Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [93]
“She’s my wife.”
“I understand that, but given her condition, why isn’t she in a hospital?”
I sat down and forked my eggs around the plate. “I guess we can skip the small talk.” He nodded. “That’s a bit of a long story.”
He checked his watch. “You been keeping up with the news?”
I shook my head. “Hadn’t really had much access.”
He flipped the channel on the TV, turned up the volume and leaned back in his chair, folding his hands across his stomach. The screen flashed: ABBIE ELIOT UPDATE.
Petey circled the table, stamping it with his feet. “Update. Update.”
About there, it hit me that our trip downriver was over.
33
Spending so much time in treatment, Abbie got to know some of the other girls. All cancer patients stick together but breast cancer patients share a bond that is unique. One of those girls was Deborah Fanning. Deborah, or Debbie as she became to us, was fighting a similar battle: double mastectomy, cancer metastasized, doctors were chasing it around her insides, too. Her husband, Rick, came with her for the first few months. They were both professionals, big house on the water in Miami, vacation home, yacht, seemed like they had everything. But over the months, we saw him less. Eventually, we saw him not at all.
Debbie just shrugged and said, “You know salesmen. Always traveling. Gotta pay that mortgage.” She wasn’t a very good liar. At Abbie’s suggestion, I requested they put her room next to ours. They did and we ended up spending a lot of time together. Watching movies, eating when they could, sharing stories, talking about life after cancer. I used to roll them both around the parking lot. We’d hang two bags on Georgie and I’d push both chairs. Debbie was a beautiful girl, four years younger than Abbie. She too had lost her hair, and though she never said it, she was terrified. It didn’t take Abbie and I long to pick up on the fact that her cell phone never rang. Rick wasn’t traveling.
One afternoon, I walked into the room and Abbie was crying. She was also mad. Fuming. She said, “Are you going to divorce me?”
“What?”
“Tell me the truth.”
“No. Abbie, what in the world are you—”
She threw a stack of papers at me. “Well, Rick did.” She pointed next door. “He’s over there now telling her how it’s really for the best but it’s all her fault.”
I leaned against the wall and listened. She was right. I pushed open the door to Debbie’s room, took three steps and punched him so hard it split all four of my knuckles. He lay on the floor, spitting teeth and foamy blood. I pointed down at him. “You don’t deserve her.” I picked her up, carried her into our room and that’s where she stayed until she died three months later.
Now Rick’s got that on his conscience. And to be gut-level honest, I hope it stays there a long time.
SO THIS BECAME OUR LIFE. Treatments, travel, staph infections, scans, more scans and still more scans, each one worse, this was the haunting fog we lived in and under. For us, the process of fighting became a Chinese water torture that weakened our expectation.
The months ran together. Because cancer is a morphing disease, the chemo chases it. Cancer knows this so it cloaks itself and morphs into something else, finally finding a way to break through the chemo. Much like a bacteria works its way around an antibiotic, eventually becoming resistant. It’s the law of diminishing returns. The hope is to kill it before it breaks through. You want to keep at it, not give the tumors a chance to breathe, but we seemed to always be one step behind.
We’d been in the hospital for weeks. Abbie was fighting an infection. My bed was a pallet on the floor.