by Brad Parks
I kept working from home all the same. I was crafting some legislation for Blake that I was convinced was mission critical. And so—heavily dosed on acetaminophen, ibuprofen, and self-importance—I kept taking phone calls, typing e-mails, and dashing to the bathroom.
Alison came home when I was in the midst of this ridiculous act. Without a word, she removed the phone from my hand and slid the computer off my lap. Then she said, “You’re allowed to be sick, Scott. The US Senate doesn’t give perfect attendance awards.”
The award became something of a running gag after that. When she got pregnant, I made it a point to be at every ob-gyn appointment and ultrasound. After the last one, she presented me with a framed plaque that contained a certificate for perfect attendance.
“This one,” she told me, “is the only one that really matters.”
That was Alison. She kept the big picture in focus. She knew family—not running off with your ex-boyfriend—was at the core of everything.
Where was that Alison now? And what made her think she was going to get away with something like this?
It was all too surreal, and I was still trying to make any sense of it when I realized Alison’s Lincoln was slowing. We had just reentered the more well-developed part of Gloucester.
Alison slid into a left-turn-only lane that channeled traffic toward the collection of low-slung white buildings that comprised Walter Reed Hospital. There were also some buildings behind it—medical offices and whatnot.
She didn’t go toward the main entrance for the hospital. She forked off to the right. According to the directional signs, she was pointed toward employee parking, deliveries, and a few other destinations whose names I couldn’t quite read. The signs were passing by too quickly.
After a few hundred feet, she took a left. The road sloped down, past a retention pond, then back up. On the left, there was a building labeled WALTER REED MEDICAL ARTS.
Had they somehow stashed Emma there as a patient? It was baffling. And I was so determined to catch my wife red-handed, so narrowly focused on the alternate reality I had constructed for her, so myopic in my view, that I couldn’t consider any other possibilities.
That changed the moment Alison turned away from the Medical Arts center, taking a right turn toward another building.
It was labeled CANCER CENTER.
FIFTY-NINE
The younger brother did not retrieve his iPad. As tempted as he might have been, they were getting a hundred-thousand-dollar bonus upon successful completion of this job. World domination could wait.
He stayed within the search grid, sometimes giving it another pass in case he’d missed something, sometimes staying put in hopes the silence might lure the little girl out.
Two hours later, he heard the van coming up the driveway. When his older brother got out and glanced his way, the younger just shook his head.
“Stay there,” the older ordered.
The younger answered with an obscene gesture.
The older disappeared into the house for a moment, then emerged with their laptop and a tool bag. He got to work, pulling a large box out of the van and struggling through the instructions. Before long he had assembled what appeared to be a very small helicopter.
A drone. The younger brother felt himself smiling. It was good thinking.
The older brother had already moved his attention to a smaller box, which was emblazoned with words, the largest of which were THERMAL IMAGING CAMERA.
The older brother soon had the entire contraption in the air, hovering smoothly several hundred feet up. He studied the laptop screen, then set it down and made a beeline for the younger brother. About twenty feet short, he slowed, then stopped at a partially fallen tree, one whose trunk was leaning at a roughly twenty-degree angle against another tree.
He studied the root ball, looking at a spot where it had pulled away from the ground to create a tiny burrow. The younger brother had walked by it at least thirty times. It had just never occurred to him something could fit under there.
The older brother pulled back his boot and let loose a savage kick, clearing away a clump of dirt. He bent low and reached under the tree.
“Gotcha!” he yelled triumphantly.
The reward for his effort was a terrified, high-pitched scream.
SIXTY
Alison pulled into a slot one row from the entrance. Without noticing the rented Chevy that had followed her into the parking lot, she climbed out of her car and made a straight line toward the building.
I parked one row behind her and watched her disappear through the front doors. After that moment’s hesitation, I went after her. Whatever thought I had about lying back and watching how this developed was now gone.
We weren’t going to be a family that kept secrets anymore.
As I plowed through the doors, I could see Alison at the reception desk. Her back was to me. She was writing her name on a clipboard.
Just like all the other cancer patients.
As the door swung shut behind me, she put down the clipboard. Her focus remained elsewhere until her peripheral vision registered that a very familiar figure was coming her way. She turned toward me and her eyes went wide.
“Scott?” she blurted.
Then her shoulders—those shoulders I loved so much—slumped.
“Hi,” I said quietly.
We stood there facing each other, perhaps five feet apart, each calculating what the other was thinking, each seeing the other in a slightly different way than ever before. Her face strained to keep in emotion. My wife wasn’t one for public scenes.
“Do you want to sit down?” I asked.
“Sure.”
We walked into a large, sunlit waiting area. A woman in what appeared to be a wig sat idly thumbing through People magazine. A gaunt man checked his phone, wearing the haunted look of someone who had already gone twelve rounds against Floyd Mayweather and knew he was about to do it again.
I gawked at them more than I should have. Somewhere inside these people were clumps of rogue cells that were trying to crowd the life out of them. And modern medicine was going to do its best to banish those cells, using tools that future generations would surely consider barbaric—bombing them with radiation, injecting them with poison, carving them with scalpels.
This was the reality of cancer. It was not just a diagnosis. It was, in a twisted way, a lifestyle. You didn’t just have cancer. Cancer had you.
And this was what my wife was now facing. In addition to everything else.
My wife had cancer. I couldn’t fully parse the implications. Alison had obviously been living with this knowledge for some time now. It was still so new to me.
I thought back to all the things that had been right in front of me. The weight loss, the vomiting, how tired she looked—symptoms I had chalked up to the stress of Emma’s disappearance.
And then there were those unexplained absences, which my paranoid mind had turned into visits with our daughter, rendezvous with kidnappers, or trysts with her old boyfriend. Really, they had been doctor’s appointments for the disease she had been keeping from me.
She had selected two chairs in the corner that were as far from the other patients as we could get. We sat with our knees not quite touching.
“So,” I said.
“So,” she replied.
“How long have you known?” I asked.
“I noticed a lump in the shower the day after Sam came back.”
“Jesus.”
“I know.”
“Where?” I asked.
She pointed to her right breast. “It was hard and had a weird shape to it. All the things they tell you to be on the lookout for. I knew I couldn’t ignore it. Especially with Dad’s history. I reached out to the doctor that morning.”
I thought back to the burst of industriousness she had show
n that Friday morning while I slept—calling the kids’ school, her workplace, the lab in Williamsburg. The call to our doctor’s office had been wedged in there. I had even seen it on her phone when I checked her call log. I had just thought it was routine.
“I was hoping it was just a cyst or a clogged pore or, I don’t know,” she said. “The doctor was able to squeeze me in that afternoon and give me a mammogram in the office. So at that point I knew it was some kind of tumor.”
“Oh, Alison,” I said, as gently as I could. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I was going to that night, but . . . I don’t know. As I was driving home, I had this thought that it would actually be selfish of me. I wanted at least one of us to be totally focused on Emma, not sidetracked by . . . whatever this is. I hope you understand I desperately wanted to tell you. Desperately, desperately. Just to be able to cry into your arms. But I felt like I couldn’t.”
“Okay,” I said simply.
It really was that easy for me. Not only did I understand, I probably would have done the same thing myself.
She smiled weakly. “Thank you.”
“You told your family, yes?” I asked, although I already knew she had. They had covered for her the afternoon of the nap that wasn’t and probably half a dozen other times.
“Yeah. There was no way not to. I couldn’t exactly bring Sam to this place and have him asking all kinds of questions. My mom has been pretty much a basket case about everything, but Karen has been great, just taking charge like always. She’s been helping me sort out all the insurance and everything. She’s made sure I didn’t have to take Sam to any of my appointments.”
“So he doesn’t—”
“Oh God no. That little boy has enough on his mind already without worrying about Momma being sick.
“Anyway, I met with the oncologist for the first time, let’s see . . . not this past Thursday, but the Thursday before. Laurie Lyckholm is her name. She’s really lovely. She did an evaluation and took some blood; then she scheduled me for a needle biopsy. That was last Wednesday.”
In other words, while I had been fretting over Denny Palgraff no-showing for a deposition, Alison had been having a massive needle jammed into her breast.
“So”—this was the question I had been wanting and not wanting to ask the whole time—“do we know the results yet?”
She nodded solemnly. “It’s called infiltrating ductal carcinoma. You can Google it if you want to. Dr. Lyckholm said it’s the most common form of breast cancer.”
“That means it’s . . . I mean, it’s treatable, right?”
“Oh yeah. Sure. That’s why I’m here today. Dr. Lyckholm wants a CT scan so we can get a clearer picture of what’s going on. Then we discuss next steps.”
“But are we talking surgery? Chemo? Radiation? All of the above? None of the above?”
“I don’t know yet,” Alison said. “Dr. Lyckholm said it helps that I’m relatively young and in otherwise good shape. I guess it expands the options, treatment-wise. But it seems like every other question I ask, Dr. Lyckholm says, ‘Well, we’ll have to see what the CT scan says.’”
“Okay. And whatever happens, you’re . . . you’re going to tell me everything now, right? I mean, no more secrets, right?”
She patted my hand.
“No more secrets,” she confirmed.
“Not even about little things, like cigarettes?”
She looked down at her lap.
“For what it’s worth, I really did quit while I was pregnant with the twins, and then for a few years after,” she said. “But then it started to become this thing I’d do at work and . . . Well, I guess I’m paying the price now.”
She exhaled noisily.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not trying to blame you for—”
“Forget it. I’m just glad you’re here. How did you know about it? Did my mom finally tell you? She’s been threatening for a while.”
“No,” I said.
She wore a question mark on her face.
“Don’t get mad,” I said, still trying to summon the courage to admit to the big, ugly thing I suspected her of.
“Mad about what?”
“I followed you coming out of the house. I rented a car so you wouldn’t see me. I followed you up to the organic farm, and then here.”
“Why?”
There was no point in hiding it anymore. “I actually thought there was a possibility you had something to do with Emma.”
“What?!” she said, sharply enough that the woman in the wig turned to look at us.
If we hadn’t been in a hospital waiting room, I’m sure Alison’s reaction would have been even louder. She immediately quieted herself, but her whisper was ferocious. “What do you mean, ‘something to do with Emma’? Scott, how could you think that for even one second?”
“Well, first there was Miss Pam saying you were the one who picked up the—”
“That wasn’t me; that was—”
“I know, I know. I’m just saying, that’s where it started. And then there was the day you took Sam to the Living Museum. After you got him settled, you left—that was the day of your mammogram, I guess. You thought Sam was too distracted by the sharks to notice you were gone. But he did. And when I asked you about it later, you lied about it. Several times, actually.”
She looked at her lap again and nodded. “So then you got suspicious,” she said.
“Yeah, I . . . Look, I’m not proud of any of this, but I also wasn’t exactly in my right mind, you know? So I went into your Facebook account, which I know I shouldn’t have done. It was such a violation of your privacy. But at the same time, I felt like I was, I don’t know, entitled. Because you had lied. And I found this message from Paul Dresser, saying he had some news and that you should call him.”
Alison cocked her head. “He wanted to tell me our favorite English teacher had died . . . Wait, what would Paul possibly have to do with this?”
“He works for ApotheGen.”
“Yeah? So?”
“Well, I thought he knew I had been assigned this case and had enticed you into going along with this kidnapping scheme.”
“And, what, then we were going to run off together?”
She actually laughed. It was the first time I had heard that sound in what felt like a century.
“Oh, honey,” she said. “Paul is basically Peter Pan. He’s the boy who won’t grow up. His whole life is self-gratification. He goes on these fabulous vacations, but . . . I mean, all those times I talked about running off with him, I was kidding.”
“He does work for ApotheGen, though. For what it’s worth.”
“Yeah, as, like, a sales rep. He works with ob-gyns. He’s basically there to charm female doctors into pushing ApotheGen products on their patients, which I’m sure he excels at. But . . . Oh, Scott. I’m so sorry.”
She covered her mouth and smiled, like she was a little embarrassed for me.
“Yeah, well, then that Thursday when you first met with Dr. Lyckholm? I called your mom’s house and I talked to Karen. She told me you were napping. You came home and said the same thing. But when I asked Sam about it later, he said you were out doing errands.”
“Wow. I guess he’s not quite as oblivious as I thought,” she said.
“He’s not. And then this morning when you said you were going to the organic farm, I thought it was another time you were going to sneak off and do whatever it was you had been doing. So I followed you.”
“And here I am,” she said, forcing a brave smile.
“Here you are,” I repeated. “Sorry I—”
She was already shaking her head. “I shouldn’t have tried to hide it. It was stupid of me to think I could. I actually sort of kept hoping you’d find out. I’m . . . I’m glad you did.”
“Me t
oo,” I said.
I felt both of her hands, so warm, so pliant, so alive. I wanted to stop everything right there, to freeze this moment when she was only sort of sick, when things were bad but not as bad as they might become. Those rogue cells were inside her, making their insidious divisions. Was it possible one of them had broken free and colonized another part of her body? What would we do then?
There were so many questions. But I didn’t want to be one of those people who got so fixated on the workings of the medical-industrial complex—the doctors, the insurance forms, the treatment options—that I ignored the bigger picture: My wife was in for the fight of her life.
And she might not win.
“So, Ali, are you . . . What does this mean?” I choked out, desperate for her to give me reassurance that she couldn’t really offer. “You’re going to be okay . . . right?”
“I don’t know,” she said honestly.
I lingered on that, but only a little. This new uncertainty—on top of all the others—was almost too much to contemplate.
“I feel like I’ve missed so much already,” I said. “What can I do to help now?”
“Just worry about Emma. After Friday, you worry about me.”
“No,” I said. “I can’t not worry about you anymore. It’s too late for that. I’ll still . . . Look, I’m not going to take my eyes off the ball with Emma, I promise you that. But there has to be something I can do to, I don’t know, make this easier for you somehow.”
She forced out a deep breath. “Oh, Scott,” she said.
“What?”
“After all these years, you still don’t get it, do you?”
Now it was my turn to wear the question-mark face.
“Do you remember the day we met?”
“Of course.”
“No, no. I’m not talking about that fairy tale you tell everyone about me walking along in front of the student center with the sun glowing and the angels singing. I’m talking about later that night. You had asked me what I was doing that night and I told you I was probably going to a party.”