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  You know who you are

  1

  This is not my beautiful life.

  Far away, in the kitchen, water runs. What’s that for? Tea? God help me, no more tea.

  The water runs and runs, far more water than a kettle requires. I can’t hear anything under the damned running water, but I know the conversation is intense. Anna’s antennae are already up. Anytime she comes in here, she scans the room for my phone and drops her voice, assessing and conferring with her sister or the hospice nurse like she’s the mother, not me.

  I can feel the twitch at the corner of her right eye. I can feel Elena’s mouth draw in and pucker with the effort not to cry. They are mine. Both girls, trying to do the right thing. It drags me like a rip current. I can’t get pulled along. I have my own problems. I don’t want them in here. I’m busy.

  Yes, okay, yesterday I fell. Or was it the day before? I was on a mission, I needed my phone. I got out of bed and made my way over to the dresser to where it was charging. I leaned on Tom, he braced for me, he paced himself for me, he’s a good dog, but I stumbled. Not his fault. Yes, I cracked a rib, my compromised bones gave way, yes, yes, high alert.

  Now Anna wants caregivers around the clock. Now Anna wants to confiscate the phone. Now Anna wants me in a special bed, secured, so I can rest and revive and survive, for how long? Another week, another month? She wants to fix me, fix everything. She is trying to will a miracle.

  Laney’s stunned. I need to leverage that. She’s still in her kid mind-set, waiting for direction, not wanting to disrespect me, wanting to believe I have enough mother left in me to rally, to assert control over this, too, the process of my dying. But I have only so much energy left and now with the rib, every breath hurts. They want to strap me down and take the phone. I need that phone. Like I said, I’m busy.

  Let me think. Not easy. My bedroom hums with monitors. Soft, steady beeps track my … I was going to say “progress,” but that’s not right. What’s the opposite of progress? Regress? If only I could go back.

  I remember when this bed, surrounded now by equipment, was a raft that rocked and rolled as we navigated the briny seas of each other. In the mornings, after he left, waves rose in me again, knocked me off balance, made me blush as I untangled sheets, retrieved pillows, tried to restore order.

  This bed is not that bed. Here, I am anchored by a line embedded in the back of my hand, and morphine keeps me bobbing and drifting, a little ways away from the pain. I’ve noticed everyone seems eager to press the button that releases the drug, on my behalf.

  Not me. I prefer the pain. Anna cannot possibly understand that. The pain keeps me sharp. When I am sharp I go inside, and I make myself feel it again, how it was with him, how I was, when everything was slippery with the chemistry of new love greasing the rusty mechanisms of my heart, and—I’ll say it—my soul.

  I shouldn’t do that. Idealize the past. It’s not healthy. Ha.

  But memory is seductive, especially here at the end, and I follow and it lures me down the same old hole, I follow it back, back, until it turns on me and I am where I started, without him, in the land of the left-behind, two hours out from the next morphine push. Swapping one pain for another, cancer for heartbreak, down in the hole, alone.

  He’s moved on. Meaning Ned.

  Meaning, love of my life, mate to my soul, late-night listener curved around my body, with late-night fingers stepping across my lines and furrows, the terrain of me, and into me as the light rose pink like me over the Hudson River, through our window, and lit me up, and opened up my folded desire. I showed myself.

  Ned put his hands on me and he stopped time. Ned put his hands on me and he stopped cells. I came alive. This, after chemo and the menopause that comes with it. I got my period again. That happened. My skin glowed. My hair, my wayward hair, flowed back shining. I trusted my body again, and forgot to run my visualization exercise, the daily action movie, bad cells in black Speedos and swim caps poised to jackknife into my bloodstream, while good cells, valiant surfer boys in board shorts and hippie hair, built dams.

  I told Dr. Keswani, “He’s younger,” as if that fact might be another symptom, which, in retrospect, it was. She laughed and said, “The best medicine.” Which, in retrospect, it was.

  Well, the medicine was addictive, and then it was poisonous.

  But that first night, when we were up against each other, I had to halt his hand. My shirt was off. He was working at my bra. “Wait, wait a second. I need to tell you something.” He looked stricken. Sexually transmittable disease? Pre-op transgender? Or any number of other show-stoppers I was too old-school, or just too old, to count.

  I reached behind and undid the hooks and let the bra drop to the floor. I said, “I’ve been sick. I have scars. Here. And here.” I closed my eyes and took his fingertips on a walk along the ropy ridges underneath each new breast, and finger-stepped him along the scar higher on my chest, the one the bathing suit did not hide.

  That was five years ago. I was a topless, middle-aged woman splayed on a grad-student sofa. Did we even pause to sweep away strewn papers, his mess of a dissertation? A window was open somewhere, the room was chilled and I was tense with the cold and the reveal, I was like a sensor, every nerve distended, my hand guiding his hand, feeling for the slightest recoil from him.

  A recoil that did not come. I opened my eyes, expecting to see his face clouded with disappointment by my body. He pushed up. He looked into me. He said, “You okay?”

  “Yes, yes, I’m fine. I think. I hope.” I gave a little smile, a little shrug, to protect myself against the gods of irony, who were surely listening, waiting for me to get cocky, to drop my guard and let myself feel a future. “I mean, I am. I’m fine.” I had to add another “I hope.”

  “Does this mean we can’t…?” He was concerned only that the slide inside, so close, was in jeopardy. It was so normal a thing to say that it took me by surprise. He was not repelled. He was worried he wasn’t going to get laid. Ned had a reassuringly male, one-track mind that made cancer irrelevant for a little while.

  I wanted him. I was wearing the pricey lingerie to prove it.

  Even though technically they were nerveless, with cosmetic nipples, created from belly fat and tattoo ink, my new breasts remembered what my real breasts once responded to. Like phantom limbs, they were gone, but the yearning was still there.

  “Does this mean we can’t…?”

  Relief flowed, loosening my thighs. I pulled him in. After, he touched his lips to the ridges where his fingers walked, kissing away my self-consciousness. That’s when I came up with the nickname. Doc. I felt healed.

  I was forty-six and he was thirty-one. I was by far the oldest woman he’d ever been with. “Is it weird for you? Do I feel old?”

  He said, “Of a certain vintage, maybe, but not old.”

  I hid my face. “Vintage! That’s just code for ‘old’!” He pulled my hands away.

  H
e said, “Textured,” in his smoke voice, and stroked the skin at the corners of my eyes.

  He said, “Wise,” and let his fingers flutter over a scar.

  “Complex,” he said, and put his hands between my legs. He moved over me again and pushed in again and whispered, “No more talking.”

  I am not healed. He did not stop time, he did not stop cells. Did I mention? Ned’s moved on. Ned’s living the high life now with someone younger, richer. Healthy. She’s iconic. She’s a celebrity skin doctor. She’s one of the best-known female entrepreneurs in the world. She’s everywhere and he’s right next to her. Smiling. Can you believe that? He’s smiling. Swipe, tap, scroll. See? There they are again, those lucky ducks, at last night’s events. There you are again, Doc, you moved-on, up-trading, lucky-duck bastard. It’s like I never existed.

  Jealousy, whoa. I hadn’t ever experienced it, never really related to the scorned-woman thing. Not like this. I guess I was always the dumper, rather than the dumpee. But now. Wow. I see them and my brain whirs like an old jukebox gearing up to search and reach and set the disc on the turntable and drop the needle into the open vein of an Adele song, any Adele song. I feel ennobled by jealousy, diva-like. I have been wronged. I have been betrayed on a level that is Adele-esque.

  Still, I need to see Ned, even if it’s only on the small screen in the palm of my hand.

  Swipe, tap, scroll. I’m fascinated. I’m disgusted. The display, the showing off, the bragging. When did that become okay? Didn’t that used to be discouraged? Look at our expensive objects, look at our famous friends. This is what we are eating, wearing. Here’s where we are, here’s where we’re going. Everyone is healthy, everything is special. Everyone poses in a sunny, filtered future where the unphotogenic are not allowed. Well, I got older, I got sick, I got totally unphotogenic.

  Refresh, refresh, refresh. Talk about ironic. I’m pushing my own buttons. I need my phone so I can check Twitter, Instagram, newsfeeds, posts. So I can see. Good morning, Doc. Good morning, Doc’s new woman.

  Trudi Mink, dermatologist to the stars.

  Trudi. I don’t like that name.

  He’s moved on. I have to accept it and move on too. If only.

  If only he would acknowledge what we had. What we meant to each other.

  If only he would apologize for walking out on me in the hour before my darkest hour.

  If only he would stop ignoring me.

  If only cyberstalking weren’t so easy.

  The truth is, I want nothing more than to move on. Except it’s too late. Where am I going, in this condition?

  Where is my fucking phone?

  I’m sobbing now, that’s what happens when the morphine is at the end of its shift. Sobbing brings coughing. I try and stifle myself with a pillow so my daughters don’t hear, so they won’t come in, and then the pain in my ribs sears me, and I can’t hold the coughing back, and then the pain in my ribs sets me on fire. Tom, who has been resting heavy against me, like ballast, raises his big dog head and looks at me with anxious eyes. He steps off the bed. He paces. He pants.

  The silence outside my door is full. Someone listening. Someone entering. Here comes the tea. Elena murmurs and fusses, but now there is something formal in her voice, something harder than before, something not-Laney, something more Anna, adapted from the kitchen conference. Things have been decided.

  Caregivers, around the clock. New bed, no phone. No phone, no reason. I can’t face it. I push the button myself this time. The morphine blur spreads thick like gel across my brain, such as it is, and it doesn’t take long, I fall away just as Laney enters, I mumble nonsense as she approaches, I’m going under and I won’t have to face her. I pretend if I can’t see her, she can’t see me.

  2

  Joanna DeAngelis was dying wrong. It was one thing the sisters could agree upon.

  She had fractured a rib, and now, surprise, an interloper, pneumonia, outpaced the cancer in her chest. Her breathing was inhibited; when she slept, half sitting up so she didn’t choke, her breath sounded like it scraped her lungs. Keswani, the oncologist, recommended they install a high hospital bed, with railings and restraints, which she would not be able to leave without help.

  Laney rinsed the porcelain cup and saucer, her grandmother’s, for the third time that gray February day. She set the kettle under the faucet and let the water run cold, for tea, again. “You’re not living here. I’m here all day. She’s … she’s okay.”

  “She is not okay, Lane. She’s not. You have to deal with it.”

  “I am not saying she’s fine. I said she was ‘okay.’ Not ‘fine.’ I’m not stupid. And stop telling me to ‘deal with it.’ You deal with it.”

  “We need someone here full-time. And she needs the special bed. Or she’s going to have to go back to Sloan. We can’t have her wandering all over the place!”

  “Anna, no one is wandering all over the place. She went from the bed to the … bathroom, probably. She had Tom to lean on. She’s done it before with no problem.”

  “Well, it’s a problem now, isn’t it? I’m getting that bed installed this week.” Anna tapped at her phone and waved it at Laney. “Jules agrees with me.”

  Laney said, “Well, Tom agrees with me, but neither of us are doctors, so I guess our votes don’t count.”

  By nature, nurture, and now, profession as a pediatric resident, Anna was devoted to her mother’s care. She’d put her own life on hold, or more accurately, double-timed it, fitting in long days of tending to the kids at Kravis, stealing time with Jules, and supervising an environment of efficiency at her mother’s apartment. Captain of the team, guardian at their mother’s door, Anna wanted only to protect Joanna—who seemed kind of deranged, frankly—from more pain, of any kind.

  “I don’t like the idea of Tom in there all the time, either. He’s too big to be on the bed! What if he knocks into the machines? Or pulls out the line? And she’s … recruited him or something, to help her get around. She’s supposed to be using the bedpan, not the bathroom. He’s her accomplice!”

  “First you go for the bed, now you want to take away the dog. Tom’s watching over her. He’s not an accomplice. And Mama’s not a criminal.”

  “Something’s off, I’m telling you. She’s not right. Maybe something going on in the brain? What is up with the phone thing? I never saw her so into her phone before. What’s she doing on the internet all the time?”

  “Tinder?”

  “Is that supposed to be funny?” Anna watched Laney, who assembled components for tea on a tray. “Lane, the water. Shut the water! You’ve got a flame open, and the water’s running, and—”

  “It might be hard for you to believe, but I do know how to make a cup of tea.” Laney set the kettle on the stove. “Fine, see about the caregivers’ schedule. Order the bed. But leave Tom alone.” By giving Anna a win and throwing down about Tom, Laney thought she might distract her sister from their mother’s obsession with her phone. Tom was not Joanna’s only accomplice.

  Anna scrolled her contacts, made the call, and set the date for the bed’s delivery. “I have to go, Jules is waiting. It’s Valentine’s Day.” She went to Laney and touched her forehead to her sister’s. “We’re okay, we’re doing okay. Right?”

  “It’s Valentine’s Day? I’m such a loser.” Laney’s eyes welled. “Yes, of course. We’re okay.”

  The sisters hugged tight. Inside the hug, they were nearly identical in stature and build; apart, blonde Laney, blue-eyed, with pale skin and an open visage; brunette, brown-eyed Anna with tawny skin and a face that revealed itself slowly. Yet, definitively sisters.

  Anna said, “You do make a fine cup of tea, I’ll give you that. And…”

  Laney waited for the parting shot.

  “You’re almost good at manipulating me. Do not let her have that phone.”

  Before Christmas, when Joanna came home from Sloan Kettering for the last time, Laney moved back home too, to help. She was secretly relieved to flee the clutte
r and grime of expensive floor-through rooms she shared with three others in Brooklyn. Aside from the circumstances, being home was a respite from watching for signs of what to do with her life, in her first year as an official grown-up after the four-year undergraduate fairy tale in Boston.

  Laney was tired of her Boston-Brooklyn friends and their opinions, their naïveté and cynicism, their distressed clothes and hair and outlooks, and most of all, their healthy mothers. She was tired of alcohol and technology, which had turned once-friends into posers with poor eye contact, all of whom seemed unable to form a sentence without reaching for a device. She worked as an intern helping the former hippie-boomer publishers “deploy” social media at Personal Growth & Human Development Books, PGHD, the company where her mother had been an editor, but that gig was on hold for the duration. She’d had to leave every normal thing, pals and work and mindless fun, everything with which her friends were preoccupied, outside the dying-mother bubble she inhabited.

  Tray in hand, she tapped her toe at the bedroom door, and whispered, “Mama?”

  Her mother drifted, drugged, in her blue bed at the Titania, the Art Deco apartment building standing sentinel over 103rd Street and Riverside Drive. The bedroom’s windows were high enough and wide enough so that the Hudson River was a presence. The river, flat glass or chop, showed on the mirrored closet doors. The watery reflection shimmered like a lure across the bed, catching the sun’s rise and set and the moods of the moon.

  Always cold, her mother had huddled and gone small under blue quilts. All Laney could see was the beanie that Anna bought a couple of years back at a skateboard shop downtown on Lafayette, white with an embroidered black skull, when the skull was still ironic. Joanna was attached to the hat. Laney hated seeing it on her mother’s head, daring death.

  Joanna had stopped eating. Bringing tea was all Laney could think to do. She set the tray down on the night table as quietly as she could. Joanna moaned from inside a dream.