Before I Go Page 3

  “My tumor markers are up,” I say. Then I laugh a little, because it feels like I’m playing The $25,000 Pyramid and the answer is “How many different ways you can tell people you have cancer.”

  Her head snaps toward me. “What?” The word comes out of her mouth like a dart.

  “They think it’s back.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wait, they think? So it might not be, right?”

  “Well, I guess they know. Just not how . . . much. I have more tests tomorrow.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Nothing, really,” I say, and then, because neither of us has ever been big on sappy displays of emotion, I pick up the remote. “Can I watch my show now?”

  “Yeah, of course,” she says, pouring more scotch into her empty glass. The move comforts me. It means—like always—she’s here to stay.

  “OH MY GOD,” Jack says, stretching his long arms above his head as he enters our bedroom. “I’m exhausted.”

  “I bet.” I glance at the clock on my nightstand. “It’s midnight.”

  Kayleigh left about an hour earlier and I got in bed to read and wait for Jack to get home.

  I slide a bookmark between two pages to hold my place and set the book beside me on top of the duvet. Jack takes it as an invitation to crawl onto the bed and lay down directly on top of me, his full body weight distributed over mine.

  “You’re smushing me,” I say into the side of his scratchy face. I inhale his evening scent—it’s mostly Jack muddled with his lingering woodsy antiperspirant, a sharp contrast to his morning smell, which is all soapy and fresh and tingles my nose. I like the evening Jack best—even on days when he’s had a surgery and smells faintly antiseptic.

  “Good,” he replies. It comes out muffled and his breath is hot on my neck. “Mmhungry.”

  “Did you eat dinner?”

  He’s silent and I know he’s thinking about it.

  “Seriously, Jack. I don’t know how you forget to eat. Doesn’t your stomach growl?” I push at his hips, heavy on my thighs. They don’t budge. “Get off. I’ll go warm you up something.”

  “No, it’s fine,” he says, rolling off me. “I’m too tired to eat.”

  He sits up and begins his nightly ritual of peeling his socks off one by one before shoving his feet under the covers and rolling up tight like a burrito in our sheets.

  “What time is your appointment tomorrow?”

  “Ten,” I say, and before he can offer, I add: “You don’t need to come.”

  Although I’m not sure he would have offered. Jack’s on the orthopedic surgery segment of his clinical rotations this week, and tomorrow he’s observing a hip replacement on a German shepherd. Except when he told me about it on Monday, it sounded more like: “AND I GET TO WATCH A HIP REPLACEMENT ON A GERMAN SHEPHERD.”

  “I can if you want,” he says.

  “No,” I say. “You’ve got that hip thing.”

  “It’s a dog. I can see that anytime.”

  “Don’t downplay it. I know you’re excited,” I say. “Besides, it’s just going to be a long day of sitting in the waiting room between tests, and I won’t even be getting the results. Trust me. It will be mind-numbingly boring.”

  “Well, I can come and entertain you with my fascinating wit and intellect,” he says, smiling.

  I roll my eyes at him, but can’t help returning his smile. “Really, it’s not a big deal,” I say, reiterating what I’ve been telling myself since I got off the phone with Dr. Saunders yesterday.

  He stares at me for a beat and his eyes turn serious. I know he’s trying to decide if he should push once more. He doesn’t. “OK,” he says, leaning over and nuzzling me just beneath my ear. I hear him inhale my skin through his nose and I wonder if I smell different in the morning and evening, too, and which one he likes best. “If you change your mind, I’ll drop everything and come straight over,” he says.

  “Don’t drop everything,” I say. “What if you’re holding the dog?”

  “Ha-ha,” he says, leaning away from me to switch the light on his nightstand off. And then, almost as an afterthought, he turns his head back toward me and crinkles his brow. “Have you called your mom?”

  My body tenses. I had been meaning to. No, that’s a lie. I had been doing everything I could to avoid it, really.

  “Daisy,” Jack chastises.

  “I know! I know,” I say. “I will.”

  Click. He turns out the light and I lean back into my pillow and try not to think about my mother or the come-back cancer.

  I fail at both.

  THERE ARE SEVEN cracks separating the large square cement blocks of the sidewalk leading up to the automatic sliding glass doors at Athens Regional. In four years, I have never stepped on any of them. Today is no exception. I slip through the silent doors and turn left toward the cancer center. I nearly run smack into a wrinkled woman supporting an elderly man down the hallway.

  “I’m so sorry,” I say, veering around their path.

  She looks at me with kind eyes, then turns her attention back to her shuffling husband. That’s love, I think. And for a split second I wish I had let Jack come with me.

  A new receptionist greets me at the front desk. I nod to her as I sign in. “Is Martha on vacation?” I ask.

  “Retired,” she says. “Bought a motorcycle with her boyfriend and they’re going cross-country.”

  “Good for her.” I try to picture the gentle, white-haired, grandmotherly woman who had been my longtime liaison for paperwork, insurance questions, and scheduling appointments on the back of a Harley.

  I pick an open chair in the waiting room and settle into it, avoiding eye contact with the other patients. It’s something I’ve done ever since my very first visit when I accidentally met a man’s gaze and he regaled me for forty-five minutes with his “cancer journey.” He ended with an invitation to his weekly support group. All my life, I’ve been a joiner. In high school, it was Honor Society, Drama Club, SADD, Pep Squad. In college, Phi Kappa Phi academic fraternity, Students for a Free Tibet, intramural soccer, and LeaderShape. But this—this cancer crowd—this was a club I didn’t want to belong to.

  Magazines litter the side tables, but I stare straight ahead at the clock, willing time to tick faster. I want to fast-forward to tomorrow, my romantic weekend rendezvous with Jack, where I can pretend to be cancer free one last time before I get my sentence on Monday. While my mind is on the future, the fingers on my left hand begin tracing my past—the jagged scar that runs from the crease of my right elbow to midbicep. The wound has long since healed, but it’s as if the skin was sewn back too tight. It often itches—and at the most inopportune times, like when I’m giving a presentation in class or waiting for sleep to overtake me at night.

  It’s a good conversation starter at parties. “Oh, this? This is the six-inch cut that saved my life.” Wait for requisite gasps from my audience, and then “How?”

  I’m glad you asked. It was finals week my senior year and I was having a study group over to my apartment for a class in which the professor was notorious for including ridiculously minute details of the lives of cognitive development theorists on his tests. I was planning to make homemade chicken enchiladas—the ultimate study comfort food. I reached up to the top shelf of my open kitchen cabinet where I kept my glass casserole dishes and BAM! An avalanche of Pyrex and CorningWare tumbled down on top of me. A dish must have broken in midair because when it made contact with my extended arm, it sliced it wide open, like a fisherman gutting a trout.

  In the ER, when the doctor was reviewing the film of the X-rays to make sure there were no fractures, he noticed something not in my arm but in my breast, which had been captured in the edge of the picture. “See that small mass?” he asked, pointing to the film hanging from the light box. “It’s probably nothing, but you ought to get it biopsied just in case.” Turns out, it wasn’t
nothing. It was cancer. During the surgery to remove the tumor, they found it had already spread to my lymph nodes. Fortunately, it was nothing a little chemo and radiation couldn’t handle. But if I hadn’t broken the dish that cut my arm that led to the X-ray, they may never have caught it in time.

  In this retelling of my tale, I don’t mention the three panic attacks I had while waiting for the results of the biopsy. I don’t mention the two surgeries I had to endure—thanks to a positive margin (which sounds like a good thing, but isn’t) and a high ratio of cancerous sentinel lymph node cells after the first lumpectomy. And I don’t mention that chemo and radiation were actually my only choices in treatment, thanks to my diagnosis of triple-negative breast cancer, meaning it tested negative for all three receptors that respond to the well-known and highly effective hormone therapy treatments like Tamoxifen and Herceptin. When it comes to cancer, people like the happy ending, not the boring details.

  When I’m done with my story, audience responses vary. “Amazing.” “God is good.” “Talk about fate.” “That is one lucky scar.” I’m not sure who’s right—whether it was fate, luck, or some divine intervention. But I am glad that when my mom was helping me unpack the kitchen in my new apartment, I ignored her advice to put the casserole dishes in the bottom cabinet instead of the top. “They’re so heavy,” she said. “It’s dangerous for them to be up so high. What if they fall?”

  “Daisy Richmond.” A large black woman with a clipboard calls my name.

  She leads me to an exam room, and I hesitate at the door. It’s the exact same room where Dr. Saunders gave me the bad news four years ago—using his red dry erase marker on a whiteboard to detail the position of the tumor in my breast, explain the lumpectomy the surgical oncologist would perform, and teach me about margins and how radiation would work. By the time he was done with the lecture, the board was bleeding with his sketches, diagrams, and poor penmanship.

  Is this a bad omen? Should I request a different room?

  I sit down in the same uncomfortable blue chair near the door and stare at the blank white board hanging on the wall across from me.

  My cell vibrates in the front pocket of my bag announcing a text message. I pull it out. It’s from Kayleigh.

  Sure you don’t want me to come up there when school’s out?

  I’m fine! I want to shout. It’s just a few tests. It’s no big deal. But I know she’s just being a good friend. And I know this tiny display of concern is nothing compared to what my mother would be doing right now. Even though Jack was right, and I should have called her, I’m glad that I didn’t. Because no matter how many times I said, “Mom, that’s all the information I have right now,” she would have still peppered me with at least forty questions that I didn’t have the answers to, and then she would have gotten overly dramatic and weepy and immediately made the hour-and-a-half drive from Atlanta to Athens so she could sit anxiously next to me all day, asking me every five minutes how I was feeling. Sometimes, it’s just nicer to be alone.

  I’m sure, I tap out to Kayleigh. As soon as I hit send, the door to the exam room opens and Dr. Saunders shuffles in.

  “Daisy,” he says warmly, and I’m instantly at ease. If there were a Zagat for doctors, Dr. Saunders would get five stars for bedside manner. Even though he called with every test result, I haven’t actually seen him since I finished my radiation therapy three years ago. Nurses were the ones who drew the blood and squished my breast between the cold metal plates. I realize, strangely, that I missed him. As he engulfs my hand in his cozy bear paw, I quickly assess the discrepancies between my memory of him and the flesh and blood in front of me. He has a little less hair on top of his head and a little more girth in his midsection, but his eyebrows are the exact same as I remember them—large and furiously unruly, like two gray and black woolly worms resting above his wire-rimmed bifocals.

  “Just couldn’t stay away, could you?” He sets a folder on the counter beside my chair and starts flipping through it.

  “Last time was so much fun, I wanted to do it all over again.”

  He chuckles, then looks up from my chart and claps his hands together. “OK, so like I told you over the phone, the biopsy from the little tumor they found on the mammogram came back positive. But your tumor markers and liver enzymes are a little more elevated than I’d like to see for such a small mass, so let’s go ahead and get a PET scan and an MRI, just to make sure it’s confined to the breast. You haven’t had anything to eat or drink today, right?”

  I agree that I’ve followed the orders that were given to me, and then, because I’ve never been good at waiting for anything, I ask: “Will I have to do chemo again?”

  He puts his hand on my shoulder. “Let’s just make sure we know what we’re dealing with before we discuss treatment.”

  “Oh, and I saw a thing about a trial they’re doing in Canada that condenses the radiation down to just one week, instead of six. Would I be a good candidate for something like that?”

  “Still trolling the Internet for medical advice, I see.” His lip curls on one side. His hand is still on my shoulder and he pats it reassuringly. “One thing at a time, Daisy. Any other questions?”

  Only about a million. I bite my lip, shake my head no.

  “Great,” he says. “Rachel and Lativia will take care of you.” He touches my shoulder a final time. “I’ll see you Monday.”

  I dread the MRI the most, so I’m glad that the nurse says we’re doing that one first. I keep my eyes shut for the entire forty-five minutes that I’m lying in the capsule and try to pretend that I can sit up and get out of it anytime I want. When the magnets bang bang bang overhead, I attempt to drown them out by going over to-do lists in my head.

  Price wood-flooring refinishers.

  Bang!

  Take salmon out of freezer for Sunday dinner.

  Bang!

  Wash sheets and towels.

  Bang!

  Buy caulk.

  Bang! Bang! Bang!

  I grit my teeth. I didn’t get a chance to buy caulk yesterday. When I called the farmer’s market about the kale, the guy said he had a few heads and that I didn’t have to wait until Saturday to get it. So after my last class, I drove to Monroe, and by the time I got back to Athens, I had to go directly home to let Benny out and make dinner.

  After the MRI, the tiny exam room feels absolutely cavernous and I don’t mind the two-hour wait between tests. I use the time to review my Gender Studies flash cards. Finally, a nurse comes into my room with a syringe and asks me to roll up the sleeve of my sweater. “This is the sugar solution for the PET scan.” I nod. I remember from last time. “It will help us see where any cancer cells might be congregating.” I follow her to yet another room and lie down for the second time that day in a machine that’s far more open—and far less scary than the first.

  Then, at the end of the long day, I’m free. I make my appointment for Monday with the new receptionist—“Does four thirty work? He’s filled up solid until then”—and step out into the cool air. The sun is setting behind the pine trees that surround the parking lot, casting long shadows over the sidewalk. I let my eyes adjust to the dusk before I walk to the car, so I don’t accidentally step on any cracks as I leave.

  WHEN I WALK into our bedroom that night, after NewsHour and long before Jack gets home, the suitcase that awaits our overnight trip still sits on the floor near our dresser. Jack’s side is still empty. I resist the urge to pack it for him and crawl into bed, exhausted from the day.

  three

  ON SATURDAY MORNING, I can see my breath when I run out the front door to get the newspaper that was thrown haphazardly in the dewy grass. It’s as if winter decided it wasn’t quite done yet and elbowed the brief respite of spring out of the way. I shiver in my cotton pajama pants and long-sleeve T-shirt and hurry back inside, even though it’s not much warmer in our house of slightly cracked windows.

  I snuggle into the couch, tugging a crocheted afghan I bought from
a thrift store around my shoulders. I put my slipper-clad feet up on the coffee table, making the legs on the right side touch the ground. A significant hump runs the length of the floor in the den, causing the coffee table to act like a seesaw—if one side touches the ground, the other side hovers about half an inch above it. When we first looked at the house, Jack was concerned it was water damage that had warped the wood, but the inspector assured us it was just normal settling of the foundation on a house this old.

  I pull the paper out of its plastic sheath and unfold the front page. Jack made fun of me when I called to order the Athens Banner-Herald delivery service shortly after we moved in. “You do know all of those stories are online, don’t you? For free?” I tried to explain that curling up on the sofa with my computer didn’t quite have the same soothing effect. That I enjoyed the gray smudge of newsprint on my fingers. That the slightly acidic, slightly musty smell of the pages reminded me of weekends in my childhood spent tracing the comics with a pencil on notebook paper while Mom read Dave Barry and hooted. If it was a really funny one, she would cut it out with the good scissors and affix it to the fridge door with a magnet, where it would stay until the paper turned yellow and the edges curled. Jack didn’t understand any of this. He just shook his head at my purchase. “Only you.”

  “T minus forty-five minutes to departure,” Jack announces from the doorway between the living room and the kitchen.

  “Aye, aye, Captain,” I say without taking my eyes off the headlines I’ve been scanning. Benny jumps up onto the cushion beside me and I scratch his ears. For Jack, forty-five minutes doesn’t really mean forty-five minutes, so there’s no urgent need to budge from the indent I’ve settled into on our worn couch.

  “Daisy,” Jack says.

  This time I look up at him. And find that he’s naked. Holding a mug full of steaming coffee. I burst out laughing. He leans against the door frame, nonplussed, crossing his right ankle over his left.

  “Happy Cancerversary,” he says with a clever grin. I jolt at the C-word. I was asleep when he got home last night, so when we woke up this morning, Jack immediately grilled me about the doctor visit and my tests, as if he could somehow glean the unknown results from every minute detail (“Did Dr. Saunders sound hopeful or worried?” “How did the technician look at you after the scan?”). Finally, when he was out of questions, we agreed we wouldn’t discuss my tests or the possible results for the entire weekend so as not to put a damper on our time together. But the irony that the purpose of the trip was to celebrate me being cancer free wasn’t lost on either of us. He pulls the cup to his lips with his left hand and takes a sip of the breakfast blend. The hot vapor fogs up his glasses.