I Wanted You To Know

1

Jess understood all the words in the sentence, but she couldn’t make them hang together properly. She looked at the doctor sitting opposite her with his hands neatly folded in his lap.

‘Can you say it again?’ she asked.

‘I’m sorry, Jessica. We’ve found evidence of breast cancer.’

Jess looked down at her feet where Edie’s car seat was resting. Edie was stirring, and Jess took hold of the handle and rocked her a little, and Edie closed her eyes and went back to sleep. She was holding the edge of her knitted blanket in her tiny fist. Jess had been a mum for a handful of weeks. She was still learning, still felt untethered and lost. She’d gone to the doctor initially because she’d felt a lump when she was feeding Edie. She’d gone to the hospital clinic, ready to be told it was a blocked duct. To be told it was nothing and sent on her way, another overcautious new mother.

‘Jessica, I know this is a shock. Do you have any questions for me?’

Jess tried to focus on his face. He was in his forties, she thought, with small round glasses and a receding hairline. She wanted to ask him whether he had a wife, whether he had children. Whether he understood this new feeling she was grappling with – that her life was no longer her own. That she owed this tiny new person everything. She couldn’t have cancer. How could she? She was a mum. She was a new mum. And she was twenty-one years old.

‘Are you sure?’ she asked.

The doctor’s face changed a little at that. He smiled a sad smile and she saw that he was probably very kind, that he was sorry for her.

‘I can show you the scan if you like? The lump you felt in your right breast, it’s definitely a malignant tumour. It’s roughly thirty millimetres in diameter. We hope you’ll make a full recovery. But look, I don’t want to bombard you with information right now. Do you have anyone with you?’

Jess looked down at her sleeping baby and back up at the doctor. ‘Only my daughter,’ she said, her voice catching as if on a hook. Something about looking at Edie made it all harder, made it worse.

‘Asha, here,’ the doctor said, gesturing at the nurse who was hovering a little way behind his chair, ‘is going to be your breast care nurse, and she can take you into a room now for you to process this news and ask any questions you might have. Okay?’

Jess nodded. And then she was being ushered out, into the corridor, where she’d waited ten minutes before, making faces at Edie, back when she hadn’t had cancer. Or hadn’t known, at least, that she had cancer. Asha put a hand on Jess’s arm, the arm that wasn’t carrying the car seat. It stilled her.

‘Let’s go in here,’ Asha said.

She pushed open the door to a small room with a sofa and an armchair. There were framed prints on the wall, cushions, a coffee table with a box of tissues on it. This was the room where they brought you after the bad news. This was where you began to come to terms with it. Cancer. Jess’s grandfather had died from lung cancer when she was fifteen. Her mum’s dad. And she’d had a friend at school once whose sister had died from cancer, but she didn’t know what kind.

Asha put a pile of leaflets and little booklets on the table between them. ‘Some reading for you,’ she said. ‘Listen, I know this is a shock. I see women receiving this news all the time, but you’re one of the youngest I’ve ever known. And your baby, still so tiny…’

Asha broke off and Jess realised she was trying to hold back tears. This stranger, this nurse who dealt with cancer every day of her life. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, her voice a little stronger.

Jess realised that she hadn’t cried, that she wasn’t crying. And just as she thought it, Edie woke with a howl and Jess unstrapped her and lifted her, held her to her chest and stroked her wispy hair. She lifted her top and pulled down her nursing bra and began to feed her daughter. And then it struck her.

‘Will I be able to keep feeding her?’ she asked.

Asha shook her head. ‘I can’t say for sure. It depends what the treatment is. But if you have chemotherapy, I imagine you’ll have to stop. Don’t think about that now, though.’

Jess wanted to ask her what she should think about. Her head was a mess, her thoughts jumping from one thing to another. Cancer. The question she really wanted to ask was whether or not she was going to die. Whether this tiny baby, who needed her for every little thing, would have to learn to live without her. But she didn’t know what words to use, and she was frightened of the answer.

‘I can’t tell my mum,’ Jess said.

‘Why not?’

‘I just can’t. I’m an only child, and my dad’s not really been in my life. It’s just the two of us. Well, the three of us, now. She won’t be able to deal with it.’

Asha pressed her lips together and tilted her head to one side. ‘Try not to worry about other people. For now, just think about dealing with this news yourself. It’s a big blow, Jessica. It’s okay to be upset, or angry. It’s okay to fall apart.’

But it wasn’t, Jess thought. It wasn’t okay to fall apart when you had a baby.

‘Is the baby’s father…?’ Asha didn’t finish the sentence, though Jess gave her plenty of time to.

‘He’s not around,’ she said when Asha’s discomfort became too much. ‘He’s not in our lives and he never will be.’

‘Okay,’ Asha said. ‘So what does your support network look like?’

Jess thought about that. She lived with her mother in a small town in Cheshire, had always lived with her mother, apart from the couple of years she’d spent away at university, and even then she’d always come home at holidays and for the odd weekend. Her mother was her support network, wasn’t she? But could one person be an entire network? There was Gemma, too. They’d been best friends for years, since the early days of secondary school, and they’d known one another for years before that. Gemma was caught up in most of Jess’s memories of being a teenager, and she’d been great throughout the pregnancy and since Edie had been born. She told Asha about her mother and her best friend. And it didn’t seem like a lot, suddenly. She felt as though she should have more people to offer up.

‘There’s my dad,’ she said, eventually. ‘I didn’t grow up with him, but he lives nearby, and I see him now and again.’

Asha smiled. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Well, I think we’ve told you everything you need to know for today. There’ll be more tests, I’m afraid, but we can get in touch about those. I’d advise you to go home and break the news to those people you’ve just told me about. You’re going to need their help and support more than ever now. How are you getting home?’

‘I’m driving,’ Jess said. She’d borrowed her mum’s car for the appointment. She’d said she needed a few bits and pieces in town. It had felt easier at the time, than explaining.

‘And are you sure you’re okay going home on your own?’

Jess looked down at Edie who’d finished feeding and was lying in her arms, her face all contentment. She wanted to say that she wasn’t on her own. That she was with Edie. But she just nodded and thanked Asha as she strapped Edie back into her car seat. When she got outside and the cool winter air hit her face, Jess stood still and inhaled it for a moment. And then just as she was about to struggle to the car park with Edie’s car seat in the crook of her elbow, she heard her name and turned, and Asha was behind her.

‘You forgot these,’ she said, brandishing the pile of leaflets. ‘And I’ve written down my number. You can call me if you think of any questions or want to talk to someone.’

‘Thank you,’ Jess said, putting the car seat down and stuffing the paper into the changing bag.

It seemed, for a minute, as if Asha was going to say something else, but then she just rested a hand briefly on Jess’s arm again before dashing back inside.

It wasn’t until she was in the car, Edie secured and her own seatbelt on, that she cried. Cancer. There was something about that word. It reeked of death. And it was for old people, people who’d lived. Not women who were just starting out. Not new mums. Jess cried hard for twenty minutes, until her eyes were sore from it and she felt empty. In the back of the car, Edie slept on, oblivious. And then, feeling that it was out of her system, Jess turned the engine on and drove, slowly, back home. When she got there, she sat in the driveway for a while, feeling like she lacked the energy to move. It was peaceful, with Edie sleeping. The jolt of removing the car seat from the car might wake her. Why not sit for a while?

Cancer. Breast cancer. Jess reached down and touched the place where she’d found the lump. It was close in to the nipple, hard to the touch. She wondered why she’d never noticed it before, or whether it had only recently become pronounced enough to be felt. She’d always had fairly small breasts, and then in pregnancy they’d become much larger, and now that she was feeding they were sore and variable, rock hard when Edie was due a feed and then soft as soon as she was finished. She’d been so sure that this lump was a part of that, part of those changes. She’d been so sure.

Jess knew that her mum was out, that she was at work. She worked in a call centre answering the phone for hundreds of small companies and passing on messages. Jess didn’t always know what shifts she was doing, but she knew she was at work that afternoon. She’d gone on the bus because Jess was using the car. So when Edie opened her eyes and Jess carried her inside the house, she knew it was empty. And part of her was glad, because she wasn’t ready yet to share this news with anyone else. But part of her was sad and felt horribly alone. For the first time in weeks, she thought about calling Jake. And then she gathered herself. She put Edie in her bouncy chair, carried it into the bathroom and had a shower, avoiding the lump when she covered her body with shower gel. She washed her hair. When she stepped out, dripping wet, and reached for a towel, a few drops of water fell onto Edie’s head, and she did a funny little wriggle. Jess laughed.

It was so hard, being a new mum, and yet every day – every hour, almost – Edie did something to make her laugh, and Jess remembered to be grateful for her. Remembered that she’d made the right decision when those two lines had turned blue. She might be missing out on her final year of university, but she was doing something else. Something better. Or she had been. Now, she wasn’t sure what she was doing. Or how long she had left to do anything.

‘I want to promise you things,’ Jess said. ‘I thought I could promise to always be here with you, but now I don’t know.’ She knew that tears were coming again. ‘Edie, you’re my love. My big love. And I’ll do anything I can to make sure I’m here to look after you. But if I can’t do that, I’ll make everything right for you for when I’m gone. I’ll make sure you’re always looked after by people who love you.’

She would wait for her mum to come home, she decided. And then she’d sit her down and tell her. And her mum would know what to do. That was how it worked with mums. Jess wondered, for a moment, whether Edie would feel that way about her when she was an adult. Whether she would believe that Jess had the answer to everything. And then the thought struck her, hard, that she might not be around to see Edie as a grownup, and she sank onto her bed, a towel around her body and her hair still dripping. Edie in that chair, playing with her fingers. And the cancer inside her, growing.