Circle of Grace: A Novel Hardback - 2004

Excerpt

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The Persistence of Memory



Present Day



Grace Benedict was fifty-two years old, and she still hated going to the doctor. Avoided it at all costs. But this time she had no choice. Two weeks ago a long-overdue mammogram had revealed a suspicious spot on her right breast. Probably nothing, the doctor assured her. Most likely just a cyst; women got them all the time. After a needle biopsy and a battery of other tests, they had called her back in to discuss the results.

No, they couldn't talk about it on the telephone, the nurse had said. Better for her to come in and see the doctor personally. They scheduled the appointment for her lunch hour, promising it wouldn't take more than thirty minutes.

"Have a seat, Mrs. Benedict," said the young woman behind the glass-paneled counter. "The doctor will be with you shortly."

Not Mrs., Grace thought. But she didn't bother to correct the receptionist. Instead, she left the counter and parked herself in a cracked vinyl chair in the corner of the waiting room. To her right, a bubbling aquarium, its back wall lined with a garish shade of blue, housed several brightly colored tropical fish.

Grace picked up a dated, dog-eared copy of U.S. News from the coffee table and tried to ignore the whining child a few seats away. ELECTION RESULTS STILL IN DOUBT, the cover proclaimed, the words superimposed over photographs of George W. Bush and Al Gore. And in smaller letters underneath: What went wrong in Florida?

Grace tossed the old magazine back onto the table, but her eyes continued to fix on the words: What went wrong?

She pondered the question--one that had haunted her for nearly three decades. And there was only one answer, which was no answer at all: Everything.

Thirty years ago, she could never have envisioned the future that awaited her. A future riddled with mistakes and heartbreak and--

Well, better not to think about that.

She shifted in her chair and watched out of the corner of her eye as the frazzled young mother tried in vain to comfort her daughter. The little girl, who was perhaps five or six years old, curled up on her mother's lap and whimpered fretfully. "It'll be all right," the mother shushed, pushing back a damp strand of hair from her daughter's forehead. "The doctor will give you some medicine to make it all better."

Grace bit her lip and averted her eyes. If only there were such a medication, something that would "make it all better." But no wonder drug could fix a life, and even if such a miracle had existed, she wouldn't have been able to afford it.

A nurse wearing pink scrubs with Beatrix Potter bunnies printed on them came to the door with a clipboard and looked around the waiting room. "Mrs. Bennett?"

"Benedict," Grace corrected, then turned to the young mother. "Unless your name is Bennett?"

The woman shook her head. "Whitlock," she said.

Grace got up and went toward the nurse. "I guess you must mean me, then. Grace Benedict." She forced a smile. "Like the traitor."

"Whatever." The nurse looked at her blankly and shrugged. "Follow me."

Grace followed to Examining Room 3. "Have a seat," the nurse said. "The doctor will--"

"I know. The doctor will be with me shortly."

The second attempt at humor fell as flat as the first. The nurse shoved the clipboard into a plastic holder on the wall and pulled the door closed.

Almost as soon as the door clicked shut, a soft knock sounded. The doorknob turned, and a man entered. He was small and dark, with dense, close-cropped black hair and deep-set eyes. The name Sangi was embroidered in red over the pocket of his white lab coat. Grace had never seen him before, but a lot of physicians served the clinic, and it wasn't unusual to get a different one every time.

"Good afternoon, Mrs. Benedict," he said, his words clipped and precise. "I am Dr. Butahali Sangi." He flipped through her chart. "We have your test results."

"Grace. Please call me Grace."

He smiled. "Grace, then. Kindly sit, if you will, upon the table."

Grace complied, scooting onto the high examining table. The protective paper made a crinkling sound under her thighs.

Dr. Sangi eased down onto a rolling stool and drew up close. For a moment or two he said nothing, concentrating instead upon reading the records in front of him. At last he raised his eyes--large, dark, liquid eyes that reminded Grace of some vulnerable little forest creature.

"You recently had a mammogram, that is correct? February 15th?"

Grace nodded. "Yes." Something in her stomach fluttered, a caged bird beating the bars. "Is anything wrong?"

Sangi gazed at her for a full minute. "There is no easy way to tell such news." He shook his head.

She exhaled heavily. "The lump. It wasn't just a cyst."

The doctor laid the medical chart aside and touched her wrist with squared-off brown fingers. "There is no one I should call, perhaps? A husband? A friend?"

The contact was brief, gentle, but Grace felt as if she had been brushed by a live electrical wire. "No one." She drew in a breath and raised her head. "Just give it to me straight, Doctor. All of it."

"As you wish." He pulled back and ran his hand through his hair, then retrieved the chart and read: "You have what we believe to be a stage IV metastatic tumor with intrusion into the chest wall and intercostal muscles. We suspect significant lymph node involvement as well, but cannot know for certain until surgery is accomplished."

Grace's hand went instinctively, protectively, to her chest. She looked down at her fingers cupping her breast, and an image rose to her mind--a dark and menacing squid, its body lodged inside her, its inky tentacles spreading out to invade her torso, slithering toward her internal organs. She shuddered.

Dr. Sangi waited while she composed herself.

"Stage IV," she said at last. "How high do the stages go?"

"Four."

"What about treatment?"

"I have already taken the liberty of speaking with a specialist. We can indeed attempt to remove the major portion of the tumor," he said. "At this stage it is unlikely, however, that surgery would be successful in a total removal of the cancerous cells. There are additional options. Intensive chemotherapy. Radiation, perhaps. Bone marrow or stem cell transplants."

The squid tightened its grasp, and for a moment Grace felt as if her lungs had collapsed. "But you can cure me," she said when she could breathe again.

"In such cases as yours we do not speak of cure," Sangi responded with a sigh. "We speak of containment. We speak of time gained."

"How much time?"

"You wished me to be direct," Dr. Sangi said. At Grace's nod, he went on. "At best, a year. Perhaps two. Perhaps not so much. We cannot know for certain until more tests are done." He turned his hands palm upward in a gesture of surrender. Grace noticed that although the tops of his hands were brown, his palms were pale pink. For a moment she felt as if she had glimpsed some private part of him, and she flushed with embarrassment.

"And what would that year--if I had a year--involve?"

"Radical chemotherapy, certainly. If we could shrink the tumor a bit, then surgery. Additional chemo afterward. As well as the other options I mentioned."

"A mastectomy, months of chemo and radiation, in and out of the hospital," Grace translated. She had seen it before. She knew the symptoms all too well. "Constant nausea. Hair loss. Depleted energy. And no guarantees."

"I fear you are correct." Sangi nodded.

"And if I elect to have no treatment?"

The physician's face went blank. "I beg your pardon?"

"If I walk out of here and don't treat this--no surgery, no chemo, no radiation. How long would I have then?"

A look of comprehension sparked in his eyes, an expression akin to respect. "It is impossible to determine. A few months, perhaps less."

"A few months without pain, without being turned into a voodoo doll, cut and poked and prodded and filled with drugs."

The doctor nodded. "You would likely have little pain until the very end. As a physician, certainly, I could not recommend--"

"Of course you couldn't." Grace slid down from the examining table and put a hand on Dr. Sangi's shoulder. "Thank you for your candor, Doctor. I appreciate it more than you know."

"You are indeed welcome." He smiled then, showing even white teeth against dark skin.

"I need a little time to think," she said. "I'll call you."

"Soon," the doctor warned. "We have no time to waste."

***

Somehow Grace managed to get through the rest of the day on autopilot--sorting through the return bin, shelving, cataloguing new books that had just come in--without thought or intention. No one at the library knew she had skipped lunch to go to the clinic. No one had a clue that anything might be wrong. Grace Benedict, the faithful stereotype, the unobtrusive librarian gliding through the stacks in silence, like an apparition.

But driving home at five-fifteen, Grace couldn't keep her mind from spiraling around the question Dr. Sangi had asked: "Is there no one I should call?"

Curiously, she felt no sense of imminent loss at the news that she was dying. On that count, she floated above the scene like the soul of a patient hovering between this world and the next, watching it all with a dispassionate eye. For the first time in years, she experienced a clarity of vision and an infusion of strength, a flood of adrenaline to the veins and endorphins to the brain. She knew without question that she would not submit to the "procedures" Dr. Sangi had described.

She did, however, feel an overwhelming sense of loneliness.

No, there was no one to call. Not a single friend or lover, no husband or parent or child, no one who might help her bear this moment of crisis.

How had her life come to this?

Grace's heart knew the answer even as her mind formulated the question. In the far reaches of her memory, she could hear the echo of a door slamming and bolts sliding into place--the clang of a vault being locked after the robbers had already come and gone. How absurd, to guard an empty soul with such tenacity. And yet she knew no other way to survive, to keep at bay the onslaughts of life's inevitable pain.

It hadn't always been this way. She'd once had friends, had once been in love, had once harbored wistful dreams of the kind of life other people seemed to live. She had trusted, had laughed, had opened her heart. But that had been a long time ago.

It had been more than twenty years since Grace Benedict had been in love, and then the fires of passion had brought not warmth and comfort but a raging conflagration that left her scarred and terrified of getting close enough to be burned a second time. On a few occasions in the past she had met someone nice and determined to try once more, only to shy away after the first date or the first kiss.

But she had had a best friend. Jet. Evelyn Jetterly.

They had met in the library, liked each other, and began meeting for coffee to discuss books. Gradually their intellectual companionship ripened into something more personal, the kind of friendship and belonging Grace hadn't known since college. For almost ten years they laughed together, cried together, told each other everything--almost. The two of them were closer than sisters, and Grace was happy.

Until Jet, too, was snatched out of her life.

Grace could still feel the frail bones of Jet's hand gripping hers, see the skeletal face with its wide eyes and dry, cracked lips. In Jet's case it was cervical cancer, and it took her so quickly that neither of them had time to adjust. She was just . . . gone.

Grace tried in vain to push Jet's dying image out of her mind. She didn't want to remember her friend that way, but the picture stayed with her. Now it was her turn, and there would be no one sitting by her bedside, holding her hand, when she passed.

How long had it been, she wondered, since she had gazed at another human face across a dinner table? Months? Years? Sometimes, in the shaded picnic area under the trees beside the library, she shared a brown-bag lunch with the part-time library assistant, Marge. But that hardly counted as socializing. Marge talked nonstop about the weather or quitting smoking or her current diet or her teenage kids, and she rarely let Grace get a word in edgewise. Not that it mattered. Grace never revealed anything personal about her own life anyway, and Marge never seemed to notice--or care--that their conversations were one-sided.

As she looked back over the years since Jet's death, Grace was hard pressed to account for how she had spent her time. She worked, took drives up into the mountains, watched TV, read four or five books a week. On weekends she went to bargain matinees and sat alone in the darkened movie theater, eating Wal-Mart popcorn she brought in a plastic bag from home. Sometimes she'd walk through the mall and window-shop. Have coffee at the food court. Chat with people she knew by sight but not by name.

Now Dr. Sangi had asked the question, and Grace had been forced to face the answer. There was no one to call. She could vanish from the face of the earth tomorrow, and no one would know she was missing until someone called the city to complain that their local branch library hadn't been open for a week.

Media reviews

"Penelope Stokes has written the perfect story of enduring friendships. It is compelling, truthful, and poignant. You'll want to buy several copies of this book, one to keep for yourself, the others to give to the women friends you are fortunate enough to include in your circle of grace."
--Lynne Hinton, author of The Last Odd Day and Friendship Cake

 
"A beautiful novel of dreams gone awry,  truths forsaken, and the blessings and redemptive power of womens' friendships. The dialogue is fast paced, intelligent, and heart wrenchingly honest. The writing is clear and concise and speaks to the truths of our connection to the universe and to who we really are."
 
Joan Medlicott, author of The Ladies of Covington Send Their Love and The Spirit of Covington