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  Spinning around, Frances glared at her daughter. Her chest tightened, her anger taking over her body. Pressing her clenched fists against her thighs, it was all Frances could do to control herself. What she wanted to do was cross the floor and shake her daughter. Why the constant complaining? The snarky comments and criticisms dug beneath her skin. She had always known that raising teenagers was hard. She just hadn’t realized that it would start so early with her daughter. And now, with Frances dealing with her own problems, making life-threatening decisions that she hadn’t been able to discuss with Nicholas yet, her fuse was shorter than ever. Carrie was only going through a phase, and it wasn’t her daughter’s fault that she didn’t know about the cancer. Still, Frances was tired of the constant verbal attacks.

  “I’m getting a little tired of your attitude, Carrie. It’s time you realize that the world doesn’t revolve around you.”

  The clipped, even way she spoke seemed to be effective. Carrie stared at her, her eyes wide and the color draining from her cheeks.

  “Mom . . . ,” she stammered in a shaky voice.

  An apology. That was all that Frances wanted. That and a little more respect from her daughter.

  “Yes?” She waited for that apology, wanting it more than she had realized.

  But it never came.

  “What is wrong with your hair?”

  Frances lifted her hand to her head and touched her hair. When she drew her hand back, she saw strands of blond hair on her fingers. Quickly, she met Carrie’s gaze.

  “You have a bald spot,” she whispered. “By your ear.”

  If just minutes ago her blood pressure had been sky-high, she now felt as if her heart had stopped beating entirely. No, no, no, she thought as she hurried over to the mirror that hung in the hallway. Not so soon. But when she looked at herself, she saw exactly what Carrie had noticed: a patch of bald skin about the size of a quarter by her right ear.

  In the reflection in the mirror, Frances saw Carrie standing behind her, her arms crossed protectively over her chest as she met her mother’s gaze.

  “Are you OK?” she whispered. Her cheeks were pale, her eyes filled with concern.

  Frances forced a smile. “I’m . . . I’m fine, sweetheart. I forgot that I banged my head on the washer lid,” she said quickly. “It banged down and . . .” She glanced at the bald patch again. She could see that the rest of her hair was thinning, too. “It must have scraped my ear.”

  They looked at each other. For the first time in a long time, Carrie did not have a smart retort. Instead, Frances saw worry etched in her daughter’s face. She appeared unsettled by Frances’s explanation. “Are you sure you’re OK?”

  Frances tried to laugh lightly. “Of course. I told you . . .” She let her fingers touch the spot on her head. “Just a bad scrape,” she added, hoping that she was convincing enough. But the truth was that the concern her daughter had just expressed, the yearning Frances saw in Carrie’s eyes for reassurance that everything was, indeed, just fine, proved that it wasn’t.

  “I . . . I have homework to do.” Carrie backed away, still watching her mother in the mirror.

  Frances waited until Carrie disappeared upstairs before she turned her attention back to her hair. She hadn’t thought it would fall out so quickly. She looked like a molting bird. Fortunately, with her hair being so blond, it wasn’t as noticeable as it could have been. But she didn’t want to wait until it was apparent, and she certainly didn’t want to find clumps of hair stuck to her pillow or on her clothes. Flimsy reminders of what she was losing: an essence of her womanhood.

  She knew what she had to do.

  Frances climbed the stairs, then quietly shut her bedroom door, making certain to lock it before she crossed the room to the bathroom. With a shaking hand, she touched the wall and found the light switch. She hesitated before flicking it on. Bright light filled the room, and she was caught off guard when she saw her illuminated reflection. There were more areas where her hair had thinned than she had noticed in the downstairs mirror.

  For a moment she shut her eyes and fought the urge to cry. She simply couldn’t afford any more tears. Her emotional energy could not be depleted, and she vowed to remain strong, if not for anyone else, then for herself.

  With a new, if not forced, determination, Frances opened the cabinet and removed a fresh towel, which she set on the counter. Then she knelt down and fished around under the sink for the dog hair clippers. The last time she’d used this tool was just before the summer had begun, when she’d trimmed their long-haired retriever. When she inspected it closely, there were still traces of the golden dog hair on the blades.

  When she looked up to find the outlet and plug in the clippers, she avoided her reflection in the mirror. The clippers buzzed and vibrated in her hand. Carefully, she lifted them to her head and then, with a deep breath, she reluctantly looked into the mirror and held the clippers to her scalp. With a single-minded focus, she concentrated on the task at hand: shaving off the rest of her hair. It fluttered down to the towel, wispy locks of blond hair that—thanks to her foresight—were short instead of long. For some reason, that seemed to help ease the pain of shaving her own head.

  It was hard to see the back, and she only hoped that she didn’t leave any patches. But after she finished, when she ran her hand over her scalp, it just felt a little like day-old razor stubble.

  She stood there and took it all in. Her scalp was paler than the rest of her face. Without her hair, her face looked plump and more round. She noticed how her cheeks appeared puffier than usual and wondered if that had anything to do with the antinausea medicine. As if it wasn’t bad enough to have cancer, she was now bald and puffy.

  Swallowing, Frances yanked the cord from the socket and threw the clippers back under the sink, not even bothering to return them to the case. She’d worry about that later. Instead, she gathered up the towel with the remnants of her hair and carried it over to the toilet. She knew better than to throw it in the trash can. If Carrie or Andy wandered into her bathroom and saw it, they’d ask questions that she wasn’t prepared to answer just yet.

  When she flushed the toilet, she watched as her hair spun around before disappearing into the sewer.

  To her surprise, when it was all over, she didn’t feel a great sense of loss. Not like she had anticipated. She had thought she would mourn her hair; after all, it had been something that had defined her since she was a young girl and had refused to let her mother cut it before each new school year. The fact was there had been something liberating about having taken control of this aspect of cancer. She had removed her own hair. Instead of letting cancer remind her, one lost lock at a time, Frances had stood up and fought back. It had been her choice. And astonishingly, it made her feel stronger. Empowered.

  With a deep breath, she left the bathroom and hurried over to her dresser. In her bottom drawer, tucked behind her pajamas, she’d hidden the wig she’d purchased last week. After she pulled it out of its box, she gave it a little shake, then put it on and adjusted it with the sticky tape, just like the saleswoman had instructed. Then, she wandered across the room to Nicholas’s closet and hunted for an old baseball cap. Now, at least, Carrie wouldn’t be able to tell that she was wearing a wig.

  “Mom?” Andy yelled from downstairs.

  Frances stared at her reflection one last time before she called out, “Getting changed, Andy. What’s up?”

  “What time is dinner?”

  Frances smiled to herself. That very normal question—one she must have heard hundreds, if not thousands, of times—was why she was doing this. Keeping a sense of normalcy in the lives of her children. It was the one thing she didn’t have in her own life now, but she just wanted them to be happy.

  CHAPTER 13

  When she walked into the chemotherapy center, she felt as if everyone was staring at her. With her short wig and thinning eyebrows, she knew that, for the first time, she actually looked like a cancer patient, and the feeling m
ade her very self-conscious. Even though it was a wig and not a thinning or patchy head of hair, she could see that they knew. The nurses, the patients, the family members waiting for their loved ones—they all knew. To their trained eyes, it was easy to tell the difference between real hair and hair meant to hide the fact that she, too, had become part of the exclusive Cancer Club; no invitation needed to join, thank you very much. No discrimination here. Age, gender, ethnicity: none of this mattered. No one chose to join; instead, cancer chose its members. The Cancer Club might be open to all, yet it came with an exorbitant price tag attached.

  Of course, they weren’t really all staring at her. It was mostly in her imagination. Still, when some looked up to see who had walked in, she felt uncomfortable. Perhaps even vulnerable, a feeling she wanted to avoid at all costs.

  The Chemo Cocktail Lounge was unusually quiet for a Thursday afternoon. Frances walked past the nurses’ station and greeted Eddie. He smiled at her and held up his hand, indicating that he needed to finish something before he would take her vitals: temperature, weight, pulse, and blood pressure.

  Frances took another glance around and wondered why it had been so busy her first time. This time, however, the nurses were lingering around the main administration desk, chatting away as they plucked chocolates from an almost-empty Russell Stover box.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Snyder,” Eddie finally said as he motioned toward the chair. “How are you doing today?”

  She had barely sat down before he popped the thermometer into her mouth and asked her to roll up her sleeve.

  “Phf-ine,” she managed to mumble while attempting to keep the device held steady under her tongue. Why do they always do that? The dentists, the doctors, the nurses. Always sticking something in their patients’ mouths, then asking the same silly questions, expecting an intelligible answer. Or, perhaps, not expecting any answer at all. It was just part of the routine, she guessed.

  “Good, good. That’s just what we like to hear!” He smiled at her and began pressing buttons on the blood pressure machine.

  For an instant she found it amusing that “Phf-ine” was just what they liked to hear. Indeed, these people had become adept at interpreting medical grunts! A silly image crossed her mind: She visualized an austere classroom chock-full of newly recruited medical students, all wearing white medical gowns and stethoscopes, each one sitting in a chair with a thermometer stuck under their tongue. Eddie was standing in front of them, like an orchestra conductor, a huge scalpel in his right hand in place of a baton. At his prompt, they were all, in unison, repeating the same sentence, “Aheh hamm phf-ine,” over and over again.

  She might as well have answered, “The sky is blue,” and he probably wouldn’t even have noticed! But the vision made her relax a little, and she fought the urge to chuckle under her breath.

  While the sleeve was inflating and becoming tighter on her arm, Frances glanced around at the row of chairs that lined the back windows near where she sat. One was occupied by an elderly woman who looked sound asleep, perhaps due to the monotonous humming of the machine she was hooked up to. Another chair was occupied by a young man in his twenties, with an even younger woman seated by his side. Down the row, at the very back in the corner chair against the wall near the window outside of which a bird feeder hung, sat Madeline.

  And like the last time, she was alone.

  “Hmm.” Eddie pressed some more buttons on the blood pressure machine. “Let’s try this again.”

  She waited until he took the thermometer from her mouth before she asked, “Something wrong?”

  “No, no. It’s probably the machine. Acting up.” He winked at her. “As usual.”

  But when the machine beeped again, he frowned.

  “What is it, Eddie?” she asked with a little more urgency in her voice.

  “Your blood pressure is quite elevated, Mrs. Snyder. You feeling all right?”

  Truth was she had been feeling tired and worn-out for quite a few days now, even though the nausea had ended shortly after the third day following her first treatment, conveniently when Nicholas had departed for Chicago.

  “Fine, just fine,” she lied. “I . . . uh . . . I walked up the stairs instead of taking the elevator, though. Maybe that’s what did it?”

  He didn’t look quite convinced.

  “Why don’t you go and find a chair, Mrs. Snyder? We’ll take your blood pressure again in a little bit. See if it goes down.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He leaned forward and touched her knee. “It’s 195 over 100. That’s too high, Mrs. Snyder. So go relax a little and take some deep breaths. Let’s see if it’s better in a few minutes, after you rest from that flight of stairs and your pulse comes down a bit.”

  That wasn’t something she wanted to hear. Even though he didn’t say it, she knew that it could translate into a problem, something that would hinder her treatment.

  Despite not feeling social, Frances walked over to the empty chair next to Madeline. At least it was more comfortable than sitting next to a stranger. And perhaps Madeline might understand exactly what high blood pressure meant in relation to her treatment. The older woman’s eyes were shut as if she was asleep. Over her right shoulder, the chemotherapy pump churned, the toxins systematically pushing their way through the narrow plastic lines that ran to Madeline’s chest.

  If she had any luck, Madeline would sleep throughout the entire treatment and she wouldn’t be bothered with any social discourse. Yet, she couldn’t help but wonder why she had been so drawn to sit beside her if she wanted to avoid making conversation. Perhaps it was familiarity; it was the same chair she had sat in last time, and Frances tended to prefer the comforting feeling of routine. At work, she used to occupy the same stall in the women’s restroom, and on the few occasions it was unavailable, she found herself quite distraught by the thought of having to decide between waiting or taking another unfamiliar stall.

  “Ah, Mrs. Snyder!” a cheerful nurse called out as she practically bounced on the balls of her feet toward Frances. “How did everything go after the last treatment?”

  “And you are . . . ?”

  It was a pet peeve of Frances’s: people not introducing themselves, especially when they pretended to know who she was. Proper decorum always dictated that a person extend an introduction. That was what her mother had taught her.

  “Laura.” She didn’t stop working as she began hanging bags and checking the machine. “I noticed that you were here the week before last, but another nurse snatched up your case.”

  I’m a “case.”

  “Now why would she want to do that?” Frances asked, only partially trying to hide her sarcasm.

  Laura glanced over her shoulder at Frances and raised an eyebrow. For the first time, Frances really looked at the nurse and realized that she had a cheerful face, her big brown eyes illuminating her entire expression. Even her heart-shaped lips seemed full of life, an invitation for adventure.

  “Well, that is a good question, isn’t it? Perhaps she was just eager to meet you and get you started with treatment.” Laura paused and gave a mischievous smile to Frances. “That is our job, isn’t it?”

  Now it was Frances’s turn to wonder about the level of sarcasm in the nurse’s comment. From the looks of the people in the Chemo Lounge, there wasn’t much to know about the patients. They appeared tired, miserable, and weak. While admittance was by invitation only, it was an invite no one wanted to receive.

  As the nurse walked away to gather some more supplies for Frances’s treatment, Madeline stirred in the corner seat.

  “Back for more, eh?” she said with a small smile.

  “Couldn’t seem to stay away,” Frances quipped, her sarcasm somehow masked in humor, which caused Madeline to chuckle.

  “Better than the alternative,” Madeline said.

  Frances took a deep breath and turned to look at Madeline. “Mind if I ask you something?”

  “Seems like you just did.
”

  It took a second for Frances to understand, but when she did, she gave a small laugh.

  “Eddie said I have high blood pressure.”

  “Oh.” It came out like a whoosh of breath. “They won’t give you treatment if your blood pressure is too high. I would take some long deep breaths. Shut your eyes and try to think of pleasant things.” She paused. “That’s why I like the bird feeder, you know. Keeps me calm during all of this”—she explained while gesturing toward the machine and tubes—“this horrible stuff.”

  Taking Madeline’s advice, Frances leaned back in the chair and shut her eyes. She concentrated on her breathing, making certain each breath was long and deep. She couldn’t possibly put off her treatment. She had cleared her schedule and precooked four meals so that she could deal with any post-treatment sickness and side effects. Mentally, she had psyched herself up for facing round two. Any delay would be devastating to her psyche.

  “Is it OK if I ask you a question now?”

  Frances kept her eyes shut and nodded her head.

  “I’ve never seen anyone come here alone for their first chemotherapy treatment,” Madeline said. “In fact, most people always have someone with them.”

  Frances tried not to smile. “That’s not a question.”

  This time Madeline laughed.

  “But if you are pointing out that people usually have a support team with them, and I don’t, my comment would be that it seems you, too, are alone,” Frances said calmly, still trying to focus on her breathing. “You have family?”

  “A son.” The crisp manner in which Madeline said the word son made Frances open her eyes and look at her.

  “I take it he’s either not local or . . .”

  That was the moment when Madeline’s face changed, the sparkle in her eye fading and her smile disappearing. Gone was the look of concern that she had worn just a few seconds earlier. In its place was a look of sorrow.

  “It’s the ‘or,’ I’m afraid,” Madeline said softly and turned to look out the window. “He’s too busy.”