“And Alice’s financial situation?”
“I’m not sure. I thought you could discuss this with her. She seemed very concerned about her daughter, so she might need some support there too.”
“Is she expecting my call?” Sonja asked. She glanced into the file to make sure all the information was there.
“Yes, but it’s hard to say how receptive she’ll be.”
Sonja nodded. Unfortunately it was often the case that the people who needed the most help were the least likely to take it.
“I’ll call her today,” she said, fully intending to stand up. And yet she remained in her chair. Some days, when she sat, she wondered if she’d ever get up again.
“How are you settling in to the area?” Kate asked, mistaking her inability to stand as a desire to chat. “You live in Atherton, right? So do I.”
Sonja nodded. “I’m missing San Francisco a bit,” she admitted. The sudden move had been George’s idea—a segue into retirement, he’d said. Sonja went along with it, but six months later she wasn’t entirely sure what they were doing there. Atherton was a desirable place to live, certainly—in fact, it had been ranked the number one most affluent zip code in the United States by Forbes a few years ago. A twenty-minute drive from Silicon Valley, it was home to Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, Hewlett Packard’s Meg Whitman, and Google’s Eric Schmidt. (Sonja had found this out when she’d Googled Atherton.) Most homes, Sonja’s included, were fenced and gated and on a minimum lot size of an acre. On the street people smiled and kept walking, minding their own business. It unnerved Sonja a little, even if it was, strangely, perfect for her. “But Atherton’s very nice. Small, but nice.”
Kate nodded politely.
Sonja glanced again at the photo on Kate’s desk. Is your marriage as good as it looks? she had a sudden urge to ask. Are you happy all of the time? Or do you have days when things are good and other days when you think about swerving into oncoming traffic? But she couldn’t ask any of these things, of course. So instead she smiled and said, “Well, I guess I’ll call Alice today.”
5
“Cancer.”
An hour after leaving her appointment, Alice was still in the hospital parking lot. Like a crazy lady, she said the word aloud, listened to the way it sounded. “Cancer.” “Cancer.” It was strange. She must have said the word a hundred times before but today it felt different on her tongue. Rounder, and in a way, ridiculous—like the words “leprechaun” or “scapegoat.” But then the whole thing was ridiculous, wasn’t it?
Two weeks ago she’d gone to the doctor with some discomfort in her shoulder. She’d had one of her increasingly rare sessions at the gym (brought on by a newly paunchy stomach she’d she blamed on too much eggnog at Christmas) and had, she thought, overdone it with the overhead weights. But when the pain continued for nearly a week, in spite of Advil, Alice finally made a visit to her family doctor.
“Shoulder tip discomfort?” Dr. Hadley asked when Alice finished explaining.
“Well … I guess it’s the tip, yes.”
“Does it get better or worse when you move your arm or head?”
Alice tried moving. “No,” she said. “It’s pretty much the same all the time.”
“And you’re otherwise well?”
“Yes.”
“You couldn’t be pregnant?”
“Does that still require sex?”
Alice chuckled at her own joke. It was hard to believe that once, sex had once been her drug, something that had never been far from her mind. Now sex was like a childhood friend that she remembered vaguely, a friend she had no intention of reconnecting with.
Dr. Hadley, bless her heart, let the comment go. “You’re menstruating regularly?”
Alice thought about that. She wasn’t clockwork regular, but more or less. And there hadn’t been any change in that regard.
Except.
“Well it’s probably not relevant but … my flow has been a little heavier than usual lately, I guess. And a few months ago, I did have a … gush.”
She’d been playing bridge with Marie Holland, a ninety-year-old client, when she’d felt it. They had nearly finished with the game, so Alice had decided to plow ahead. But she’d had to keep her back to the wall when she’d excused herself a few minutes later. There’d been enough blood to soak her underwear and her trousers and leave a faint stain on the armchair. She’d sponged it clean and covered it with a cushion and attributed it to changing menstrual cycles as she’d got older. Then she’d made a mental note to mention it the next time she went to the doctor. Which she was doing. Although she failed to see what any of this had to do with her shoulder.
“Okay,” Dr. Hadley said. “I’d like to palpate your abdomen if that’s all right with you. Make sure everything feels normal.”
“Sure,” Alice asked. “But you know I’m here for my shoulder, right?”
“I do.” Dr. Hadley grinned as she guided Alice toward the table. “What I’m trying to ascertain is whether the discomfort you’re feeling in your shoulder is what we call referred pain.”
Alice lay down on the table. “Referred pain?”
Dr. Hadley began to touch her belly. “It’s a pain perceived at a location other than the stimulus. An example is when a person is having a heart attack and they feel pain in the neck or the jaw, rather than the chest.”
Dr. Hadley’s fingertips, Alice noticed, had slowed in one particular area. She glanced at Alice’s face as she pressed down on it. “That sore?”
“A little uncomfortable,” she admitted. “Why?”
Dr. Hadley continued examining her stomach in silence, leaving Alice to wait. It wasn’t like Dr. Hadley to leave a question hanging like that.
“Why?” Alice repeated. “Do you feel something?”
“I’m going to refer you for an ultrasound. Your abdomen feels distended and I think it’s best to be safe.”
“What do you think it is?” she asked.
“It could be a cyst, or possibly even gallstones. Or”—she smiled—“it could be a sore shoulder. An ultrasound will tell us more.”
Two weeks later Alice was in the hospital parking lot. With ovarian cancer. The same cancer that killed her mother.