If Only There Was A Word Called Adulting - Chapter 4

Part II – Anne

But now they only block the sun
They rain and snow on everyone
So many things I could have done
But clouds got in my way – Both Sides Now, Joni Mitchell

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January 2001, Everett, Washington

A year – and change - is a whole lot of time when you’re twenty-two. It’s five percent of the entire time I’ve been on earth. It’s practically a third of the time that Frederick and I have been together. In fact, the time we’ve been apart is exactly equal to the time we’ve been engaged, though I guess you could argue that we wouldn’t have the need to get properly engaged yet if we hadn’t known that this time apart was looming, and we needed something to hold onto. A way to mark our resolve to build a future together after this long, forced separation, because we knew Fred would be stuck for a year on an Air Force base for Undergraduate Pilot Training, which they call UPT for short, right after our graduation, with no leave allowed in between, and no way for me to go with him.

“Well, I did think a lot before I asked, about whether I was asking too early,” he’d said. “Or too late, actually. If I’d asked earlier, maybe we’d be married by now and I’d be bringing you on base with me.”

Of course, he said that half tongue-in-cheek, but that’s just his wry way of joking about all the crappy stuff that’s completely beyond our control. If just one thing had been different, we’d be in a place where I could see and touch him every day and where he’d be able to come home to me every evening, married or not. If he had parents, and they could help him out enough with expenses to have something saved up so I could join him on base without worrying about money. If Father – or even just Grandma alone – approved of our relationship (fat hope to even get them to neutral ground) so I could openly declare to them that we’re together with a clear conscience and be fully at peace with myself and my family. Or if he had some other scholarship, something that didn’t bind him to the military. Just one of those three things would’ve done the trick – it’d mean we could either get married right away after college and I could live with him in family housing during his training, or that we’d both be free to choose jobs that would allow us to live in the same city after graduating, maybe even share digs if we wanted. But the word “if” is a many-headed hydra, and we can’t go back and change what’s fixed and done. That the military is his life and his livelihood, both by necessity and by choice. And that we can’t possibly get married yet when he was always perilously close to having zero dollars in his bank account before he got commissioned as an officer and started getting full pay.

That part – the zero-dollar bit – it sounds as if Fred’s such a reckless spendthrift, when the truth is, he’s anything but. It isn’t his fault that his mom had his eldest sister Sophia when she was just sixteen and landed up on her own with three kids by the age of twenty-three. When their mom died, penniless, from a drug overdose, Sophia was the one who stepped in to become his de facto mom – and at that time, he was only thirteen and his brother Edward was fifteen. It’s a sheer miracle, growing up in the ‘hood the way they did, that Fred and Edward made it into college at all; and ROTC isn’t designed to fully eliminate the need for your parents to give you money, even when you get the Type 1 scholarship that pays all your tuition and fees, like Fred did. It gives you a cost-of-living stipend, but that amount doesn’t hit $500 a month till you’re a senior, and that’s still a far cry from what it’d cost for dorm housing alone. So, Fred ended up staying anywhere that gave him a mattress to crash on for the lowest amount of money possible – he was in a frat house freshman year, until his buddies moved off-campus and he was able to rent a corner of their living room for $100 a month. Still, a body has to eat; even with me cooking most of our meals and a $3 lunch from a food truck being a once-a-week treat, there were hardly any times he had two cents to rub together by the end of the month, especially in freshman and sophomore years. Furthermore, ROTC is so intense that it isn’t humanly possible to hold a campus job during term time, and he was already lucky that Air Force ROTC didn’t eat up that much of his summers, not like the way the Army and Navy ones could, so he could earn some money from having summer jobs most times. The most ironic thing was, they gave him nine hundred dollars a year to buy books, a far princelier sum than Father deigned necessary for my own book allowance, so we figured out the best way to put as much of that money as possible into his pocket for necessities – he’d buy brand new textbooks, for upperclass engineering texts can go for well above $100 apiece, and then I’d share my used textbooks with him so we wouldn’t scuff his books up. Two terms later, I’d sell the books in like-new condition, as if he’d passed them on to me after using them, and then hand him the cash.

A university is a great place to be in love without a cent to your name, though, because we could do so many things for free. Pick-up basketball games, free on-campus talks and concerts, watching TV at my digs with my roomies, going for runs along the Charles River, we did all those things and more. A couple times a semester maybe, we’d take the T across the river with our friends and explore the streets of Boston, though most city entertainments were priced beyond our reach. Although we had immense fun together for very little money, our relationship was built on way more than just fun. We both shared a common major; we had big dreams, dreams we were willing to fight for; and both of us knew what it was like to grow up without a mom. Since the day I met him, he’s been my biggest rock – the one man who blows me away with his authenticity and sincerity, who has the strength to hold the weight of both his burdens and mine on his determined shoulders. By the time we were upperclassmen, our lives were inextricably entwined – intellectually, socially, and logistically. We might as well have been married already, except that we were both still undergraduates on student incomes. I got a spending allowance from Father, just like Liz did, but he’d never revised the amounts all through our high school and college years. He hadn’t needed to, when he gave each of us a supplementary credit card to cover our bigger expenses with. Liz used it shamelessly to buy clothing and have extravagant clubbing sessions on weekends, but I scrupulously saved it for emergencies, and supplemented my pocket money with a campus job at the library. And during summers, I got internships to put me in a better place to find a job after graduation. All of it kept me comfortable when I was at school, but it certainly isn’t a big enough nest egg to build a home on. Not that Fred would let himself live off my income anyway – he wants to be the one to take care of me, and he’ll never accept an arrangement where he isn’t able to contribute at least his fair share.

So that’s how we landed up like this, stuck on opposite ends of the country, going cold turkey from seeing each other every day, sometimes every hour, to being unable to see each other’s faces for an entire year. The only thing holding us together being a verbal promise to be with each other for the rest of our lives, with a Polaroid we took on our Commencement Day, the day he got commissioned as an officer, him resplendent in his service dress uniform and me in my cap and gown, the words “Love you, Baby” scrawled in Sharpie on one corner, as the one tangible proof that I didn’t dream up that day, the best day ever. All the Air Force ROTC cadets getting commissioned as 2nd Lieutenants had their parents there to pin on their single gold bars, except Fred who had only me. And when he said the oath of office and I pinned the bars to his epaulettes, one on each shoulder – we knew he had achieved every single one of his dreams, and we’d done it together. That was the biggest thing, though not the last thing, we could cross off from the list of goals we hung on my refrigerator door. Weeks before graduation, he’d given me a very special gift with a very special note, telling me how much he wanted to keep me in the rest of his life, even after he went off to his base. We’d planned meticulously how we’d save up, after we started our real jobs, the ones that paid us for our degrees, so we could hope for the possibility of a future together. What we hadn’t acknowledged, though, was that but for the practical constraints, we were more than ready for that joint future to become our present, that the last thing we wanted was to slip out of each other’s lives once we both left campus. That subject was always bubbling just under the surface, both of us skirting around it, afraid that if we brought it up, we’d lose all our resolve to do the right thing, the responsible thing, to wait and lay a proper foundation for our lives. He hadn’t planned to ask me to marry him the minute we got off the stage, it just happened. There was no diamond ring, no extravagant declaration on bended knee, no Romeo and Juliet balcony scene. Just an intimate moment, at the same time the most public and the most private one we had together, that we will take with us the rest of our lives. At twelve, I’d never thought I would ever become like Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice; but at twenty-two, the one marriage proposal I hope will be the only one I’ll ever need in my lifetime was better than any of the ones I ever read about in Austen, because it’s built upon years of shared joys, sorrows, and fears; it’s the promise to continue the life we’d already lived, where we both worked our hardest to fulfil each other’s biggest dreams.

Even though I haven’t seen his face in more than half a year, I comfort myself with the sound of his voice. He calls, like clockwork, first thing every Saturday; if we didn’t have to worry about how much long-distance calls cost, we could stay on the line for hours on end, but we try to be disciplined and pack as much togetherness as we can into a half hour. I’ve brought all the treasures from our time at college with me: the biggest and most expensive gift he ever got me, a 1:100 scale Lockheed Tristar model, sits snug on the sturdiest shelf in my bookcase, in its own little cubbyhole where I won’t knock it over. Our list of shared goals is pinned to my refrigerator with a magnet, everything crossed out except one final one, the one we didn’t get to before we finished college; we agreed that I should take the list because that last goal belongs to me. And no, it’s not “engagement” or “marriage”, because those things were beyond our capability to consider as broke college students and we only ever set goals that we were confident of executing on. On my walls, I’ve pinned up posters of the T-6 Texan II and the Lockheed Martin F-16: the aircraft which Frederick is training on, and the one he hopes to fly in future up there together side by side. Every day, I drive to work in the 1982 Pontiac J2000 Sunbird that Fred’s brother-in-law AJ handed down to him when AJ went back to the Navy after college; it was probably supposed to be brown, but now it’s unclear how much of that is its true body colour and how much is rust. That’s the car Fred asked me to junk for him when he left for UPT, except I can’t bear to do it when the bumper sticker I gave him the summer after freshman year, which says, “I love the smell of jet fuel in the morning”, is still stubbornly surviving after three summers of the hot sun beating down on it while he traipsed down south for flight training. Fred told me that car was already a beater when AJ picked it up, and by now it’s in a completely disreputable condition, but it’s the biggest physical reminder I have of Fred over here, which means it’s a treasure to me, nonetheless.

We talk every Saturday after both of us have returned from our morning runs and freshened up; by the time we hang up, it’s usually lunchtime and I go grocery shopping with my roommate Harriet, the one constant who’s stayed with me from freshman year to my new life at Boeing. Saturday evenings are usually for hanging out – the co-workers who are around our age have introduced us to their friends, and there’s usually someone planning something, mostly hanging out at people’s apartments with pizza and drinks. Sundays are when I miss Fred the most, because they’re an empty space of nothingness where our homework – and Fred’s constant presence – used to be. I do my longest runs on Sunday mornings, so that takes up a good chunk of time already; and sometimes I drive with Harriet to Seattle, exploring all the cafes and checking out cute shops in Lower Queen Anne or trying out the eclectic food at Capitol Hill. Then the grind of the week settles in – somehow, no matter how repetitive our homework got, college was seldom boring, but working as an entry-level engineer means every day you do all kinds of calculations and measurements… only to wake up the next day and do more of the same. Fred says even training for the coolest job in the world is just as boring, he spends a ton of time doing what they call “chair flying”, which is exactly what it sounds like: you sit in a chair, and you run through all the flight procedures in your head. They also make him do verbal pop quizzes on emergency procedures all the time, which means he has to store all this information in his head constantly, ready to spout it out on a second’s notice. On our Saturday calls, we make a little game out of relating the week’s most boring experiences at work in the most farcical way possible, to see who can make the other one laugh harder. In my childhood, I used to love Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes; now, I’ve grown a new appreciation for Dilbert, and I’m planning to mail Fred a few volumes of Beetle Bailey in a couple months’ time for his 23rd birthday.

Still, I thought I’ve been trundling on pretty good, and we’re hitting the halfway mark between the last time we saw each other and the next time we’ll be together again. Things were going on as swimmingly as they possibly could with me actively missing Fred every single day, until the email from home came.

“Stage 4 adenocarcinoma,” the medical report said.

Wait. Wait a minute. Anything with an “-oma” in it sounds suspiciously like cancer. Furthermore, anything with a “carcinoma” in it is most definitely cancer. But this can’t possibly be real; I was just home last June, and everybody was fine. I read and reread that email, but no matter how many times I read it, the words stubbornly refuse to change.

I start sorting out the facts in my head:
Nobody suspected anything might be wrong – it was a regular annual check-up when an X-ray showed a lump in Grandma’s jaw.
They then went on to run more tests, and a CT scan showed that there was another lump in her lung, which was the one they called the primary.
That meant the lump in the jaw was a “secondary tumor”, also known as a “metastasis”, and because the cancer had gone from the lung into another, faraway part of the body, it was called Stage 4.
Except for the cancer, everything else in the medical report came back great. Father said he hadn’t told her, so she had no idea anything was wrong.

Except for the cancer. Two little lumps, each of them barely the size of a marble. Hardly big enough to cause any noticeable trouble, since everything else is fine. Yet combined, because there are two of them, and they happen to be in different parts of the body, they create those damning words, “Stage 4”. And then there are three even more damning words: “Palliative care recommended”. Those aren’t the words you use for someone who feels fine, they’re the words you use to describe someone who’s dying. Female, age 85. Stage 4 adenocarcinoma. Palliative care recommended. All of those words are talking about someone who’s not Grandma. They’re used to describe someone the doctors can’t do anything about, a person they’re just making comfortable as they wait for her to die. I can’t let that happen, can’t let the words “Palliative Care” stay there like that. How can a person who looks fine and feels fine possibly be beyond any medical help?

Strangely, I don’t cry at all that day, or the next. It just feels so strange, so surreal, like they’re talking about somebody entirely different, a person whom I don’t know, someone I’ve never met at all. Numbly, I book my air ticket back to Detroit and take half a week off from work, thinking if I just see for myself, see that Grandma’s fine, then everything else will be all right. But drat – it’ll be Saturday when I fly, and Frederick isn’t going to be able to get to me when he calls at the usual time. I have no idea what to tell him, but I just know I can’t possibly do it in an email, so I text him, “Call me now,” knowing he’ll only get to see it when he’s ready to crash in his dorm after a long, exhausting day. Sure enough, it’s 10 p.m. Central time when my phone buzzes, which is 8 p.m. Pacific, just after I’ve cleared away my dinner dishes and gotten to the privacy of my room in the apartment I’m sharing with Harriet.

“Hey, baby. Man, I’m beat. What’s up?” Fred’s voice usually never fails to make me feel a little better right away, but not this time. I wish he wasn’t trying to sound chipper on purpose to mask his tiredness when I know my news is going to leave him even more deflated than before.

“I – sorry. OK, first thing, I need to let you know I’ll be away this weekend, so I won’t be free for our usual call. I’m flying home.” That’s the easy part of this conversation – the part that’s purely functional.

“Home? Didn’t you always say Everett is now your home?” Fred sounds puzzled; to him, I’ve not called Grosse Pointe “home” in just about forever. Especially that last semester, the one where we danced around each other all day trying not to say the things we desperately wanted to say. That semester, I’d declared to him my intention of establishing myself away from my family, making myself a new home wherever my life might take me. The thing I didn’t say, because I never dared to say it out loud, was that wherever Fred was, would always be the place I’d think of as home.

“My childhood home. Grosse Pointe. But don’t get me wrong. I’m not going back there to get back into the fold, but to figure out what’s going on.” I pause, not knowing what to say next. If I read out the medical report, that’ll make everything in it become real. And maybe it isn’t; maybe they just got it all wrong. “I got this weird report from Grandma’s check-up,” I finally say. “I’ll send it to your email tomorrow, so you can see what they say. But she was fine the last time I went back there and saw her before coming out here. Maybe it might be a mistake, but I’ll know more after I get there.”

“That sounds serious,” says Fred, pausing for a long while to think. “You sure you don’t want to talk to me about it now? You can tell me anything, you know.”

“I know.” I close my eyes and wish he was here, so I could just lean over and touch his forehead with mine, letting his presence send stillness and calm into my very being. “I guess – well, maybe – I really hope it’s not what they say it is. But I’ll keep you posted with what I find out over there – I promise.”

“Take care, OK, Anne?”

“OK. I’ll – it’ll all be fine. Good night. Love you.”

“Love you too. Sleep tight, OK?”

The next night, Friday night, which is the last night before my flight to Detroit, Fred calls me. He’s read the report in his email by now, I know.

“This – it says, your grandma has - cancer. That’s serious.” The silence hangs there between us, heavy and ponderous. And eventually, he’s the one who breaks it after a too-long, too-pregnant pause. “Are you sure you’re doing OK, Anne?”

Just by asking that, a question I don’t have an answer to, he’s made it all real. The tears that didn’t come for two and a half days now come on in full force, and I have no idea how long I sit there on my bed, my knees pulled up to my chest with one arm resting on them and my face buried in the crook of my elbow, my sobs wordlessly answering his question because I can’t.

“She – she’s the only mother I’ve had since I was old enough to remember,” I finally blurt out. “And she promised me – ever since I was five, she promised me she’ll live till she’s a hundred years old. She’s never sick, never needed the hospital. If you saw her, you’d think she was seventy-five, not eighty-five!”

“Anne.” It’s just one word, but in the low, steady tone he says it, the word envelops me like one of his giant bear hugs. The ones that anchor my world at dead center, making me feel as if the strongest wind wouldn’t be able to knock us down. “Maybe they’re right. Maybe they’re not. Whatever it is, I’ll be there with you when – when it happens. That’s a promise.”

When it happens. That – that’s a foregone conclusion that Grandma’s going to die. Not if, but when. Fred never makes promises to me that he won’t keep; but even though I have no idea when I’ll need this one, I also have no idea how he can possibly be so sure he’ll be there when neither of us know where the Air Force will send him after he’s done with this training.

“Thank you, Fred,” I finally reply, my voice still wavery and teary. “I hope I won’t need that promise for a long, long time.”

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“Surprise! I’m back!” I bound through the hallways of the big house at Grosse Pointe, trying to channel a jauntiness that I don’t feel. Our maids, Jemima and Sarah, come to greet me at the door; they’re surprised but overjoyed at my unexpected arrival, and it doesn’t seem as if they know the news. Everyone’s doing all the things they’ve always done – even though I make the most noise coming in that I possibly can, trying to get somebody to notice me, I don’t see hide or hair of Father, Liz or Mary on the way up to my old room. Grandma isn’t living at the big house anymore, now that all of us are grown; she moved back to her own house a couple streets away when Mary started going to SEM. I know exactly where everybody probably is – Mary’s in the basement entertainment room watching endless reruns of Friends, Father’s probably in either his bedroom or study going through the latest issues of People or Tatler so he can tell his tailor how he wants his next suit to look, and Liz is probably planning her outfit for the next social engagement she’ll attend, ostensibly as a representative of Father’s company. Although she’s on the payroll, nobody has any idea what she does except to go to every conceivable social function in New York, Boston and Chicago since apparently the ones in Detroit aren’t enough for her, flying first class even though she’s never in the air for more than two hours at a time, all in the name of making new business connections for Father.

I refresh myself in my room, then head straight to Father’s study and knock on his door, because I’m here on a mission.

“Anne, what brings you here,” asks Father, the blandness of his face and tone taking the question away from his words. “What a pleasant surprise, when we missed you at Christmas.”

The hint of a bite in his words doesn’t escape me, and I do feel a twinge of guilt about not visiting last Christmas. To reach my target amount of savings for the year, I can only afford one cross-country flight; and because I’ve qualified for the Boston Marathon this April, a once-in-a-lifetime affair, I decided to make that my trip instead of Christmas at home. With the medical report, of course all things are different now; but back then, I’d had no reason to think future Christmases at the Elliot family home would in any way become a scarcity.

“I’m sorry, Father. I was busy catching up with work, being new and all, but I came back now to make up for it,” I lie. Then, now for the true reason I’m back. “Father – I’ve read the report, and I can’t believe things are so bad they won’t do anything. Can you please tell me exactly what the doctor said?”

Father furrows his brow for a few minutes – the first time I’ve ever seen him ever have any facial expression that could make creases on his baby-smooth skin. “Frankly, I don’t remember,” he admits. “All this medical jargon, I could swear the medical profession makes up those convoluted words on purpose just to torment us – they could try to show more respect, you know. But I’ve told Mr. Shepherd to take care of things, and make sure all the bills are paid, and spare no expense for the doctors to do their best. No need to worry at all.”

“I know, Father. We can and should afford the best for Grandma. But did they say what they’ll do? Surely there’s something they can do to take the tumors out when they’re still so small?”

“The schedule for us to take her back in is with Hill, if that’s what you’re asking for. But one thing they did say was that at her age, trying to treat the tumors aggressively may do more damage. We haven’t told her a thing, because she feels perfectly fine, and we want her to be happy.”

I should’ve known I won’t get any useful information out of Father; I get out the printed medical report and find the doctor’s telephone number on the stationery header to call on Monday. For the rest of Saturday, everyone behaves exactly as if nothing has happened, and the reason for my impromptu visit is never discussed; I see Liz and Mary at dinner, but they talk about all the same things they’ve always talked about during my visits home from SEM and MIT, without mentioning the subject of Grandma. On Sunday, I hop into the Golf, which I’d left at Father’s house when I moved to Seattle, and then drive over to Grandma’s to see her.

“Anne, dear, how wonderful to see you!” Grandma greets me at the door with her usual vitality; as always, she’s impeccably turned out in her blouse and tailored slacks, with not a hair out of place. “You look so thin – are you sure you have enough to eat over there? You really ought to take better care of yourself; if you’d stayed here, we would’ve taken care of you.”

“I’m really fine, Grandma,” I say, running my hand through my overgrown mop of hair; it’s mushrooming out in an awkward bob, a necessary (evil) stage of growing out the pixie style I had in college. Elise gave me all my haircuts when we were at MIT, and now without her around, I figured it’d be easier for me to maintain my hairstyle if I grew it long again. “It’s just my hair that’s growing out, that’s all. Makes me look smaller. But anyways. I came back just for a weekend because I missed home, and yesterday I went to check in on Father, today I’m all yours. I just want to hang out here today and do all the stuff we used to back in the old days, be a kid again just for a day.”

We pop in the DVDs of Colin Firth’s Pride and Prejudice, going through all five hours of it during the course of the day. In between episodes, we break for lunch; these days, Sarah cooks Grandma’s meals and brings carefully packaged portions over for her to heat up in the oven when she wants them, but I don’t want to deplete her stash for the week, so I whip up some grilled cheese sandwiches for us and she’s surprised that I actually know how to cook, after all the years we girls weren’t allowed in the kitchen. She doesn’t know how I’d diligently meal-prepped every single weekend for three years to make sure Frederick and I had three healthy and balanced meals a day, or why I’d decided to wear my hair short (Elise surprised me and said I looked much better without being overpowered by my hair), or exactly what I do when I’m at work. But I still know all the old movies she likes and can reel off any of the songs she used to play, telling me they were Mom’s favorites. The eighth grader who used to read books in my room and watch TV by Grandma’s side all afternoon is now a stranger to me, and the real me is now practically a stranger to Grandma; though everyone else at home seems completely unchanged from the way they were the last time I truly lived in Grosse Pointe eight and a half years ago, before I went to boarding school.

After that day with Grandma, a day which allowed us to relive the past though I can’t quite put the present completely out of my mind, Monday comes, and I unleash my plan of attack. I call the hospital where the medical report came from early in the morning and by telling them I came back specially from out of town, I manage to get a half hour to speak to the doctor later in the day. What they tell me, though, is still deeply unsatisfying. They say surgery isn’t an option, because if the cancer has spread to two different parts of the body, then there are cancer cells all over so cutting the lumps out won’t remove the cancer. As for chemo, they don’t recommend it for someone who’s eighty-five, both because of the brutal side effects and because the cancer appears to be slow-growing and anyway, cancer cells generally don’t grow quickly in elderly people. OK, fine, I ask, then what do they recommend us to do? Then that’s when they say to bring her back for monitoring every now and then, but otherwise to just let her carry on the way she is, and whenever she needs it, they will figure out interventions to mitigate her symptoms. I guess that’s what they mean by “palliative care”, they won’t do anything to get rid of the cancer altogether, but at least they’re not saying they’ll do nothing. I’m still not convinced that this is the best we can do, so I spring into action once I get back to Father’s. Firstly, I email my boss to send in my two weeks’ notice at Boeing, because it’s clear nobody’s going to hunt for a second opinion if I don’t come back and do it myself. Next, I check up all the top hospitals and make a list: Memorial Sloan-Kettering, Mayo Clinic, MD Anderson, Johns Hopkins, and Dana-Farber are the ones that make it into my shortlist. I start calling and trying to get appointments right away, having nailed that I’ll need to do this far more than two weeks in advance. It’s late at night when I realize I’m on Eastern time, so I can still call Frederick on his cell and probably reach him in his dorm before he falls asleep.

“It’s… not good,” I tell him. “They’re not doing anything about the lumps, and I want somebody who’ll do something. She’s in great shape, and I just don’t believe ‘palliative care’ is the best I can do for her.”

“Then, what are you going to do?” he asks.

“First things first, I have to move back to Grosse Pointe.” I gulp. “It’s a real bummer, but Father and Liz and Mary are absolutely no use at all. They’re completely clueless, and none of them has the motivation to look for better options. But I’m not staying put for long – I’ll find a second opinion, somewhere else that can do something, and wherever that is, I’m going to take her there.”

“Wow.” For once, Fred is completely lost for words, and I can’t blame him. We’re both only twenty-two; what do we know about cancer, after all? There’s nothing he could say except for platitudes, and we both know this is a disaster: not only because the cancer is real, but also because the time we have to wait before we can finally be together has just grown from six months to – maybe forever.

“Anne, it – I don’t know,” he finally says. “Whatever you need to do, I’ll wait for you. When AJ first started going out with Sophia, y’know, they were only in high school. He was eighteen, and she was just sixteen. Me and Ed thought he’d forget about her after he joined the Navy, but he waited for five years and then he married her when he could. He kept writing and calling her from wherever he was, and finally when he was twenty-three, he got into the NESEP program and got a trailer for us all to live in while he went to Ann Arbor. If he could do that for Sophia, I can do that for you.”

“Fred – I don’t know if five years is enough,” I say. “I – I want it to be – forever. I can’t imagine a world without Grandma in it, and she promised. One hundred years. I still think she can make it, or at least I want to try.” I start sniffling again.

“I don’t think…” Fred tries to say something, then kills his thought mid-sentence. “No matter how long it takes, I’ll wait,” he finally says. “That’s a promise.”

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After I get back to Everett, my days are filled to the brim with handing over my duties and packing. Moving out of my apartment feels almost like a bad break-up; Harriet and I have been roomies for so long that we’ve bought a ton of stuff for our apartment, most of which we transported directly from Cambridge to Everett, without really thinking of figuring out whose stuff is whose, and it’s now my job to split it all.

“You can have everything in the kitchen,” I tell her. “After all, I’m going to boomerang back into my eighth-grade self, living off my only functioning parental unit.” There’s a bitter edge to my voice, but I don’t care.

Harriet is so nice about it, almost too nice. I promise her I’ll pay her my share of the rent till she finds another roommate to replace me, but she kindly tells me not to worry because she’ll still have her job and her pay, and she can ask her parents to help her out in the meantime if she needs. She kneels beside me, both of us folding up clothes and putting them in boxes. Through every step of the process of packing up and getting ready to move out, she’s there with me all the time, making sure I’m never alone. And she promises to supervise the movers when they come to pick up my stuff, because they’re all booked up many weeks out, and I don’t want to delay going back for that long.

That Saturday, the last one I spend in Everett, Fred doesn’t call. I’m still up to my neck with packing, but every now and then I keep staring at the phone, willing it to start buzzing, but it never does. I wonder if this is it, that he’s decided it’s over because I can’t be with him in the foreseeable future when I’ve got to move back and be with Grandma. Or if he’s sick or injured – or worse. I text, “Are you OK?” and check my phone practically every twenty minutes for his reply, but it never comes.

Sunday morning, I’m in such a funk I don’t have any energy for my usual run and Harriet finds me sitting in a ball on our futon couch, staring blankly into space. I still haven’t heard from Fred at all, not even by text.

“Come,” Harriet finally says, taking me by the hand and dragging me off the couch. “Anne, it’s your last weekend here, and you can’t say you’ve lived in the Seattle area till you’ve properly celebrated the life of Kurt Cobain. We haven’t been yet, so let’s go to the Experience Music Project and we can drown all our sorrows in rock.”

Harriet’s idea turns out to be a brilliant one – I’m still miserable but spending a day with Pearl Jam and Nirvana and Alice in Chains reminds me that I’m not the only tortured soul on this entire planet. And after we listen to all the hits we want, standing in line twice sometimes to get another round with the headphones, we head to Linda’s Tavern in Capitol Hill, the place where Kurt Cobain was supposedly last seen alive. We order mac and cheese because that’s what they say was his favorite dish, and then I progress from beer on to shots. I have no idea how wasted I am, but at some point, I remember the Beatles had to know what lost love was like if they could write Yesterday and I have no idea if I’m really belting it out loud or only in my mind. Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away, now it looks as though they’re here to stay, oh I believe in yesterday…

On Monday I have a splitting headache, but I’ve promised to work out my notice period and have a whole bunch of handover meetings to do, so Harriet lets me ride with her to work and back in her car and I plod through the day. There are still no texts from Fred, and I sink exhausted into the futon after we get back to our apartment, dozing off right there in the living room without any dinner.

Fred finally calls me on Tuesday, during the day while I’m at work. Usually, his days are much longer than mine and he’s not allowed to use his phone when he’s in training, so this isn’t good either – it means either he’s cutting training to call me, or –

“I’m so sorry babe,” he says. “I wanted to call, but I couldn’t.”

“Fred, are you OK?” I’m starting to suspect that one of my theories was correct, and though I’m relieved he isn’t breaking up with me, this alternative isn’t necessarily any better. “Did you have an accident?”

“Yeah, sort of. But I’m fine now.” Unconsciously, he puts emphasis on the now, which means for the past few days, he wasn’t fine.

“You don’t sort of have accidents, you either have them, or you don’t. Where were you hurt? How bad was it?” I know he’s probably downplaying whatever happened, so it must be bad. And I feel awful, because through all of this, I’ve been only thinking about myself and Grandma, and not about Fred. This news must be almost as horrible for Fred as it is for me, because it throws all our previous plans down the drain and puts our future together indefinitely on hold. He’s been so calm every time he spoke to me on the phone, but still, I’m the reason why he lost focus and got into trouble. And probably got hurt, even though he doesn’t want to tell me about it.

“Don’t worry about it,” he says, still evading my questions. “I’m OK now, I really am. And I’ll be going back to training tomorrow. How are you holding up?”

“I’m almost all packed, and Harriet’s a godsend. She’s been keeping me sane all week. Fred, please promise me – you’ll be careful, and please, please don’t get into any more accidents again.”

“I’ll be careful. I promise.” He’s careful. He never makes any promises he can’t keep, and so that’s why he doesn’t promise to never have another accident again.

“I’m so glad to hear you’re OK now. I was so worried about you, and I don’t want to ever have to worry like this again, OK? And I’ll call you when I get back to Grosse Pointe and settle down at Grandma’s. I’ll be keeping this cell phone, so you can text me anytime you want. Please, promise me you’ll take care of yourself this week and I’ll call you on the weekend.”

“OK, I will. Love you, baby.”

“Love you, too.”

---

When I get back to Grosse Pointe on Saturday, pulling a roller suitcase with only the stuff I need immediately, I realize there are a ton of things I haven’t thought of. Most of all, I don’t have a job anymore, now that I’ve resigned from Boeing, and with no income, who is going to support me? How am I going to explain why I’m moving in with Grandma, when she doesn’t know about her illness? What is going to happen if anyone catches me talking to Fred on the phone? Who is going to pay for travel and accommodations when we go looking for second opinions? A week ago, I thought I was sure about my plan, until all the loopholes in it start staring at me in the face.

I get the taxi to bring me around to Father’s, because at least there’s a bedroom in his house that’s technically my property, sort of. This time, I try to make the least noise possible going up into my room, hoping nobody is going to notice me. After dropping my suitcase off there, I head to Father’s study and plant myself in the leather-backed chair facing him across the desk. I wait until I’ve engaged his attention, eye to eye, before I speak.

“Father, I need your help, please,” I say earnestly. I never thought I’d ever end up begging from Father, but there’s no way I can deal with a problem like cancer on my own when I’m only 22 and my bank account has just barely crossed the five-figure mark. “We need to find a way to help Grandma. I’ve moved back so I can help her get a second opinion, go to more hospitals, and find someplace that’s willing to do something to take away the cancer. But I need you too, to help me help her.”

“Anne, I told you the last time, I’m willing to spare every expense to see to her needs. And the doctors know best, they’ll tell us what we need to do.” The furrowed brow, again. So, at least Father cares more about Grandma than he does about his complexion, which is a good sign. “Are you telling me you think the doctors aren’t doing enough?”

“Father, after we talked the other time, I went back to the hospital to ask them some questions, ‘cause if the lumps are so small and she feels fine, I can’t understand why they aren’t trying to take them out,” I explain, trying to break down everything into simple words he can understand. “Here’s what I know: if you want to take a cancer out, you have three ways to do it – surgery, radiation, or chemo. These lumps are small, so I asked them if they could cut them out, but they said no because there are two of them in different places, and also because they don’t want to put someone who’s eighty-five through surgery. They didn’t talk about radiation, but they did say they won’t try chemo because they think it’ll make her sicker than if they didn’t do anything. And they said, cancer grows slower in older people, so there’s a chance they’ll die of something that isn’t cancer anyway. But I don’t believe that’s true with Grandma, ‘cause she’s so healthy there won’t be other things for her to die of before she dies of cancer if they don’t do anything. I’m back now, and I came back for good; I want to help find someone who will be willing to treat the cancer and give Grandma more time.”

“Well, you’re an Elliot after all, and this house is as much yours as anyone’s, I suppose. You’ve always come and gone as you wanted, anyway. And I told you I’ll spare no expense with her treatment – just send the bills to Mr. Shepherd. But are you sure you know better than the doctors? After all, you’re still so young.”

“Well, I don’t think I know better than the doctors,” I admit, “but maybe there’s some other doctors out there who do. We’re the Elliots, after all, and we’ve always gone for the best in everything.” I wince when I say this, because I never hankered after the best of anything when it just costs tons of money and does nothing except puff up Father’s pride, not until it becomes a matter of life and death. “So why not look for the best of medical care when it comes to Grandma? I quit my job over at Boeing, just so I can take her to all those other hospitals I made appointments with, until we find somebody who has a solution.”

“Very well,” he says loftily; I sense he’s losing interest in this discussion and agreeing just so he can get rid of me. “And is there anything else you want from me?”

“Father, you told me she still doesn’t know she has cancer,” I venture timidly. This is the one thing I don’t think I can do, and I don’t know if he will help, but I’m desperate. “Can you please tell her what she needs to know before we go to the hospitals? I’m really scared I will mess it up if I tell her.”

He turns his chair ever so slightly so that he’s not looking me in the eye; I’ve opened up this landmine, this can of worms that none of us want to touch. There’s a long silence, him pretending to look out the window and me lowering my eyes to the floor, and I know I’ve boxed myself into a stalemate.

“I guess we don’t have to tell her today,” I finally say. “I’ll think about it. Thank you, Father.”

Then I take my leave of the room swiftly and quietly, closing the door as softly as I can on my way out.

---

The next two weeks, I hide behind a façade; I tell everyone I’ve come back because I missed home and especially Grandma, and most nights I end up hanging out at her place till I crash there though my official residence is still with Father. Our house is so huge nobody can hear anyone else most of the time, but Grandma’s residence is more compact, so I know I can’t possibly talk to Fred on the phone when I’m bunking in with her if I don’t want her to find out. So, our conversations get reduced to hasty texts, hammered out furiously in the deep of night before we go to bed. He knows the essence of what’s going on, but we have no freedom or privacy to properly discuss it together, and I get repeated reassurances that he’s back in tip-top shape and flying again, but never get any more details from him about the mishap he had. Replies come to the requests I sent out for appointments with the hospitals, and I spend a few hours every day in my room pretending to read when I’m actually at my laptop making travel arrangements and getting everything scheduled.

I line up all the appointments from the nearest out: Johns Hopkins, Memorial Sloan-Kettering, Dana-Farber, MD Anderson, Mayo Clinic, and then if we can’t get any of them to help us, we might do the California circuit of UCLA, Cedars-Sinai, and Stanford. As the first appointment with Johns Hopkins draws near, I wonder what I’ll tell Grandma.

Eventually, I chicken out and lie; I say that I haven’t been to Baltimore yet, and before I find another job and get busy again, I want to go there with her and explore. After we get there, we have a full day to ourselves before the day of the appointment, so we’re able to visit the National Aquarium and see the USS Constitution at Inner Harbour. We take lots of pictures, especially with all the architecture, like the World Trade Centre by I.M. Pei and the 19th-century City Hall and rowhouses. Then the next day, I drive her to Johns Hopkins in our rental car, and this time I’ve got to explain why we’re going to a hospital, so I say that at her last check-up, the doctor suggested we get a few more things checked out, just in case, and so since we’re here in Baltimore, the city with one of the most famous hospitals in the world, we might as well do it here. She looks at me askew for a moment, but doesn’t ask any more questions, and so I think I’ve gotten away with my charade, at least for this visit. And after the day of tests and scans is over, I take her to Inner Harbour and pick a fancy Italian restaurant for dinner. Over dinner, we talk as if nothing is amiss; I give her an edited version of my life in Seattle with Boeing, and she fills me in on all the latest that’s been going on with Liz and Mary and Father. Then we fly home the third day, and I anxiously await the results.

About a week later, I get a call from Hopkins asking us to go in again; this time, I ask Father to come with us, and he reluctantly agrees. The doctor wants all three of us to be in the room, and he directly addresses Grandma, instead of talking around her to us.

He shows us the two scans with the two lumps, both still barely the size of marbles, and explains what adenocarcinoma is, and why they think the lump in the lung was the first one. Then, he reassures us that the cancer is slow growing, and says he has a plan for treatment. We will be doing a course of low-dose chemotherapy, and the goal will be to keep the cancer under control and bring down the tumour markers as far as possible.

Grandma doesn’t flinch and doesn’t fall apart. When the doctor tells us that adenocarcinoma is a cancer, she says, “I know”, and I ask, bewildered, “How did you know?”

“I can read,” says Grandma calmly. “When you brought me in here, the signs said ‘Oncology’, and I know what that word means.”

So, she probably knew all along, I realize. After all, they must’ve had signs like these at our local hospital back in Detroit too. And yet she’s probably been the most even keeled of all of us, despite seeing through all our flimsy charades. I think about how I would feel in her shoes; what it would be like to be eighty-five and have a cancer that can’t be completely taken away even if you treat it, and I wonder how she can face all that without panic, since even imagining it makes a twinge of fear shoot right through me.

Before we leave the doctor’s office, I pick up the medical report they give to us, and quickly skim it from top to bottom. It still has the word “adenocarcinoma” on it, but the two most damning words, “palliative care”, are gone. That’s good; I know I’ve found the place which can do the best for her, at last.

The next few days are a whirl of activity; I have to cancel the appointments with all the other hospitals and find a short-term fully furnished apartment for us to stay at during chemo. Then, I text Fred our temporary address, but also need to let him know we won’t be able to call each other, since I don’t have a bedroom of my own in this apartment. After sending Father back to the airport, I swap our rental car out for a smaller model I can rent at a monthly rate. We have some basic things with us, but we’d packed for a three-day stay, not a three-month one, so I figure out what we might want to buy and what we should arrange to get sent from home. There’s no entertainment here except cable TV, because naturally all our books, CDs and DVDs are all at home. I end up tuning into Days of Our Lives and All My Children to keep Grandma entertained, while I creep off into the bedroom to Google everything I can about adenocarcinoma.

Cancer and statistics have never been best friends; in the movies when the doctors tell people they have cancer, they always tell them how long they’ll live. When people in movies and TV get cancer, they start out feeling fine, and drawing up all these bucket lists going off doing all the things they want. Then they go for chemo, and that’s when all their hair drops out. But they carry on, falling madly in love or going on that trip of a lifetime or whatever, until they faint, and the doctor tells them the chemo isn’t working anymore. Then they slowly wither away and eventually die, almost to the day the doctor predicted.

I don’t know if it’s necessarily a good thing, but what I find out is cancer in real life is nothing like the movies. You can have two people with the same kind of cancer, and the progress of their disease may look nothing like each other. Nobody can tell if a person will live months or years, and that’s why the doctors now stop telling you how much time you’ve got left when they deliver a cancer diagnosis. The thought of years gives me hope – maybe if they can bring the tumor markers down with chemo and make the lumps even smaller still, then we can carry on like this, and it isn’t all that awful. After all, she can still walk, eat, talk and enjoy life; the best news would be if the cancer could go away, but since that isn’t going to happen, then isn’t it great if the cancer always stays small enough that it doesn’t cause trouble?

Days in the oncology clinic are long and boring, but the longer it is, the better. When you know each day is irreversible, the passage of time that can’t be rewound, with a cancer that can’t be reversed, then the best thing is for time not to pass. I don’t want things to change, and I don’t want time to pass, which means I’m stuck in this limbo forever, the one where Frederick and I don’t have a future. I let the days stretch long before me, we watch the TV screens in the chemo room to pass the time, and whatever is looping there is incredibly boring to me, so it makes the time stretch even slower. There’s only that long I can stand this, though, so eventually I end up binge-ordering books on Amazon: the books on cancer nutrition, the cancer memoirs, and the reference books, so I can plough through them through the long days of chemo and the even longer days between chemo. Slowly, the books pile up in our one-bedroom apartment, taking over corners of the living room as they stack up into high piles on the floor. They’re dry and depressing reading, which makes time seem to pass even more slowly; I’ve succeeded in slowing time down, but also in making that time into absolute agony, for time always passes faster when you’re happy, so to slow it down you end up robbing it of all its joy.

Chemo is kind to Grandma; it’s low dose, after all, so luckily, she gets nausea and loses her appetite but doesn’t puke, and her hair thins instead of her going completely bald. I shop for wigs anyway and get her a head of blond curls like Blanche Devereaux from The Golden Girls. Whenever we have a good day, we spend our time hanging out at Inner Harbor, trying out all the fancy restaurants; I’ve got Father’s credit card, after all, and as long as it’s for Grandma, I spend shamelessly because she’s earned it, whereas I haven’t.

One day, a package from Amazon arrives on our doorstep, and it’s addressed to me. This is the first piece of mail I’ve gotten which wasn’t something I ordered myself, and I tear it open eagerly. It’s Lance Armstrong’s It’s Not About the Bike, and the receipt in the package tells me that Fred ordered it from his military base. Lance accompanies me to chemo after that, and much as I know it’ll help me learn more about cancer, I also relish in the beginning chapters, the ones where he was twelve years old in Plano and flew away on his bike. When I’m Lance, I can fly; flying away from all this cancer stuff; away from all the hospitals back to a land where I can have dreams again. Even though our conversations have degenerated into texts, Fred is still the person who knows what I need, what really speaks to me; the realization of this leaves me nearly in tears.

Maybe a twenty-third birthday shouldn’t be a big deal; after all, we’ve gotten past all the birthdays that will unlock new freedoms. I can work, I can drive, I’m not jailbait if someone knocks me up, I can get married without parental consent, I can vote, and I can drink. Hah – isn’t it ironic the order in which those freedoms come up? You’d think drinking was the first thing that would spark all the other things, but who knows? Anyways, I’ve gotten off the point here; the main thing is, this is the first birthday where I have the three no’s – no cards, no cake, no presents. Apparently, this is what happens when you get too old for milestones, and you know, it’s all downhill from here. Thanks so much, world, for reminding me that I peaked at 21. All I get this year is a text from Frederick who remembers to wish me a happy birthday, and the rest of the world might as well have forgotten that I exist.

The other thing that April brings, besides my birthday, is Boston Marathon day. I’d dreamed of qualifying for Boston all the way since freshman year, and when I finally BQ’ed, I have to forfeit my place anyway because I can’t leave Baltimore. My initial plan was to qualify in time to do it in senior year, before graduating college, but I tanked our qualifying race pacing Frederick to his BQ. He was really sorry about it, and explained he got distracted because of the warm-up song, a song about apartheid he didn’t expect to play at such a big occasion. And then, he paced me to my qualification in October 1999, so I could enter the Boston Marathon for 2001. With not a cent to his name, time was the currency he dealt in while we were in college, and the biggest gifts he gave to me were gifts of time. During that year, he was extremely stressed out with the Professional Officer Course and Leadership Laboratory, as well as the pressure to graduate on time, yet he made time to ensure I got to fulfil my dreams anyway. Who’d know that after all that effort, I’d end up being stuck here in Baltimore, forced to default on my race, ensuring that last item on our list of goals will never get checked off?

After the three-month course of chemo has ended, they measure Grandma’s tumor markers again, and they’re all the way down. I almost feel like giving all the doctors at Hopkins a high-five, but I do realize they probably won’t appreciate the gesture. They give us a plan for maintenance therapy, and then we can head home.

The movers have sent all the stuff I shipped home from Everett to Grandma’s, just as I asked them to, and the living room is chock full of boxes and packages when we get there. As for the Pontiac, I told them to send it somewhere else, to someone who’ll safekeep it for me. But there is also a new row of smaller packages in front of the piles of moving boxes, and they’re all addressed to me too; they’re birthday gifts from all my roomies from college as well as all of Fred’s too. Elise has gotten me a perpetual motion machine, with the words “May we all live forever” inscribed in the stand, Emma got me a cute outfit that’s sexy without being slutty, Harriet sent me the cuckoo clock I picked out for our college apartment which I left for her, Benwick gave me a book of poetry (how predictable), and from Harville, I get a kit to build the T-6 Texan model. None of them have Grandma’s address, so right away I know who has orchestrated all of this: Fred. When I text him to thank him, he gives me the wink emoji and says, wasn’t he brilliant to think of all of this, when he can’t openly give me a gift in his name to my household.

Before I unpack my tower of boxes, Grandma and I have something more urgent to do. We get out all the CDs of Mom’s favorite songs and play them all just for old times’ sake. One of those that Grandma likes best is Frankie Valli’s Can’t Take My Eyes Off You, except to me, there’s now a new definitive version, which is the 1998 cover of the song by Lauryn Hill. That was the year every single touchy-feely love song set Fred and me off; instead of Frankie, I keep hearing Lauryn’s voice singing sensuously, “Uh, uh, uh uh, I need you baby, if it’s quite alright, I need you baby, all through the lonely nights…” and I miss Frederick, in the most tactile way possible.

“Anne, dear, you’re tearing up,” says Grandma. “What’s wrong, honey?”

“I… I guess I’m just missing Mom,” I prevaricate. It’s a bald-faced lie, but there’s no way I can possibly tell Grandma the truth, so I just swallow the guilt and carry on.

“Oh honey,” Grandma hugs me tightly. “I miss your mom, too. And I know I’m not long for this world, so I pray for the day when I’ll see her again in heaven.”

That gets me feeling even more guilty for betraying Grandma and lying about it, even when we both know her time might be up any minute. Just like I’ve done through all the twenty-three years of my life, I bury my face in her lap and bawl, and she smooths my hair just like always; only this time, we don’t know how many more times like this we will have, even though we’re both loath to admit it.

---

Finally, I unpack the last of my boxes and take out the list of goals Fred and I made, the one where everything but my Boston Marathon got crossed out; I put it away with all my old journals from my school days, stapling it to the page with the bucket list I wrote the summer before I went to college. And when I look at that yellowing page, I feel as though it could have been written by a stranger, for my days are now divided between the Before Times and the After Times, where everything that was important to me changed when I met Fred.

Get a summer job as a counselor at Raquette Lake Camp – seriously, that had to be the most bourgeois of all my goals. Once I knew I had to make my way in the world on my own with Fred, I had to start planning for summer jobs that would pave the way to real jobs. Internships weren’t much better than filling my summers with school, but they’d make sure I had the best chance of landing a job offer right after graduation, and of getting jobs that would pay me in full for all the investment Father had made in my education.

Be a leader in aircraft design, so you can prevent plane crashes from happening – well, I knew I wouldn’t be able to do that if Fred and I got married, because he needs to be in active duty for ten years to repay the military for his pilot training. That means I need to live on base after I marry him, and there won’t be the money for grad school. I can still be an engineer, but without a graduate degree, I’m stuck with operating stuff other people design, not innovating and designing the future of aircraft.

See the US and see the world – well, we sort of got there, whatever we could see with Amtrak and Greyhound and $10 a night backpacker hostels. And I guess I’ve seen quite a bit of the world when Father used to bring us on exotic vacations, but travel is a bottomless pit that always leaves you hungry for more.

Run the Boston Marathon before you graduate – this was the one that almost got there, the one that just got away. I can’t blame Fred for taking this one away, when it was my decision to throw my race by pacing him; he had such a difficult life growing up, I just couldn’t bear to let him fail at anything again. But it was such a close shave, and Fred has nothing to do with the reason why I can’t run it this year, maybe ever again.

As with all the other relics from my school days, the journal goes into a box that I seal up and stash under the bed in Grandma’s guest room; I’m putting my childish things away for good, to face this barren future ahead of me. Forever – because for as long as I want Grandma with me, none of this can change.