Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [88]
They’d moved her to a recovery room and told me I could see her while we waited for a room upstairs. Prior to surgery, it was not uncommon for her to be at a function or anything where a bunch of women had gathered and for some lady to discreetly pull her aside, glance at her breasts and ask, “Tell the truth, who’s your plastic surgeon?” I walked into her room, glanced at her gauze-covered chest and knew she’d never get that question again.
That’s when I really clued in. The breast is not simply a body part. It’s a part of the whole that says, I am woman and I am beautiful, but it’s not on equal footing with the others. I sat in that room and realized that you can cut off a finger, cut off a hand, even cut off a leg, but if you take a woman’s breast, you are cutting more than just a body part.
It requires an adjustment.
I slid my hand beneath hers and waited. When she woke, it was somewhere in the night and she was in a great deal of pain.
I didn’t tell her until the next morning when the medicine wore off and the sun broke through the blinds. “Honey, the cancer was more…had spread further than they first thought. They got what they could. Now they’re talking more chemo and alternating that with radiation.” She glanced down at her flat chest. I shook my head. “Not yet. They didn’t want that to get in the way of…” I trailed off. What did I know. Abbie was in a lot of pain and kept hitting the morphine button after it reset every fifteen minutes.
Doctors Hampton, Smith and Meyer, along with Dr. Dismakh, her surgeon, stood in a semicircle around the foot of her bed. Dr. Hampton started. “Abbie, the lymph nodes we took from you tell us that your cancer has spread beyond what we call its organ of origin. The breast. At this point, it’s systemic, meaning it could be anywhere. We know of one mass on the lining of your lung.” We waited, listening but not quite comprehending. “We want to send you to M. D. Anderson in Houston. And maybe Sloan-Kettering. Both are on the cutting edge of this type of cancer.”
I swallowed and then eeked out, “What kind is that?”
Dr. Smith spoke next. “It’s aggressive, fast-growing, known for an insatiable appetite. The good news is that because it’s fast-growing, it’s also easier to kill. But that’s also the bad news. It’s fast-growing.”
At this point, I didn’t care if her breasts were ever reconstructed. We could live without them.
The doctors left us alone. When I looked up, Dr. Hampton had reappeared in the room. He sat next to us both. He asked, “Do you like to dance?”
The question came out of left field. “What?”
He smiled. “Do you like to dance?”
I shook my head. “What kind of question is that?”
“This”—he waved his hand across the room and looked at Abbie—“is a delicate dance. Because we must kill it without killing you…and before it kills you.”
Two days later, they sent us home.
30
JUNE 6, MORNING
The sun was just cracking through the treetops when I tried to open my eyes. I lifted my head and found Abbie sleeping next to me and dressed in clothes I had not seen before. Curled up inside her arms was a Jack Russell terrier.
The smell of cigarette smoke turned my head. Mr. Hawaii sat in an Adirondack chair against the far wall, a mound of butts and ash at his feet. The room was a porch of sorts, wrapped in screen and at least as high as the treetops, because they rubbed gently against the screen. He was tall, handsome, had shoulder-length black hair, a mustache, blue eyes, was cleanly shaven, muscular and maybe late-forties.
He held a cigarette in one hand and a Popsicle in the other. He waved the cigarette at me. “I gave her the clothes and she dressed herself. Fell back asleep a while ago.”
“How’d we get here?”
He laughed, puffed and sucked. “Well,