KIRSTEN SAT before the oncologist, shifting back and forth in time.
The closest she’d ever come to death was her pregnancy. Her labor had not gone well. At thirty-nine weeks she woke up in a wet bed at dawn and called Margaret. While she was on the phone, Ann drank castor oil and started walking loops around the block. By the time Margaret arrived, Ann was in labor as well. Ann delivered quickly, but Kirsten was not progressing. Margaret raised the possibility of transferring her to a hospital but Kirsten begged her to wait. At thirty hours, Margaret gave her a tiny injection of morphine to allow her to rest. She woke up disoriented, in hard labor.
It was not so different—loss of appetite, cramps, nausea. You think something is wrong but then you think, no, it’s always like this, pains, moods, things come and go. They run tests and say…You’re pregnant. You have swallowed a watch. Now the crocodile will always be able to find you. Then later, you don’t eat like you used to and get nauseous. There are ghost pains—but isn’t it always something? The stress of scrappy living, hormonal changes. You’re fifty-two. What do you expect? They run tests and come back and say…We have found a clock inside you. But it’s the windup kind.
“You shouldn’t feel like you did something wrong,” said the oncologist. “Stomach cancer is often undetected until stage three or four. It’s like ovarian. What we have to do now is begin treatment.”
“I don’t want to rush into surgery.”
“You’re not a candidate. Have you spoken with your children?”
Kirsten heard the light clicking of her own teeth as her jaw trembled and wondered if it was audible outside her head or only visible.
“You’re free to do what you want,” said the oncologist, “but in your case I think aggressive treatment is the only real option.”
“This from the people who brought you floating wombs, Lysol douches, cigarettes for pregnancy weight, and episiotomies,” said Kirsten.
“It’s your choice.”
“Not really it isn’t.”
A fat tear ran down her cheekbone.
As a teenager Kirsten had pranced into Margaret’s office and announced she was not terminating her pregnancy. Margaret did not crown her with praise or throw her a party.
“Women died so you could have a choice,” she said.
Puffed up like an affronted pheasant, Kirsten said, “I made a choice.”
“The hell you did. A real choice has three questions: What the fuck am I going to do, and who are these bastards I’m talking to, and is this bullshit even real? Which of these have you asked?”
As an adult she knew how to ask those questions, but no matter how she asked them, the choices looked no better.
SHITTY FUCKING OPTION #1: Do rounds of chemo and radiation and hope it works for a while.
SHITTY FUCKING OPTION #2: Go to Mexico for experimental treatment. Consort with rich people afraid of death. Start a blog.
SHITTY FUCKING OPTION #3: Do nothing.
Kirsten had seen stars in total blackness once. She’d been twenty-one. She was driving across the desert her first night away from the girls and there it was, the galaxy, uncountable specks of dust moving in circles lighting the dark. She drove under the canopy, vacillating between an awareness of brilliance and sorrow—because she hadn’t known magic was real until she saw this, because she’d never really been anywhere and now probably never would.
Two years. Two years. Two years of Cheyenne awake while Livy slept. One sick then both sick. One bleeding because the other knocked her down. She’d learned to parent with stomach flu, with fevers and food poisoning. Two years. Two years of never going to the bathroom alone, showering with the curtain open so she could hear what was going on. She’d learned not to scream at them in the grocery store when she couldn’t keep them from running through the aisles. And she’d learned not to cry when all the other mothers looked at her like she was trash and made comments about controlling her children. At night after she put them to bed she’d walk into the living room stunned by the day. She’d sit in a chair and sob. She’d made the wrong decision. On everything. Everything—her deep independence and love of autonomy, her night-owl ways and desire for solitude, her dreams of travel—it was all gone. She couldn’t stand a single thing about her life anymore. She hated being a mother. But she loved her girls.
She was in a metaphysical bookstore—because it didn’t take a genius to know she was more than materially fucked and symbolically fucked but archetypally fucked on a grand scale—trying to speed-read a book on tarot when Cheyenne pulled a whole row of books off the bottom shelf and Livy ran out the door.
A young woman in the Feminine Mysteries aisle ran out, snatched Livy up, and brought the furious eighteen-month-old back to Kirsten, who already had Cheyenne by the arm. After passing the flushed and kicking Livy back to Kirsten, the woman cleaned up the aisle, putting the books back. Then a miracle happened. She offered to watch the girls so Kirsten could finish reading the chapter on tarot. An act of kindness so powerful it broke her life in two. Kirsten before that, Kirsten after.
A month later she and the young woman dedicated themselves to the Goddess, and for Kirsten’s twenty-first birthday the women of her newly minted coven took her kids for the weekend, filled her tank with gas, and sent her to a hot spring in the desert.
Driving across a desert free of light pollution, liberated for two nights from motherhood, Kirsten searched for her planets but couldn’t tell them from planes. The constellations had also been easier to see on paper. The only things she recognized were the Big Dipper and the North Star. Propelling herself toward a nameless star at the top of her windshield, counting up the miles behind her, she tried to outrun motherhood. Hitting 110 miles per hour on the freeway, the car rattled, breaking apart in the atmosphere. Holding the wheel her arms shook; burning up in the waves of gravity, battered by planetary tides, shards of a life, violence of light, she was never going to get there.
Option #3 it was.