She had gone to her doctor alone because she did not want to worry me before she knew anything definite. The blood work came back wrong. The biopsy came back worse.
Lymphoma, she said. Aggressive. But treatable.
She said the word treatable the way someone says the single thing they have been holding onto with both hands through a long and frightening passage of time.
I sat in the lamplight and felt something hollow open in the center of me. I looked at the dressing on her skin, at the long sleeves still folded on the chair, at the shadows under her eyes that I had seen every day for six weeks and not understood. Everything I had spent the day constructing rearranged itself in front of me. Every piece of evidence, taken apart and laid out again, pointed at something I had refused to consider because I had been moving too fast in the other direction.
Why didn’t you tell me.
It came out harder than I meant it to. Pain has a way of borrowing the voice of accusation without asking permission.
She looked at me for a long moment. What was in her face was not guilt. It was the exhaustion of someone who has been carrying fear alone for a month and a half and has finally set it down in the most complicated possible circumstances.
