First
We had been awake for an hour, though neither of us had said a word. My back was against his chest, and I laid there, woven in his arms, staring at the alarm clock. It was nearly seven. It was nearly time. I looked at the mash of our fingers, the match of rings on those left hands. It had been less than forty-eight hours. The sharpness of the gold still startled me, the way that they glowed in the deep heart of the night.
I pressed the mix of our hands against my chest, against the slices of my scars, and I felt him shift closer to me, tighter against my skin. As if he could river into me if he just tried harder.
He sighed, and I kissed his hand, right there on his ring. And then I kissed my own finger, careful not to let the diamond scrape against my lips. He had covered me in things that shined: these rings, a necklace, earrings the color of the midday sun, all of the stars in my skin, all of his love. He had turned me into a constellation years ago, and now, I was studded in brightness.
Five more minutes. This was a luxury, just to lie here. To have a bed that belonged to us, a house that belonged to us, everything was steeped in him and me. We battled over the color of the sheets, which abused tables from Goodwill we should buy for the bed stands, where the dresser should go, all of these little decisions that we soaked in importance because it was all about us. This was our home, his and mine, and everything was important, right down to the kind of soap in the bathroom.
"We're being stupid," he said, peering at a glass bottle of soap that smelled like the sweet greens of lime and basil.
"Little things, my angel—little things knit together to become big things," I said, tapping him on the forehead with the hard bottom of that bottle, the puckered ridge of glass making a slight knocking noise against his bone.
Back before these rings came on our fingers. Back before they took a pearl-sized lump from my lung. Back before I spit up a mouthful of blood into the sink. The moment that started it all. This was a week before, when tables and soap and the stripes on sheets said so much about us and who we were together.
Then we remembered: it is the two of us, a sickness, and a want. It didn't matter how the soap smelled, what colors the spatulas were, if I slipcovered the battered couches. All we wanted was each other. And for me to get better.
Again.
We could have spent this time awake in bed doing something else—maybe talking. In three and a half years, we had never run out of things to say. Sometimes, the time would run away like a ribbon, winding down to its end before we were finished looping words at each other. He would fall asleep with his head on my stomach, or my fatigue-heavy hand would drop the phone on the floor, his voice still echoing out.
Maybe something else, a thing for beds and lovers. Though we had found that there were other places—college students have to be creative, with roommates and dorm rules and walls thinner than breath. The back seat of my car when we were desperate to touch each other. The dark shadows in gardens and parks, the empty locker room at his basketball arena—places with creativity and timing. But, mostly it was the unoriginal place: hotels. Our favorite, a place near the hospital with blankets blizzard-thick with soft cotton filling and stern, stiff mattresses, the contrast of that hard surface and the gentle cradle of the blankets and each other.
He would call and say a number. 252. 110. 376. And I would grab a bag that was permanently packed and unzipped, waiting for more. For the next day's clothes, for a blue fleece blanket that I brought with me every time. So he could lay me down in the blue grass feel of it. When I would arrive to that numbered room, 252 or 110 or 376, he was sometimes huddled on the floor, working on his homework in the silence, and I would join him, matching his work with my own.
Sometimes, though, he'd be lying in the bed, his clothes stuttering the carpet. I would tear off what I was wearing and dive into him with a ferociousness that erupted from somewhere under my blood. Once, he was asleep just like that, just in his bare skin, and I took the flowers he had brought for me and ripped off the heads of the blooms, raining the petals all over him and that bed. When I slid on to him, he rolled me over, and the crush of us broke into the pieces of the flowers; the deep musk of the roses coated our bodies and lingered on my back, in my hair, for hours.
But this morning, no, it wasn't the time for speech or sex. It was for bearing witness to the last hour where my body would be mine, not shackled to the drugs that would try to blast my sickness away. Besides. He spoke best to me in silence; I could feel his eyes digging into me, boring a hole into my heart, and they were filling up all of the quiet. They were enough for me.
The alarm shrilled out as the numbers changed to seven o'clock. I broke my hand away from his and slapped the off button. Sighing, I rolled over to look at him.
"Good morning, Logan," I said.
"Good morning, Mary Anne," he replied, and we kissed as the minutes flipped by. "We should probably get up," he said, pulling away.
"We should," I grinned. "But it's so warm here. I don't wanna get up." He pushed his fingers into the soft place of my waist until I shrieked with laughter, bouncing away from him and off the bed, scrambling to my feet. "That was cheap!"
He shrugged. "I'm the master of cheap shots, you know that."
"Yeah, well, this isn't a game, and I'm not some shady…basketball-type guy," I finished with a lame flop of my hands.
"Wow. That was so specific," he winced. With a long stretch, the rope of his arms unwinding and filling up the whole width of the bed, he curled himself up and off of the mattress. "I showered last night, so you can go use up all the hot water if you want."
I shook my head, heading to the closet. "No, I'm good, too." I picked out a shirt with buttons, those shirts that were perfect for chemo treatment—easily taken off, easy access to the place that needed to be treated. This is what it was like to live in a world where treating cancer dictated everything, right down to what to wear. The hang of my catheter buckled the line of the buttons; it was so new that the skin around its mouth was still an angry red.
I peeked over my shoulder and caught him looking at me as he slipped on a t-shirt. What was he thinking? About how this was the beginning—or maybe the end, in a way. This was supposed to be the start of our trial, living together for the next year to see if it would be as good as we thought. As we had known it would be, from the small times we had lived together in the past—the weeks where he slept in my hospital rooms back during my first battle with cancer, the days we had strung together since. This was supposed to be a practice for when we made it official after we graduated.
But the cancer had changed that. It had ended all of that. I looked down at my left hand: it was no longer practice anymore, either.
What was he thinking? Something sad? But from the way his cheeks were fringing with red, I realized, no—something good. Something pillowed in a lust. My boy—he was a boy all right.
"You think I'm hot?" I teased, sliding the last button into place.
"Stop it," he muttered, yanking out a pair of boxers and a fresh set of jeans. "We don't have time for that, and it's not fair."
I shuffled across the room, tiptoeing closer to him. "Not fair?"
"Stop it, Mary Anne," he repeated.
"Stop what?" I grinned. "I'm just walkin' here."
Logan turned away from me, and I slid my hands over his hips as he warned, "I swear to all that's holy, I will not be responsible for my actions if you keep this up."
I leaned my head into the valley of his spine, wrapping my hands over his stomach. "I just wanted to give you a hug. Today's gonna suck, I thought you needed a little love."
"Right," he snorted. "You were torturing me, don't play all innocent." His hand covered mine, and he squeezed tight. "Come on, we've gotta hustle if we're gonna get there on time."
I stepped back, letting him yank on his clothes. When he turned back to me, fastening the button on his fly, he was still shaking his head. I reached around him to grab a skirt out of the dresser—another piece of clothing with the cancer in mind. His finger hooked a pair of my panties, and he dangled them in the air in front of my face, letting them tick there in the air.
"I thought you said we had to hustle, and here you are, being all suggestive?" I scoffed, grabbing the underwear.
"I'm just making sure that you don't go flashing the doctors. That wouldn't be a very good way to kick off treatment—'Hi, cure me, please ignore the fact that I'm showing off my stuff,'" he replied.
"Hey, some doctors may appreciate that," I laughed. "I'm not above dirty tricks to get the best care."
"You didn't just cross the line there, pretty girl, you, like, spat on it, jumped on it, and then ripped the line to shreds." He took my hand and tugged me to my feet. In a swoop, he pulled me up and into his arms, basketing me in his grip. I giggled, curling my arms around his neck as he carried me down the steps. I was still his new bride, and there were thresholds everywhere.
"I could get used to this," I smiled as he stooped down to avoid bumping his head on the low ceiling on the stairway. "Logan as chariot."
"I do accept tips," he noted, kissing my forehead.
"How about…don't wear orange? It washes you out," I replied.
"Yeah, thanks, Stacey," he grumbled, setting me on my feet in the kitchen.
I dashed in front of the refrigerator. "Sit, sit. I'm in charge of breakfast. There will be no Trix cereal, got me? We're going for nutrition here."
"But Trix are for kids!" he whined, hopping onto the counter next to the oven.
"You are not a kid," I laughed. "You're a married man."
"I'm in college," he said, waving his hand dismissively at me. "I'm supposed to be delightfully immature until graduation."
I pulled out a carton of eggs and a block of cheese. "So…that means you eat food with a cartoon rabbit on the box."
"Damn straight," he nodded, fishing out an onion and a pepper from the basket behind him. He tossed them to me in a lazy underhand, and I sunk a knife into their fleshy bellies, the seeds of the green pepper lurching out of the cuts and slipping against my fingers. I shredded the cheese into a fine lace and piled it next to the heaped vegetables, turning to the stove where I placed a pan onto the burner. The gas jet leapt to life in a blue exhale, that stuffy, chemical smell of the fire hissing the pan into a thing of warmth.
I scraped at the eggs, the sound of them bubbling and the crisping of the vegetables creating a concert of noise over our quiet. When Logan cleared his throat, I nearly jumped. "I'm glad you're letting me come," he told me, tipping his head. "I'm glad you changed your mind."
Biting my lip, I admitted, "I didn't—I still think that this is going to be totally mundane. I'll be there for an hour, tops—I'm going to need you more this afternoon, when the side effects hit. They wanted you to come; when they called yesterday with the reminder checklist, they specifically asked that you be there."
He frowned. "More paperwork? What do they need from me? I mean, I'm not a bone marrow match for you, we already know that." His face slumped a bit, and I reached over and rubbed his thigh. How could be blame himself for that, that if I needed to rebuild my blood, we couldn't harvest it from him? Logan was my match in every way except inside the spongy mass of my bones—it wasn't his fault.
It was like that from birth.
It's not like we were meant to be from the moment we were conceived. We grew up and grew into each other. You can change yourself; you can't change your chemistry.
He took my hand and kissed the root of my forth finger, sliding his tongue against the sunrise bend of the wedding ring. The chaplain had him slide the engagement ring against it, saying, "To remind you of the promise you made to each other when he gave you this ring—your choice of each other."
I winked at my almost husband; the chaplain didn't know: I asked Logan to marry me. The ring came second. I asked him first.
I asked. He said yes. And then, before he had even touched me, even kissed me, he ran upstairs and came back with a small box, a thing of black the size of a lump of coal. "I've had this for awhile," he admitted, sitting back on the floor next to me.
"How long?" I asked.
"Since we got back together," he said.
I smiled, letting my legs slide into the crossing of his own. "We were never apart."
Shrugging, he replied, "I know. But that whole 'dating other people' thing—it was, just, stupid."
"Necessary," I smiled. "Tell me. Tell me the story."
He rolled his eyes. "Tesorina, no. Come on. It's embarrassing."
"No. I want you to tell it again. Your essay, read it to me." Logan pulled back from me and walked over to the office we had made in the small room to the left of the front door. He dug into the files in the cabinet, yanking out a manila folder. He trotted back to me, this time sitting behind me so that he was my wall, my thing to lean against. I cuddled back into him as he opened up the file and pulled out one of his freshman composition papers.
Logan leaned his head on my shoulder, letting the low sounds of his words murmur into my ear, under my skin. It felt like a wave, the tidal pull of his voice. The accent that had grown deeper and richer over the past two years, baking up under the heat of the South.
On our first day of school, she and I met at a bookstore halfway between our towns, neutral ground. We shared a muffin in the café and browsed through shelves of books that called out to us. She would open up their crackling spines and move them like mouths, saying in a high, silly voice, Buy me. Read me. And I would roll my eyes at her and hold up books with somber looking people on the covers and say, Someone needs a hug
And she would take the hardcovers into her arms and squeeze them tight, giggling before settling them back where they belonged, waiting for the person who would take them home.
It was the last day that I saw her—an entire month, we didn't see each other. We had both decided, we needed time to settle in at our colleges, in our new lives. Duke was her dream, North Carolina was mine, we needed to fall down into our places and find where we belonged. We belonged with each other—we were a forever thing. We had talked about getting married; we had even floated the idea of eloping on her eighteenth birthday, but no. No. That was the moment we decided we had to be sure. Our lives were more than each other; it's what made us so strong, that we could orbit out into other things and still come back. We shared a skin, her and me—it wasn't my life or her life, it was our life. We had to be sure that we were right.
I spent a month without seeing her, diving into my new team, into my classes, into myself. I went out on a couple dates with girls who were wrong for me—I knew they were the first time they exhaled. It wasn't that they weren't Mary Anne, they weren't, it's that they were not me. Maybe there was a girl at my school who was right, maybe I just didn't find her, but I didn't care. I had found a right girl, and she was ten miles away.
We talked every night, speaking so fast that our voices tangled up and tied together. "No, I want to hear about you," she'd laugh, and I could hear the sounds of her roommate chattering away in the background.
"No," I'd protest. "You did that thing with the dorm council, right? Tell me about that."
And we'd talk until my own roommate would throw a shoe at my head and yell at me to shut up for God's sake, so she and I would move to our computers and shoot messages at each other until yawning made my eyes squint up in pain. We'd end each talk with so many I love yous, my fingers found the keys without thinking.
I went on dates, she went on dates. But it was a waste of time.
On her birthday, we met at that bookstore again. Her car was already in the parking lot, and I pulled up beside it, picking up the mass of flowers I had bought for her, tied into a block with a blue ribbon that she could wear in her hair, the short cap of near black hair that had grown in so slowly over this past year. She was sitting in the café, flipping through a magazine; when she saw me, she jumped down the stairs and met me in the fiction aisle. I dropped the flowers on the ground and caught her as she flew into me. My feet arced in a circle as I swung her around, grinding the rose petals down into the carpet, releasing their sweet pinking scent into the air and into us.
"I know what I want," she told me. "I know what I need."
"It's you," I replied, and she beamed at me. We kissed there in the fiction stacks until a bookseller snapped at us to buy a book and get a room.
"We did both," I giggled.
"It was a great book," he nodded, and I smacked his arm. "The next day, I went with Keshawn and picked this out. Well, I picked it out, and he put it on his pinkie and tried to convince the jeweler that he was my, what did he call it—Chosen Life Partner or something. I told him to shut the fuck up before someone believed him."
I twisted back to look at his face, the gentleness that had settled in his lips and his eyes. "You were going to hold on this for four years?" I gaped.
"Yeah," he said. "I knew that you were my one, you know? But that I'd have to wait. I could wait for you."
"When would you have given this to me, if the cancer hadn't come back?" I asked.
His mouth twisted into a question mark. "I don't know—maybe Christmas, senior year? Or on your birthday that year. I kinda had a thought to do it after the NCAAs next year if, like, we won or something." He let out a little snicker. "The guys on the team wanted me to propose at a Duke-UNC game, but I said you'd die of embarrassment. I was right, yeah?"
"Oh, yeah," I snapped. "Bad idea, guys." I took the box and opened it, the wink of the diamond brightening in my eyes. It wasn't huge, it wasn't small—it was perfect, somewhere in the middle. What made it special was the filigree on the sides, the ivy of gold that snaked around like lace and held that stone in its hands. The snowing of the metal sparkled as much as the diamond—it looked like a thing of stars.
"Angel," I sighed. "It's perfect."
"It's you," he smiled, plucking it from its perch and pressing it up my finger to where it rested so well. "I'm so glad you asked me to marry you."
"I wish…I wish it hadn't been like this," I told him, curling that new ringed hand against his face.
He shrugged. "Yeah, but this is how it is. It's okay. Maybe it's better—I mean, I'm not the only married guy on the team, you know? And two other guys have fiancées. I'm not a freak this time," Logan beamed.
"This time," I laughed, stroking his cheek. "There're still so many other opportunities." And he kissed my hand.
Like he was doing now, going over the line of the gold and then snaking down to the lines in my hands, mapping out the M of my life line, my love line, my fate line. Logan strung it all together and folded my fingers into a fist; he knocked that against his heart and then winked at me.
"Your eggs are going to burn, Rachael Ray," he noted, bending his head towards the stove.
I yelped, skipping a step back to the burner and desperately spooning the eggs around the pan. I tossed in the cheese and waited for it to bubble, the rising heat of it all browning the yellowing mass at the edges. I dumped the scrambled mix onto a large plate and then scooted up on the counter next to him, handing him a fork.
"So," I said, sticking my own fork in and ladling out a large bite. "We need to make sure that we get the house Dawn and Stacey-proofed."
He rolled his eyes. "There is still time to hook them up with an apartment. Like, tesorina, there's that great place just across the street. We could wave at them every morning—hi, guys!" he chirped. "Look at you, in your own place, not torturing Logan every day. Every. Damned. Day. For the whole summer."
"Oh, whatever," I sniffed. "If you can't handle their middle school teasing, then I should give Coach a call and tell him that you're a total wuss."
"Yeah, you know? There is a huge ass difference between 'You suck, Number 10, I hope you get hit by a bus' and 'Hey, Lee, let's pick on your clothes, life, and sexuality all day long because we don't have a hobby,'" he said, swinging his fork with each point.
I screwed up my mouth in thought. "I could teach Dawn to knit."
"Knit her and Stacey gags," he grumbled, stabbing the eggs. "Good-bye, nice quiet house."
"Hello, my sister? Who I really haven't spent any time with since we left for college?" I pointed out. "I have hung out with Kerry and Hunter, like, a hundred times more than Dawnie in two years, and come on, if they are totally on your case, I'll tell them to back off. They tease because they love," I grinned, rubbing his knees.
He leaned over and kissed me. "I love you, so I will deal. But I hope you understand what you are giving up." With a wicked curl on his mouth, his eyes edged down at the counter, then to the floor, and I felt my cheeks blush. That thing for lovers and beds—it had kind of happened here in the kitchen the night we moved in. Okay, so having my sister and her best friend live with us for the summer wouldn't be one hundred percent fantastic.
Almost, though.
"Well, the girls won't be here all the time," I reasoned, biting my lips. "And they'll understand. We're still newlyweds, and this is our honeymoon—they will have to accommodate that."
"I told you—the very day you make remission, we're off to Italy," he stated. "We're not leaving the beach for a week. The end."
"I already have my bag packed," I told him. "Fourth of July."
"Six weeks. Perfect," he smiled. "Which is good. I mean, a vacay right away would have really fucked up my internship. So, the cancer is a good thing."
"Oh, sure, it was totally my plan all along to relapse," I nodded. "I penciled it right in—move into house, finish finals, cancer relapse, elope, the girls move in, Independence Day cookout…totally, totally planned."
"You are an organized lady," Logan agreed. "Well done."
"Thank you," I bowed. I sighed. "Tomorrow, the girls are getting in right around dinner, and that's when Dad and Sharon are due, too. My plan is, we'll make dinner—"
"We?" he mumbled, raising an eyebrow.
I rolled my eyes. "Okay, Mr. Cereal is Good Eatin', I will make dinner, and you'll be my Food Bitch, is that fair?" He grinned. "So. Okay, I'll make dinner and a cake, and I'll light candles and stuff, and we'll say that we're celebrating—and hopefully the diamond will get all sparkly-like, and that's how we'll tell them," I rushed, tossing my fork into the sink.
He pulled the plate into his lap and frowned. "'Cause they won't notice it before?"
"Until dessert, no rings," I told him, and he gasped a little, clutching his hand to his heart with a wounded look. "Come on, angel, I don't want that to be the first thing that they say. Not the marriage, not the cancer—I want to say hello to everyone and, like, be with them for a bit before we heap everything on them. You know my family—we're the freaking out type."
"I don't like lying," he sighed, still holding his hand against his chest.
"We're not lying," I protested. "We're concealing something. And not even for that long—like, maybe an hour or two. Logan, please. I just want that hour to be about me and my family, not me and my cancer. 'Cause you know that really, no one is going to be that surprised that we eloped."
"That's what Kerry said," he sighed. "Okay, all right. But," he added, pointing at me, "if somehow, someone says something about us, I might not be able to keep my mouth shut. I'm no good at secrets. I get surly."
"I know you do," I laughed. "You are so silly sometimes." He glanced at his watch, and I nodded, hopping off of the counter. I reached over to grab the plate and took a step towards the sink.
That's when it hit me, hammering right into my chest, into the flat land of scarred skin, the trenches of the war I faught against this illness three years ago. I had died. I had come back. But I had died. It didn't matter how good the prognosis was this time, it didn't matter how optimistic we all were, it didn't matter that I knew so much more that I could wrap the information around my hands like boxing gloves: I had cancer. It was back.
It was in me, tarring me up as I breathed and laughed and was just Mary Anne.
I had cancer. I always had cancer—it lives inside of bodies, just dormant, and you pray that it forgets how to wake up. But mine had roared back and volcanoed into the tissue between my missing breasts. Where it loved to live. It was creeping over my torso and bunking in my lungs. It was back, it was here, it was me.
The plate tumbled out of my fingers and crackled against the tile. I wanted to break with it, but I was grabbed before my bones could meet the floor, too. Logan swung me into his body, curling me into his cool skin and lifting me high up so that my face was on his shoulder, my feet creaking against his knees.
"I have cancer," I wept, nuzzling my wet eyes against his neck.
"I know," he whispered. "I know." His fingers dove into my hair, the near-black curls that had grown back after the chemo burned away my short chestnut bob. Would I lose my hair again? What would it come back like this time?
My hair, my nails, my mouth—all of these things so ruined. They came back. Dead nerves healed, my heart grew strong enough for me to start running again: look how I came back. I could do it again. I was an extraordinary thing when I wanted to be.
But I had cancer. For the moment, it was killing me to look it in the eye. All of the flippant courage dissolved, and I let myself be held.
I pressed my hands into Logan's back. "We better go," I sighed.
"Whatever, they're always running behind," he retorted, holding me fast against his body. "We'll go when you want to, not when you feel obligated."
I smiled into the hem of his collar and didn't move for a few minutes. I wrapped my legs around his waist and just burrowed myself deep. He had been so calm about all of this, calm from the moment I told him that the cancer was back, calm when I proposed, calm when I cried after our wedding, when I realized that I could make him a widower.
"What is wrong with you?" I demanded, shoving him as he sat there on our bed, just watching me. "How can you be all zen and stuff?"
"I have you," he told me, pulling me close. "All of this crap, we can deal with it because it's you and me, pretty girl. I have you: the rest will fall into place."
"You might lose me," I shot back.
"You leave me, I'm diving right after you and wrenching you back, Mary Anne," Logan replied, narrowing his eyes. "No dying."
I started saying that now: "No dying, no dying, no dying." He rocked me back and forth to the rhythm of my promise. "No dying, no dying, no dying."
"No dying," he agreed.
"I want to be Mary Anne for so much longer," I whispered. "I just want to live my life." He stood there, holding me like the limb of his tree-like body, as the kitchen warmed over in the gold shades of the rising sun, until the two of us glowed, shining hard like we were light, too.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
We stood in front of the glass doors of Duke Hospital, pausing there in the middle of the black mat. The doors hissed open and shut, hitting together with a dull smack and then rocketing open like a mouth. Logan put his hands on my face and breathed hard into the space between us. I gripped his arms, squeezing tight into the veins that charged from his perfect hands up to his heart. His heart, my heart.
"No matter what happens from here on out, it's you and me," he promised. "You're gonna do this, and I'm gonna be there."
"I'm going to beat this," I said. "No dying."
He kept looking at me, through my eyes and into the place where I was tucking all of my doubt, all of my insecurities, and I could feel a ringing in there, the way that bells shake when they are booming all over a town. With the lightness of wings, he put his lips on mine, and I kissed him as the doors kept opening, closing, and then opening over and over again.
"Come on, angel," I sighed, putting my arm around his waist. "It's time." When we walked over the threshold, I had an odd feeling that he should carry me, the way a bride should be held as she enters her home. But we walked through, me on my own feet, holding tight against him.
When we got to the oncology wing, there were clipboards waiting. I frowned. "We filled all of these out—right?" I asked, looking at Logan.
"We filled out so many forms, they all kinda look the same," he shrugged, glancing down at the papers.
The nurse smiled at me. "It's just a bit more medical information, that's all. Oh, and Mary Anne, they have you as Bruno in their system," the nurse noted, tapping a finger on the file that said Spier. "Do you want me to change that?"
I elbowed Logan. "Yes, please."
"She hates my name," he confided. "Ignore the sob story about being the last person in the Spier family. She's a liar."
The nurse rolled her eyes at us. "Just review the information for me, please."
I sat down and checked over the forms. My medical history in its entirety. The cancer from before, the changes in my body after, the medicines, the treatments, the pains. All of it was here. I hadn't missed a thing—how could I, it was still drilled in me.
There were two new forms, one focused on my cardiac system, the other a gynecological paper. I opened up my day planner with a sigh and started filling in the dates. Heart attack on February 25, 2006, and cardiac arrest on Febrary 26, 2006. Ecocardiagrams yearly on…March 20th, March 21st, and March 30th. Yearly EKGs. No to pacemakers. No to stents in the arteries. I yanked out the small card stuffed in a pocket in the day planner cover and grabbed the GYN form. Last period, January 15th, 2006. Yes, I have had Cytoxan. Yes, I have had Tamoxifen. Yes, I am in menopause. Yes, I have had spotting within the last year: October 13th and March 15th, to be exact.
Yes, I am sexually active. No, I do not have any STDs. I sighed; there was no connection between my cancer and the HPV virus. We already knew that. These forms were boring.
I stood up and gave them back to the nurse with a shrug; when I sat back down next to Logan, he didn't look up from his book. "Are you still nervous?" I teased, touching its pages, a manual for cleaning teeth.
"Uh, yeah?" he said. Duh. "Though at least I have, like, a friend for my first patient. That's something," he said, biting his lip. "I just need to convince Coach D not to tattle on me if I, like, puncture his gums or something."
"I think the blood gushing out of his mouth would kinda belie that one, angel," I grinned.
Glaring at me, he shifted away and bent farther over his text. "You could be supportive and come to the clinic and let me clean your teeth on Monday, too."
"You practiced on me last week!" I protested.
"Yeah, but that didn't count towards my internship hours," he whined, shutting the book around his finger. "And, and, I could use the little polisher on your teeth. Isn't that thing great? It just," he balled his hand into a fist and beamed, "just really makes everything clean."
I blinked. "Sometimes, I forget how OCD you can be."
"Shut up," he snapped.
"At least you're a lot cleaner around the house," I shrugged.
"I always feel like the dorm monitor from my old boarding school is gonna come in and give me detention if there are clothes on the floor," he said with a shudder. "Haven't you ever noticed that I keep the bedroom door open? It's because we weren't allowed to have girls in our rooms unless the door was open. It's still, like, a habit."
"You know, I have noticed that!" I laughed. "We'll have to make sure that it is shut when the girls come."
"And locked," he added, nodding fiercely. I put my arm around his back and leaned into his arm, watching him trace his finger over the Universal Numbering System for the hundredth time. As if he hadn't been saying out things like, "Is it 15 that's hurting?" for years when I complained of a toothache.
Dentist's kids. They are always a little odd. I looked at him and then down at myself. Our poor kids—they were going to be neurotic, the children of a dentist and a psychologist. They would probably rebel by getting gingivitis and being completely, absolutely well-adjusted. How horrible. They were going to wish a different couple adopted them.
I reached down into my bag, my fingers brushing over the folded triangle of Barbara's flag, its Star of David shining in the light, making the clear blue of it turn slightly green, a strange snaking of its color. I tugged out my teddy bear, J.B., and held him tight. I had a boy to hold, yes, but J.B. was my partner in all of this. I could rip on him, and he would take it, my fists in his stomach, my hands wrenching at his arms. Unlike the fleshed out support I had in Logan, J.B. couldn't bleed when I ripped my fingers on his body. Unlike Logan, J.B. felt no pain. I curled around Logan and the bear and sighed. Waiting, waiting, I was always waiting with this disease.
"Spier?" a nurse called out, opening the door to the exam areas. I stood up and waited for Logan to take my hand before following her inside. Before we went into an exam room, she had me step on the scale in the hallway. I gave Logan a huge smile as I stepped up on the bouncing platform of the scale and raised my hands above my head in triumph, like a victorious boxer, as the nurse put the large stone weight on 100 and then slid the balance up to the number twelve.
"Fantastic," he gushed, giving me a high five. "I thought you had gained some weight."
"This might be the first time in the history of the world that I have seen a girl not flip when her guy says that," the nurse laughed.
I giggled as she took my height. "Oh, you don't understand," I told her. "This is what I used to weigh before…well, before I got sick the first time."
"It just took three years. Freshmen fifteen my ass," he muttered. "More like freshmen two."
"I just let you carry the load for me," I shrugged, and he slung his arm around my neck; I squeezed the hardness there, the stony feel of his forearm. That's where his freshman fifteen had gone, there and in the new rise of power in his back. He was maturing into his body, making it into a weapon, something he could wield with a fierceness on the basketball court, and it was almost odd to feel it changing under my hands. We both were growing so strong as we grew up—just different kinds of strength.
My doctor, Dr. Wilks, was standing by an exam door, smiling at us. "Congrats, you two," he said, giving me a hug. "Why wasn't I invited?"
"You, my coaches, my team, her research team, our friends, families," Logan told him, shaking his hand. "Everyone hates us, just join the club."
"We just wanted to get it done before this started," I apologized, following him into the exam room. "After graduation, we'll, like, have a huge thing, I promise, and you can come. And sit on my side of the church," I ordered with a nod.
"Oh, that was never a question," he winked. He sat down on a stool, opening my thick file on the small table jutting out of the wall. That was me, a history, stretching back years. I sat down next to my husband—husband, husband, wow, he was my husband—and watched him click his pen to life as he looked over my forms. Dr. Wilks had been my doctor ever since I got to Duke, and I had learned two things about him—first, he had an incredible poker face. I could never tell if the news was good or bad just by looking at him. On the other hand, the other thing I knew about him—and loved—was that he never prolonged my wait. He liked to get started, get things done, and get to action.
We got along well, him and me.
"So, okay, give me my pump, gimme some drugs, and let's get going," I announced. "I had a bad moment about an hour ago just thinking about the cancer, so I'm ready to kick some ass here."
Dr. Wilks scratched his nose. "Oh, Mary Anne," he sighed, spinning around to face me. "It's not that simple."
"What do you mean?" Logan asked, taking my hand. "You said that today would be so routine, it would put us to sleep. She wasn't even going to let me come—in fact, why am I here? I mean, duh, but, this wasn't supposed to be a big deal."
I dug my hand in his and clutched harder on J.B. "What's going on? Is it my heart?"
"Well, that's a concern," he said, folding his fingers into a steeple. "Mary Anne, when was the last time you saw a gynecologist?"
"Like, in the fall, when I had some spotting," I said. "I thought maybe my period was coming back, but she said that it was normal, that I was still menopausal. Why?"
I glanced at Logan. The questions about STDs. No. He'd never cheat on me, no way. He was the one who craved relationships, stability, he was the one who was the romantic, the mushball who was always planning little things for us. Senior year, I had to beat it into him that love wasn't just a doing thing, it was as simple as holding hands, meeting eyes in a room where we were talking to other people, saying I love you because it felt right on our tongues. There wasn't a perfect night or a perfect date or a perfect anything. Love was made of little things that strung together into a big thing.
Not that I didn't love flowers all the time. I had kind of gotten used to that, to the floral smell of his thoughts about me. When I thought of his scent, it was the rubber of his hands, the ginger of his shampoo, the mint on his breath, and a country of flowers that bloomed from somewhere under his skin. His love for me was deeper than all roses.
No. He would never cheat on me. He wouldn't…no.
No. But the cancer spreads. I have Li-Fraumeni Syndrome, I have a deformed BRCA-2 gene. That means my cancer loves to find the parts that are special to women, to live in breasts and ovaries and wombs.
"Oh, my God," I choked. "It spread, didn't it. It spread, I have ovarian cancer or uterine cancer, don't I. Oh, my God." It's not like those parts of me had worked in years, but still. The idea of losing that…losing another part of me like that…they'd chop all of that out, wouldn't they. They'd take it out and garbage more parts of me.
"No, Mary Anne," Dr. Wilks said. "Actually, that would almost be preferable. We could still start your treatments today if that's what it was."
Logan frowned, shifting his arm tight around me. "I don't get it."
"We can't start chemo today," Dr. Wilks stated. "We can't do anything today, Mary Anne."
"Why not?" I breathed.
He stared at Logan and then at me. "You're pregnant."