Chapter 1
CLICK.
Cancer nurses have kind eyes. Kindness must be their superpower. How else could they continue to smile when most of the time they are treating people who are dying? Because while there is all this talk about survivors, everyone knows cancer is a death sentence. It takes longer to kill some people. And, of course, the good ones like my mother, Sophie Corielli, go down too swiftly.
Click.
Today even the softhearted cancer nurses can only summon up pity smiles for Mom and me as Dr. Chen clears his throat to deliver the dire news.
Click.
Throat cough.
“I’m sorry, Sophie,” he begins.
My mom squeezes my hand, the one she’s held since we sat down. It’s the only thing keeping me from ripping the New York Memorial Hospital pen out of his hands so I don’t have to hear the goddamn click again. A nurse swishes by, the soft shoe sweeps on the marble adding slightly different vibrato.
Click.
Throat cough.
Shuffle.
It’s a bad Broadway musical beat where the disease is the conductor. It’s the disease—the mutating killing cells—that directs the players. Today the tone is somber.
The last time we saw Dr. Chen we were all high-fiving each other. Even the looming medical bills couldn’t diminish the happiness we’d felt when he gave us the all clear three years ago.
“Your MCL is back, and it’s unsurprisingly aggressive. We’ll need to start an immediate round of chemo. Last time we didn’t need to do stem cell treatment, but I think we’ll have to and we should do it right away.”
I stare wide-eyed ahead because I don’t want to see the fear that is in Mom’s eyes at this news. Or maybe it’s my fear I’m hiding from. The first time we discovered she had cancer, she was an endless well of optimism and for three years I’d been convinced right along with her.
But while I’ve inherited her light brown hair and her green eyes, I’ve always been more pragmatic—which she tells me I got from Dad. I wouldn’t know. He died when I was three. My memories of him are dim and incomplete. For twenty-two years it has been my mother and me.
The Corielli girls. Indestructible. Not brought low by men, disability, or disease.
As Dr. Chen explains about more treatment, including the eight hour chemo drips Mom will have to endure and the likelihood she isn’t going to be able to work for the next two months, my hand starts to get squeezed as if she is attempting to make lemonade out of my fingers.
In my peripheral vision, I see the skin draw tight around her skull. Even optimism can’t hide the deep lines illness has drawn on her skin, aging her far past her forty-seven years of life. Her face is closed down, her gaze fixed at some point over Dr. Chen’s shoulder.
My own mind is preoccupied with our ugly financial picture. We’re still trying to dig our way out of the medical bill black hole we found ourselves in the last go-around. The spot I’m worrying in my cheek may ache for days but that’s better than having a meltdown over the unfairness of the universe. A lament I’m sure sounds too often in these rooms.
It’s not that I don’t have options. I do. It’s that I had been able to successfully avoid those options in the past, choosing honest struggle with debt over a more lucrative under-the-table career. My foolish pride isn’t going to provide food or medicine. I take a swallow, pushing down the grief and anger, and pulling up my resolve.
“We’ll see you tomorrow,” Dr. Chen wraps it up, and we all stand. “I’ll have Donna call in the prescriptions. Take the steroid and the anti-nausea before tomorrow. And remember,” he shakes a finger at my mom, “don’t forget to eat.”
“Thank you, Dr. Chen.” Mom gives him a wan smile and takes the checkout sheet. As she walks out, he grabs my arm.
“Tiny,” he says low, “a minute?”
“Sure, Dr. Chen.” My fingers clench the strap of my sling backpack as I brace myself for more unpleasantness.
“I saw on the nurse’s notes that you’re living in a fifth floor walkup?”
I nod. “Mom and I moved in together when she was sick and the midtown apartment didn’t make sense for the both of us.”
Clearly not understood by Dr. Chen was that we could no longer afford the midtown apartment with its lobby and elevator access to the upper floors. He had to know that many of his bills from three years ago, during my mother’s first bout with mantle cell lymphoma, were still unpaid. Medical bills are astronomical if you had insurance and if you didn’t? The bills were crippling and every little luxury had to be excised, so Mom lives with me in a tiny one bedroom apartment that has no doorman and no elevator and sits over a greasy spoon restaurant.