Yes. She knows the drill.
They treat it until everything stops working, and it continues to spread.
That, she suspects, is where they’re headed now. A few weeks ago, the morning after an idyllic Mother’s Day spent with Hank and the kids and grandkids, the doctor gave her some discouraging test results, then told her they’re going to try this current treatment—which she knows is basically her last hope—a little longer and take some more tests to see whether it’s working.
She has a feeling it isn’t.
She’s been doing her best to prepare herself for what lies ahead—if not in the immediate future, then at some point down the road.
Sooner or later, she’ll be told to call hospice and get her affairs in order.
Even then, she knows, many doctors aren’t able—or perhaps, aren’t willing--to provide a time frame.
She’s seen it happen to her online friends time and again, and now it’s going to happen to her. Maybe not this year, maybe not even next, but eventually this damned disease is going to get the best of her.
She’s privately told a few of her online friends of her situation, but not everyone. Eventually, she’ll have to write an official blog post about it. The moment it goes live, she’ll become that person—the doomed friend everyone rallies around.
I’m not ready. I don’t want to be her. Not yet. I want to be me for as long as I can.
There’s only one way to do that: pretend this isn’t really happening.
The lyrics to an old Styx song—one she and Hank used to listen to on vinyl back in their dating days—keep running through her head.
You’re fooling yourself . . . you don’t believe it . . .
She’ll get through her days staying busy so that she won’t have to dwell on the future—and get through her nights the best she can.
Right now, she’ll have to settle for over-the-counter pain relievers without courtesy of bourbon to numb the pain in her back—or the disquieting, morbid thoughts that sometimes strike at night, especially when she’s here alone.
With a sigh, she leaves the lamplit bedroom and flicks on the hallway light. As she makes her way to the stairs, she hears a whisper of movement below.
“Hank?” she calls.
No answer.
Of course not. He’s in Cleveland. She spoke to him a half hour ago on the phone, although . . .
He could very well have just said he was in Cleveland. Maybe he was really on the road, headed home early to surprise her.
“Hank! Is that you?”
Absolutely still, poised midflight with her hand on the banister, Meredith is enveloped in complete silence.
“Is someone there?”
No.
And yet—she did hear something before. Or perhaps it’s more just a sensation of not being alone in the house . . .
Or did you just imagine it altogether?
For a long time, she stands there, listening—one moment, certain she can feel someone there, the next, certain she’s losing it.
Just last week, she blogged about this very scenario. Not about things that go bump in the night, per se, but about getting older and potentially senile.
That entry stemmed from Hank’s report that his mother suspected her neighbor—a distinguished widowed professor—of sneaking into her condo in the wee hours, trying on her clothes and taking perfumed bubble baths in her tub.
Meredith’s blog entry was written entirely tongue in cheek, as so many of them are. Even during the darkest days of her cancer treatment, she’s always managed to find a humorous angle.
She’d started the blog at the suggestion of her therapist, who knew she’d dreamed of going to college and becoming a journalist before marriage and motherhood set her on a different path. Even the title of the blog page—Pink Stinks—is meant to be an irreverent poke at the breast cancer awareness movement.
Determined to keep her latest diagnosis to herself, she wrote last week about the inevitability of aging and the many signs, now that she’s past her sixtieth birthday, that the process is well underway: I can’t recognize a single musician on the cover of Rolling Stone, I can’t remember my user names and passwords if they’re not saved in my laptop or phone, I can’t see a blessed thing without my bifocals and if they’re not on my head chances are I have no idea where I left them . . .
She ended the post on an upbeat, if bittersweet, note: Faced with the prospects of old age and senility—or not sticking around long enough to grow old and senile—I’ll take the prior.
That post was greeted by a barrage of positive, amusing comments from her regular followers and a couple of newcomers who have since stuck around. Someone—who was it?—wrote that she was wise and had a tough outer shell, like a turtle, and turtles are known for their longevity—“So I’m sure you’re going to live a good long time!”
From your lips to God’s ears, Meredith wanted to respond to whoever it was, but of course, she didn’t.
Standing on the stairway, listening for movement below and wondering if she should go back to the bedroom for the baseball bat Hank keeps under his side of the bed, she mentally composes the opening of a new blog post she’ll write tomorrow.
So there I was, armed and dangerous in my granny nightgown . . .
Oh, geez. She really is losing it, isn’t she?
And her taut posture as she stands clenched from head to toe, clutching the railing, isn’t helping her back pain.
Either turn around and go to bed, or go downstairs, get what you need, and then go to bed.
Meredith opts for the latter. She flips a wall switch at the foot of the stairs, then another in the living room, and the one in the dining room, reassured as she makes her way through familiar rooms bathed in light. As always, she notices not just the threadbare area rug, the worn spots on the furniture, the chipped paint on the baseboards, but also the clay bowl Beck had made in Girl Scouts, the bookshelf lined with Hardy Boys books Hank had handed down to his sons, the faint pencil marks on the doorjamb where they marked their growing kids’ height over the years . . .
It’s a good house. It’s been a good life here.
In the kitchen cabinet where she keeps her daily vitamins and the medications prescribed to keep cancer at bay for as long as possible, she finds a bottle of drugstore-brand painkillers.
Having left her glasses upstairs on the nightstand, she can’t quite make out the label. It looks to her like they expired last year, but they’re probably fine. Fine, as in safe to swallow, if not as effective as they might have been.
She takes three, just in case they’re less potent. Washing them down with tap water, she wonders how long it will take before the pills ease the tension in her muscles.
It really is too bad she can’t take something stronger.
Not medicine. Just a nip of something that will warm her from the inside out, and let her sleep.
She glances longingly at the high cupboard above the fridge where they’ve kept the booze since their firstborn, Teddy, reached high school—as if keeping the stash out of arm’s reach would deter him and his friends from getting into it. It didn’t work, they discovered belatedly, when Hank realized that one of the kids—by then, all three were in college—had replaced the contents of a bottle of Woodford Reserve with iced tea.
Still, they were good kids, Meredith remembers as she sets the empty water glass into the sink. Spirited, but good. She’s blessed to have watched them grow up and give her grandchildren—three grandsons so far between Teddy and Neal and their wives, with another little stinkerdoodle on the way this fall.
That’s what Meredith calls her grandchildren, just as she always called her own children: the stinkerdoodles.
Everyone is hoping for a girl this time. Everyone but Meredith. Secretly, she worries about passing the cancer gene to a new generation.
&nbs
p; “Men get breast cancer, too,” one of her blogger friends pointed out when she wrote about that.
True. But it’s not nearly as common.
She can’t help but worry about the health of her daughter and future granddaughters. She’s been warning Rebecca that she needs to do self-exams, and start her yearly mammogram screening in another couple of years.
Beck, of course, waves her mother off. She’s too young and full of life to worry about illness.
So was I at her age. I never thought something like this could happen. No family history . . .
You just never know. Oh, well . . .
It’s been over a year now since Beck married Keith. They’ll probably be starting a family too, soon.
Meredith has so much to live for. If only . . .
Shaking her head, she turns off the light and leaves the kitchen, never noticing the cut screen on the window facing the newly planted garden out back, or the shadow of a human figure lurking in the far corner.
About the Author
USA Today and New York Times bestseller WENDY CORSI STAUB is the award-winning author of more than seventy novels and has twice been nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award. She lives in the New York City suburbs with her husband and their two children.
Learn more about Wendy at www.wendycorsistaub.com.
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Praise for THE GOOD SISTER and the work of WENDY CORSI STAUB
“Fans of Criminal Minds will especially love this book.”
Kirkus Reviews
“Taut, tense, and incredibly suspenseful. This chillingly creepy psychological thriller is the perfect page-turner . . .”
Hank Phillippi Ryan, Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity-winning author
“Intense! . . . a masterful psychological mystery that is both chilling and thrilling. You will not be able to put The Good Sister down until the very last page.”
Allison Brennan, New York Times bestselling author
“Fans of Gillian Flynn will love this one. . . . The Good Sister shows again why Staub is one of the best suspense writers today.”
Jamie Freveletti, internationally bestselling author of Dead Asleep
“. . . Staub weaves a tale of good sisters and fallen angels as terrifyingly chilling as the winter winds off Lake Erie!”
Chris Grabenstein, New York Times bestselling author
“A chilling, captivating, and all-too-timely tale of suburban suspense, The Good Sister is guaranteed to keep you up at night—and keep a closer eye on your kids, too! I couldn’t put it down.”
Alison Gaylin, USA Today bestselling author
By Wendy Corsi Staub
The Good Sister
Shadowkiller
Sleepwalker
Nightwatcher
Hell to Pay
Scared to Death
Live to Tell
Coming Soon
The Perfect Stranger
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Excerpt from The Perfect Stranger copyright © 2014 by Wendy Corsi Staub.
THE GOOD SISTER. Copyright © 2013 by Wendy Corsi Staub. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition OCTOBER 2013 ISBN: 9780062222381
Print Edition ISBN: 9780062222374
FIRST EDITION
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