She went into her room and flicked on the light. In the years they’d lived here, she’d changed nothing in this room and bought almost nothing to decorate it. She saw no point. It was bare and ordinary, filled with the garage-sale furniture they’d collected over the years. The only real sign of Leni herself was the photography equipment—lenses and cameras and bright yellow rolls of film. Stacks of pictures and collections of photograph albums. A single album was filled with her pictures of Matthew and Alaska. The rest were more current. Tucked into the corner of the vanity mirror was the picture of Matthew’s grandparents. THIS COULD BE US. Beside it was the first picture she’d taken of him with her Polaroid.
She opened the door that led out onto the small cedar-planked deck that ran the length of the house. In the backyard, Mama had cultivated a large vegetable garden. Leni stepped out onto the deck and sat in one of the two Adirondack chairs that had been here when they moved in. Overhead, the star-spangled sky looked limitless. A solid cedar fence outlined their small lot. She could smell the distant aroma of the first summer barbecues and hear the jangle of kids’ bikes being put away for the night. Dogs barked. A crow scolded something in a sharp little caw-caw-caw.
She leaned back in the chair, stared up, and tried to lose herself in the vastness of the sky.
“Hey,” Mama said from behind her. “You want some company?”
“’Course.”
Mama sat down in the second chair, positioned close enough that they could hold hands as they sat here. It had become their place over the years, a narrow deck that jutted out into some dimension that was neither past nor present. Sometimes, especially this time of year, the air smelled of roses.
“I’d give anything to see the northern lights,” Leni said.
“Yeah. Me, too.”
Together they stared up at the immense night sky. Neither of them spoke; they didn’t need to. Leni knew they were both thinking of the loves that had once been theirs.
“But we have MJ,” Mama said.
Leni held her mother’s hand.
MJ. Their joy, their love, their saving grace.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Cora had pneumonia. It was hardly a surprise. For weeks, she’d caught every illness that moved through MJ’s school.
Now she sat in a sterile waiting room; irritated. Impatient to be let go.
Waiting.
She appreciated all of the just-to-be-sure tests her mother’s doctor had insisted upon, done, but Cora just wanted to get an antibiotics prescription and get out of here. MJ would be home from school soon.
Cora flipped through the latest People magazine. (“Ted Danson Leers Again on Cheers” was the absurd headline.) She tried the crossword puzzle in the back of the magazine, but she didn’t know enough popular culture to make much headway.
More than thirty minutes later, the blue-haired nurse returned to the waiting room and led Cora into a small office, its walls lined with degrees, awards, that sort of thing. Cora was shown to a hard black chair.
She sat down, instinctively crossing her legs at the ankles as she had been taught years ago in her country-club days. It occurred to her suddenly, stupidly, that it was a metaphor for all that had changed for women in her lifetime. No one cared anymore how a woman sat.
“So, Evelyn,” the doctor said. She was a stern-looking woman with steel-wool hair and an obvious affection for mascara. She looked like she survived on black coffee and raw vegetables, but who was Cora to judge a woman for being thin? A series of X-rays hung across a Lite-Brite-like screen behind her desk.
“Where’s the pneumonia?” Cora asked, lifting her chin toward the images. An octopus devouring something; that was what it looked like.
The doctor started to speak, then paused.
“Doctor?”
Dr. Prasher pointed to one of the images. “You see these large white areas? Here. Here. And here? You see this white curve? The shadow along your spine? It is all highly suggestive of lung cancer. We will need more tests to be sure, but…”
Wait. What?
How could this be happening?
Oh, right. She was a smoker. It was lung cancer. For years, Leni had nagged Cora about the habit, warned her of this very scenario. She had laughed and said, “Hell, baby girl, I could die crossing the street.”
“The CT scan shows a mass on your liver, which indicates metastasis,” Dr. Prasher said, and kept talking.
The words became a tangle in Cora’s mind: consonants and vowels, a series of breaths taken and released.