“It’s not . . . an affair,” she said. “It’s worse. Much worse.” She stared straight at me now. “All that cramping and bleeding I’ve been having? The nonstop period? I thought it was just menopause and fibroids, or maybe endometriosis. But it’s not. It’s cancer, Bill. A fast, mean kind of uterine cancer.” She drew a shuddering breath and held it for a moment, but when she breathed out, the exhalation sounded oddly steady; calm, even, as if saying the dreaded word had freed her from something. Meanwhile, as she regained her equilibrium, I began to lose mine. The room seemed to spin, the floor—the abyss—to open beneath me. “It’s called leiomyosarcoma,” she went on. “Smooth-muscle tumor. I’d never heard of it. Have you?” I just stared, and she suddenly smiled an ironic, heartbreaking smile. “That man in Nashville—my ‘boyfriend’? That was Dr. Andrew Spitzer, from Vanderbilt. He’s a gynecologic oncologist—a specialist in cancer of the lady parts. That hand-holding over lunch? That was when he gave me my test results. Gave me my death sentence.”
“What are you talking about? Stop,” I said, struggling to catch up, struggling to keep it together. “Tests can be wrong. We need to get a second opinion.”
She shook her head. “Spitzer was my second opinion. I saw my regular ob-gyn while you were out in San Diego. She referred me to Spitzer; got him to work me in on an urgent basis. I didn’t tell you. I didn’t want to worry you with it.”
“I’m your husband, Kathleen. I want to be worried, if you’re worried. But this can’t be right.”
“It might not be right,” she said, “but it’s real. Remember last year, when I had that fibroid cut out?”
“Sure,” I said. “Power . . . power something-or-other?”
“Power morcellation,” she said. “Remember the tool the surgeon used? Looked like my handheld blender, the one I call the ‘Wand of Power’?” I stared, not quite following the thread. I was miles behind, but she didn’t wait for me to catch up. “Turns out power morcellation wasn’t such a great technique. The blade chopped up the fibroid, like they said it would. But it wasn’t just an ordinary fibroid. And they didn’t get out all the pieces—all the morcels—when they flushed me out afterward.”
“But the pathology report came back clean,” I reminded her. “Not cancer.”
“Not in what they looked at,” she said. “But there must have been tumor cells hiding in there somewhere. That’s what Spitzer thinks, anyhow. And the tool they used to cut up the fibroid—the power morcellator? It scattered those cells like seeds.” She shrugged. “And now, those seeds have taken root, all over the place, and I’ve grown a bumper crop of tumors.” She gave a short, bitter laugh. “Funny thing,” she said. “That surgery was supposed to help me, but instead, it killed me.”
“Kathleen, stop talking like that,” I said. “We’ll fight this. We’ll beat this.”
“We can’t, Bill. It’s not beatable. It’s too far along. The CT scan at Vanderbilt showed cancer all over my abdominal cavity. It’s already in my lungs, too. Spitzer said radiation and chemo might—might—give me an extra few months—”
“Can we do it here, or do we need to go to Vanderbilt?”
“No,” she said.
“No, what? No, we don’t need to go to Vanderbilt?”
“No, we’re not doing it. Either place. Any place.”
“What are you talking about? Of course we are. How soon can we start?”
“No.” Her face was no longer slack; it was now set, as hard as I’d ever seen it. “You don’t get to decide this, Bill. This isn’t we, this is me, and I say no.” She shook her head, her expression resolute. “Listen to me. Spitzer said the treatment would be brutal, and any extra time it gave me would be pure hell.” I started to argue, but she cut me off again. “Pure hell. Those were his words. I won’t put myself through that, Bill. And if you love me, you won’t try to make me.” She gave a wry half smile. “Funny, I was always so sure you’d be the one to die first. I figured some ex-convict would come gunning for revenge, or maybe you’d have a heart attack from working so hard. I never once thought I’d go first. And I sure never thought it’d be so soon.”
“Tell me this isn’t happening, Kathleen,” I pleaded. “Tell me this is a bad dream.”
“I can’t, honey. I wish I could, but I can’t.”
“Don’t leave me, Kathleen. Please. I can’t bear it.”
“Yes, you can.” She gave me an appraising glance. “It won’t be easy for you, though. You’re going to miss me when I’m gone.”
I knew she was right, because I could already feel a deep, black fissure cracking open within me—a fault line zigzagging down to depths I could not even begin to fathom.