“Maybe there’s someone else, Alice?” Kate interrupted. “A friend? Even an acquaintance? Someone to drive you home from surgery, to be at these kinds of appointments?”
Alice shook her head. Dr. Brookes and Kate conferred with their eyes.
“We can get a social worker to contact you,” Kate said, finally. “They’ll be able to attend appointments with you, they might be able to organize meals, or even get access to special funding to help with out-of-pocket costs.” To Kate’s credit, she wasn’t reeling off a speech; she appeared genuinely engaged in what she was saying. “The thing is, Alice, you are going to need someone. We need to do more tests, but the current information we have indicates that your condition is very serious. You have a mass in your ovaries, your CA 125 levels are up in the thousands, and you have a buildup of fluid in the abdomen, indicating the cancer may have already spread. Even in the best-case scenario, if everything goes well in the surgery you will most likely have to have chemotherapy. We will do everything we can, but I promise you … you are going to need someone.”
If she’d felt a jolt earlier, this was a cannon, blowing a giant hole right through her. “Cancer.” Had they used that word earlier? She didn’t remember it.
Apparently appeased by her expression—finally the reaction they’d been waiting for—the doctor began to explain it all again, a third or maybe fourth time. Once again, Alice zoned out. Because … she couldn’t have cancer. She was barely forty, she ate well, exercised occasionally. More importantly, she couldn’t have cancer. She had Zoe.
Dr. Brookes finished his spiel and asked her if she had any questions. Alice opened her mouth, but no sound came out. She thought again about what Kate had said. You are going to need someone. Alice wanted to tell her she was wrong. Because if what she was saying was true, Alice wasn’t going to need someone. Zoe was.
2
As cancer-care coordinator, Kate Littleton delivered bad news for a living. In five years at the job she’d given hundreds of people what was, arguably, the worst news of their lives, and in five years it hadn’t got any easier. Today’s appointment was no exception. When the doctor explained to Alice Stanhope that she had cancer, it was almost as though she didn’t hear. A severe case of denial, most likely, which was why they asked patients to bring a support person to appointments—so they could hear what the patient could not.
There wasn’t anyone, Alice had said. Was that possible? In five years at Stanford Health Care, Kate had never heard this. Most patients were surrounded by people, in chemotherapy, in post-op; usually Kate’s problem was getting them all to leave so the patient could rest. The ideal scenario, in Kate’s experience, was for patients to have one primary support person. There was something about pairs—the yin and the yang of it. When one fell apart, the other was strong; when one zoned out, the other would listen. Yet Alice Stanhope didn’t have a single person she felt she could nominate to walk beside her in what was going to be the hardest journey of her life. Which meant that Kate would have to do her job a little better than usual.
Kate knew there was one thing that a patient needed more than a doctor, more than a nurse, even more than medicine, and that was a mother. Someone to reassure them, to fluff their pillows, to give them that look of certainty that said they were in good hands. Someone to fight for them. At the age of nine, after an emergency appendectomy, Kate had learned this firsthand. Her father, widowed when Kate was just a toddler, had visited her every night, but it was Ann, Kate’s nurse with the short brown hair and thick ankles, who’d cuddled her before she fell asleep. It was Ann who shooed the younger nurses out of her room and wheeled in the old TV and VCR along with kids’ movies she’d rented at Blockbuster on her way to her shift. It was Ann who’d told her that under no circumstances was she to eat her vegetables. For those two weeks, Kate had had a mother. Now Kate strived to be that mother for her patients.
“Lunch?”
Kate looked up from her desk. Dr. Brookes—Chris—stood in her doorway. He was so tall his head almost brushed the top of the doorframe. His top button was undone and his skin had a bluish tinge.
“Lunch?” Kate glanced at her watch. “It’s not even eleven A.M.”
“When you are called into surgery at three A.M., lunchtime is whenever you have a break,” he said. “Oh, I managed to get Alice Stanhope’s surgery scheduled for Monday.”
“Perfect.” Kate reached for a pen. “What time?”
“First up. Eight A.M.”
Kate wrote the details on her desk calendar.
Alice Stanhope: Bilateral Salpingo-Oophorectomy.
The one thing Kate couldn’t get used to was that you couldn’t see the cancer. Alice, in particular, looked well. Blondish and slim with short tousled hair, she was the picture of Meg Ryan, back in her heyday. The image of health. It was always a shock to learn that someone like that had cancer.
Chris leaned against the doorframe. “What do you think was up with Alice’s daughter? What did she say … that she isn’t like a normal teenager?”
“I wondered that myself,” Kate said. “Who knows? Some kind of special needs, maybe?’”
“Geez, I hope not,” he said, and they both drifted into silence for a moment. Eventually Chris shook his head. “Well, we’ll just have to take extra-good care of her mother, won’t we?”
Sometimes Kate loved Chris Brookes.
“All right,” he said, “I guess I’ll get one of those plastic salads from the cafeteria. Those salads are probably causing the cancer that we treat here, you know. We’re probably keeping ourselves in business.”
When he had drifted off down the corridor, Kate listened to her voice mail. She had two messages: the first from an anxious middle-aged woman wanting information about her newly diagnosed breast cancer, the second from David, who had seen cheap fares to Cancún and thought it was high time for a second honeymoon. “Or, what do they call them nowadays,” he’d added, “a babymoon?”
Kate’s eyes drifted back to her desk calendar, specifically to the Post-it on the bottom of tomorrow’s date. Twelve weeks. She’d written it eleven weeks and two days earlier when she’d seen the two pink lines appear on the pregnancy test she’d promised her fertility doctor she wouldn’t take. Twice before she’d written this note on a Post-it—but those had ended up in the trash at seven and nine weeks respectively. This time, she’d made it to twelve weeks. Almost.
It was the final piece of her puzzle, growing inside her, ready to make them whole. All Kate needed to do was hold on to it.
3
In third-period science, Zoe was trying to follow the rules. Not the class rules, her own. And her own rules were far more extensive.
??Never place both feet on the ground while sitting.
??Never touch the sides of the chair.
??Never be the first or last person to take their seat.