A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [23]
Lights snapped back on, and Bridget was asked to get dressed and to meet with the radiologist in his office. Even though her hands trembled as she buttoned her blouse, Bridget still thought she would be told essentially good news. Removal of a cyst or even a biopsy might be necessary, though one expected a routine result.
In the darkened and cramped office of the radiologist, Bridget was asked to look at her X-ray. She was shown a spot that looked, in the doctor’s words, “suspicious.” A code word, Bridget would later learn, for “bad.”
“You see the star?” he asked, pointing to a shape but looking straight at Bridget. And it was only that afternoon, as she was telling Bill, that she realized that “star” was a euphemism for “crab,” for she had seen the crab, the oval with the tentacles reaching into her flesh. Still, even as she said the dreaded word to Bill, she did not believe in it. The tumor would turn out to be benign.
In the weeks that followed, Bridget absorbed the increasingly dismal bulletins as a series of shocks: first the biopsy (malignant); the findings after the lumpectomy (the tumor slightly larger than anticipated); the decidedly bad news about the lymph nodes (five of them implicated); followed by the realization that radiation and rigorous chemotherapy would be necessary. And even the messy reality of those treatments had not fully registered until Bridget had attended a grisly orientation session with a nurse who spoke of anal hygiene and sexual atrophy until Bridget had put up her hand and said, quietly, Stop. She did not want to hear another word, fearful of the power of suggestion. Denial, she was learning, was not only effective but sometimes essential.
Bridget returned home to face a difficult task: Matt needed to be told. Though he’d been vaguely aware that his mother had had some kind of procedure done earlier, he did not know yet about the cancer. She asked Matt to come with her to the living room, the request itself disturbing since Bridget seldom asked for a formal sit-down.
“What?” he asked. And again as he sat down, “What?”
“I have breast cancer,” she told her son, knowing that the word “breast” and the word “cancer” might, initially, carry an equal charge, his mother’s breasts and cancer being entities Matt would not, at fifteen, want to think about.
Matt, who’d had a unit on cancer the year before in science and who knew all about the disease, cried out, “I don’t want to be there when they tell you it’s come back!” He then went rigid with shock and fear, and Bridget had had a time of it reassuring her son that, against the odds, all would be well, a physically arduous task that had ended with the two of them eating tacos and watching SportsCenter at 10:00 that night.
Bridget put a foot up on the dashboard and rested her right arm on the windowsill. The few weeks following that night with Matt had been difficult, her son growing increasingly withdrawn, refusing to discuss what was bothering him, as if he, too, knew that to talk about a thing was to make it real. Though Bridget and Bill had decided that for Matt’s sake Bill would not move out of his Boston apartment and into Bridget’s house (a nostalgic