CHAPTER 1
Let me tell you how it feels to learn that your wife is going to die. It’s like you’ve swallowed something bitter, something permanently stuck in your throat. In an instant, the future you’ve been planning together is gone. The sadness is all-consuming. Trust me, a heavy heart is more than an expression. You try to act strong, sound reassuring. You glom on to statistics, study the odds like a Vegas bookmaker. You say things like, “We can beat this thing. We’re going to be the twenty-five percent who makes it.”
At night, darker thoughts sneak past your mental defenses. You imagine your life after the inevitable. You think about all the holidays and birthdays that will come and go without your beloved. You cry and hate yourself because you’re not the one who is dying.
My name is John Bodine. I’m twenty-nine years old. I’m married to the love of my life. And no matter what it takes, or how far I have to go, I’m not going to let her die.
Eight weeks earlier . . .
I’m like a dog. Soon as I heard the sound of keys jangling in the front door lock, my heartbeat kicked into overdrive. I got all excited. Five years of marriage hadn’t dulled my pleasure. The sound of keys meant Ruby was home. I glanced at the electric stove, the only working clock within eyesight. Twenty minutes until midnight. Poor Ruby. Poor sweet, tired—no, make that utterly exhausted—Ruby. God, I was glad she was home.
I greeted Ruby in the cramped entranceway of our one-bedroom apartment with a mug of mint tea at the ready. Ruby’s strawberry blond hair, cut stylishly and kept shoulder length, glistened from a light nighttime rain. She shivered off the cold and inhaled the sweet mint smell emanating from the steaming mug.
“My hero to the rescue,” Ruby said.
Ruby cupped the mug in both hands and let the aroma warm her bones. She kissed me sweetly on the lips. Her eyes, the color of wan sapphires, flashed her desire for a more prolonged kiss with a lot less clothing. But her shoulders, sagging from the weight of her backpack stuffed with textbooks, told me otherwise. For an acupuncture and herbal medicine school that taught the healing arts, Ruby’s education took an extraordinary physical and mental toll.
“Hold this,” Ruby said. She handed me back the mug of tea, slung her backpack from off her shoulder, and then knelt down to unzip it on the floor. From within she pulled out a brown paper bag. The second I saw it, my eyes went wide.
“You went to Sinful Squares?” I asked, feeling my mouth already watering.
“That’s why I left so early this morning. I’m sure you forgot, but it’s your mom’s birthday on Thursday. I mailed her a dozen of her favorite brownies, and it just so happens that I knew they were your favorite, too. Don’t eat them all at once.”
She gave me a soft kiss on the lips.
“Ruby, Sinful Squares is way out of your way. You didn’t have to do that.”
“Well, I love you, and I love your mom. So, happy birthday to us all.”
We shared a brownie. Heaven.
“Want to watch TV?” Ruby asked.
“You know it.”
We didn’t have cable, way too expensive on our limited budget. We had cut back on most all expenses now that we had tuition to pay. But I like to please Ruby, so I rigged Hulu up to our thirty-inch television. Now she could watch her favorite shows anytime she wanted. Ruby didn’t have much time for TV, but after a late-night study session, it helped her clear the brain, decompress.
As I expected, Ruby wanted to watch her favorite HGTV show, Designed to Sell. She sank deeply into the soft sofa cushions, almost vanishing between them. I always watched with Ruby, even though I’m an ESPN sort of guy, and this episode, one we’d never seen, featured a three-million-dollar Beverly Hills mansion in desperate need of a makeover before going on the market. Ruby spread her long and beautifully toned legs across my lap.
“Wait,” I said, after watching a minute of the show. “The challenge is to redesign an enormous mansion with a few-thousand-dollar budget?”
“Yeah. Cool, isn’t it?” Ruby said. Her voice drifted off, as if she was already in a dream.
“Well, it seems a little bit odd,” I said. “I mean, they live in a mansion. You’d think they could spend a bit more, is all.”
“That’s not the point of the show. The point is to teach people how to do more with less.”
“So if our one-bedroom got featured, they’d redesign it for what? Fifty bucks?”
Ruby dug her toes between my ribs until I cried out in mock pain. Actually, it felt pretty darn good.
“The show doesn’t use a sliding scale, darling. And besides, our place doesn’t need to be redesigned. I like it just the way it is.”
“Small,” I said.
“I prefer to think of it as conducive to closeness.”
“Oh, in that case . . .”
I changed position and kissed Ruby, long and deep. Ruby responded in kind as best she could, but tonight her romantic mood had the life span of a mayfly.
“Baby, I want to,” Ruby said. Her voice sounded as sweet as the mint tea tasted on her lips.
“All right, then, let’s go,” I whispered between gentle kisses planted on her freckled cheeks.
“But I need you to quiz me.”
I sat up.
“Quiz you?” I said. “Ruby, it’s after midnight.”
Ruby surprised me by breaking into song. “And we’re gonna let it all hang out,” she sang.
The melody was to the tune of one of our favorite Eric Clapton covers. Ruby held up a finger for me to see. That was her way of marking the musical reference as being worth one point in our long-standing game. A point could be earned if either of us completed a song lyric, tune required, from something the other had said. We didn’t keep a running tally, because it was obvious Ruby possessed an insurmountable lead. Let’s just say if Jeopardy devoted an entire board to trivia about music and bands, she’d clear it without giving the other contestants a chance to buzz.
Ruby got off the sofa to grab her schoolbooks.
As I waited, I ran my hands through my hair, half expecting to feel the long locks I had chopped off after the Labuche Kang tragedy. A lot about my appearance had changed in the aftermath of that day. My face still looked young but had weathered, with newly formed creases and crevices, which Ruby thought made me ruggedly handsome. My eyes had grown deeper set, too, and like mountain river streams, changed color with the day or my mood. Sometimes they were clear like a well-marked path, but at other times they’d cloud over, and Ruby would ask, “What are you thinking?” Ruby was the only person who could see through my haze, burrow into me, to get beyond the surface layers I allowed others to see. After the shock, the therapy sessions, the black depression, it was Ruby who brought me back from the brink. She held the map to my soul.
Ruby returned with backpack in hand.
“You can’t really be serious about wanting me to quiz you,” I said. “How can your brain even function?”
“Remember when I said that I loved how small our place is?” Ruby asked.
“Yeah.”
“I lied.”
“Oh.”
“Well, not entirely. I do like being close to you.”
“We could be closer,” I said with a wink.
“Come on, baby. Just a quick quiz tonight.”
I pretended to have fallen asleep, and Ruby needled me again in the ribs, this time with her fingers.
“I’m up! I’m up!” I said, feigning alertness.
Ruby ruffled through her backpack, looking for her notes, but something else caught her eye. “Oh, I almost forgot,” she said. “I went to the computer lab and made you something today.”
“Moi?”
Ruby removed a single sheet of paper from a folder in her backpack. It was a logo for my online game, One World. I loved the overall design she made, but it was the O in the word One that literally took away my breath.
She had created three concentric circles. The outer circle she rendered to look like wood grain, the next circle was made to look like rock, another like water, and in the center was the earth. It was astoundingly beautiful. “Professional” didn’t do it justice.
“Ruby, I’m speechless. I love it.”
“I’m so glad. It took me a while, but I think it came out great. What’s today’s number?”
“One hundred twenty-three thousand registered players.”
Ruby broke into a smile. “Forget acupuncture. You’re taking us to Beverly Hills, baby!”
“Last I checked, mortgage companies aren’t accepting future potential as a down payment on a mansion. I really need closer to a million registered players before I can start touting my rags-to-riches story.”
“I believe in you, John. I know it’s going to happen.”
I made a “Who knows?” shrug.
With a hundred thousand registered players, I should be rolling in the dough. Only, I didn’t charge people to play. I’d basically built FarmVille meets Minecraft. It’s an eco-conscious game, which takes longer to build a loyal enough following to start charging a fee. Like a lot of game designers, I make my money selling virtual items that enhance the game play. After expenses, I cleared about fifty thousand dollars, most of which got reinvested back into the business. In addition to Ruby’s tuition, we have other expenses to pay as well. Rent. Food. Bills. Insurance. All the usual suspects. Hence, no cable.
“I’m glad you like the logo,” Ruby said.
“I don’t just like it. I love it. It goes live tomorrow.”
“Good. I’m going to get something to drink before we start. Want anything?”
“No,” I said.
I watched her go. Hard not to. I felt like yelling out that I was the luckiest man alive, only Ruby didn’t believe in luck.
A few years back, Ruby hung a vision board on our bedroom wall. The vision board was a three-foot-by-three-foot corkboard, covered with a purple silk cloth—for prosperity—and decorated with images and words that conveyed our shared desires. Ask and the universe will provide, at least that’s what Ruby believed. I believe in relying on yourself to solve your own problems. The mountain has a cold and angry way of reinforcing that kind of thinking.
Still, Ruby pleaded with me to ask the universe to make One World a smash success. I thought it was silly at first, but I relented—Ruby’s hard to refuse, especially when pleading—and so I tacked up the logo of a prominent gaming blog onto the vision board. A few weeks later, I got a five-star review. Did I think the universe had answered my wishes? No, not in the least. Coincidence? Sure. Now, that’s something I can believe in. I have a degree in computer science from Boston University, so logic is the ruler of my world. Trusting in the universe is a heartwarming idea, but I’m a bigger believer in hard work, determination, and a sprinkle of talent.
A game designer needs to understand computers the way a general contractor must know all facets of building a house, which is why it took a team of people to put my game together, but now I manage the code and servers on my own. Anyway, the bloggers seemed to like the idea behind the game. Players are tasked with building the coolest, biggest, most awesome virtual world possible without pillaging One World’s limited resources. Oh, and you’ve got to do all this while battling marauding hordes of zombies, who come out only at night.
There was a time, not that long ago, I couldn’t muster the energy to get out of bed. I just lay there, hearing Brooks’s screams as he fell to his death. Dark years. Ruby plastered the vision board with every image of health and happiness she could find. Three weeks later, Ruby found a flyer for a local acupuncturist in the mail and urged me to give it a try. The results were so astounding that Ruby decided to quit her job as the in-house graphic designer for a finance company to concentrate on becoming an acupuncturist herself. I encouraged her to do it. We could squeak by on one income for a while. It’s amazing how far a few judicious cuts can take you.
Ruby returned and got her study materials together, but I wasn’t done trying to woo her into bed. I started rubbing the soles of her feet.
“Hmmmm,” Ruby said. “That feels nice.”
I removed Ruby’s cotton socks and dug my thumbs gently against ten years of jogging calluses. Ruby cooed some more, and I kept on massaging. I thought about the number—one hundred twenty-three thousand registered players—and couldn’t help but imagine how a million would alter our lives. I wondered if Ruby and I would start a family sooner than our current post-school thinking.
Brooks Hall would never have children, and I might. “Where’s the fairness in that, dear universe?” I switched from the right foot to massage Ruby’s left. My thumb traveled from the toes and finished at the heel. But my fingers brushed against something strange. A sensation that felt surprising to touch. I ran my thumb over the offending area again, and still again.
“Hey, the rest of my foot is getting jealous,” Ruby said, shaking it.
I raised Ruby’s leg and shifted position to get a better look at the underside of her foot.
“What is it?” Ruby asked. A touch of alarm seeped into her voice.
I went to the kitchen and grabbed the penlight flashlight I used to build or repair my computers. When I returned, Ruby was sitting on the floor cross-legged, examining the bottom of her foot. I got down on my knees and took a closer look with the penlight. Ruby’s eyes were wide, dancing nervously. I knew she hated when I went silent on her.
“What’s going on?” Ruby asked again.
“Have you seen this dark patchy area before?” I asked her. “Do you have any idea how long it’s been there?”
“I’m not checking out the bottom of my foot every day, if that’s what you’re asking. John, you’re scaring me.”
“I don’t like how this looks,” I said.
I had reason to be concerned. Mountaineering exposed climbers like myself to a greater degree of ultraviolet radiation. I had studied up on the latest gear, lotions, and trends for delivering maximum sun protection. I had also learned to detect the signs and symptoms of skin cancer—asymmetrical growth, ragged edges, nonuniform coloration, and a large diameter. The oddly shaped mole on the underside of Ruby’s foot, about the size of two pencil erasers, was far larger than the quarter-inch safety limit. What I didn’t know, and what Ruby couldn’t tell me, was if the area of concern had grown in size, and if so, how quickly it had evolved.
“John, you’re really starting to freak me out,” Ruby said, pulling her foot away from my lengthy and silent examination. “What are you thinking?”
I moved in close to Ruby, cupping her flushed cheeks in my hands.
“I think we need to call a doctor, just to be safe,” I said. I made sure my voice sounded soothing. “But I also think that everything is going to be just fine.”
Ruby looked me in the eyes and strained to smile.
We’ve been married five years, and we dated for an equal amount of time.
She could always tell when I was lying.