Five Days

One

I SAW THE cancer immediately. It was right there in front of me. As always, I found myself taking a sharp intake of breath as the realization hit: I am looking at the beginning of the end.

The cancer was shaped like a dandelion. Sometimes this sort of tumor looks like a cheap Christmas decoration — a five-and-dime star with ragged edges. This specific one was more like a minor-looking flower that had been denuded, stripped down to its seeds, but with an insidious, needle-like design. What radiologists call a ‘spiculated structure’.

Spiculated. When I heard that word for the first time I had to look it up. Discovered its origins were actually zoological: a spicule being ‘a small needle-like structure, in particular any of those making up the skeleton of a sponge’ (I’d never realized that sponges have skeletons). But there was an astronomical meaning as well: a short-lived jet of gas in the sun’s corona.

This last definition nagged at me for weeks. Because it struck me as so horribly apt. A spiculated cancer — like the one I was looking at right now — might have commenced its existence years, decades earlier. But only once it makes its presence known does it become something akin to the burst of flame that combusts everything in its path, demanding total attention. If the flame hasn’t been spotted and extinguished early enough, it will then decide that it isn’t a mere fiery jet stream; rather, a mini supernova which, in its final show of pyrotechnic force, will destroy the universe which contains it.

Certainly the spiculated species I was now looking at was well on its way to exploding — and, in doing so, ending the life of the person within whose lung it was now so lethally embedded.

Another horror to add to the ongoing catalog of horrors which are, in so many ways, the primary decor of my nine-to-five life.

And this day was turning out to be a doozy. Because, an hour before the spiculated cancer appeared on the screen in front of me, I had run a CT scan on a nine-year-old girl named Jessica Ward. According to her chart she’d been having a series of paralyzing headaches. Her physician had sent her to us in order to rule out any ‘neurological concerns’. which was doctor shorthand for ‘brain tumour’. Jessica’s dad was named Chuck; a quiet, hangdog man in his mid-thirties, with sad eyes and the sort of yellowing teeth that hint at a serious cigarette habit. He said that he was a welder at the Bath Iron Works.

‘Jessie’s ma left us two years ago,’ he told me as his daughter went into the dressing area we have off the cat scan room to change into a hospital gown.

‘She died?’ I asked.

‘I wish. The bitch — ’scuse my French — ran off with a guy she worked with at the Rite Aid Pharmacy in Brunswick. They’re livin’ in some trailer down in Bestin. That’s on the Florida Panhandle. Know what a friend of mine told me they call that part of the world down there? The Redneck Riviera. Jessie’s headaches started after her ma vanished. And she’s never once been back to see Jessie. What kind of mother is that?’

‘She’s obviously lucky to have a dad like you,’ I said, trying to somewhat undercut the terrible distress this man was in — and the way he was working so hard to mask his panic.

‘She’s all I got in the world, ma’am.’

‘My name’s Laura,’ I said.

‘And if it turns out that what she has is, like, serious. and doctors don’t send young girls in for one of these scans if they think it’s nothing. ’

‘I’m sure your physician is just trying to rule things out,’ I said, hearing my practiced neutral tone.

‘You’re taught to say stuff like that, aren’t you?’ he said, his tone displaying the sort of anger that I’ve so often seen arising to displace a great fear.

‘Actually, you’re right. We are trained to try to reassure and not say much. Because I’m a technologist, not a diagnostic radiologist.’

‘Now you’re using big words.’

‘I’m the person who operates the machinery, takes the pictures. The diagnostic radiologist is the doctor who will then look at the scan and see if there is anything there.’

‘So when can I talk to him?’

You can’t was the actual answer — because the diagnostic radiologist is always the behind-the-scenes man, analyzing the scans, the X-rays, the MRIs, the ultrasounds. But he rarely ever meets the patient.

‘Dr Harrild will be talking directly to Jessica’s primary-care physician — and I’m sure you’ll be informed very quickly if there is—’

‘Do they also teach you to talk like a robot?’

As soon as this comment was out of his mouth, the man was all contrite.

‘Hey, that was kind of wrong of me, wasn’t it?’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said, maintaining a neutral tone.

‘Now you’re all hurt.’

‘Not at all. Because I know how stressful and worrying this all must be for you.’

‘And now you’re reading the script again that they taught you to read.’

At that moment Jessica appeared out of the changing room, looking shy, tense, bewildered.

‘This gonna hurt?’ she asked me.

‘You have to get an injection that is going to send an ink into your veins in order for us to be able to see what’s going on inside of you. But the ink is harmless.’

‘And the injection?’ she asked, her face all alarmed.

‘Just a little prick in your arm and then it’s behind you.’

‘You promise?’ she asked, trying hard to be brave, yet still so much the child who didn’t fully understand why she was here and what these medical procedures were all about.

‘You be a real soldier now, Jess,’ her father said, ‘and we’ll get you that Barbie you want on the way home.’

‘Now that sounds like a good deal to me,’ I said, wondering if I was coming across as too cheerful and also knowing that — even after sixteen years as an RT — I still dreaded all procedures involving children. Because I always feared what I might see before anyone else. And because I so often saw terrible news.

‘This is just going to take ten, fifteen minutes, no more,’ I told Jessica’s father. ‘There’s a waiting area just down the walkway with coffee, magazines. ’

‘I’m goin’ outside for a bit,’ he said.

‘That’s ’cause you want a cigarette,’ Jessica said.

Her father suppressed a sheepish smile.

‘My daughter knows me too well.’

‘I don’t want my daddy dead of cancer.’

At that moment her father’s face fell — and I could see him desperately trying to control his emotions.

‘Let’s let your dad get a little air,’ I said, steering Jessica further into the scan room, then turning back to her father who had started to cry.

‘I know how hard this is,’ I said. ‘But until there is something to be generally concerned about. ’

He just shook his head and made for the door, fumbling in his shirt pocket for his cigarettes.

As I turned back inside I saw Jessica looking wide-eyed and afraid in the face of the CT scanner. I could understand Jessica’s concern. It was a formidable piece of medical machinery, stark, ominous. There was a large hoop, attached to two science-fiction-style containers of inky fluid. In front of the hoop was a narrow bed that was a bit like a bier (albeit with a pillow). I’d seen adults panic at the sight of the thing. So I wasn’t surprised that Jessica was daunted by it all.

‘I have to go into that?’ she said, eyeing the door as if she wanted to make a run for it.

‘It’s nothing, really. You lie on the bed there. The machine lifts you up into the hoop. The hoop takes pictures of the things the doctor needs pictures of. and that’s it. We’ll be done in a jiffy.’

‘And it won’t hurt?’

‘Let’s get you lying down first,’ I said, leading her to the bed.

‘I really want my daddy,’ she said.

‘You’ll be with your daddy in just a few minutes.’

‘You promise?’

‘I promise.’

She got herself onto the bed.

I came over, holding a tube attached to the capsule containing all that inky liquid, covering with my hand the intravenous needle still encased in its sterilized packaging. Never show a patient an IV needle. Never.

‘All right, Jessica. I’m not going to tell you a big fib and say that getting a needle put into your arm is going to be painless. But it will just last a moment and then it will be behind you. After that, no pain at all.’

‘You promise.’

‘I promise — though you might feel a little hot for a few minutes.’

‘But not like I’m burning up.’

‘I can assure you you’ll not feel that.’

‘I want my daddy. ’

‘The sooner we do this, the sooner you’ll be with him. Now here’s what I want you to do. I want you to close your eyes and think of something really wonderful. You have a pet you love, Jessica?’

‘I have a dog.’

‘Eyes closed now, please.’

She did as instructed.

‘What kind of dog is he?’

‘A cocker spaniel. Daddy got him for my birthday.’

I swabbed the crook of her arm with a liquid anesthetic.

‘The needle going in yet?’ she asked.

‘Not yet, but you didn’t tell me your dog’s name.’

‘Tuffy.’

‘And what’s the silliest thing Tuffy ever did?’

‘Ate a bowlful of marshmallows.’

‘How did he manage to do that?’

‘Daddy had left them out on the kitchen table, ’cause he loves roasting them in the fireplace during Christmas. And then, out of nowhere, Tuffy showed up and. ’

Jessica started to giggle. That’s when I slipped the needle in her arm. She let out a little cry, but I kept her talking about her dog as I used tape to hold it in place. Then, telling her I was going to step out of the room for a few minutes, I asked:

‘Is the needle still hurting?’

‘Not really, but I can feel it there.’

‘That’s normal. Now, I want you to lie very still and take some very deep breaths. And keep your eyes closed and keep thinking about something funny like Tuffy eating those marshmallows. Will you do that for me, Jessica?’

She nodded, her eyes firmly closed. I left the scan room as quietly and quickly as I could, moving into what we call the technical room. It’s a booth with a bank of computers and a swivel chair and an extended control panel. Having prepped the patient I was now about to engage in what is always the trickiest aspect of any scan: getting the timing absolutely right. As I programed in the data necessary to start the scan I felt the usual moment of tension that, even after all these years, still accompanies each of these procedures: a tension that is built around the fact that, from this moment on, timing is everything. In a moment I will hit a button. It will trigger the high-speed injection system that will shoot 80 milligrams of high-contrast iodine into Jessica’s veins. After that I have less than fifty seconds — more like forty-two seconds, given her small size — to start the scan. The timing here is critical. The iodine creates a contrast that allows the scan to present a full, almost circular image of all bone and soft tissue and internal organs. But the iodine first goes to the heart, then enters the pulmonary arteries and the aorta before being disseminated into the rest of the body. Once it is everywhere you have reached the Venus phase of the procedure — when all veins are freshly enhanced with the contrast. Begin the scan a few critical seconds before the Venus phase and you will be scanning ahead of the contrast — which means you will not get the images that the radiologist needs to make a thorough and accurate diagnosis. Scan too late and the contrast might be too great. If I fail to get the timing right the patient will have to go through the entire procedure again twelve hours later (at the very minimum) — and the radiologist will not be pleased. Which is why there is always a moment of tension and doubt that consumes me in these crucial seconds before every scan. Have I prepped everything correctly? Have I judged the relationship between the diffusion of the iodine and the patient’s physique? Have I left anything to chance?

I fear mistakes in my work. Because they count. Because they hurt people who are already frightened and dealing with the great unknown that is potential illness.

I especially fear moments when I have a child on that table, that bier. Because if the news is bad, if the images that emerge on the screen in front of me point up something catastrophic.

Well, I always absorb it, always assume a mask of professional neutrality. But children. children with cancers. it still pierces me. Being a mom makes it ten times worse. Because I am always thinking: Say it was Ben or Sally? Even though they are now both in their teens, both beginning to find their way in the world, they will always remain my kids — and, as such, the permanent open wound. That’s the curious thing about my work. Though I present to my patients, my colleagues, my family, an image of professional detachment — Sally once telling a friend who’d come over after school: ‘My mom looks at tumors all day and always keeps smiling. how weird is that?’ — recently it has all begun to unsettle me. Whereas in the past I could look at every type of internal calamity on my screens and push aside the terribleness that was about to befall the person on the table, over the past few months I’ve found it has all started to clog up my head. Just last week I ran a mammogram on a local schoolteacher who works at the same middle school that Sally and Ben attended, and who, I know, finally got married a year ago and told me with great excitement how she’d gotten pregnant at the age of forty-one. When I saw that nodule embedded in her left breast and could tell immediately it was Stage Two (something Dr Harrild confirmed later), I found myself driving after work down to Pemaquid Point and heading out to the empty beach, oblivious to the autumn cold, and crying uncontrollably for a good ten minutes, wondering all the time why it was only now so getting to me.

That night, over dinner with Dan, I mentioned that I had run a mammogram on someone my own age today (this being a small town, I am always absolutely scrupulous about never revealing the names of the patients who I’ve seen). ‘And when I saw the lump on the screen and realized it was cancerous I had to take myself off somewhere because I kind of lost it.’

‘What stage?’ he asked.

I told him.

‘Stage Two isn’t Stage Four, right?’ Dan said.

‘It still might mean a mastectomy, especially the way the tumor is abutting the lymph nodes.’

‘You’re quite the doctor,’ he said, his tone somewhere between complimentary and ironic.

‘The thing is, this isn’t the first time I’ve lost it recently. Last week there was this sad little woman who works as a waitress up at some diner on Route 1 and who had this malignancy on her liver. And again I just fell apart.’

‘You’re being very confessional tonight.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Nothing, nothing,’ he said, but again with a tone that — like much to do with Dan right now — was so hard to read.

Dan is Dan Warren. My husband of twenty-one years. A man who has been out of work for the past twenty-one very long months. And someone whose moods now swing wildly. As in, having just made that somewhat catty comment he followed it up with:

‘Hey, even the best fighter pilots lose their nerve from time to time.’

‘I’m hardly a fighter pilot.’

‘But you’re the best RT on the staff. Everyone knows that.’

Except me. And certainly not now, positioning myself in front of the bank of computer screens, staring out at Jessica on the table, her eyes tightly shut, a discernible tremor on her lips, her face wet with tears. A big part of me wanted to run in and comfort her. But I also knew it would just prolong the agony; that it was best to get this behind her. So clicking on the microphone that is connected to a speaker in the scan room, I said:

‘Jessica, I know this is all very spooky and strange. But I promise you that the rest of the procedure will be painless — and it will all be over in just a few minutes. OK?’

She nodded, still crying.

‘Now shut your eyes and think about Tuffy and. ’

I hit the button that detonated the automatic injection system. As I did so a timer appeared on one of the screens — and I turned my vision immediately to Jessica, her cheeks suddenly very red as the iodine contrast hit her bloodstream and raised her body temperature by two degrees. The scan program now kicked in, as the bed was mechanically raised upwards. Jessica shuddered as this first vertical movement startled her. I grabbed the microphone:

‘Nothing to worry about, Jessica. Just please keep very still.’

To my immense relief she did exactly as instructed. The bed reached a level position with the circular hoop. Twenty-four seconds had elapsed. The bed began to shift backwards into the hoop. Thirty-two seconds when it halted, the hoop encircling her small head.

‘OK, Jessica — you’re doing great. Just don’t move.’

Thirty-six seconds. Thirty-eight. My finger was on the scan button. I noticed it trembling. Forty-one. And.

I pressed it. The scan had started. There was no accompanying noise. It was silent, imperceptible to the patient. Instinctually I shut my eyes, then opened them immediately as the first images appeared on the two screens in front of me, showing the left and right spheres of the brain. Again I snapped my eyes shut, unable to bear the shadow, the discoloration, the knotty tubercle that my far too-trained eye would spot immediately and which would tear me apart.

But professionalism trumped fear. My eyes sprang open. And in front of me I saw.

Nothing.

Or, at least, that’s what my first agitated glance showed me.

Nothing.

I now began to scrutinize the scan with care — my eyes following every contour and hidden crevasse in both cerebral hemispheres, like a cop scouring all corners of a crime scene, looking for some hidden piece of evidence that might change the forensic picture entirely.

Nothing.

I went over the scan a third time, just to cover my tracks, make certain I hadn’t overlooked anything, while simultaneously ensuring that the contrast was the correct level and the imaging of the standard that Dr Harrild required.

Nothing.

I exhaled loudly, burying my face in my hand, noticing for the first time just how rapidly my heart was pounding against my chest. The relief that Jessica’s brain showed no signs of anything sinister was enormous. But the very fact that my internal stress meter had shot into the deep red zone. this troubled me. Because it made me wonder: Is this what happens when, over the years, you’ve forced yourself to play a role that you privately know runs contrary to your true nature; when the mask you’ve worn for so long no longer fits and begins to hang lopsidedly, and you fear people are going to finally glimpse the scared part of you that you have so assiduously kept out of view?

Nothing.

I took another steadying breath, telling myself I had things to be getting on with. So I downloaded this first set of scans to Dr Harrild — whose office was just a few steps away from the CT room. I also simultaneously dispatched them into the PACS system — that’s the Picture Archiving and Communication System — which is the central technological storage area in Portland for our region of the state (known by its code name, Maine 1). All scans and X-rays must, by law, be kept in a PACS system for future reference and to ensure they are never mixed up, misplaced, assigned to the wrong patient. It also means that if a radiologist or oncologist needs to call up a specific set of patient scans — or compare them with others on file — they can be accessed with the double-click of a mouse.

The images dispatched, I began running a second set of scans to have as back-up, to compare contrast levels, and to double-check that the imaging hadn’t missed anything. Usually, if the scans in the first set are clear, I relax about the second go-around. But today I heard a little voice whispering at me: ‘Say you got it all wrong the first time. say you missed the tumor entirely.’

I grabbed the mike.

‘Just a few more minutes, Jessica. And you have been just terrific. So keep lying still and. ’

The second scan now filled the two screens. I stared ahead, fully expecting to see proof of my corroding professionalism in front of me as a concealed nodule appeared in some ridge of her cerebellum. But again.

Nothing.

That’s the greatest irony of my work. Good news is all predicated on the discovery of nothing. It must be one of the few jobs in the world where ‘nothing’ provides satisfaction, relief, the reassertion of the status quo.

A final scan of the scan.

Nothing.

I hit the ‘send’ button. Off went this second set of scans to Dr Harrild and the PACS storage centre. I picked up the mike again and told Jessica we were done, but she would have to remain very still as the bed was brought back to ground level again.

Ten minutes later, dressed again and sucking on a lollipop, Jessica was reunited with her father. As I brought her into the waiting room, where he sat slumped, anxious, he was immediately on his feet, trying to read me the way a man on trial tries to read the faces of the jurors filing back into court with a verdict already cast in stone. Jessica ran over to him, throwing her arms around him.

‘Look, I got four lollipops,’ she said, holding up the three untouched ones in her hand and pointing to the one in her mouth.

‘You deserve them,’ I said, ‘because you were such a brave, good patient. You would have been proud of her, sir.’

‘I’m always proud of my daughter,’ he said, picking her up and putting her on a bench, asking her to sit there for a moment, ‘while this nice lady and I have a talk.’

Motioning for me to follow him outside into the brisk autumn morning, he asked me the question I always know is coming after a scan:

‘Did you see anything?’

‘I’m certain the diagnostic radiologist, Dr Harrild, will be in contact with your primary-care physician this afternoon,’ I said, cognizant of the fact that I also sounded like a scripted automaton.

‘But you saw the scans, you know—’

‘Sir, I am not a trained radiologist — so I cannot offer a professional opinion.’

‘And I don’t design the ships I work on, but I can tell when something’s wrong if I see it in front of me. Because I have years of on-the-job experience. Just like you. So you now know, before anyone, if there is a tumor in my daughter’s head.’

‘Sir, you need to understand — I can neither legally nor ethically offer my opinion on the scans.’

‘Well, there’s a first time for everything. Please, ma’am. I’m begging you. I’ve got to know what you know.’

‘Please understand, I am sympathetic. ’

‘I want an answer.’

‘And I won’t give you one. Because if I tell you good news and it turns out not to be good news. ’

That startled him.

‘Are you telling me there’s good news?’

This is a strategy I frequently use when the scans show nothing, but the diagnostic radiologist has yet to study them and give them the all-clear. I cannot say what I think — because I don’t have the medical qualifications. Even though my knowledge of such things is quite extensive those are the hierarchical rules and I accept them. But I can, in my own way, try to calm fears when, I sense, there is clinical evidence that they are ungrounded.

‘I’m telling you that I cannot give you the all-clear. That is Dr Harrild’s job.’

‘But you think it’s “all-clear”.’

I looked at him directly.

‘I’m not a doctor. So if I did give you the all-clear I’d be breaking the rules. Do you understand, sir?’

He lowered his head, smiling, yet also fighting back tears.

‘I get it. and thank you. Thank you so much.’

‘I hope the news is good from Dr Harrild.’

Five minutes later I was knocking on Dr Harrild’s door.

‘Come in,’ he shouted.

Patrick Harrild is forty years old. He’s tall and lanky and has a fuzzy beard. He always dresses in a flannel shirt from L.L.Bean, chinos, and brown desert boots. When he first arrived here three years ago, some unkind colleagues referred to him as ‘the geek’ — because he isn’t exactly the most imposing or outwardly confident of men. In fact he does veer towards a reserve which many people falsely read as timidity. Before Dr Harrild the resident diagnostic radiologist was an old-school guy named Peter Potholm. He always came across as God the Father, intimidated all underlings, and would happily become unpleasant if he felt his authority was being challenged. I was always ultra-polite and professional with him — while simultaneously letting him play the role of Absolute Monarch in our little world. I got along with Dr Potholm, whereas three of the RTs actually left during his fourteen-year tenure (which ended when age finally forced him to retire). Dr Harrild couldn’t have been more different than ‘Pope Potholm’ (as the hospital staff used to refer to him). Not only is he unfailingly polite and diffident, he also asks opinions of others. But he did quietly engineer a staff member’s early retirement when she messed up five scans in a row. He’s a very decent and reasonable man, Dr Harrild — and an absolutely first-rate diagnostician. The diffidence and the slight social awkwardness mask reinforced steel.

‘Hey, Laura,’ Dr Harrild said as I opened his office door. ‘Good news on the Jessica Ward front. It looks very all-clear to me.’

‘That is good news.’

‘Unless, of course, you spotted something I didn’t.’

Peter Potholm would have walked barefoot across hot coals rather than ask the medical opinion of a lowly RT. Whereas Dr Harrild.

‘I saw nothing worrying or sinister,’ I said.

‘Glad to hear it.’

‘Would you mind talking to Jessica’s father now? The poor man. ’

‘Is he in the waiting area?’

I nodded.

‘We have Ethel Smythe in next, don’t we?’ he asked.

‘That’s right.’

‘Judging by the shadow on her lung last time. ’

He let the sentence hang there. He didn’t need to finish it — as we had both looked at the X-ray I’d taken of Ethel Smythe’s lungs a few days earlier. And we’d both seen the very sinister shadow that covered a significant corner of the upper left ventricle — a shadow which made Dr Harrild pick up the phone to Ethel Smythe’s physician and tell him that a CT scan was urgently required.

‘Anyway, I will go give Mr Ward the good news about his daughter.’

Fifteen minutes later I was prepping Ethel Smythe. She was a woman about my age. Divorced, No children. A cafeteria lady in the local high school. Significantly overweight. And a significant smoker, as in twenty a day for the past twenty-three years (it was all there on her chart).

She was also relentlessly chatty — trying to mask her nervousness during the X-ray with an ongoing stream of talk, all of which was about the many details of her life. The house she had up in Waldeboro which was in urgent need of a new roof, but which she couldn’t afford. Her seventy-nine-year-old mother who never had a nice word for her. A sister in Michigan who was married to ‘the meanest man this side of the Mississippi’. The fact that her physician, Dr Wesley, was ‘a dreamboat, always so kind and reassuring’, and how he told her he ‘just wanted “to rule a few things out”, and he said that to me in such a lovely, kind voice. well, there can’t be anything wrong with me, can there?’

The X-ray said otherwise — and here she was, now changed into the largest hospital gown we had, her eyes wild with fear, talking, talking, talking as she positioned herself on the table, wincing as I inserted the IV needle in her arm, telling me repeatedly:

‘Surely it can’t be anything. Surely that shadow Dr Wesley told me about was an error, wasn’t it?’

‘As soon as our diagnostic radiologist has seen the scan we’ll be taking today—’

‘But you saw the X-ray. And you don’t think it’s anything bad, do you?’

‘I never said that, ma’am.’

‘Please call me Ethel. But you would have told me if it had been bad.’

‘That’s not my role in all this.’

‘Why can’t you tell me everything is fine? Why?’

Her eyes were wet, her voice belligerent, angry. I put my hand on her shoulder.

‘I know how frightening this all is. I know how difficult it is not knowing what is going on — and how being called back for a scan like this—’

‘How can you know? How?’

I squeezed her shoulder.

‘Ethel, please, let’s just get this behind you and then—’

‘They always told me it was a stupid habit. Marv — my ex-husband. Dr Wesley. Jackie — that’s my sister. Always said I was dancing with death. And now. ’

A huge sob rose in her throat.

‘I want you to shut your eyes, Ethel, and concentrate on your breathing and—’

More sobs.

‘I’m going to step away now and get all this underway,’ I said. ‘Just keep breathing slowly. And the scan will be finished before you—’

‘I don’t want to die.’

This last statement came out as a whisper. Though I’d heard, over the years, other patients utter this, the sight of this sad, frightened woman had me biting down on my lip and fighting tears. and yet again silently appalled at all this new-found vulnerability. Fortunately Ethel had her eyes firmly shut, so she couldn’t see my distress. I hurried into the technical room. I reached for the microphone and asked Ethel to remain very still. I set the scan in motion. In the seconds before the first images appeared on the screen I snapped my eyes shut, opening them again to see.

Cancer. Spiculated in shape, and from what I could discern, already metastasized into the other lung and the lymphatic system.

Half an hour later Dr Harrild confirmed what I’d seen.

‘Stage Four,’ he said quietly. We both knew what that meant — especially with this sort of tumor in the lungs. Two to three months at best. As cancer deaths go, this one was never less than horrible.

‘Where is she right now?’ Dr Harrild asked.

‘She insisted on going back to work,’ I said, remembering how she’d told me she had to hurry back after the scan because the school lunch she’d be serving started at midday, and ‘with all the cutbacks happening now I don’t want to give my boss an excuse to fire me’.

Recalling this I felt myself getting shaky again.

‘You OK, Laura?’ Dr Harrild asked me, clearly studying me with care. Immediately I wiped my eyes and let the facade of steely detachment snap into place again.

‘Fine,’ I said, hearing the enforced crispness in my voice.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘at least the little girl’s news was good.’

‘Yes, there’s that.’

‘All in a day’s work, eh?’

‘Yes,’ I said quietly. ‘All in a day’s work.’

Two

PEMAQUID POINT. A short stretch of sand — no more than a quarter-mile long — facing the open waters of the Atlantic. The ‘point’ is more of a cove: rocky, rugged, fringed on either side by vacation homes that are simple, but clearly upscale. Ostentation is never liked in this corner of Maine — so even those ‘from away’ (as anyone not born in the state is called) know better than to throw up the sort of garish shows of money that seem to be accepted elsewhere.

In Maine so much is kept out of sight.

I had the beach to myself. It was three-eighteen in the afternoon. A perfect October day. A hard blue sky. A hint of impending chill in the air. The light — already beginning to decrease wattage at this hour — still luminous. Maine. I’ve lived here all my life. Born here. Raised here. Educated here. Married here. All forty-two years I’ve had to date rooted in this one spot. How did that happen? How did I allow myself to stand so still? And why have so many people I know also talked themselves into limited horizons?

Maine. I come down to this point all the time. It’s a refuge for me. Especially as it reminds me of the fact that I am surrounded by a natural beauty that never ceases to humble me. Then there is the sea. When I was in a book group we worked our way through Moby-Dick two years ago. A retired navy woman named Krystal Orr wondered out loud why so many writers seemed to be drawn to the sea as a metaphor for so much to do with life. I heard myself saying: ‘Maybe it’s because, when you’re by the sea, life doesn’t seem so limited. You’re looking out at infinite possibilities.’ To which Krystal added: ‘And the biggest possibility of them all is the possibility of escape.’

Was that woman reading my mind? Isn’t that what I was always thinking as I came out here and faced the Atlantic — the fact that there is a world beyond the one behind me now? When I looked out at the water my back was turned to all that was my life. I could dwell in the illusion of elsewhere.

But then there was the distinct bing of my cellphone, bringing me back to the here-and-now, telling me that someone had just sent me a text.

Immediately I was scrambling in my bag for my phone, as I was certain that the text was from my son Ben.

Ben is nineteen; a sophomore at the University of Maine in Farmington. He’s majoring in visual art there — a fact that drives my husband Dan just a little crazy. They’ve never been able to share much. We’re all products of the forces that shaped us, aren’t we? Dan was raised poor in Aroostook County; the son of a part-time lumberman who drank too much and never really knew how to spell the word r-e-s-p-o-n-s-i-b-i-l-i-t-y. But he also loved his son, even if he often thought nothing of lashing out at him while tanked. Dan grew up both adoring and fearing his dad — and always trying to be the tough outdoorsman that his father considered himself to be. The fact that Dan himself rarely touches alcohol — and looks askance at me if I dare to have a second glass of wine — speaks volumes about the lasting trauma of his dad’s considerable drink-fueled furies. He privately knows his own father was a weak, cowardly little man who, like all bullies, used brutality to mask his own self-loathing. As such, I’ve tried to talk to Dan on many occasions about the fact that he is a much better person than his father — and that he should extend his innate decency to his son, whatever about their polar differences. It’s not as if Dan is in any way cruel or hostile towards Ben. He shows only nominal interest in him, and refuses to explain to me why he treats his only son as a stranger.

Only recently, after Ben was written up in the Portland Phoenix as a young artist to watch — on the basis of a collage he had exhibited at the Portland Museum of Art, which turned ‘the deconstructed remnants’ of lobster pots into ‘a chilling vision of modern incarceration’ (or, at least, that’s what the critic in the Phoenix called it), Dan asked me if I thought Ben was, in any way, ‘disturbed’? I tried to mask my horror at this question, instead asking: ‘What on earth makes you think that?’

‘Well, just look at that damn collage which all those smarty-pants down in Portland think is so fantastic.’

‘People respond to the piece because it is provocative, and uses something indigenous to Maine — a lobster pot — as a way of—’

‘“Indigenous”,’ Dan said with a decided sneer. ‘You and your big words again.’

‘Why are you being so hurtful?’

‘I’m just voicing an opinion. But go on and tell me I’m shooting my mouth off again. And this is the reason I’m still out of work twenty-one months after—’

‘Unless you were keeping something from me, you didn’t lose your job for saying the sort of inappropriate things you’re saying now.’

‘So I’m also inappropriate, am I? Unlike our “brilliant” son. Maine’s next Picasso.’

Ever since he’d lost his job Dan had begun to increasingly display flashes of unkindness. Though an apology for this last harsh comment was immediately forthcoming (‘There I go again, and I really don’t know why you put up with me’) the effect was, yet again, corrosive. Even if these momentary lapses only arose twice a month, they were coupled with the way Dan was increasingly withdrawing into himself — and refusing to share any of the understandable anger he felt about being laid off. The result was that things just seemed askew at home. I can’t say ours was ever the most romantic or passionate of marriages (not that I had anything since my marriage to compare it to). But we had rubbed along for years in a reasonable, stable way. Until the lay-off that suddenly opened up a dark recess which seemed to grow larger with each ensuing month when Dan was stuck at home, wondering if his career would ever be resuscitated again.

What I sensed most unsettled Dan now about his son was the fact that he was, at the age of nineteen, already getting recognition for his work. To be chosen to exhibit in the Young Maine Artists show at the Portland Museum of Art, to be just one of two college students included in the exhibition, to have a critic call him innovative and a talent to watch. All right, I know my maternal pride is talking here. But still it’s quite an achievement. And Ben is such a thoughtful, considerate, and wonderfully quirky young man — and one who just wants his father’s love and approval. But Dan simply can’t see that. Instead, from hints dropped here and there, it’s clear that he’s quietly uncomfortable with the fact that the boy he always wrote off as different, weird, not the sort of son he expected, is very much coming into his own — and being publicly praised for that. I often tell myself that once Dan finds a good job again, all will be well. Just as I simultaneously think: If only an instant fix could change everything.

Bing.

More pips, informing me that this newly arrived text was demanding my attention. I now had the phone in my hand and was squinting at the screen, the sunlight blurring the message. Cupping my hand around it I could make out the following words:

Please call me now. Ben

Immediately I felt anxiety coursing everywhere within me. The same anxiety that now hits whenever Ben sends me one of these messages. My son is currently in a somewhat dark place. From the outside — if you just look objectively at the facts — it might seem like much ado about a silly romance. Nine months ago Ben met a young woman named Allison Fell. Like him she’s studying visual art at Farmington. Her father is a big-deal lawyer in Portland. They live in one of those big houses that hug the coast in Cape Elizabeth — the most exclusive suburb of the city. I gather that her parents were wildly disappointed when she didn’t get into a variety of ultra-prestigious colleges (‘I was never that into studying,’ she told me) and had to ‘make do’ with U Maine Farmington (which has actually become quite a respected liberal arts college, despite the State U tag). She’s relatively pretty and seriously bohemian; the sort of nineteen-year-old who dresses all the time in black, keeps her long nails also painted black, and wears her elbow-length black hair in an elaborate braid. I often think she targeted Ben because he was the most talented of the small group of young visual artists at Farmington and because he was so ‘cute and vulnerable’. For Ben, the fact that this very outgoing, very confident, very flamboyant, rather rich young woman wanted him. well, considering how in high school he was girlfriend-less and often considered himself ‘something of a freak’, he was just completely overwhelmed by Allison’s desire for him. Just as I’m pretty sure she also introduced him to the pleasures of sex.

All this started in January of this year — though Ben told me nothing about it until Easter when he was back from college. He asked if we could go out to Moody’s Diner for lunch. There, over grilled cheese sandwiches, he informed me, in such a shy, hesitating way, that he’d met someone. His difficulty in articulating this — the way he also said, ‘Please don’t tell Dad. I don’t think he’ll like her’ — filled my heart with such love and worry for him. Because I could see that he was in an unknown territory and rather deluged by it all.

‘What do you feel exactly for Allison?’ I asked him at the time.

‘I want to marry her,’ he blurted out, then blushed a deep red.

‘I see,’ I said, trying to sound as neutral as possible. ‘And does Allison want this?’

‘Absolutely. She said I am the love of her life.’

‘Well. that’s lovely. Truly lovely. But. you’ve been together how long?’

‘Ninety-one days.’

‘I see,’ I said again, thinking: Oh my God, he knows the exact number of days and maybe even the exact number of hours.

‘First love is always so. surprising,’ I said. ‘You really cannot believe it. And while I certainly don’t want to rain on your parade. ’

Oh God, why did I use that clichй?

‘. but. all I’m saying to you, is — how wonderful! Just give it all a little time.’

‘I love her, Mom. and she loves me.’

‘Well. ’

There was so much I wanted to say. and so much I realized I couldn’t say. Except:

‘I’m so happy for you.’

We met Allison once. Poor Ben was so nervous, and Dan asked a lot of leading questions about how much seafrontage her parents had in Cape Elizabeth, and Allison was looking around our rather simple home and smiling to herself. Meanwhile I was trying to will everyone to relax and like each other, even if I knew this was downright impossible. I didn’t like the way she was so deliberately tactile with Ben, stroking his thigh with her hand at one point in full view of both Dan and myself, whispering things in his ear (she may think herself a Goth, but she behaves like an adolescent), and playing on his evident neediness. All right, maybe I was being far too maternal/cautious — but what worried me most here was that Ben was so in love with being in love. How could I explain to him that sometimes we project onto others that which our heart so wants. As such, we aren’t seeing the other person at all.

Dan told me after the dinner:

‘She’ll drop him like a hot potato the moment she’s decided he’s outlived his interest to her.’

‘Maybe you should have a talk with him about—’

‘About what? The kid never listens to me. And he finds me so damn conservative, so Republican. ’

‘Just talk with him, Dan. He really needs your support.’

To my husband’s credit the next time Ben was home for a weekend from college they did spend much of the afternoon raking leaves in our garden and talking. Afterwards Ben said that his father seemed genuinely interested in knowing how he felt about Allison and just how serious it was. ‘And he didn’t lecture me about anything.’

Then, just six weeks ago, I got a phone call early one morning from the college. Ben had been found by a campus security officer in the middle of the night beneath a tree near his dormitory, oblivious to the pouring rain that had been cascading down for hours. He was brought to the college nurse, diagnosed with a bad chill (thank God it was only the tail end of August) and sent back to his dorm room. After that Ben refused to get out of bed, refused to speak with anyone. When this carried on for two days his roommate did the smart thing and alerted the college authorities. A doctor was called to Ben’s bedside. When he didn’t respond to the doctor’s entreaties to speak or even make eye contact with him Ben was transferred to the psychiatric wing of the local hospital.

That’s when Dan and I both rushed up to Farmington. When we reached the infirmary and Ben saw us, he turned away, hiding his head under a pillow, refusing to engage whatsoever with us, despite the nurse on duty asking him to at least acknowledge his parents’ presence in the room.

I was doing my best to keep my emotions in check, but Dan actually had to leave the ward he was so upset. I found him outside, smoking one of the three cigarettes he still smokes a day, his eyes welling up with tears, clearly so unsettled by the psychological state of his son. When I put my arms around him he briefly buried his head in my shoulder, then shrugged off my embrace, embarrassed by the outward sign of emotion. Rubbing his eyes, sucking in a deep lungful of smoke, he said:

‘I want to kill that little rich bitch.’

I said nothing. Except:

‘He’ll be OK, he’ll get through this.’

The psychiatrist on duty — a large, formidable woman named Dr Claire Allen — told us later that day:

‘I suppose you are aware of the fact that Ben’s girlfriend took up with someone else just a few days ago. My advice to you is to give him a little space right now. Let him start talking with me over the next few days. Let me help him find his way to an easier place — and then I’m certain he’ll want to talk to you both.’

To Dr Allen’s credit she phoned me every few days to update me on his progress — though she also informed me that the information she was providing me with was ‘very generalized’ so as not to breach patient/doctor confidentiality. As such she would never go into anything that was discussed during their sessions. To Dan’s credit he was eager to hear all the developments from Farmington and seemed relieved to discover that Ben was talking and ‘genuinely wants to get better’ (to quote Dr Allen’s direct words). He left the hospital after a week. But it was a full three weeks before Ben returned to classes and before Dr Allen gave us the all-clear to see him. On the day in question Dan had a first interview for that job in Augusta, so I went up on my own to the college. I met Dr Allen alone in her office. She pronounced herself pleased with Ben’s progress, telling me that, though still rather vulnerable, he seemed to have come to terms with what had befallen him and was having two sessions a week with her to ‘talk through a lot of things’.

‘I have to say that, without revealing too much of what Ben told me, he still does have a great deal to work through. I know all about him being chosen for that big exhibition in Portland. But like so many creative people he is also wracked by considerable doubt — especially when it comes to the issue of self-esteem. He has told me he is very close to you.’

‘I like to think that,’ I said, also noting her professional silence on the subject of his father.

‘There’s a sister, isn’t there?’

‘That’s right, Sally.’

‘They are rather different, aren’t they?’

Understatement of the year. If Ben is creative and withdrawn and tentative about himself, yet also given to thinking outside the box, then Sally is his diametric opposite. She is wildly outgoing, wildly confident. Dan adores her, as she adores her dad — though his testiness has been getting to her recently. My own relationship with Sally is a little more complicated. Part of this, I think, has to do with the usual stuff that adolescent girls (she’s seventeen) have with their moms. But the other part — the part that troubles me — stems from the fact that we are, in so many ways, such profoundly different people. Sally is Ms Popularity at her high school. She has worked hard at this role, as she truly cares about being liked. She is very all-American girl. Tall, clean-limbed, sandy-haired, always fresh-faced and well scrubbed, with great teeth. Her image means so much to her — to the point where she is already obsessively working out two hours a day and spends at least forty-five minutes every night ensuring that her face is blemish-free. She uses teeth-whitening strips to make certain that her smile is electrifying. No wonder she has half the football team chasing after her, though her current steady, Brad, is the school’s baseball star pitcher. He’s also something of a politician in the making who, I sense, sees Sally as nothing more than a very good-looking girl to have on his arm. Sally knows this too. When Brad was admitted early decision to Dartmouth a few weeks ago, I found her crying in our living room after school. In a rare moment, she confided in me:

‘He’ll be in that fancy Ivy League college in New Hampshire and I’ll be up in Orono at stupid U Maine.’

‘U Maine is where I went.’

‘Yeah, but you could have gone anywhere you wanted to.’

‘U Maine offered me a full scholarship. My parents didn’t have any money and—’

‘Well, if I had the grades to get into Dartmouth, would we have the money to—?’

‘We would find the money,’ I said, sounding a little tetchy on this subject, as Sally will sometimes bemoan the fact that we have to live so carefully right now — though, thankfully, she only targets me for these comments, as she knows it would devastate her father to hear his much-adored daughter going on about the lack of family capital. But she also chooses me to vent her frustration to about most things to do with her life — especially the fact that she wasn’t born into a family of Wall Street big shots. For Sally there are always points of comparison. Brad’s father made a lot of money opening a small chain of big box hardware stores around the state — but still decided to send his very ambitious youngest son to the local public school (I like that fact). Brad’s parents live in a big waterfront house with all sorts of deluxe fittings (a sauna, a jacuzzi, an indoor gym, an outdoor pool, plasma televisions in every room). They now also have a home in ‘an exclusive gated development’ (Sally’s exact words) near Tampa. She spent a week with Brad down at their Florida spread, and went out with Brad and his father on the family cabin cruiser. And Brad already has his very own ‘cool’ car: a Mini Cooper. And.

I truly love my daughter. I admire her optimism, her verve, her forward momentum. But I also wonder often what she’s driving towards.

‘I know Brad’s going to drop me as soon as we graduate next summer and we both head to college. Because he thinks of me as his high-school fun, nothing more. And he’s after somebody who can be a future senator’s wife.’

‘Is that what you want to be — a senator’s wife?’

‘Do I hear disappointment in your voice, Mom?’

‘You never disappoint me, Sally.’

‘I wish I could believe that.’

‘I don’t want you to be anything you don’t want to be.’

‘But you don’t like the fact that I want to marry a man like Brad.’

As opposed to specifically marrying Brad? Was that the underlying theme here — marrying a guy with money who has firmly planted himself on the career escalator marked ‘Up’?

‘Everyone has their own agenda, their own aspirations,’ I said.

‘And there you go again, putting me down.’

‘How is what I said putting you down?’

‘Because my aspirations strike you as small. Because I am not going to do anything fantastic with my life. ’

‘You have many gifts, Sally.’

‘You consider me shallow and vacuous and someone who, unlike you, never picks up a book.’

‘You know that I think the world of you.’

‘Ben is your favorite.’

‘I consider you and Ben equally wonderful. And the thing is, you honestly have no idea what your life is going to turn out to be. Or where it will land you. Even when you think: “So this is what my life is now,” well, things can change in an instant or two.’

‘You think that because you look at other people’s tumors all day.’

Ouch. I smiled tightly.

‘Well. it does give me an interesting perspective on things.’

‘I don’t want to be a slave to routine.’

‘Then don’t be somebody’s wife.’

There. I said it. Sally flinched, then shot back with:

‘You’re somebody’s wife.’

‘Yes, I am. But—’

‘You don’t have to complete the sentence, Mom. And I know if I were a really creative type like Ben. ’

There are certain arguments with children that you simply cannot win.

‘There’s a sister, isn’t there?’

‘That’s right, Sally.’

‘And they are rather different, aren’t they?’

I was snapped back into the here-and-now of Dr Allen’s office.

‘Sally is a rather different person to Ben,’ I said, hopefully sounding neutral.

‘Ben intimated that to me. Just as he intimated he feels closer to you than to his father.’

‘Dan stills loves Ben.’

Dr Allen looked at me with care.

‘I’m sure he does, in his own way,’ she said. ‘But let me ask you something, Laura — do you always feel the need to make things better?’

‘Is there anything wrong with that?’

‘It can be rather disheartening, can’t it? I mean, other people’s happiness — it’s ultimately their own concern, isn’t it? And that also includes your children at this point in their lives. You can’t blame yourself for Ben’s problems.’

‘Easier said than done.’

Half an hour later I met Ben — as arranged by Dr Allen — at a cafй off campus. He’d lost a noticeable amount of weight — and he was already skinny before all this. His face still looked a little pasty. He let me hug him, but didn’t respond in kind. He had difficulty looking at me directly during the half-hour that we spoke. At first, when I told him how well he looked, he said: ‘Mom, you’ve never lied to me about anything. so please don’t start now.’ He then proceeded to ask me how things were going at home, whether his sister was ‘still hung up on Mr Jock Republican’ (I was very reassured to hear his natural acerbity hadn’t vanished), and how he’d actually started a new canvas that was not a collage.

‘It’s a painting this time. So it doesn’t contain body parts or try to replicate a car crash with me behind the wheel of a Porsche.’

‘You mean, like James Dean?’ I asked.

‘My mother the Culturally Aware Technologist.’

‘Not that culturally aware.’

‘You just read more than anyone I know.’

‘That’s more of a hobby. ’

‘You should try and write, Mom.’

‘What would I have to write about? I’ve not done anything that interesting or important with my life. outside of raising you and Sally.’

‘You were under no obligation to add that.’

‘But it’s the truth.’

Ben reached out briefly to touch my arm.

‘Thank you.’

‘You look a little tired,’ I said.

‘I’m finally starting to sleep again without pills. But I’m still on other medication. Pills to keep me happy.’

‘There’s no real pill for that,’ I said.

‘Isn’t that the truth,’ Ben said with just the barest hint of a smile.

‘But you seem stronger. ’

‘You’re being far too nice again.’

‘Would you rather me be far too mean?’

Another half-smile from Ben.

‘You’d never pull it off,’ he said.

‘It’s good to see you OK, Ben.’

‘I’m sorry if I freaked you out.’

‘You didn’t freak me out.’

‘Yeah, right. ’

‘OK, I was very concerned. So was your father. ’

‘But you’re here today.’

‘Your dad’s got a job interview this morning.’

‘That’s good news. Because it’s all such bad news with him now.’

‘That’s a little extreme, Ben. He loves you very much.’

‘But we’re not friends.’

‘That will change.’

‘Yeah, right.’

‘At least we’re friends,’ I said.

Ben nodded.

‘You’re sure you’re not angry at me?’ he asked.

‘I’m never angry at you.’

Upon returning home that evening from Farmington I wrote my son a text, informing him that, though I was always here for him day and night, I still wouldn’t crowd him.

Take your time, know that I am always at the end of the phone — and can be with you in ninety minutes if you need me.

Since then, I’ve had at least two texts a day from Ben — often funny/ruminative (Do you think the only real broken hearts are in country and western songs?), sometimes troubled (Really bad night’s sleep. Session with Dr Allen today), sometimes just a hello. Twice a week there’d always be a phone call. But still no indication that he wanted to spend a weekend at home, or wanted to see me.

Until.

Bing.

Staring out at the water from Pemaquid Point, my brain awash with so many thoughts, I dug out my cellphone and found myself reading:

Hey Mom. Want to finally get out of Dodge this weekend. Thinking maybe we could meet somewhere like Portland. A couple of good movies in town. We could also catch dinner somewhere. You up for this?

Damn. Damn. Damn. This would have to be the one weekend in literally nine years that I am going out of town. I texted back:

Hey Ben. Would love to do dinner and a movie Saturday. but I have that professional conference this weekend in Boston. I could try to get out of it.

His immediate reply:

Don’t do that for me.

My immediate reply:

It’s just a work thing. But you are more important than that.

And you never go anywhere — so let’s push the night out to next weekend.

Now I’m feeling guilty.

You’re always feeling guilty about something, Mom. Go run away for a few days — and try not to feel bad about it.

I stared at this last text long and hard. Thinking of a phrase my poor father invoked time and time again whenever considering the limitations he’d placed on his own life:

Easier said than done.

And considering my own personal condition, Ben’s admonition genuinely unsettled me. Because the only response that came to mind was:

Easier said than done.

Three

YOU NEVER GO anywhere.

Ouch.

Though I know Ben didn’t mean that comment to hurt it still did. Because it articulated an uncomfortable truth.

Walking back to my car, putting the key in the ignition, pulling out of the parking lot, the ocean now behind me, I turned left and followed the spindly, narrow road left, knowing it would curve its way past the summer homes now largely empty with autumn edging closer to winter’s dark harshness, before veering right again and ascending a gentle hill lined with the homes of the peninsula’s full-time residents. Outside the occasional artist or New Age reflexologist, the majority of the houses here are owned by people who teach school or sell insurance or work for the local fire brigade or have retired from the navy or the shipyard in Bath and are trying to get by on a pension and social security. These houses — many of which (like my own) could use several licks of paint — soon give way to open fields and the main route back west towards town. I mention all this because I have driven this stretch of road three, four times a week ever since Dan and I moved here years ago. Bar the two weeks a year when we have been out of town on vacation, the town of Damariscotta, Maine, has been the centre of everything in my life. Just recently the thought struck me: I don’t have a passport. And the last time I left the country was way back in l989, my senior year at the University of Maine, when I talked my then-boyfriend Dan to drive with me up to Quebec City for a long weekend. Back then you could still cross into Canada with an American driver’s license. It was the Winter Carnival in Quebec City. Snow was everywhere. The streets of the Old City were cobbled. The architecture was gingerbread house. Everyone spoke French. I’d never seen anything so magical and foreign before. Even Dan — who was initially a little unnerved by the different language, the weird accent — became charmed by it all. Though the little hotel in which we spent those four happy days was a bit run-down and had a narrow double bed that creaked loudly every time we made love, it was a sublimely romantic time for us — and, I am pretty certain, the moment when I became pregnant with Ben. But before we knew that we were about to become parents — a discovery that changed the course of everything in our lives — Dan told me that we’d always go back to Quebec City. Just as we’d also visit Paris and London and Rio and.

One of the many naive pleasures of being young is telling yourself that life is an open construct; that your possibilities are limitless. Until you conspire to limit them.

I have rooted myself to one spot. This thought has been on my mind considerably. But, honestly, there is no anger towards Dan underlying this realization. Whatever about the other problems in our marriage, I don’t blame him for the way my life has panned out. After all I was the co-conspirator in all this. It was my choice to marry him. I now see that I made certain huge decisions at a moment when my judgment was, at best, clouded. Is that how life so often works? Can your entire trajectory shift thanks to one hastily made resolution?

I hear these sorts of ruminative regrets frequently from patients. The smokers who are now ruing the day they took their first puff. The morbidly obese who wonder out loud why they have always needed to compulsively eat. Then there are the truly sad souls who are wondering if some chance tumor — with no direct link to what doctors like to refer as ‘lifestyle’ — is some sort of retribution (divine or otherwise) for bad behavior, accumulated sins, or an inability to find simple happiness in this one and only life that has been granted to them.

There was a time when these scan-room confessions — usually blurted out in moments of mortal terror, shadowed by the great fear of the unknown — were all in a day’s work for me. Are they beginning to unnerve me because, in their own direct way, they are now forcing me to reflect on the ever-accelerating passage of time? For here we are again in October. And I am now in my forty-third year and still can’t totally figure out how a year has simply vanished. My dad — who taught calculus at a high school in Waterville — once explained this to me with elegant simplicity a few years back, when I mentioned how one of the stranger aspects of impending middle age was the way a year was over in three blinks.

‘And when you get to my age. ’ he said.

‘If I get to your age.’ (He was seventy-two back then.)

‘Always the pessimist. But I guess it comes with your professional territory. OK, I will rephrase. If you get to my age. you will discover that a year passes in two blinks. And if I make it to, say, eighty-five, it will be, at best, a blink. And the reason is a simple mathematical formula — which has nothing to do with Euclidian precepts, and more with the law of diminishing returns. Remember when you were four years old and a year appeared huge and so slow. ’

‘Sure. I also remember thinking how, every time Christmas had come and gone, the wait until next year would be endless.’

‘Exactly. But the thing was — a year back then was just one quarter of your life. Whereas now. ’

‘One thirty-ninth.’

‘Or, in my case, one seventy-second. This means that time shrinks with the accumulation of years. Or, at least, that’s the perception. And all perception is, by its own nature, open to individual interpretation. The empirical fact is that time doesn’t elongate or shrink. A day will always have twenty-four hours, a week seven days, a year three-hundred and sixty-five days. What does change is our awareness of its speed — and its increasing preciousness as a commodity.’

Dad. He died last year after a slow, cruel descent into the fog that is Alzheimer’s. Twelve months earlier he had still been so mentally sharp. As sharp as my mother before the pancreatic cancer that came out of nowhere and killed her just four summers ago. Was it the love story of the past and present century? I can certainly remember moments when I was younger — especially during my adolescence — when there was a decided chill between them. I recall Dad dropping hints that teaching calculus in one of Maine’s smaller cities wasn’t the career stretch he had envisaged for himself when he was an undergraduate and the star of the U Maine math department. But it was Dad who had elderly parents in Bangor and felt beholden after college to turn down a doctoral scholarship at MIT in favor of one at U Maine in order to be on standby for his aging mother and father. And it was Dad who took the job in Waterville when he couldn’t find a college post in-state.

Dad.

I got lucky on the parent front. Despite those few years of quiet, yet perceptible tension — about which neither of them ever really spoke during or afterwards — I grew up in a reasonably stable household. My parents both had careers. They both had outside interests — Dad played the cello in an amateur string quartet. Mom was something of an expert on historical needlework. They both encouraged and loved me. They kept whatever sorrows or misgivings they had about their individual and shared lives out of my earshot (and only when I was a woman in my thirties, coping with all the daily pressures of family life, did I realize how remarkably disciplined they were in this respect). Yes, Dad should have been a chaired professor at some university and the author of several ground-breaking books on binary number theory. Yes, Mom should have seen the world — as she herself once told me was her ambition when younger. Just as I also sensed she often rued the fact that she married a little too young and never really knew a life outside of that with my father. And yes, there was the great sadness that happened two years after my birth, when Mom had an ectopic pregnancy that turned frightening. Not only did she lose the baby, but the complications were so severe that she had to undergo a hysterectomy. I only found this out around the time I was pregnant with Sally and had a bad scare (which turned out to be nothing more than a scare). Mom then told me why I was an only child — something I had asked her about many years earlier, and which was explained simply as: ‘We tried, but it never happened again.’ Now, looking into the nightmare of a possible ectopic pregnancy, Mom told me the truth — leaving me wondering why she had waited so long to trust me with this tragedy that must have so upended her life at the time and still haunted her. Mom could see the shock in my eyes; a wounding sort of shock, as I struggled to understand why she never could have simply told me what had happened, and why Dad — with whom I thought there was such total transparency — had conspired with her on this huge central piece to the family puzzle. Me being me — and yes, Ben was right, I always want to make things right for those nearest to me — I never once spat out the hurt that coursed through me in the days after this revelation. Me being me I rationalized it as all coming down to their worry about the effect it might have on me, and whether (had they told me when I was much younger) I might have even suffered my own dose of survivor guilt over it. But it still bothered me. And hearing the whole terrible story for the first time when I was twenty-four. well, it just seemed to exacerbate the confusion I felt afterwards.

Dan’s reaction was direct, to the point. And though I initially considered it just a little brusque, in time I realized he had cut to the heart of the matter when, after musing about it all for a moment or two, he just shrugged and said:

‘So now you know that everybody has secrets.’

Cold comfort. Dan never does touchy-feely. But at the outset we did function well as a couple. We had little money. We had a big responsibility as new parents. We coped. Not only that, bills got paid. A house got bought. We managed to hold down two jobs and simultaneously raise two children without any sort of serious childcare (except the occasional babysitter or mother-in-law). We suffered broken nights courtesy of babies with colic and were able to laugh about our four a.m. tetchiness the next day. We were frustrated about our lack of latitude. But even though we both felt a little closed in, a little overwhelmed with children and financial obligations, what I remember most about those years together was the way we fundamentally got along, dodged so many potential areas of conflict, helped each other through rough patches without ever playing the ‘I did this for you, now you do that for me’ game. We seemed to be a reasonable match.

A reasonable match. It sounds so profoundly pragmatic, so down-to-earth, so devoid of passion. Well, ours too has never been the love story of the century. Nor, however, is it one of those marriages where the last time we made love Clinton was president. Sex is still there — but even before Dan lost his job and began to disengage from me, it had lost its basic exuberance or the sense of mutual need that fuelled it for so long. When we met the attraction was (for me anyway) the fact that he was stable, unflappable, together, responsible. Unlike the man who came before him and was.

No, I don’t want to think about that. him. today. Even though, truth be told, I think of him every day. Even more so over the past two years when the realization was hitting me so constantly that.

Stop.

I have stood still.

Stop.

You lose things and then you choose things.

Didn’t I hear someone sing that somewhere? Or as my dad once ruefully noted when he said to me, in passing, during the weekend of his seventieth birthday, ‘To live a life is to constantly grapple with regret.’

Is that the price we pay for being here: the ongoing, ever-increasing knowledge that we have so often let ourselves down? And have settled for lives we find just adequate.

Stop.

This morning underscored for me what our life together has become. Dan sleepily reached for me when the alarm went off, as always, at six a.m. Though half-awake I was happy to have his arms around me, and to feel him pulling up the long men’s shirt I always wear to bed. But then, with no attempt at even a modicum of tenderness, he immediately mounted me, kissing my dry mouth, thrusting in and out of me with rough urgency, and coming with a low groan after just a few moments. Falling off me, he then turned away. When I asked him if he was OK he reached for my hand while still showing me his back.

‘Can you tell me what’s wrong?’ I asked.

‘Why should there be anything wrong?’ he said, now pulling his hand away.

‘You just seem. troubled.’

‘Is that what you think I am? Troubled?’

‘You don’t have to get angry.’

‘“You seem troubled.” That’s not a criticism?’

‘Dan, please, this is nuts. ’

‘You see! You see!’ he said, storming out of bed and heading to the bathroom. ‘You say you don’t criticize. Then what the hell do you do? No wonder I can never, ever win with you. No wonder I can’t. ’

Then, suddenly, his face fell and he began to sob. A low throttled sob — so choked, so held back. Immediately I was on my feet, moving towards him, my arms open. But instead of accepting my embrace he bolted to the bathroom, slamming the door behind him. I could still hear him crying. But when I knocked on the door and said: ‘Please, Dan, let me—’ he turned on the sink taps and drowned out the rest of my sentence.

Let me help you. Let me near you. Let me.

The water kept running. I returned to our bed and sat there for a very long time, thinking, thinking, despair coursing through my veins like the chemical dye I have to shoot every day into people who may be harboring a malignancy.

Is that what I am harboring here? A cancer of sorts. His cancer of unhappiness, caused by his loss of career, and now metastasizing in so many insidious directions that.

The water was still running in the bathroom. I stood up and went over to the door, trying to discern if I could hear him still crying over the sound of the open taps. Nothing but cascading water. I checked my watch: 6:18 a.m. Time to wake Sally — unless she happened to hear all the shouting earlier and was already up and concerned. Not that Sally would ever show much outward concern — her one comment after being nearby when Dan railed against me a few weeks ago was a blasй:

‘Great to see I come from such a happy family.’

Were we ever a happy family? Do I even know a truly happy family?

I knocked lightly on her door, then opened it an inch to see that she was still very much asleep. Good. I decided to let her have another fifteen minutes in bed and went downstairs to make coffee. Dan showed up a few minutes later, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, his gym bag in hand.

‘Heading off to work out,’ he said, avoiding my line of vision.

‘That sounds like a good idea.’

He moved towards the front door.

‘See you tonight.’

‘I’ll be home at the usual time. But you know I have my weekly book talk with Lucy at seven. And tomorrow—’

‘Yeah, you’ll be heading to Boston at lunchtime.’

‘I’ll make all your dinners for the weekend tonight.’

‘You don’t think I can cook?’

‘Dan. ’

‘I’ll take care of the dinners myself.’

‘Are you angry I’m going to Boston?’

‘Why should I be angry? It’s work, right?’

‘That it is.’

‘Anyway, if I were you I’d want a break from me.’

‘Dan. ’

‘Don’t say it.’

‘You have me worried.’

He stopped and turned back, still not able to look at me directly. Then, in a half-hushed voice, he said one word:

‘Sorry.’

And he was gone.

Now, nearly eleven hours later — turning down my road after having spent much of the working day trying to keep the entire unsettling aftertaste of the morning somewhat at bay — a certain dread hit me. A dread that has been so present since that day twenty-one months ago when Dan walked in from work and said that he’d just been laid off. The economic downturn had meant that annual sales at L.L.Bean had fallen by 14 percent. The people on the executive floor decided that they could shave some excess off the info tech department — which handles all the online sales and marketing for the company — by cutting the two people in charge of ever expanding its sales capabilities. One of these people happened to be my husband. He’d put in twelve years at L.L.Bean — and was floored by such a summary dismissal, just four days after New Year’s Day. The look on his face when he came in through the front door that night. it was as if he had aged ten years in the ten hours since I’d seen him. Reaching into his back pocket he pulled out a letter. The letter. There it was, in hard typography. The notice that he no longer had a job, the regret of the company at ending such a long association, the assurance that a ‘generous termination package would be offered’, along with ‘the services of our Human Resources department to help you find new employment as quickly as possible’.

‘What a joke,’ Dan said. ‘The last time they laid off a bunch of people from my department none of them found any work for at least two years. and the only people who did find new jobs had to go out of state.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, reaching for his hand. But he pulled it away before I could touch it. I said nothing, telling myself at the time the man was so understandably floored by what had happened. Even if Dan was never the most tactile or outwardly affectionate of men, he still had never pulled away from me like that before. So I reached out again for his outstretched hand. This time he flinched, as if I was threatening him.

‘You trying to make me feel bad?’ he said, the anger sudden.

Now it was my turn to flinch. I looked at him with shock and just a little disbelief.

I quickly masked it by changing the subject, asking him about the sort of ‘package’ they had offered him. As these things go, it wasn’t too mean: six months’ full salary, full medical insurance for a year, plenty of free career counselling. At least they had the decency to wait until after Christmas before delivering the terrible news — and it wasn’t just the IT department that had suffered cuts, as around seventy employees across the board had been shown the door. But as soon as Dan said ‘six months’ full pay’ I could almost hear what I was thinking simultaneously: We’re just a bit screwed. Only three months earlier we’d taken a $45,000 home-improvement loan to reroof our house and deal with a basement that was riddled with damp. As home upgrades go they were hardly sexy — but absolutely necessary. We took them after much dinner-table discussion and scribbled calculations on the backs of assorted envelopes. Our roof was leaking, our basement was wet. We were filling the space between these two encroaching molds. We had no choice but to borrow the money, even though we knew it would strain our already stretched household budget. Between our $1,200 mortgage per month, the $15,000 it cost to send Ben to U Maine Farmington (and that was a bargain, compared to a private college like Bowdoin), the $250 lease on the car that Dan drove to work (my vehicle was a twelve-year-old Camry with around 133,000 miles on the clock and in urgent need of a new transmission), and the $300 in essential monthly premiums to cover Ben and Sally under my hospital insurance scheme, the idea of burdening ourselves with another $450 per month for ten years was disheartening. Add all these essential outgoings together, and we were already spending close to $3,500 per month. Now Dan earned $43K per year and I earned $51K. After tax we had a combined net income of $61K — or $5, 083 per month. In other words, this left us with just under $1,600 after our main outgoings to pay for all our utilities, all our food, all our clothes, all Ben and Sally’s additional needs, and whatever we could squeeze out every year to fund a one-week vacation.

I knew many families around us who were making do on far less. Even though Sally did complain that we always seemed to be counting pennies she finally got wise and started using her weekend babysitting money to buy all the iPods and funky earrings and the butterfly tattoo (don’t ask) that she came home with after a day out with some girlfriends in Portland. Ben, on the other hand, never asked us for a penny. He had a part-time job at the college, mixing paints and stretching canvases in the visual arts department. He refused anything more than the room and board we provided for him in addition to his annual tuition.

‘I’m living la vie de bohиme in Farmington,’ he said to me once when I tried to press $100 into his hand (I’d done a week’s worth of overtime). ‘I can live on air. And I don’t want you to lose the roof because you slipped me a hundred bucks.’

I laughed and said:

‘I doubt that is going to happen.’

Actually we decided to pay off part of the new roof loan with Dan’s severance. The basement was now dry. And Dan turned in his leased car and used $1,500 to buy a 1997 Honda Civic that never made it above 60 mph. But at least he had wheels while I was at the hospital. The one-salary situation meant that money was ferociously tight. We were just about making all our bills every month and had absolutely no cash to spare. Dan had knocked on every door possible within the state. Perhaps the most terrible irony of his story was that, around eighteen months after he’d lost his job at Bean’s, he discovered that they were readvertising his old post. Naturally he contacted the head of personnel. Naturally the guy spun some yarn about sales upturn allowing them to re-expand the department they had just reduced. Naturally the guy also told Dan he should reapply for the job. Then they went and hired someone else who was (again according to the head of personnel) ‘simply more qualified’. Shortly after that Dan also lost what seemed to be that shoo-in position in the State of Maine’s IT department in Augusta — and the outbreaks of rage really started, perhaps augmented by the fact that, just two days ago, the head of personnel at Bean’s called and said they did have an opening — but it was in the stockroom. Yes, it was an assistant supervisor’s position. And yes, after six months he would be back in their health insurance system. Yet it only paid $13 an hour — but, hey, that was almost twice the minimum wage — and just about $15K a year after taxes.

That extra $15K would give us just the necessary breathing room, and avoid debt (which I have been so damn determined to dodge, but which we are careening towards very quickly). It might even allow us to borrow Dan’s brother-in-law’s condo in Tampa for a week during Christmas and have a proper family vacation in the sun. Of course Dan knew all that. Just as I also so understood he hated the idea of going to work in the stockroom — and for half of what he used to be making within the same organization.

‘It’s like he’s throwing me a bone,’ he said to me on the evening it was offered to him. ‘A crappy consolation prize — and a way of soothing his conscience about having fired me.’

‘It wasn’t him who fired you. It was the boys upstairs. It was their decision to make the cutbacks.’

‘Yeah, but he carried out their dirty work for them.’

‘Unfortunately that’s his job.’

‘You sticking up for him?’

‘Hardly.’

‘But you want me to accept his offer.’

‘I don’t want you to take the job if it is something you absolutely don’t want to do.’

‘We need the money.’

‘Well, yes, we really do. Still, we would find a way to keep things somehow ticking over. ’

‘You want me to take the job.’

‘I’m not saying that, Dan. And I have asked the hospital if they would let me do ten extra hours of overtime a week — which would bring in around two hundred and fifty more dollars.’

‘And make me feel guilty as hell. ’

Now, as I was turning this all over in my mind, I headed down my road. It’s a country road, around a mile from the center of Damriscotta. A road that loops its way through slightly elevated countryside. though the realtor, when he first brought us to see it, referred to the surrounding landscape as ‘gently rolling’. When I mentioned this once to Ben (in a discussion we were having about the way salesmen inevitably pretty things up) he just shook his head and said:

‘Well, I suppose if you were a rabbit you’d think it was “gently rolling”.’

The fact is that, down towards the waterfront, the terrain is elevated, humpy. The town lawyers and doctors live on those wonderful prospects overlooking the Kennebec River. So does one rather successful painter, a reasonably well-known writer of children’s books, and two builders who have cornered the market in this part of mid-coast Maine. The houses there are venerable clapboard structures — usually white or deep red — beautifully maintained and landscaped, with recent SUVs in the driveways. Hand on heart I have never had a disagreeable thought about the people who are lucky enough to live in these elegant, refined homes. Hand on heart there is a moment every day when I drive by this stretch of waterfront houses and think: Wouldn’t it be nice if.

If what? If I had married a rich local doctor? Or, more to the point, had become that doctor? Is that a tiny little stab I always feel — and yes, it has been a constant silent prod recently — whenever I pass by this stretch of real estate, before turning upwards towards my far more modest home? Is midlife inevitably marked by the onset of regret? I always put on a positive face in front of my work colleagues, my children, my increasingly detached husband. Dr Harrild once referred to me (at a surprise fortieth birthday party two years ago) as ‘the most unflappable and affirmative person on our staff’. Everyone applauded this comment. I smiled shyly while simultaneously thinking: If only you knew how often I ask myself: ‘Is this it?’

My dad often sang a tune to me about ‘accentuating the positive’ when I was younger and getting into one of those rather serious moods I used to succumb to during the roller-coaster ride that was adolescence. But considering how often I caught him singing those upbeat words to himself I can’t help but think that he was also using the song as a way of bolstering his own lingering sense of regret. Dr Harrild actually heard me humming this once in the staff room and said:

‘Now you are about the last person who needs to be telling herself all that.’

Dr Harrild. He too always tries to accentuate the positive — and genuinely be kind. The trip I’m taking this weekend being an example of that. A radiography conference in Boston. OK, Boston’s just three hours down the road, so it’s not like being sent to somewhere really enviable like Honolulu or San Francisco (two places I so want to visit someday). Still, the last time I was in Boston. gosh, it must be two years ago. A Christmas shopping trip. An overnight with Sally and Ben. We even went to a touring production of The Lion King and stayed in an OK hotel off Copley Square. The city was under a fresh dusting of snow. The chic lights along Newbury Street looked magical. I was so happy that Ben and Sally were so happy. And I told myself then that I was going to find the money to start travelling a little every year; that life was roaring by and if I wanted to see Paris or Rome or.

Then, a few weeks later, Dan was out of a job. And the dream was put on permanent hold.

Still, thank you, Dr Harrild. An all-expenses-paid trip to Boston. Gas money. A hotel for two nights. Even $300 in cash for expenses. And all because he was invited to this radiological convention, but his eldest boy has a football game this Sunday and he wanted the hospital represented at the convention, and when I raised the concern that maybe I wasn’t senior enough (i.e. a doctor) to be attending, he brushed that worry away with the statement: ‘You probably know more about radiography than most of the senior consultants who will be there. Anyway, you deserve a trip on us, and a break from things for a few days.’

Was that his way of letting me know that he’d heard something about the state of ‘things’ at home? I had been pretty damn scrupulous about not telling anyone at the hospital or around town about Dan’s problems. Still, small hospitals and small towns breed small talk.

Not that Dr Harrild would ever really engage in such gossip. But he was right about me needing a break — even one that would last just under seventy-two hours. A change of scene and all that. But also — and this was a realization which, when it hit me a few days ago, truly shocked me — the first time I had been away on my own since Ben and Sally were born.

I have let myself stand still.

But tomorrow I am on the road. Alone. Even if it is a destination I already know — and one that’s just a small jump from the place I call home — travel is travel. A temporary escape.

I turned into our driveway. The reclining rays of an unusually bright autumn sun reflected off the new roof of our house. A two-story house, somewhat squat, finished in off-gray clapboard that I would love to darken by two shades if I could ever find the $9,000 our local house painter told me it would cost to redo the entire exterior (and it really needs it). Just as I’d love to landscape the half-acre of land that fronts it, as it has become rather scrubby. Behind us, however, is a wonderful oak tree that, right this moment, is almost peacock-like in its autumnal beauty. Sometimes I think it was the tree that sold me on the house — as we bought it knowing it was a fixer-upper, a starter place from which we’d eventually graduate.

But enough of that (as I tell myself most days). We have raised two children here. It’s our home. We worked hard to buy it. We continue to work hard to keep it (though the last mortgage payment falls in seventeen months — hurrah). It is our history. Only now can I honestly say that I’ve never warmed to the place. Nor has Dan. How I wish we’d talked ourselves out of ever buying it.

Our home.

I thought that as I pulled up our driveway and saw Dan sitting on the bench that covers most of the front porch, a cigarette between his lips. As soon as he spotted my car pulling up he was on his feet like an anxious schoolboy, dumping the cigarette onto the porch deck and then trying to hide the evidence by kicking it into the crabgrass below. Dan has been allegedly off cigarettes for six months — but I know he smokes several every day.

‘Hey there,’ I said, all smiles as I got out of the car. He looked at me sheepishly.

‘It’s the first cigarette in over a week,’ he said.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Good day?’

‘I took the job.’ He was staring down at his feet as he said this.

At that moment I felt relief and a terrible sense of guilt. Because I knew that the last thing Dan wanted to do was accept that offer in the stockroom. Just as I knew that he knew the breathing space that extra money would bring us. I tried to take his hand. He stiffened and pulled away, putting his hand behind his back, out of reach. I said nothing for a moment, then uttered two words:

‘Thank you.’

Four

MEATLOAF. DAN HAD prepared a meatloaf. He’d used his mother’s recipe — covering the loaf in Heinz’s tomato sauce and flavoring the beef with three cloves of crushed garlic (a recipe, he’d told me on several occasions, that was somewhat radical for Bangor, Maine, in the 1970s. when garlic was considered nothing less than foreign). He’d also made baked potatoes and a fresh spinach salad to accompany the meatloaf. And he’d bought a bottle of Australian red wine — Jacob’s Creek — which he told me that ‘the guy at the supermaket said was “very drinkable”’.

‘That’s high praise from a guy at a supermarket,’ I said. ‘I really appreciate you going to all this trouble. ’

‘Thought we should celebrate me landing the job.’

‘Yes, I think that’s worth celebrating.’

‘And I know you’ve got your book thing with Lucy at seven.’

‘That still gives us an hour — as long as the meatloaf is ready by—’

‘It will be done in fifteen minutes.’

‘Wonderful. Shall we open the wine?’

He reached for the bottle and screwed off the cap, pouring wine into two glasses. He handed me one and we touched them.

‘To your new job,’ I said.

‘I never thought I’d be toasting a job in a stockroom.’

‘It’s a supervisor’s job. ’

‘Assistant supervisor.’

‘Still, it’s a management position.’

‘In a stockroom.’

‘Dan. ’

‘I know, I know. It will ease up so much for us.’

‘And it will also lead to other things for you. I’m certain it’s just a temporary—’

‘Please stop trying to make me feel better.’

‘Should I try to make you feel rotten?’

He smiled. I came over and put my arms around him and kissed him straight on the mouth and whispered:

‘I love you.’

Instead of kissing me back, he hung his head.

‘That’s nice to hear,’ he finally said.

I put my finger under his chin and tried to raise his head. But he shrugged me off.

‘I need to check the potatoes,’ he said.

I stood there, feeling numb. Maybe I’m sending out the wrong signals. Maybe I’m telling him things subconsciously which he is interpreting as belittling or critical or.

‘Have I done something to upset you?’ I heard myself asking out loud. Dan closed the oven door, stood up and regarded me with bemusement.

‘Did I say that?’ he asked.

‘Do you feel I am not supportive enough or am conveying some sort of negative—’

‘Why are you bringing this up?’

‘Because. because. ’

The words were catching in my throat, as they were being intertwined with a sob.

‘Because. I’m lost.’

What he said next was. well, ‘unbelievable’ was the only word that came to mind.

‘That’s not my fault.’

Now the sobs were no longer trapped in my throat. Now I was sitting down in a kitchen chair, crying. All that I had been repressing for weeks, months, suddenly cascaded out in heaving sobs.

Then Sally wandered in.

‘Another happy night at home,’ she said.

‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’ I said, forcing myself to stop sobbing.

‘Sure you are. And Dad’s fine too. And we all love each other. And everything is just great. And, by the way, I’m skipping dinner.’

‘But your father’s prepared a wonderful meatloaf.’

‘Since when was meatloaf ever “wonderful”? Anyway, just got a call from Brad. His parents have decided to eat at Solo Bistro down in Bath tonight and asked if I wanted to come along.’

‘It’s a little late for that,’ Dan said.

‘And why?’ Sally asked.

‘Because your dinner is in the oven.’

‘I’ll eat the leftovers tomorrow.’

‘Sorry,’ Dan said, ‘but I’m not allowing it.’

‘That’s unfair,’ Sally said.

‘Too bad you think that.’

‘Come on, Dad — Solo Bistro is a great restaurant. ’

‘Can’t say I’ve ever eaten there.’

‘That’s because you’ve been out of work and miserable for the last year and a half.’

‘Sally. ’ I said.

‘Well, it’s the truth — and you know it, Mom.’

Silence.

Dan slowly bent down and put the potatoes back in the oven. Then, standing up again, he turned away from his daughter as he said:

‘You want to eat with those people, off you go.’

Sally looked at me for confirmation. I nodded and she ran off out the door.

I heard a car pull up outside — and glanced out the window to see Sally heading towards Brad’s silver Mini convertible. He got out to greet her and give her a very full kiss right on the lips. She didn’t hold back either. At that moment I was absolutely certain that they were sleeping together. Not that this had come as a shock, as I was pretty sure this had been going on for a year. Just as I also knew that she had asked for an appointment with my gynecologist six months ago and just said it was ‘routine stuff’. Did that mean my daughter was on the pill or had been fitted for a diaphragm? Either way I suppose it was better than getting pregnant. Gazing at Brad — so tall, so lean, so deeply preppy in a town where preppy wasn’t a common look — all I could think was: He is going to break her heart.

I watched the car zoom away, and saw Sally put her arm around Brad as they headed off into the actual sunset. Immediately I thought back to the time when I was seventeen, on the cusp of everything, so determined to succeed. I reached for the wine bottle and splashed a little more in my glass. In the wake of Sally driving off Dan had stepped outside and lit up another cigarette. The joylessness in his eyes was palpable. Seeing him staring out at the world beyond I felt a desperate stab of empathy for him, for us. Coupled with the realization: He is now a stranger to me.

I set the table. I took out the meatloaf and the potatoes. I ladled sour cream into a bowl. I rapped on the glass of the kitchen window. When Dan swivelled his head I motioned for him to come inside. Once back in the kitchen he looked at the dinner ready to be eaten and said:

‘You should have let me do all that. I was making dinner. I didn’t want you to have to do anything tonight.’

‘It was no trouble at all. Anyway, I thought you might need a little time out.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

He came over and put his arms around me. As he buried his head in my shoulder I felt a momentary shudder come over him and thought he was about to cry. But he kept himself in check, while simultaneously holding me tightly. I returned the embrace, then took his face in my hands and said:

‘You know I am on your side, Dan.’

His body stiffened. Had I said the wrong thing again — even though I meant the comment to be reassuring, loving? Could I ever say the right thing anymore?

We sat down to eat. For a few moments silence reigned. I finally broke it.

‘This is wonderful meatloaf.’

‘Thank you,’ Dan said tonelessly.

And the silence enveloped us again.

‘For me, it really is one of the great modern novels about loneliness,’ Lucy said, motioning to the waitress that she should bring us two more glasses of chardonnay. ‘And what I loved about the novel was how it so brilliantly captured forty years of American life in such an economic way. I mean, I couldn’t get over the fact that the novel’s only two hundred and fifty pages long. ’

‘That really intrigued me as well,’ I said. ‘How he was able to say so much about these two sisters and the times they passed through in such a compressed way, and with such descriptive precision.’

‘This is one of those rare instances when you can actually say there’s not a wasted word in the novel, along with this absolute clear sightedness about the way people talk themselves into lives they so don’t want.’

‘And by the end, we really feel we know these two women so desperately well. Because their lives and choices are a reflection of so many of our own wrong choices, and the way despair and disappointment color all our lives.’

‘I’ll drink to that,’ Lucy said as our two glasses of wine arrived.

Lucy and I were sitting in a booth in the Newcastle Publick House — a rather decent local tavern, where the din was never so overwhelming that you couldn’t have a conversation — engaged in our weekly book talk. Actually ‘book talk’ makes this weekly get-together sound formal, rule-bound. The truth is, though we have been having this Thursday get-together for over a year, the only principle that we follow is that the first part of the conversation is all about the novel we have agreed to read that week. That’s right — we try to read a different novel every week, though when we tackled The Brothers Karamazov a few months ago we gave ourselves a month to work through that mammoth enterprise. The only other rule we have is that we take turns choosing the book under discussion and never raise objections if it is out of what Lucy once dubbed ‘our respective literary comfort zones’. The truth is, we both share a similar sensibility when it comes to novels. No fantasy. No science fiction (though we did, at my suggestion, read Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles — which we both agreed had more to do with things mid-century American than actual extraterrestrial matters). And no treacly romantic stuff. Having discovered early on that we both read to find windows into our own dilemmas, our choices (outside of The Brothers Karamazov — my idea — and Gravity’s Rainbow — Lucy’s suggestion, and a book which we spent four evenings trying to understand) have largely centered around books which reflect the difficulties inherent in day-to-day life. So we’ve veered towards novels about family complexities (Dombey and Son), money complexities (The Way We Live Now), state-of-the-nation complexities (An American Tragedy, Babbitt), and (no surprise here) marital complexities (The War Between the Tates, Couples, Madame Bovary). We always spend around ninety minutes each week talking animatedly about the novel under discussion — though these Thursday rendezvous (which inevitably stretch to three hours) are also an opportunity for us to catch up with what Lucy once elegantly called ‘our ongoing weather systems’; the stuff that has seemed to constantly circle around our respective lives.

Lucy is a year my senior. She is about the smartest person I know. She went to Smith, joined the Peace Corps, taught in difficult places like The Gambia and Burkina Faso (I had to check out a map to see where that was), then traveled the world for a year. Upon returning to her native Boston she promptly fell in love with a PhD candidate at Harvard named Harry Ricks. Harry landed a job teaching American history at Colby just after he got his doctorate. Lucy retrained in library science and also found a job at the college. Then she lost two pregnancies back to back — the first at three months, the second (even more heartbreakingly) at eight months. Then her newly tenured husband ran off with a colleague (a dance instructor). Then she was badly advised legally and came away from the marriage with virtually nothing. Then she decided that staying at Colby was emotionally impossible — for all sorts of obvious reasons. So she packed up her decade-old Toyota with her worldly goods and headed down to Damariscotta after landing a job at the local high school, running their library.

She was thirty-six when she got here — and I met her during one of her weekend ‘extra money’ shifts at the library in the center of town. We became fast friends. She is the one and only person in the world with whom I confide — and she also knows she can talk with me about virtually anything. Dan has always been pleasant and reasonably welcoming towards Lucy — especially as she usually spends part of Christmas Day with us (she has no direct family of her own). But he is also a little suspicious of her, as he knows she is my ally. Just as he senses what I know Lucy thinks, but has never articulated: that Dan and I are a mismatch. That’s been one of the unwritten rules of our friendship: we tell ourselves everything that we want to share. We ask advice and give it reciprocally. But we each stop short of saying what we really feel about the other’s stuff. Lucy, for example, had a two-year relationship with a wildly inappropriate man named David Robby — a would-be writer who’d fled a bad marriage and a failed career in advertising, and was one of those guys who had just enough of a trust fund to ruin him. Coastal Maine is full of metropolitan refugees like David — whose personal or professional life (or both) have flat-lined and who have come to our corner of the northeast to reinvent themselves. The problem is: Maine is quiet. And underworked. And largely underpaid. Its visual pleasures — the ravishing, primary sweep of its seascape, the verdancy of its terrain, its sense of space and isolation and extremity (especially in winter) — are counterbalanced by the fact that life here throws you back on your own devices, on yourself. And David — an outwardly charming, but clearly unsettled man — was about the last thing my friend needed in her life back then. Still, between the divorce and the lost babies, and the knowledge that her dream of motherhood might be finished, David was, for a time, something of a recompense (even though I found him creepy). But I never said a word against him. Just as Lucy never made any comments about Dan. Was this wrong — a personal confederacy based on being there to hear each other out, but not to ram home certain self-evident verities? I think we trusted each other because we didn’t blitzkrieg each other with lacerating observations — because we both understood our different fragilities and were best keeping ourselves buoyed.

But the book under discussion tonight — Richard Yates’s The Easter Parade — was one of those profoundly disquieting novels that hit you with the most lacerating (and unsettlingly accurate) observations about the human condition.

‘I read somewhere that Richard Yates wasn’t just a serious alcoholic, but a manic depressive as well,’ Lucy said.

‘Wasn’t there that well-reviewed biography of him a few years back,’ I said, ‘which talked about how, even when he was on a binge — which was most of the time — he somehow managed to grind out two hundred words a day?’

‘Words were obviously a refuge for him from all of life’s harder realities.’

‘Or maybe the way he tried to make sense of all the craziness he observed within himself and others. Do you know what the biography was called? A Terrible Honesty.’

‘Well, that is, without question, the defining strength of The Easter Parade. It pulls no punches when it comes to examining why Sara and Emily Grimes lived such unhappy lives.’

‘And the genius of the book,’ I said, ‘is that even though Emily becomes a desperate alcoholic, she’s never painted as sad or pathetic. Yet Yates also makes it so clear that the two sisters have nobody but themselves to blame for their disappointments.’

‘His psychological clarity and his humanity are everywhere. As you said, we all know these women because they are, more or less, reflections of ourselves. It’s what Emily says to her niece’s husband at the end of the book, “I’m almost fifty years old and I’ve never understood anything in my whole life.” That’s the hard truth at the center of the novel. There are no solutions when it comes to life. There’s only mess and muddle.’

‘But we all want answers, don’t we?’

‘You’re talking to a Unitarian,’ Lucy said. ‘We pray “to whom it may concern”.’

‘And the one thing I liked most about being an Episcopalian — besides all that good Anglican choral music — was that it always preached a gospel of thinking about faith in a personal and non-doctrinal way. No real directives from on high. No Old Testament God who kicked butt if you didn’t believe he was the Man in Charge. Still, the one problem with being part of a thinking religion is that there is absolutely no certainty whatsoever.’

‘Does that truly bother you?’

‘Sometimes, honestly, yes, it does unsettle me — the idea that this is it, that there is nothing beyond this except mystery. God knows I’ve tried to believe in a hereafter — that is a component of Episcopalianism. But it’s always held out as more of a poetic idea — a fantasia, so to speak — than an absolute divine truth. As such I doubt I am ever going to run into anyone I know in the afterlife either. But if there is no hereafter, then how do we make sense of this very flawed business called life?’

‘Now there’s a question that will never have a definitive answer. But I do have a question about a completely unrelated, but nonetheless important matter — did Dan take the job?’

I nodded.

‘That’s good news, I guess,’ Lucy said.

‘Not for him. But I didn’t coerce him or force his hand. though he acts as if I did.’

‘That’s because he feels guilty about being out of work for so long, as he also hates the fact that he has no choice but to take this job.’

I stared into my glass of wine.

‘I wish it was as simple as that. I just feel that we’re kind of lost together. And that’s an oxymoron, isn’t it? If you are together you’re not supposed to be lost. Then again. ’

‘So many of us are lost together. Have you suggested counseling?’

‘Of course. To Dan the idea of talking about our problems in front of a third party. it’s anathema to him. Anyway, I only know one marriage that was saved by counseling—’

‘And that’s because they had a suicide pact.’

I found myself laughing. Loudly.

‘You’re terrible,’ I said.

‘I think it’s called being a realist.’

‘I don’t want the marriage to end.’

‘But you don’t want it to continue as it is.’

‘No. But. how can I put this? I don’t know of a way out. If I leave, then what?’

‘You’ll be like me. A woman in her early forties on her own in small-town Maine. Were I the devious type I’d encourage you to leave him — so you’d end up where I am now. Alone. Wondering what the future holds. Thinking: Maybe I should try my luck in a bigger place — Boston or Chicago or somewhere in the Sun Belt, not that I could stand the politics down there. But then what? You cart your baggage with you wherever you go. So, I suppose the real question is—’

‘I know what the question is,’ I said.

‘The thing is — do you have an answer?’

Again I looked down into my wine.

‘I have many answers and no answers,’ I finally said.

‘Join the club.’

Outside the tavern Lucy said:

‘So tomorrow’s the big day.’

‘A trip to a radiography conference in suburban Boston is hardly a trip to Paris.’

‘Still, you get to play hooky for a couple of days.’

‘And if you tell me that the time away will make things seem clearer. ’

‘Fear not. If anything you’ll just come back feeling even more conflicted because you’ve stepped away from it all for a couple of days. Such is life.’

She leaned forward and gave me a hug.

‘You know what I want more than anything?’ she said. ‘Surprise. A surprise or two would be nice.’

‘Don’t you have to be on the lookout for surprises in order to find one?’

‘You’re a philosopher, Laura.’

‘No, I am a wife and mother and radiographic technician who works nine to five forty-nine weeks a year. My life.’

‘And if I were to tell you: “It could be worse. ”’

‘I’d hate you and agree with you at the same time.’

On my drive home my cellphone began to emit the bing sound indicating that I’d just received a text. It had to be Ben. No one else texted me at this hour. I didn’t reach for it until I was parked in our driveway, simultaneously noting that all the lights in the house were off, except for the one in the downstairs hallway that we always leave on to indicate someone is home — and, more recently, to welcome back children arriving home late. On which note, I had received a text earlier tonight from Sally:

Sleeping over at Brad’s. Will come by early tomorrow for my school stuff.

‘Sleeping over’. What a clever use of an innocent, pre-college euphemism. No doubt Brad’s parents knew that my daughter would be sharing his bed tonight and that they wouldn’t be doing so as ‘just friends’. Then again, Sally turns eighteen in nine months. I was sleeping with my boyfriend when I was her age. So I can’t exactly reproach her for ‘sleeping over’ at Brad’s. But this is the first time she has been direct and open about the fact that she is sexually active — and I can’t help but figure that she decided, after all that went down tonight with her father, to be finally direct about her relationship with Brad. Or, at least, direct with me — as I doubted she texted Dan the same information. Like so many fathers he’s rather queasy about the idea that she is no longer the innocent daddy’s girl. not that she has been a daddy’s girl for some time. I texted Sally back:

Leaving about nine for Boston, so will still be here to see you. Love — Mom.

Pressing ‘send’ I watched it disappear. Then I turned my attention to Ben’s message:

Am wondering if true love really exists? Answers on a postcard to my new website: thesorrowsofyoungwertherinmaine.com. Trying to paint. Not having much luck. Don’t call tonight — going to sit in my studio all night and force myself to do something with a brush. B xxx

Ben citing Goethe. I smiled and tapped out a reply:

Hope all goes well in the studio tonight. If not will go right eventually. Important thing is to go easy on yourself — I know easier said than done, but also absolutely crucial. You have been through a difficult time. Don’t expect too much of yourself right now.

Immediately I deleted those last two sentences. ‘I know I’ve been through a difficult time,’ I could hear him saying, ‘and I always have — and always will — expect a lot of myself. so don’t tell me to short-change myself.’ It’s one of the most complex aspects of parenting — knowing when not to say something or when to sidestep the sort of advice that sounds like a bromide or a band-aid applied to a major wound. And even if, in time, Ben may look upon the loss of his first love as a necessary rite of passage, the fact is that he still remains raw and fragile in its aftermath. To tell him that, five years from now, he might consider it all much ado about nothing would be so counterproductive. So I rephrased the end of the text to read:

Do know I am always here for you whenever you need me. Love — Mom

I wanted to add something about me hoping that he could still come home next week, but again applied the brakes, thinking that he doesn’t want to feel pushed into anything right now. If I say nothing he’ll probably show up.

I checked my watch. It was almost ten p.m. — and I needed to be on the road by seven tomorrow. I went inside. Dan had cleared away the dinner plates and turned on the dishwasher and left everything tidy. I shut off the hall light and went upstairs, hoping that Dan was already asleep and wouldn’t question our daughter’s whereabouts. I too needed rest. Today had been a particularly complex day. But aren’t all days complex? Don’t they all throw something in your path that upends the momentum of things, or simply reminds you that life never goes the way you want it?

Then again, what is it that any of us truly want out of life? When asked about this rather large, frequently troubling question people often talk in headlines: happiness, someone to love, a life without fear, money, sex, freedom, nothing terrible to happen to my family, recognition for what I am. All reasonable requests. Yet show me a life where anyone really ends up getting what they want. I see this all the time with the patients awaiting results from scans. The terror and hope etched in their eyes. The sense that fate may have just short-changed them. The need to believe that there is a way out of what might be a terminal situation.

Enough.

Opening the bedroom door I saw that my husband was very much asleep — his arms clutching the pillow so tightly I couldn’t help but wonder if it wasn’t some sort of nocturnal life preserver keeping him afloat. Dan suddenly groaned, then let out a sharp cry — as if something had startled him. I rushed over to comfort him. But by the time I reached the bed he had turned over and was back in the unconscious world. I sat and stroked his head and thought: In the best of all possible worlds he’d sit up and take me in his arms and tell me that we were golden. No wonder we all love the fairy tales that don’t end with the princess getting eaten by the dragon. or (worse yet) finding herself sad and alone.

I get a taste of the great outdoors tomorrow. A few days away from all this. A brief flirtation with escape.

But I don’t want escape. I want.

Yet another question for which I don’t have an answer.

Dan groaned again, seizing the pillow even tighter. I suddenly felt very tired.

Lights out now. Close the door on the day. Close it tight.