DANCING WITH NED by Julia MacDonnell

It was a steamy August rush hour when they left the Granite State, three of them, Cancer Queenie, Husband, and Big Sis, heading to the heart of Beantown, some 75 miles away. Husband drove the couple’s Cherokee, and beside him, in the bucket seat, Queenie held in her slender hands a Rubbermaid container with a blue lid, purchased in bulk at Costco, for times such as this, when Queenie was in transit, nausea inevitable, and sinks and/or toilets as unreachable as moon or stars.
Husband, a contractor, an authentic Mr. Fix-It, white-knuckled the leather-wrapped steering wheel, hunched over it, ramming through battalions of Expeditions, Armadas, Hummers, Rogues, Explorers, Excursions on the glimmering tangle of superhighways surrounding the metropolis. Queenie held her bucket, hunched too; looking into the bucket, not at the apocalyptic streams of vehicles on merges, entrance and exit ramps, cloverleafs; arteries that supplied the city’s great heart, often clogging it, and that might, at any moment trigger an infarction.
Big Sis sat in back, steaming mad but pretending she was fine with her demotion to “along for the ride.” She, after all, should have been the one behind the wheel, taking her sister to Brigham and Women’s for this appointment with one of the great gurus of gynecological cancer. That had been the original plan. That’s why she, Big Sis, aka Celestine, had been summoned from Philadelphia: to drive Queenie to see this oncologist whom she’d waited months to see.
Oh, Cellie, please, please come. I need you to drive me to see . . . Pretty please with sugar on it. Queenie’s exhortations slipped through fiber optic cables, a caress. Husband worked in construction and had to finish a big job. He’ll be knee-deep in doo-doo; maybe even get fired, if he doesn’t meet this deadline.
You got it, said Big Sis, keeping the promise she’d made to herself three years before when Queenie, aka Ruth Ann, got her diagnosis, ovarian cancer, stage 3B or 4. She’d do anything within her power to help her sister through her illness. Hence, Big Sis dropped everything, work, children, all of her other many responsibilities, too numerous to name, and hopped into her Sentra. She sped from southern New Jersey, 316 miles north and then east along shivering swaths of interstates, doing better than 70 mph most of the way. Eyes adhered to the highway up ahead as she blasted Sade’s “Lovers Rock,” and chomped on a sustaining mix of almonds, walnuts, raisins, dried apricots chopped into little pieces, plus M&Ms. Again and again, her fingers wriggled through the Baggie on her lap until they found the M&Ms, which were always in the bottom corners of the bag. Her beloved sister, now nicknamed Cancer Queenie, had asked, no begged, Big Sis to make the trip. (It was Big Sis herself who had baptized her Cancer Queenie, noting her sister’s sudden uncharacteristic querulousness, her peevish grumbling, her regal expectations, her imperious demands. Queenie smacked her cheek, then laughed and couldn’t stop.)
Outside it was hot, hot, hot. Inside the Cherokee, a chill wind blew, Freon-tinged air laced too with anger, confusion and uncertainty, mashed-up feelings, not all yet identifiable. On sleep dep for awhile, Big Sis gazed out at the awful traffic, annoyed, no, disappointed, no, angry, no furious, maybe incensed about sitting in the back instead of driving Queenie. All through the 300-plus miles she’d driven the day before, she kept thinking about her upcoming day with Queenie, no husbands, no kids, just the two of them, the way it used to be. Not lunch and a movie, true, nor a shopping trip to an upscale discount mall, but still, a girl’s day, the two of them together. Sisters, secret-sharers.
No reason given for the change of plans. Don’t ask, don’t tell had always been the Couple’s policy. Today, Big Sis adopted it as her own. She took her seat in back as if it were the best possible vantage point from which to experience the world. She zipped her lips, tried to quiet her roiling gut, and sparred with Queenie’s dread, which felt like her own, suffocating in the heat.
Queenie’s trip, this really bad trip, had begun in the most mundane possible way. She’d gone to her local emergency room complaining of indigestion, maybe poisoning from some bad lobster pie the night before, or too much chardonnay. She ended up diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. The emergency room doctors cut her from hip to hip, discovered long, tangled strands of tumor wound around her ovaries, her fallopian tubes, her uterus, her large and small intestines. Epithelial ovarian carcinoma, Stage 3B or 4.
Since then, in the most cliché but also most apt of tropes, she’d waged a high tech war against the wily mutant that had taken her unaware, rooting in her omentum, a fatty apron covering the belly that holds the stomach, intestines, other organs in place. The omentum, a rich nurturing place for mutant cells. It sloughed them off and they fell like acid rain into nearby tissues, rooting, creating more tumor sites, more malignancies. The pitched battle to outsmart it: cutting-edge forms of radiation and multiple surgeries – debulking for fuck’s sake. Early on, Queenie had been debulked. Some diet plan, Queenie joked, shriveling from a size 12 to a size 6, snap, just like that. You’re svelte, dahling, svelte, Big Sis insisted. You’ve always wanted to be svelte.
What damned good does that do me now? Queenie wailed.
For a full year Queenie had worn a colostomy bag, a fucking bag of shit attached forever to her body, and Husband often helped to change it. Doesn’t that prove his deep true undying love? Queenie had asked Big Sis more than once, and Big Sis always answered yes.
Husband had been there every step, through all the ups and downs and, perhaps as a result, in an inversion of his truest and best self, a mellow guy, an aging hippie loved with all her heart by Queenie, he’d become prone to irritability, outbreaks of rage. He’d also developed a tic, maybe a few. All of a sudden, for no reason whatsoever, he’d blink a bunch of times, like he was trying to keep his eyeballs in their sockets. After that, he’d stretch out his lower jaw, as if preparing to take a big bite out of something, maybe an Italian hero sandwich, or possibly a Baconator, one of his favorites, despite its negative health consequences. Then he’d jerk his head two or three times to the left, with a startled look, disbelief, a grappling with reality, or a pitched battle to fight it off. At times, during this ritual, he made a growling sound.
In the Cherokee, in the awful heat and traffic, Queenie smacked him every time he twitched.
“When did you develop Tourette’s Syndrome?” she asked him, as if it were an unprecedented inquiry, not one she’d made at least a dozen times before.
“Tourette’s? I don’t have Tourette’s.” He clutched the wheel tighter, hunched lower.
“Maybe it’s dyskinesia,” said Queenie, an avid student of the PDR. She purchased every new edition. “You know, tardive dyskinesia. What meds are you taking?”
He turned to her, ignoring eight lanes of traffic gleaming in front of them. “No dyskinesia,” he said. “Whatever that is.” He blinked three times, then twitched. Big Sis counted.
“Involuntary spastic movements of the face,” announced Queenie. “Often a side effect of anti-psychotic medication.”
“I don’t take anti-psychotic medication.”
“Then why do you keep spazzing like that? I really hate it. You look ridiculous.”
“Like what?”
She pointed to Husband’s chin as his head jerked to the left.
“You blink and stick out your jaw and then you jerk your head.”
Big Sis watched their routine, the oh-so familiar tango of their love, a dreary back and forth of accusation and denial, one they’d been doing their entire married life, a quarter of a century, neither of them knowing how to stop or change the steps.
“It’s not involuntary,” insisted Husband. “I’m doing it on purpose. It’s relaxing.” Then he jerked his head back the other way.
“You look ridiculous,” repeated Queenie, shaking her own head.
“It feels good. It beats getting hooked on Xanax.”
This last, Big Sis understood, was a dig at Queenie who’d been known, from time to time, through the years and decades, during periods of extreme duress, to rely upon the occasional benzodiazepine in order to calm down. OK, Queenie was a hypochondriac, many of her loved ones, even Big Sis, at times whispered behind her back. Much as Big Sis loved her, her love notwithstanding, Queenie was a card-carrying hypochondriac, the card being her Health Benefits Prescription Drug Plan ID. Queenie’s kitchen cabinet, where she also kept coffee and corn flakes, was a satellite site of the US pharmacopeia: rows of translucent brown, white-capped containers, arranged the way most women organize their spices; so many pills, so little time. Chronic fatigue, Epstein-Barre, Lyme disease, IBS, fibromyalgia, possibly lupus – Queenie suffered from them all.
Most every summer, when the heat and the kids and the general demands and frustrations of life got to be too much, when she tired of hiking and camping with her boys, and sewing and reading, and arguing with Husband, Queenie took to her bed. For days on end. You’ve got the vapors, honey, Big Sis liked to tease. You know, like our greatgrandmother who struggled with the vapors her entire life. All 83 years of it.
“Hmmmph,” Queenie replied to Husband in the Cherokee. “Try the Xanax. It might help.”
“Don’t want to get hooked.”

Cancer Couple lived in a quaint New Hampshire town, in a 1950s rancher they’d rescued from ruin, on a quiet Tree Named street without sidewalks. Picture perfect, this town, with its white-steepled churches, and a landscaped central square where, from dawn until dusk, Old Glory flapped from a tall pole. The square, more of a circle, really, bejeweled by coffee shops, antique shops, an honest-to-goodness hardware store, a used book store, stores with glass-paned doors and crystal doorknobs.
Along the edge of town, not quite through it, rushed the Merrimack River, black and shiny, narrow though deep, swift-moving, its sighs and gurgles, its endless headlong race, audible always throughout town, except during the darkest months of winter when it was frozen, its ruffles of white water, its slithering currents stopped in time, photographic.
Wired and tired, Big Sis had reached town about nightfall, slowed along the spiraling exit ramp, slowed more on the narrow street through the center, circling the square, her mind still stuck in the slipstream, somewhere back on I-495.
Oh, Cellie, please, please come. I need you.
She pulled up in front of the couple’s rancher. It glowed from the inside, a clean, well-lighted place. She got out, stretched, then hurried to the back door, a glass-paned door, a salvage, in a mid-century modem home. (Call me eclectic, I like to mix things up, Queenie said the day it was installed.) Big Sis tried the door, found it locked, then banged on the glass. She waited an eternity, knocked again.
Husband at last appeared, a sad, beaten man. Big Sis watched him shuffle to the door, unlock and open it.
“Oh, you,” he said.
“Oh you, too,” she answered.
Husband pointed in the direction of their brand new Florida room, then disappeared, a relief to Big Sis, since the last time she’d visited Husband had called her the most insensitive, self-centered person on the face of the earth. A furious, red-faced, spit-flecked accusation that had sent Big Sis packing. She’d grabbed her things, gotten into her car and driven back to New Jersey. Husband would repeat his assessment of Big Sis, with variations, throughout Queenie’s illness, even with Queenie stuck there, inside Cancerland’s ever-spinning door of terror and elation, one she could neither stop nor exit.
“Yo, Ruthie,” hollered Big Sis, heading for the new room. “Oh, Cellie,” Queenie cried, “you’re here, you came,” like it was wondrous, a miracle.
The Couple had built this room – they called it the Florida room, Florida, with its connotations of citrus fruit, sunshine, sun-heated skin, beaches, retirement, both the Gulf and the Atlantic, easily accessible – the year before, soon after Queenie’s cancer had gone into remission and her oncologists had declared her cancer free.
Cancer free!!
Yeah, baby, I beat the rap, Queenie chorused every chance she got, her eyes optimistic blue, a smile cracking her pretty, hope-lit face. Life goes on.
Dodged a bullet, echoed Husband.
With its skylights and big windows, the Florida room looked out onto the Couple’s sloping yard, edged with tall white pines. They’d also built an intricate hardscape outside, its focal point a gas grill, big as an APC, Husband bragged. They’d be spending long years together here, Cancer Couple would. They just knew. They’d grow old together, entertaining grandchildren, grilling steak, chicken, hot dogs on this fabulous grill, or inside watching crime shows on the big flat screen, and, in winter, snow falling on the pines outside.
Queenie sat in her La-Z-Boy recliner, a brand new one in a jazzy geometric print, the Incredible Shrinking Woman, so pale; her skin milky but with a bluish tinge, like fat-free milk. A doll in a too-big chair. A pink cap over her bald head, pink sweats, extra small, but still too big, draping like a toga on her torso and her thighs. Brown Uggs on her feet despite the August heat. A remote in her little hand, several more beside her on the table. A pilot navigating a trip she was taking by herself. The Iron Chef seared soft-shell crabs in a shiny silver pan.
Inside this shrinking woman, Big Sis saw the sister she’d grown up with, so smart, so funny; robust and rowdy, a brunette with sapphire eyes, a size 10 at her thinnest; a 12 most of the time, but firm-fleshed, with the heart-shaped ass all the Malloy girls shared. The sister she adored. In college, the same Catholic college, a Jesuit school, Big Sis and Queenie caroused around the bars of Boston and Newport; guzzling Dubonnet Red on the rocks with a twist, of all things, just for the hell of it; yakking forever; laughing their heads off about nothing. They’d doubled-dated with their future husbands, gotten married the same year, just a few months apart, each serving as the other’s maid of honor. “A Chinaman and a Jew, go figure,” said their mother Mimi, a declaration that had triggered much hilarity and entered family lore.
Queenie, hypnotized by the Iron Chef, didn’t look up when Big Sis walked in. “Sit, Cellie, sit,” she commanded, eyes riveted to the flailing crustaceans. She patted the arm of the recliner next to her, Husband’s spot.
“You sure?”
“Sit. He’ll never know. He’s done for the night.”
Big Sis lowered her butt into the matching recliner, but feeling, as she did, Husband’s territoriality, his disinclination to have anyone, let alone Big Sis, lower their fat ass, heart-shaped or otherwise, down on his throne. The crabs jumped and sizzled in the pan. Queenie remained mute, mesmerized by this luscious fantasy of food. She’d had not so much as a bite for the best part of a year. Instead, she’d been nourished by a creamy vitamin-laden goo called TPN, purchased by the quart in sterile Baggies, and shot into her bloodstream through a titanium port above her clavicle, following the same route as the chemo. Queenie didn’t ask her how she was, how her trip had gone. Silent too, Sis watched her watching. Since her recurrence, Queenie was like that sometimes, mute and ethereal, off in her own world. Big Sis hoped it was peaceful there, but she couldn’t ask since Queenie refused to admit she ever slipped away.
After Iron Chef, Queenie, commandeering the multiple remotes, a woman of agency, of power, they watched reruns of NYPD Blue. Sis took Queenie’s hand, feeling the small bones, bird bones, plus itsy-bitsy tendons, veins and arteries, encased within her soft silky skin. Enchanted, Big Sis and Queenie watched Andy and Bobby on the big screen, fabulous color, incredible definition, rounding up mutts and humps and skels and perps. Giggling and sighing over Bobby, they fell backward, 20 or 30 years, to the place where their entwined futures had glistened, not a shadow anywhere.
“I’ve always had the hots for him,” said Queenie, sorrowfully, that part of her life over before she was ready to let it go. She shrugged, gestured with a remote to Bobby. “How ’bout you?”
“I wouldn’t kick him out of bed.”
“Heh-heh, I knew it,” Queenie cackled, a hint of her old sexy self. “Sometimes when we were doing it, you know, back when we were still doing it, when I had functional parts left to do it with, I imagined I was Kim Delaney banging Bobby. That crazed lust, melting from passion.”
A necessary fantasy, thought Big Sis as Queenie’s attention stayed riveted to the screen, on Jimmy Smits, in his NYPD Blue glory, a man to whom Husband could not ever measure up. Not for a second, not even from his best angle, on his best day. Which, in the opinion of Big Sis, had lasted maybe only for a nanosecond, back in the ’80s, a speck of time just long enough to snag Queenie, and long since passed. Queenie could have done so much better.
Queenie sighed. A single tear trickled down her cheek. She was already far away.

In the morning, after hardly sleeping, feeling she was in a foreign land whose culture she didn’t understand, whose language she could not rely on, Big Sis gathered up the items they needed for their journey: Rubbermaid container with lid; wet wipes; wintergreen Life Savers; bottles of water; a soft pillow in case Queenie’s bony butt began to hurt.
She was putting them into the Jeep when Husband re-appeared, freshly shaven, his hair wet from the shower. He held up the keys, jangled them before her, like they’d been playing a game and he’d won.
“I’ll be driving,” he said. He turned to Queenie. “Let’s go, or we’ll be late.”
Big Sis watched him walk out into the driveway and climb into the driver’s seat, turn on the ignition. Queenie, leaning on her walker, stood in the open doorway of the house looking at a sparrow perched on what was left of the pots of red and white petunias Big Sis had planted for her that spring. “I love you so much, Cellie,” Queenie said.
“A redundancy,” Big Sis answered. Then, bearing much of Queenie’s weight, what little of it there was, sister helped sister clomp over to the Jeep and climb into it.

Boston rush hour traffic: Arterial sclerosis all around the city, the poor old city, its streets laid out eons before the Expedition or the Hummer or even the little Cherokee could have been envisioned. A madness . . . Time ticked past. For a while, Lucinda Williams spoke for them. “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road;” “2 Kool 2 B 4 Gotten;” “Can’t Let Go.” But then Queenie began to fret that they’d be late. “Could you step on it, please?” She skewered Husband with a look.
“I’m stepping. Chill,” he answered. Blink blink.
The hospital, a magisterial place of hope and future, shone in the distance, a city on the hill, backlit, shimmering in the morning light, but they could not seem to reach it. Between the intricate grid of one-way streets, the mess of the Big Dig, the traffic and the heat, Husband began cursing, a throaty mumble, fucking shit, goddamn assholes, motherfuckers . . .
“That’s another sign of Tourette’s,” Queenie announced, an edge of triumph in her voice, “that cursing.” Then she puked into the Rubbermaid, a grinding sound, like an unprimed pump.
Big Sis reached both arms around the front seat. With one, she handed her sister a wet wipe; with the other, caressed Queenie’s bony shoulder. Queenie’s anxiety, a scaled and heavy thing, slithered up through her palm. Big Sis grasped it, sensed its danger.
“You’re an idiot, you know that, right?” Husband aimed his tirade to Big Sis in the rearview mirror. “This is all your fault.” Queenie’s puking, he meant but did not say.
That morning, cuddled next to Queenie on the loveseat in the Florida room, still pretending they were like they used to be, not just sisters, but best friends, their lives a bowl of cherries, scads of happiness, their birthright, piling up around them, Big Sis had eaten breakfast, a cup of strong Green Mountain breakfast blend with light cream, and a toasted, butter-slathered Thomas’s English muffin.
Queenie moaned over the smell of the coffee, the toasted muffin.
“How about a teeny-tiny little sip? A little crumb?” Big Sis coaxed. What harm could it do?
She held the mug up to her sister’s mouth. Queenie inhaled the steamy fumes but didn’t drink. Then she took the English muffin out of Big Sis’s hands. Queenie held it, stroked its edges with her fingertips the way she always fingered fine bone china – she collected antique cups and saucers – because she loved the way it felt. Queenie sniffed the muffin. Her pink tongue flicked out and back. She licked the butter melted in one of the muffin’s little crannies. A taste, an itsy-bitsy but oh so scrumptious taste! Minutes later, paroxysms of nausea, green bile spewing, a force that knocked her to her hands and knees onto the brand-new tiled floor. Big Sis got down beside her, the two of them on all fours. Big Sis held on to Queenie until the spasms passed and the spurts of green bile stopped.
“How stupid can you get?” Husband asked when he’d walked in, seen his wife sprawled on the floor and Big Sis cleaning up. “You know she can’t eat.”
“It’s not her fault,” cried Queenie. “Stop picking on her. I hate it when you two fight.”
Now, in the Cherokee, stalled in traffic-pocalypse, the world no doubt ending soon, Queenie didn’t say a word. Neither did Big Sis.

When at last they reached the hospital, all perspective disappeared. They could not actually see the building. Instead, they entered through a series of concrete chutes, hard and lightless, a tunnel, spiraling deeper, into an underground garage. As they nosed downward, three levels or more, a choked pitchy sound filled the Cherokee, a whine, a wail, a wounded animal on board. No, Queenie. Husband ignored her; pretended he couldn’t hear. He couldn’t; couldn’t allow himself to hear. Had to find a parking space. Big Sis sopped up the sobs. She reached around the seat to hold her sister’s shoulders. There, there, Sweet Pea.
Finally Husband found a handicapped spot near an elevator, Level 3C, Big Sis made a mental note, then, on second thought, scribbled their location in her day planner. Husband hopped out, grabbed one of the wheelchairs lined up near the elevator door like carts outside a supermarket. Big Sis got out, too. She opened Queenie’s door, stood there stroking Queenie’s soft cheek, ready to lift her into the chair.
Queenie clutched Big Sis’s arm, as if she’d been waiting for this chance to divulge critical information. She pulled Big Sis close. “I’m so sorry, Cellie,” she whispered. “But he doesn’t want you here. Just in case you didn’t pick up the vibe.”
“Well, I did, honey. I picked it up.”
“We had a big fight this morning. He didn’t want you to come with us, but I insisted. I mean, after all, you’d driven up from New Jersey, right? He said, ‘So what,’ but I held my ground.”
Why didn’t you call me and tell me to stay home? This question thrashed in Big Sis’s mouth, but she couldn’t ask it. Queenie’s face, so close, was paper white, her big eyes sapphire blue.
“No worries,” Big Sis said. “I’ll do anything for you.”
In the underground garage, the weight of the city bore down on them. Big Sis looked at Queenie. That morning, before they left, they’d struggled with grooming and dressing, these sisters had, the older one forcing the younger into the shower, then massaging her feet with a lotion redolent of melon and cucumber; bustling into the laundry room to find something “halfway decent” for Queenie to wear out into the world. Queenie resisted. She didn’t want the shower. She wanted to stay in her pink sweats and Uggs.
I’m comfy. I’ve gotta right to be comfy, don’t I? Don’t I have a right to decide about my own clothes? Who the hell cares what I look like?
You’re a professional. You’ve got advanced degrees, for heaven sake, Big Sis reminded her. Where’s your pride?
In the toilet, Queenie answered.
Very funny, Big Sis scolded, at last convincing Queenie to “at least pretend” that she lived somewhere other than Cancerland. That she carried dual citizenship, was not a full-time resident of the crazed place with its ever-spinning doors. Big Sis coaxed Queenie into denim capris, sandals, and a white shirt knotted at her waist to take up the extra slack. Big Sis wrapped Queenie’s sweet bald head in a red silk scarf, printed with a pattern of the children of the world. Queenie perked up when Sis waved the scarf in front of her, then tied it into a neat turban. Queenie loved the scarf, a gift from her special ed students at a trilingual middle school in Lowell.
But now, on Level 3C, in the dank underground garage, it has slipped down on one side, to where Queenie’s eyebrow used to be.
“He says you can’t come in the room with us when we meet with the doctor,” Queenie said. “He put his foot down on that point. I want you there, but he doesn’t.”
Big Sis straightened out the scarf, stroked Queenie’s cheek.
“Why not?”
“Well, it’s not personal,” said Queenie. “We just don’t need any more confusion. That’s what he said. No more confusion. No more opinions. We don’t need to have anybody else in on the act. It’s all too stressful as it is.”
Queenie gazed at Big Sis with her baby blues. The humid heat and airless stink of the garage made it hard to breathe. Another time, another place, Big Sis might have argued. Might’ve asked, Why did you let me make this trip if he doesn’t want me around? Or, Why does he get a vote? It’s your illness, not his. Instead, she chirped, “I get that. I can go with that. I’ll wait in the waiting room, baby, that’s what they’re for, right? I’ll read my book.” Carson McCuller’s Heart is a Lonely Hunter for the Southern Lit class she was teaching.

Husband returned with the wheelchair. He and Big Sis helped Queenie into it. “I can’t breathe,” she gasped as they waited for the elevator. “No air in here.”
“You’re hyperventilating,” Big Sis said. “It’s the anxiety. Breathe normally, nice and slow. Let’s count. Breathe in, one . . . breathe out..” The elevator arrived, they boarded, began ascending, gliding upward to the 20-something floor, up, up, up, as if being pulled up to a deity, one they’d bow before, praying he would, could, stop Queenie’s rush toward death.
“I hope he knows more than those clowns at Dartmouth-Hitchcock,” Husband said. He made a fist, punched the elevator railing a couple of times. “Those guys were really bad. Incompetent.”
Queenie nodded her agreement. Her illness was never supposed to come to this. This recurrence was not supposed to happen. Rage, disappointment, the belief they’d been betrayed, perhaps lied to, trembled on the faces of Cancer Couple as the elevator glided up. Why, only the year before Queenie had been given a clean bill of health by oncologists considered among the best in the business.
After that three-year-long hard fought hell, they’d been told they won, and they believed it. They’d earned it, after all. They were winners. Queenie, one of the lucky ones, was good to go for a normal middle-aged, middle-class lifestyle and life span. She’d gone back to work, they built the addition. I beat the rap, Queenie told everyone who’d listen, repeating what she believed the oncs had told her. Yeah, baby, I’m one of the lucky ones. Outta Cancerland and back to life.
Dodged a bullet, Husband chorused.

The elevator doors slid open onto a pristine space lined with big windows and a view of vast empty sky. The waiting room, filled with sofas and chairs nicer than any Queenie or Big Sis had ever owned. Not a magazine in sight. No waiting patients either. No indication whatsoever of what could be gotten here. Sit. Take a load off. Relax. Keep your mind off why you’re here.
Husband checked his watch. “10:30, right on time. Perfect. I knew it would take three hours.”
Just then a set of doors swung open, and a young Asian doctor, his face stricken, rushed toward them.
“You’re here, you’re here at last,” he cried, his arms outstretched like a priest’s during the Consecration. “At last. We’d almost given up on you.”
“We’re right on time,” declared Husband, pointing to his Timex, its glowing hands. Blink, blink. Shrug.
“No, 10 a.m.,” the doctor said. “Ten.” By now his face was scarlet, and he rubbed the pockets of his lab coat. Cancer Couple had kept the Big Guy waiting. This, however, was not the Big Guy, just one of his acolytes.
“Gee, I wonder who screwed that up.” Husband aimed his microwave smile at Queenie.
“Chemo brain,” she said, two pink spots glowing on her white cheeks.
“No harm done,” said the resident, who was young and plump and very serious. Gesturing with a white-sleeved arm, he ushered Cancer Couple, Husband pushing Queenie in the wheelchair, back through the swinging doors. That’s when Queenie twisted, turned to give Big Sis the eye. A signal. Big Sis read it, slipped through the swinging doors behind them, into a carpeted hallway done in such soft neutrals that it was hard to tell where the walls ended and the floor began. The carpeting muffled the steady hum of the building’s HVAC systems, as well as the gasps and sighs that leaked from Queenie.
Queenie wants me here; needs me here, Big Sis prepared herself to argue. That’s when she figured out Queenie’s ruse. Husband was never not going to drive her to this appointment. But she needed Big Sis there. A last they entered a large light-filled corner office. The resident took a seat in a small chair beside, not behind, the shiny desk and began to interrogate Queenie. He wrote her answers on a yellow legal pad attached to a clipboard.
“On a scale of one to ten, one being the worst, and ten the best, how would you describe your quality of life?”
“My quality of life?” Queenie cried. “My quality of life?” A bark of laughter. “Minus ten.” She glared at him. “It totally sucks. I never thought I’d ever have to live here, in downtown Bitesville, where everything really sucks.”
“Bitesville?” repeated the resident.
“The capital of Cancerland.” Queenie gazed at him, daring him to challenge her. He didn’t, instead wrote on his pad.
“Can’t eat or drink. Can’t run. Can’t play. Can’t even love my baby.” She tilted her head toward Husband. “But I’m not ready to die. I’m only 47 years old, for heaven’s sake. Forty-seven.”
“Forty-seven,” Husband repeated, outraged, blinking and nodding, agitated, like he was at the customer service counter of a big box store, disputing a warranty.
The resident nodded, too, his smooth brow furrowed, then went back to writing.
“We’ve sent down all the test results,” Husband said, losing patience, taking over. “MRIs, CATs, ultrasounds, blood tests, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. You must’ve gotten them. I’m sure you did. You had to have gotten them. From Dartmouth-Hitchcock. All new. All of them recent. And if you looked at them, even a quick glance, you would have noticed what they said: No evidence of disease. N.E.D. She ought to be able to eat.”
Husband gestured to his wife who watched him, nodding, encouraging him with her saucer eyes. “Do they know what they’re doing up there? I think not! How else to explain our desperate conundrum: No evidence of disease, but my poor wife still cannot eat, not even a tiny mouthful, without tectonic nausea and the shits. She keeps losing weight.”
Big Sis had never before heard her brother-in-law use such vocabulary, such syntax. Behind his thick bifocals, his eyes were wet. She guessed he must have practiced.
“That’s why we’re here,” said Queenie in her normal person voice. “It’s what we’ve got to figure out.”
The young resident nodded, made a note. Then he stood, placed his pen carefully into the lapel pocket of his lab coat.
“Our imaging devices are excellent,” he said suddenly, his mouth pinched, the clipboard clutched to his chest, his other hand on the door. “Unfortunately, technology can’t always keep up with the disease.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” Husband asked the closing door. “Technology can’t always keep up with the disease? Jesus.”
Then he turned his gimlet eye on Big Sis.
“I want her here,” said Queenie. “She stays. She can take notes.”
Queenie handed Big Sis a little pad of paper and a pen. Teachers Make the World Go ’Round it said in sprightly letters printed around a globe shaped like an apple. Below, in Queenie’s looping scrawl, were questions:
Food - when will I eat again?
Surgery for blockage - when? where? length of recovery?
New Protocol? What besides Carbo/Taxol?
Prognosis : Howlong? Howlong? Howlong? Howlong?
Big Sis read this last question as howling. Howling. Howling. A wail, a keening, a siren sound from deep inside her heart. Queenie, who knew exactly where she stood. Howling. How long? Big Sis clutched her hand. Queenie squeezed back.

For a moment, waiting for the big guy, Big Sis took in the heat-misted Boston skyline. Had it been New York or Philly, cities she knew well, maybe she could’ve gotten her bearings. But in Boston, Boston of all places, the city of her childhood, home to generations of her, their ancestors, she was disoriented, lost. She did not recognize any of the tall buildings; couldn’t tell where was north or south.
She was still wondering when the Renowned Oncologist himself swept in, his white coat rustling. All three quaked a little. He was tall and thin, with an aquiline nose, austere features, the fingers of a pianist. Better educated, probbly, than the three of them put together, thought Big Sis. All the smart successful guys were tall and thin, graceful like that. Beneath his lab coat, his collar was unbuttoned, his silk tie loosened. He carried Queenie’s file, a thick one with charts and documents and transparencies sticking out here and there, as though it had been dropped, shoved back together in a rush. Queenie’s file, a hot mess, like her failing body, stuffed with things that didn’t belong; would not fit, most of them incomprehensible except to an elite highly specialized few. A fluorescent green tab bore her name in big hand-printed letters: Ruth Ann Malloy Quinn.
The oncologist carried Queenie’s file and he carried, too, his reputation as one of the world’s foremost experts in gynecological cancers. It surrounded him, a shimmering aura that inflated to fill the room. Queenie could hardly breathe. Again she panted, edged toward panic. Big Sis saw this. Slow it down, she whispered. She squeezed her sister’s hand harder, but she and Husband, too, were having trouble breathing. They gazed at Him, all three, and saw, attached to Him, like Flair pens on the vests of waitpersons, the aprons of home improvement store employees, their own anguished optimism, their delirious faith, their bright and gaudy hopes, every last one. Oh yes, this man could – Say it, he would - vaporize those renegade cells feeding off the most girl parts of Queenie. He could, he would, release Queenie from her illness. He would – he would, he must – tell them how to make her well.
He shook each of their hands, spending a couple of extra seconds with Queenie, gazing into her eyes, stroking her shoulder. Then he took his seat behind his desk, rolled his shirtsleeves up to his elbows.
“What do you want from me?” he asked Queenie, his gray eyes full of knowledge if not wisdom. Believe it, yes, this great oncologist really did want to know. And he was going to listen, however long it took, their own tardiness notwithstanding. “What can I do for you?”
Simple questions, logical questions, but also as vast and impossible to answer as the sky outside.
That’s when Big Sis realized, and perhaps Cancer Couple, too, that they’d reached a pinnacle of the health care system, a place above bed pans, barf buckets and blood, the stench of unhealing wounds, the fearful cries of the dying. Up here, in transcendent splendor, with the city shining all around them, the Renowned Oncologist plied his trade. But for Queenie, this was a one-time-only visit. Everything was at stake.
“Well, I want to eat,” Queenie said, a reasonable answer, hewing close to the essentials, her eyes as purely blue as the sky outside. “That’s the main thing. I’d like to hold down some food. Mashed potatoes. Cheerios. Anything.”
The Oncologist nodded slowly. He understood. He had a golden tan. He likely spent his weekends on Nantucket or the Vineyard, maybe sailing over in his own boat, or flying in a small plane. He riffled through Queenie’s file, examining the contents, seemingly bewildered, as if Queenie had just asked to jump out the window and hop a rocket ship to Mars.
“If we could eat, we’d have a fighting chance to beat this thing,” said Husband.
“We?” echoed the oncologist, turning his gaze on Husband. The first person plural pronoun had stalled his gears. “What do you mean, we?”
“Oh, I mean she.” Husband jerked his head toward Queenie, not once but three times, then blinked. “She’d be able to put back on some weight and have the strength to fight this thing.”
This thing.
Renowned Oncologist fiddled with the fluorescent tab, Ruth Ann Malloy Quinn. The doctor took his time. He read and/or reread Queenie’s documents with utmost care. No rush. At this level of the health care system – health care system? Surely, an oxymoron! – Queenie liked to joke – the docs had all the time in the world. No phones rang, no one else was waiting, no voices were overheard from other rooms. Nobody else clamoring for care. A stark contrast to the lower levels, i.e., the chemo treatment room with its awful noises and rush; the chemical and vomit smells; the awful clatter of rolling IV poles, the cries and lamentations of the ill; the soft soothing voices of the nurses, the lame and halt lined up outside the door, some weeping as they waited for their turn.
Regal now, Queenie watched him, her turbaned head held high, the veins in her neck and temples visible as streams, tributaries, through her fine pale skin. Her bony fingers grasped the armrests of the wheelchair. She was nearly helpless, this sweet Ruth Ann, just 47, a shadow of her former self, always kind and full of optimism, the good one of the six Malloy sisters with their matching heart-shaped butts.
At last He spoke.
“There’s nothing I can do to help you eat,” he said. A shard of hope disintegrated. Big Sis, looking into Queenie’s eyes, saw it disappear from the iris on the right.
He, capital ‘h’, might have been ready to say more, but Husband interrupted.
“But the test results.” Husband jerked and twitched. He pointed to the folder in the doctor’s hands. “Those test results say no tumor. No goddamned tumor, excuse my French. No Evidence of Disease. N.E.D. We’re dancing with NED here.” Husband stared at Doctor. He spoke as one great mechanic to another. “This is a whole new battery of tests, just done . . . No Evidence of Disease. “
“I love dancing with Ned,” burbled Queenie. “Doesn’t everyone?”
Neither man heard. Husband stretched his jaw. Queenie tried to punch him before the head jerks started, but she missed. Big Sis was ready to do this for her, but Queenie read her mind, warned her off with a look.
“We’re thinking it’s got to be radiation enteritis,” said Husband. “She had that radiation, the Intensity Modulated type, and it did her in.”
“I’d rather die than go through that again,” murmured Queenie.
The Great One glanced at her, then back at Husband.
“If it’s radiation enteritis we can fix it, can’t we?” Husband raised his hands in supplication, stared across the vast and shining desktop at the Great One. “If there’s no sign of tumor, isn’t it just a matter of finding the blockage and unblocking it?”
Big Sister’s antennae began to quiver at the Husband’s line of questioning. She felt him pushing the doctor someplace the doctor did not want to go. Queenie didn’t either.
“It’s not that simple,” the Great One said, but Husband, who came from a long line of mechanics and was himself a whiz, kept right on going.
“We know a guy who’d do it, a general surgeon. I mean he promised us he would, if it would help keep her going for a little bit longer.”
Keep her going a little bit longer.
The thing was, Husband could fix just about anything, especially complex and mysterious things such as motherboards, sound amplifiers, ride-on mowers. He was good with toasters, too. He set up Queenie’s TPN with a little pump inside a rolling backpack so she could get around without attachment to an IV pole. Before Husband figured out this pumping system, she sat for hours while it drip, drip, dripped into her bloodstream from a hanging bag. With the rolling back pack, she could pee by herself, or hobble to the window to look out at her overgrown, untended garden. For Husband, everything came down to the mechanics, the wiring, gears, drives, widgets, sprockets, buttons, levers. Everything was fixable.
At last, the Great One answered.
“I wouldn’t consider Mrs. Quinn here, Ruth Ann” – a nod in her direction, seeking permission for his intimacy – “a good candidate for surgery. I don’t even need her file to make that judgment – I can tell by looking at her. She’s just too fragile.”
All three of them looked at Queenie in her shining silver chair, tiny Ruth Ann, fragile Ruth Ann, almost transparent in the high bright morning light. Big Sis put her hand on Queenie’s. Her sister was in vibrate mode.
By this point, Queenie had survived half a dozen major surgeries, including a hysterectomy and, twice, the removal of lengths of bowel. Debulking, the cutting out of all visible tumor. Not to mention several rounds of chemo and 12 weeks of radiation. After a year with the colostomy bag her bowel had been reattached. That’s when the oncs at Dartmouth-Hitchcock had taken more than 100 biopsies.
“No evidence of disease,” repeated Queenie.
Then, ever so slowly, it started again. Poor Queenie couldn’t eat or poop. More tests and more biopsies. Some atypical cells revealed. OK, some atypical cells, whatever the hell that meant, but no malignancy.
“Her ability to heal has been compromised. That’s obvious, isn’t it?” He, capital ‘h’, spoke gently, understanding fully the weight and meaning of his words. “I couldn’t in good conscience recommend surgery.”
“But scar tissue and enteritis, they’re not cancer, are they?” Husband voice was high-pitched, unfamiliar, a cry from the desert. He blinked and jerked his head. They waited for an answer the doctor did not give.
“Do you know of any studies?” Queenie asked at last, the old familiar Queenie coming out, the intelligent, well-educated, self-possessed professional Queenie. She was coming back to herself. “Anything experimental I might take part in?” Queenie stared at the doctor. Hope and terror caromed in her eyes.
“You’d need to be much stronger than you are right now. You’d need to be stable in some way, and you’re still losing weight.”
A quick plunge to the bottom. Another shard went dark.
“All the tests say no tumors,” Husband repeated. “You’ve got a new MRI right there.”
He pointed to the file. “Clean as a whistle. No tumors. That means something else is causing the blockage, and if we could only find out what it is . . . “
“Mr. and Mrs. Quinn,” he said, oh so quietly, so patiently, then realized Big Sis was there. “And Miss? Mrs.?”
“Cho,” she told him. “Celestine Malloy Cho.”
“Mrs. Cho,” he repeated.
“Ruth Ann’s sister.”
He nodded, then let the silence swell until it filled the room. An awful, blooming silence, a mushroom cloud. “The blockage may well be partly enteritis. And it’s likely also partly scar tissue. But no doubt, no doubt at all, that it’s also partly tumor.”
Big Sis was scribbling on the pad when he said this, but would, forever afterward, swear the sunlight flickered; the world threatened to go dark.
“In my experience with this illness, there’s no way it isn’t partly tumor.”
Technology can’t always keep up with the disease.
“No dancing with NED?” asked Queenie.
“No dancing with NED,” the oncologist repeated, but it was not a question.
In the quiet after this detonation, Husband cleared his throat and blinked. A mechanic, desperate, he rummaged through his box for the best tool. He threw out terms. Hyperthermic chemo perfusion? Bone marrow stem cell rescue? He had it somewhere, he was certain he did. Antiangiogenic agents? The oncologist kept nodding no, his palms together, and pressed against his lips, almost as in prayer. Big Sis saw him as an icon, carved in wood and stained, attached to the wall of a shadowy cathedral. Now Husband offered the names of medications, a litany, a lamentation. He’d spent hours on the Internet, in libraries, Husband had. He’d borrowed Queenie’s PDR. He’d scoured all available sources for information; memorized a new vocabulary: Gemcitabine. Bevacizumab. Erlotinib. Pemetrexed. Ondansetran. Dexamethasone. Cisplatin. Carboplatin. Adriamycin. Words odd enough to bring on tachycardia. The poetry of cancer. The oncologist kept praying.
“With Google, everyone’s an expert,” he said when Husband finally fell silent. He turned to Queenie. “Mrs. Quinn, your timing is off.” He shrugged beneath the weight of the great sorrow on his shoulders. He meant it, he really did. “I’m sorry to be so blunt. But some of these things your husband mentioned, we’re not even trying yet. Others we’re trying on . . .” He paused, inhaled and exhaled slowly, Zen breathing. “We’re trying them on healthier women. That’s the only way I can express it. You’ve been through too much already. I can’t put you into a study at this time for the same reason you can’t go into surgery. You’re too weak. I couldn’t risk it.”
Everything was silent for a time until Queenie’s voice, a fragile fiber, uncoiled from a great distance. “What should I do? What can I expect?”
“No new tumors means the Carbo-Taxol’s working,” the doctor said, opening her file. “It’s keeping those tumors at bay.”
Paclitaxel and carboplatin, the chemo protocol prescribed by the ones at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, the one most often used against high-grade ovarian malignancy.

“At bay?” cried Husband.
“That’s a good result, a very good result,” the doctor said. He did not look at Husband.
“You’re saying we should be happy with her situation?” Husband’s cheeks were flushed. He pointed to Queenie, who gazed out the window, some part of her already gone. Husband’s finger trembled.
The doctor looked at Husband with compassion, or maybe pity, but still he moved his head from right to left.
“Maybe grateful,” he said, “given the nature of this disease, and her original prognosis.” Queenie stared out the window, still in vibrate mode.
“Sooner or later, the Carbo-Taxol will stop working, won’t it?” she asked. “The tumors will come back.”
“There’s no way to predict. You could wake up a month from now, and the cancer could go into remission. You’ve got to keep your hopes up.”
“Hope?” Husband choked on the word. “What hope is there if she can’t eat? If she can’t maintain her strength?”
“You could insert a G-tube,” the Great One said then. “A minor procedure. It will siphon off her digestive juices into a disposable bag. It should mitigate the vomiting.”
“And if we can stop the vomiting,” said Husband, “she might gain some weight?”
“It’s worth trying,” said the doctor. “It’s a little thing that might improve your quality of life.”
Queenie, hypnotized by the vast empty sky, didn’t answer, another piece of her already gone.
“How long? How long do you think I have?”
Big Sis looked at Queenie. She’d wondered if her sister would get there, to that final question on her list. Howling. How long?
“A lot of that is up to you,” the high priest answered. “With the TPN, and the G-tube, and the good result from Carbo-Taxol, you could live a long, long time.”
Queenie turned to him. “What do you consider a long, long time?”
“I’ve learned not to ever make predictions.” He offered a rueful smile, looking first at Husband, then Big Sis, and last at Queenie. “This disease is just too unpredictable. And we’ve got so little control. In spite of our very best efforts.”
Then he got up and walked around the desk to shake Queenie’s hand. He squeezed one of hers in both of his. And that was it. He was gone and with him went his shimmering aura, glowing at a distinctly lower wattage.
In a moment, Cancer Couple and Big Sis, too, were outta there, ushered by the resident, all the way to the elevator, then on their own down down down into the sweltering garage and the gritty world of terminal illness.
“A G-tube . . . a f-f-f-fucking G-tube . . . I coulda figured that out myself!!” cried Husband once the doors slid shut. “What an asshole. And you’re the one who had to see him. Happy now? We’ve wasted more time and gotten no help at all. What an asshole! Wasn’t he, babe, an asshole? A big flamer!”
Queenie, slowly, nodded yes, but didn’t speak, the two of them against the world, the way it had always been. Husband could not, would not, ever let her go. Big Sis held the handles of the wheelchair, gazing at the back of Queenie’s turbaned head. The pad of paper with Queenie’s questions was tucked into her summer purse, smoldering like dry ice. Howling. I need you, Queenie had said and Big Sis, her secret-sharer, finally understood.
Queenie, aristocratic in her wheeled throne, surveyed her kingdom, the steel box of the elevator car. She couldn’t ask. She couldn’t tell. In a jolting whoosh, the car plummeted 20 stories. The doors slid open. The rank hot air of the garage, a rogue wave, rushed toward them.

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Julia MacDonnell is the author of the novels Mimi Malloy At Last (Picador, 2014) and A Year of Favor (William Morrow & Co., 2013). Her work has appeared in American Literary Review, Briar Cliff Review, North Dakota Quarterly, The Larcom Review, and Many Mountains Moving.