The Second Mouse - Archer Mayor [40]
“That’s okay. I don’t know anything about your family, either.”
She laughed again, but without humor this time. “Yeah, well, let’s keep it that way if it’s okay with you. Not a place I want to go back to.” Standing again in her bedroom, the robe forgotten in her hand, she surveyed the mess around her, feeling the meaning of it seeping in. Her new boyfriend was asking her out on a date while she was staring at her husband’s underwear on the floor.
“Hey, why not?” she finally said. “Mel’ll be gone for the rest of the day, probably cooking up new ways to get us killed. Can you give me a couple of hours to put myself together?”
“I’ll pick you up at eleven,” he said.
The hospital was at the edge of Bennington. They rode on Ellis’s Harley, barely talking because of the wind and the noise, the bike having a muffler in name only. But despite her slowly ebbing headache and fragile stomach, Nancy discovered it was all curiously soothing. She found herself holding on to Ellis’s waist, enveloped by the summer warmth, her eyes closed, breathing in the smell of him and thinking of next to nothing. Times like these, she could almost believe that life had a future worth anticipating. There was no Mel, no madcap schemes, no vigilance about whose headlights might be lurching over the trailer park’s uneven road late at night.
Ellis had given her a glimpse of something better than the ever more slippery slope she occupied with Mel.
When they arrived, Ellis stowed the helmets in the bike’s travel bags and led the way into the hospital’s lobby, bypassing the receptionist with the ease of familiarity.
“You come here a lot?” Nancy asked, getting used to the antiseptic smell she found that all such places shared.
“As much as I can,” he said, slowing down to fall in beside her down the wide hallway.
“I gotta tell you, too,” he added in a low voice. “It’s been a little rough lately. Mom’s got thyroid cancer. Maybe it’s all the smoking. I don’t know—it’s not what they say, but you gotta wonder. Anyway, they’ve been trying stuff on her and they just got through something that pretty much cut her off from everybody for a few days, so she might be kind of emotional.”
Nancy looked alarmed. “What did they do?”
His eyes widened with the memory. “It was like Star Wars. Two guys in white suits. I was in a gown with gloves and booties and a hat. She’s in a lead-lined room where everything’s covered in plastic. All so they can give her a single pill. But it’s radiated, like nuclear or something, so it has rays. They took it out of a box inside another box, and as soon as she took it, her whole body lit up the Geiger counter one of them had. It was really creepy. And then we all had to leave—for days.”
“Oh, my God,” Nancy said. “Why?”
“The thyroid eats up iodine like it’s going out of style—or in her case, what’s left of the thyroid. Why, I don’t know. But that’s what the pill was—loaded with radioactive iodine. So the iodine goes straight to the remaining thyroid tissue, and the radiation kills the cancer there. At least that’s the theory.”
Nancy pondered that for a moment before saying hesitantly, “But you said she was dying.”
Ellis stopped to look at her. “She is. I’m sorry. I’m not doing this right. They took the thyroid out with surgery. That was before. This was just to catch what bits and pieces they might’ve missed. But no one’s kidding anybody. Her chances are basically nothing. This thing’s a killer. It isn’t always. In fact, with younger people it’s usually not that big a thing, but for people her age, it’s a done deal.”
She reached out and put her hand on his arm. “Ellis, I’m so sorry.”
He smiled back sadly. “It’s really not that bad. We’ve all accepted it. There’ve been counselors and everything. Most of the time we joke about it. It’s just that this time might be a little worse, only because she’s been alone so much. I did wave at her through the window a couple of times,” he added brightly. “I think that helped some.”
Nancy frowned, trying to absorb it