When Jill Lepore lost her best friend to leukemia, she was left with an old laptop and not much else. Then she found a folder named “personal.”
The piping on the red snowsuit was yellow, and on the green snowsuit it was blue: fire-engine red, sunflower yellow, summer-grass green, deep-ocean blue, the palette of preschool, the colors in a set of finger paints. I loved everything about those mail-order snowsuits—the snap-off hoods, the ribbed cuffs—but I especially loved the piping, which ran, as thick as a pipe cleaner, across the yoke of each jacket and down each leg of the pants, like the stripes of a military uniform.
All historians are coroners. I began my inquest. I hunted around this tiny-screen world of black and white, poking at the membrane of her brain. I clicked on a folder named “personal” and opened a file called “transitions notes.” Microsoft Word version 5.1a 1992 popped up, copyrighted to the kid in graduate school we’d pirated our software from; she’d never updated hers.
We met the first week of graduate school, when I gave her a ride home from a department picnic and she tested my knowledge of music, a test I failed. She was the sort of person who could draw anyone out, talk about anything, and forgive everything except pretension and pettiness. She was almost immoderately charming; she was irresistible. Go to a restaurant with her, and in five minutes she’d find out where the waitress had gone to high school.
A folder labelled “cancer stuff” contained a file called “treatment options,” with this list: cord-blood transplantation; mixed chimeric/mini-transplant—Cytoxan up front, ATG, radiation to the thymus; chemotherapy—azacitidine; full mismatched related transplant—full-body radiation, course of idarubicin/Ara-C preparatory to infusion of donor cells; haplo-identical transplant, T-cell depleted, full course of chemo and radiation. Those were her very rotten choices.
Twenty years ago this spring, I put my baby in his Kermit fleece and carried him out of the hospital. No one knows how these things will strike you, before they come to you, and I’d never taken care of a baby before, but I loved everything about it, everything about him. “When can we have another one?” is the first question I asked my doctor. I’d won a prize for my first book, a book about war. I didn’t go to the award ceremony. I could not leave my baby.
When it was too cold and blustery to walk them to their day-care center in the stroller, even with the snowsuits and the blankets, we had to drive the car. I’d pack their snow pants in a canvas bag, bring that to the driveway, and then carry the boys out, one in each arm, and buckle them into their seats, and we’d pretend they were astronauts. Once, after I backed out and started driving down the street, the car staggered, and I thought it was stuck on ice and snow.
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