Escape Points by Michele Weldon Page B

remember writing and why—the birthdays, the anniversaries, the congratulations on this, the condolences on that. I suppose he intended for it all to soften me; the note he included said I once felt differently about him and here was the proof.
    Yes, but he was a different person then. I didn’t know he would disappear. I didn’t know who he would become.
    “Your father leaving has nothing to do with you,” I said to the boys so often it made them mad. I wanted to be sure I said it, even if in some back room of their minds they did not believe it.
    I no longer was angry at him for anything he did to me; that had dissipated years ago. I had worked hard to let it go. But our children are not adults. There is no mutual blame. These boys are your children. And you are the father. Every time I saw how the boys reacted to his omissions or his hurtful actions, every time they were reminded of his abandonment by his own sudden eruptions, I was infuriated for what he did to them anew. The fresh harm.
    A good friend said his sudden departure to Europe gave the boys all the hurt of a parent’s death with none of the insurance benefits. I was familiar with the insurance benefits.
    “Do you have any other insurance? This has been canceled,” the receptionist in the pediatrician’s office said somewhat cheerfully whenI signed the boys in. I had three back-to-school physicals booked for the boys. They were eleven, nine, and six years old.
    The receptionist called the insurance company again and handed me the phone. “This was canceled months ago by the policyholder,” she told me.
    My mouth went dry. The boys had been walking around—and wrestling—uninsured, even though the divorce decree included the stipulation that he carried the boys on his insurance. In the car on the way home, I called my brother Paul, and the next day he arranged to get the boys insurance before I could add them to mine. There was little at this point that my former husband could have done to reclaim the trust I had in him as a father. On a very basic level I did not trust he had their best interests at heart.

PART TWO
TAKEDOWN
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8
Wait
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October 27, 2006
    “ D r. Werber saw your mammogram and wants you to come back as soon as you can for another look,” her assistant said on the phone. I was in my office on campus and made an appointment for the following day, Friday.
    You should know your life will change when the doctor calls you back in for a second, third, and fourth look. I had been going to Dr. Joan Werber for almost ten years for annual mammograms. Every year I was afraid to go, and every year they found nothing, the results were normal, I was fine.
    Minutes after the return visit for the second ultrasound, I was in Dr. Werber’s office. She shut the door.
    “This is not good,” she said, pointing to the X-rays and the ultrasound image she had tacked next to it. I had to push down the tears, swallow the suffocating fear. “We have to find out what this is.”
    She explained what would happen next. She was kind. She wrote her home phone and cell phone numbers on a card, then asked me what hospital I wanted to go to for the core biopsy. She got mein Monday morning with Dr. Kambiz Dowlat at Rush University Medical Center. The day before Halloween.
    I couldn’t shake the thought of how bad it would be for the boys if I died. It was too Dickensian. Their father runs away and has nothing to do with them. Their mother gets cancer. My boys should not be abandoned again.
    Who would know them the way I do? Who would know they love the custard filling with fresh strawberries in their birthday cakes, the egg lemon soup from the Greek restaurant on 22nd Street? How they like drinking milk straight from the plastic jug and roast chicken stuffed with oranges.
    I never should have grounded them; that would be all they remembered. Did I make their lives sing? I know I yelled too much. Sometimes I was mean. They did not understand me. So