Elizabeth Strout - The Best American Short Stories 2013

“So what’s her prognosis?” Rebecca made herself ask, though she felt she already knew.

The surgeon looked seriously at her. “I have no idea,” he said.

Rebecca wanted to hug him for that, and would have hugged Steve’s father, if he had been there. She did hug Steve, who had showed up unexpectedly at the hospital and sat in the waiting room with her all day. They had spent most of the time hunched over a book of Sunday New York Times crossword puzzles; they screwed up each one irreparably, in ink, and then they would make a big blue X on it before moving on to the next one.

During that day, and right afterward, Rebecca thought that maybe the divorce was a mistake, and that she and Steve would get back together. But it turned out to be like the illness of Anna Karenina: a kind of temporary exalted goodwill, a glimpse of how lovely things might have been if everybody hadn’t felt the way they actually did feel.

She went out and bought People magazine, and a copy of Diana: Her True Story . Every day she read to Harriet, who lay in bed with tubes coming out of her nose, and puffy boots automatically inflating and deflating around her legs at intervals, to prevent blood clots. “She tried to kill herself with a lemon slicer? ” Harriet said. “What’s a lemon slicer? Do they mean a peeler? She tried to peel herself to death?” The two of them sat there in the dark hospital room, laughing. Whenever the surgeon came in, Rebecca hid the book and the magazine in the nightstand, because Harriet didn’t want him to think she was the kind of woman who read trash.

Harriet would later say of that time, “It was a nightmare.” Rebecca, who, partly in reaction to her mother’s hyperbolic way of putting things, tends toward understatement, would say, “It was tough.” But while it was going on, it was, in some bizarre way, also wonderful. They liked being together, for the first time in years. One afternoon, a couple of days after the surgery, Harriet needed a blood transfusion. The drip was still running when someone, mistakenly, brought in a dinner tray. Harriet was not allowed to have anything by mouth, and so Rebecca told the aide: “We don’t need that.”

“Oh, you’ve eaten already?” the aide said.

Harriet, lying on her back with the blood still dripping into her arm, raised her hands and curved them into little bat claws and said, in what Rebecca somehow understood was meant to be a Transylvanian accent, “I’m still eating.”

Rebecca laughed, and her eyes filled with tears at the valiancy of it, the surprise of that sudden little flash of wit.

It was before Rebecca started the bookstore; she was teaching high school English then, so she had the summer off. She went to the hospital every day and stayed there all day.

Then Harriet went through her year of chemotherapy. Rebecca was teaching again, but she went down to Connecticut on a lot of weekends. The pope got colon cancer. They watched the networks grappling with the delicate challenge of reporting on a pontiff’s gastrointestinal system: lots of disembodied scientific diagrams juxtaposed with footage of worried-looking nuns praying in St. Peter’s Square.

“What do you think the nurses are saying to him right now?” Harriet said, lying on the couch and looking at a shot of the outside of the hospital where the pope had been operated on earlier that week.

“Okay, Your Holiness, scoot your hiney over to the edge of the bed,” Rebecca said.

Harriet laughed and laughed. Then she threw up.

So here’s the glib psychological explanation: Harriet had always craved attention and now, made vulnerable by illness, needed more; Rebecca had failed at her marriage and needed to feel like a hero.

All of which was true. But it was more that they both discovered, almost shyly, that they liked each other. That they were having, in the middle of all this dire stuff, a good time together.

It was also, Rebecca knew, that her mother was dying. She sometimes lay in bed at night and cried, alone, or with Peter Bigelow, who taught architectural history at Harvard and whose two children—he was divorced—went to the school where Rebecca taught. He held her and listened while she talked about how hard it was to be finding her mother and losing her at the same time.

But, Peter said, it sounds like the knowledge that you’re losing her has been part of what allowed you to find her.

Oh, he was a nice man, Peter. Back then, her romance with him felt too new, too green and slight to bear the weight of everything Rebecca was feeling, about her divorce, about Harriet. Poor guy, she had thought, looking at Peter’s kind, earnest face, his sandy rumpled hair, his open trusting bare chest, his hand resting on the sleeve of her flannel nightgown.

Are you sure you don’t mind, if we don’t, tonight?

Of course not.

I’m sorry, I thought I wanted to, but—

Rebecca. Don’t worry. It’s fine.

She might have been suspicious of his tenderness, seen it as his own need for heroism, or as a ploy to hook her before revealing his true selfish self (remember, she was just wrapping up a divorce). But she’d seen him for years with his kids. He was nice, period. He took her out to dinner and to concerts, talked to her about his work enthusiastically and not at all pompously (he was writing a book on H. H. Richardson), listened while she talked about wanting to quit teaching to open a bookstore, and was frank and relaxed in bed.

He advised her to pace herself, with Harriet. Her friends were saying the same thing, especially the ones who’d had sick parents. Go easy, take time for yourself, don’t let this take over your whole life. But her mother was dying, and Rebecca wanted to cram in as much as she could. In some unexpected way she and Harriet had fallen in love.

Incredibly, Harriet didn’t die. Her cancer never came back. She kept having more surgeries: to insert a catheter for the chemo drugs under her chest wall, to remove it again because of recurrent infections, to remove scar tissue in her abdomen, to remove more scar tissue. Rebecca kept driving down and spending time with her mother.

The glow wore off.

What a disconcerting thing to feel, to acknowledge! It wasn’t that she was sorry Harriet was still alive. It was more that she couldn’t keep it up: the attention, the rapport, the camaraderie, the aimless joy of just hanging around with her mother, watching the news. She had burned herself out, just as Peter and her friends had warned she might; but looking back at the time when Harriet had seemed to be dying, she couldn’t imagine having managed it any other way.

Harriet started feeling that Rebecca wasn’t visiting often enough. It was true, she was coming down less often. But oh, that “enough.” That tricky guilt-laden word that doesn’t even need to be spoken between a mother and daughter because both of them can see it lying there between them, injured and whimpering, a big throbbing violent-colored bruise of a word.

“What about Easter?” Harriet asked—plaintively? coldly? in a resolutely plucky way that emphasized how admirably she was refraining from trying to make Rebecca feel guilty? It could have been any of those ways of asking, or any of a number of others, all of which did make Rebecca feel guilty, and angry, and confused. The burnout took the form of an almost frantic protectiveness of her own time whenever Harriet wasn’t sick. If her mother needed her, she dropped everything and went; but if her mother didn’t need her, she wanted to feel free to say no.

Harriet, on the other hand, seemed to feel that the time Rebecca spent caring for her didn’t count. Hurting, drugged, frightened, throwing up—that’s not what Harriet called spending time with her daughter. (The watching-the-news part was engrossing, and sometimes fun, but it was more like a jailhouse party, a desperate entertainment concocted by people who have very little to work with.) Harriet wanted to travel with Rebecca—to go on a cruise to Alaska or the Panama Canal. Or see Moscow and St. Petersburg, for heaven’s sake—all those mythical places that you could now, suddenly, actually go to.