At some level, I think travel has overall become less stressful since I was a kid—with the advent of bank cards, the euro, electronic ticketing, the iPhone. Fewer moments of stark panic on the way to the airport, at least. But maybe I am also generally less uptight of a traveler than my mom.
I am trying to know myself. I want a better sense of what kind of mother the kids will remember me to be. It’s hard: I am not done becoming me. I am still in the works. I still aim to be softer in some places, firmer in others. Someday—impossibly not that far from now, the boys will come to Orlando with their own families—memories etched in each of their brains of this visit here—and they will learn something of themselves, too. The shape of themselves: their arms around their kids on the teak bench, that hospital bed on the children’s ward, my dad’s old Datsun on the side of the highway.
As we walk together now across the Portofino piazza in the late afternoon sunset of winter, I feel us—me, John, the boys, my mom somehow—all of us hurtling separately—yet so very close to one another—toward the future.
*
Back at the resort pool, John and I sip real alcoholic beverages while the boys run around on a fake sand beach. We clink champagne glasses that have been specially designed not to break on the ground cover surrounding the pool, as the bartender explains to me when Freddy later knocks mine off the table with his towel.
“At least I’m here with you,” I say to John—an inside joke of our relationship. At least I’m here with you is a line from one of the Llama Llama books that we have read to the kids before millions of bedtimes: “I think shopping’s boring, too,” said Little Llama’s mama when the baby llama was having a meltdown in the llama version of Costco. “But at least I’m here with you.” We’ve said it to each other a hundred times over the years—words of solidarity and disarmament on the battlefields of parenting.
What happens to little scraps like this, when there is only one person left to get the allusion? I picture a piece of paper—soggy and unreadable—that I saw a groundskeeper fish out of the canal with a net earlier in the day when we were waiting for the water taxi. What is the use of an inside joke with the dead?
“I sure wouldn’t ever want to do it with anyone else,” John says, putting his arm over my shoulders.
The sun on our backs is real. And Benny’s laughter on his way down the pool’s impressive waterslide—made to look like the ruins of an ancient temple—is real. And the boys’ still-little bodies, wrapped in towels, blue-lipped and shivering in our laps after they decide the day is done: They are real.
*
I will never travel with my nearly grown sons through Italy. Let’s just say that. Just as they will—probably—never buy an espresso with lire or navigate the world without a handheld map that knows their exact location and the likelihood of a coming squall to hamper their hike along the cliff side from the villages of Corniglia to Manarola. That world is gone.
Instead, we follow our children down manicured paths through an overdeveloped inland swamp, whispering remember you must—we all must—die in their ears as they find their way through worlds rebuilt and worlds that never were.
30. Tumor Burden
Another hospital stay—this time, my lungs. I’m not breathing well. Tests, scans, waiting. The doctors suggest a cause they are investigating: the microscopic invasion of the lymphatic ducts in the lungs of millions of unimageable cancer cells. Lymphangitic carcinomatosis. It is not a good development.
“The tumor burden could be quite high,” the pulmonologist says, “making it hard to get the oxygen you need.”
Tumor burden: like a backpack you might put down, like a worry you might unload, a crime you might confess. I’ve been here five days: the river of nurses and techs and transporters; merry-go-rounds of doctors; vitals and alarms. Someone urgently needs to weigh me at 3 a.m. Something is beeping.
Sometimes it feels like the whole world is beeping.
*
Outside, a dreary January morning: low clouds draped on the helicopter; uncharacteristically warm and muggy. Around noon, a hospital transporter comes for me and wheels my bed down a long corridor and into the abyss of the hospital for another breathing test, and all during our passage I can see, inside the cell-like rooms we pass, the face of the new president on dozens of TV screens. The world is anxious: The cloud cover has shifted under the tightrope. Everywhere, the tumor burden is high.
“How are you holding up today,” says the breathing tech in the windowless room. “All things considered?”
I’m not sure to which things he is referring exactly. I don’t know if he is sure either.
“I’m okay,” I say. “Considering. How are you?”
He says he is fair to middling.
“Of course, that’s what I always say,” he says. “Because it about always fits.”
When the scan is done, he says, “Bon voyage, madame,” holding open the door as the tech wheels me back into the hallway. “Hasta la vista. Ta-ta for now. Have a blessed day.”
*
When I am back in my room there is a covered tray by the bed I forgot I had ordered. There, in the chocolate pudding, I discover a continent of whipped cream that I plan to explore. And also a dish of peaches, which somehow—even in their thick syrup—are plump and firm: a suggestion of rebellion in their freshness—sweet and lovely on the tongue.
John has just returned as well—after spending a few hours at work and at home with the kids—and is now hunched in his impossible recliner by the window where he’s been spending his nights, catching up on email on his laptop.
“Well, that’s a mess,” he is saying, sipping coffee from his thermos.
Behind John, I can see billows of steam rising off the top of the hospital buildings, and the midday light—what there is of it—that filters through the ninth-floor window is silvery and thin.
Everything is strange—so unlike anything we have done before—and everything, too, is exactly as we imagined.
31. Scrummle
“So, do you know what ‘scrummling’ is?” asks Benny as we cuddle in bed on the night before I start a new chemo regimen. Downstairs: the sound of our new at-home oxygen compressor—kicking on, kicking off. I don’t yet need the extra air in bed.
I’m on the laptop, searching unsuccessfully on the regular Internet forums for people’s experiences with the cocktail. Then it occurs to me that I’m not finding much because generally these people are pretty dead. It’s not like with the earlier drugs where everyone’s buzzing about hair loss and metallic tongue.
“I do not,” I say. “Do you?”
“Sure. It’s a secret sound,” he says. “A puppy sound. Only puppies can hear it. And you and I are brand-new puppies who haven’t opened our eyes and only know how to scrummle.”
“Does MacDuff know about scrummling?” I ask MacDuff on the floor.
“He used to,” Benny tells me. “But he might have forgotten now.”
“Now that you mention it,” I say to him, closing my laptop and snuggling us both down deep under the covers, “I think I do remember scrummling. From when you were a baby.”