For an hour, my father and Freddy and I held council on what to say, how to tell my mother, and in the end we came up with nothing much better than that radiant vocabulary the butterscotch doctor had spread around his news. Freddy called one of his medical school professors and discussed statistics, but none of us cared about statistics much; we had just fallen by the wayside of a tiny statistic, and were in that undreamed-of two percent that gives foil to a treatment with a ninety-eight percent success rate. Each of us tried to believe the doctor’s tone for the sake of the others, and so we repeated in apologetic litany that things might have been much, much worse. And then the orderlies appeared with my mother on a rolling bed. My father, my poor father, was the only one who could tell her the news, her news, our news, and now she opened her eyes and stared groggily for a moment. “Well?” she asked with all the fervid effort of anesthetized concentration. “It’s good news and it’s bad news,” my father said. Lines of anger etched themselves into my mother’s face and her teeth set. “It’s not over,” she said, and closed her anesthesia eyes before my father could progress into his efforts at cheer. On that day, the day we all understood that my mother would probably die, there was an expression on her face like nothing I had ever seen, a concentrate of the final rage that lies beyond despair. And my father, when he saw that she had locked herself back in unconsciousness, turned to my brother and me, and said, “What are they going to do to her now?” And then he paused and murmured, “And she looks so beautiful.”

Freddy put a hand on his arm. “Dad, she doesn’t look so beautiful right now,” he said. My father turned to see again, as though he were afraid that it was the wrong body they had brought in, as though to make sure that it really was my mother who lay on the hospital bed. He looked at her pale, distorted face, and at her almost hairless head—an eighth of an inch had grown in since the chemotherapy had ended—and at the emptiness where her eyebrows should have been; he looked at her features puffed from surgery, her teeth clenched tight enough to fix girders. He stared for a long moment as though he were trying to see clearly. And then he shrugged. “To me, she’s beautiful,” he said.