Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [81]
On the back in pencil he had written:
It was my fault so please don’t punish yourself. Guard your ankles; beware of ice. ∼ELI
Between the office and home I read the note a dozen times, trying to tease meaning from between the lines. Did this count as an apology? And if so, was he just sorry for betraying Jillian or was he sorry it happened at all?
Distractedly, I put my key in the back door only to find it had already been unlocked. Someone had turned the kitchen light on. Zoë was sitting in the living room, waiting for me.
“Hey,” she said, standing. Her cheeks were streaked with tears. Balled-up Kleenex lay scattered on the coffee table. “I’m so sorry.”
I set the collage down on the kitchen table, my bag on the floor.
“No,” I said. “I’m the one who’s sorry.”
“It’s my mom.”
Something cold washed over my head.
“What happened?”
She began to sob. “They don’t think she’s going to make it.”
16
When Fay’s doctors stopped telling her what she wanted to hear, she went to another oncologist for a second opinion. With frightening conviction, he recommended she transfer to palliative care immediately and enjoy the weeks she had left with family and friends. Fay returned to her previous team of physicians; she returned—stubbornly—to chemotherapy.
Of course, in a fit of solidarity, Zoë shaved her head.
She e-mailed me a picture, her and her mother wearing colorful scarves wrapped about their heads.
I wrote back:
You know, you really are the most darling bald person. Like a Halle Berry. Like A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A freckled Navy Seal.
Zoë had an aversion to cell phones that even rivaled Eli’s. We corresponded by e-mail. She wrote:
… no one who knew my mom would have thought she cared a great deal about appearances. She tanned easily but the sun imprinted her skin in irregular patterns, white lines at her arms and legs, a halo of her gardening T-shirts and high-rise shorts. her nails were always dirt-stained from potting and tending houseplants, and her hands were always dried out from hours washing dishes at the food pantry. she hated makeup. sometimes she’d dab a bit of Vaseline on her lips for shine and pinch her cheeks for color—that was it. but she LOVED her hair. i’d never noticed it before, but even in my earliest memories, she wouldn’t leave the house unless her hair was neatly braided and pinned. i didn’t recognize this as vanity because it was so unstylish. it was a good braid—thick as climbing rope—but a waste of hair, I thought. but she had to have it just so. not a strand out of place during her first chemo treatments, Dad and I went with her to buy her first wig. she hated that thing. said it looked nothing like her real hair. for a week, she refused to leave the house. she washed that wig, she tried ironing it into submission. no matter what she did, she couldn’t get it to braid like her hair did. Dad finally told her she was coming out with him. his new book was out and she was coming to his book signing, whether she liked it or not. of course, everyone praised the new look. The wig was more stylish than she’d ever been. from then on it was an obsession. she collected wigs like some women collect purses …
Zoë ranked the doctors according to attractiveness and availability, promising to give my number to anyone worthy of me. She praised the nurses’ kindness. She reported the conversations she and her dad had about the general state of things. Both were avowed pessimists, and the world provided no lack of things to criticize. They talked long into the night every night, distracting each other from the inevitability that as pessimists they were obliged to accept, but as family could not discuss.
I should have been grading papers. I should have been cleaning the bathroom or replying