Warm Wuinter's Garden (12 page)

Despite all of his efforts to focus on
nothing but her sweet smell, his concentration was broken by a
series of questions. How differently would holding Bett feel after
the biopsy? What would he be feeling in a week if the growth were
malignant? What would he be feeling if her breast were gone? What
would he be feeling if in the close future—rather than in the long
future where thoughts of death had always been kept before—what if
the spot next to him, which was filled with warmth and the smell of
forty years, should be empty of everything but the wound of loss
and the weak palliative of memories?

Neil Koster didn’t know whether to hold on
tighter on to his wife’s arm or whether to loosen his grip.

Bett stood in the middle of the walk-in
closet looking at the luggage. It was hard to decide what to
take.

Despite Dr. Maurer’s recommendation to have
the two-stage procedure, Bett had opted for the one-stage. She
would go to the hospital that evening, have blood work done, go
under general anesthesia in the morning, and have the mass removed.
During the surgery, while the operating team waited, a frozen slice
of the lump would be analyzed by a pathologist. If no cancer cells
were found, the incision would be stitched up and she would be
wheeled to the recovery room. Depending upon how she recovered from
the anesthesia and how her vital signs and the wound responded, she
could be released later that day. If the doctors’ divinations said
the biopsy results were normal, the small leather bag would be
adequate for the nightgown, underwear, robe, slippers, toothbrush,
hairbrush and a Van Gulik mystery that she would need.

Bett couldn’t stop thinking about the biopsy.
She kept imagining the thin, pink icy slices she cut from
half-thawed eye of round when she was preparing to stir fry beef
and broccoli. The closet filled with a low hiss as she shushed
herself.

If the pathologist found cancer, the surgeon
would continue his work by cutting off her breast. He would slice
away the lining over the muscles of the chest and, after pulling
back their covering muscle, dig out the lymph nodes from her
armpit. Depending on how her wound drained she might have to remain
in the hospital for a week or even longer.

If it were cancer, she would need a larger
suitcase to hold more books, a second robe, her shrug and, if Dr.
Maurer were proved right about the quick restoration of mobility of
her arm, her knitting.

Bett stood in the closet’s murky light of
sunshine filtered by old paper blinds trying to make a decision. If
she took the smaller brown bag was she being unreasonably hopeful?
Dr. Maurer had assured her that only a small percentage of breast
abnormalities were malignant.

During the dozen years Nita had waited to
learn whether the DES was going to give her cervical cancer, Bett
frequently had told her daughter that the odds were greatly in her
favor she would reach twenty-five without harm. However, despite
her calm reassurances to Nita, Bett herself had flopped from worry
to prayer to anger to guilt during those years. There had been
times when she had known with utter certainty that Nita would be
just fine and other times when she had been convinced that her
daughter’s body was going to explode in sickness.

Throughout the previous week, in the midst of
making a sandwich or folding a beach towel, Bett had wondered about
cosmic good will. Was it expecting too much for neither the
daughter nor the mother to be diseased? Was there a limit to
prayer? Knowing that it was foolishness as soon as she thought it,
she could not help wondering if prayers were not unlike grocery
coupons. They could be used to redeem a person or a situation, but
once the boon was granted, the coupon was used up. Bett pushed back
on that thought. God’s grace was inexhaustible. She knew that. She
had only doubted for a second. And a second second and a third.

Bett studied the larger suitcases. If she
took a bigger one, it would indicate her willingness to accept that
life might change. There had been much health and joy in her life.
She should be willing to accept something different. Bett hefted
the weight of the Pullman bag and made her choice. She would take a
large one. She put the bag back down. She couldn’t take it. What
was she thinking? She had told Neil that she was positive the
biopsy would come back negative. Taking a large bag would frighten
him. She sat down on the smooth tan leather. What changes. Not two
weeks before she had been digging out her children’s old sleeping
bags for her grandchildren. Her biggest concerns had been sleeping
arrangements and ripening tomatoes and hiding the six pounds that
she recently had gained from Dilly’s inquisitional eye. By this
time tomorrow she might be waking up with a large mass of her flesh
just chopped off. She might be a cancer victim. What a terrible
word. Victim. It sounded so hopeless.

Bett rearranged her thinking as carefully as
if it were a drawer of linen. She might be a patient, a cancer
patient. But, she reminded herself, if she were a cancer patient,
at least, she would be a recovering one. It had been that
reassuring thought—that the very moment the disease was diagnosed
would be the same moment that the treatment would begin. It was
that notion that had led her to decide to have the one-stage
operation. She would wake to learn that she had, she corrected
herself, had had cancer and that it had been removed.

Dr. Maurer had taken a lot of time to
describe Bett’s options. He had gone into great detail to explain
the advantages of the two-stage procedure. The pathology report
would be more useful to any treatment. If the biopsy found cancer,
then, the short delay between diagnosis and surgery would give her
time to prepare her family. Choosing the two-stage process would
give her ample opportunity to research her options. Dr. Maurer told
Bett that she could consider breast reconstruction or even schedule
a plastic surgeon to rebuild her breast as soon as the general
surgeon had finished the mastectomy. He had given her pamphlets. He
had shown her the 1990 National Institute of Health recommendations
that lumpectomy and radiation were as effective as mastectomy in
many situations. Bett recalled how she had listened to most of what
Dr. Maurer had said without really hearing it. Opa had always said
that if she saw a weed, pull it. There was something. It could be a
weed. If it were, it made sense to her to pull it immediately. The
time to dig out dandelions was before the blossoms turned to seed,
before they could be scattered by the wind.

At the end of Dr. Maurer’s consultation, Bett
has chosen the one-stage option because the cancer would be removed
before she, or Neil, or Nita, Lise or Peter, or, especially, Dilly
knew that she had it. She could be home recovering before anyone,
except Neil, knew that she was, or had been—it was hard to know
what tense to use—sick.

Bett grabbed the small bag off the shelf. She
would make up a pile of books and other things that she would want
if there were to be an extended stay. She would cache them in her
closet. If she needed them, she could tell Neil where they
were.

The Kosters ate an early supper at the picnic
table. Although Bett had planned on grilling chicken thighs that
were marinating in lemon, garlic and winter savory, she put them
aside when Neil walked into the house holding a pound of boiled
lobster tail meat. They sat quietly eating lobster salad, fresh
tomatoes with basil leaves and vinaigrette, and cantaloupe. They
watched the sky get finger-painted with long strokes of salmon and
something pinker, but not pink. Each was relieved that the sky was
so magnificent that it could be the focal point. Sitting at a warm,
worn picnic table, each next to the other as they always sat when
watching the sun set, surrounded by the familiar, stuck in a scene
so placid it could have been an image for a silver anniversary
card, Bett and Neil were swept with emotions. Even as the colors
deepened and the lower clouds became backlit and outlined in molten
gold, the theatricality of the plunging sun and the drama of the
efflorescing night, could not match the emotions they were
feeling.

Methodically chewing a lump of lobster, Bett
was rocked with the nearness of loss. The loss of her breast, the
loss of their familiar life, the loss of her life. She was buffeted
by all the possible pain. The bother. The ungiving tightness of
healing flesh. The tingling of a nerve-damaged arm. The distancing
of disease.

Bett knew they both wanted to believe that in
twenty-four hours they would be out here again looking at another
red-washed sky, eating grilled chicken legs and sharing an
overwhelming sense of gratitude. They wanted to believe, but each
had doubts. Doubts led to lists of things that should be discussed.
As Bett tried to savor the lobster’s sweetness, as she watched the
sunset colors intensify, she knew they should talk about losses—of
a day, a lump, of a breast, of hair and weight, of appetite, of
rhythm, of pattern, of the familiar, of life, or lives. She knew
she should talk of all those possible losses but already, disease
or no disease, one loss, that of finding the right words, had
already occurred. The feelings that were surging up and sweeping
through her were too dramatic for the kinds of words that she and
Neil used between themselves.

Bett thought that the feelings boiling inside
her were better suited to being expressed by Dilly. Looking out
over the carmine stained water and, then, upward to the molting
sky, she thought of the thousands of sunsets she and Neil had seen
in the years they had lived on Clarke’s Cove. They had seen ash
black thunderheads and evanescent wisps of the palest orange; they
had watched the sky fill with more shades of purple than there were
irises. There had been evenings where the sky overhead was black
but the horizon was a darker, reddish orange than could be found in
any foundry. They had seen beauty so striking that it made their
bodies tingle and their breaths catch. And on those nights when
nature was painting something as miraculous as life itself, they
would say to one another, “Nice sky, huh?” or “Sure is beautiful”.
Unnamable colors and indescribable shapes would fill them with
emotions so strong that it felt like electric current inside their
skins. They would reach out, hold hands and share the buzz of that
empyreal electricity. And, fully charged with that energy, one
would say, only say, “Nice sky.”

Cute baby. Fun day. Nice Christmas. Great
movie. Nice music. Good tomatoes. Nice breeze. Pretty sunset. This
was their lexicon. It had been serviceable for the forty years of
their life together. Bett wondered if it would be adequate for
their, her future.

Bett involuntarily moved enough that Neil
turned to look at her.

“Kind of scary,” she said quietly.

“Not knowing usually is.”

He put his fork down to reach for her
hand.

“Anything I can do?”

“Just what you’ve always done. Love me.”

“I do that. What time do you want to be at
the hospital?”

“I’m all packed. Let me get the dishes; then
we’ll go.”

Neil shook his head.

“Always competent.”

“At dishes, anyway.”

As her hands finished the few dishes, Bett’s
mind raced with the details of what should have been done if she
had to stay in the hospital for a week or more. She should have
prepared a number of meals for Neil and frozen them. She should
have laid out a dress and shoes in case there was a problem with
the anesthetic. She wondered if she should leave a note somewhere
saying that donations should be made to the American Cancer
Society. What if she was to die from the anesthetic and, afterward,
it was found that she did not have cancer? Should donations go
elsewhere? The Children’s Fund?

Bett fought to brake her thinking. There was
no reason to make herself upset. She had a lump. Period. They would
take it out. Successfully. She would be home. Tomorrow. In
twenty-four hours she would be standing where she was, at that very
moment, rubbing a glass with a red and white checked dish towel.
The only difference would be that tomorrow there would be more
dishes because they would have a celebration. Bett looked forward
to using the splayed toothbrush to brush clean the raised grape
leaves on the good china.

The Kosters rode to the hospital with few
words other than those from the radio announcing Rhode Island’s own
Dave McKenna playing piano on “Dancing in the Dark.”

After going through the paperwork of
admission and finding Bett’s room, Bett and Neil both remained
silent as she unpacked her bag and put away her few things.
Finally, after she had run out of things to arrange, she turned to
Neil.

“Will you keep your promise?”

“Yes, if you really think it’s the right
thing to do.”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know why, Neil,
but I’d just rather the kids not know until it’s over.”

“And over is when?”

“At least until I’m out of here. I’m sure
that everything is fine and that I’ll be back home tomorrow night.
But, if I’m not, if I have to stay, then let’s keep it quiet until
I do get home.”

“And if someone calls? Not even if, but when.
Bett, if you’re in here for more than a day or two, someone’s bound
to call.”

“It shouldn’t be that bad. They were just
here. If they call, can’t you say that I’m not there? Then, you can
call me, and I’ll call them from here.”

“Bett, I’m not a good liar. You know that. I
don’t know why you’re doing this. I don’t know why you didn’t tell
all of us over the weekend…or, when you first found out.”

“Please, Neil, don’t. I’m sorry to have to
ask you. I don’t want to worry them. That’s one reason. If
everything is fine tomorrow, then it’s over before they know. If I
had said anything, then, it would have been several days of
unnecessary concern. Hovering. I can’t imagine the last two have
been fun for you. Secondly, if it ends up that I have to stay,
then, I’d rather be alone. If anyone knows, then, Dilly will know,
and if Dilly knows, she’ll be here in two hours, and, Neil, you
know, if she’s here, it’s not going to leave either me or the
doctors much energy to work on getting better.