Charles Bock - Alice & Oliver

The glare from the wall fixtures was brighter than she remembered. She kept blinking; in the few seconds it took for the brightness to make her wince, her mother figured out how to work the dimmers.

“Much better,” Alice said. “Thank you.”

She took in the large open space, the Japanese mural she knew so well, its succession of interconnected vertical screens lining a far wall, images hand-painted on long rectangles of rice paper: a lone traveler, waking tigers.

Behind her the front door shutting, creaks and weight, Oliver moving into the apartment’s main room.

Alice called out, she never imagined their apartment could look so immaculate. She told Oliver how much she appreciated him getting it spotless for her.

“And did you see those nice smooth stones in the bathroom sink?” said her mom, coming out of the kitchen. “I love those.”

Mom held a steaming cup of green tea on a small plate. She, too, looked the worse for wear, her face pale and drained, her shoulders slumped. The week of watching her only daughter had taken its toll, obviously, damage that had been exacerbated by an innate discomfort with the city’s pace and noise. Alice accepted the ceramic offering, felt the steam clouds rising onto her chin and mouth and nose. Her mom smiled, touched Alice’s shoulder.

Mom said she’d fix the bedtime bottles. She could never sit still.

Oliver was at the doorjamb to the entranceway, he was irritated, that much was obvious to her. And now she saw the room’s dimness distracting him. Likely he was assuming that the darkness had something to do with Alice, and he’d find out more particulars soon enough.

She remained in that chair, in her robe, holding her daughter, who kept rubbing an impossibly soft cheek against Mommy’s chin.

—

The first four days of her hospital stay had gone according to plan. No complications on the medical front, and when the nurse had wheeled Alice down to the ground floor, Oliver had already commandeered a conference room, and was waiting, with building blocks and stuffed animals spread all over the couch, pacifiers and a diaper-changing pad ready on the conference table. Alice was in a medical mask, lead smock, and protective gloves; her pole of IV medicines accompanied, looming above the festivities. Doe saw her mother and immediately bawled, absence backing up on her. Alice touched her daughter’s tummy, lifted the child’s little pink blouse, gave a big kiss through her mask. “Mommy loves this belly.” She caressed Doe’s knee. “Mommy loves this knee. Deep inside your heart, know I love this knee.” Alice gave her daughter time to be sad, rubbed slow circles on her child’s back. “Mommy loves your chin. Mommy loves your sternum. Mommy loves your thorax. I love every part of you, even when we are apart.” Doe giggled, crawled, clung; though Alice tried to maximize their skin-to-skin contact (as the parenting books said you should do), doctors’ orders made this almost impossible. “We will be together again soon — maybe in a few days,” Alice said. “Until then, we will miss each other and be sad, but we will also both be okay.” She and Oliver held hands, talked about logistics, about nothing, everyone enjoying this little created, artificial island of normalcy, right until the nurse arrived, and Oliver followed Alice’s prearranged instructions: packing up and sweeping away the child as quickly as possible.

“You are in Mommy’s heart,” Alice had said, even as Doe, unable to understand, had started to bawl. “Mommy is in your heart.”

The day before her scheduled release, Alice’s fever had spiked and she’d been quarantined. Everything had become that much harder. Alice had been apoplectic, refusing to accept she had to be there any longer, she could not see her child. Her meetings with Eisenstatt became tense, full of impatience, willful misunderstandings. For the first time she was short to nurses. Then she had a blood clot in her arm, furthering her stay, and her cell counts started dropping, a result of the chemo. She remained an inpatient for a full week longer than they’d been expecting. At home Doe was inconsolable, bawling through the night, lashing out, kicking and hitting, even at Grandma.

Now that she was home, Oliver was getting ready to clean her port site — running warm water over washcloths in the bathroom — one red, one blue. He brought both with him, searched through the newly prescribed bottles of medicine, and brought a long tube of cream out to the sewing table, where he began loosening the collar on his wife’s robe. Oliver kissed his wife’s head, kneaded the back of her neck with the knuckles of his fist; Alice moaned approval. Her eyes shut. “That feels nice.” Oliver saw his wife’s jugular: pressing up against the skin beneath her neck, a protruding root. Near Alice’s left clavicle was that giant bandage, the reminder of her latest central line.

“Mother, do we have any green tea?”

“I brought you some already. On the table.”

A laugh. “I guess this is what they call chemo brain. I overheard a nurse say it happens.”

—

Oliver now set to the renewal of certain nightly rituals, dusting off the procedure for changing Alice’s bandage and washing her wound. First step: running the damp red cloth over the transparent tape around the bandage. Next: he peeled a curdled strip of gauze from off her neck. Alice continued playing with Doe, feeding her child a thumb, enjoying the suckling sensation. Oliver finished taking off the last strip, reached for the soaked blue cloth. Alice felt his eyes studying the back of her neck, heard the undertones of his subdued breaths. She leaned backward, met his washcloth’s circular motions. Both of them ignored the ringing phone. Besides, when her mom answered, whoever was calling hung up.

North Shore Oncology, Long Island City, Suite 4

It was during her first week, working the front desk at an oncology office, that she felt a lump in her right breast. It wasn’t imagined, that Patty Hearst syndrome thing. Quite the opposite: the lump was hard, and present, most definitely, a knob in her lower right quadrant. A person might think an oncology office would be the best place to work if you were going to feel a lump in your breast, but this wasn’t the case. It was more complicated than that. The receptionist didn’t have insurance before getting hired, for one thing, and the clinic didn’t offer insurance until after three months on the job. The out-of-pocket costs of tests, consultations, diagnosis, therapies, treatments — all that would bankrupt her, that much was obvious. So without talking to her husband, ex-husband, or her grown children, without letting them know what she’d discovered or planned, she endured. Until her insurance kicked in, she’d just hope for the best.

And that’s what she did. For three months: five days a week, eight thirty to six, the receptionist checked in patients who’d been diagnosed and were going to begin therapy and were plainly terrified. As a formality she made sure there had been no changes to the insurance policies of patients who were undergoing chemo. She relayed medications questions from patients who’d gone through the hell of chemo and thought they’d made it, only to have the cancer return. Patients with less than six months left spent hours of their lives in her waiting room. She kept her head down and bit her lip and tried to control her pounding heart so nobody could hear it. She did her job. There was one young woman the same age as the receptionist’s daughter: suffering from ovarian cancer. Her uterus had been bombarded with so much radiation that putting on a seatbelt caused her pain. The receptionist overheard this and excused herself from her desk. She went into the ladies’ room and hid in a stall and felt whether her lump was growing and sobbed until her body heaved.