Julie Murphy - Side Effects May Vary

My parents sobered up at that and turned in their chairs to face me. They looked at me, really looked at me like they hadn’t seen me for a year, and I guess in a way they hadn’t.

After I got sick, I wondered if they tried to stop loving me a little bit. Not on purpose, but maybe in the interest of them surviving this thing. I mean, my parents loved me. But wouldn’t anyone try to distance themselves from something they knew they were about to lose entirely? I was their only child, but my life had never consumed theirs. Then I got sick, and for the last fourteen months, my disease had become the axis of their world. They’d gotten to this point where they started looking through me, rather than at me. It wasn’t anything I fully realized until this very moment, this moment when they were really looking at me again, their daughter. It made me want to be anywhere but here. With a handful of words my life had fallen off the rails.

I’d wondered what would happen to them after I died. Would my mom have left my dad for that guy? But, now, what would happen now? Would she tell us that she’d been having an affair? Would she leave us after we’d weathered this storm together?

I opened my mouth to speak, but swallowed my words when I realized I had no idea what words to use. My body was being stretched in every direction, begging to be felt. The list—my final to-do list—had fixed almost everything. But nothing could fix this.

My vision blurred, and all I saw was everything I’d done over the last year. Everything I’d said. Harvey . I didn’t know how to live with the weight of what I’d told him the other night, what I’d said without words.

“That being said,” the doctor continued, “in all my years I have never . . . I’ve never seen anything like it. My profession frowns upon this word, but, Alice, it appears to be what some call a miracle. You hear about these things from time to time, circumstances that defy science. It seems that after we had decided to suspend your chemotherapy treatment, your body began to fight back. I could go on for days with theories and possibilities, which I will do next week during our official appointment. And I do apologize for the last-minute call, especially right before the holidays. I wanted you all to know the moment we were sure.”

After we had decided to suspend your chemotherapy treatment . The day we stopped, none of us had said we were giving up, not out loud. But we did, I did. I had given up the day I was diagnosed. The chemotherapy was horrible and, in my eyes, made the act of dying that much more degrading. After almost a year of chemo, I had to put my foot down.

All of a sudden, the room and everything it contained rushed to meet me. I emerged from under water, hitting the surface after having been submerged, and the sound of nurses in the hallway and the smell of disinfectant clogged my senses. Everything had been muffled and blurred, but now it was all too sharp and overenunciated.

I’ll miss you most . I didn’t know how to be with Harvey now. Not without ruining us. What if I already had? We had nowhere else to go.

“Motherfucker,” I mumbled.

My mom heard me and turned back around. My name formed in her mouth like an old habit as her lips parted. But she stopped herself. I could even hear it. Alice Elizabeth , she would say in a vicious whisper that I could hear even in my sleep. But no, instead my mother was utterly confused, like I was an equation with no answer. It wasn’t the cursing that bothered her; it was me saying it here in my doctor’s office after he’d told me I was some Lifetime miracle. Yell at me , I wanted to say. Make this normal.

After wiping his tearstained eyes in the crook of his elbow, Dad stood up to shake Dr. Meredith’s hand. “Thank you so much, Dr. Meredith, we’re so . . .” He reached out for my mother’s hand and she was at his side in an instant. “We can’t believe it,” he finished.

Over the last year, I’d watched my parents transform into magnets defined by the length of space between them, letting this tragedy hold them together. But no matter how dependent upon each other they seemed to be, all I saw was the truth that had become the lie my mother lived. It was the truth I’d never been able to tell my dad, even if he deserved to know.

Dr. Meredith grasped my dad’s outstretched hand. “Now we’ll see Alice next week. We’ll stick to the regular schedule,” he said, “because you never know. This could be the eye of the storm. We don’t know. That’s the hard truth. But be happy for today.”

Mom doubled back to me and ushered me forward, nudging me with the tips of her fingers at the small of my back. I knew what she wanted, so I played along. It had been quite a while since I had made nice for Mom and Dad, and now it looked like there would be some making up to do. I reached up to pat Dr. Meredith on the shoulder and thank him, but he pulled me into a bear hug instead. The sweat seeped through his dress shirt, and I wanted to pull away, but I didn’t. Because if I did, my parents would have seen the few tears rolling down my cheeks and onto Dr. Meredith’s lab coat. I’d grown so used to the terms of my life—the conditions—that now I didn’t know how to tell the difference between the good and the bad. But I knew, unless the cancer came back, that I was going to live. Now, I had to decide who and what I could live with.

After grabbing my keys, I headed out to my hand-me-down car. I had parked out by the buzzing Grocery Emporium sign with the rest of the employees. I spent most of my childhood with this car, a mid-nineties red Geo Metro. It was small, but it’d always been me and my mom so it was never a problem. For my sixteenth birthday my mom bought herself a shiny new Jetta, slapped a Miss P’s Ballet Academy car magnet on the driver door of the Geo, and called it my birthday present.

Technically, it was more than a ballet academy. When I was younger, my mom had all these requests for jazz and tap classes, so she expanded her courses after her first couple years in business. Not until I was about nine or ten did she hire a hip-hop and jazz teacher and a lyrical/modern dance teacher. I tried to convince her that changing the name of the studio to Miss P’s Dance Academy would bring in more students, but she refused. The name was something she wouldn’t budge on. When she’d first decided to open a ballet school, she wanted to call it the Poppovicci School of Ballet, but Bernie told Mom that people don’t like to do business with a place whose name they can’t pronounce. Eventually Mom caved and settled on Miss P’s.

The bumper of the Geo was covered in recital stickers (Martin designed new ones every year). One day I tried to scrape them off, but my mom threatened to take the car right back if I touched her stickers. So, essentially, my car was on loan from my mom until further notice.

It wasn’t really a guy car, but it was my car. The fact that it had an engine and wheels outweighed the fact that the steering wheel bumped against my knees when I turned and that I always hit my head when I got in and out of the car.

Before reversing out of the parking lot, I glanced through the call history on my cell. No missed calls. I’d spent the last couple months teetering on the edge of insanity, so scared of getting the call.

I took the back roads to Alice’s house, hoping to beat the five o’clock traffic, which sounded more pressing than it was. We lived in Hughley, a small suburb, where traffic existed solely because modern roadways did not. Every street was a two-lane street, and many streets were one way.

Racing past the studio, I prayed my mother wasn’t outside greeting students at the door. If she were, she might see the Geo speeding down Little Ave and know that I’d skipped out on work early. Again.