Dr. Monroe was an oncologist. In mid December I found a lump in my right breast. I forgot about the worry of cancer in the wake of a more immediate and needier pain. I sat in his waiting room, my hands pressed between my knees, a strange man waiting in my car, and all I could think about were Isaac’s words. The ones on his arms and the ones that came out of his mouth. A red bicycle in a stark white room.
A door opened next to the reception window. A nurse said my name.
“Senna Richards.”
I stood. I went.
I had breast cancer. I could talk about the moment Dr. Monroe confirmed it, the emotions I felt. The words he said to me afterwards, meant to comfort, reassure; but the bottom line was, I had breast cancer.
I thought about his red bike as I walked to the car. No tears. No shock. Just a red bike that could fly. I didn’t know why I wasn’t feeling anything.
Maybe a person could only deal with one dose of mental atrophy at a time. I slid into the passenger seat. He’d changed the radio station, but he switched it back to the classical one before he put the car in reverse. He didn’t look at me. Not until we arrived at my house and he opened the front door with my keys. Then he looked at me, and I wanted to disappear into the cracks between my brick driveway. I didn’t know what color his eyes were; I didn’t want to know. I pushed past him into the foyer and stopped dead. I didn’t know where to go—the kitchen? The bedroom? My office? Everywhere seemed stupid. Pointless. I wanted to be alone. I didn’t want to be alone. I wanted to die. I didn’t want to die.
I went to my barstool, the one positioned to get the perfect view of the lake, and I sat. Isaac moved into the kitchen. He started to make coffee and then stopped, turning to look at me.
“Do you mind if I put on some music? With words?”
I shook my head. His eyes were grey. He set his phone on top of the breadbox while he spooned grinds into the filter.
This time he played something more upbeat. A man’s voice. The beats were so strange I stopped my incessant ability to not feel and listened.
“Alt-J,” he said, when he saw that I was listening. “The song is called Breezeblocks.”
He glanced at my face. “It’s different, right? I used to be in a band. So I get a kick out of their beats.”
“But, you’re a doctor.” I realized how stupid that sounded when it was already out. I pulled an inch-wide chunk of grey hair free, and wound it around my finger twice, right by the roots. I left it there, with my elbow resting on the counter. My security blanket.
“I wasn’t always a doctor,” he said, grabbing two mugs out of my cabinet. “But when I became one, my love of music remained … and the tattoos remained.”
I glanced at his forearms where they peeked out of his shirtsleeves. I was still looking when he brought me my coffee. I caught the tips of the words that faced me.
After he handed me the coffee, he started making food. I didn’t have an appetite, but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten. I didn’t want to, but I listened to the words of the song he was playing. The last time I listened to this type of music the boy bands had just taken the world by storm and filled every radio with their cliché-licked songs. I wanted to ask him who was singing, but he beat me to it.
“Florence and the Machine. Do you like it?”
“You’re fixated on death.”
“I’m a surgeon,” he said, not looking up from where he was dicing vegetables.
I shook my head. “You’re a surgeon because you have a fixation on death.”
He didn’t say anything, but slightly hesitated as he cut into a zucchini—barely noticeable, but my eyes caught mostly everything.
“We all do don’t we? We are consumed with our own mortality. Some people eat right and exercise to preserve their lives, others drink and do drugs daring fate to take theirs, and then there are the floaters—the ones who try to ignore their mortality altogether because they’re afraid of it.”
“Which are you?”
He set down his knife and looked at me.
“I’ve been all three. And now I’m undecided.”
Truth. When was the last time I heard such stark truth? I stared at him for a long time as he spooned food onto plates. When he set a plate down in front of me, I said it. It was like a sneeze ejecting from my body without permission, and when it was out I felt mildly embarrassed.
“I have breast cancer.”
Every part of him stopped moving except his eyes, which dragged slowly to mine. We stayed like that for … one … two … three … four seconds. It was like he was waiting for the punch line. I felt compelled to say something else. A first for me.
“I don’t feel anything. Not even fear. Can you tell me what to feel, Isaac?”
His throat spasmed, then he licked his lips.
“It’s emotional Morphine,” he said finally. “Just go with it.”
And that was it. That’s all we said for that night.
Isaac drove me to the hospital the next day. It was only my third time leaving the house and the thought of going back there made me sick to my stomach. I couldn’t eat the eggs or drink the coffee he put in front of me. He didn’t push me to eat like most people would, or give me the concerned eyes that most people would. It was all matter of fact; if you don’t want to eat—don’t. The moment you are diagnosed with cancer a gavel comes down on life, you start being afraid. And since I was already afraid, it felt compounded; fear pressing against fear. And just like that you inherit a cancer gremlin. I imagined it looked mutated, like my genes. It was sinister. Lurking. It kept you awake at night, gnawing on your insides, turning your mind into a distillery of fear. Fear trumps good sense. I wasn’t ready to go back to the hospital; it was the last place I was really afraid, but I had to because cancer was eating at my body.
The tests and scans started around noon. My first consult was with Dr. Akela, an oncologist Isaac went to medical school with. She was Polynesian and so strikingly beautiful my mouth hung open when she walked in. I could smell fruit on her skin; it reminded me of the bowl Isaac kept filling on my counter. I expelled the smell from my nostrils and breathed through my mouth. She spoke about chemotherapy. Her eyes had a heart and I was under the impression that she was an oncologist because she cared. I hated people who cared. They were prying and nosy and made me feel less human because I didn’t care.
After Dr. Akela, I saw a radiation oncologist, and then a plastic surgeon who pressured me to make an appointment to see a grief counselor. I saw Isaac in between each appointment, each scan. He was on his rounds, but he came to walk me to my next appointment. It was awkward. Though each time his white coat emerged, I became a little more familiar with him. It was a weird form of brand recognition—Isaac the Good. His hair was brown, his eyes were deep-set, the bridge of his nose was wide and crooked, but the most telling part of him was his shoulders. They moved first, then the rest of his body followed.
I had a tumor on my right breast. Stage II cancer. I was a candidate for a lumpectomy with radiation.
Isaac found me in the cafeteria sipping on a cup of coffee, staring out the window. He slid into the chair across from me and watched me watch the rain.
“Where is your family, Senna?”
Such a hard question.
“I have a father in Texas, but we’re not close.”
“Friends?”
I looked at him. Was he kidding? He had spent every night for a month in my house and my telephone hadn’t rung once.
“I don’t have any.” I left off the haven’t you figured that out yet? bit.
Dr. Asterholder shifted in his seat like the topic made him uncomfortable, and then, as an afterthought, folded his hands over the crumbs on the tabletop.
“You’re going to need a support system. You can’t do this alone.”
“Well what would you suggest I do? Import a family?”
He continued as if he hadn’t heard me. “There might be more than one surgery. Sometimes, even after radiation and chemotherapy, the cancer comes back…”
“I’m having a double mastectomy. It’s not going to come back.”
I wrote about shock on people’s faces: shock when they find out their love has been cheating on them, shock when they discover faked amnesia—heck, I even wrote about a character who constantly wore a look of shock on his face, even when there was nothing to be shocked about. But I couldn’t say that I’d ever seen true shock before. And here it was, written all over Isaac Asterholder. He dove in immediately, his eyebrows drawing together. “Senna, you don’t—”
I waved him off.
“I have to. I can’t live every day in fear, knowing it might come back. This is the only way.” He searched my face, and I knew then that he was the type of man who always considered what someone else was feeling. After a while the tension left his shoulders. He lifted his hands from where they’d been resting on the table, and placed them over mine. I could see the crumbs sticking to his skin. I focused on them so I wouldn’t pull away. He nodded.
“I can recommend—”
I cut him off for the third time, jerking my hands out from beneath his. “I want you to do the surgery.”
He leaned back, put both hands behind his head and stared at me.
“You’re an oncologic surgeon. I Googled you.”
“Why didn’t you just ask?”
“Because I don’t do that. Asking questions is at the forefront of developing relationships.”
He cocked his head. “What’s wrong with developing relationships?”
“When you get raped, and when you get breast cancer, you have to tell people about it. And then they look at you with sad eyes. Except they’re not really seeing you, they’re seeing your rape or your breast cancer. And I’d rather not be looked at if all people are seeing are the things I do, or the things that happen to me instead of who I am.”
He was quiet for a long time.
“What about before those things happened to you?”
I stared at him. Maybe a little too fiercely, but I didn’t care. If this man wanted to show up in my life, and put his hands over mine, and ask why I didn’t have a best friend—he was going to get it. The full version.
“If there was a God,” I said, “I’d say with confidence that he hates me. Because my life is the sum of bad things. The more people you let in, the more bad you let in.”
“Well, there you have it,” Isaac said. His eyes weren’t wide; there was no more shock. He was a cucumber.
It was the most I’d ever said to him. It was probably the most I’d said to any person in a long time. I pulled my cup up to my mouth and closed my eyes.
“All right,” he said, finally. “I’ll do the surgery on one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“You see a counselor.”
I started shaking my head before the words were out of his mouth.
“I’ve seen a psychiatrist before. I’m not into it.”
“I’m not talking about medicating yourself,” he said. “You need to talk about what happened. A therapist—it’s very different.”
“I don’t need to see a shrink,” I said. “I’m fine. I’m dealing.” The idea of counseling petrified me; all of your inner thoughts put in a glass box, to be seen by someone who spent years studying how to properly judge thoughts. How was that okay? There was something perverse about the process and the people who chose to do it for a living. Like a man being a gynecologist. What’s in this for you, you freak?
Isaac leaned forward until he was uncomfortably close to my face and I could see his irises, pure grey without any flecks or color variations. “You have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. You were just diagnosed with breast cancer. You. Are. Not. Okay.” He pushed away from the table and stood up. I opened my mouth to deny it, but I sighed instead, watching his white coat disappear through the cafeteria doors.
He was wrong.
My eyes found the scar from the night I cut myself. It was pink, the skin around it tight and shiny. He hadn’t said anything when he found me bleeding, hadn’t asked me how or why. He had simply fixed it. I stood up and walked in his wake. If someone was going to be digging around in my chest with a scalpel, I wanted it to be the guy who showed up and fixed things.
He was standing at the main entrance to the hospital when I found him, hands tucked into his pockets. He waited until I reached him and we walked in silence to his car. We were far enough apart that we couldn’t touch, close enough together that it was clear we were together. I slid quietly into the front seat, folding my hands in my lap and staring out the window until he pulled into my driveway. I was about to get out—halfway suspended between car and driveway—when he put his hand on my arm. My eyebrows were drawn together. I could almost feel them touching. I knew what he wanted. He wanted me to promise I’d see a counselor.
“Fine.” I yanked myself out of his reach and stalked toward my house. I had the key in the lock, but my hands were shaking so badly I couldn’t turn it. Isaac came up behind me and put his hand over mine. His skin was warm like it had been sitting in the sun all day. I watched in mild fascination as he used both of our hands to turn the key. When the door swung open, I stood frozen on the spot, with my back toward him.
“I’m gonna go home tonight,” he said. He was so close I could feel his breath moving tendrils of my hair. “Will you be all right?”
I nodded.
“Call me if you need me.”
I nodded again.
I climbed the stairs to my bedroom and crawled into bed fully clothed. I was so tired. I wanted to sleep while I could still feel him on my hand. Maybe, I wouldn’t dream.
The next morning it was snowing. A freak February snow that coated the trees and rooftops in my neighborhood with a butter cream frosting. I wandered from room to room, standing at the windows and staring out at the different views. Around noon, when I was tired of looking, and felt the slow thrumming of a headache starting behind my temples, I talked myself into going outside. It’ll be good for you. You need the fresh air. Daylight doesn’t have teeth. I wanted to touch the snow, hold it in my hand until it burned. Maybe it could clean me of the last few months.
I walked past where my jacket hung on the coat rack and swung open the front door. The cold air hit my legs and crawled under my t-shirt. The t-shirt was all I was wearing. No layers of sweaters, no tights underneath sweatpants. The thin beige t-shirt hung around me like a shedding second skin. I was barefoot as I stepped into the snow. It gave under my feet with a soft sigh as I took a few steps forward. My father would have freaked out if he saw me. My father who yelled at me to put my slippers on if I walked on the kitchen floor barefoot in the winter. I could see tire marks that led up one side of my horseshoe driveway to where Isaac parked. It could have been the mailman. I looked back over my shoulder to see if there was a package on my doorstep. There was none. It was Isaac. He was here. Why?
I walked to the middle of the driveway and scooped up some of the snow, cupping it in my palm, looking around. It was then that I saw it. A patch of snow had been cleared from my car’s windshield. The car that I never park in the garage, though now I wish I had. There was something underneath my wiper blade. I carried my handful of snow over, stopping when I reached the driver’s side door. Anyone could drive past my house and see me half undressed, cupping snow in my hand and staring limpidly at my snow-capped Volvo. There was a brown square underneath the blade. I dropped my snow, and it landed in a semi-hard clump on my foot. The package was thin, wrapped grocery bag paper I turned it over in my hands. He’d written something on it in blue sharpie. His handwriting flicked across the paper in messy, carefree lines. A doctor’s scrawl, the kind you might find on a medical chart or a script. I narrowed my eyes, absently licking off drops of snow on the back of my hand.
Words. That’s what he’d written.
I carried it inside, flipping it over in my hand. There was a slot on one side of the cardboard. I stuck my finger inside and pulled out a CD. It was black. A generic disk, something he’d burned himself.
Curious, I put the disk into my stereo and hit play with my big toe as I stretched out on the floor.
Music. I closed my eyes.
Heavy drum beat, a woman’s words … her voice bothered me. It was emotive, going from warm cooing to hard with each word. I didn’t like it. It was too unstable, unpredictable. It was bipolar. I stood up to turn it off. If this was Isaac’s attempt at facilitating me into his music, he was going to have to try for something less…
The words—they suddenly picked me up and held me, dangling in the air; I could kick and writhe and I wouldn’t have been able to come down from them. I listened, staring at the fire, and then I listened with my eyes closed. When it was over, I played it again and listened for what he was trying to convey.
When I ripped the CD from the player and stuffed it back in its envelope my hands were shaking. I marched it to the kitchen and shoved it in the back of my junk drawer, underneath the Neiman Marcus catalog and pile of bills bound by a rubber band. I was agitated. My hands couldn’t stop moving— through my skunk streak, into my pockets, pulling on my bottom lip. I needed a detox so I retreated to my office to soak up the colorless solitude. I lay on the floor and stared up at the ceiling. Normally the white cleansed me, calmed me, but today the words to the song found me. I’ll write! I thought. I stood up and moved to my desk. But even when the blank Word document was pulled up in front of me—clean and white—I couldn’t splash any thoughts onto it. I sat at my desk and stared at the cursor. It seemed impatient as it blinked at me, waiting for me to find the words. The only words I could hear were the words of the song that Isaac Asterholder left on my windshield. They invaded my white thinking space until I slammed shut my computer and marched back downstairs to the drawer. I dug out the cardboard sleeve from where I’d shoved it underneath the catalogs and bills, and dropped it into the trash.
I needed something to distract myself. When I looked around, the first thing I saw was the fridge. I made a sandwich with the bread and the cold cuts Isaac kept stocked in my vegetable bin, and ate it sitting cross-legged on my kitchen counter. For all of his save the earth with hybrids and recycling bullshit, he was a soda fanatic. There were five variations of carbonated, stomach-eating, sugar-infested soda in my fridge. I grabbed the red can and popped the tab. I drank the whole thing watching the snow fall. Then I dug the CD from the trash. I listened to it ten times … twenty? I lost count.
When Isaac walked through the door sometime after eight, I was draped in a blanket in front of the fire, my arms wrapped around my legs. My bare feet were tapping to the music. He stopped dead in his tracks and stared at me. I wouldn’t look at him, so I kept to the fire, focused. He moved to the kitchen. I heard him cleaning up my sandwich mess. After a while he came in with two mugs and handed me one. Coffee.
“You ate today.” He sat down on the floor and leaned his back against the sofa. He could have sat on the couch, but he sat on the floor with me. With me.
I shrugged. “Yeah.”
He kept staring at me and I squirmed, pressed down by his silver eyes. Then, what he said hit me. I hadn’t fed myself since it happened. I would have starved if not for Isaac. That sandwich was the first time I’d taken action to live. The significance felt both dark and light.
We sat in silence drinking our coffee, listening to the words he left me.
“Who is it?” I asked softly. Humbly. “Who is singing?”
“Her name is Florence Welch.”
“And the name of the song?” I sneaked a glance at his face. He was nodding slightly, like he approved of me asking.
“Landscape.”
I had a thousand words, but I held them tightly in my throat. I wasn’t good at saying. I was good at writing. I played with the corner of my blanket. Just ask him how he knew.
I squeezed my eyes shut. It was so hard. Isaac took my mug and stood up to carry them to the kitchen. He was almost there when I called out.
“Isaac?”
He looked at me over his shoulder, his eyebrows up.
“Thanks … for the coffee.”
He tucked his lips in and nodded. We both knew that was not what I was going to say.
I put my head between my knees and listened to Landscape.