Of course, I had moments of doubt. Once when my nightmare jerked me awake, as she helped me into dry pajamas, I told her, “Just in case I don’t get better I want you to know if I find out there’s something after all this, I’ll send you a message.”
My mother shook her head no and repeated her mantra, “You are not going to die.” But I could tell she had her doubts, too, when, a few heartbeats later, she asked me, “What kind of message?”
“Email.” She thought that was funny even though she was crying.
When we got home from the hospital, I started to feel better. I was hungry again. My hair was growing back and my white blood cell count was normal two blood tests in a row. April 1, I was officially in remission. And then I wasn’t.
The doctors didn’t sugarcoat it: the best and only chance I had was an allogeneic stem cell transplant, a.k.a. a bone marrow transplant. If we could find someone whose HLA—human leukocyte antigens—were compatible with mine and was willing to have a needle stuck in their pelvic bone and give me a couple hundred milliliters of their healthy marrow, we might be able to trick my body into stopping producing the cancerous white blood cells that were killing me. The HLA tests showed my mother’s marrow would have worked, but the oyster that had given her hepatitis C ruled her out. The virus lingering in her blood would kill me before her marrow could save me.
My oncologist took her into his office to tell her my HLA was difficult to match. The chances of finding a compatible donor who was not a blood relative were one in one thousand. My late father was an only child and his parents were dead. My mother was adopted, had no idea who her birth parents were, and no desperate desire to find out until now.
For the next forty-eight hours I could hear her in the hall outside my hospital room on her cell phone. My mother’s adoption records were sealed, and according to New York State law, even in a case when a fourteen-year-old girl needs a bone marrow transplant, they could not be unsealed without a court order. And even then the names of my mother’s birth parents could not be released unless they had already registered in writing that they did not object to being contacted, which was a legal process guaranteed to take longer than my oncology team said I had to live.
My mother inundated every New York State official she could think of with calls and emails begging for help. What she needed was a miracle. If I had known what it meant to be Buddy Quimby’s daughter, I wouldn’t have been surprised that when she found out the originals of her adoption records were stored in the Townsend County courthouse, she cold-called the town clerk and offered him a $10,000 cash bribe to unseal her records. When he said, “That would be against the law,” she jumped her offer to $50K. My mother had no idea where she would get that kind of money, but the silence on the other end of the line was promising, “Believe me, ma’am, I’d like to help you out here, but when the Mink River flooded our basement last spring, the Sheriff’s Department loaded all our records up and dumped them in the town hall in Rangeley.” My mother asked for the name of the sheriff. She got her miracle.
When my mother came into my hospital room that afternoon to tell me she was taking me to the Adirondacks, I was still too groggy to make sense of what she saying. America? Rangeley? Next week? She said she had to leave me alone for a few hours and would be back after she saw a woman at the US consulate about speeding up the renewal of my passport and the forms we’d need to take my medications through customs. All I could think to say before I nodded off was, “So I guess I’m going to meet Jimmy the crow after all. . . .”
I don’t know how long I slept, but when I woke up, I was startled to see an elegantly dressed man in a chalk-stripe blue suit with a rosebud in his lapel standing at the foot of my bed holding the biggest bouquet of flowers I had ever seen. Calla lilies, roses, birds of paradise all wrapped in pink tissue paper and cellophane, bowed with silk ribbon. Friends of my mother’s had brought me flowers, but not like these.
The bearer of this unexpected bouquet was in his fifties, American, and fit. Most of all what I recall was the way he just stood there, unnaturally still, smiling at something I couldn’t see. He introduced himself. I was still trying to figure out if he was part of a dream. By the time the nurse came in and put the flowers in a vase, I knew he was real. His voice was boyish, and his manner had a courtly bashfulness that pulled me in as he said, “Your mother and I are old friends. I heard you weren’t feeling well and I wanted to stop by, see how you’re doing.”
“Yeah, I’ve been sick for a while.” I didn’t like to say the C-word out loud.
I was surprised when he took hold of my hand in his and sighed, “You’re as lovely as she was, at your age.” He said a few more words, but nothing that seemed important at the time. Then he was gone.
When my mother got back to my room that night, I could tell she was nervous. Slipping into my hospital bed, she wrapped her arms around me. “There’s some things you need to know about me before we go back to Rangeley.” I was only half listening until she said, “When I was seventeen, I walked into the woods and shot a man.”
“What do you mean?” I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right.
My mother’s voice caught as she told me, “It was a hunting accident.”
“Why are you telling me this now?”
“I didn’t want you to hear it from someone else. Rangeley’s a small town.”
“Did he die?”
“No.”
I was shocked, but not as much as you might expect. Cancer has a way of putting the unexpected into perspective. I thought my mother’s confession solved the mystery of her reluctance to talk about her past. She didn’t notice the flowers until then.
“Who sent the bouquet?”
“A friend of yours brought them. He said his name was Scout.”
I never suspected that as soon as I fell asleep that evening, she eased herself out of my hospital bed, slipped on her shoes, and took the elevator down to the first floor. My mother waited until she was out on the street to scream.
CHAPTER 2
The people coming in and out of the block-long medical center on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Jacques on that balmy spring night stopped and stared. Somebody shouted, “As-tu besoin d’aide?” Do you need help? When the security guard at the hospital entrance heard her cry out, he thought a woman was being attacked. He wasn’t far off. Evie’s scream was a howl of rage spiked with pure panic. The sound of it shocked her. Having spent her girlhood working traplines that ran the length of Townsend County, she recognized it as the wail of a creature that has just discovered it’s caught in something that’s never going to let go.
The security guard ran toward her, calling out, “Est-ce que tu vas bien?”
She wasn’t remotely all right, but it was too complicated to explain. When the guard came out and asked what had happened, all Evie could think to say was, “I’m not sure.” And that was what scared her the most. She had no idea why after seventeen years of complete silence, no contact of any kind, Scout had suddenly appeared at the foot of her daughter’s hospital bed with a bouquet from the most expensive florist in Paris. The possibility that at that moment he might be standing in the shadows watching her was all that kept her from screaming again.