Almost Family: A Novel

All my life, if you’d said, Join a support group, I’d have said, I can’t think of anything worse. Two hours in a circle of folding chairs, trapped with all that angst. The on and on and on of it all. Bad parents. Drunken husbands. Jobs not only shitty but so low paid you can’t even afford your own shrink, so there you all are in a group session, talking about your shitty jobs. God, no. It’s bad enough just getting through these things. You want to waste more time whining about them? Staring at them in other people’s faces? Yet here I am, going to a support group, after having just trashed the whole concept out of hand.

In my defense, this group I’m in is about the thing, the thing you can’t get over or move on from or leave behind. It’s the thing that makes you leave everything else behind, not just school or city or friends. No next new stage, no trying any different way to be. Just this one last adventure. So I figure none of the usual admonitions apply. Yes, we’re a group, and we do sit around. But you really can’t tell us, Get a life, like I used to say, or think, anyway, about any other kind of support group. Say it about ours and you’d be even more of an asshole than I was.

Strange thing is, that’s exactly what we’re trying to do here. Get a little life, even if we are dying. And who’s to say we’re dying anyway, so long as we’re still walking around?

The first time everything fell apart was late on a Friday afternoon in August 2008. I’d skipped out of work at four thirty, a first, and was still unpacking boxes in my supposedly temporary postdivorce apartment. Just a week earlier, I’d left the beautiful Oakland Hills home I’d shared with my husband, Bradley, for twenty-three years and had moved into the bottom floor of a borderline-shabby Tudor-style fourplex on a leafy street near Lake Merritt.

I unwrapped my half of the silverware, the mugs, and put them in a cupboard sticky with too many layers of semigloss paint. Aretha was on the cheap CD player I’d brought in from my office, and I raised a fist to Respect, shouting the letters to no one but me. It hadn’t really hit me yet, the finality of my decision, or the things I might mourn. I hadn’t even figured out why I’d stayed married to an alcoholic for so many years even after our daughter, Marisa, was out of school. But I did know what finally gave me the courage to leave.

Lyle.

The first man I ever really opened up to, the first man who knocked my socks so far off he made me want to sing out loud. I was giddy with possibility, even if my grown daughter wasn’t speaking to me as a result. Even if Lyle wouldn’t be leaving his wife for at least another year.

I was on my way to the kind of life I’d thought was reserved for others. People who knew love because they knew how to feel at home in places, people who didn’t have to try so hard to be perfect, to fit in, to do the best job, be the best parent, clean up after everyone else’s mess.

When the phone rang, I thought it was Lyle calling to confirm he’d be in that week from New York. We’d have sex for the first time in my own place instead of at the Excelsior, that dumpy hotel with saggy drapes. He’d stay all night long. Maybe I’d even get the kitchen together in time to cook him dinner.

It wasn’t Lyle on the phone, though. It was my doctor, his usual lighthearted voice slowed down to the point where I knew something was off.

Liz, I need you to come in . . .

It was breast cancer. Stage One, but aggressive. I’d need surgery right away.

I did what I always do when a crisis hits, whether it’s a PR client caught in a felony and I have to come up with a positive spin or a tree blown down on our house or my parents getting their own cancer diagnoses. I went into full-on Army brat mode, froze my emotions, and did what I had to do. I made plans for someone to take over my workload when necessary, assured my boss it would hardly be necessary. I’d be working through this thing.

I went on a binge shop at Macy’s, ordering a shaker coffee table, a cheap sling-back chair, and a green leather sofa that was too big for the living room. I took from my house, temporarily my ex-husband Bradley’s house, Grandma Millanova’s overstuffed chair, the one we never got around to refinishing after our puppy Boris chewed on it, not even after Boris got old and died.

I didn’t cry until I called Lyle to tell him the news. I cried just as much because he wouldn’t be spending the night that weekend, and who knew when I’d see him next.

Oh no! he said. Darlin’— But then his wife must’ve come home because he started in on a fake business conversation: Yes, that sounds like a good rollout plan. I’ll go over the schedule with Ron.

After that first diagnosis, I stood up tall in my kitchen, a glass of wine on the counter, and called my daughter, Marisa. She was in her third year at Georgetown Law, slammed with studies and law review.

No, really, I’m fine, honey, I said. Prognosis is great. This’ll just be a blip, nothing to worry about.

Instead of saying, Honey, would you consider flying out so we could have a weekend together, just us? I said, Don’t worry, I’ll be working right through treatment. Don’t even think of coming out here. Patsy at work has already put in an advance order of a whole week of take-out meals, and Kate will be over all the time. Not exactly true—Patsy, my assistant, didn’t know about the surgery yet, but I was sure my best friend, Kate, would be around.

There was a pause on the line. I had the fleeting hope that Marisa would insist on getting on a plane, but she didn’t press. Marisa was mad at me about the divorce, mad at me anyway, I suppose, for being too interested in her life, for years of imperfectly trying to keep everything in our out-of-control household in perfect control.

Glad you have such a good attitude, Mom, she said. That’ll help, for sure. Then, Sorry, I’m late for study group, but we’ll talk soon.

I could have told her I was scared. I could’ve told her, again, that I was sorry about the divorce. I wanted to give her as much time as she needed, but also, I didn’t know what I could say to make things better between us. How do you start talking, really talking, after brushing things under the rug for so many years? How do you mention a new man—especially a married man—in the same breath as divorce and expect your daughter won’t judge you harshly for that?

How’s my sweetheart? he asked. That South Carolina drawl never failed to calm me down.

He came out from New York to see me again after my first chemo, when I still had hair and felt good enough to have sex, desperately fantastic sex, despite my still-healing scar, the punch-holes under my arm where the lymph nodes were taken. I told him we should savor that weekend but that I wouldn’t see him again until after chemo was done. I didn’t want to be a drag.

My face turned gray and I had no eyebrows and only wisps of hair, like a baby bird. Kate and my new neighbors, Linda and Stu, were plenty attentive—Kate, another military brat, knowing me enough to pretend she was the one who needed to share laughs over a meal on the concrete patio. Treatment went by in a blur. Surgery, back to work, chemo, back to work. Wearing a wig made getting ready for work easy. Just put on your hair and slap on a smile.

In the in-between moments, dragging myself from one meeting to the next, or in that sliver of preconsciousness after sleep, I had Lyle to think about. Finally, he could call me at home. Finally, I could email him at midnight, and I did email, morning and night, revealing my every up and down, always concluding on a positive note. Lyle fantasies stretched through my days, lightening my spirit when my body was wrecked. I lay in bed exhausted but reviewing down to the finest detail our first working lunch that turned out to not be about work. The pale stripe in his shirt, the way his eyes, always intense, suddenly became intent upon me. What we ate and how quickly we went up to bed when I saw him in New York, at the Roosevelt and that one time at the Algonquin. That day we sat with sandwiches on a bench at Lake Merritt and talked about how we’d quit the firm and move up to Oregon someday, after his son graduated and he and his wife could have the kind of talk I’d had with my husband. Bradley and I didn’t fight. The tension and secrets between us had crowded our marriage for so long that they had become like a third person to be finally rid of, so that we could get along. I even remained in the house while we had it on the market, sleeping in our bed while he slept in Marisa’s room or cheerfully headed out somewhere else.

With Lyle, I imagined a different life, coloring in the specifics of it until it became more vivid than the one inhabited by my body. When we moved to Oregon, I’d find a job at something nonprofity, and he’d build fine furniture in the refinished garage of our Craftsman house. My daughter might even come up to visit a week at a time, and we’d grow close, taking a watercolor class together or hiking along the Columbia River. Lyle and I would make friends. Have people over. Discuss books and politics and maybe get to know a few people really well. My cancer? A bummer, sure. A waste of a year, but lucky to get through it while he was still with his wife.

I’ve gone over and over it in my mind and figured out that this was the time that must’ve done it: Before starting radiation, as soon as I could travel after chemo, I put aside my initial reservations and went to see Lyle. We planned to meet in Kansas City, where neither of us had ever been. I was still bald, but my color was back, and I couldn’t wait. We’d giggled over messy room service ribs, and after sex I went to the shower in our hotel room, taking off my crooked wig. For the first time ever, he did not want to come in with me. That look on his face just before he turned away to shave, when he dropped his smile and pulled in a deep breath. I saw fear in his eyes and then, when they narrowed, disgust. How could I have gotten so used to my cancer self I didn’t prepare for what a turnoff it would be to him? How could I have let myself become so gaga over anyone that way, believing that giving my whole self would make him happy?

Three weeks later, with twenty-three of thirty-three radiation treatments to go, Lyle dumped me. By email. That is, the romantic email he sent was addressed to someone named Ellen. And when, heart racing, I asked who Ellen was, he wrote a pathetic, defensive apology, explaining in too much detail how he and his old girlfriend had reconnected and, you know, rekindled. It felt as if, just as we’d been singing along with the radio on a road trip, he’d pulled over on a freeway in empty, unfamiliar territory and told me to get out.

Call it the last straw, after divorce, then cancer, then treatment. When he dumped me, Lyle’s lies and the truth of cancer punched so hard I could barely get out of bed. I called in sick every day after each of my twenty-three remaining radiation treatments, and another whole week after the last one, something I’d rarely done through the months of chemo, when I actually was sick and not just heartbroken and fatigued. All that time off after the breakup, I stayed home and obsessed. Almost fifty, obsessing like a high school kid. I’d google Lyle and his college girlfriend, stalk them both on Facebook, and then I’d google Medline and breastcancer.org, cutting and pasting all the worst-case statistics into my very own document of doom. I convinced myself I had two years left, max. Two years, and I was spending them humiliating myself.

Kate was the one who forced me back to work.

For God’s sake! You’re cancer-free! Forget about the bastard, she said. We were having Greek takeout on the rickety patio table, celebrating the end of my treatment. She blew her cigarette smoke away from me into the juniper hedge.

The next morning, I brushed my teeth, imagining it was Lyle I spat on.

I slapped on my fringy Halle Berry wig and squeezed into stilettos, the black pencil skirt Lyle thought was so sexy, the drapey sage-colored top that looked great with the reddish tint in my synthetic hair. Lyle was in town for our monthly all-hands meeting on the SoClo account. Our goal: produce and market credible studies showing the health benefits of salt, using doctors who’d say low-salt diets had been dangerously hyped, athletes who swore by salt supplements, that sort of thing.

If I’d stayed home, claiming radiation fatigue, I wouldn’t have to face Lyle. But then he would run the meeting, instead of me, and that thought propelled me with rage. Remember, he dumped you in the middle of cancer treatment. By email! Fucker could’ve waited another six weeks. Three minutes till ten, I exited the elevator on the twenty-first floor, into the bright cubicle-filled headquarters of Star Solutions. Head down, I ignored the normal morning greetings, brushing off Patsy when she inquired, I thought you were still off? You feeling okay?

Had a checkup, but I’m here, I fibbed, heart beating too fast. I can take the meeting.

You look great, she said, soft round eyes lifting behind wireless glasses as she smiled. It’s what people say to cancer patients no matter how awful they look, but Patsy knew me and my bullshit detector well enough not to kiss up. I was so grateful for the compliment I felt tears coming on.

I closed my office door behind me long enough to take a breath and look out the window. That view—Bay Bridge, across to San Francisco. Whenever I felt like a fraud, I looked out the window to remind myself I got there by being good at my job. Kate’s words replayed as a pep talk. Lyle was merely a coworker now. I headed to the conference room and hesitated two breaths before entering. Howcouldyou howcouldyou howcouldyou you bastard.

I opened the door. Eight people sat at the walnut table that could hold twenty: four colleagues from my office, two thick-bodied white men representing SoClo, and a beautiful young woman I didn’t recognize who must’ve been the new hire from the Manhattan office, the new hire who now sat next to Lyle. My cheeks burned, stomach roiling with jealousy, and this wasn’t even the old girlfriend he’d dumped me for. Smooth Lyle. Beautiful gray Italian suit, as usual more formal than his West Coast counterparts but impeccably so. I could hear him inhale sharply as I settled into my chair, but then he immediately lifted his shoulders and flashed me a brilliant smile. Why, Liz, so good to see you, he said. You doing okay? The note of concern made me want to puke. You’ll take the meeting? Or shall I . . .?

I looked him hard in the eyes before returning the fake smile and then offering it to the room. Lyle fiddled with his pen.

I’ll lead, I said. I’ve prepared.

I was certain that day, the first day I had to face Lyle again at work, was the low point.

Fifteen months later, my hair had grown back thick and curly, better than before I’d gone bald. Lyle was mostly back at the New York office, but thoughts and images of him still ping-ponged around my brain, no matter what mantras or breathing tricks I tried to make them disappear. The thoughts would stop my breath, freezing time to let shock, humiliation, and grief have their turn. Still, I got my work done. If I had to talk to him, I made myself sound so breezy I almost believed he didn’t matter at all.

You’re looking good, Lyle said one day while he was heading toward me in the hallway. Insincere son of a bitch. But then, before we passed each other, he looked at me in the old way, heat in his eyes, and I startled with a sharp inhale. No response required, I told myself, though something like a smirk involuntarily appeared. I walked on, using a file folder for a quick wave.

The SoClo rollout went so well that we picked up Agricorp as a client. I’d just had a stultifying lunch in Jack London Square with two of the company honchos who’d flown out from Des Moines to see how we’d go about rebranding high-fructose corn syrup.

I took a hard look at Buzz Nyland, who’d called me young lady twice since we’d met, and then at Pete Crawley, so cowed by his boss he seemed to shrink during lunch. It was all I could do to resist getting up from the table, going to the restroom, and leaving for good. But then, these new clients came with a big bonus and salary bump. I’d been looking to buy a condo on Lake Merritt, with a grown-up kitchen, office nook, and bathroom big enough to fit a tub. I’d have a guest room, too, so maybe I could convince Marisa to stay with me some weekend. We could talk, really talk, like we hadn’t done since, well, honestly, ever.

How to explain my relationship with Marisa? I was just figuring it out myself, but so much of what we’d become had to do with Bradley, and his drinking, and both of us covering for him and denying to each other and ourselves that there was a problem—you do that long enough and what’s true and what’s a lie becomes hard to discern. Of course, my lying about Lyle and leaving Bradley for a fantasy didn’t help any. But she played her part too. Marisa was tough.

This is what I was thinking as Buzz droned on, displaying a mouthful of crab cake. I reached unconsciously up to my collarbone, where a dull pain had emerged the day before. It grew sharper when I touched it there at the lunch table, and my breath stopped.

It wouldn’t be the first time I’d come up with symptoms mimicking a cancer recurrence. I’d had the coughs (spread to my lung?), the headaches (to my brain?), even the suspect yellowish cast to my skin in a department store mirror (liver?). We all do it. Anyone who’s had cancer has had a symptom that comes with the gut-stabbing terror that this is it, the metastasis that will kill. I’d been prodded, x-rayed, MRI’d.

I pressed my collarbone and heard my dead father’s voice say, It’s nothing. My dead mother chimed in, Don’t be a hypochondriac, for gosh sakes!

I have no idea what Buzz said during the rest of the meal. Sure thing, I told him, as their limo pulled up afterward. I’ll be back to you with a proposal. Patsy was going to have to get on the line with his assistant, just to confirm what was discussed.

I went home instead of back to the office, dialed Dr. Wong’s number, and made the first available appointment for a CT scan of my bones. For once, I was taking my stoic parents’ advice with grains of salt. Healthy, healthy salt.

The day of the appointment, I drove all the way to the Hayward suburbs, where, in a faux Tuscan mall, a diagnostic center was stuck between a camera store and a Michaels hobby shop.

I passed through the tiny lobby with Florida rattan chairs and plastic philodendrons and into a prep room where a man named Tarik stuck an IV in the usual spot on my hand. Dye pumped into my bloodstream but needed time to circulate. Come back in three hours, he said. There’s a Starbucks.

I sat there in the Starbucks, staring out the window, coffee growing bitter and cold. Across the parking lot sat a group of middle-aged women, gathered around an outdoor table in front of the Applebee’s. Their lunches heaped on trays before them, they clasped hands and bowed their heads. Instead of thinking, Maybe now’s a good time for me to start praying, or at least facing up to my life and the possibility of it coming sooner rather than later to an end, I started in on obsessing about Lyle. Was it the obsession itself that’d led me to where I was? Or was the obsession a way of escaping the fear of this day coming?

I needed to think of something else, so I fiddled with my pad and pen and wound up writing a prayer of my own:

Lord, why hast thou forsaken me

in the shadow of Rubio’s fish tacos?

I thank you, oh Lord, for the sustenance

of Texas West BBQ pulled pork

And ask your forgiveness for stuffing the temple of my soul

till these shorts are an abomination on my thighs.

I pray for the resurrection of Scrapbook World

and for the financial health of Ritz Camera too.

Yet, surely, I shall not wander till the end of my days

in the wilderness of Tuscany Roads.

Its porticos are dark, Lord, and also fake.

Lead me to the path of something better to do, Lord.

Give me time, Lord, and I’ll do things differently, somewhere else.Somewhere more pleasing in your sight.

And then, stupidest thing ever, I emailed the prayer to Lyle. I hadn’t contacted him in months—by then we were working on different accounts—but there, in the worst possible moment, my most vulnerable moment, I emailed him.

I wrote him a little note saying I was waiting for the results of a bone scan because of some complications, and that in my boredom I wrote this fake prayer I thought he might enjoy. I pressed send, still hoping he’d be there and be real, that I could touch him, somehow, and everything would be back to the way it used to be. What an idiot. What a liar, telling myself I was so over him. That things had been perfect in the first place. What a lie everything about Lyle was. I didn’t even want to think about all the lies in my life.

Seconds later, my email buzzed:

Liz, you are hilarious! Thanks for sending this. And do let me know the results of your scan. I’m sure you’ll be just fine!

Take care,

Lyle

I dug in my purse for a rubber band. It had been nearly a year since I threw away the thick red one I’d put around my wrist to ward off my obsession. The band would snap, and I’d think, Forget him and the sting of him; make my wrist sting instead. So that day in the parking lot of Tuscany Roads, I dug through my purse, the wadded-up pink-ribbon tissues, the Tylenol and codeine pills, shoulder-sized Salonpas, too many lipsticks, and the purplish-brown polish I kept thinking I was going to take to that new Vietnamese nail place on Twelfth. No rubber bands.

The man simply couldn’t handle anything uncomfortable, any hint of real pain or fear. I couldn’t believe I used to think all that denial was just optimism, that he was just a positive guy, not a chickenshit passive-aggressive two-faced southern asshole. This was the very thing that had attracted me most when we’d first met at work—his always-upbeat South Carolina southern-gentleman charm. Never a fucking discouraging word, never facing up to anything real, his manners keeping tough conversations at bay. He’d made it so easy, and sure, I’d been complicit, but still. Fucking Lyle. To think that he’d been my big goal in life. If I had any life ahead of me, any time left with my health, I needed a better goal.

Dr. Wong confirmed what I knew the scan would show: metastases—mets—in my collarbone. As I stood in the paper robe, mouth stuck on open, she handed me a piece of paper with the information about Mercy’s Thriving Survivors. A support group. For me. I’d never in a million years.

Out of habit, I suppose, I called Bradley first.

Everything okay with our little girl? he asked before I even said hello. Our little girl had just turned twenty-six and had started work as a lawyer in a big-time firm in LA.

It’s been a while since we’ve talked, but I assume so, I said.

Well, I talked to her last Thursday; she sounded great.

I felt the corkscrew twist in my stomach. She always called him, never me. Twiddling the cord on the old-fashioned wall phone, I looked out through the tiny living room and into my bedroom. Sycamore leaves banged against the bay window above the bed where I’d lain like a block of cement after chemo, sweating a chemical smell, drifting in and out, in and out.

Actually, this is about me. I wanted you to know first, so after I tell Marisa and she calls, maybe you can buck her up and help her through this?

Through what?

My cancer’s back. Metastasized. In the bone. Not my bones but the bone—the way doctors describe it. Part of a nameless body. Already closer to cadaver.

What? Bradley acted as if he hadn’t heard me, but I knew he was just buying time. He hadn’t the slightest idea of how to respond when serious issues came up.

I’m Stage Four, Bradley. It is not good. I’ll be okay for a while, maybe a few years, but most likely this is going to kill me, barring a Mack truck or heart attack, you know . . .

Jesus. Liz. My God, really? A pause. I imagined him reaching for a flask. Hold on. Don’t be such a pessimist. Practically every day I hear of new treatments. If anyone can beat this, you can! I wouldn’t want to take you on. I bet cancer thinks twice too.

Ha ha, I said. Always the sales pitch with Bradley. The optimism that really means please don’t make me uncomfortable.

You’re right, I said. I’ve got a whole shitload of pills to take. I’ll probably outlast you. Anyway, just wanted you to know. Let me be the one to tell Marisa. I don’t want her getting upset. And it may take a while, because she’s so slammed at work. I want it to be the right time. Not that there’s precisely a right time, but she’s so busy, you know? I’d hate to set her back . . . I was babbling. Even though we were divorced, and even though Bradley was more often than not too high to really listen, there I was, expecting him to be my sounding board. The one thing I knew he’d understand was my worry about Marisa.

Okay, I won’t tell her till you tell me it’s okay.

Thanks, Bradley.

You give ’em hell, kiddo. I heard the catch in his voice.

You take care of yourself, I said.

Right then I realized that I wanted him to comfort me. And right then I realized what I hadn’t realized in our years of marriage: he couldn’t.

I needed a walk. I locked