All You Could Ask For: A Novel (39 page)

The last time I heard from her was three days ago. She has taken to sending me notes from the tops of mountains, mostly in the Maroon Bells, which is part of the Elk Range, where there are six peaks known as “Fourteeners,” which means fourteen thousand feet of elevation. After she told me about making the first hike of that sort, I asked Dr. Z if it was all right for her to be in such elevation.

“Have you ever heard her happier than she is up there?” he asked me.

I had not.

“Then there is no better place in the world she could be,” he said.

That made sense to me, and so I am always thrilled when an e-mail comes in from her and the message says it was sent nineteen hours ago. That means she was in a place too close to the sky for cellular service. And Stephen, bless him, is always by her side. They always attach a photo, and each time their choice in hats seems to have become more and more outrageous. And, always, there is the dog at their feet.

So that’s where she is now, and I’m here in her home in the Hamptons. She has ceaselessly encouraged me to spend my weekends out here but this is the first time I have taken her up on it; there has just been too much to do in the city. But when I awoke this morning and smelled the salt in the air, it took me back, in a way that only the sense of smell is able, to Hawaii, and I thought to myself: I need to be here more. I need to ride my bicycle out here in this air, and run on the beach, and swim, when the ocean gets a little warmer. Maybe I’ll do another triathlon next year. I could set aside some time to train. That would feel great. I feel good now, but I could feel even better and that would be the way.

Maurice drove us out. He continues working for Katherine, at full salary, and I suspect he always will. They love each other, those two, and there is no doubt he misses her more than I do and he hears from her more often as well. In the meantime, he drives me around the city when I need him, which isn’t often, and looks after the house. It is easy to understand why Katherine leaned on him over the years as she did: he has an air of serenity that is soothing on even the longest days.

And so that is pretty much the story up to now. It is difficult to say for sure where it will go from here. Right now I need to go. I hear Andrew rustling upstairs. He sleeps a lot later than I do. I think I’ll run upstairs and jump into bed with him before he wakes up too much. This is our first weekend together in a while and I’ve missed him. Usually he sneaks into the city for dinner with me or I race up to Connecticut to see him. It isn’t ideal but such is life; he’s busy, I’m busy, you know how it can be. We’re having a good time. Brooke is apoplectic we aren’t talking about getting married. Actually, her disapproval is one of my favorite things; it adds an air of danger and naughtiness to the relationship, which it really doesn’t deserve. I like him a lot. I think I might even love him, but for the moment liking him is working just fine.

From: Katherine Emerson

To: Dr. Gray

Sent: Tuesday, April 11, 2012

6:02:07
A.M.

Greetings from the top of the world!

Get a load of this picture Stephen just took of me as the sun first peeked over the horizon. It is about the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. That lump behind me is Florence. Cute, isn’t she?

I had to write immediately to tell you, even though I have no idea when this will actually make it to you, that I have finally figured it out and I wanted you to be the first to know. You challenged me, before I came here the first time, to discover what makes life worth living. And I thought I did. I thought what makes life worth living is all the wonderful things that might happen. I could tell you weren’t crazy about that answer when I came home, and now I know why. I realize I was wrong. I realized it just now as I felt the sun brush my cheek.

So here it is.

What makes life worth living is not anything that might happen. It is what is happening right now. It is
this
moment, which I own every bit as much as anyone else. It doesn’t matter how many moments I have left; all that matters is right now I am as alive as I have ever been and as alive as anyone else, and this moment belongs to me as much as it does to anyone. And that’s what it’s about, whether you have cancer or not. What makes life worth living is what is happening right now.

Not yesterday, not tomorrow, right now.

I hope you’re proud of me, and I hope you’ll come soon for a visit. Right now I need to go. Stephen just finished cooking breakfast and we have a tight schedule if we’re going to make it down in time for our massage appointments. Give my love to New York, and if anyone should ask how I’m doing, tell them I’m having the best day of my entire life.

NIKKI WAS A MONTH shy of two when we met and she’s twelve now, so the math is easy to do. It was the first day of nursery school and Stacy and I were there with Nikki, and Heidi and Adam were there with Walker. Stacy and Heidi were both hugely pregnant, and as hugely pregnant women often tend to do in crowded places, they found each other. A few months later Heidi had Georgia and Stacy had Stevie, and after that what we had was a whole lot of fun together.

No one was more fun than Heidi was. Especially on skis. Heidi was as beautiful a skier as I have ever seen. And she was delightfully patient with me, even though I could barely keep up with her. My favorite memory of Heidi on skis was the time she implored me to ski faster by suggesting I chase her down the mountain as though I were James Bond and she a beautiful villain. I went after her as best I could, and any time I got close I could hear she was humming the James Bond theme as loudly as she could. It was so much fun.

I told that story at her memorial service.

If you, like I, believe there must be some justice in the universe, then you would have struggled as much as I did with what happened to Heidi. One day she was a wonderfully healthy, happy, sexy, outdoorsy, soccer-coaching mom and wife, the next day she had a pain in her back. By the time they figured out it was cancer that began in her breast and spread to her bones there was almost nothing they could do. When it spread to her brain, it was over. She died September 30th, 2009.

At the service held to celebrate her memory, before I told the James Bond story, I was sitting two rows behind Walker and Georgia and Adam and I was the angriest I can ever remember being. I had never witnessed anything that felt like more of an injustice. And then I sat and listened to the reading of what sounded like letters but I later found out were internet posts written by women whose names I did not know. They were some of the most emotional passages I had ever heard; they spoke of Heidi as though she had been their sister. But Heidi didn’t have a sister. By the end of the night, I wasn’t as angry anymore.

We were in the kitchen, Stacy and I, a few days later when I remembered those words and I asked who had written them. That was when Stacy told me that Heidi, during her illness, had developed these incredibly intense relationships with a group of women from a cancer support website, women she called her “breast friends.” She died without ever actually meeting any of them, but they loved her and cried for her and wrote of her, again, like she was their sister. Which, in a way, I suppose she was.

So that is where this book came from, and that is who it is for. It is for Adam and Walker and Georgia, and Bobby and Natalie and Bob Sr. and Carole, and all the rest of Heidi’s family. And it is for all the other husbands and sons and daughters and brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers living with holes in their lives that will never be filled. And, most of all, it is for Heidi. If there is any justice in the universe, we will ski with her again someday.

There are always people without whom a book
would
not have been written. In this case, however, there are several without whom the book
could
not have been written, beginning with Jacques de Spoelberch, my literary agent, golf companion, and friend. A month or so after I began to write, I awoke one morning in a cold sweat, convinced I was wasting my time. I sent what I had written to Jacques, with instructions not to spare my feelings. I asked him to tell this sportscaster he had no business trying to write a novel in three distinct female voices. To my astonishment, he called the next day and said: “Mike, I think you have it, keep going.” That was the beginning. And every day, from that one until this, he has been a tireless champion of this project and of Heidi’s Angels. Jacques is the best friend and agent you could ever ask for, and Lou Oppenheim of Headline Media Management and Peter Benedek from United Talent Agency are exactly the sort of agents you dream of having, the kind who care more about your happiness than anything else. I am very lucky to have Jacques, Lou, and Peter on my side.

This book could also not have been written without Dr. Richard Zelkowitz from the Whittingham Cancer Center in Norwalk, Connecticut; he was Heidi’s doctor. The last months of Heidi’s life were difficult, but Dr. Z made them better, as much better as they could possibly be. He is a doctor in the way we all imagine we want our doctors to be; he treats his patients the way he would treat his family. When I began to write I knew I needed Dr. Z to help me get the medical parts right. Anything I did get right is thanks to him.

This book next found its way to the hands of a yoga instructor named Sarah McGrath and an artist named Elaine de Spoelberch, who, along with my wife, Stacy, read it when I was halfway through and showed me all the parts I had gotten wrong. Elaine told me: “Forget the men; I want to read about the women.” And Sarah, quite bluntly, told me that no twenty-eight-year-old woman would use the word “blouse.” They also wrote the ending for me with their ideas, even if they didn’t mean to. I adore them both; thank you, ladies.

As for Kate Nintzel from William Morrow, there aren’t words. Or, if there are, I don’t know them. From the instant we met she understood what this book meant to me and she knew how to make it the best it could be. You can’t do a job any better than Kate edited this novel, and you can’t do it with a cheerier disposition, either. Thank you, Kate, you are the reason this happened.

Thanks, too, to Richard Koenigsberg of Spielman Koenigsberg & Parker, Mark and Jason Bradburn of Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, and Michael Prevett of the Gotham Group for their valued counsel, assistance, and friendship.

I would like to thank my colleagues at ESPN, all of whom work so hard to support the V Foundation, and especially my partner of fourteen years, Mike Golic, who has taught me more than he’ll ever know. I am very proud to have had the seat next to Mike’s for all these years, and forever proud to have the letters ESPN attached to my name.

Finally, I should explain that I invented the phrase “Heidi’s Angels” with no celestial connotation in mind. The nickname was derived from the show Charlie’s Angels and Heidi loved it. I used it to describe the three friends who came together for her in a way I had never seen before and would never have believed possible had I not seen it for myself. The unconditional love these women demonstrated was worth writing a book about. This is not that book, I couldn’t write that book. All I can say is that I will live the rest of my life in awe of the way three women rallied around their friend and never wavered, no matter how hard it became. And so, again, this book is dedicated to them, and to all the other angels everywhere.

MIKE GREENBERG
is cohost of ESPN’s
Mike & Mike in the Morning
and the author of two previous
New York Times
bestsellers. He is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and a native of New York City. He lives with his wife, Stacy, and their two children in Connecticut. In conjunction with the release of this book, Mike and Stacy have created a foundation called Heidi’s Angels, through which all of the author’s profits from the sale of this book will be donated to The V Foundation for Cancer Research to combat breast cancer.

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Author photograph by Pamela Einarsen

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

ALL YOU COULD ASK FOR
. Copyright © 2013 by Mike Greenberg. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.