Chris Mitchell (27 page)

“So,” Orville smiled as the music revved back to life and, all around us, guests and waiters and street atmosphere performers went back to doing what they were doing. “What are you going to do now?”

“Now,” I said, imagining my mom and dad opening presents under an impossibly tall Christmas tree. “I’m going home.”

I
t took me four days to drive back across the country, ample time to chastise myself for dropping my safe, journalistic objectivity and getting carried away with the Disney Dream. In New Orleans, I changed my ringtone from Jiminy Cricket’s “Give a Little Whistle” to Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer.” In Dallas, I uploaded a hazmat icon as my avatar. By the time I crossed the Arizona state line, however, my self-immolation had run its course, and I was glad for every single experience at the Magic Kingdom.

Nikki left a message to say that she and her partner had been selected to adopt a Colombian child. Johnny left me a couple of messages describing the awesome ascendance of Boy Banned, but by the time I got to New Mexico, he had given up calling. Calico, on the other hand, called me every day, crying, commanding, begging, cajoling. She ran the full gamut of emotions from martyred to manipulative, but I let all her calls go to voice mail. I couldn’t decide if she was schizophrenic or if she really thought she had me fooled.

I hated the fact that I had fallen for her. Orville had warned me not to get involved. He had told me stories about people like Wigger who shoplifted their personalities from the lovable Disney characters. The day Calico and I went skating, she had said something that sounded like a line from
The Little Mermaid.
And it probably was. In retrospect, it was clear as Cuban rum: there was no Calico. In her place was only a dull, ordinary girl who took on the personalities of Disney characters the way Silly Putty copied a comic strip from a newspaper. Only she did it in serial succession, one character at a time. As Ariel, she was soft and dreamy, a wedding planner who sought beauty and love. She wished on stars and cried for terminal children. When she was approved in Cruella, she became downright wicked. She wore makeup. She ate meat. Only a woman who killed puppies could lie about having cancer.

So what kind of woman could lie to
cover up
cancer? There was no easy Disney archetype for my mother. Walt’s world was a place without maternal influence, an oligarchy of eternally youthful heroes and aging villains. I didn’t for a second think that she was lying to spite me; more likely, she was doing what she’d always done: protecting me from the truth, letting me have my Fantasyland.

LA smelled like sweaty kneepads and smog, like home. Since it was my first night back in LA, mom insisted on cooking dinner for my brother and me, and she wouldn’t take no for an answer. Michael lived about an hour east of our parents, so I stopped there and let him drive us the rest of the way. As expected, he forced me to sit through fifteen minutes of well-rehearsed lecturing before he warmed up.

“I’m glad you came back,” he said.

“Me too.” I watched the cars move past us on the freeway, shiny imports with polished chrome parts. Of course, the weather was perfect, arid, with just enough sea spray that I could taste the salt. I closed my eyes and felt the sunshine on my face. The sounds of traffic, the radio stations that I had known since I was a kid.

My brother looked over at me. “Are you still upset that Mom and Dad kept you in the dark?”

I stretched my fingers through the sunroof. “No,” I said. “Well, yes. I mean, I guess I understand that they didn’t want to scare me.”

“That’s part of it,” Michael said. “But there’s a part of Mom that doesn’t want to admit she has cancer. She thinks if she doesn’t talk about it, it might just go away.” He shook his head. “I know it sounds preposterous, but it’s true.”

Actually, it sounded quite reasonable. Hadn’t I been doing the same thing for the past twelve months? “But she talked to you.”

“Barely!”

“Really?”

“If I hadn’t stayed in touch with her oncologist, I probably wouldn’t have had half the information I got. It was really frustrating. She’s like you.” He paused here, and for the first time, I recognized something like envy in his silence. “Living in her own little Fantasyland.”

Nothing he said could have cheered me up more. “So how is she?” I asked.

“She’s good.” Michael nodded. “Recovering.”

“Is she…?”

He looked at me. “What?”

“You know.”

“What? Cured?” He turned down the radio and cleared his throat. “You have to understand something. Cancer doesn’t just go away. The best you can hope for is that it goes into remission.” He took a deep breath. “Right now, it appears that Mom’s cancer is in remission, but we have to wait a few weeks for more accurate test results, and we’ll never know anything with one hundred percent certainty. Not ever.”

I fidgeted with a loose string on my jeans. “Does she
feel
better?”

Michael smiled. “She feels great.”

I was struggling across the driveway with my bag when she opened the front door. Her hands left little streaks of stuffing across my cheeks when she hugged me.

“Look at you,” she exclaimed. “Such a nice haircut.”

“Disney makes everybody wear this haircut, Mom,” I said. “It’s in the Rule Book.”

“Well, it’s very handsome.” Her hug was surprisingly strong.

Sure enough, she looked great. Her hair was coming back in, grayer than before, but thick and stylish. She had lost a lot of weight and the wrinkles on her face were a little deeper, but she had a natural flush to her cheeks and she smiled constantly. I couldn’t take my eyes off her as she ran around the kitchen fixing dishes, checking the roast, setting the table. She didn’t want anyone helping her, but Dad and I did little chores behind her back, using involvement as an excuse to steal snacks from the table.

At one point, she caught me watching her. “What?” She stopped mixing a brown sauce and sat down next to me. “What are you looking at?”

I shook my head. “Why didn’t you tell me you had cancer?”

She wiped her hands on her apron and frowned thoughtfully. “Didn’t I?”

“No, you didn’t. You told me you were feeling tired or fluish or had allergies or something, but you never told me the truth. And you never told me about the treatments.”

She smiled and patted my hands. “Well, luckily, that’s all behind us now.”

“Really? Because Michael said—”

“Oh, pishposh,” she waved her hands in the air between us as if my concern were an annoying fly, and she could make it go away by swatting at it. “Look at my hands.”

Her nails looked strong and healthy again. “Nice manicure,” I said.

“No, look. Here. No veins. The chemo treatments disintegrated my veins. Don’t my hands look young?”

I laughed. “There’s a benefit I bet the doctors never thought of.”

“The wonders of science,” she said, tousling my hair. “I can’t believe how well-groomed you look. You say Disney makes everybody do that?”

I wanted to know more about her experiences, but I could tell she wasn’t going to subject herself to my questioning. Maybe it was me. Maybe it was the intense nature of the illness and the treatment. Or maybe, like Michael said, she just wanted to have her own little Fantasyland where there was no such thing as lymphoma or sadness. Either way, we had come full circle, not talking about things. I was home and I was happy to be with her.

“Disney makes their employees do a lot of things,” I said.

She affected a thoughtful pose. “I seem to remember you telling me something about a girlfriend,” she said. “A lovely mermaid?”

“A
little
mermaid,” I said. “It didn’t work out.” It was too onerous to relive the whole escapade, so I left it at that. “I love you, Mom.”

“I love you too.” She gave me another firm hug and stood up. “But if I catch you or your father ruining your appetite before dinner, so help me!”

That night, as we ate, I told stories about my Disney adventures, the good stories about Magic and Pixie Dust Moments, not the ones about deviant characters or manipulative Cast Members. Everyone laughed at the funny parts and smiled when it was poignant and begged for more stories even when I couldn’t think of any more to tell.

When dinner was over, somebody put on
Peter Pan
, and I sprawled out on the couch to watch. I made it as far as Never Land before I fell asleep, smiling.