Her weight plummeted, stabilized, plummeted again; by midsummer her hair was mostly gone. In August there was a break in her treatments, and O’Neil rented a house for all of them on the Jersey shore. He had taken it sight unseen, over the phone, but it was perfect: a charming cottage on a quiet street that ended at stairs and the beach. He had lied to his sister about how much it cost, which was fifteen hundred dollars for the week. It took him two days before he realized his mistake. Her bony body, one breast gone, her balding head impossible to really hide, no matter what hat she wore: of course it would break her heart to be at the beach. She took off her T-shirt or robe only to swim; everywhere she looked she would see golden, healthy bodies in the sun. The next morning he drove around town, looking for a barbershop, but had to settle for an expensive salon called Trendz.
When his turn came, he sat in the chair. “Short,” he instructed.
The girl was slowly chewing gum; she was very attractive, with hazel eyes and silver bracelets all up and down her bare arms. She held her comb and scissors slightly raised, like a conductor preparing to lead an orchestra. She spoke to him through the wide mirror.
“How short, exactly?”
O’Neil nodded. “All of it,” he said.
She used scissors, then clippers, and finally a safety razor to scrape his scalp clean. At the first touch of the blade O’Neil felt the coolness of air on skin that had not felt it since the first days of his life. When she was done, he ran his hand over it again and again, amazed. And yet his face in the mirror was the same.
“I don’t get many requests for something like that,” the girl said, bewildered. “A lot of older guys come in here and actually want me to somehow make it longer.”
He paid her, tipping generously, and returned to the house. It was lunchtime, and Mary and the children were making sandwiches in the kitchen. Sam, reading at the kitchen table, saw him first and started to laugh.
“Holy shit, O’Neil,” he said. “You look like a white Michael Jordan.” But his face was proud-he understood what O’Neil had done.
Nora giggled. “Daddy lost his hair,” she sang. “Bald man, bald man.”
“Hush,” Mary said. She put down the knife she had been using to spread peanut butter onto sandwiches for the children. She wiped her hands on a dish towel and looked at him. “O’Neil?”
He shrugged. “It’s just something I’ve been meaning to try for a while. What do you think? It feels great.”
She narrowed her eyes, tilted her head this way and that to examine him. “Well, I think I like it. I really do. Turn around and let me see the back.”
He did, pivoting toward the doorway in time for Kay to enter the room and meet his gaze. She stepped forward and touched his bare scalp. Tears floated in her eyes, and O’Neil’s heart constricted: another mistake?
“Oh, honey,” she said, and laughed. “Is that what I look like? You look just awful.”
That evening the two of them went down to the ocean to swim. Kay had asked him if he could get some marijuana for her, to help her appetite, and he brought it with him to the beach-three joints, tightly wrapped in green and red paper, like little Christmas presents. It had been years since he’d smoked it; he’d bought it from a friend of Mary’s, a sculptor she’d known in graduate school, who knew someone who knew someone else-the road it had traveled to him was obscure. Why had Kay thought that he, of all people, would be able to get it? And yet he had, and done it with ease. O’Neil had planned a big meal to follow it: spaghetti with clam sauce, a salad of mixed greens, fresh sweet corn slabbed with butter, and a key lime pie for dessert. He’d told her nothing about this; the meal was an ambush. The joints were in a Baggie, and after their swim, he took one out and lit it, somehow, in the wind.
“I feel like I’m in high school,” she said, and took the joint from him. “I mean that in a good way.”
The smoke tasted like pepper on his tongue. They finished about half the joint before the wind blew it out, and O’Neil returned it to the bag. The pot he’d had in high school and college was all stems and seeds-sometimes they smoked through the night and barely caught a buzz-but everything he’d heard told him that, these days, half a joint would probably be more than enough for his purpose. Sure enough: he looked around and discovered that, already, the scenery seemed a little fluttery, like a movie just slightly out of synch. This fact was also elusively funny.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
She was sitting cross-legged on the sand, her legs covered by a towel. He saw her eyes had closed. “Choirs of angels are soaring from the heavens, singing the Hallelujah Chorus.” She turned, wide-eyed and grinning, to look at him. “No, but seriously, I am stoned. It’s like 1979 all over again. Where did you get this stuff?”
O’Neil shrugged. “Apparently not much has changed in this regard. A few calls, next thing you know, a car’s in the driveway and money’s changing hands.”
“Interesting.” She looked out over the water, blinking. The sun was behind them, low against the buildings, which sawtoothed the light. “Really, it’s fucking marvelous, O’Neil. I wish I’d had it the last time, though Jack probably would have disapproved. Does Mary know?”
“Mary helped.”
“Good for Mary. Thank her for me. No, I’ll thank her myself.” She straightened her back and touched his bald head again. “You didn’t have to do this, you know. Make sure you wear sunscreen. You wouldn’t believe how fast you can burn.”
“Hungry?”
She thought for a moment and nodded. “I could eat.”
She packed it away: two helpings of the spaghetti, three ears of corn, seconds on the pie. O’Neil was elated, but later that night he awoke to a sound he recognized at once. He crept down the hall and waited by the door until Kay finished, as he had learned to do, then entered the room and prepared a moistened washcloth for her face.
“I tried,” she said dispiritedly. “I really tried.”
“It was my fault.” He dabbed her face and mouth with the cloth. “I let you overdo it. It was just so good to watch you eat.”
Sam came in, wearing boxer shorts and rubbing his eyes. Down the hall Leah had woken up and was calling for Mary. It would be just moments before everyone in the house was prowling the halls. “Is Mom okay?”
Sitting on the closed toilet lid, Kay managed a smile. “I’m all right, honey. Go back to bed.”
The boy looked warily at O’Neil. “Is she really okay?”
“She’s fine, son,” O’Neil said. “Just a few too many clams.”
They didn’t smoke again. By the day the trip ended, his head, despite Kay’s warning, was tender with sunburn. Already it was prickly with stubble; he would have hair again by the start of the school year, just three weeks away. They drove back to O’Neil’s and Mary’s house in Philadelphia, and the next morning, in smothering heat, O’Neil took Kay and the boys to the airport for their flight home to Vermont. At the gate, when Sam took his brothers off to the bathroom, he took the Baggie from his pocket and slid it into her purse.
She wrinkled her brow. “Is that safe? I don’t want to get arrested.”
“You just don’t check it through,” O’Neil explained. “We did it all the time in college.” This wasn’t true; he’d done nothing of the kind. But when it came down to it, he couldn’t believe that anyone would search such an obviously sick woman.
“You’re lying,” Kay said after a moment. “But it’s all right. What could they do to me? I’m a public relations nightmare.” She paused and gave a little laugh. “The good thing about cancer, sweetie, and I mean the only good thing, is that you don’t sweat the details.”
Their plane was announced. Sam emerged from the men’s room, holding each of his brothers by a hand. Noah, almost as tall as his brother, was clutching a paper bag of seashells he had collected on the beach. O’Neil saw that Simon had had some troubles; one buckle of his overalls was undone, and both his sneakers were untied. All three were deeply tanned and wearing souvenir T-shirts O’Neil had bought for them, neon-blue with a picture of a surfer and the words Sea Isle, New Jersey printed on the front. Kay rose and waved to hurry them up.