The War of the Flowers Page 4

  But today, driving the delivery van, even the bleakness of living back at his mother's house could not dim his feeling that a change was coming, that a sort of dormancy was over. He had been surprised how powerfully the twin blows of losing Catherine and the baby had struck him. It was more than just the weird bad dreams: for weeks he had found himself bursting into mortified tears while listening to old songs on the van radio — songs he had never liked that much in the first place. Anthems of lost love, Fifties car accident weepies and horrible, saccharine tunes about dead girlfriends and children, even things that seemed to have nothing to do with his own upside-down life could catch him like a sharp needle in the heart. Once an old chestnut from the Seventies about a drowning sheepdog (as far as he could tell, since he had never listened to the lyrics very intently) made him pull over because he was crying too hard to see. But not today. Spring had actually arrived a month ago, but for the first time he could feel himself respond to it, as though he too were full of sap being warmed by the sun, as if he were about to bud.

  Don't know about budding, he thought as he pulled the van into the slot behind the store. But maybe I could go out and catch a few beers with Johnny, go listen to some music. An Irish band he had heard about was playing at a club in the Mission. He considered inviting his mother — she was Irish by birth, after all, and she had a kind of weird soft spot for Johnny B., soft for her anyway. And Johnny in turn kind of flirted with her. He had actually once said, "Your mom must have been at least a semi-babe when she was young." The whole thing had been far too bizarre for Theo to deal with, but now he found himself liking the idea of taking her out with him and Johnny. Might do her good, and he would feel a little less guilty about sharing the house with her as though he were an itinerant stranger.

  "You're singing," Khasigian said as Theo hung the keys on the hook board. "Is that a good thing?" "Guess that's for the people listening to decide." Khasigian squinted at him, gnawed his pencil. He had a shiny bald head like an ancient tortoise, but the rest of him was surprisingly fit for his sixty-something years. He jogged, sometimes coming into the shop on hot days in running shorts and allowing the employees to make respectful jokes about his thin brown legs. "It could be worse. You sing okay. But I don't like it when my employees are happy. I think when they are not afraid they don't work so hard."

  "A priceless example of your nineteenth-century management style." Theo plucked his faithful leather jacket off the rack. "That's why you win the Ebenezer Scrooge Award year after year, Mr. K. They're going to have to retire that trophy, you know."

  "Go home, Singing Boy. Go annoy someone with less to do." Khasigian could be an unalloyed bastard occasionally, and he certainly wasn't going to drown his employees in money and benefits, but he was at least middling honest and did a pretty good imitation of the Gruff But Lovable Boss when he wanted to. Too good, really — that's how you could tell it was only an act.

  Theo rode back to the Sunset district with the visor of his helmet open. The wind was damp and warm and the smell of blossoming things filled the air, stronger even than the auto exhaust.

  ————— Mrs. Kraley was out in the yard next door, watering her garden. Theo waved to her. She did not wave back, although she was only using one hand to operate the hose. Mrs. Kraley was another thing that made staying at his mother's such a warm, satisfying experience.

  His mother did not respond to his call when he came in. After the terrible night when he had found Cat, he had a reflexive need to know where everyone was, so he checked and found her in her bedroom, napping fully dressed, propped on three pillows, her chest moving up and down just like it was supposed to. It was strange to see her sleeping in the middle of the day, but then again he seldom came home right after work ended. He wandered back to the kitchen, took a bottle of beer out of the refrigerator, then made his way out to the tidy emptiness of the living room. He found himself wishing that if he had to be stuck in his parents' house, it was at least the house in San Mateo in which he had grown up, a place with memories, where he would have something to react to, even if only depressive nostalgia. But his mother and father had bought this house less than ten years ago, a year after Theo had moved out for good and his father had retired — a retirement Peter Vilmos had only a few years to appreciate before the massive stroke had killed him. His picture stood by itself on the mantel, a setting too stark to be any kind of a shrine. There were moments when Theo thought he saw his own features in his father's, when the jaw or cheekbones seemed inarguably his own, but most of the time the man seemed as remote genetically as he had been paternally, a decent guy who had simply worked too many hours to have much strength left for dad-stuff.

  There were no other pictures of Pete Vilmos anywhere on display, which had more to do with Theo's mother than any fault of his father. She had only one of Theo as well, a school picture from when he was in second or third grade that sat on her dresser, still in its original little cardboard frame. There were no other photographs visible in the house, and very few pictures of any kind. The large framed print of a bridge over the River Liffey in Dublin on the living room wall was the exception, and Theo believed it was mostly there because the wall would look too bare without it. Anna Dowd Vilmos was not sentimental.

  In an uncharacteristic bit of disorganization, his mother had left her coat over one of the chairs and her purse lying on its side on the dining room table; a small scatter of objects had fallen out of the open top. He found himself wondering what exactly it was she did all day. She volunteered at the library, but that was only once a week. Most of her working years had been spent cooking and cleaning for her child and her fairly old-fashioned husband. What did she do with her time? A pang of guilt struck him, that he was only thinking about this now, with his own life in tatters. Dad had been dead for a long stretch. Had Theo, her only child, ever gone to her and asked her if there was something he could do to help? Had he tried to make time for her, take her out, get to know her? Sure, she wasn't the most responsive person in the world, but he hadn't done much to try to overcome that, had he?

  He left the silent television, the muted scenes of car accidents and school district protests on the early evening news, and hung his mother's coat up in the closet. He could make her dinner. That would be something nice to wake up to, wouldn't it? He wasn't a great cook, but he wasn't hopeless, and even grilled cheese sandwiches and canned tomato soup would be better than her having to get up and do the cooking. Or maybe he should just take her out to a proper dinner. Call John from a restaurant, then they could all go out and see that Irish band.

  He was halfway through scooping the fallen objects back into her purse when he realized he was holding a pill bottle, that he had been looking at it for some moments without quite understanding why he had paused.

  Fentanyl Citrate, the label read. It also had a bright orange warning label. It took long seconds reading through the many cautionary notations on the label before he understood that what he was looking at was some kind of morphine derivative — serious, serious pain medication. His insides went cold, as though he himself were being numbed. He stared at it a moment longer, then, not entirely conscious of what he was doing or why, dumped his mother's purse out onto the table. A lipstick rolled off and clicked onto the floor but he did not bend to pick it up. The glossy pamphlet, folded and unfolded so many times that the creases were white, had a bar across the top that identified it as a publication of the California Pacific Medical Center. The words on the cover, the typeface careful, almost respectful, read "Pancreatic Cancer: Questions and Answers."

  —————

  "Why didn't you tell me?" She gave him a look that was like something he'd expect from Kris Rolle, almost teenage in its sullenness. "I didn't know for sure. They're still not one hundred percent certain until they do a biopsy, but the what-do-youcall-it, the endoscope, showed there was a big tumor." She shrugged. "It wasn't nice, that endoscope. I didn't want to go in for it — I hoped it was nothing."

>   "This is bad, Mom. We have to get serious about this. This is important!" For a moment her expression seemed to lighten, but there was an abyss behind her crooked smile. "Yes, Theo. I know."

  "Sorry. Jesus. Sorry." He took a deep, shuddering breath. "What did they tell you?" What they had told her was not good. If the biopsy confirmed it was malignant, as seemed very likely, it was probably Stage Three or Four, she said. He found out the next day, when he used the computer at the library to go online, that they were usually spelled "Stage III" and "Stage IV," as though putting the ugliness in Roman numerals made it distant, somehow, less fearful, a mere historical footnote. It seemed to have gone undetected for a long time already, the doctor had told her, which was often the way with pancreatic cancer since it was seldom noticed until the tumor began to press on the other organs, and the chances were high that it had spread into her lymphatic system, rogue cells sowing the seeds of chaos throughout her body.

  "Six months," she said. "A year if the radiation and chemotherapy help."

  "Jesus." He stood staring at her awful composure. "Are you telling me it's incurable?" She shrugged again. "There are some, what do they call them, some temporary remissions. Sometimes with the chemotherapy and all that, people survive longer. It's not usual."

  He couldn't understand how she could sit here talking about death, her own death, as though discussing an appliance warranty. "But there's a chance, right?"

  "There is always a chance, Theo." She did not have to add what was in her voice. But probably not for me.

  "Has this . . . oh, God, has it been hurting you a lot, Mom?" She thought about it before answering. She was not in a hurry. He had a sudden insight into how that part must feel, anyway: there was no point in hurrying anything now. "For a while. At first, it wasn't so bad. I thought it was just aching muscles — my back, you know. Sometimes I get that when I carry things around, move the furniture to vacuum."

  Another stab of guilt — no, of something closer to pure misery — at the thought of his mother dragging heavy sofas around so she could vacuum a house empty but for him and herself. But what did it matter now? He wanted to laugh at the horror of it all, but even with his mother's strange, detached mood, it didn't seem like the right thing to do. But he had a feeling that she'd like it better than if he started crying. He looked around the empty house, at the clean carpets and unprepossessing furniture, at the small dark-haired woman sitting on a chair in front of him, and tried to think of something to say.

  "I wasn't very hungry either," she said abruptly. "But I've never been someone who wanted to eat a lot. Not like your father. He always had a can of nuts next to him, or something like that. . . ." She stopped as suddenly as she had begun, finished with the thought.

  "Do you . . . do you want to come out with me? Tonight? There's an Irish band at the Kennel Club. They're supposed to be good — real Irish music, all acoustic instruments."

  She actually smiled, and because it was a real smile, for the first time he could see the pain and weariness. "That would be nice, Theo. Yes, let's go out."

  ————— After that, the descent began. What had happened with Cat and the baby had been so sudden that it had seemed more like a brutal mugging — one moment walking down the street thinking about what you were going to have for dinner, the next lying in the gutter wondering if you could manage to crawl to where someone would find you. Watching his mother die was like something else entirely, a sort of terrible, slow-motion accident that went on and on and seemed to have no ending. But there would be an ending, of course.

  They spoke a different language in the land of death, he discovered. If he had thought Cat's miscarriage was wrapped around with strange arcana, he had not even begun to glimpse the possibilities. First off, it wasn't just cancer or a tumor they were dealing with, it was adenocarcinoma. They didn't examine his mother, they performed laparoscopic staging or endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography — that last word something you couldn't even fit on a Scrabble board. And there seemed to be no real treatments, just mysteries of which even druid priests would be proud, things like Gemcitabine or Fluorouracil, palliative bypass or even chemical splanchnicectomy. Sometimes the smoke would rise, the curtain part, and someone in a white coat would lean out and breathe, "percutaneous radiologic biliary stent," before disappearing again. It was like someone had opened a hole into Theo's life — his life and his mother's, but she was daily growing more and more distant in her haze of pain-deadeners — and backed up a dump truck full of spiky Greco-Latin terms, then poured them over everything in an avalanche of meaningless but still terrifying syllables.

  Unresectable. That was one of the worst.

  Metastasized. That was the worst.

  ————— He had to quit his job, of course, although Khasigian was kind enough to tell him he could have it back when he wanted it. His mother, frugal by nature, had stashed a bit away out of her husband's pension and Social Security over the years, enough to pay the tiny mortgage payments and put food on the table, especially as Anna Vilmos seldom ate anything now, no matter how much Theo begged her. He was so worried about her not eating that he even got Johnny to bring over a few buds of high-grade weed, which after a great deal of argument they convinced Theo's mother to smoke.

  "You're trying to turn me into a dope addict like you," she said, wearily amused, clutching John Battistini's furry arm. It would have been comical, the kind of thing Theo and Johnny would have marveled over forever — "the night we got your mom stoned!" — except that there was nothing funny about the circumstances, about Anna Dowd Vilmos' yellowish skin, the bruised circles under her eyes, the headscarf that she always wore now because the chemotherapy was making her hair come out of her scalp in patches. She had just discontinued the Gemcitabine, declaring in a moment of stubborn determination, "It's not going to help anything and I'm not going to die without my hair."

  Marijuana didn't have the effect Theo hoped. In fact, Anna had a sort of bad trip, the kind of thing he had rarely seen even in the most paranoid of first-time smokers. She moaned and cried and began to babble about "the night they took the baby," something that made no sense to Theo unless she was talking about Cat's miscarriage. As he held her, patting her awkwardly and trying not to think about how thin she had become, whispering reassuring nothings, he wondered if something in her own family history had triggered it. It was shocking how little he knew about the events of his mother's life before she had given birth to him.

  Even when the worst had passed, she was too distraught to do anything more that night, and certainly had no interest in eating. He put her to bed at last. Johnny went home full of apologies, promising that he would find "some mellower weed" so they could try another time. But Theo knew, as he looked down at his mother whimpering in her shallow sleep, that this would be the last experiment. It was hard to say whether her remoteness in the last weeks had been denial or courage, but whatever it was, he didn't want to take it away from her again.

  ————— "I want you to sell the house," she told him one morning, a morning like every other morning of late, on their way to the clinic with hours of treatments ahead for her, tattered waiting room magazines and mediocre coffee for him.

  "What do you mean, sell the house? What, are we just going to move down to the clinic full-time?"

  She still had the strength to give him an annoyed look. It was one of the few pleasures she had left. "I mean after I'm dead." "Mom, don't talk like that . . ." "If I don't talk like that now, when do I do it?" She pulled down the scarf where it had begun to creep above her ears. "When? No, you just listen. That's not your house — you don't want to live there after I'm gone. You'll never keep it clean anyway."

  "I don't want to think about it right now."

  "You never want to think about things like that. That's why you're still doing what you're doing, Theo. That's why you're living with me."

  "I could have moved out if . . . if you hadn't got sick." She made a face. "Maybe. But you li
sten to me. You sell it, get yourself a nice apartment, then you'll have a little money. You can go back to school, get a degree. You could have done well in school if you'd ever tried — the teachers always said you were bright, but you wanted to spend all your time in those rock and roll bands. The house is almost paid off — there's the second mortgage for the kitchen remodeling, of course, but you'll still get enough to go to school."

  The thought of how it would happen was ghastly, but it kindled something inside him all the same, something that might have been an idea of eventual freedom. "We'll talk about it . . . we'll talk about it later, Mom. You're going to beat this thing."

  "You are a very bad liar, Theo." She paused for a long beat. "It's a lucky thing you're musical." He flicked a glance at her. Yes, she was — she was smiling. It was all just weird beyond belief. Did my mother have to get cancer to develop a sense of humor? That's a fairly shitty trade-off, isn't it?

  But there are no trade-offs. The universe isn't a machine for fairness. There's no Complaints Department. There's no court of higher appeal.

  Pretty well sucks, doesn't it? ————— The descent went on throughout the spring and early summer, a free fall both agonizingly swift and yet somehow as thrashingly, stickily slow as a nightmare. Johnny Battistini quit coming over, unable to face the scarecrow figure that Anna Vilmos had become, although he still called from time to time to ask after her and to urge Theo to get out, just for an evening.

  "Come on," he said the last time. "It would do you a lot of good, man. Just for a couple of hours . . ." "Right. Right. And what if she falls down in the bathroom while I'm out?" Theo heard the hysterical edge in his own voice as though he were eavesdropping on someone else's conversation. "I'm supposed to just sit there drinking beers and scoping chicks and hope that doesn't happen? Easy for you to say. If it was your mom, you probably would."