TWENTY-TWO

It usually takes days if not weeks to get a cancer diagnosis. All those countless tests, bloodwork, biopsies, MRIs.

My mother and I got it even before we made it to the hospital. From a medical technician in the ambulance. The guy took one look at my mother and asked me what kind of cancer it was. He was a burly guy who spoke with a strong Eastern European accent. I said that my mother didn’t have cancer. She’d had a colonoscopy! It was clean! It was perfect! He turned away from me. What an idiot! I thought.

But then an admitting intern at the hospital took one look at her and immediately requested an oncologist.

The oncologist arrived at the same time as the first batch of test results. He was a cheerful middle-aged guy with fake teeth that must have been cheap, because they looked faker than fake teeth usually do.

Ovarian cancer, he said. Metastatic. Stage four. Lots of secondary tumors. He recommended the surgery right away. Because without the surgery my mother could be gone in days.

I looked at my mother. She wasn’t reacting to his words; she appeared to be confused. She was smiling at him like an eager student trying to please the teacher. I wondered if this was the effect of painkillers or something worse.

Meanwhile, the doctor continued with his speech. It was a simple surgery. With a simple name. Debulking. All of her reproductive organs had to be taken out. But she didn’t need them anyway, did she?

“You don’t need that anymore, mamacita?” He smirked at my mother.

I don’t think I ever hated anybody as I hated that doctor at the moment when he called my mother “mamacita.”

mamacita (when addressed to a dying older woman who speaks English with a strong accent):

1. Somebody who is less than an American

2. Somebody who is less than a woman

3. Somebody who is less than a human being

4. Somebody whose impending death is an appropriate subject for your cool, lighthearted jokes

Example: “Hey mamacita, why don’t I take your organs out?”

I told my mother that I was taking her home. We would find other doctors, better doctors; we definitely wouldn’t agree to any treatment until we had a second opinion. We were incredibly lucky, I said, because my best friend, Anya, worked at a cancer hospital and personally knew the best oncologists in the country. My mother smiled with relief. The nurses had drained the liquid from her abdomen, the terrible pressure was gone, but more importantly my mother saw that I had accepted being in charge instead of her and was grateful.

By the time the kids came home from their trip, I had the second, the third, and many other opinions. Most of the doctors were reluctant to talk until they had done their own tests and personally examined my mother, but a few of Anya’s close friends agreed to look at the existing results. All of them said the same thing. There was no sense in starting with the surgery, because the tumor was too large for a safe removal. The best option was to start with chemo and see if it worked. They were especially reluctant to discuss the prognosis, but one of them said that in the best-case scenario, my mother would have up to a year.

I didn’t know whether I should tell this to my mother. I knew that Americans always chose honesty with terminal patients. But Russians did not. As a Russian I was required to lie; as an American I was required to tell the truth. In the end I did both. I told my mother that her prognosis was grave, but it wasn’t like there was no hope. There is always hope, right? Even if a tiny one? Nobody can tell you that there isn’t hope.

My mother smiled for the first time in days and said how strange it was that she’d been scared of cancer her whole life, but now that she had it, she wasn’t scared at all.

“What do you want to do?” I asked. “Do you want to go for a walk? I can drive you to the beach. It’s not too cold. Or maybe we could order some food?”

My mother said that she wanted to watch a video. She had a boxed set of Sex and the City, which she’d never opened.

In the middle of the pilot episode she pressed pause and asked if I was going to tell people. “So I don’t have to?” she said. I said that I would.

I called Uncle Grisha later that day. There was such a long silence on the other end that I thought that the call was disconnected. I said: “Grisha? Grisha! Are you there?” Then I heard him sobbing; it was like the barking of a deranged dog.

The kids arrived the next day around five. They were messy, loud, gushing about their trip, happy to see me, and eager to go and greet their grandmother. Len was hovering behind, impatient to leave.

I told the kids that their grandmother was asleep and sent them upstairs. I said I’d be there shortly. Then I asked Len to come to the kitchen with me, where I told him everything, about myself and about my mother.

“Is there any hope?” he said.

I shook my head.

Len covered his face with his hands, and when he took them away, I saw that he was crying.

There had been so much ugliness in our marriage, but his tears at that moment canceled all that. At least for me.

He offered to help us in any way, or even to move back into the house. I thanked him, but said getting back together would be a very wrong thing for both of us. He agreed and left.

As I saw him to his car, I thought how bizarre it was that a few weeks ago, I had three men in my life. Now I had zero. It was as if my whole life were screaming “error” at me.

I found both kids in Dan’s room, leaning over his desk, arguing about the best way to upload Mexico photos. I sat down on Dan’s bed and asked them to come to me.

The conversation that I was going to have was probably among the most daunting tasks a parent could face, and as with many daunting parental tasks before that, I didn’t handle it very well.

My speech was vague, convoluted, and broken by sobs.

“But she’s not going to die, is she?” Nathalie asked in the end.

“Of course she is going to die, you stupid idiot!” Dan screamed.