Unconsciously, I straighten up a bit, check my rearview mirror, as if something might be coming from behind.
Dr. Aster sent me the results of a recent MRI for your father, and indicated you were the point of contact. Please call me back at your earliest convenience.
It’s funny how quickly the whole world shrivels up to the inside of a car, to the space between ringtones. I watch birds streak across a washed-blue sky. Six of them. Then a seventh one, late.
I squeeze my phone until it turns warm beneath my fingers.
One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret, never to be told.
I reach a receptionist. Possibly, it’s the same receptionist at every doctor’s office, rental car agency, and health insurance claim office I’ve ever called. Possibly, there is only one in the whole world, and she rotates her bored inflection from desk to desk, like a Santa Claus who brings nothing but not giving a shit. She informs me Dr. Chun will call me back when he can, in a way that suggests I will be very lucky if this occurs before Christmas.
But he does call me back, almost immediately.
“Abby? It’s Dr. Chun, from the neurology wing of Lincoln Memorial. Thank you for returning my call. Dr. Aster sent over some scans for me to look at,” he says.
Finally I find my voice. “I’m sorry. What kind of specialist are you?”
“Neurology,” he says, and I almost, almost relax. Neurologists look at brain scans. Normal. But then he goes on: “Actually, my specialty is neurological pathologies. And oncology,” he adds, almost apologetically.
I close my eyes and remember all the times I wished for my father to die. I open my eyes. The world is still there. A pickup truck rolls by, the truck bed packed with sunburned teenagers.
It carries a memory I must have buried long ago: me and Kaycee, maybe third grade, when my mom was still alive, the first and only time I was allowed to go to the Halloween Fright Fest.
I’d been scared out of my mind in the haunted house. Not because of all the monsters popping out in masks with chainsaws, but because Kaycee had run ahead, thinking it would be funny to pretend to disappear. I ran room to room, terrified and searching for her. There were coffins everywhere, and fake blood, and even a mannequin with blond hair hanging floppy-necked from a noose. She didn’t even have a face, just drawn-on eyes and a lipstick mouth—but in my panic, in the dark, I thought it was her.
We took a hayride afterward. We were on the back of a wagon, just the two of us, because Kaycee’s dad had gone to get another beer out of the car. Kaycee was sulking because I hadn’t seen the point of the joke.
I scared you, didn’t I? she kept saying. It’s a haunted house. Get it? I scared you.
Then, suddenly, we were in the woods. In the quiet drip of the overhanging branches, paper ghosts nailed to the trees, she turned to me. “I’m not scared of dying,” she said. “Not one bit. How about you?”
I had never actually thought about it before. My mom was dying, and that was enough to think about.
“No,” I lied.
She reached for my hands. “When I die, I’m going to become an angel, so I can look after you all the time.” Then she squeezed so tightly it began to hurt. “But first, I’m going to take revenge on everyone who deserves it. I’ll frighten all of them to death, one by one.”
—
One second, two seconds, three: I open my eyes, and the world is still there. I’m still holding the phone to my sweating cheek. Kaycee is still gone.
“Do you think you can bring your father down here to see me?” Dr. Chun says.
“When?” I croak out. I’m praying he says, Whenever you can make it. I’m praying he says there’s no rush. I’m praying he says, In a few weeks.
“I’m here until seven tonight.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Dr. Chun has obviously had a lot of practice making bad news sound like just the news you were hoping for. He is quiet and patient, warm and matter-of-fact. He doesn’t stutter. He looks us in the eyes without blinking. And I believe that he cares.
He asks whether my father has experienced mood changes, whether he’s had trouble sleeping, whether he’s shown signs of forgetfulness. Whether he’s fallen recently, or had trouble with his balance.
He explains that often in older people, the symptoms of glioblastoma multiforme are confused for other signs of mental deterioration like Alzheimer’s.
He explains that the tumor has likely been growing for some time.
He tells us that the median survival rate is roughly fifteen months. But he also says, gently, that he expects, given the size and location of the tumor, that my father will have less time than that.
He tells us that our focus now should be on my father’s quality of life, during the little quantity of it he has left, and I know, deep down, he is already dead.
Chapter Thirty-Three
We drive home mostly in silence. I’m full of a terrible burning, a frantic urge to blow something up.
One month. Six months. It’s hard to know. But it will be fast from here.
My father can’t be dying. My father is indestructible. He is the rule. He is the law.
He is all I have.
He dozes with his head against the window. His breath smells old. Something white is crusted to the corner of his lip.
The weather is changing. A bleak covering of clouds is rolling across the sky but the heat is still crackling, electric, and the air churning through the car vents smells like singed rubber.
When my phone rings—Joe again—my father startles awake. I thumb it silent. Then, after a pause, turn it off entirely.
“Who was that?” my father asks me. Catching sight of the name on the screen, he asks, “Joe? Is that your boyfriend?”
“I don’t have a boyfriend, Dad,” I tell him, for the ninetieth time. Since I’ve been home, my father has found creative ways to work my love life into nearly every conversation. Does your boyfriend mind you work so much? Why don’t you ask your boyfriend to help you with that steering issue? I can’t tell whether he’s doing it deliberately, whether he’s making a dig, or whether he really has forgotten, over and over again, that I have no one. Joe is the closest to a functional relationship I have—and he’s gay, and mad at me more than half the time.
“A girl needs a boyfriend,” he mutters, turning back to the window.
I think of what Dr. Chun said, and imagine my father’s tumor like a chunk of hard metal, a residue of chemical waste.
“Did I ever tell you how I met your mother?” My dad speaks the words to the window.
“You did, Dad. A hundred times at least.”
“—Back in 1980. The Reagan years.”
“I know,” I say. Call-and-response. “And she was working the line of drunks at the soup kitchen, and you saw her from across the street.” Amen.