Anxiety looks like this:
Three sisters on speaker phone for the hour and a half leading up to The Call, when the doctor will say if the cancer is back or not.
The one-year bone marrow biopsy was done twelve days ago. One sister had a bad feeling about it. One sister had a good feeling about it. But an hour and a half from The Call, everyone has a bad feeling about it.
Two of the sisters are together in a backyard in Chicago. The other sister is in Boston. The two sisters in Chicago sit on the steps facing the backyard with a plate of vanilla wafers, passion fruit curd to dip them in, and toasted coconut flakes. The sister in Boston is also outside in her yard. Her cat is napping in the sun on some rocks. She just moved there, and as the sisters talk, the movers are inside, unloading furniture and boxes, setting up the pieces of her life that have moved so often, and so far, from Alabama to Alaska to Hawaii, from California to Cameroon and then to Madison, where two and a half years of pain and grief have carved something deep into the sisters’ hearts.
If The Call goes one way, a kidney transplant will bring two of the sisters together in a few months. One will give a kidney and one will get a kidney, and it’s strange to say that such an event would be a dream-come-true, the fulfillment of years of crushing disappointment and wafer-thin hope, but it is. As kids, they dreamed of a lot of things–horses and boys, first kisses and beautiful dresses–but getting kidneys wasn’t one of them, so this is a surprise.
If the Call goes the other way, it will be time to face death. They’ve faced it before over these two and a half years, but this time, there would be a finality to the story. There will be no second bone marrow transplant. If the cancer is back, the ending begins.
In an hour and a half, their lives could change forever. It’s a strange feeling, to be a breath away from such a moment. (And is there anything as life-changing as death?) The world feels both a little pretend and a lot lethal. It could crumple like paper, or stab you in the heart.
Erica and I sit in her backyard together, feeling faint and sick one minute, faint and weepy the next, faint and slap-happy after that. We’re killing time with Heidi on speaker phone, because it’s unthinkable to do anything else, to do anything normal, not when we’re this close to the edge. So we start talking about butts. It starts with someone alluding to that classic elementary school math problem. If Train A leaves the station at a velocity of 90 mph, and train B leaves from the other station . . . except trains become asses.
The Eastward-facing ass is traveling at a rate of three knots. What will be the force of its collision with the Westward-facing ass given the wind resistance and relative body mass ratios of each ass?
The asses are soon colliding past each other, breaking the space-time barrier, and time-traveling into the past. Time-traveling asses lead to the collapse of the space time continuum, with pauses in our little armageddon story to remark on the true origins of the Grand Canyon. All of this traveling ass humor is delivered in our “Chicketarian” voice (™) which is a dead ringer for Christopher Walken. We laugh so hard we almost pee our pants. We briefly panic when Heidi gets an incoming call (it’s Dr. Hall! The cancer is back!), but then it’s just prescription refills and we proceed. “As the old proverb says, ‘A greased ass travels fast’ . . .” We laugh and eat wafers and watch Erica’s chickens. One of them digs three holes in the yard. We keep waiting for her to take one of her legendary dirt baths, but she doesn’t seem interested in anything but her digging, with brief interludes to terrorize the other three chickens.
The weather is perfect in Boston and Chicago. Sunshine and a gentle breeze, warm but not hot.
Every now and then we check the time. Fifteen minutes until The Call (will he be late? Do you promise to text right away?). Five minutes. He calls. “Gotta go.” Click.
Erica and I sit on the steps in the shade, the chickens and the sunshine before us. But we can’t remain there. She hops up to do something in the yard, and I compulsively look at my phone.
If she doesn’t text for a long time, that must mean bad news . . .
How long is a long time?
We get a thumbs-up text from Heidi’s husband five minutes in. This seems promising. But still too tenuous. We need more. We are freaking out. We haven’t stopped freaking out for hours.
Heidi calls. There is no cancer.
No cancer.
No.
Cancer.
Ahhh.
All three markers they check are one hundred percent clear.
We don’t have to cry tonight.
We don’t have to rage and fall apart and limp back to our anti-depressants.
We don’t have to plan an emergency trip to Boston because you could never hear the news your sister’s death is imminent and not hop on a plane.
We get to hang up after a few celebratory whoops, rise from the steps, and go back to our days. I log back onto my laptop to check my work email. Erica fires up the sewing machine. Then she goes to get her kids from school and I come back home.
The day is normal.
The sun is shining.
The news doesn’t feel real.
Good news is like that. Anti-climactic. Where bad news is a punch. And after the tortuous adrenaline storms, the horribleness of the punch sometimes fits better than the gentle caress of good news.
It’s a relief . . . but somehow it doesn’t feel as full and as happy as I want it to.
Yet.
That’s okay. I’ll save it like a stone in my pocket and slip my hand against it as the day goes on, feel its edges, feel its weight, feel the warmth of my own hand on its surface.
And I’ll repeat it back to myself, over and over:
That she is not dying. My sister is not dying. Not today.
