Karma Brown - In This Moment

Her blond hair, once so pretty and the envy of most of our friends, is caked with rusty red clumps, the usually bone-straight strands tangled in knots. The rain seems to have done nothing to rid her shirt—which used to be a pretty pale blue eyelet tank—of the dark crimson blotches covering its surface. I suddenly understand all the red is blood, her blood. But it’s her head, specifically the shape of it, that makes my legs give out. I didn’t notice before, the shadows that followed her while she walked toward me hiding it, but now I see what’s missing. The left side of her head—including one beautiful blue eye—is gone. Just...gone.

I wake myself screaming. Taking a few deep breaths I try to calm the rattling inside me, but the image of Paige’s face hovers around the edges of my consciousness, and I think I’m going to be sick.

It has been twenty-eight years since that horrible night, and nearly as many since Paige came to me while I slept.

And now it’s happening again.

* * *

Two days after Ryan slid the engagement ring on my finger—only a week after my twenty-fifth birthday—was when I learned my mom had breast cancer.

Back then we had a weekly, standing dinner with my parents: Sunday night, seven o’clock. A free meal was always welcome as we were broke—Ryan in pre-med at Tufts and me working a front desk job at an orthodontist’s office, my eye on teacher’s college by the fall if we could afford it. Ryan proposed on a Friday evening and though I was bursting to call my mom moments after, I decided to wait until our dinner. So I sat on our exciting news for two days, having no idea my mom was sitting on some news of her own.

We arrived ten minutes early, like always, because for my parents, showing up on time meant you were already late. I wore my engagement ring but kept my hand in my skirt’s pocket when Dad opened the door. He seemed distracted and tired, his face drawn and the buttons on his shirt mismatched by one hole, which was out of character. He was always immaculately dressed, even for a trip to the gas station. But I assumed he was merely work-weary—being a high school principal wasn’t an easy job, teenagers masters at creating drama-fueled challenges—and that mom was too busy getting ready for dinner to notice.

After Dad poured our drinks, Danny, my younger brother, regaled us with stories from middle school, while Mom’s famous black bean and cilantro cream enchiladas warmed in the oven. I couldn’t keep the grin off my face. I was sitting on my left hand, had been careful to keep the ring out of view. A lull in the conversation came, and I opened my mouth to shout the words, “We’re engaged!” when my mom suddenly stood, her small shoulders rolling back and her chin held high.

“I have cancer.”

I don’t remember doing it, but suddenly I was standing as well, facing her. “What?” The word, barely a whisper. My hands shook, the beautiful, if not tiny, cushion-cut diamond ring on my finger forgotten.

A lot happened all at once. Dad started crying. So did I. Danny fetched a box of tissues, seeming more mature than his thirteen years, and pushed them into our hands. Mom assured us, in her best nurse’s no-nonsense tone, she would be fine. Ryan stood beside me and I clutched on to him.

Though Mom’s cancer was advanced, there were decent treatment options. Plenty of people survived cancer these days, so why not Mom, who was tenacious and well-equipped for what lay ahead?

But those three words, “I have cancer,” shook something loose in me, took my confidence and spun it around like socks in a dryer. My mother was my rock, a small woman with a huge personality and the ability to put my brother and me in our places with only a glance. Because of her I knew how to throw a proper dinner party, I understood being kind was as important as being smart or successful, and that she would always be there for me. Without her I would not have survived the aftermath of Paige’s accident—along with a million tiny heartbreaks in my childhood, like when my beloved guinea pig, Sherman, died and when Johnny Saxon dumped me after I gave him my first kiss. My mother carried me through the grief that threatened to swallow me whole after Paige died—I knew I needed her as much as an adult as I did as a child.

I wanted to be stoic, like she, my dad and Danny were that evening, but her diagnosis pulled the rug right out from under me. To this day I’m still embarrassed by how selfishly I took her news. One of my first thoughts upon hearing she’d need chemotherapy and would likely lose her hair was to hope it would grow back in time for the wedding. I couldn’t cope, so instead focused on the small, unimportant things, like taking wedding pictures with a bald mother-of-the-bride.

Six months later Ryan and I were married—in a no-frills ceremony at city hall, Mom wearing a gorgeous wig—and I quit my job to take care of her a month after that when it became clear the cancer was winning. Dad had Danny to worry about, plus he had to keep working to pay the bills, and I needed to be useful. But there was only so much a daughter’s love and devotion could do, and much too soon for all of us, Dad and I were picking out a granite headstone, Danny standing beside us with silent tears rolling down his peach-fuzz covered face, me understanding I would now have to live with a hole inside me, forever.

It was around that time the debilitating nausea started. I was distracted by my grief and so, not worried, but Ryan—suffering “second year syndrome,” medical student hypochondria—dragged me to a specialist after I threw up in the sink one night after dinner. The doctor agreed it might be an ulcer, certainly the stress of the last year could have done it, she said, and they took enough blood I actually felt woozy when we left the clinic. Of all the possible things it could have been, I was not expecting the result: I was pregnant.

With the baby on the way and my heart still shattered from Mom’s death, I nested in our cramped apartment full of secondhand furniture and cheap but cheerful decor and tried to prepare for motherhood. Meanwhile, Ryan finished second year, and Dad started dating, which I thought was absolutely too soon, but I never said so because I’d promised Mom I wouldn’t let Dad wither away.

“I love your father, Margaret, but he is a man born without the ability to read a recipe or keep his whites and darks separate in the laundry machine. Bless him, my Hugh.” I’d laughed softly when she said this, but I knew the domestic tasks excuse was a cover. Dad did better as a team. Plus, Danny, only a week away from celebrating his fourteenth birthday when Mom died, also needed someone. He was too young, she said, to be left without a mother.

“But he has a mother,” I’d said, biting my lip to keep the tears at bay so she would see how strong I was. How capable she raised me to be. “I’ll take care of Dad. And Danny.”

She’d taken my hand then and pressed my palm to the paper-thin skin of her cancer-hollowed cheek. “You have your own life to worry about,” she’d said. “I won’t steal the joy of that away from you, along with everything else I’m taking.” I’d nodded, leaned into her body so bony and frail and smelling like antiseptic—the scent of sickness and death—but still warm with life and love.

I never did announce my engagement that evening. It wouldn’t be until the next day, when I sat with Mom and Dad at her oncology appointment, that my secret would be revealed.

“What is this?” she’d exclaimed, grabbing my hand and holding it up to the light. Delight had brightened her face as she stared at the ring. She’d still looked like herself—wavy brown hair to her shoulders, enough weight on her body to prove she loved good food—and despite where we were and why we were there, it’s one of my favorite memories of my mother.