Remission
It Begins
To start with there were the tests, the endless fucking tests.
Blood tests, bone marrow tests, MRI’s, CAT’s, urinalysis, x-rays, ultrasounds—you name it and it was done.
It was decided that the best course of treatment would be to install
a shunt—a semi-permanently installed hookup for the IV in Justin’s
chest so that he could be plugged into the tubes more easily. He had been
accepted for treatment at Sloan Kettering in
I hoped to fuck they were right.
I’d been checking the net for whatever I could find about what he had and it scared the shit out of me.
There are some cancers that you can get that you know that you have a decent survival rate, you know that you have a fighting chance. Breast cancer if it’s caught early, some of the skin cancers weren’t too bad if you were lucky, even a few types of leukemia were doable…but this one was a mother. If someone had decided to stack some fucking deck against Justin, this would have been one of the trump cards to play.
Fuck me.
So what does Justin have? Rhabdomyosarcoma. That’s what it’s called and I know it’s a mouthful and a half. It’s a soft tissue cancer and we were told that it’s the most common childhood cancer but don’t look so fucking smug. You can get it any time. It starts in the muscles and spreads from there. It’s aggressive. If you hit remission you can almost count on it to reappear. If it’s in a limb and the leg or whatever is amputated, it can still come back. Some people have it ten years or more before it’s diagnosed, some two year olds have it. It’s cancer. It sucks.
It starts with one mutated cell. The one cell becomes millions and then billions and then—well, then you’re pretty much screwed.
Life expectancy is generally about five years with this one.
OK, I’m not a complete asshole. Justin doesn’t know that last part but he’s a smart fuck and can use the Internet as well as anyone can. If he doesn’t know it now, he will soon enough.
He doesn’t want to deal with his father and the thought of having the rest of the ‘family’ know is more than he can think about right now.
Me, too.
Jesus, can you picture the look on Deb’s face when she hears that Sunshine has the big C?
Christ, I sound like John Wayne.
Fuck. So he spoke to his school about a medical leave and they weren’t a problem—about that. They’d hold his place, all best wishes, please get well, keep us informed, we’ll be praying for you and all that shit. A refund for the semester’s tuition? Well, you’re too far along into the work for that. Credit? Well, we’re really not far enough along for you to have full credit for the courses—that wouldn’t be fair to the students who’ll be here, now would it?
Take the money and give nothing back.
Fuckers.
Then there was the night, almost after the first week was over and we were still digesting it all, when I realized that he had to tell his mother.
I was sitting at the computer and I looked over at him watching Yellow Submarine for the ten millionth time and he looked like he was about twelve years old. His knees were drawn up against him, he had an old blanket pulled up and he looked so—solemn, I guess is the word I want.
He was nineteen years old and the last year of his life had been fucking hospitals and physical therapists and when that was finally, finally behind him…shit. Round two.
He couldn’t break it to Jennifer. No, no fucking way. He couldn’t.
But he had to—or I did.
I did. I had to tell her. She had to know.
Justin wasn’t a minor, but he was a full time student covered under his mother’s health insurance policy. She’d be getting letters and calls from Blue Cross about the bills that would be coming in.
She had to know before she was blindsided by it.
I’d have to tell her for him.
Shit.
We hadn’t seen Jennifer in a month or six weeks. The school year was just starting up and we were all busy. Molly was starting her first year of high school, Jen was working, Justin and I were doing our thing. We’d been meaning to get together but just hadn’t had time. I guess that both sides were half expecting a call from the other, so she wasn’t completely surprised when she picked up the phone at work and I asked if she’d mind if I stopped over after work that evening. Say, around six or so?
Sure, of course—you two are coming for dinner? No, just me.
She sounded a little taken aback that I wanted to see her without Justin being along—it wasn’t like I hung out with her or anything, but she probably thought I wanted to talk about Craig the asshole picking up some of the PIFA bills or something.
She was smiling when she opened the door.
“Brian, come in. Have you eaten? I was just about to take the casserole out of the oven.” She turned to the stairs. “Molly? Dinner in fifteen minutes.”
“No, I’m fine, thanks.” I took off my jacket and was suddenly sorry that I was still dressed for the office, all Armanied and silk tie. It was so—formal and I didn’t want to intimidate her.
Christ. Listen to me.
“Can I get you something to drink?” She was pouring herself a diet soda.
“No, thanks.”
Maybe there was something in my voice or my demeanor, I don’t know, but I could see her warning signals going off. Something was wrong and it was wrong enough for me to come out here to suburbia to discuss it with her.
“Is Justin alright?” She probably thought we’d broken up or something, maybe we’d had a fight or he’d dumped me again.
Cut to the fucking chase, why don’t you? I’d been trying to think how I would say this, what phrases I could use to try to make it a little easier but there wasn’t anything. An anvil is an anvil whether it catches you offside you or hits you right in the face.
I think I took a breath and then just jumped in.
“There’s a problem, he has a problem.” I hoped that she would say something, but she just looked at me with these enormous eyes. She knew it was bad if it had me stammering.
“He has a tumor on his wrist, well it’s really his forearm.” I was babbling. “The doctors have done tests.” Jesus, I was shoving a knife into her and watching her bleed. “It’s malignant.”
“What?” She froze and sounded like I was speaking another language and she couldn’t understand what I was saying, that it didn’t make any sense. I knew what that was like. A couple of days ago I was as illiterate as she was now. Whatever she thought was coming—this wasn’t it.
“He has cancer. The tests have been confirmed and treatment is starting on Monday.”
“Treatment?” I was still speaking fucking Swahili as far as she was concerned. “Cancer?”
“Radiation and chemo. They want to start as soon as possible.”
“But—What kind of cancer? How advanced is it? When did you find out—how?” She was as white as Justin had been. “Monday? This is Thursday. How can they start so quickly?”
I told her what she asked, if not what she wanted to know. I didn’t know if he’d get better. I wish to shit I did know, but the doctors were too used to dealing with this to give false hope. Justin would have seen through that and they would have lost any hope of cooperation from him from then on. They told him the truth. It would be an uphill fight, they’d do the best they could but there were no guarantees.
“Jennifer, Justin didn’t want you to know at first. He didn’t want you to have to go through it. He didn’t want anyone to know until he knew more about it and no one does know—OK? Don’t tell them. It’s important to him right now. He wants to do this himself—with me. He has to do this the way he wants to.” Babbling again.
She looked another question at me. I went on. “He’s under your insurance policy. They might give you shit about some of the treatment. If they do, I’ll fight them for you. You had to know before the bills started coming in. It’s going to be expensive” Like that fucking mattered.
She was still just staring at me when Molly came in for dinner. She caught the mood the second she walked through the door, even if she didn’t know what was going on. She stood next to me—she’s always been in my corner, even when Justin was with Ethan and I didn’t think we’d get back together.
Molly was the only Taylor who called me then—she would call me to help her with her math or her soccer drills and use it as an excuse to hang out together and keep me up on what was happening with her brother. I looked forward to it every Saturday. The rest of her family didn’t know.
“Did you and Justin break up again?” That was the worst thing she could imagine.
“No. We’re good”
Jennifer sort of woke up and asked if I would mind giving Molly her dinner—she was tired, had an awful headache and would like to lie down.
I ate a tune casserole with Justin’s sister that night and all we talked about was soccer until we were loading the dishes into the washer.
“Justin is sick, isn’t he?”
“You were listening.”
“You can hear anything people are saying in the kitchen if you stand at the top of the stairs by the door. Is he going to die?”
There was no point in bullshitting her. She was a kid, but she was as smart as Justin was and she’d find out soon enough anyway. “I don’t know.” That was too blunt even for me. “He’s seeing good doctors.”
“But you guys just got back together.”
“We’re together.”
The fucker wasn’t that she started crying then—I’d sort of expected that she would cry. The fucker, the thing that got me was that she put her arms around my waist and held on while I let her cry herself out and I had this thought that I’d be doing this a lot the next few months—or longer, and the selfish, asshole Kinney side of me wanted to know who the fuck was going to hold me when I needed it?
I used to count on Justin for that support system, and Mikey before that, but Justin had enough to deal with now and Mikey had Ben. Besides—I didn’t want Mikey for this. I wanted—fuck, I wanted Justin to be the one to help me but he was going to need me to hold him up and that mattered more.
Molly was still holding onto me but her crying was down to hiccupping. I rubbed her back and gave her this load of crap pep talk about how she had to help her Mom and all of that shit, that I was counting on her to help her mother. She nodded and asked if she could call him, that she hadn’t seen him in a while and she wanted to tell him that she had some of his old teachers and they’d been asking about him. I told her to keep the cancer a secret between us for now, that Justin didn’t want to have to cope with everyone’s reactions until he had a handle on it himself and she nodded, understanding.
She’s a smart little fuck.
“It’s really bad, isn’t it?”
I remember nodding to her and was going to leave to get home to Justin when the whole Goddamned thing hit me while I was standing there in Jennifer’s kitchen with Justin’s little sister looking at me with pity, feeling sorry for me, and I could feel the cracks starting. I remember taking a breath, trying to center myself and just fucking completely failing and leaning over the counter with my face in my hands and breaking down. The thought “fucking faggot” went through my mind and I didn’t care and then I realized that Molly was trying to hug me, holding onto me as tightly as she could and saying the same shit I’d been saying to her a few minutes before. She was telling me that it would be alright and that Justin needed me and that he loved me and all of that crap I knew and then it hit me that this child was the only one I could break down with because—because she wouldn’t think I was a twat or a pansy or any of that.
Because she knew that I loved her brother and I was scared out of my Goddamned mind and I couldn’t fall apart with him so she let me do what I had to and never told anyone that I stood and cried in her mother’s kitchen.