“Remember when Lou told her she should have been a Southern Baptist preacher?” Scarlet says, and they laugh at the memory, briefly, before Cora grows serious. She is quiet, looking out the window again. Morning light like this isn’t kind to anyone, but Cora’s face has grown lovelier with age; its lines reveal depth, resolve, but there’s a softness there too, and it never goes away. Addie had the same softness, Scarlet realizes suddenly, and it hits her like a stabbing pain. It was just hard to see it sometimes.
“You know,” Cora says, “it stunned me to look at Addie over these last few weeks, to see all that passion drained from her face. It seemed like she finally wasn’t interested in fighting anymore. I still can’t decide whether to call that peace, whatever it was she felt at the end. I can’t bear to think that she felt resigned, or defeated somehow. Not Addie.”
When she says this, both women begin to cry quietly. “I think it was peace,” Scarlet says, her voice a hoarse whisper that she can barely hear herself. She isn’t sure of this at all. But if it wasn’t peace, she thinks, maybe it was still something good, something close to peace, something as close to peace as was possible for Addie. And far, very far from resignation—of that Scarlet is certain, based on Addie’s last request. But she promised Addie, when she made that request two weeks ago, not to burden Cora or Lou with this information.
And so she clears her throat to say it again, without necessarily believing it, because she wants Cora to believe it: “I think she’d found a kind of peace, Cora. Resignation wasn’t really in her repertoire, you know?”
There’s a pause then, a heavy one—a quiet between them that, Scarlet knows, Cora would like her to fill with news of what was said, late last night, when Cora and Lou left Tom and Scarlet with Addie. But she isn’t ready to relive those last hours that feel, now, like she must have dreamed them. She would like, for just a little while, to pretend that Addie’s just asleep—that it wasn’t her body they wrapped up and carried down the street a few hours ago, then fussed over ridiculously, as if about her comfort, as they laid her out on the cot.
When they’d gotten her to the restaurant cooler, there, inexplicably, had been Dustin, ready with a plastic sheet and bags filled with dry ice—an “extra precaution,” he’d said, in case they needed extra time. He helped Tom and Scarlet position the bags below Addie’s head and back, at the sides of her legs, her feet. Scarlet shakes her head at the memory: Could she have dreamed it? Had they really laid out her mother’s dead body in a walk-in cooler just hours ago? And were they really going to move that body, and somehow bury it on their own, a few short hours from now?
She is not ready for this, not ready for what will come next, not ready for all the questions, not ready for the full wave of Cora’s sadness, much less her own. So Scarlet is relieved and surprisingly grateful when—conveniently, miraculously—the sound of an old handsaw grinding through wood rises from the lawn below the screened porch, and she and Cora both turn to look out the window at Dustin, back at work on the coffin he is making for Addie.
“Who is that guy?” Scarlet blurts out, her voice rising above the saw’s steady hum, and they both laugh, silly with relief. But Scarlet also hears the petulance in her voice. She hears it because she’s felt it—petulant, overlooked, hurt—for a good part of the last twenty years.
Who is that guy? It’s a rhetorical question really. Earnest, idealistic young people like Dustin have been trailing in her mother’s wake for years, ever since she started staging her own forms of protest in the face of overdevelopment and loss of habitat—camping out on the sites of planned subdivisions and shopping malls, erecting angry art installations in response to things like pesticide use and declining populations of birds.
Addie has been a darling of radical environmentalist types since she hid out to avoid arrest in connection with a supposed act of ecoterrorism sixteen years ago. She caught on with the art world too, after her run-in with a conservative senator eight years ago. Then, when her cancer returned last year, the news quickly found its way into the publications and listservs and chat rooms favored by both those groups.
She would have nothing to do with traditional treatment this time, she said. No chemotherapy, nothing. Despite the time it might buy her. No more battling the cells exploding everywhere inside her, growing fast and furious—her own internal suburban sprawl.
“There are too many toxins inside me already,” she said, her voice clear and steady as a bell, that day in her oncologist’s office eight months ago. “I’m finished.” And with that she stood and walked out the door, leaving Tom and Scarlet to thank the good doctor for his suggestion of another round of full-scale chemotherapy and shake their heads no. No, no—they wouldn’t be trying to persuade her. Not this time. No.
Thirteen years before, they’d sat together in the same office, between the rounds of chemotherapy and the radiation. Addie—pale and slim and bald, looking younger than her forty-five years—was a striking presence; it shocked Scarlet to realize that the oncologist seemed almost afraid of her.
Addie’s dark eyes flashed, but that time she said nothing as the doctor urged her to “cover all the bases”—radiation next, followed by hormone therapy: a daily tamoxifen pill for the next five years.
Tom took her hand and kissed both her cheeks. “I know you hate this, Addie. But please, love, let’s try it. Please.”
“ ‘Let’s’?” she snapped. “ ‘Let us try it ’? Who exactly is us?”
And then, Scarlet couldn’t help herself: She started to cry. No, to sob. The chemotherapy had already made Addie so sick. Scarlet and Tom had insisted on that, refusing to listen when Addie had proposed looking into alternative therapies first. But what were they supposed to do, Scarlet had asked herself then. Sit back and watch her die?
Addie could never bear to see Scarlet cry. Past the age of four or five, she’d seldom done it in her mother’s presence.
“I’m sorry,” Scarlet whimpered, reaching into her bag for tissues. “I’m sorry, Addie.” She couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Addie looked at Scarlet and opened her mouth as if to say something, then closed it again.
“All right,” she said, her voice hoarse. Tired. “Yes, all right.” She started gathering her things—her bag, the book she was reading, her jacket. “I’ll do whatever you say. We’ll call to schedule it. Right now I’m tired. I need to go home.”
And Scarlet and Tom walked out behind her, after wordless handshakes with the doctor.
And she had the radiation therapy, and took the tamoxifen.
And now they all know that in some cases additional hormones—so-called adjuvant therapy—eventually lead to changes in the uterine wall. The place where Addie’s cancer showed up next.
Oh, but Addie, Scarlet imagined saying to her, so many times: We were only doing what we thought was right. Just a few big bombs to blast that overdevelopment in your tissues. Then a pill a day to stanch those strip malls and Wal-Marts and drive-through pharmacies in your lymph nodes. It all seemed so sensible at the time.
And then she imagined Addie’s response: Right. Kind of like Hiroshima.
They did talk briefly about the tamoxifen two weeks ago, the last time Scarlet visited before these last few days of gathering again in Cider Cove for Addie’s imminent death. “I don’t blame you for that,” Addie said to Scarlet and Tom then. “I’ve made my own decisions, all along. I took the damn pill each morning. No one held a gun to my head. I just filled a goddamn glass of water and swallowed the stupid thing. Of course I wanted to fight it then, of course I was going to do what they told me to do. It’s all as simple as that, isn’t it? You can’t think of anything else to do. You assume they know what’s best. You follow instructions.”
“And then you die,” Tom said. And they all laughed.
“Right. No surprises there,”