Good Harbor

The last stop was at a lab for a final blood test to rule out anemia. A child’s outraged wail filled the silence in the waiting room outside the lab. The grown-ups in the chairs around her smiled at each other and shook their heads in sympathy. “Poor thing,” said the woman sitting next to Kathleen.

Danny hadn’t cried. He was knocked unconscious by the car. And then they had put the tube down his throat. Pat had promised Kathleen that her little boy wouldn’t remember the pain or the disgusting procedures they did on him — because of the drugs. Amnestics.

Buddy and Kathleen spent the Sunday night before surgery at a motel near the hospital in Boston. The bed was as hard and flat as a frozen pond, but somehow they managed to fall asleep, waking at dawn to get to the operating room on time.

Within minutes of entering the building, Kathleen lay gowned and shivering on a gurney. She was so frightened — trembling and almost blue at the lips — the anesthesiologist asked if she’d like a mild sedative once they hooked up the IV. Kathleen was mortified at her cowardice, but said yes. Was it Fiona or Madge who had told her about some woman, diagnosed with DCIS and dead of metastatic breast cancer a year later.

Buddy sat beside her in pre-op, alternately silent and gasping. She thought about reminding him to breathe, but she couldn’t spare the energy to form the

words.

Lying between the green curtains, she remembered Pat’s last days in the hospital: the foul, metallic smell of her sister’s breath, her face, bilious and yellow, distorted into a bloated circle. And then Pat in her casket. “Isn’t she the picture of peace?” the old nuns had said. But Kathleen had been horrified. Who had picked that lime green polyester suit? Who had turned Patty into a frump for a roomful of strangers to peer at and pronounce “at peace”?

She closed her eyes tighter against the memories and the bright light and the cold of the pre-op room. Why did they keep it so cold?

Dr. Truman walked into the room, transformed by the green operating scrubs into an outsize elf. The doctor’s fingers felt dry and warm on Kathleen’s arm as she crouched down close enough for Kathleen to feel her breath against her cheek. Kathleen smiled at the sound but didn’t pay attention to the words. The voice was calm. “Okay, Doc,” Kathleen said. At least she thought she said it.

The doctor vanished, Buddy kissed her, and Kathleen was wheeled into an even brighter, even colder room. She shuddered under the sheet. A voice told her to take three breaths, and she fell back.

She woke up vomiting into a blue plastic basin in another curtained cubicle. A West Indian nurse held her by the shoulders. “There you go, darling, you’ll be feeling better now.” She wiped the inside of Kathleen’s mouth with a minty swab and asked, “Ready to see your husband?”

Buddy walked in with a broad smile across his face. “Dr. Truman says you were great. She says we can go home whenever you feel up to it.”

She nodded and closed her eyes, just for a moment, just to rest from the strain of retching. But she woke up much later, in a hospital bed. The room was illuminated only by the fading daylight slipping through narrow blinds. She stirred, aware of the bandage on her breast, a dull ache beneath it.

“Buddy?” He was asleep in the chair beside her.

“What!” he said, jumping up.

“I’m ready to go home.”

An aide helped Kathleen out of bed and wheeled her out to the curb. They drove home without speaking, and both fell into bed, exhausted, with their clothes on.

Dr. Truman called in the morning to ask how Kathleen was feeling. They would meet the following Monday to review the pathology report. “Don’t worry,” Dr. Truman said. It was a stupid thing to say, and Kathleen tried to forgive her for it.

Kathleen did nothing but worry. It was a school vacation week, and it rained. The phone rang and she told her sons she was doing fine. That’s what she said to Madge and Fiona, and to Louisa, her next-door neighbor, who brought over a pie.

“Waiting is hard,” she admitted when they asked how she was feeling, but she said nothing about the ugly bruises from the intravenous lines, or about how the steady beat of fear kept time with the dull throbbing of the incision. She certainly didn’t talk about how she woke up sweating, the sheets twisted around her arms and legs, or about how she was trying to get used to the idea of never seeing her sons married, never meeting her grandchildren.

Buddy rented movies he thought Kathleen might like. Eating popcorn and fruit for dinner, they watched a succession of recent comedies, which neither of them found especially funny. Finally, after a damp weekend that included — on Buddy’s insistence — a long walk through a crowded mall, and a nearly silent dinner at the White Horse Inn, they were ushered into Dr. Truman’s office for the verdict.

The doctor was smiling. “Good news, Kathleen. The best news I could give you today. The margins were clean, and there was no evidence of invasive cancer cells anywhere.” She looked down at Kathleen’s chart. “Of course, given your family history, we want to be extra careful. After the radiation, you’ll need to be checked every six months. But it looks good. And you understand that the surgery confirmed that your diagnosis and prognosis are completely different from your sister’s.”

The doctor closed the chart and talked about radiation treatment, but Kathleen had stopped listening. Her ears pounded. For a moment she thought she might faint. She wasn’t going to die. At least not this summer. She wasn’t going to die.

“Is it okay to get the radiation closer to home, instead of down here?” she heard Buddy ask. Thank goodness he was paying attention, taking notes on the little pocket pad he used for orders at the store. Kathleen tried to look interested in the conversation. But she was busy reclaiming the summer. The light, the garden, the beach.

Thank You, God, thank You.

Dr. Truman recommended a radiation oncologist in a new clinic near Beverly. Buddy wrote as she described the probable treatment: every day for six and a half weeks.

I’m not going to lose my hair or throw up or turn yellow and die like Pat. Forgive me, Pat, Kathleen prayed silently, lying on the table while the doctor examined her incision and pronounced her a “good healer.”

Walking to the car, Buddy said they could schedule her treatments to start after school let out for the summer. Kathleen would likely be fully recovered from the surgery by then. He would map out the quickest route to the clinic. She’d be done early in August, so the summer wouldn’t be a total loss. Come September, she’d be rested and ready to go back to school.

Kathleen said almost nothing all the way home. How did I get away with this? she wondered. Why Pat and not me? I’m sorry, Pat. You didn’t deserve to die. God forgive me, but I’m glad to be alive. You’ll forgive me, too, won’t you, Pat?

They approached the end of the “mainland,” passing the last of the malls and condo developments. Then there was nothing but trees to look at, all on the verge of green.