The Art of Saying Goodbye - Ellyn Bache [53]
“The cancer isn’t going away?” Andrea’s voice is dull.
“Not going away. Spreading like wildfire. Eating me up.”
“Don’t say that.”
“You wanted to know. You’ve been polite about this, but I know you wanted to know.”
Andrea nods, because she did. She wanted to hear from Paisley’s mouth what she’s known, and pretended to herself not to know, all along.
“I would have told you right away, but I didn’t want to tell the children yet. I wanted a little normalcy for them to—I don’t know. Maybe to get used to this.” As if that were possible, getting used to their hyperactive mother sitting demurely in the family room with drugs dripping into her veins, wearing a feather boa and taking frequent naps. “It’s not that I thought you’d tell anyone,” Paisley adds. “I just felt it was only right for the children to know first. I wanted to put it off as long as I could. But I decided to get this”—she lifts the arm with the morphine drip—“I got it this morning. We talked to them last night.” She shifts again in the chair, which seems determined to swallow her up.
“So the treatments—?”
“I know everybody has a theory about my treatments. I’ve heard about more treatments than you can think of,” Paisley says. “Well, here’s the scoop. There are no treatments. There never were.”
“What?”
Paisley shakes her head.
“No chemo? No radiation? Nothing? Then why did you tell me—?” Andrea stops, because she realizes that Paisley didn’t tell her anything. Evasion was the whole point of their overarching silence. Paisley didn’t admit to anything at all.
“Well, there was Tylenol,” Paisley says. Unthreatening Tylenol. Of course. Four times a day, the bottle always in plain view on the end table. “The cancer had already spread by the time they found it. There was really nothing they could do.”
“I don’t believe that.” The research Andrea’s done—and she hasn’t done a lot, because she doesn’t want to know much more than she’s already found out—doesn’t hold out much hope, but it offers some.
“They told me I’d be eligible for one of the clinical trials, but the experimental drugs have awful side effects and don’t do much. The best one that’s actually approved for metastatic pancreatic cancer—the best—can prolong your life, get this, two weeks. Two weeks.” An angry blush of color tints Paisley’s yellow cheeks for the briefest second, then disappears. “So we decided just to . . . to hang on as long as I could. To keep it peaceful around here and tell the children when we had to.”
“And now you ‘had to.’ ”
Paisley nods. “I didn’t want to be moaning and groaning in front of the kids when I told them I was thinking of checking out.” She lowers her voice. “So we called in hospice.”
Tears swim to Andrea’s eyes, which she furiously blinks back. She forces her attention to the bag of liquid. “Does it help?”
“Sure. Remember how much it helped Courtney? The painkillers are even better now.”
“They made her throw up.”
“They say they can give me something for nausea.”
Andrea notes that she does not say she doesn’t have nausea. Paisley looks at something in the corner of the room, but when Andrea follows her gaze, there’s nothing there. Both of them study the empty corner. After a time Paisley says, perfectly cheerful, “It sucks, doesn’t it?” The hint of a tiny, honest-to-goodness smile.
Andrea grimaces, not seeing the cause for merriment. “It totally sucks. And now you’re in pain.”
“The pain is only sometimes.” Paisley’s smile retreats. “The real problem is being so tired. I mean, megatired. It was less a matter of telling the kids because I had to than a matter of telling them while I still had the energy. The hospice counselor said the sooner the better.” She settles back into the recliner. “Anyway, it’s done.”
“And how did they take it?”
“They didn’t burst into tears or jump off the roof or anything. I think Brynne already knew.”
“And Melody?”
“She’s a little confused.”
“I bet.”
“We went the ‘angels you can’t touch but who look out for you’ route.