LOOKING BACK, MIA KNEW that Glen had been frightened to see how her body had changed, although at the time he hadn’t let on. Even now she felt some gratitude toward him for hiding his fear, for allowing her to think he could see the worst she had to offer and still love her. Back then, she couldn’t have taken the blow. It was bad enough when it finally came.
Karen Barker, the social worker in Dr. Bella’s office, had counseled her. Was there a man in her life? Yes, Mia had said, she was engaged. She and Glen had planned the wedding for that very month, but they had put it off until she was feeling well again.
“Has he seen the incision?” Karen asked, and Mia started to cry, realizing how desperately she needed him to do exactly that, and how afraid she was of his reaction. It was hard enough to look at the scar herself.
Karen asked her what Glen was like, and Mia told her how he had helped her care for her mother, how he had even stayed with the older woman one night a week while Mia took a class. She told her how, when Laura had moved home devastated after breaking up with Luke, her boyfriend of several years, Glen had worked to cheer her up.
“He sounds like a sensitive man,” Karen said. “A caring man. He’ll be fine. You have to trust him. You’re trying to be very strong for him, but he sounds like someone who likes taking care of people. Let yourself be taken care of for a change, Mia. Give him the chance to do that. Give him the chance to show how much he loves you.”
She and Glen were in her bedroom that evening. Since her mother’s death a year earlier, Glen had lived in the house with her, had slept with her every night. After the surgery, though, he’d started sleeping in her mother’s old room. “What if I roll over and accidentally hurt you?” he asked, and she hadn’t been able to tell him that mattered to her far less than having him close.
She had taken a shower and had put on her white chenille robe, and she stood close to him, near the bedroom window. “I’d like you to see—” She couldn’t find the word. Her chest? Her incision? “My scar,” she said.
Glen nodded. “Good.” He sat down on the bed. “I wasn’t sure if I should ask or not. I didn’t want to push you.”
She undid the tie of her robe, wishing the lights were dimmer. The skin of her hands had a bluish cast to them in the stark overhead light. She could see every vein. She didn’t like the idea that the skin of her chest would look so translucent, so deathlike. She opened the robe, but left it on, her eyes on Glen’s face.
“Just for a year,” she said. “It’ll only be like this for a year. Then I can have the reconstruction surgery and it won’t look so—”
“It’s fine, Sunny,” he interrupted her. “It’s not so horrid.” He reached up to touch the taut skin covering her chest, and she flinched, pulled away. “Does it hurt?” he asked.
“No.” She laughed. “You surprised me, that’s all. It burns a little when you touch it, but it doesn’t actually hurt.”
“Do you feel… off balance?” He smiled at her.
“A little.” For the first time in weeks she felt a surge of happiness. The poison was gone from her body. The danger. And Glen could handle this.
He reached up to tie the sides of her robe together again, then he stood and held her. “I love you.” He kissed her temple.
“I’d like you to sleep in here tonight,” she said.
She felt him nod against her head. “All right.”
The next day she stopped by Dr. Bella’s office, although she had no appointment. She poked her head into the social worker’s cubicle. “You were right,” she said. “Glen was great.”
For several days everything seemed as though it would return to normal. She felt strong enough to work with clay again. Glen spent his mornings at his studio, but despite the fact that she insisted she wanted to cook, he came home early enough each night to make dinner for her and Laura. Laura was working as an assistant buyer for a large department store, and she was starting to laugh again; Luke’s name came up less and less in conversation.
Then Laura started helping Glen cook, both of them gleefully banishing her from the kitchen when she tried to participate. They told her she was still recovering. She needed to be cared for, pampered, and she tried to ignore the feeling of being left out.
Glen didn’t bring up sex, and Mia figured it was up to her to let him know she was ready to make love again. More than ready. She’d put in her diaphragm for three nights in a row in the hope that he would suggest it, but there was a distance between them in bed that she tried to deny. He was afraid of hurting her, she thought.
On the fourth night, she told him that her diaphragm was in.
“Ah,” he said. “You must really be feeling better.”
She got into bed wearing her cotton nightshirt and pushed her way close to him. He wrapped his arms loosely around her.
“I’m okay,” she said. “I won’t break.”
He kissed her, but there was no passion in the kiss, no fire, and she nuzzled closer to him, close enough to feel the softness of his penis through his boxer shorts. After a moment he drew back from her. “I’m wiped out tonight,” he said, stroking her hair. “Sorry.”
“That’s okay.” She had never been that close to him when he wasn’t hard and ready for her.
The following night was a repeat performance, and on the third night when he rolled away from her, he sounded truly upset. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he said.
“It’s my breast.”
“No, no, Sunny.” He put his arm around her, pulling her head to his shoulder. “It’s me. Maybe I need a physical myself.” He laughed. “Have you ever known me to strike out three nights in a row?”
She had never known him to strike out even once, but she said nothing.
He wasn’t in the bed when she woke up the following morning, although it was quite early. She got up and went to the closet for her clothes. Through the air conditioning shaft that ran through the rear of the closet, she heard voices. Glen, talking to Laura. She could hear them clearly; she didn’t even have to rest her ear against the shaft to make out their words.
“I nearly retched when I saw it,” he was saying. “I know I’m a shit for feeling that way, but it’s grotesque. She’s damaged beyond repair. She looks like a freak. I try to block it out of my mind when I’m sleeping with her, but I can’t. I can’t even… perform.”
Laura said something too soft to hear, then her voice grew louder. “She’s still the same person, Glen,” she said. “She’s still Mimi.”
There was a long silence, and when Glen began speaking again, Mia knew he’d been crying. She had seen him cry only once—when they were traveling in Rome together and visited the Pieta.
“I tell myself she’s the same person, but she’s not. Sunny’s gone. My bubbly, giggly, happy, radiant Sunny. They destroyed her when they destroyed her body.”
“Glen.” Laura sounded almost desperate. “She’s still recovering, for Christ’s sake. You can’t expect her to be kicking up her heels. Every day, she’s a little more like her old self, don’t you see that?”
“I can never, ever get used to that one breast staring at me.”
“She’ll have reconstruction.”
Mia heard the scrape of a chair on the floor, and when Glen spoke again, his voice sounded very close. “I’m not proud of myself for reacting this way,” he said. “I can’t let her know how I feel. But, God! Every night she’s hoping we’ll make love, and I can’t even get the bloody thing up when I’m near her.”
Mia stepped out of the closet, shutting the door behind her and leaning back against it. She thought she might get sick. Closing her eyes, she tried to block out the pain and humiliation roiling inside her and focus on what she should do next. It would be best if she told him she’d heard, that she knew how he felt. She could suggest they both see the social worker, that they get counseling. But she couldn’t bring herself to confront him. Not now, not yet.
She didn’t go downstairs until she was certain Laura had left for work and Glen had gone to his studio. Throughout the day and into the night, his words pulsed in her head: She was damaged. Grotesque. A freak.
She called Dr. Bella to ask him if she might have reconstructive surgery sooner, but he was adamant about waiting and chastised her for having unrealistic expectations. “It will never be exactly like your old breast, Mia,” he warned her. “You mustn’t expect it to be.”
To her face, Glen continued to be kind. He said loving things to her she no longer believed. She was careful not to undress in front of him, careful to seem like the old, untarnished Mia he had fallen in love with in the hope that he would fall all over again, and his discomfort with her body would gradually disappear. She no longer bothered with her diaphragm at night, though, and in bed, she didn’t ask him to hold her or touch her. She allowed him his distance, until it felt as though they were not even sleeping in the same bed at all.