Suspicious country: ninth floor, oncology ward. Outside the window, a view of the helicopter taking off from and landing on the hospital roof. Quieter than it should be, the rotors spinning long after the frenzy of action disappears. “Your kids are gonna love that when they come visit, aren’t they?” says a nurse who I can’t see, who is typing on a computer somewhere behind me.
Do I know the answer to this one? Benny used to love fans and helicopters as a baby. He called helicopters “cagooies.” Is that different from being thirsty? I half think through the morphine. I am extremely thirsty, and that thirst seems in this moment to be the hardest problem I’ve ever been asked to solve. I smile just in case that is what I am supposed to do. Or was Freddy the fan lover? No. Definitely Benny. Freddy loved lights. I have been admitted up here. I almost remember that. John was here. Where are the kids? Who has the kids? Everyone has the kids except me. Who has the ice chips? A doctor has just finished talking; a doctor is about to talk. It is Christmas Eve. I have had surgery. They have removed my L2 vertebra, a big lump of cancerous mush. They have installed a titanium cage with impressive screws that they show John on X-ray before I wake up, and then they email him a picture to show me.
“You are doing great,” says a nurse. “They’ve cleared you to try standing up. Do you want to?”
I don’t know the answer to this either, but then I am standing up. John is taking a picture. “Wow!” he is saying. He is putting it on Facebook. “Oh my God,” says everyone I know. “Amazing!” Facebook is saying. “Can’t believe this is happening to you! What can we do?” I am scrolling and scrolling. “Thank you,” I am saying to Facebook. “I love you so so much. More than anything in the world. You are so beautiful.”
John texts: “Maybe you should put your phone away and try to get some sleep. Maybe not the best time to be on Facebook.” I look around the room. He is not here. He is nowhere. It is too dark to see what the helicopter is doing. I imagine the rotors: silent, still. Maybe no one will need them Christmas Eve. Now John is calling. Now he is a voice.
“I am in Greensboro—at your dad’s. I have the kids. Charlie and Amelia are here. So is Jennie.” Jennie, John’s sister and one of my closest friends, lives in Tucson. Everyone has arrived for Christmas. “Jennie needs to talk to you for a minute,” says John.
“I am trying to figure out stockings,” she is saying.
I remember now I never wrapped the kids’ presents. My back hurt too much, the paper and tape was too hard to get to. In the back of the linen closet behind the sheets, I tell her. And in the little cabinet next to my bedside. And in my closet. And above the refrigerator. And there’s something in that T.J. Maxx bag behind the green chair. That deck of Harry Potter playing cards is for Freddy. The Pokémon watch is for Benny. Sugar-free gummy worms and chocolate wrapped to look like a hamburger. Jennie is laughing: “How on earth are you remembering all this?” She is also part crying: “Can’t wait to see you. Will I get to see you?”
At some point in the night I wake up: John is back. I can see his outline asleep in the uncomfortable chair. “There is something I need to tell you,” I say to him when he stirs. “There are tickets. Two tickets to Paris in our names in my email. For your birthday.”
“What?” he says, not quite awake. “What are you talking about?”
“For the end of January,” I say. “It was supposed to be a surprise.”
He is turning forty in a couple weeks, and I wanted to take him to France after our tough year. It was a splurge, an impulse. We lived in Paris as newlyweds when John was in graduate school—before law school—and we haven’t been back since having kids. It’s his favorite place on earth: He makes sense there in a way I have never made sense anywhere.
“Seriously?” he says, trying to roll over in the chair. “You might have gone a little over the top if this is your way of letting me in on the surprise.”
“I want you to know the tickets are there.” I say. “Just in case.”
“Okay,” he says. “I can call the airline in the morning and try to cancel.”
“No,” I say. “We’re going to Paris. I don’t know how exactly, but I’m going to Paris with you.”
“Okay,” he says. I can hear his breathing slip into sleep again.
A few hours later—Christmas morning—I’m awake again just before dawn: the shape of the dark helicopter against the darker sky. The rotors are still. “Merry Christmas,” says a nurse who is measuring my urine into a jug in the bathroom. “Do you want some pain meds? Do you want another stool softener?”
*
A man named Nurse Jon shows up in my hospital room while Tita and my dad are sitting with me. He tells us he moonlights as a stress management specialist when he’s not working the oncology floor. He has a hypnotic voice and an almost eerie command of the room. He purrs to us about breathing techniques and mantras and allowing ourselves to be held by the bed or the chair. “You soften your belly,” he says. “You send your breath there. Softest belly. Softest breath. You let your muscles relax: soft belly. You let the world hold you up.”
“May I demonstrate my techniques?” he asks, but already we are under some kind of spell.
My dad has his eyes closed. Tita leans back in her chair. Time stretches and bends as he guides us with his voice into an impeccably quiet place. I feel my morphine controller fall out of my hand, but do not reach for it. Nurses and techs seemed to hover at the door, but sense his spell and are uncompelled to disturb us.
Only one person knocks at the door and it is Dr. Cavanaugh. It’s the first time I’ve seen her since I’ve been at the hospital. She smiles, but in her ocean eyes I can see all the trenches and ledges of a cancer doctor.
“I don’t ever come over here,” she says. “Just know you’re special.”
Then when she sees Nurse Jon, she freezes and starts to back out. “Oh, it’s you!” she says. “I’ll come back later!” I cannot emphasize enough how unusual a stance this is for Dr. Cavanaugh.
“No, no—please come in!” I insist, and so she finds a space to sit on the edge of my bed, joining the four of us in my closet of a room.
She is unusually calm and relaxed in his presence—I bet anything she has one of his breathing CDs, I think—as he seems to disappear into the corner of the room while she talks about my latest scans: Right now the cancer is focused on the spot on my lower spine. Surgery stabilizes the spine, but can’t get rid of all the cancer. We will do radiation there. This won’t get rid of all the cancer either, but it should help with pain. A few spots higher up the spine are lighting up, and we will keep watching them. CT scan of the organs looks clean. Brain scan: clean. We will rescan in a couple weeks, we will make a plan.
“I’m not going to say I’m not worried,” she says. “Some patients in your situation don’t make it to their first set of scans. Others go for a couple years. We’ll have to see.”
I try to soften my belly. I try to feel for the world holding me up.
“Listen to what this man has to say,” she says as she leaves, glancing at Nurse Jon in the corner. “Not to scare you, but what he has to offer you is way more valuable than anything I have.”