The Art of Saying Goodbye - Ellyn Bache [55]
At home John’s in the kitchen, taking a frozen lasagna out of the oven for supper. The house is eerily quiet. He hasn’t even turned on the news. “Where’s Courtney?” she asks. He points upstairs. A reprieve. Good.
“Paisley isn’t taking treatments,” she says. “She was never taking them. It was too far along.” She weeps then, allows herself the luxury of long choking sobs into John’s shirt. He holds her and strokes her hair, she doesn’t know for how long, as if both of them are waiting for her heart to shred itself and then re-form for the next task at hand, not to be avoided: taking on their daughter. “I promised Paisley I wouldn’t go until it’s over,” she tells him.
“Of course not,” John says. They both take a breath, and Andrea fixes her face, and they call Courtney down to dinner.
Sitting at the table, Andrea studies her daughter for the first time in—she’s not even sure how long. Since before her last round of tests, and maybe the ones before that. If you don’t look, you don’t have to know. Now she can’t stop staring.
What she sees is the hardness. A hard-bitten girl of fourteen, her body fully developed with small breasts and wiry, hard-muscled arms and legs, no softness anywhere and probably none to come. Dark shirt and jeans hugging the unwelcoming flesh. Bitten-to-the-quick fingernails, painted almost black. Face as round as John’s with features as small as Andrea’s, saved only by the big gray eyes and thick dark brows, if she’ll only leave them alone, not pluck them into angry thin arches, as Andrea fears she might. Hair erupting from her head in a frizzy black halo she tries to tame with gel that only makes it greasy—and that to Andrea seems especially unfair because when Courtney was three, before the chemo, she had a fine cap of silky dark hair like John’s, and remarkably long lashes that grew back into short, spiky stubs above her eyes.
Andrea had never been good-looking, either, but she’d been so lighthearted it hadn’t mattered—a trait Courtney either hadn’t inherited or that had been pummeled out of her by her illness. In the hospital she’d been bewildered at first, then frightened and tearful, and finally sullen and ill natured. She scowled at the nurses. Once, she bit one of them. She wasn’t charming. By the end of her treatments, she looked and acted like a nasty, wizened dwarf. She’s just as angry now. It radiates from her like heat, punishment directed to the world that hurt her. But cured her, too. Black nail polish can be removed. Fingernails grow. The scowl is harder. And even worse: the mask of perpetual surliness, etched onto the small features like a tattoo.
One reason Andrea doesn’t look at her daughter is because if she has to face Courtney’s surliness straight-on, she might not be able to suppress her urge to strike her.
How can you love someone so much, how can you put so much energy into willing them to grow and thrive, only to find—despite your overwhelming gratefulness to have them there—that lately you don’t like them at all?
John waits until the dishes are cleared before he speaks. He’s thought about this a long time. Andrea trusts that. No hedging. Right to the point. “You know those trips I’ve been taking to California?”
“Yeah. So?”
“I gave a couple of seminars. They liked them so well they offered me a job.”
Courtney freezes, halfway to the sink, serving plate in hand.
“I’ve accepted a position,” John says. “It starts the first of January. We’re going to find a house out there.”
“And when were you going to spring this on me? Christmas morning?” Her tone is so calm, so placid that Andrea wonders if she already knew. How was it possible to live in this house the past week or so and not know? Yet she senses Courtney’s surprise. Her horrified surprise.
“Not Christmas morning,” John tells her, equally placid. “We’ll be in the middle of moving then. I was going to tell you right now.”
“I think you’ll like it there,” Andrea hears herself gush. “All that sunshine. It’s one of the nicest places in the country.”
Courtney