When I get back inside, Noah comes over to me and holds out his arms, and we finally dance.
I put my head on his shoulder, and I say, “Are you feeling a little better? Did you get something to eat?” This is probably a very wifely thing to say, and I realize he’s probably resenting the hell out of it.
“Yes,” he says in a weary voice. “Yes, I’m better. I ate some protein.”
I feel so careful around him. “Good. And you were singing a lot, you and Whipple. That must have been okay, right?”
Then who knows what makes me brave enough to say this—maybe it’s all the alcohol I’ve had, or Blix’s words, or the fact that I’m feeling disconnected from reality—but I say the scary thing: “What’s next, do you think?”
“I dunno. The honeymoon?”
“Okay,” I say. “What about tonight?”
“What do you mean? Tonight we’re going to the hotel and we’re going to have great sex and sleep late. Like newlyweds.”
There are some other things I want to know. Like, is he going to be my husband? And am I really his wife? Are those words we can use? He puts his arms around me and we slow dance to another song, and then they turn the lights on, and I see that Noah’s eyes have no light in them. The air around him is a muddy beige I’ve never noticed before.
So I guess my first miracle will have to be to try to light him back up.
FIVE
BLIX
It’s a week after the wedding and I’m back home now. My tumor wakes me up before sunrise. It is thrumming right below the surface of my skin, like something alive, running under its own power.
Hi, love, it says. What shall we do today?
“Sweetheart,” I say to it. “I was hoping for just a little more sleep this morning. Would you very much mind if we did that—and then later we can talk and do whatever you want.”
The tumor hardly ever goes for this kind of reasoning. And why should it? It knows I’m at its mercy. I’ve made friends with it because I don’t believe in that whole battle metaphor for disease. You always read about that in obituaries, you know—“So and so battled cancer for five years” or worse, “He lost his battle with cancer.” I do not believe cancer appreciates that kind of thinking. And anyway, I’ve made nice with trouble my whole life, and I’ve noticed that what happens is that problems just curl right up like declawed kittens and nestle at your feet and fall asleep. Later, you look down, and they’ve wandered off somewhere. You bid them a fond farewell and get back to what you wanted to do in the first place.
In the interest of friendliness, I have given my tumor a name: Cassandra. She was the prophet nobody believed.
I turn over in the bed and listen to Houndy softly snoring beside me, his grizzled, beautiful face tipped toward mine. I lie there in the grayness of dawn and watch him breathe in and out and feel the magic of the city waking up. After a long time, the sun comes up for real, and a long time after that, the 6:43 bus comes wheeling around the corner and hits the pothole at its usual breakneck speed, causing the metal chassis to complain and screech as it always does. The windowpanes shudder. Somewhere, if I listen, there’s a siren starting up.
An early summer morning in Brooklyn. The heat is already pressing against the window. I close my eyes and stretch. Cassandra, satisfied that I’m awake, goes back to whatever she was doing before she felt the call to wake me up. Sometimes she is as silent and worn out as time, and sometimes she’s a rascally kindergartener wanting only to thump against something living.
I place my hand against her, and sing her a little song in my head.
Call me crazy, but the day I named her Cassandra, I also started giving her nice things to wear. Some days, when she is fierce and hot, I picture her in a hard hat, and other days—like maybe today—I think of her in a lacy dress and invite her for tea. I tell her to imagine she has been given the most delicate and beautiful of my china cups, the one I hang on the hook over the stove.
“I will not forsake you,” I say to Cassandra. “I know you came for a reason, even though I’ll be goddamned if I can figure out what that is.”
Last week, when I got back from the wedding, on a day when I was nearly doubled over in pain, I gave myself a huge reward for making it through and to celebrate meeting Marnie. I told Houndy and Lola that I’d found the person I’d been waiting for all my life, the someone I probably knew from many other lifetimes, and who was my spiritual daughter. And then I painted the refrigerator bright turquoise. I was so proud of myself for not letting anyone in my family know that I am dying that I had to paint the refrigerator as my own little reward.
Houndy—sweet old family-oriented Houndy—thinks I should just tell my family about the mass. “Why not?” he says. “Don’t they deserve to know? Maybe they’d want to be nicer to you.”
Ha! My family wouldn’t want to be nicer to me. They’d want me locked up in some hospital, treating Cassandra with needles and knives and making me talk to doctors, people who would speak to me in that condescending, medical way, people with clipboards and appointment books and computers. Office assistants who would speak too loudly in my presence, as if Cassandra had somehow interfered with my ability to hear.
No thank you. I went to the doctor and got my diagnosis, which I will not dignify by using its medical terminology, because to say the words makes it feel fatal and incurable, and I refuse to go with that. Except I will say this: I got up from the examination table, and put my clothes back on, thank you very much, and I tore up the pieces of paper they gave me—the treatment plan—and I walked out. And I will not go back.
If Cassandra leaves my body—and she may, it could still happen—it will be of her own volition, and this will be the reason: our work together is done. I don’t want to die, but neither am I afraid. I won’t use chemotherapy or put poison into my body. I won’t suffer. Instead, I have taken energy drinks and done chants; I have consulted a shaman in an African village online; I have buried talismans and sowed seeds and performed yoga poses at midnight under a full moon. I have danced and primal screamed and practiced laughing out loud and had massages and acupuncture. And Reiki.
And by the look of things, Cassandra is thriving. So you know what that means? It means it’s the way things are supposed to be.
So I am going to die. Most natural thing in the world to have happen. Life ends.
And I’m okay with that. It’s just a change of address, really. It doesn’t have to be awful.
I sigh, kick off the sheets because I’m suddenly hot, and then I close my eyes and tune in to the conversation the pigeons are having on the windowsill. They always sound like they’re on the verge of figuring everything out.
Later, I get up and go to what Houndy calls my crazy-ass kitchen to make tea. Funny, these old Brooklyn brownstones. This one has a parquet floor that once was probably grand but which now slopes down to the outside wall. It’s a floor with personality, all pocked and scarred from a century of footsteps and bootheels and water leaks and even worse grievances than those. And a high tin ceiling with a glaring fluorescent ring of light in its yellowed center—a light I never turn on because it’s harsh. It promotes ugliness, that light. Instead, I’ve put lamps all around. Warm, yellowish light to give softness.
Houndy says we could get the floor made level and maybe have the stairs replaced in the front of the house, get the roof fixed. He’s a do-something kind of guy, not one to sit around and watch the metal rust. Finally I had to say to him that I am all about slowing down all that striving. I just want to enjoy the sun coming through the cracks near the windows. I am tired of making so much effort.