Where the River Ends (26 page)

37

T
wo years passed. Abbie’s health became tidal—it ebbed and flowed. A tug-of-war between chemo and cancer with her caught up in the middle. Some days she could get out of bed, maybe once a week I’d push her down the Battery in her chair, but for the most part, she was bed-or couch-ridden and withering away in front of me.

Somewhere in here, it struck me—the truth in all this. Normal cells have automatic self-destruct buttons that they punch after they’ve served their purpose. They live, do what they were made to do, then pull the cord. Suicide is expected. At the end of the day, cancer is nothing more than a cell or group of cells that refuse to die. And to make matters worse, cancer cells are not foreign. It’s not like they come from somewhere else. Our bodies make the very thing that kills us.

I have a difficult time with the logic in all of this.

It’s strange. I know my wife has cancer because they told me, but I’ve never actually seen it. Never touched it. I don’t have any real connection to it other than it’s killing my wife.

Cancer hurts beyond the pain. It is a cycle of diagnosis, prognosis and scan. We live not paycheck to paycheck, but scan to scan. Every time we stand in the doctor’s office and hear the scan results, we think, It’s getting bigger and I can’t do a single thing about it.

That may be the single worst feeling in the world.

Any positive report is tempered by our experience, and the knowledge that no matter what the doctors do, we will always believe there are still cancer cells in her body. We feel as though we’re always just one scan away from hearing the word
metastatic,
which is often followed by,
I’m going to miss you.

Riddled with fear, sadness and stress, our imaginations run wild like they did when we were kids and the monsters camped out in the closets. What’s worse, we listen like Captain Hook, haunted by the ticking of the clock. Cancer-free moments are the exception, not the norm. We have progressed from beating it, to living with it…to just living. I have become more defensive in posture, building walls to insulate us from the bad news. Because there’s always more. Life and death are always on our mind. Idle thinking is no longer idle. I wanted so badly to think in future tense, to talk about summer movies, buy two tickets to the next Superbowl, plant a garden, put off something, schedule an appointment to get her teeth cleaned, plan a vacation, but then would find myself standing in the produce aisle and asking myself, Should I buy green bananas?

If there is one plus, it is this: For someone with cancer, life is more real. They
feel
more. It’s like having the senses of a blind and deaf man and yet you can hear and see just fine. Abbie says it’s like the difference between a six-inch black-and-white TV and an IMAX.

38

JUNE 8, EVENING

A
t 10 p.m., I woke Abbie and fed her some eggs, an RC cola and a Kit Kat—her favorite. “You feel like getting up?”

“Foooooor you?” The slurring struck me, pile-driving my spine down into the earth. “Yyyyyeeeeessss.” Her eyes were glassy and swimming around the room. She too heard the slurring. She pressed her forehead to mine. “I’mmmm sorrrry.” She pressed a finger to her mouth in an effort to shut herself up.

“Come on.” I helped her stand and held on to her while the blood rushed to her head. “I’ve got a surprise for you.”

We walked down Bob’s dirt trail to the airplane hangar. He rolled out the bike and I straddled it. It was an older Honda 250cc. He said, “You know how to ride these things?”

“I didn’t always paint.”

“Good. Third gear sticks, so pull hard.”

I cranked it, and gave it some gas. It backfired, spat white smoke out the muffler, then quieted and purred. He thumbed off the choke. “Give her a minute and she’ll warm up.” Abbie threw a leg over, pressed her chest to my back and leaned on me, wrapping her arms around my waist.

She whispered, “I’m wiiiiith yewww.”

The clock was ticking.

I patted her on the thigh, eased off the clutch and followed Bob’s taillight through the night. We swerved through soft sand down dirt roads, crossed a hard road and then down a wider dirt road that was lined with a ditch on either side. The lights of the Ferris wheel turned counterclockwise across the treetops in the distance. We came through a tall stand of old pines, probably thirty-plus years old and then turned right, into a grass lot where most of the grass had been replaced with mud. Four-wheel-drive trucks sitting on top of mud tires that were four feet tall, bookended by chest-high bumpers and capped with silver roll bars, dominated the parking lot. Most were circled by kids holding a cigarette in one hand and an aluminum can or spit cup in the other.

The carnival was closed but either nobody had bothered tell the kids or they didn’t really care. We rode around the trucks, through the gate and down a long row of booths vacant of people.

Trash, most of which had been heeled into the ground, was strewn from one end to the other. It reminded me of Templeton in
Charlotte’s Web.

We rounded a corner, Bob stopped and leaned his bike against the side of a trailer. A short, squatty man with little beady eyes and a hat that covered most of his face walked out of the shadows next to the carousel. I heeled down the kickstand while Bob helped Abbie slide off the seat. Bob might be gruff, may even tend to push people away with his callous exterior, but there was a deep tenderness about him. Abbie felt it, too. She leaned on him while she caught her balance.

Bob spoke to the little man in Spanish. When he finished, the man looked around Bob, tilted his hat back and waved us closer. “You want to ride my carousel?” His Mexican accent was thick.

“Yes.”

He extended his hand.
“Mi llamo es Gomez.”

“Doss. And my wife, Abbie.”

Behind him stood what looked like a very old carousel. He waved his hand across it. “Dentzel, 1927. My pride and joy. Two rows, forty horses.” He flicked a switch behind him and ten thousand lightbulbs lit half the county around us. He stood aside and waved at his horses, “Take your pick.”

Abbie looped her arm in mine and we shuffled like an old married couple toward the horses. Her steps were slower, shorter, more uncertain. Her heels dragged the ground. I helped her up the steps, and she walked between the horses. Each horse’s name had been painted across its saddle:
Fancy, Dreamer, Spicy, Flame, Untouched, Wild Angel, El Camino.
Abbie walked alongside each, stroking their wooden manes. She ran her hands along the windswept tails, the thick manes, then grasped the pole that connected their head to the ceiling and the feet to the floor. Finally, she chose Windswept.

The horse had no stirrup, so I formed one with my hand. Fortunately, Windswept had ended his last ride closer to the floor than the ceiling. Abbie swung her leg over and I lifted her into the saddle. She sat gently, one hand on the neck and mane, and one hand on me. I stood alongside and nodded to Gomez. He thumbed his cigarette, pushed a button and the music started. The he slowly palmed a lever forward and we began the slow circle.

Windswept slid up and down, lifting Abbie closer to the ceiling, then lower toward the floor. Gomez watched, slowly increasing our speed to match that of the music. Abbie closed her eyes, and leaned on the pole that raised and lowered her horse. We rode around ten, eleven, then twelve times. After the twelfth pass, Abbie said, “Uh-oh.” She picked her head up off the pole, turned past me, and spewed eggs, RC cola and Kit Kat in a long arc across the walkway that circled the carousel. I braced her as she lurched to one side, trying not to soil the man’s carousel. He slowed us quickly, cutting off the music and the spinning horses. He jumped onto the platform and stood next to me. “
Señor,
I am sorry.”

I shook my head. My hands were wrapped around Abbie’s stomach, which told me a second wave was coming. When it did, she let go of the pole and slid off the saddle. I caught her and held her while she heaved over the edge.

Eyes closed, she spat. Her forehead sparkled with sweat. She wiped her mouth and said, “Ferrrrgottttt how dizzzzzzzy these…make mmmme.”

I turned back toward Gomez. “If you’ll show me where I can get a hose or a mop, I’ll clean up.”

He waved me off. “No, no. Me do. I do every night. No problem.” Abbie straightened, some color returned to her face and Gomez pointed to the Ferris wheel. “Please. You ride? Much slower. No dizzy.”

“Sir, I’m not sure she’s—”

Abbie spoke up, “I’m okay.”

He opened the small iron gate and we sat in the seat of the Ferris wheel. He whispered to me, “Very slowly.”

Abbie leaned against me as the wheel lifted us higher. It was a tall wheel. Much larger than it looked from a distance. When we got to three o’clock we cleared the treetops. When we reached the top, he stopped the wheel. I looked down and he gave me the thumbs-up along with a shrug.

I returned his thumbs-up. Abbie opened her eyes and wrapped her arms across me. “Sorrrrry aaaabout that.”

The night was clear. Above us, ten trillion stars lit the universe. The moon, half full, shone like a spotlight. The oblong shadow of the Ferris wheel laid out across the ground like a giant clock face with us sitting at the stroke of midnight. In the distance, the river snaked out of the trees—dross from the silversmith’s ladle.

Abbie laid her palm across my chest. “Howwww far?”

“As a crow flies, almost thirty to Cedar Point. As the river flows, forty-five plus.”

She held up her hand and starting counting to herself. “We’ve checked off…six.”

After a few minutes, she pointed behind us at a growing mass of clouds that spread from one end of the horizon to the other. Then she turned and pointed at the lights of St. Marys shining in the distance, and the river that flowed into her. “I wish we could finnnnish.”

I nodded. It was all I could do. Everything else hurt. The words came hard. “I wish I could take your place.”

39

E
arly in this entire process, Abbie tested positive for an ugly little gene called VBRCA-1. The presence of the gene meant she had a really good chance of also developing ovarian cancer. The problem, or one of the problems, with ovarian cancer is that there is no good or effective screening for it so it’s difficult to know that you have it until it’s too late. By the time you present symptoms, the cancer is usually stage four, which is metastatic. The best defense against it is the prophylactic removal of the ovaries. This came as a bit of a blow. Our remaining option was in vitro, so the doctors stimulated ovulation, forcing Abbie’s body to produce several eggs which they harvested and quickly froze. Then, with the casual demure of sipping a Starbucks and nibbling on a bear claw, they cut out her ovaries and pitched them.

Because they planned to dump enough poison into her system to kill the abnormal cells, they also ran the risk of compromising her bone marrow. The marrow produces white blood cells that fight infection that occurs when your body is weak—like after chemotherapy. If you’re starting to think that fighting cancer is a lot like a dog chasing its tail, you’d be right. To increase her chances, doctors harvested Abbie’s own marrow in preparation for what’s called an autologous bone marrow transplant. The marrow held in reserve would enable Abbie’s doctors to treat her disease as aggressively as they could—giving them unlimited license to pummel her with every treatment at their fingertips.

Given the choice of the possibility of life or the guarantee of a slow painful death, we chose the pummeling. And the evening after her third surgery—the removal of her own marrow—we watched Reese Witherspoon in
Sweet Home Alabama
on my laptop in the hospital.

They had intended to be aggressive and they were. The chemo wiped her out again, annihilating her white blood count. Doctors quickly recommended the bone marrow transplant. After her fourth surgery—putting the marrow back in—she was laid up about a month. We were living at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville. Abbie had a room in the recovery ward while I had a small one-room in what they call the family wing. It’s an apartment complex built by Mayo for the family members of those in treatment. It was a pretty close-knit community and everybody was on a first-name basis. We’d eat together, share stories and compare diagnoses and suggested treatments. Abbie was exhausted and usually fell asleep about 6 p.m., so most nights, I ate by myself. I’d stay with her until her eyes started rolling back and forth behind her eyelids, then I’d walk over to the cafeteria or go for a drive and find some dinner.

It was a lonely time.

I’d had about all the cafeteria food I could handle, so I walked across the parking lot to the Jeep and started to get in.

Another couple in the community was Heather and John Mancini. He was a feisty Italian, she a fiery redhead. Heather and I had met in the cafeteria one Saturday during lunch about three months ago. I was just starting a Clive Cussler novel and she sat at my table. She eyed the novel. “You a Cussler fan?”

“Yeah…only one Clive.”

She reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out a paperback. “I’m a Patterson person myself.”

I shuddered. “He gives me the creeps. I can’t read him without making sure all the doors and windows are locked tight and that some firearm is loaded and within arm’s reach.”

She laughed, we talked and I never made it to the second page.

Heather was a stewardess for a major airline and, like me, spent a lot of time alone. After John had been diagnosed and they saw that he’d be spending a lot of time at Mayo, she asked that her hub of origination be moved to Jacksonville so she could spend her nonworking time with John. John was not responding well to treatment, so I did what I could to cheer her up. Which brings up another thing. You play this treatment game long enough and, sometimes, there’s just not much that can cheer you up. Sometimes, you just need someone to listen to how bad the situation really is, nod their head so you know that they’ve heard you and that’s it. Nothing more. We all know there’s no magic wand. If there was, we’d be passing it around like a group of high-schoolers with a case of stolen beer.

So there I stood, getting in our Jeep when I heard somebody call my name. I knew who it was before I turned around. Heather waved. She said, “I think I’ve had about all the light blue walls and hollow metal tubes that I can handle.”

“Yeah,” I said, scratching my head, “me too. The walls, that is.”

Her red skirt matched her hair, which had been pulled back in that I’m-grown-up-but-still-a-kid-at-heart style. She pointed toward the treatment center. “John’s sleeping. How ’bout you let me buy you some dinner?”

“Sure.”

So, with my wife fighting for her life, I drove some strange woman, whose white oxford had been unbuttoned down to the third button, to the beach and strolled Third Street in search of a place to eat. We landed on Pete’s. Glad to be out of the compound, we sat through seven innings of a Red Sox baseball game and one period of a hockey match. Somewhere during dinner, another button slipped through its hole and her skirt climbed halfway up her thigh. With every sip, it climbed further. It didn’t hit me until halfway through my third beer that people don’t visit hospitals dressed like that. Admittedly, I can be a little slow on the uptake.

We ate hot wings until the snot dripped out of our noses and drank enough beer to numb the hot sauce on our lips. To walk off the buzz, we strolled down the boardwalk next to the beach and told each other how we’d met our respective spouses. I didn’t realize until we were headed back, walking up the beach, that she held her shoes in one hand and had her other looped through mine. I told myself, It’s just the sand. It’s too soft. Right?

We walked to the Waffle House and downed a pot of coffee. It was nearly midnight by the time we got back.

We stepped onto the elevator, the door shut and without a word or a moment’s notice, she pressed me into the corner. It had been a long time since anyone but my wife had kissed me. The little guy on my right shoulder sounded with the measured cadence of an ESPN commentator, “He might go all the way!” Both his arms shot into the air like an end-zone referee. “Score!” And the little guy on my left shoulder was standing there quiet as a church mouse. In his hand he held the picture of my Abbie that I kept in my wallet.

I tried to wriggle free and feed some oxygen to my brain, but that was not in her plan. When the elevator bell signaled the fifth floor and the doors slid open, she stepped through and, as she did, she reached up with her right hand and began unconsciously twirling the hair at the base of her neck. When she turned, an inviting smile had creased her face.

I watched her loop her finger through the thin, short hair behind her ear, then straighten it and let it go. She never should’ve done it.

It wasn’t the kiss, or her leg that she had wrapped around mine as the elevator lifted off, or even the pressure of her chest, taut stomach and narrow hips against mine. No, it was that finger twirling the hair at the base of her neck. And in that split second, her spell had broken. Like crystal on a marble floor, slivers shattered everywhere. Abbie, who’d taught me how to love, used to twirl the hair at the base of her neck as she stood at the sink cleaning dishes or standing in the shower while the hot water poured down her back or while she studied one of my paintings. It was a telltale sign that she was thinking.

In truth, I don’t know much about women, but I knew better than to get off that elevator. Inexperienced? Yes. Stupid? Not yet. Tempted? Just a little. My decision not to get off that elevator was a combination of knowing better and just plain cowardice. I placed my hand across the sensor that held the doors open and watched her walk backward toward her room. She had already unbuttoned and untucked her shirt and was dangling the room key in front of me.

Between treatment and exhaustion, cancer had robbed me and Abbie of any real physical relationship whatsoever. That’s not to say Abbie was ever unkind. She wasn’t. She did what she could, but there came a point at which my physical need had to take a backseat to her need to not be in pain—to be left alone. I stood in the elevator watching Heather undress in front of me. She backed up to her apartment doorway and by the time she slid her key in the door, her skirt had fallen to the floor. And whereas for the last six months my wife had worn granny-panties designed to hold the adult pad that assisted in the loss of bladder control, Heather had no such problem. The white lace thong was proof of this.

The little guy on my right shoulder had changed his tune. Instead of screaming, he was whispering. “Go ahead. No one will ever know.” Quiet man on my left shoulder hadn’t changed one bit. He simply stood, holding that wrinkled and faded picture and tapping his foot.

Love might leave, but the memory of its touch and the hope of its return doesn’t. Ever. It’s like that street in Hollywood where all the stars press their hands in the wet concrete. Abbie had long ago pressed her imprint into my heart. There on that elevator, Heather tried to place her hand into the dried form but it wouldn’t fit.

I shook my head. “Heather, I…” What could I say? Abbie had long ago taught me that people wear their inside hurts on their outside self. Heather was no different—a beautiful girl, a good heart. Even a tender heart. How else does someone survive as a stewardess? Think about it. She served pretzels and Diet Cokes, handed out pillows and blankets and offered connection information to cranky air travelers, day after day after day. Compound that with John’s decline and she lived in a bleak present with the prospects of a dismal future. All that hurt had to go somewhere. I’m not excusing her, and I’m not blaming her. It is what it was. For my part, I didn’t see it until it was too late.

I took a deep breath, pushed the button for the seventh floor and watched her roll the sides of her thong off her hips. I rode the two floors to my room wishing I could pull that cool steel out of my back and turn it on my demons, but I’m no King Arthur. I unlocked the door and tied on my running shoes while the phone rang off the hook.

Running had become my narcotic. There were times that I would have preferred something more passive like scotch or bourbon, but I’d never developed a taste for it. Running had become my escape.

I usually ran between three and seven miles. Any less and I don’t feel like I’ve run. Any more and my knees start aching. I climbed downstairs to the fitness room, jumped on the treadmill, set it for an eight-minute pace and tried to run that lace out of my mind.

Given that my mom had died and I was more or less raised by the people who populated my trailer park, I didn’t have much of a fatherly role model. Hence, knowing how to treat a woman was something Abbie alone had taught me. The instincts were there, but Abbie had honed them. The way a man speaks to a woman who’s alone in a parking lot after locking her keys in her car, the way he holds the door for an older lady with an armful of groceries, the way he asks a question of a female police officer, the way he stops to pick up the movie ticket that the college co-ed dropped, the way he orders for his date, the way he walks her up the sidewalk fifteen minutes before her curfew because he knew her dad was counting the minutes, the way he asks her father’s permission to drive her to the lake on Saturday for a day of skiing—the way a man treats a woman is intangible. It is like a baton in a relay race—handed off and given from one to another. Abbie passed that baton to me. My learning curve with girls had been steep and mistake-riddled, but until that moment, not regret-laden.

After an hour, the treadmill had done little good so I hopped off, ran out to the parking lot, took a right turn on San Pablo and ran under J. Turner Butler Boulevard. A half mile later, I crept around a security gate and snuck out onto the golf course of a private club commonly referred to as “Pablo.” Pablo Creek is one of the more exclusive and less well-known golf clubs in the country. Membership is capped at two hundred and fifty, and if you have to ask about the initiation fee, you can’t afford it. The course makes the Masters course look like kiddie Putt-Putt. I ran all eighteen holes beneath the moonlight. About 3 a.m., I hobbled back to the clinic and walked straight to Abbie’s room.

The pain of her transplant was rather intense, so most nights, they gave her a sedative. Basically, it forced her into a twelve-to fourteen-hour coma—which was good. That meant she only hurt half the day.

I walked into the room, took one look at my wife and felt the pang of dinner at the beach. She was deep in sleep, eyes rolling back and forth behind her lids. Sweat caked across me, I rolled the silver stool up next to the bed, slid my hand beneath Abbie’s and started at the beginning. I told her about the parking lot, how Heather had been dressed, Pete’s, the buttons and skirt, then the beach and, finally, the elevator. Then I told her I was sorry and that I loved her.

It was little consolation.

I walked back to the apartment building, climbed seven floors to my room and stood in the shower nearly an hour. Daylight was breaking through my windows when I walked out of the bathroom wearing a towel. I cracked the blinds, staring out over the marsh and the Intracoastal Waterway, and that’s when a lump between my sheets moved. I turned on the light, and Heather sat up in my bed.