The Long Goodbye Read Free Page A

you,” she said, with a deliberateness that alarmed me. “And I wanted you to hear it from me.” She hesitated. “I haven’t been feeling well and I went to the doctor for some tests, and she found a tumor.”
    â€œWhere?” I said, stupidly.
    â€œIn my colon,” she continued. “They don’t know what it means. It could be benign. They’re running tests and we’ll know more about it on Tuesday.” The way she said, “They don’t know what it means,” made me hopeful, as if the tumor were something that could be interpreted, like a passage in Shakespeare. It’s not a disease; it’s a pound of flesh. I could hear that she, too, wanted to think of it this way.
    The next week she called as I was walking back from lunch to my office on Fifty-seventh Street. As the afternoon crowd bustled industriously around me, she said, bluntly, “The doctor got the results. The tumor is cancerous.” My knees went weak—the cliché is true—and I leaned over the scaffolding beside me, the metal bar hard against my stomach. “I’m going to need to have surgery and then maybe radiation and chemotherapy, and we need to do it soon. But they think they can treat it,” she continued.
    I do not remember whether I got any work done that afternoon or what, exactly, came next. I remember calling a former colleague and friend who is a cancer researcher for advice. I remember talking to one of my two younger brothers. I remember fighting with my parents on the phone because they scheduled surgery but had done no “research.” I couldn’t fathom their approach. They didn’t know very much about the doctor they’d chosen or whether surgery was even the right course of action. This made me crazy with anxiety and frustration. In my work as a journalist, I collect information for a living. I read books, articles, and studies as a way of knowing the world. I am also a perfectionist. It’s cancer, I thought. What if the surgeon is third-rate? We can wait a week to find out more. We need the best surgeon. We need a perfectionist of a surgeon; no, we need me to be the surgeon.
    Â 
    Â 
    M Y BROTHERS, Liam and Eamon, and I spent an inordinate amount of time with our mother when we were children, not only because we went to school where she worked, but because she loved being with kids. She was a bit of a child herself. She had a vivid sense of what makes children feel safe, and she believed in the validity of a child’s experience of the world. This is why students trusted her, even when they’d been sent to her office to be disciplined and she was asking them how they could have done something so stupid.
    She wasn’t a mother who only cared about her kids—we always knew she enjoyed the adult world too much for that—and our house was messy and chaotic as often as not. But she spent hours with my brothers and me making gingerbread houses or sledding or cutting out paper snowflakes. She taught us all to make apple pie, and read The Black Stallion to us at night—though she also had a habit of promising to read a book out loud and then giving up partway through. When Eamon came along, I was practically a teenager, and I could see how much pleasure she took in playing silly games with him. Later on, after the three of us had grown up, her best friends’ children—Isabel’s daughters and our friend Diana’s sons—became her stand-in grandkids, and whenever I visited there were still toys in the house.
    It’s funny what you remember most about a person: after my mom died, we all talked a lot about how much she loved driving. She was deeply at home behind the wheel—a feeling I never understood, since I didn’t learn to drive until I was thirty. (She taught me, so I could take her to the doctor.) When Eamon was little, she used to drive him to and from his babysitter’s in Brooklyn on