Read Online The Year My Mother Came Back by Alice Eve Cohen - Free Book Online Page A

anything.”
    Then she drops into her chair, exhausted by the effort. Slumped over, she rests her arms on the table and catches her breath. The musicians pick up the tempo, and she perks up.
    â€œMom, I wish that you could have met my daughters, and my husband—and that they could have met you.”
    â€œOh, goodness, yes, it’s a shame we never met.” She sits straighter. “From everything I’ve observed, my granddaughters are amazing girls, so different, one from the other, and yet both of them smart and kind and imaginative and brave—truly courageous, each in her own way. And Michael. You chose a wonderful man, Sweetheart, which is a laudable triumph. He’s one of the good ones. A gem.”
    â€œWow, I’m glad you think so. You didn’t like
any
of my boyfriends.”
    â€œThat was then. I’m sure I wasn’t easy to live with.”
    â€œNo. I guess I wasn’t, either.”
    â€œNope. Now where did that waiter go? I’m starving.”
    â€œI’m sorry, Mom, for so many things.”
    â€œWell, choose one thing and get it over with, Sweetheart, so we can order dinner.”
    â€œI’m sorry we gave you that stupid broom and dustpan on Mother’s Day.”

PART 2
    â€œIt’s not true, yes it’s true, it’s true and it’s not true, there is silence and there is not silence, there is no one and there is someone, nothing prevents anything.”
    â€”
SAMUEL BECKETT , Stories and Texts for Nothing

ONE
    â€œI loved having radiation,” says Aunt Phyllis, my father’s sister, my fairy godmother, my good luck charm, my surrogate mom—the optimist I wish I could be.
    â€œI don’t believe you, Phyl. Nobody loves radiation.”
    â€œWell,
I
did! Listen to me, dahling. It was almost thirty years ago, but I’ll never forget. Arthur had just died, and I was getting used to being alone for the first time in my life. When my doctor told me I would have to go every day for six weeks, I thought I’d be bored to death. So I decided to add a little variety. I drove to the hospital a different route every day. It was like seeing my neighborhood for the first time. The leaves were changing color. Oh, it was the most beautiful fall. I know it sounds crazy, Alice, but I loved radiation. I missed it when it was over.”
    â€œThat’s impossible. Nobody misses radiation.”
    â€œ
I
did. I loved the whole experience.”
    I keep Phyllis’s reminiscence as a mantra. As if I could ever love it. But who knows.
    â€œYOU’LL START MONDAY,” says Dr. Sofia Giordano, my elegant and erudite radiologist, in a lilting Italian accent. “Thirty sessions, five days a week for six weeks. Today, we design your treatment plan.”
    The technician applies permanent tattoos to my back —four small black dots that I’ll have for the rest of my life — and aligns a laser grid to the dots to capture 3-D images. Before allowing me to move, she marks the position of my tumor with a big X, drawn with blue magic marker.
    â€œDon’t wash off the X. It has to last the weekend.”
    X Marks the Spot. Like a pirate’s treasure map. Or an executioner’s document. Or my mother’s lullaby.
X marks the spot, with a dot, dot, dot.
    IT’S MY FIRST day. The hour-long commute begins with a rush-hour subway from Seventy-second Street, mashed into a standing-room-only train, followed by the walk west through the crush of midtown crowds. I pause outside the NYU Cancer Institute on Thirty-fourth Street and Third Avenue. Radiation scares me. My instinct is to “duck and cover,” to hide under a desk like we did in kindergarten in 1959, in the deluded belief that this would protect us from radioactive fallout, should an atomic bomb explode in the vicinity of our classroom. In the waiting room, surrounded by fellow cancer patients—my new peers—I try to channel Aunt