Assignment: Write about J.

Before the doctor has finished speaking to me from her position crouched down in front of my chair, I find myself cataloguing the scene away in case I need it later, some sort of marker as the first time I knew something was wrong.

The scene: a waiting room. I am alone in it, because the surgery has gone an hour and a half longer than the expected twenty minutes and the desk is closing up. There was an older man and, before that, a much older woman in a wheelchair, both of whom looked like hospital patients, but now it’s just me and the doctor, whose words I can examine and consider but which at this point make little sense. Modern Bride is still open across my lap. The door opens and his surgeon strides out and kneels in front of me and before I can orient myself begins to explain that she couldn’t go through with the surgery because the tumor was too deep. They hadn’t expected this, she says. She describes how she had tried for nearly an hour, making sure they had made an incision in the correct place – two hours earlier, I had watched them draw on his skin with a purple marker designed specifically for writing on skin, and he and I had laughed at that – and asking him to shift positions and move his arm around. She explains that she had tried to take a needle biopsy, shooting blindly from above the muscle, and that when she did he bled. Her hands gesture rather emptily, and I focus on them as she explains this could mean the growth has become highly vascularized.

“So,” she says, meeting my eyes, “It’s a little more serious than we originally thought, and we’ll have to be a bit more aggressive than we expected.”

She explains the next step – a follow-up with an orthopedic surgeon – and I’m stuck thinking about the night this past October when it was just dark out and I was walking to my car alone after class on the phone and he was telling me, his voice measured and disciplined, that the lump they had found in his stepmother’s breast was not a benign calcification but was cancer. After I hung up I still had a block to go and I spent it wondering if I would need to remember the night as the first time I realized she might die.

When the doctor walks away I close my eyes to stop the deluge of arguably unjustified tears from spilling out. I close Modern Bride and breathe into cupped hands and practice a smile and jokes I will make until I’m allowed to go in and see him. He is swallowed by a thin billowy gown and cap and he’s sitting, and at first all I see are his eyes, huge. The nurse gives him juice and graham crackers – he hasn’t eaten all day – and I hold his cup when he’s not drinking out of it. When the nurse leaves I rummage around the drawers for more crackers. He must still be hungry.

“I’m fine,” he says. “Really, I’m not that hungry.”

“How’s it feel?”

“It’s starting to hurt.”

“A lot? Is the anesthesia wearing off?”

“The doctor said to take vicodin before it starts to hurt,” he says. “How long you think it’ll take to fill the prescription? Twenty minutes? Half an hour?”

“Ask for one now,” I say. “As soon as the nurse comes back, tell her you need one now.”

“I don’t know if I’m supposed to wait for the prescription,” he says.

I bristle. “No,” I say. “You tell them it’s hurting now and that they need to get you one now.”

When he’s changed back into his own clothes and is filling his prescription I escape to the bathroom and lean against the wall and shut my eyes tightly. I’ll let myself cry when I’m alone, but not yet.

At home I drop him off and promise to go buy dinner for him, even though he says it isn’t necessary. I want to. When I drive away I expect to let go, at last, but I can’t and my eyes stay dry.

I buy him dinner, gyros from his favorite restaurant. I stop by my friends’ house so I have someone to tell the news. When I repeat everything the doctor told me it’s easy to stay far away from what I’m saying, to neutralize the language the way it was for me: the body, not his body. They pray with me and I feel pricks of tears but nothing happens. I bring his dinner back to him. Walking up three easy flights of stairs to his apartment my heart begins to thud so hard I think I might go into cardiac arrest and when I open his door and he hugs me tightly and thanks me for the food, I’m gasping for breath and he stares at me, concerned, and we go outside and take deep breaths together until I feel better.

In my own apartment that night, I email my best friends to tell them. After that I check my email religiously every hour or so, waiting for them to respond. They don’t for a little while, a few days, and I know it’s not quite fair but in the time before that I’m hurt. I don’t think they understand that I need something from them – just something really small, an Oh Wow or a Are You Okay or even something less than that. I’ve unconsciously decided to need small things that can be fulfilled easily – an email back, a text message, a brief conversation – because I think it will distract me. It does, a little bit.

At night as I’m trying – and failing – to sleep I wonder if I will become one of those women who drop to the floor and keel back and forth and hide their faces in their skirts, moaning with grief. I can’t imagine myself there.

Two days later we talk about death, a hot afternoon when we’re lying on my couch together. He says he’s not worried. I nestle into the space he makes with his body and let myself feel safe there for a moment before I ask, “Not worried that anything’s wrong, or you do think something’s wrong but it doesn’t worry you?”

“The second,” he says after a while. I can feel him smile, and he pinches me. “I can handle chemo,” he says. “My body can own that junk.” He has always been proud of his ability to stay healthy. In the three years I’ve known him I have had an ulcer, the stomach flu, countless colds, several severe migraines, a heart infection and multiple other vague illnesses and he has never once been sick.

“So,” he says, and shifts so that he’s facing me, “What if it’s malignant?”

“What do you mean, what if?”

“What happens?”

“What happens with what?”

“What happens with us?” he asks.

“What do you mean what happens with us?”

“Well, what happens?”

“Are you asking if I’m going to like … leave you, or something?”

“No,” he says. “Will you marry me? If I’m malignant?” He pushes his lower lip out and looks up at me through his lashes.

I laugh. It’s easier. “If it’s terminal.”

“Nooooo,” he says. “Marry me anyway.”

I place a quiet kiss on his forehead. I would, of course, and he knows it. Two days before the hospital I was in Colorado for one of my best friends’ wedding and the whole trip back home I was substituting him and myself in as the bride and groom.

Later that night we’re with friends, seven or eight of us sprawled across assorted couches and chairs, voices carrying over each other. The topic turns to marriage and everyone expects that we’ll be the first. We smile at each other and he reaches over and squeezes my hand, and, when no one’s looking, blows me a tiny little kiss. I want to keep him. I want him to be around forever or at least as long as I am. I don’t want to need the afternoon in the hospital.

I smile back, and rejoin the conversation seamlessly, but inside I’m really, really scared. Already I can hardly remember what it was like to not think about this every moment, and I can't imagine where we're going to go from here.