Read The Blessings Online

Authors: Elise Juska

The Blessings (4 page)

It would all be much easier if she and Kate were close, Lauren thinks. They're the same age, but Kate is entirely different from her—stylish, outgoing, an exception to everything. She went to Bryn Mawr and has no children. She calls Patrick
babe
. To family parties, she brings frozen appetizers you warm in the oven or those giant chocolate-chip cookies they sell in malls, and somehow, from Kate, this seems charming, understandable, as if she has more important things to do than cook. Lauren wouldn't dare. She slaves over coleslaw and three-bean salads, following the recipes she was given in a pretty flowered binder at her wedding shower—
The Blessing Family Cookbook
—along with a food processor, an electric mixer. For Kate's shower, they'd all pitched in to send her and Patrick on a long weekend down the shore.

It doesn't matter
, John likes to say.
It's not a contest.

He enjoys teasing her, finds her discomfort endearing. He knows his own family too well to appreciate how they make her feel: like standing so close to a mirror you can't see your own face. Because how could she
not
feel inferior around them? Between the supremely capable sisters and the supremely confident sister-in-law, she has every right—though in truth, Lauren has always been prone to feeling this way. When she was eleven, the one time she agreed to try overnight camp, she had refused to do the trust fall, the one where you flop backward blindly into strangers' arms. The other kids were pressuring her and Lauren became so adamant, so agitated, that the blood rushed to her head, and she started to faint, so they caught her anyway.

II

When John first felt the pain in his back, they assumed it was a pulled muscle. A strain from all the swimming. They'd had the in-ground pool dug over the summer and he'd been doing twenty laps each day before work. This was John: determined, disciplined. He set his mind to something and he did it. He stretched his muscles, took Extra Strength Tylenol. At night, watching TV, he pressed a heating pad against his side.

It was October then, not a particularly remarkable October, though later Lauren would remember its every moment as if gilded in gold. The dinner party they hosted for some of John's friends from the brokerage. The compliments she received on the stuffed peppers (her own family's recipe). Max taking his first steps. The Phillies making it all the way to the World Series, then losing in game six. Dropping Elena off at preschool, ripping Lauren's heart out three mornings a week.

Then one morning, a Saturday, John said:
Lauren. Something isn't right.

  

The appointment with Dr. Gwynn had been inconclusive, John said. He wanted John to go to the hospital for tests.
Tests?
Lauren said, a tick of alarm.
What kind of tests?
John wasn't worried. Ed Gwynn was his old family doctor, the one they'd all gone to since they were children. He probably wasn't equipped to deal with more than flus and fevers, skinned knees. They would wait and see what a real doctor had to say.

  

Aggressive
, the oncologist called it—that was the first word that stuck. They were sitting in his office side by side, facing the vast shining expanse of his desk, deep enough to buffer him from the people receiving bad news.
Cancer in the kidney.
Lauren watched the doctor's mouth moving but couldn't absorb what he was saying. Other words drifted by. She heard a few—
fatty tissue, renal cells
. Beside her, John's hands gripped the leather arms of the chair. He nodded, kept nodding, as the doctor showed them the CT scan, pointed to a gray blur. It looked like a smudge, something she could erase with a dab of spit on her thumb.
Lymph nodes
, he said. The sun was coming through the blinds on a slant, striping the desk. Lauren stared at a picture of the doctor's family: his wife and three children, waving from a dock. They were all wearing life preservers. Did the parents usually wear life preservers? The doctor wanted to order more tests—
chest X-ray
,
bone scan
. He handed them a Kleenex and shook their hands. They left the office in numb silence, rode the elevator with two chatting receptionists, and stepped into the cool, oily dark of the parking garage. Her hands were tingling. She held John's arm to keep from falling. They walked quickly toward the car, as if they'd mutually agreed to just keep moving, get into the car and out of sight. John opened her door, as always, and she took comfort in this small act of consistency, in the businesslike clap of his shoes as they rounded the bumper. But when he slid into the seat beside her, she saw the fear on his face. Something snapped in her brain, and she started sobbing. “It'll be fine,” John said. “It'll be fine. We'll be fine.” But his voice was stunned. He turned on the car. “We need gas,” he said, and Lauren remembered the tank was low, that they'd discussed filling it on the way but had been running late. It seemed inconceivable that this was the same car they were sitting in an hour ago, the same life with its same trivial problems. But the evidence was all there: the two car seats strapped in the back, the saltine crackers ground into the carpet, the needle on the dashboard hovering near E. How could the car need gas in a moment like this? “We'll get through this,” John told her. “We will.” They stopped at the Hess station and John pumped the gas and drove home.

  

Once, shortly after they were engaged, Lauren and John had gone to the wedding of one of his high school friends. John was nearly thirty then, Lauren only twenty-two.
Sure you don't mind being with an older man?
John often teased her. She didn't. In fact, she liked that John was so much older, the same way she liked that he was so much taller; it made her feel safe. Toward the end of the reception, when John was refilling their drinks, a guy started hitting on her. He was loose and red-faced, one hand on her elbow, his drunken grin too broad and too close. John walked up to him, smiled, and said:
I see you like looking at my wife?
It was so out of character, like a line from a gangster movie. It thrilled her, especially because they weren't married yet.
Wife.
She loved just hearing him say it. She had let her mind run wildly, girlishly, imagining the word in different contexts.

My wife and I have an eight o'clock reservation.

Oh, I'm sorry—have you met my wife?

But in the oncology ward of Holy Redeemer, the word carries a different weight. The wife is the one whom the nurses question, the one to whom doctors deliver the sobering news, the one who talks to insurance companies and signs forms. The wife begins learning a new language—
radical nephrectomy
, which the first oncologist recommended. The second one agreed.
Full removal of kidney and nearby lymph nodes.
“I'm the wife,” Lauren tells them, countless times, the transition from
his
to
the
happening without her noticing.

  

John is in the hospital for a week. His family is there every day, some in the morning and some the afternoon. They trade off taking care of the children. Neighbors, family. Abby, home for Thanksgiving. When Lauren misses Thanksgiving dinner, Ann drives over with a lukewarm plate. At home at night, Lauren pumps her milk for the next day and stores it in the refrigerator and holds the baby, who cries for some loneliness he doesn't understand. She eats late at night, whatever she can find. She can't bear being in their bed alone, so she sleeps on the couch. Staring at the darkened ceiling, she thinks that she should have pressed harder for John to see a doctor. Should have made him go when he first mentioned the pain. Everybody knows men are stubborn about seeing doctors, admitting weakness, John especially. His sisters, mother—any of them would have gotten him there sooner. This was her job—the wife's job. What difference, she wonders over and over, might those weeks have made?

  

John insists on coming to Christmas even though he's started chemo and has been vomiting for four days. Everyone moves carefully, quietly, as if not wanting to awaken the sickness. Even the children are uncharacteristically subdued. John has assumed the spot in the brown tweed recliner, the position once occupied by his father, who died only in February—shouldn't that have been their greatest trial this year? But the family carries on with all the usual traditions. Almond crescents, powdered snowballs, Mrs. Blessing's potato soup. If anything, they adhere to these things even more closely. They stay in motion. The men gather around the TV, the women around the dining room table, telling stories—a friend of Stephen's, a boy Mark, whose father up and left the family,
a shame
—but it feels different with so much sadness right here in the room. Twice Kate gives Lauren's arm a sympathetic squeeze, and Lauren feels a burst of resentment—pure, unmitigated, unjustified. Then John is standing in the doorway, signaling her with his eyes. Her anger leaves her. He is horribly pale. They refuse leftovers, moving quickly—Elena crying because she doesn't want to go yet and Meghan petting her arm consolingly, only making it worse.
Why don't we drop her off later?
Ann offers, but Lauren shakes her head firmly, no.
But thank you
, she manages before hustling them out the door, fastening Max into one car seat and Elena into the other. John leans his forehead against the dashboard as Elena starts kicking the back of his seat with her hard patent leather heels. Then John opens the door and vomits on the sidewalk, and Elena stops kicking, and Lauren drives them all home.

  

New Year's Day: It feels significant this year. John is plodding through the chemo treatments, determined to get back to normal. But there is no normal, Lauren thinks. The hair in the sink, sweat on his face. Like a fool, she was surprised. She wouldn't have believed, didn't believe until she saw it, that her husband was as vulnerable as anybody else.

  

Sunday mornings, they go to Our Lady of Ransom. Though Lauren converted when they got married, she still feels self-conscious in Catholic churches. At least no one here knows her; John's mother and sisters all go to their old parish, St. B's. Lauren recites the prayers but doesn't really think about the words, too preoccupied with trying to remember what to do and say and when. Secretly, the only thing she likes about church is how they look as a family in their nice Sunday clothes. Now, when people look, Lauren sees sympathy on their faces: the sick husband, the two young children.
A shame.

  

John is determined to attend a work event: a black-tie dinner, for charity. Lauren worries out loud that it's not a good idea, though secretly she wants to go. She buys a new dress, gets her hair done. John wears his tuxedo, though it hangs loose everywhere. At the dinner, people speak to them too kindly, too carefully. She sees the tension creeping into John's face. After an hour, Lauren's mouth aches from smiling. In the auction, they win two tickets to a B&B in New England:
Romantic Getaway
. They are in the car twenty minutes later, John punching the dashboard. The next day, his knuckles are bruised.

  

Lauren no longer hides in spare bedrooms at family parties; she couldn't if she tried. If she had no clear role in John's family before, she does now: liaison, informant, nurse, repository for everyone's questions and concerns. Her life is public now, available, turned inside out. The phone rings off the hook.
How can I help? What can I do?
They are a family that responds by doing.
What do you need?
Lauren bats away their offers, politely, because what she needs is for them to leave her be. What she needs is for the chemo to be over, for their lives to go back to normal. What she needs is for her husband to get better, which he does—but only briefly, a clean scan, a spasm of unfair hope, before the illness takes a swift turn for the worse.

  

Metastasized.
Another word that sticks.

  

The family stops asking permission. Help just appears. Casseroles in the freezer. Margie's boys, to cut the lawn. When John is recovering from chemo, someone might show up to take Elena to the mall or to the roller rink, the movies. Lauren wishes they would leave her alone.
We were fine before
, she thinks, smiling furiously
. Just leave her here! Leave us be!
She is so worried about their little girl. If anyone is going to explain to Elena what's going on, it should be her mother. It should be her father—it should be her mother
and
her father. God knows what a sensitive child like Meghan might say. Recently, Elena has had a defiant streak about her. Maybe it's her age. Maybe it's a response to the tumult, the constant visitors, the time spent with her older cousins, the disruptions to her usual routine—all the things she quietly absorbs with those big violet eyes.

  

Lauren feels ungrateful. She should be glad for the help from John's family, even if it makes her feel inadequate. Other times, gratitude overwhelms her, and she takes comfort in their constancy, in the reliability of small things.

  

She devotes herself to doing: monitoring medication, cleaning the bathroom, the kitchen, disinfecting the tub, taking care of the children, who need diapers changed and baths drawn and bottles made. She is beginning to understand the comfort in it. How these small tasks keep you busy, focused, make you feel not entirely helpless. Keep your mind from thinking unbearable thoughts.
How can I help? What do you need?

  

When his wedding band falls off, John sets it on the dresser beside an army of pill bottles, hand sanitizers, anti-itch creams. Lauren remembers how he proposed, down on one knee—
Will you do me the honor?
He'd bought her a dozen roses, asked her father first—
I promised him I'd take good care of you
, he told her. It had all been just how she'd imagined it would be.

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