistence, was left untouched. Not so the chin hairs that she
plucked assiduously.
The bigger difference
though, was that one had a brain tumor. The other did not.
“Why can’t I have a
fucking—what’s the one that kills you quick?”
Ann readied for the
surge. “What are you talking about, Stéphanie?” she asked evenly.
“You know,”
Stéphanie wailed. “What’s its name? Fucking butterfly tumor, a year at the
most.” She pressed a forefinger to her brow. “Boom! I’m dead.”
A passerby slowed his
pace and held back for a split second. He darted ahead, avoiding eye contact.
Stéphanie recognized
flight. “What the fuck is his problem?” she snapped loudly. She raised a hand,
ringed on every finger, and readied a punch at the fleeing man. Ann knew what
was coming. She could have said the tumor you have will kill you, eventually.
Twelve years of suffering, possibly longer, was a very long eventuality.
Gently, but deliberately, Ann pushed her into an unlit doorway before the light
of the corner bookstore giant left them cruelly exposed.
“It doesn’t matter,”
Ann urged. “Breathe.”
“It does matter,”
Stéphanie whimpered, now dazed and slack jawed. Flustered, she rummaged
distractedly in her handbag, shredding paper napkins like she was building a
nest. “I forgot the name—.”
“Of what?” Ann urged.
“The other one…”
Stéphanie said, drifting, and then looked up from the opened bag. Relief purged
the hard lines. “Bilateral Glioblastoma Multiforme,” she gasped, clutching
a grape webbed in bits of torn napkin. “The butterfly tumor.”
Ann had seen the
glazed looks, dropped jaws. She’d heard involuntary yelps on the occasions when
Stéphanie had let rip in public. Waiters, taxi drivers, theater ushers,
shopkeepers suffered her outbursts. Strangers who brushed against her unawares,
or strode in the wrong direction down a city street, suffered a swift thumping.
Children were reprimanded in public to sit straight, their pocket-sized shoes
forcibly prodded from the subway seat. A too long wait at a red light released
a barrage of insults to the back of a cabbie’s head. In any public gathering
Stéphanie found someone in the wrong shoes, maybe an unflattering fashion faux
pas; someone who failed her rigid ideal, and then, sotto voce, she’d
announce: “She looks like she fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on
the way down.”
Ann caught the eye of
the injured party in every instance of street shoving, taxi rants, and
predictably angry reactions from parents, and staved off confrontation with a raised
eyebrow, a knowing grimace, and a hastened withdrawal, never forgetting the
words of Stéphanie’s neurosurgeon, Dr. Son: “These tumors may have been present
at birth.”
At birth. A
tumor so tiny as to be invisible, yet making its presence known in unusually
angry outbursts as a child, followed by teenage years that left school chums
perplexed when her acutely vivacious nature suddenly turned stubbornly sour. As
an attractive, whip smart young woman, she’d endured advice from friends who
claimed her Achilles heel was her choice of men, or rather, how she handled
them once she had chosen them.
Stéphanie’s family
gathered at the hospital after each surgery, fussily apprehensive. They were
her extended maternal side. Aunts and cousins, nieces and nephews, crowded into
the visitors lounge and each time Ann was reintroduced as if for the first
time. They never spoke of anything in particular from what Ann could tell. Some
prayed. Politics never entered the fray until Barack Obama’s presidential
campaign, which coincided with Stéphanie’s last operation. Two-by-two they
paraded in and out of Stéphanie’s room, each with a tale to tell of her
bravery, her recovery, and of her anger. Invariably one of them returned, head
shaking and whispering of an “…unholy shit fit in there.”
Stéphanie’s brother
was a self-described black sheep. He was a delicate version of Stéphanie, a
father of three. Despite her description, he had none of the “little devil”
about him. He never called her Steph and he never forgot to write her name with
the accent she demanded. He quailed, like others, when he’d incurred her wrath
over some minor offense. Mostly, he just stayed away.
Friends seemingly
dropped away like inexperienced, unsuspecting climbers negotiating an avalanche
prone mountain face. The few Ann had met were nearly always in passing. “They
have all deserted me,” Stéphanie cried when Ann inquired.
Unflappable therapists
and surgeons and Stéphanie’s neuro oncologist, Dr. Hunter, were prepared for
extremes. However, they saw only the docile childlike behavior, her eagerness
to be a good girl for them and perhaps be rewarded with life. She was at the
best of times what most would call emotionally reserved. Still, she insisted on
an awkward fumbled embrace with her specialists at the start of every meeting.
“Whatever. I’ll ride
up the west side with you,” Ann offered. “Take the crosstown home.”
Stéphanie gripped
Ann’s arm and they headed west on 22nd Street toward the
multifarious outdoor cafes clogging Eighth Avenue. Ann steered her friend
unflinchingly through hurriedly indifferent Chelsea crowds. She ran
interference among workers preoccupied with loosening the harness in brief
retirement at the bottom of a frosty margarita glass. A taxi was out of
the question. Small spaces were combustible. They made a careful ascent at the
bus stop. It would mean a longer, slower route for Ann, but her husband would
understand. Ann dipped her MetroCard twice, circumventing the now tiresome and
embarrassing drama of Stéphanie’s lost card. If she had the energy she’d walk
from Stéphanie’s building on 89th Street to her apartment on East 95th
Street. Traversing Central Park proved a reliable path to the respite that greeted
Ann at home.
They’d discovered when
they’d met in Paris ten years ago that both women worked in magazine publishing
and lived, literally, across the park from each other. Like Ann, Stéphanie was
a native New Yorker. A French writer Ann had known for years, and whom
Stéphanie had met more recently in New York, had introduced them. Both
confessed to a secret writer’s life; Ann for her journal and short stories,
Stéphanie for a screenplay she was writing. Ann liked Stéphanie though she’d
found her a bit bossy, a bit snobbish. Her intellect sliced through a
conversation like a hard flung cleaver and straight away separated the meat
from the bone. You had to be on your toes and Ann appreciated a challenge.
Then, Stéphanie laughed girlishly. She was small-boned and had the grace of a
guarded dancer. So unlike the scowling, bloated, listing figure she’d become.
Ann was self-taught, a
discriminating reader with a voracious appetite. She loved to travel. Any
insecurity due to a rudimentary education was kept well below the radar for the
most part, made up by a curious open intelligence. She’d learned to type in
high school and the tedious dictum had proved true: You’d never want for a job
if you could type.
She’d found her niche
with a small newspaper publisher in a loft in Chelsea. She knocked out
community news stories for weeklies on the newfangled Compugraphic machines.
She paid attention to fledgling journalists and the frenetic language of
deadlines, regularly contributing last minute captions and sidebars when the
flagging writers had hit a wall.
Ann didn’t mind the
coke-fueled verbal antics. She could outshout the best of them. Late hours and
grueling deadlines left her unfazed. She was reminded of Kerouac’s famous
scroll when she’d processed the punched tape into another machine and watched
it unfurl in long galleys as readable copy she’d hand over to the art
department. She fell in with a blustering soft-bodied editor with a sharp
intellect and a huge appetite for alcohol. He relished playing Svengali and
encouraged her writing.
Long hours of
typesetting and proofreading, though, had chipped away Ann’s knack for reading
anywhere. She’d no longer open a book on the subway. If she managed to scan a
few pages in the wee hours of her return she was guaranteed the sound of the
book hitting the floor would send her bolt upright in unexpected daylight.
Writing stopped. The Smith Corona lay untouched on the kitchen table.
Ann was drawn to the
paper cut banter of overworked, underpaid designers and paste-up artists, every
one indifferent of a freelance disguise: painters, actors, performance artists,
writers. They knew who they were at the end of an interminable day. She liked
the tools of that trade: burnishers, rollers, proportion wheels. Little by
little she’d gravitated across the warped plank wood floor of the Chelsea loft
to the intoxicating smell of hot wax, the decisive cut of an X-acto knife drawn
around galleys and veloxes, and the lofty determination in placing elements on
the page.
When her editor left
for a rival publication on the upper eastside she went with him. Camouflaging
inexperience with goodwill, she’d bluffed her way into another community
newspaper at his behest. He wanted Ann’s company and he’d favored her with
covert on the job training. She reconfigured as a mechanical artist.
Over the years, purely
by happenstance, she’d transformed into a highly paid senior graphic designer
at a French-owned publishing company. Stéphanie, on the other hand, had forged
a relentlessly aggressive path toward her top-ranked position as copy chief at
a multinational media corporation. Still, Stéphanie was dissatisfied. She
exhibited an unquenchable need for something that she never seemed able to
attain.
After a few years
Stéphanie stopped talking about her screenplay and dismissed Ann’s inquiries.
Ann never quite abandoned her dream of a writer’s life. She’d continued to keep
a journal and wrote short stories. Apart from a few friends, she’d kept
that mostly to herself.
Encouraged by her
husband, Ann had applied to workshops, but was put off by what she felt rattled
her cage. She liked her private unbothered escape into writing. She had friends
who encouraged her, calling her a natural writer. Stéphanie had read some of
Ann’s stories. Though she was patronizing, she was unwilling to contradict
their mutual friend in Paris. Stéphanie, too, remarked that Ann was a natural
writer, but followed that with sly offhand remarks, “…for someone who never
actually studied. You have something, I’m not sure what.” She persisted in
criticizing Ann’s stories for length, telling her she aimed too high in
reading the likes of Virginia Woolf, for example. And she hated the novels of
Anita Brookner, a contemporary favorite of Ann’s. “Too depressing, all those
boring stories about single women. Try to write like David Sedaris,” she’d
urged. “You know, keep it light.”
Stéphanie’s call to
Ann’s office had been unexpected. They had only just met. Both knew the demands
of the job left little time for social calls at work. Ann was swamped on a
regular basis, meeting deadlines, juggling photographers, freelancers, and
editors. An impatient managing editor was bivouacked in her office, armed with
layouts of health spas, E-Z dessert recipes, knitting how-tos—all aimed at the
kind of woman Ann was not.
“Ann MacDonald here,”
she’d snapped. When Stéphanie asked if it was a bad time the usual conceit was
not in evidence. The tone of her voice had given Ann pause. She waved off the
managing editor. “What’s up Stéph?”
Hastening to correct
her slip—Stéphanie did not tolerate nicknames—a feeble response cut her off:
“It’s back.”
The bus was summer
empty. It was past rush hour and they settled into seats generally reserved for
the handicapped. Stéphanie stared ahead blankly. Ann recalled that phone call
as if it was yesterday and not ten years ago. How her stomach had seized when
she’d been told about the tumor; how Stéphanie had rebounded from the first
surgery and rewarded herself with Paris. How Stéphanie felt they had always
known each other. It was the first time Ann heard those words: benign
meningioma. It would not be the last.
They rode in silence.
The subject that evening was Staying In the Moment. How could Stéphanie
be expected to stay in the moment? They had not been spared the terrible
eventuality. Her surgeon—top in his field—would not risk another operation, not
even by gamma knife, and directed Stéphanie to a clinical trials program. Dr.
Hunter, a petite child-like waif dressed in adult designer clothes, with the
wisecracking humor of Woody Allen and the warrior stance of a pint-sized
Amazon, pushed for radical experimentation. Meningiomas were tough nuts, she
said. Another doctor protested. The drugs had no successful track record. The
side effects were potentially horrendous. Again and again they were reminded:
This was not cancer. Cancer was easier. Both knew what was to come.
Stéphanie, now sunk
into partialness, deserted by the fulgurant rage that drove her, stared ahead
as the bus headed uptown on Amsterdam Avenue. Ann searched for an opening to
lighten the mood. “It was a good talk, though, right? Baker’s always got
something to say. Funny, kind of dry humor?”
“Fuck that. Fuck
enlightenment,” Stéphanie retorted under her breath. “Fuck God.”
Shambhala was out of
the question now. They had come to the Tuesday night dharma gatherings, as they
were called, by circumstance. Circumstance was the stubborn benign, yet
recurring, tumor crowding Stéphanie’s brain. It was Stéphanie’s invitation and
Ann’s response to that exigent tumor that had forged a curious friendship.
Stéphanie’s tumor was for some time the elephant in their friendship.
Eventually Ann had come to know every inch of that elephant; the toughness of
its hide, how its eyes narrowed when disturbed and then rampaged with tusks
bared. Some meningioma, like Stéphanie’s interloper, disables at a deceptively
moderate pace, a serial killer with limitless patience. It smothered normalcy
in barely perceptible degrees of antisocial behavior that infuriated strangers
and left friends and family aghast and wary. It was far from benign.
The call to her office
marked the beginning of Ann’s quotidian role. Without actually noticing, Ann
became Stéphanie’s advocate. She waited with her in claustrophobic anterooms
for countless MRIs, sat in on innumerable meetings with brain surgeons and held
her hand after every surgery that disfigured her face by degrees and after
every reconstructive surgery that invariably fell short. She held a prism to
her own eye at the direction of a noted ophthalmologist and saw for herself the
kaleidoscopic chaos that was Stéphanie’s vision. She’d accompanied Stéphanie
for innumerable rounds of chemo and radiation treatments. She laughed at
Stéphanie’s predictable joke about chemo having its upside and then saw the
lost weight redoubled with each gallon of ice cream, every carton of junk food
ordered online.
They did not return to
the dharma gatherings. Ann went to church.
An avowed atheist, Ann
was once a cranky non-believer who’d carried her atheism around like a
sledgehammer until the argument was just too tiring. She’d begun, instead, to
seek a quieter disaffection with religious belief. Stéphanie believed in God.
She believed enough to be both angry and pleading for her life. Ann resisted
comment on the late night TV miracle cures Stéphanie clung to: tiny bottles of
holy water, prayer beads, money sent to histrionic Evangelical preachers. A
solution that smelled very much like olive oil prompted Ann to suggest that
Stéphanie was wasting her money. “You have the best surgeons in the country.
God won’t help you with any of this.”
When Stéphanie lost
sight in her left eye Ann read to her. They read in Stéphanie’s apartment
until, at the urging of Stéphanie’s long time primary care
doctor, Ann coaxed her into the sunlight on weekends. They’d started with
the lighter fare of popular humorists until the jokes ran into each other.
Stéphanie suggested Sun Tzu’s The Art Of War and they were delighted by
a nod, acknowledged in passing, from the actor, Kevin Bacon, walking his dog in
Central Park.
They’d read the slim
volumes of a female Buddhist monk about what to do when things fall apart, or
things scare you, and they tried to get their heads around starting where you
are. Ann’s reading voice seemed to calm Stéphanie and they discussed meditation.
This led them to the weekly dharma gatherings on 22nd street.
At the end of that
summer Ann was the first to face a broad swing of the ax that severed her from
her job and left her unemployable, at least at her former professional level.
It wasn’t a surprise. Women in her department had been circling the drain for
months prior to her layoff. The company was being restructured, which meant
older women earning high salaries, in particular, were jettisoned. She’d
joined, unenthusiastically, the freelance circus, only to have young clowns at
the door dismiss her age and treat her accordingly, that is patronizingly or
with undisguised rudeness. The industry was in free fall. Every revolution on
the carousel spun her from one struggling magazine to another.
Lunchtime walks in the
various neighborhoods solved multiple problems. Eating out was an avoidable
expense. Usually there was a vest pocket park, at least, to pick a bench or
café chair and eat lunch brought from home. She walked off her agitation with
spikey self-absorbed art directors whose personalities were dictated by
panoramic tattoos and capricious piercings. She jotted ideas for stories in the
little spiral notebooks she had time for again. The first bad weather day drove
her indoors, as it happened, to a church.
Ann found these
churches, these quiet places, which were mostly empty, mostly undisturbed at
midday. Where she felt the presence of her own unquiet mind ripple as over
still water in ever widening circles until the tension disappeared at the
horizon.
The neighborhood
determined the visitors. Some pews held homeless men and women hunched over
bulging plastic bags, willing invisibility. Other churches welcomed stout
ladies in kerchiefs, singly or in mute pairs, fiddling their rosaries. Quiet,
dark haired children with bowl cuts sat alongside mothers who spoke to them
softly in Spanish.
A church in Times
Square was the busiest and saw actor types curtsey theatrically in the aisle,
while a businessmen dipped hurriedly onto another seat. Tourists wandered in
clutching their guidebooks like bibles, but there was a noticeable absence of
them in places like the Episcopal Church on East 29th Street.
Ann discovered the
little church around the corner, as it was called, after a particularly
aggravating morning tolerating the antics of a self-absorbed art director, an
overwrought diva decades younger with none of her hard won experience. She left
the office and wandered further downtown on Park Avenue South, turned aimlessly
toward Madison Avenue and was surprised and enticed by the brick path winding
through cultivated greenery and she escaped into a quietly unpretentious
storybook chapel.
Then, Stéphanie lost
her job. She’d lost the ability to control the pace when her reflexes failed
her. No longer able to intimidate, she frankly scared her staff. An obdurate
relationship with Human Resources had come to an end. The crushing defeat was
palpable. After so many years of a threatened firing, she’d finally been
defeated by a sweeping company lay off.
Freelance work dried
up. Ann had more time for crowded doctors’ waiting rooms and impersonal labs.
She sat with Stéphanie on hard plastic chairs in windowless government benefit
offices. They made their case across institutional desks of harried employees
who dutifully assessed Stéphanie’s disability.
Early movie show times
preempted Stéphanie’s increasingly mercurial relationship with the public. They
settled in the nearly empty darkened theater, still too soon even for the
gunboat of popcorn Stéphanie required. They watched as the White Queen
theorized wistfully to Alice. Her sister’s demented behavior, she said, and her
large head, might be because of a tumor pressing against the Red Queen’s brain.
Stéphanie groped for Ann’s hand and gripped it with impossible force. “I love
you,” she whispered. “I know,” Ann said.
Stéphanie’s gait was
increasingly unstable and she canted like an overburdened mule on uneven
cobblestones. Steroids were prescribed. When both weather and mood lightened
they ventured from the apartment and teetered in sync along a steep path to the
Hudson River. The walker the doctor had urged Stéphanie to purchase—for the
good of both of them—met Stéphanie’s rage, and its fate, at the bottom of the
lobby stairs. On Stéphanie’s really bad days they remained indoors and turned
to Emily Dickinson: “To fight aloud is very
brave….”
After so many stops
and starts over the years, Stéphanie’s condition deteriorated alarmingly.
Bruised evidence of her falls appeared all over her body like Rorschach tests.
At Stéphanie’s now desperate urging they explored alternative therapies. In an
expensively appointed office awash in fleshy pink hues they met with a follower
of a famously unconventional cancer researcher and therapist. He informed her
immediately that her tumor was not cancer. Ann bit her tongue. Apprised of
Stéphanie’s former profession, he reached into his drawer and drew out a
manuscript, as a jeweler would a rare diamond. Would she give him advice on his
first novel? Ann hustled her foul-mouthed friend from his office and left him
to his stupefaction.
“I want to die,” she’d
say. “Kill me.”
“I can’t do that,” Ann
insisted. “You can’t ask a friend to do that.”
“I don’t have friends
anymore, except you.”
As quickly as the
meningioma reclaimed the 90% removed from her brain at the last surgery, their
world shrunk to the far west side neighborhood of St. Luke’s Roosevelt
Hospital. Ann found relief inside the grand Gothic Revival of St. Paul the
Apostle, which was a short walk from the hospital, and waited while Stéphanie
endured now weekly blood tests to check white and red blood cell counts. MRIs
increased. A full body PET scan was ordered. Dr. Hunter conducted the highly
experimental drug trials that were like a chair offered to a worn out person
and then pulled from beneath her, again and again and again.
Ann was not a
sentimentalist. She rarely had an emotional reaction even to Stéphanie’s
increasingly dismal outcome. God may have crossed her mind now and then, when
she’d heard other people’s reactions to cataclysmic events like fires and
floods and earthquakes.
“If God brings you to
it he will bring you through it.”
Ann welcomed the brief
escapes into the increasingly familiar surroundings of St. Paul: Ornate altars,
brightly painted, sweeping archways beneath lofty cathedral ceilings, a
massive, gilt-edged bible open upon an oaken pulpit, murals of the history of
the faithful hung from the marble walls. Sometimes she would leave her seat at
the back and wander along a row of silent confessionals. Organ pipes rose like
some mutated coral from a biblical sea. She marveled at the deceptive scale of
stained glass windows looming high above the congregation. Polished stone
floors reflected the sweep upward and made her feel like she was walking somewhere
between heaven and earth. Tiers of candles, like piano keys, some burning with
an ivory white light, others still darkened and waiting to be played. The
outstretched arms of the figure of Christ, perpetually crucified, held her
gaze.
Surrounded as she was
by the clues of a deity, Ann found only the absence of the outside world, a
respite from hospitals and waiting rooms, from tentative replies that it was
difficult to “tease out” what caused the changes in Stéphanie’s equilibrium.
At what turned out to
be the last office visit with Stéphanie’s oncologist, Dr. Hunter strongly urged
her to break what she called a vicious cycle. If cooking for herself had become
an insurmountable chore, enlist more friends to prepare meals, to shop for her.
To be self-immured was no longer an option. She had been lucky and now Dr.
Hunter recommended “fun.” They listened and left quietly. Both knew what that
meant.
“Fuck lucky,” said
Stéphanie.
Stéphanie surrendered
her e-mail addresses to Ann. It was a formidable list. “They won’t respond,”
Stéphanie predicted gloomily.
“We can only try,”
said Ann.
Ann was stunned by the
return on her enquiry. Friends responded like the ex-communicated welcomed back
into the fold, their sins forgiven. Many had friendships with Stéphanie that
reached back years.
“We’ve been in school
together probably since 1st grade!”
“I am an old friend of
Stéphanie’s. Stuck in a remote part of Italy. Please tell her I’ll see her as
soon as I get back and will help in anyway I can.”
“She never returned my
calls. I had very nearly given up.”
“It’s been extremely
difficult for years. I feel guilty that I should have done more for her. I feel
I so terribly let her down and wasn’t a good enough friend.”
Some had suffered her
tantrums unaware of her condition. Others took her word that she was busy all
the time. Still others knew and remained steadfast, but at the arm’s length
Stéphanie had thrust at them.
Ann did her best to
staunch the bleeding.
More names were made
known to Ann, even former lovers, and she continued to reach out. They joined
forces, putting aside arguments, hurt feelings, eager to make up for lost time.
They shopped and cooked for her in turns. Ann answered their myriad questions
as best she could and organized visits. Stéphanie basked in their attention.
“Dear Ann,” Stéphanie
wrote, “There’s no sun up in the sky. Stormy weather.”
The e-mail arrived in
the dead of night. Ann wasted no time and contacted Dr. Hunter. Within the hour
Stéphanie was admitted to St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital.
Friends and family
visited Stéphanie. Some offered reiki, some read to her. They rubbed lotion
into her hands and feet. They kept her lips moistened. Prayers were offered.
Stéphanie’s speech
became greatly impaired. She was disoriented from the morphine. She was moving
toward the inevitable, leaving by degrees.
On the day the feeding
tube was ordered removed by her family, Ann was granted a few moments alone
with her friend. Suddenly Stéphanie’s hand, now ringless, gripped Ann’s with
the same force she had shown in the movie theater. Her eyes darted back and
forth. She made a gurgling sound and Ann leaned in close to her.
“This sucks,” she
heard.
Ann shook her head in
agreement.
“Writing?” Stéphanie
rasped.
Ann was taken aback.
“Yes,” she replied.
“Long?”
Ann bit her lip, fighting
tears. She squeezed Stéphanie’s hand gently and stroked her hair.
“My story is as long
as it needs to be,” she said quietly.
Stéphanie’s eyelids
fluttered, two delicate butterflies willing escape. She bared her teeth and
flashed a rictus grin.
Ann left the hospital feeling unnaturally calm. At the great church
she started up the stairs, wavered, and returned to the street. No, she didn’t
need this. She would go home now and she would write.
