Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [3]
I had mentioned nothing to John earlier, although I spoke to him several times a day during the campaign, as we had for our entire marriage. I couldn’t let him worry when he was so far away. And I had hoped there would be nothing to tell him. Certainly not this. I had promised myself he would never have to hear bad news again. He—and Cate, our older daughter—had suffered too much already. Our son Wade had been killed in an auto accident eight years earlier, and we had all been through the worst life could deal us. I never wanted to see either of them experience one more moment of sadness. And, after almost thirty years of marriage, I knew exactly how John would respond. As soon as he heard, he would insist that we drop everything and take care of the problem.
Sitting in the car, I dialed John’s number. Lexi Bar, who had been with us for years and was like family, answered. I skipped our usual banter and asked to speak to John. He had just landed in Raleigh—we had both come home to vote and to attend a large rally where the rock star Jon Bon Jovi was scheduled to perform.
He got on the phone, and I started slowly. “Sweetie,” I began. It’s how I always began. And then came the difference: I couldn’t speak. Tears were there, panic was there, need was there, but not words. He knew, of course, when I couldn’t speak that something was wrong.
“Just tell me what’s wrong,” he insisted.
I explained that I had found the lump, had it checked out by Wells, and now needed to have a needle biopsy. “I’m sure it’s nothing,” I assured him and told him that I wanted to wait until after the election to have the biopsy. He said he’d come right home, and I went there to wait for him.
Hargrave and I got there first. I opened my back door to the smell of clean laundry. As much as I truly enjoyed traveling the country campaigning, there’s nothing like walking into your own house warm with fresh laundry. Ryan appeared in the kitchen, clean socks in his hands. It was often impossible to do laundry on the road, and everyone knew that our house in Raleigh was there for their use whenever they needed it. When he saw Hargrave’s face, Ryan simply gave me a hug. I sent them all home—Ryan to his hotel, Hargrave to her house around the corner—and I sat in the study looking out at the basketball goal where I had watched Wade play so often, and in my perfectly still house I waited for John.
I have always loved my house. John and I had bought the lot more than twenty years earlier, when Wade was a baby and I was pregnant with Cate. It had taken every penny we had at the time to build it, but it had always been worth it. We designed it to be built in stages. It started as a simple house for a young couple with two infants and had since grown to be so much more. It had been a home brimming with teenage enthusiasm, a cradle for a family in grief, and a playroom for babies nearly twenty years apart.
It was where we had raised our two oldest children, watching them grow to young adults. There was the big kitchen, its barstools accustomed to the weight of teenage boys. There was the playroom above it that the children had decorated as a fifties diner, with old metal advertising signs on the walls. What was once the garage had been transformed into a small bedroom for our youngest children, Emma Claire, then six, and Jack, who was four. Upstairs was Cate’s room, for her visits home from college, and Wade’s room, unchanged, his book bag beside his bureau, still filled with his papers and eleventh-grade textbooks.
I heard John’s Secret Service caravan pull into the driveway, and I went to the door. He got out alone. He walked through the gate as I came through the door. His eyes, narrow and focused, filled with tears when he looked up at me, and his face, which had been set