Stolen

by Daniel Palmer

  “But you need that hardware to expand your business!” Ruby exclaimed. “That’s what you’ve been telling me.”

  That’s Ruby for you, thinking of me when it’s her life on the line.

  “I don’t need anything but you,” I said.

  “This is just like you, headstrong and impulsive.”

  “And it’s just like you to balance me out, which is why I knew I had to ease you into this plan.”

  “This is how you ease?”

  Time to switch tactics.

  “When I was depressed, you never once gave up on me.”

  “Because I love you. I’d do anything for you.”

  “Don’t you think I feel the same?”

  This gave Ruby a moment’s pause. “Of course.”

  “There’s something else you should know.”

  “I don’t think I want to,” Ruby said.

  “We can’t leave this place for six months.”

  “Six months? What are you talking about?”

  “Well . . . I sort of rented our apartment.”

  “Rented our apartment?”

  “To a couple of professors from Barcelona.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because I couldn’t sell enough equipment to afford both places.”

  “So what? We move here starting now? We just start living our lives as Elliot and Tanya Uretsky?”

  I nodded and then said, “Hey, at least it’s a short walk to the movies.” Ruby shrugged that benefit off. “There’s more,” I said.

  “More?”

  “You’ve got to get rediagnosed. And, of course, we’re going to have to find another dermatological oncologist to see.”

  “What do you mean? Start this whole process all over again? The MRI? PET scans? Needles? Oh God, John. You can’t be serious.”

  “It’s the only way. We’ll tell them that we just moved to town. We don’t have any primary care doctor, because we haven’t needed one. We’re young. Young people don’t always go to the doctor. They’ll believe us. There’s no primary doctor for anybody to contact. Dr. Lisa Adams essentially no longer exists. They’ll run the tests over again. They’ll come to the same conclusion. Think of it as a very thorough second opinion.”

  Ruby scoffed and threw up her hands. “Yeah, maybe the results this time will show I’m cancer free.”

  “Let’s hope they do.”

  Ruby put her hands on her hips and gazed absently out the windows directly behind the futon. Her fifty-thousand-yard stare reminded me that I needed to buy curtains for those windows. I wanted to rent a first-floor apartment because of my acrophobia but couldn’t find one furnished in our price range. Light spilling inside through those very windows lit her hair, giving the appearance of an angelic glow. Ruby stood still for a long, tense moment. When she looked back at me, there were tears in her eyes.

  “I don’t want to do it, John,” Ruby said, taking steps toward me. “I don’t want to.”

  I opened my arms, and Ruby fell hard into me. I held on to her, rocking back and forth on my heels as Ruby wept onto my chest. Eventually, I started to cry as well. I tried to speak, but I’m sure it was hard for Ruby to understand me, as I was struggling to catch my breath.

  “I can’t risk it, Ruby,” I said, my voice cracking and quavering. The tears were flowing freely now. I don’t often cry, and I could sense my tears were bringing Ruby closer to me. “I don’t want to trust our lives to the kindness of strangers. I don’t want to wait for the cheaper drug to miraculously become available. I don’t want to waste time chasing grants and assistance programs. I want you to take the medicine you need without having to worry about how we’re going to pay for it. You have a right to live. This isn’t your fault. This is just how it is. And I’ve got a way to fix it. Please, baby. Please let me fix this—this one thing, the only thing about your cancer that I can control. Please, don’t say no. Please.”

  Ruby pulled away, her eyes ringed black with running mascara. She sniffled and forced a half smile. “I’m not okay with it,” she said. “But if you think it’s the only way, I’ll do it.”

  CHAPTER 9

  We’d been living as Elliot and Tanya Uretsky for six weeks, a milestone for sure, but tomorrow would be the biggest day of this ongoing charade. Tomorrow we were getting a progress report from Ruby’s new oncologist, Dr. Anna Lee.

  As far as Dr. Lee’s practice was concerned, Ruby was just a new patient, Tanya Uretsky, who had no primary care physician, no past medical history to share, who appeared to be afflicted with an aggressive melanoma caused by a mutation in the BRAF gene. Dr. Lee had prescribed Ruby a course of Verbilifide, not knowing Ruby had been taking the drug for weeks. Surgery would follow once Dr. Lee saw how the nodes were responding to the treatment. We worried that traces of Verbilifide might show up in her blood work, but apparently that wasn’t the case.

  Ruby, dressed in spandex workout clothes, was on her yoga mat in the downward dog position, and I was on my computer, debugging code and occasionally leering at Ruby. A knock on the door startled us.

  Ruby sprang to her feet with a graceful motion. She flashed me a nervous look. “What do we do?” she whispered.

  “Um, we answer the door,” I said, without glancing up.

  Ruby came over to me and got close to my ear. She smelled like strawberries and sweat. Love it. “What if it’s somebody who knows what we did?”

  “Nobody knows what we did,” I said. “Just answer the door.”

  Ruby grabbed her towel, dabbed at her skin, went over to the door, and asked, “Who is it?”

  “Hi! It’s Rhonda Jennings, your downstairs neighbor.”

  Rhonda’s high-pitched voice was cheery and warm. Even so, Ruby turned to me, still looking unsure, so I motioned for her to open the door. Clearly, one of us had grown more accustomed to our new identities.

  Rhonda Jennings entered our apartment with a bright smile and a fine-smelling pie. My kind of neighbor. She was sweet-faced, with shoulder-length, straight blond hair and an athletic build—not a runner’s body, but maybe a onetime field hockey player’s. Her cornflower-blue eyes surveyed our place, while her expression suggested a sort of sheepish embarrassment.

  “I’m so sorry I didn’t come up to greet you sooner,” Rhonda said. “I’ve been crazy busy at work and . . . and I have more excuses ready but figured pie forgives all.”

  “Oh, thank you so much,” Ruby said as she brought the pie over to the kitchen island. She went to grab some plates. “I hope you’ll stay and have some with us.”

  Rhonda again got that sheepish look on her face. “Actually, I have to run out. My boyfriend is taking me out to dinner.”

  “You made us a pie on date night?” Ruby said. “That’s incredibly nice of you.”

  “It was actually a frozen pie I bought a few weeks ago but forgot to bring up to you. I just defrosted it.”

  A moment of silence ensued. Then Ruby laughed delightedly, and Rhonda joined in. “Frozen pie is my favorite kind,” Ruby said. “I’m sorry. I should introduce myself. I’m—”

  Here, my breath caught. I was sure my wife was going to say, “Ruby Dawes,” but instead she surprised me by saying, “Tanya Uretsky. And this is my husband, Elliot.”

  We all shook hands. Rhonda took notice of Ruby’s yoga mat.

  “Are you good at yoga?” she asked.

  “Not bad,” Ruby said. “I’ve been practicing it for a few years now. Why? Do you do yoga?”

  “No, but I’ve been wanting to try it for a while now. I’m getting married—well, after I get engaged, but it’s going to happen—and I heard yoga is great for getting in wedding dress shape.”

  “The best,” Ruby said. “And congratulations on the engagement. That’s wonderful.”

  “Well, he hasn’t proposed yet, but I helped pick out the ring.”

  Ruby held up her finger, showing Rhonda the impossibly small diamond ring I bought her. “I picked this out, too,” she said. “I have my romantic side, but I k
new my husband has an even bigger ‘I’d buy a ring we couldn’t afford’ side.”

  She was right, of course. Thank goodness I had Ruby to keep me in check.

  Rhonda smiled. “It sounds like Matthew and Elliot would get along great.”

  Who’s Elliot? I was thinking. Then I got it.

  “I’m in school, studying acupuncture, and Elliot works from home. We’re here a lot. Come up anytime and I’ll show you some yoga poses that will help you get started.”

  “That would be great,” Rhonda said. “I really wish I could stay. You guys seem really cool. Most of the people living here keep to themselves.”

  “We’ve noticed,” Ruby said, chuckling.

  I’m thinking, It’s just like the last place we lived. Ruby was still attending school, but we had stopped inviting friends over to our place for obvious reasons. We were essentially alone on an island of our own creation.

  “Well, look, I have to run, but it was really nice to meet you. I’m sorry again that it took so long to send the welcome wagon.”

  Ruby already had a spoonful of pie in her mouth. “Great to meet you, too,” she said, her words garbled from the pie. She swallowed, pointing to the aluminum pie plate. “Honestly, this is the best frozen pie I’ve ever had,” she said.

  Rhonda laughed. “You guys are great. Dinner at my place next week. Deal?”

  “Deal,” Ruby said.

  We took turns shaking hands good-bye, and then Rhonda was gone.

  “See, it’s not so bad here, after all,” I said. “You’ve already made a friend.”

  “Honey, real friends know your real name.”

  Later that night, Ruby and I were lying in bed. Ginger, tucked firmly between us, purred with the intensity of a revving engine. Ruby was reading from one of her textbooks, a meaty tome titled Alternative Medicine Best Practices, and I was watching the Bruins at low volume. I used a wireless video sender to transmit the signal from the cable box to the TV I had brought over from our old apartment—our old home, which we both missed so terribly. Even though at the moment we were both doing something perfectly normal, what we weren’t doing was relaxing.

  Ruby made a frustrated noise. “I think I’ve read the same page for the third time,” she said.

  “What’s got you so riveted to that page?” I asked.

  Ruby sighed and said, “I’m serious. I can’t study, John. I can’t concentrate on anything at all.”

  I turned over onto my side and eased the book from her hand. It dropped to the bed with a muted thump.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “What’s going on?” Ruby laughed because it should have been obvious to me. “I think I have to drop out of school, that’s what.”

  “But your professors promised they’d give you extra time on your assignments. Nobody wants you to drop out.”

  “They can give me all the time in the world. My heart isn’t in this anymore. Besides, what good is alternative medicine,” Ruby said, patting the textbook, “if I can’t use it to make me better? I don’t need herbs and needles. What I need is this stupid, superexpensive drug that makes me feel like absolute shit.”

  Ruby flipped over onto her side, hiding her face from me, but I could tell by the way her shoulders heaved up and down that the tears were flowing. I ran my fingers through her hair like a comb and then traced the contours of her slender neck with the palm of my hand. Ruby pressed her body up against mine, her way of saying she needed my touch.

  The softness of her silk pajamas blanketed me in a familiar comfort. I rubbed her back, keenly aware of how her weight loss continued to reveal more and more of her bones. The longer I rubbed, the more she sank into me, until our bodies melded together. With each breath she took in, I did the same, and eventually her tears stopped altogether.

  Ruby turned to face me. Her fragile, vulnerable expression put a walnut-sized lump in my throat. I wanted to fix this. Fix it now. What I’d done instead was add to her misery by compounding it with guilt. I knew why she couldn’t concentrate. Her school subjects weren’t the problem. The issue was what I had done.

  “Tell me what you need,” I said, stroking her hair. “Tell me and I’ll do it.”

  “I just want to go home,” Ruby said, her voice drenched in misery. “I miss our life, John. I miss it so much. This just isn’t fair.”

  “It isn’t forever.”

  “No, it just feels that way.”

  Ginger stretched and yawned to make her presence known.

  “Hi ya, sweet pea,” Ruby said, scratching Ginger’s furry little head. If Ruby had her druthers, she’d adopt again. Her heart was wide open that way, and her love for animals, especially those unwanted and abandoned, seemed boundless. And that love didn’t apply solely to four-legged critters. Winnie Dawes could have decided to abandon ship, literally, to come stay with us awhile, and Ruby would have welcomed her without any lingering animosity.

  Winnie had called a few times to, in her words, “check in,” but I wasn’t expecting to turn the futon into a guest bed anytime soon. Sadly, Winnie would have no idea we were living here under false pretenses. She’d never once visited us in our Somerville apartment.

  “What would happen if we got caught?” Ruby asked.

  “We’d be arrested, that’s what.”

  “I’ve never done anything illegal in my life.”

  “You’ve gotten high.”

  “I didn’t inhale.”

  “Liar.”

  “Okay, besides that.”

  “How about speeding?”

  “I’d say what we’re doing is a heck of a lot worse.”

  “What would you prefer? Give up?”

  “No, I’d have preferred that we didn’t buy the cheap health insurance from Atrium.”

  “Me, too,” I said. “Believe me, if I could take it back, I would.”

  “It’s bad karma what we’re doing, and you know that’s true.”

  “I don’t know if I believe in karma. We didn’t do anything wrong, and you got sick.”

  “That’s not how karma works. It looks at what you do with the hand you’re dealt. It doesn’t deal out the cards. It’s the circle of cause and effect. Karma is the consequence of our actions.”

  “Didn’t know you knew so much about it.”

  A fresh look of concern crossed Ruby’s face. “I can’t help but feel that we’re stockpiling a whole lot of bad karma by doing this.”

  She turned her back to me and shrugged off my touch.

  “No, it’s not your fault. It’s mine. I screwed this up, and I need to make it right. Please. Just stick with me on this. We’ll get through it together.”

  Ruby flipped over to face me. For a while we just stared at each other.

  “We’re going to have to make it up to Elliot Uretsky. Somehow, we’re going to have to make it up to him.”

  “He’s not being hurt by this,” I said.

  “No, UniSol Health is,” Ruby replied, disgusted.

  “Do you think UniSol is the good guy here? You want to talk karma? How many claims do they deny unjustly on a daily basis? I’m sure they’ve done their fair share of wrong.”

  “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” Ruby said.

  “No. But this wrong is working out right, and we’ve got to keep going to the end. That’s all that matters.”

  “That’s not all,” Ruby said. “Karma. That matters, too.”

  CHAPTER 10

  We were sitting in Dr. Lee’s office, which looked a lot like Dr. Adams’s office, with the exception of a well-stocked saltwater fish tank, hoping the karma gods were on sabbatical or something. We were holding hands and waiting as patiently as could be.

  “The waiting is the hardest part,” I said into Ruby’s ear.

  She shot me a surprised look. “Really?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m used to fixing buggy software. When something is broken, all I have to do is write a few lines of code and I can see right away if it’s been fixed.” />
  Ruby shook her head dismissively. “No, I mean, are you really going to give me a softball like that to hit?”

  “What do you mean, softball?”

  There were others in the waiting room, so Ruby sang in a whispered voice the lyrics from the tune made famous by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. I knew the song well enough to have performed it myself at karaoke, if I ever sang karaoke. Ruby held up her finger. One more point for her. Add one to the tally that could not be counted. Ruby kissed my cheek and smiled.

  A door opened to our right.

  “Mrs. Uretsky?”

  Neither of us looked up.

  “Tanya Uretsky?” the woman announced again.

  Ruby jumped a little as the recognition sank in. I did, too, and we both stood a bit shakily. The woman speaking was the receptionist, and she motioned us to the window.

  “Dr. Lee can see you now,” she said.

  For a place that dealt with cancer on a daily basis, the receptionist’s manner was surprisingly upbeat. I figured she was cheery for everybody, but decided to see her sunshiny demeanor as a sign that Ruby’s results would come back positive.

  Dr. Lee, a stylish Asian woman who wore hipster black horn-rimmed glasses, had the films of Ruby’s latest imaging work.

  “How are you feeling, Tanya?” Lee said, giving us both a friendly handshake hello.

  “I’m doing okay,” Ruby said.

  Ruby’s strained expression told me that the identity theft was eating away at her, same as her cancer.

  “Well, I have your CT and PET scans here,” Lee said. “I was looking for signs of active disease to compare it to the first sets of scans we took.” She illuminated her light board so we could see the images clearly. Not that we could understand them; they looked like a Rorschach inkblot test to me.

  “And?” I asked, my voice dripping with anticipation.

  “And”—Lee’s voice rose in pitch, another positive sign in my book—“the amount of activity has definitely decreased. I would say, being cautiously optimistic here, that the nodes are definitely responding to the drug.”

  Ruby’s face lit up in a way I hadn’t seen since the day I proposed to her, down on one knee, on the roof deck of a restaurant overlooking the Charles River.