Chapter 12

Don’t Drink and Fly

It all starts happening pretty fast, then. Mom quits her job. She spends a lot of time in front of the television wrapped up in quilts, or out on the back porch with Billy, talking for hours and hours. She takes long naps. She stops cooking. This may not seem like a big thing, but Mom loves to cook. Nothing fills her with more domestic joy than putting something wonderful on the table, even if it’s something simple like her signature coffeecake or five-cheese macaroni. Now it’s too much for her, and we fall into a predictable pattern: cereal for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, frozen dinners. Jeffrey and I don’t complain. We don’t say anything, but I think that’s when it really hits us, when Mom stops cooking. That’s the beginning of the end.

Then one day she says to Billy and me, out of the blue, “I think it’s time we talk about what we’re going to tell people.”

“Okay,” I say slowly. “About what?”

“About me. I think we should say that it’s cancer.”

I suck in a shocked breath. Before that moment I hadn’t given any thought to what we would tell people, how we would explain Mom’s “illness,” as she likes to call it. Cancer would definitely explain it. People are starting to notice, I think. How she stays seated now at Jeffrey’s wrestling matches. How quiet and pale she’s become, how this one strand in the front of her hair has turned silver and she always wears hats now to cover it. How she’s gone from slender to just plain thin.

It seems so sudden, but then I think, I wasn’t paying attention before. I was so consumed with my own life, my dream, with the idea that it was Tucker who was going to die. She’s been getting weaker all this time, and I didn’t really notice until now.

Some stellar daughter I am.

“What kind of cancer?” Billy asks thoughtfully, like this is not at all a morbid topic.

“Something terminal, of course,” Mom says.

“Okay, so can we not talk about this?” I can’t take this anymore. “You don’t have cancer.

Why do we have to tell them anything at all? I don’t want to have another lie I’m going to be forced to tell.”

Billy and Mom share this amused look I don’t understand.

“She’s honest,” remarks Billy.

“To a fault,” Mom replies. “Gets it from her father.”

Billy snorts. “Oh come on, Mags, she’s like a carbon copy of you at that age.” Mom rolls her eyes. Then she turns her attention back to me. “A rational explanation will help everybody. It will keep them from asking too many questions. The last thing we want is for my death to appear mysterious in any way.”

I still find it crazy that she can say the words my death so calmly, like she’s saying my car or my plans for dinner.

“Okay, fine,” I concede. “Tell them whatever you want. But I’m not going to be involved.

I’m not going to call it cancer or lie about it or anything. This is your thing.” Billy opens her mouth to say something smart-alecky or maybe chew me out for how insensitive I’m being, but Mom holds up her hand.

“You don’t have to say anything at all,” she says. “I’ll take care of it.” So, cancer it is. But Mom was wrong about me not having to deal. Maybe it would have worked before I got slammed by the power of empathy, but now it’s impossible not to know how everyone is feeling about me. The news that my mother has terminal cancer is like an atom bomb going off at Jackson Hole High School. It doesn’t even take a whole day before everybody, and I mean everybody, knows. First it’s people looking away, some of the nicer girls shooting me sympathetic looks. Then whispers. I quickly know the script by heart. It starts with, “Did you hear about Clara Gardner’s mom?” and it ends with something like, “That is so sad.” I keep my head down and do my work and try to act normal, but by the second day I’m suffering through overwhelming waves of sympathy, and this from people who didn’t even bother to learn my name last year. Even my teachers are solemn, with the exception of Mr.

Phibbs, who just looks at me like he was quite disappointed in the half-assed paper I wrote on Paradise Lost, for which he gives me a D minus and demands that I rewrite. It’s like I’m a tiny boat adrift in an ocean of pity.

For instance: I’m in a stall in the ladies’ room, minding my own business, when a bunch of freshman girls come in. They chatter like squirrels, even while they pee, and then one of them says, “Have you heard about Jeffrey Gardner’s mom? She has lung cancer.”

“I heard it was brain cancer. Stage four, or something. She’s only got something like three months to live.”

“That is so sad. I don’t even know what I’d do if my mom died.”

“What’s Jeffrey going to do?” asks one. “I mean, when she dies. Their dad doesn’t live with them, does he?”

Amazing, I think, what they know about us, this group of total strangers.

“Well, I think it’s tragical.”

They murmur their agreement. The most tragical thing ever.

“And Jeffrey’s so broken up about it, too. You can totally tell.” Then they move on to discussing their favorite flavor of lip gloss. Either watermelon or blackberry cream. From my dying mom to lip gloss.

Tragical.

“O goodness infinite, goodness immense! / That all this good of evil shall produce, / and evil turn to good; more wonderful / than that which by creation first brought forth / light out of darkness! Wait,” I say, laying my book on the floor next to my feet. “I don’t even know who’s talking here. Michael, or Adam?”

“Adam,” supplies Wendy, homework buddy extraordinaire, looking down at me from her perch on my bed. “See where it says, So spake the Arch-Angel Michael, then paused, / as at the world’s great period; and our sire, / replete with joy and wonder, thus replied. So now it’s Adam speaking. He’s our sire, get it? I love that line, ‘as at the world’s great period.’”

“Ugh! What does that even mean?”

“Well, Michael was telling him about redemption, about how good is going to triumph over evil in the end, all that stuff.”

“So now he’s okay with it? He’s going to get thrown out of Eden but everything’s great because someday, thousands of years after he dies, the side of good is going to win out?”

“Clara, I think you’re taking this a tad too seriously. It’s only a poem. It’s art. It’s supposed to make you think, is all.”