Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [104]
Given the choice of the possibility of life or the guarantee of a slow painful death, we chose the pummeling. And the evening after her third surgery—the removal of her own marrow—we watched Reese Witherspoon in Sweet Home Alabama on my laptop in the hospital.
They had intended to be aggressive and they were. The chemo wiped her out again, annihilating her white blood count. Doctors quickly recommended the bone marrow transplant. After her fourth surgery—putting the marrow back in—she was laid up about a month. We were living at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville. Abbie had a room in the recovery ward while I had a small one-room in what they call the family wing. It’s an apartment complex built by Mayo for the family members of those in treatment. It was a pretty close-knit community and everybody was on a first-name basis. We’d eat together, share stories and compare diagnoses and suggested treatments. Abbie was exhausted and usually fell asleep about 6 p.m., so most nights, I ate by myself. I’d stay with her until her eyes started rolling back and forth behind her eyelids, then I’d walk over to the cafeteria or go for a drive and find some dinner.
It was a lonely time.
I’d had about all the cafeteria food I could handle, so I walked across the parking lot to the Jeep and started to get in.
Another couple in the community was Heather and John Mancini. He was a feisty Italian, she a fiery redhead. Heather and I had met in the cafeteria one Saturday during lunch about three months ago. I was just starting a Clive Cussler novel and she sat at my table. She eyed the novel. “You a Cussler fan?”
“Yeah…only one Clive.”
She reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out a paperback. “I’m a Patterson person myself.”
I shuddered. “He gives me the creeps. I can’t read him without making sure all the doors and windows are locked tight and that some firearm is loaded and within arm’s reach.”
She laughed, we talked and I never made it to the second page.
Heather was a stewardess for a major airline and, like me, spent a lot of time alone. After John had been diagnosed and they saw that he’d be spending a lot of time at Mayo, she asked that her hub of origination be moved to Jacksonville so she could spend her nonworking time with John. John was not responding well to treatment, so I did what I could to cheer her up. Which brings up another thing. You play this treatment game long enough and, sometimes, there’s just not much that can cheer you up. Sometimes, you just need someone to listen to how bad the situation really is, nod their head so you know that they’ve heard you and that’s it. Nothing more. We all know there’s no magic wand. If there was, we’d be passing it around like a group of high-schoolers with a case of stolen beer.
So there I stood, getting in our Jeep when I heard somebody call my name. I knew who it was before I turned around. Heather waved. She said, “I think I’ve had about all the light blue walls and hollow metal tubes that I can handle.”
“Yeah,” I said, scratching my head, “me too. The walls, that is.”
Her red skirt matched her hair, which had been pulled back in that I’m-grown-up-but-still-a-kid-at-heart style. She pointed toward the treatment center. “John’s sleeping. How ’bout you let me buy you some dinner?”
“Sure.”
So, with my wife fighting for her life, I drove some strange woman, whose white oxford had been unbuttoned down to the third button, to the beach and strolled Third Street in search of a place to eat. We landed on Pete’s. Glad to be out of the compound, we sat through seven innings of a Red Sox baseball game and one period of a hockey match. Somewhere during dinner, another button slipped through its hole and her skirt climbed halfway up her thigh. With every sip, it climbed further. It didn’t hit me until