Cancer.
It’d been a year since the cancer took my voice.
Now I sat in the back of the church, closing my eyes each time the choir stood to sing. Their voices floated to me and I knew, rationally, that it was beautiful. Ethereal and bright and reaching toward heaven… that place I wasn’t even sure I believed in anymore.
I rubbed the back of my head, at the base of the skull where the shallowest of impressions gave away where the tumor had been, that golf-ball sized lump that had squeezed against nerves in such a fashion that I’d begun to have trouble breathing and forming my words. Vocal cord paralysis, the doctors called it. They’d removed the tumor and the margins had been clean. My breathing had eased…
But I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t sing. It was as if with that one small lump of cancerous flesh, I’d lost my identity. I pulled my hand from beneath the dark golden strands of my hair, not caring that I left behind knots in the usually-glossy locks. I hadn’t bothered drying it today, applying the little oils that kept it so silky. I hadn’t cared enough about looking good so that I could sit and watch people sing joyfully when I could not utter a singular syllable.
The most ironic thing was that I once dreamed about being the Little Mermaid. It was my favorite childhood movie. I liked how she had to win over the Prince without her voice, without one of her best features and talents. It was the thing that got me into singing, into proudly standing at the front of the choir. And now, here I was, voiceless and stumbling around on a pair of legs that physically were fine, but emotionally felt like a flipper on dry land.
“Laurie, are you ready?” My mom’s voice floated to me, pushed through the fog that seemed to always hang around my head nowadays. It dulled my sense of hearing and that was good. Good because not hearing made it less painful that I could not add to the noise, the cacophony of sound that was life. Utterly amazing, beautiful, loud life.
Blinking, I looked around and realized that the church was emptying out, fast and hard, like a dam being lowered to lessen the water in a lake. That was how it always was, as if people were only stuffed into the building by force of conscience and fear of the afterlife and, as soon as duty was done, they filtered out as fast as their legs would carry them. I wondered if they thought God would be satisfied. I wouldn’t be if I was him… or her… or it.
“Laurie?” Mom questioned again, her amber eyes, so like my own, crinkling at the edges, adding to the already-existing wrinkles of age. She’d laughed so much when my father was alive, so much so that the memories of happiness were painted across her face as a constant reminder. I often wanted to ask if that bothered her, but I didn’t, because maybe she lived inside her own type of silence.
I nodded quickly, fighting the tears that wanted to fall from my eyes like the people filing out of the church. I stood slowly, smoothing out the pale pink skirt that I hated, but wore more often than any other piece of clothing in my closet. I’d been wearing it the night Ross had asked me to marry him. Ross had taken my diagnosis harder than anyone else. He’d walked around in a daze, imagining a world in which he didn’t have a sick fiancé. He found comfort in the arms of a co-worker.
And then he’d left me a month after we found out I was sick, because it was ‘too hard’.
I don’t know why I wore the damn skirt. I should have trashed it a long time ago.
I still had our picture in my wallet too. In it, he was stood behind me, his arms thrown around my shoulders. Even in the wrinkled, cracked photo, Ross’s smile was like daylight. And I hated him for that. I also still loved him and I didn’t blame him for running away from me. If I could have run from the cancer, I would have been right behind him.
He’d tried to call some months ago, after hearing I was cancer free.
I’d ignored his calls, despite my mother’s urgings to do otherwise. Everyone makes mistakes, my darling. Everyone deserves a second chance. It was hard to believe she’d urge me back to a man who’d abandoned me in my greatest hour of need. Then again, she’d been more fond of Ross than even I. Had he been some years older… Yes, my mother would have made a move. I was sure of it. And that was almost funny in a way.
Mom drove slowly home. I lived with her now. Even if I’d stayed in Dallas, I couldn’t have afforded the apartment Tom and I’d rented shortly before our engagement. I missed it there though. It had skylights, bathing the rooms in warmth at all hours of the day. Mom’s house was large, but the architect hadn’t been particularly enamored with windows. It was a three thousand square foot house and there were exactly six windows. Two large bay windows at the front, which only brought in early morning sunlight, one large, seamless window at the back of the house overlooking a pond that was so algae-infested that it didn’t even look like water―it looked like a field of emerald grass that you could walk across, only if you did, you’d sink into murky wetness―and three windows upstairs, one in each bedroom.
It was so dim, all the time, no matter how many artificial lights I turned on. Mom would comment that I was wasting power, but I needed the brightness. I needed to see it, needed to hear the electricity pulsing through the house.
There were other things I missed about Dallas, of course, like teaching music at the local elementary school and working with a local acapella group but I try not to think about that. I try not to dwell on it. Besides, what good is a music teacher that can’t speak, let alone sing?
When we got home, Mom asked me to sit with her and have lunch. I shook my head, raising my hand, fisting my fingers but keeping my thumb out, and flicked beneath my chin with my still-extended thumb to sign ‘not’. I shaped my hand like a ‘c’ open to the sky, placed it against my upper chest between my breasts, and ran it slowly downward a few inches to sign ‘hungry’. Mom frowned at me. She wasn’t picking up sign as fast as I was; she still held too firmly to the hope that the speech therapy would work, that the stimulation therapy to the nerves would work, and that the cancer would stay gone and I wouldn’t need chemo, which would be the first course of action if it made a reappearance.
It’d been a year since the cancer took my voice. I was too tired to hope.