The Wednesday Sisters(36)

“That's a super sweater you're wearing,” Jeff had said, his first words not memorable on their own. But she placed her hands over his eyes without even thinking, without hesitating to touch this boy she'd never met. “Do you really like it?” she asked. “Then tell me, what color is it?” She felt the flush of his embarrassment against her palms, and she knew then it wasn't the sweater, exactly, that he admired, knew it even before he said, “Blue?”



“MOST LUMPS ARE just fibrocystic tumors or fibroadenomas, especially at our age,” Brett said the next morning when Linda told us about finding the lump, having already been to the doctor that morning. She'd persuaded Jeff to stay home with the children while she went to see Albert at seven. She hadn't wanted to alarm the children by dragging them along.

“They don't think it's hereditary, either,” Brett said. “Or if it is, genetics play only a minor role, so the fact that your mom—” Her gaze dropped to her gloved fingers tightly intertwined on the picnic table. “We think it's caused by viruses or chemicals or hormones. We know mice can transmit breast cancers to their young through viruses in their breast milk, and researchers have found—”

“I read this article in Reader's Digest,” I interrupted. You could tell Brett meant to be helpful—if she were Linda, she'd want the scientific facts—but you could see Linda realizing she might have caught cancer from her mom's breast milk, and thinking she'd breast-fed her own children, too. “It said even if it's . . . not good, they do an operation, a mastectomy, and most women live for years.”

For five years, that's what the article had said. The five-year survival rate for breast cancer was 80 percent.

“I've Lived with Cancer” was the title of that article, about a woman who was thirty-seven when she discovered a lump in her breast. It had been weirdly upbeat: most lumps were nothing, and for those that were something, an operation would likely save you, and your husband would still find you attractive, even without your breasts. But the details were sobering: a permanent form cost fifteen dollars, and they came in all sizes so you could feel “perfectly balanced.” I was left imagining taking my kids into the ocean, seawater dripping from my permanent form for hours afterward. I was left picturing myself cowering behind the bathroom door while Danny, in bed, willed himself not to be repulsed. Or worse. In five years, Davy would be only seven, and Maggie ten.

In five years, Jamie and Julie would be ten, like my Maggie. In five years, J.J. would be six.

“Jeff is just flipping out,” Linda said, her gaze fixed on the rough wood table in front of her. “It's like he's already imagining me without a breast, already imagining having to climb into bed every night with a freak.” The word spit out, but with a crack in her voice.

“Linda,” Kath said gently.

“Like he's crawling into bed with a corpse,” she said more quietly, her eyes shaded by her Stanford cap, but tears making tracks down the arc of her cheek, under her jaw, disappearing into the bold stripe of her turtleneck, the one she'd worn that first day I met her. “It's like he thinks I'm already dead, like he's already drawing away from me so he can bear it like he . . .” She swiped a hand across her eyes. “His mom . . . Like my mom.”

Had died, too, she meant, leaving unspoken the details. Was he two or twelve or twenty when she died? Had she been ill long, or at all? Had she been hit by a car and left in a coma? Had she been unstable, taken too many pills?

“What does the doctor think?” Kath asked gently.

Linda tucked her hands underneath herself on the picnic-table bench, straightened her spine. “He thinks it's benign, but he wants to do a biopsy. It's a small lump, so he'll cut out the whole thing and they'll look at it under the microscope, just to make sure.”

There was an audible sigh of relief around the table: Small Lump, Probably Benign.

“Jeff is trying to arrange a hospital bed for me now.” She looked to the empty mansion across the park. One of the front steps had splintered and fallen in on itself. I wondered when that had happened, if it had been hours or days or weeks.

“Good,” Brett said. “The sooner, the better.”

“They'll put me under, and if the biopsy . . . if it's bad, they won't wait, they'll just do the mastectomy and I'll wake up and . . . Oh, God.”

That's what they did back then: they put you under for a biopsy, and if you woke with your chest and your arm all bandaged, you knew—if you could bear to know it—that your breast was gone, that it was cancer, although no one would likely tell you it was until you'd had a chance to recover from the surgery. You trusted your doctor back then. You weren't given any other choice.