The house was quiet that weekend. Because no one, not even me, was there at all.
Instead, that was the weekend when once more, my world began to collapse around me.
But this time, it was even worse.
How did it happen?
Like it always seems to happen: seemingly without warning.
But, of course, in retrospect there had been warnings all along.
It was Saturday morning, November twenty-eighth, two days after Thanksgiving. I’d spent the previous evening with Emily, dining out and visiting the Charlotte Comedy Zone. Once again, I was tempted to kiss her at the end of the evening, but settled instead for another long and glorious hug, one that confirmed my desire to keep her in my life for a long, long time. My feelings for her were already displacing thoughts of Vivian in a way that I hadn’t anticipated, and that I hoped would continue. I felt undeniably lighter and more positive about the future than I had in months, if not years.
The call came in on early Saturday morning. It wasn’t yet six a.m. when the house phone began to ring, and the sound itself was ominous. My cell phone was on airplane mode, and no one would call the house at that hour unless something terrible had happened. I knew even before I picked up the phone that it was my mother on the other end, and I knew that she was calling to tell me that my father was in the hospital. He’d had a heart attack. Or something worse. I knew she would be frantic, probably in tears.
But it wasn’t my mom on the other end of the line.
It was Liz, calling about my sister.
Marge, she told me, had been admitted to the hospital.
She’d been coughing up blood for an hour.
CHAPTER 23
No
When Marge was eleven, she and my mom were involved in a car accident.
Back then, my mom was still driving one of those huge, wood-paneled station wagons. Because they were from a different generation, my parents weren’t accustomed to wearing seatbelts, and as a family we rarely did.
Marge liked seatbelts even less than I did. Whereas I simply forgot to put mine on when I hopped in the car – I was still young, remember – Marge deliberately chose not to wear them, because it allowed her more freedom to punch or pinch me whenever the mood struck. Which, I might add, was way too often.
I wasn’t in the car that day, and though I’m not sure how accurate my recollections are, it seems the accident was no fault of my mom’s. She wasn’t speeding, the road wasn’t busy, and she was passing through an intersection while the light was green. Meanwhile, a teenager – probably fiddling with the radio or scarfing down McDonald’s French fries – blew through the red light and broadsided the rear of the station wagon.
While my mom was a little banged up, it was Marge whom everyone was most worried about. The momentum from the crash had thrown her into the side windows, shattering the glass. While she wasn’t unconscious when she arrived at the hospital, she was bleeding and bruised, and had sustained a broken collarbone.
When I entered Marge’s hospital room with my dad, the sight of my sister scared me. At six years old, I didn’t know much about death, or even hospitals. My dad stood over her bed, his expression flat, but I could tell by his posture that he was frightened, which scared me even more. Looking down at my stricken face, he frowned.
“Come see your sister, Russ.”
“I don’t want to,” I can remember saying.
“I don’t care what you want,” he said. “I told you to come here, and you’re going to do what I tell you.”
His tone brooked no argument and I inched toward the bed. Marge’s face was grossly swollen, with deep bruises and multiple stitches, like she’d been sewn back together. She didn’t look like my sister; she didn’t look like anyone. She looked like a monster in a scary movie and the sight of her caused me to burst into tears.
To this day, I wish I hadn’t cried. My dad thought I was crying for Marge and I felt him lay a comforting hand on my shoulder, which made me cry even harder.
But I wasn’t crying for Marge. I was crying for myself, because I was afraid, and over time, I came to despise myself for my reaction.
Some people have courage.
On that day, I learned that I wasn’t one of them.
The doctors didn’t know what was wrong with Marge. Nurses took samples of blood and X-rayed her chest. That was followed by a CAT scan. Three different doctors came to examine her. I watched as a needle was inserted into Marge’s lungs to remove tissue for further examination.
Throughout it all, Marge was the only one who didn’t seem worried. Part of that had to do with the fact that since she’d arrived at the hospital, her coughing had abated. She joked with the doctors and nurses while Liz and my parents looked on with grim concern, and I thought again about how effective my sister was at hiding her fears, even from those who loved her. Meanwhile, in another part of the hospital, tests were being run. I heard the doctor whispering words like pathology and radiology. Biopsy. Oncology.
Liz was clearly worried, but not yet panicked. My parents sat like stones, barely holding it together. And I was upset, because Marge didn’t look good. Her skin had a grayish pallor, which accentuated her weight loss, and I found myself replaying all that I’d seen and the things she’d said over the last few months. The racking cough that never seemed to go away, the soreness in her legs. How exhausted she’d been after her vacation.
My parents and I, Liz and the doctors, were all thinking about the same thing.
The cancer.
But it couldn’t be cancer. Marge couldn’t be that sick. She was my sister and she was only forty years old. A little more than a week ago, she’d gone to a specialist because she wanted to have a baby. She was looking forward to being pregnant. She had her entire life ahead of her.