Lift - Kelly Corrigan [18]
“Because she will cry and have to go to the hospital and get so many shots. Right, Mommy?”
I had emphasized how unpleasant hospitals are.
Then I hear myself say, “That’s right, Peach. Doctors, hospitals, lots of shots.”
Emily gives me an exam on her sofa. We joke about her husband coming home to find me topless on his couch, arms over my head. I say I was hoping he would be there so I could get a two-for-one. Georgia and Claire are terribly charming, asking if Emily will tickle them too and then trying breast exams on each other. It’s probably a cyst, Emily assures me. I leave Berkeley twenty minutes later, relieved to have a doctor involved. Emily will line up a mammogram for me in the next couple of days, just to be sure.
I come home, carry the girls to their beds one by one, and wait for Edward to call from his business trip. He works for TiVo, and he’s gone to Philly to negotiate a deal with Comcast. When he calls, he runs through the highlights of his day—the contract’s coming along, stuck on one issue, one of the guys is a real prick. We tell each other how tired we are. He mentions a sore throat.
Then, in a carefully controlled tone, I say, “So, when I was in the bath with the girls, I was, you know, washing myself, and I found a lump.” As I talk, I touch it again and again, like you would a loose tooth or a canker sore, each time, surprised to find it still there. “It’s hard as a rock. It’s so right there. You won’t believe it.”
I tell him everything Emily told me; that it is hard, which is bad, but it is movable, which is good, and that in younger women, lumps tend to be cysts.
“Okay, that’s good. And you have no breast cancer in your family, so that’s good. And hopefully you can get a mammogram tomorrow or the next day and we can be sure,” he says, in character. He is a man of reason, my husband. He does not buy into worry. “It’s gotta be a cyst,” he adds. We hang up a few minutes later, both projecting optimism.
Alone in my room, though, I feel the onset of alarm. I lay my whole body across it, to muffle the earsplitting sound. To fall asleep, I read a long article from a ten-year-old National Geographic about Hurricane Andrew in Florida. On the cover, there’s a dirty, sticky, sunburned Marine holding a newly homeless toddler. The guy who wrote the article says that over the course of ten days the hurricane revealed itself, starting as just a patch of thunderstorms, then becoming a tropical storm, and eventually showing its true colors as the unstoppable hurricane it was. A local TV reporter named Bryan Nor-cross stayed on the air for twenty-two hours straight, “talking his listeners through the most horrifying hours of their lives, telling them how to find safe places in houses that were blowing apart.” I don’t usually last for more than a couple of pages at night, but tonight, I keep going until I finish. I have to follow the arc from panic to toil to renewal. I have to get to the end, to the part where the devastation gives way to rebirth. I read this one sentence over and over again, until I am ready to turn out the light:
“Seven weeks after the storm, there are signs of recovery. Many trees are flush with new growth. Power has been restored. It will be a splendid place once again.”
ALSO BY
KELLY CORRIGAN
The Middle Place
Copyright
LIFT. Copyright © 2010 Kelly Corrigan. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic