What Remains (25 page)

We will spend the summer here in the Vineyard, we have decided. Anthony confides in Diane. He tells her he is taking a leave of absence from HBO. His work, he says, is now sapping too much of his energy. It is a huge defeat, another benchmark of his normal life eroded. Diane suggests we move into their guesthouse, where he can concentrate on regaining his strength for the next treatment, whatever that might be. I take an official leave of absence from ABC.

I feel as if we are coming to the Vineyard to die, but Anthony calls it a vacation. “This is a
once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity,” he says. “We’ll have the summer off, I can recoup.” He is upset with me for hesitating when he first brings it up. I don’t want to move into an empty house on an island at the end of a long dirt road.

“I don’t understand why you can’t stay with us,” John says when I call him with the news.

“Their house is closer to the hospital,” I tell him. “Besides, we don’t even know how long we’ll be here.”

We are not staying at John’s house, not yet, because Anthony has his superstitions. You visit your
friends
. You are taken care of by
family.
He is not ready to go to his family. He is not ready to concede. It is all very difficult for me to navigate. There is a lot left to interpretation, and that means a lot of room for error.

The other reason not to stay there is more obvious but even less likely to be said:
Because you are healthy, John. You can swim and waterski and kayak.
I don’t say either of these things to him. I say, “It’s closer to the hospital.”

We are just visiting here this summer. Taking a leave of absence to recuperate. This is what I tell people who ask. Anthony is playing a complicated game in his mind. To stay alive, not to break down at the end, to be
brave,
to have
dignity, grace,
and
courage.
It is all that he knows to do, to be
brave,
and I wish he didn’t have to be.

When we get to Diane’s I call the hospital and give them detailed directions to the house. The ambulance driver tapes them to the dashboard. I get an oxygen tank and read the instruction booklet attached to the valve, and then I hide it in the closet of our bedroom.

We have been here three days when John breaks his ankle. He is up in the “flying lawn mower”—I call it this because it looks like a sit-down mower with a parachute attached, but it can fly as high as ten thousand feet. He has had it for a few years and never had an accident, but then today he comes down too fast and hits a rock on the makeshift runway he has constructed on their property.

Carolyn calls me from the hospital, and she is crying. “I don’t know if we can survive a broken ankle. It’s such a goddamn bad time for this.” She is angry, exhausted. We can’t afford to be careless now. We simply can’t manage anything else.

“It’s okay, it’s—an operation?” I glance over at Anthony sitting at the table in the kitchen, squeezing a ball in his fist.

“Six
weeks
in a cast!” she says. “No kayaking, no waterskiing, no swimming. No physical activity of any kind.”

I hang up the phone and look at Anthony. “John broke his ankle.”

It is the last thing we need in what we know is an ill-fitting summer, another hospital.

When John checks into Lenox Hill they stare at him, even here whispering, trying to peek at the American prince on the stretcher. They gawk at him, rehearsing the stories they’ll tell at home tonight, or to strangers on the subway, or when they get down the hall. “Haven’t you seen a broken ankle before?” Carolyn snaps. “Stop staring! Please!” Furious now at the endless scrutiny. She is not comfortable yet with this part of the life they have together, and it frustrates her.

I’m starting to figure it out. I take Carolyn’s advice at last and see a therapist.
You have to think about yourself,
she always tells me, and so I do. But there is a precedent for me; husbands have died before. There are books, even, on this. I have degrees and trophies, and now I have stood by my husband’s side. However meaningless it may be now, I get his family’s approval. They have told me as much.

On the other hand, she has stopped seeing her therapist this summer—even as she is thrilled that now I have one. She has stopped going to the gym. She has given up, for the time, the idea of going back to school. We talk about making documentary films, but she seems to have lost her footing. I want to tell her it will be okay, but I think it can wait.

The weekend after John’s surgery they come to see us at Mike and Diane’s. John and Anthony, both convalescing, are on level ground now. Anthony is propped up on the bed, and John is on two chairs pulled together next to him. Carolyn and I carry lunch to them on trays, and we all laugh about it, our helpless husbands. “Can you run the old chap a bath?” John yells out to us in a British accent for Anthony’s benefit, and Carolyn goes in to run water. Cold, with no bubbles.

We go out to the beach the next day, and Anthony takes off his shirt to go into the water. The ribs poke out of his skin. The lines of scars are messy across his chest, as if someone has scribbled on him, and John drops his head and sobs. He’s standing several feet behind Anthony, and the sound of the waves drowns everything out.

“Hey,” Anthony yells out. “Where’d you go?” He’s making his way to the water smiling, oblivious, and John shakes his shoulders, takes a breath, and pulls himself together. He limps down in his cast, and Mark, who is here for the weekend, helps them both into the water, holding John’s leg up with one arm so the cast won’t get wet.

It is summer at the beach, and Carolyn and I plan parties: Anthony’s fortieth birthday, Tina’s bridal shower. We address invitations and send them out. We call caterers and discuss finger foods as if it were any other summer. As if this year were something to celebrate.

At the end of June, I fly back to the city alone for Tina’s engagement party, because Anthony is too weak to travel. Holly offers to spend the night with him on the Vineyard. The party is at Caroline and Ed’s apartment, and Carolyn comes by early to pick me up. She calls from the taxi on her way uptown.

“Should I wear a sundress with strappy sandals or something with flats?” I ask.

“Strappy sandals, of course.”

When she arrives at the apartment, she hands me a small Cartier box. “Here, this is for you. Open it now.”

The box holds a thin gold band. A toe ring, to match hers. “Put it on!” she orders me, her face lit up in excitement. “Uh, Lamb, what’s up with the dress?”

“What?” I have on a thin, silky red sundress, gathered in the front and off the shoulder.

“It’s a little
Postman Rings Twice.
”

“Really?” I’m happy to be away, on my own for one night. A girl, a summer night in the city, a pretty dress.

“Sweetie, your husband has cancer. It’s a family gathering—you need to rein it in a little.”

“Oh, come on, it’s fine,” I say, giggling now.

“Okay, Lana Turner.”

I try to respond, but can’t get it out because I start laughing, twirling around in my strappy sandals in front of the mirror.

“You are a complete kook,” she says, and then hugs me.

We walk to Caroline’s, and John is already there. Carolyn is always anxious coming here, and we are both usually eager to leave. Tonight they make it easy—after an hour they announce they have tickets to a Knicks game. “You can stay if you need to,” they say. “Marta will be here.”

The three of us take a cab back to North Moore and order takeout from Bubby’s and watch TV until we fall asleep. The next morning John hobbles into the kitchen and makes us oatmeal with blueberries. After breakfast he and I share a cab uptown. I drop him off at an appointment and go into my office for a few hours. I fly back to the Vineyard that evening.

That night Anthony’s breathing is more labored than usual. He wakes up struggling for air, taking long, shallow breaths. In the morning I call Dr. Ruggierio in New York. He makes an appointment for us in Hyannis.

We take the fifteen-minute flight to Hyannis, and then a cab to Cape Cod Hospital. The doctors do an echocardiogram. They point at the scans, shaking their heads. His heart is three times its normal size. The cancer has created fluid around his heart, and he needs an operation to relieve the pressure. The sooner the better, they say.

While Anthony has dialysis across the street, I schedule an appointment with Dr. Girardi, a cardiologist at New York Presbyterian, for emergency surgery the next day. We return to the Vineyard, then take an early morning flight back to New York.

After the surgery, I catch Dr. Girardi in the hall. “How did it go?” I ask. “Is everything okay?” He’s a young-looking doctor, Anthony’s age.

“It went fine. Very well.”

“What did you do?” I ask him.

“We cut a ‘window,’ they call it, in the pericardium. It’s a sac that surrounds the heart like a cushion. We cut a hole in that to release some of the fluid caused by the cancer.”

I am listening carefully. He is calm and matter-of-fact. “It should relieve his symptoms.”

“The breathing?” I ask.

“Yes, it will certainly help him breathe easier.”

We stand there for a moment. There is something not right. The way he looks at me or answers. Or there is something I am forgetting to ask. I lay a hand on his arm when I see he is starting to turn away.

“Wait. Where did the fluid go?” I remember. The cancer cells are what filled up the sac. “What did you do with the fluid?”

He hesitates, and I wait. “When we cut the hole,” he explains, “the fluid drained into his body cavity.”

“But then aren’t you spreading the cancer everywhere?”

His look changes immediately, and he seems to understand. But I don’t like the look. Pity, maybe, or disbelief, I can’t be sure. “Carole, he’s not going to recover from this. I’m very sorry. I assumed you knew. Your husband is dying. He has a few weeks left at best.”

I take my hand off his arm, and he walks away. He says it so matter-of-factly, a little surprised, I’m sure, that he has to say it at all, that I might have been entertaining other options. The moment before a thing is said out loud. This moment has been five years for me. In five years no one has said this to me, that Anthony is going to die.

This morning, as sick as Anthony is, I thought, as he did, that they would cut the hole, and he would be okay. We have been going along like this. We’ll go to the NIH, and then he’ll be fine. We’ll do chemo, and then he’ll be fine.
Just a few weeks of radiation, Nut, and I’ll be fine. I’ll get a new kidney, and this will all be fine. We’ll just take time off this summer to rest, and then I’ll be fine.

I let out a long, deep breath after Dr. Girardi leaves, and then it comes up on me fast. I start sobbing so hard my body shakes in the middle of a busy hospital. Embarrassed, I sit down on a bench at the end of the hall, and the elevator doors open and Diane walks out. She sits down beside me and puts her arm over my shoulder. We don’t say a word; we sit there until I stop crying, and then we walk down the hall to see Anthony.

John calls me at the apartment the next morning early, while Anthony is still in the hospital.

“Hey, sorry to wake you. I need to talk.”

“Is everything okay?” I ask. Wondering what he possibly has to talk about that can’t wait until seven.

“We need to talk about Anthony. He’s in denial, and he needs to come to terms with this.”

He starts reading to me from a book, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s
On Death and Dying.
He thinks, suddenly, he has an answer. To get Anthony through the “Five Stages of Death.” He reads them to me:
anger, denial, fear, acceptance, peace.

He is oddly formal with me, rehearsed. “I wanted Carolyn to talk to you about it, but she was afraid to. She was afraid you’d get angry. But, Carole, he can’t go on like he is. He needs to accept that he is going to die.” His voice cracks.

It’s too early in the morning for this conversation, and I take a deep breath. “I’m not telling him.”

“He thinks you’re holding on to hope,” he says. “You have to tell him it’s okay.”

“Don’t you think that’s a conversation I’ve wanted to have with him for months? Years?”

He is silent for a moment, and then says quietly, “No, I don’t.” This stings, because I know he’s right. I made my pact with Anthony long ago. I never wanted a husband with cancer. And I don’t want to be the one to tell him he’s dying.

It is too late at this point to talk about death. To shake Anthony by the shoulders until we are convinced he knows. It is too late to have everyone start saying it out loud. John is desperate and mad and trying to handle this, to pull us out. He knows this is his role, and he is stumbling. We are all a little frantic and too aware of the clock and looking at each other terrified.

It’s a terrible thing to watch someone die. We are angry and desolate, consumed with hate for this disease. It doesn’t help that we have silently sworn to keep up appearances. Things are about to change and never be the same, and it isn’t a quick flick of fate’s wrist but a slow, wrenching turn, as if the power steering has gone out.