The Mother's Promise(35)

24

When Alice woke the morning after her operation, she couldn’t find her phone. She needed to call Zoe. She was about to press her buzzer for the nurse when Dr. Brookes came in, trailed by Sonja. Today Sonja was wearing a silk shirt, tailored pants, and an immovable expression.

“Can I sit?” Dr. Brookes asked, and Alice hesitated. She’d been waiting all night for him to come in and discuss her prognosis, but suddenly she didn’t want to hear it.

He sat anyway. “You sure you don’t want anyone to be here?”

“Sonja’s here,” Alice said without looking at her.

“All right.” Dr. Brookes let out a slow breath. “I’m going to get straight down to it. The bad news is the tumor in your right ovary is extensive. We also found tumors on your left ovary and the cancer has spread to the outside lining of the bowel, which puts you at stage three. I was able to debulk some tumors, though not all.”

“Debulk?”

“Remove them.”

“Okay!” Alice said, feeling a burst of optimism. “So you removed them?”

“Some of them. It’s what we call a suboptimal debulking. Unfortunately some of the tumors were inoperable, due to their location near organs.”

“So … what happens now?”

“Now we hit hard with chemo.”

Alice’s heart sank. “Chemo?”

“Yes, I’d like to get you started as soon as possible.”

Alice had known there was a strong likelihood she would need chemo, so she wasn’t sure why this felt like such a shock. “And … after the chemo, then what?”

“With any luck you’ll go into remission.”

Beside her, Sonja scribbled furiously on a legal pad. When Alice looked at her, she lifted her head and gave the tiniest of nods. It made Alice feel a little better. For the first time, she felt glad Sonja was there.

“And,” Alice said, “remission is—?”

“Remission is when we can’t find any evidence of cancer.”

Her mood lifted. “Okay. Good. Remission.”

The pause, though short, was a presence in the room.

“Alice,” Dr. Brookes said, “I always like to be optimistic. But you should know that only about twenty percent of women with stage-three ovarian cancer survive five years.”

A shiver went down Alice’s spine—powerful enough to make her jolt. But just as fast, something else happened. A memory. Of a bumper sticker she’d seen when Zoe was about a year old. She had been stuck in a line of cars in the supermarket parking lot while a tub of ice cream sat melting on the passenger seat. Alice looked around for another exit while simultaneously reaching back to pat Zoe’s feet while she screamed in the backseat. Finally she’d opened the tub of ice cream and, with her fingers, scooped some into Zoe’s mouth. The crying stopped immediately. That’s when she noticed the sticker, on the rear window of the car in front.

I’M A SINGLE MOTHER, WHAT’S YOUR SUPERPOWER?

Single mothers, she realized, did have superpowers. Ovarian cancer might have been the silent killer, but the silent killer hadn’t banked on the superpowers of a single mother.

“Good,” she said. “I plan to be one of those twenty percent.”

Dr. Brookes smiled. “Glad to hear it. Now, I should have the pathology back before Friday and then we can come up with a plan of attack. I want you to know I’m going to give this my all, Alice.”

“So am I,” she said.

Once he was gone, Sonja put down her notebook and came to Alice’s side. Alice was staring at her knees, tented in the bedcovers. She couldn’t be bothered with Sonja. She was thinking about cancer. About 20 percent survival rate. About her superpowers. She was thinking about how she needed to find her damn phone.

“Sonja,” she said. “Have you seen my phone? I really need to call Zoe.”

Sonja was quiet long enough for Alice to look up.

“Alice,” Sonja said, “there’s something I need to tell you.”





25

Kate stepped out of the car in the hospital parking lot and took a deep breath of secondhand cigarette smoke and damp asphalt air. Don’t look, she told herself as she walked into the foyer. Don’t look at the babies. But everywhere she turned there they were. Babies. Crying, burping, smiling. Clamped to its mother’s hip or sitting contentedly on someone’s lap. The yearning to hold a baby, to smell his or her milky breath, was so overpowering it almost doubled Kate over. Of course, babies were around the hospital every day, but this day, the day she returned to work, they seemed to be everywhere.

She caught the elevator to her floor, and as soon as the doors opened, she heard the shouting. She hurried down the corridor, following the noise. She found Alice Stanhope trying to lever herself out of bed while shouting at Sonja, who stood across the room from her.

“Alice!” Kate said. “What are you doing?”

Alice looked over at her and exhaled. “I’m discharging myself.”

“What?” Kate put down her bag on the chair and went to Alice’s side. “What’s happened?”

“She”—Alice stabbed her finger toward Sonja—“put my daughter into foster care. She spent the night there. Sonja says she’ll stay there as long as I’m in here. So I’m leaving. Right now.”