Anna North - The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

At first the treatments shrank the tumor, and for the next year we had Mom back. We had a normal Christmas, except that all our presents were way too extravagant. I got an electric keyboard, and Mom got a bicycle. It was a stupidly optimistic gift, but she rode it once, around the block, while my sister and I watched nervously like we were the parents. Mom went to my sister’s dance recital and the high school talent show, where my band, A Gooseless City, played a song I’d written about a man who worked in a coal mine, and she clapped and cheered even though we were awful. She started teaching my sister German again.

Once that year my mom took me to the aquarium. I don’t remember where my dad and sister were, but I know it was just the two of us. I felt embarrassed and too old to go look at fish with my mom, but the aquarium had a giant octopus on loan then, and Mom really wanted to see it, and that year I never said no to her. We looked at a bunch of tropical fish first, and a pancake turtle, and a moray eel that looked like an evil log, and then there was the octopus. It was in a dark room and lit from above, and it moved like no living thing I’d ever seen. Its arms and its weird pale underbelly were against the glass, and it was straining and sucking and writhing; when the arms moved apart I could see its pointed monster head. It was the size of a three-year-old child, and it seemed awful to me that something could be so big and have no bones, that something could be so far from human and obviously want something as badly as it wanted to get out of the tank. I heard a black sound in my head. I wanted to go home, but my mom put her arm around my shoulders and squeezed — she was touching all of us a lot then, stroking our cheeks, ruffling our hair. When I turned to her, she had on the funny tight smile she got when she was trying not to cry.

“I know you know this already,” she said, “but I have to tell you anyway. When I get—” She paused. “When I get mean, when I say nasty things to you or your sister or your dad, I want you to know it’s the cancer talking and not me.”

“I know, Mom,” I said. All my scariest thoughts were rushing into that dark room, and I wanted to go back out into the light where we could laugh and get a soda.

“I know you know. But I just want to tell you, because even though I hope it never happens again, I think it might. And I want you to be ready and know that your real mom would never say those things, not ever.”

I nodded and we hugged, and then we went to the food court, where she bought me starfish-shaped chicken nuggets, which I was definitely too old for but which I ate with barbecue dipping sauce. Mom laughed and chatted like she was glad she’d reassured me and like she’d reassured herself, but all the time I kept thinking that if she knew that the meanness came out when she was sick, and if she knew that it would again, then it had to be somehow part of her.

It was late spring when she started getting worse again. It was more unpredictable this time. She’d be talking about our dog getting into the trash, and then her voice would drop an octave and she’d say he should be put to sleep, and then she’d laugh and say she was only kidding, why was I looking at her like that? She started hiding things from us — small, worthless things like the dog’s leash or the salt and pepper — and when we confronted her, she’d say she was just rearranging. At first the doctors said her scans were clear, and I thought maybe we were being paranoid, maybe she was cured now and we were the ones who were crazy. Then they did another scan and found the cancer back after all, crawling through her brain. The doctors offered her an experimental treatment, a new chemo drug they said could extend her life by as much as a year. She said she’d take it, but that night she asked to talk to my dad alone. Jenna and I left the hospital room, but instead of following my sister down to the cafeteria I stood outside and listened.

“I can’t be in the hospital anymore,” she said.

“I know it’s hard,” my dad said. “But it’s like you used to say when you were a kid—‘That’s where they make you better.’”

Mom laughed then, and the way she laughed made me afraid. I thought of leaving, but I didn’t move.

“Listen,” she said, “when you’re a sick kid, everyone has a certain way they want you to act. They want you to be all sweet and positive, so they don’t get too fucking depressed about the fact that you’ve had fifteen operations and you’re only eight years old. And you learn to give people what they want, because it’s just easier. But I’m an adult now, and I’m going to die, and I’m done giving people what they want.”

I did follow Jenna to the cafeteria then. And when she asked me what was wrong, I told her to shut up, which I never did, and when Dad came down to get us, he explained the meaning of “palliative care.”

It turned out that what Mom wanted was to go back to the lake. The doctors okayed it — she was weak but she wasn’t on chemo anymore, and they said we should do what made her happy. Mom wouldn’t let me help her pack — she said she hated how I was always sticking my nose in her business. But when we got to the lake, she seemed calm, even happy. We sat with her on the dock, and when she saw a loon, she jumped up and pointed and made sure we saw, just like she’d done when Jenna and I were little. She offered to help Dad cook, and she did it without fighting, washing the lettuce and slicing the hard, unsalted bread from the bakery in town, smiling at us over dinner in a way she hadn’t in months. She ate, too — the bread and salad and even meat. We went on a short walk down the road one morning, and she took her scarf off, and I saw white-blond hair growing from her scalp, like a baby’s. I let myself think maybe she would get better after all.

On the warmest day that summer, Jenna and I wanted to go to the little beach by the general store — I wanted to look at the girls, and maybe Jenna wanted to look at boys, too. She was eleven by that time and so quiet I had no idea what went on in her head. We tried to get Mom to go with us, but she said she was tired.

“You should take them,” she told my dad. “Get some exercise. I’m going to stay here and read.”

So he took us, and I watched an older girl with long beautiful legs and angry red pimples swim lap after lap, butterfly style. Then my sister and my dad and I raced to the marker buoy, and I won, and then we all went to the store and got chocolate-and-vanilla-swirl soft-serve ice cream, and Jenna got it on her swimsuit and waded back into the water to wash it out. I remember all this very clearly, because when we got back to the house, my mom was gone.

It took the police and the dogs three days to find her. She wasn’t in the lake, although they did drag part of it. She was in the woods, north of the house, just over a mile from the road. She had cleared the leaves away from a space under a beech tree and lain down there with her head pillowed on her hands. The coroner said she’d been dead just over a day.

After the funeral, after that first hard year when we didn’t have to go to school if we didn’t want to and we ate cereal for dinner most nights of the week and all slept in the living room because we couldn’t fall asleep alone, my dad started to feel better. He still teared up when he talked about her, and on her birthday and their anniversary and the day she was diagnosed and the day she died, but he started disciplining us again and playing Frisbee with the dog instead of taking him on short sad walks around the block, and he shaved the beard he’d grown because he was too miserable to look at his own face. My sister started having friends over again and going to the mall and buying the ugly clothes girls her age wore to try to look older. I was the only one who didn’t start to get happier once the first bad grief was over, because all I could think about was that when my mom knew her life was ending, what she wanted was to get away from us.