Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [82]
Chemotherapy is a systemic therapy, meaning it attacks fast-growing cells all over the body. So while it attacks the cancer, it also attacks the cells that grow hair, heal wounds, color your skin, etc. It’s the reason why so many chemo patients look like the walking dead. Because parts of them are.
We signed in and sat next to a woman about Abbie’s age. They began talking and their stories were similar. That’s another thing we learned pretty quickly. While the types of cancer were different and in different stages, everybody’s stories were similar. Their diagnosis surprised them and, depending on lots of factors, they either had been or were fearful. Fear is the primary mode of transportation for cancer because cancer is the one six-letter word none of us ever wanted to hear. And if I had any doubts before, a quick look around the room confirmed what I’d already suspected. Cancer is the ultimate identity theft. It’s a vulture—it doesn’t care how old you are, where you’re from, who your daddy is, how much money you have or how important you think you are. It is no respecter of persons.
About half the women wore a hat, scarf or wig that some loved one had told them didn’t look fake. Most had lied. Those who still had their hair looked around the room as if afraid that they were next. And because cancer is a vulture, most were. A few of the women wore baggy shirts that had not been baggy when they bought them. Some wore bright colors, some neutral. All wished they were someplace else.
We’d been going there here a few weeks when it finally hit me. Admittedly, I can be a little slow. I thought to myself, Where are all the boyfriends and husbands?
Finally, I asked Abbie. She shook her head. It was one of those intuitive things that she knew without having to ask. “They left.”
Apparently, some do. Not all, not most, just some. I did meet some super-dads who were wearing three hats and had soccer-mom stickers plastered on the backs of their Suburbans, but I never got used to that picture of a pale, skinny, gaunt woman wearing a scarf, baggy clothes and connected to a clear plastic line with the empty seat next to her. A powerful statement about them and a pitiful statement about the men who had left them.
So I asked Abbie. “Well…” She looked slowly around the room. “If you married a face, a set of boobs or a couple of curves”—she turned to me—“and those are gone…” She shrugged.
Behind Abbie’s statement loomed a much larger question. One she was too afraid to ask. I had a feeling that the answer she was looking for might take months, even years, and was not verbal.
28
JUNE 5, AFTERNOON
The distinguishing feature of Prospect Landing is not the elegantly sloped concrete boat ramp, the Florida Cracker houses that bookend either side of it, the cows or their pastures that lead down to it, or the manicured rows of cathedral pine trees whose needles have been raked and sold to the home mulch market, but rather the back end of the yellow 1957 Chevrolet station wagon that rises up out of the water like a channel buoy. Word has it that a disgruntled housewife had come home to find her husband entwined with the neighbor. In revenge, she backed his ’57 Chevrolet out of the garage, punched the accelerator and in a move reminiscent of Sally Field in Smokey and the Bandit, tried to jump the river. It was his pride and joy and this was payback. Only difference was she had no bridge to launch her heavenward.