“How are you holding up?” Ali asked.
“All right, I guess,” Bree said. “Things are pretty tough, but I’m glad I can be here to help. Howie’s taking it real hard.”
Howie had always struck Ali as a bit of a prig, but he was a lot easier to tolerate than Reenie’s first husband, Sam Turpin, had been. Besides, where was it written that friends had to like their friends’ husbands? Truth be known, Ali’s own husband didn’t care for Reenie or Howie much, either, referring to them as “nobodies from Podunk, Arizona.” Ali supposed that made things even.
“I’m glad you’re there, too,” Ali said. “It sounds like Howie needs all the help he can get.”
During the phone call, Ali had made her way through the house and settled into her favorite chair-the oversized one. The soft brown leather was smooth and buttery against her bare skin. It was also solid and substantial.
Looking for comfort-for someone to tell about Reenie, for someone who would sympathize and tell her how awful it was to lose a friend-Ali dialed Paul’s cell phone, but he didn’t answer. She tried to remember exactly where he was scheduled to go on this trip, but with him doing most of his travel by corporate jet these days, it was hard to keep track. Since it was late Sunday afternoon, however, she could be relatively sure that wherever he was, he was out playing golf. Wherever Paul went, so did his Pings, and once on a golf course, Paul made it a practice-a religion almost-not to take calls, from anyone.
Ali hung up without bothering to leave a message. Feeling hungry-or was it just a matter of nerves? — she went out to the kitchen and scrounged through the refrigerator. Before the cook, Elvira Jimenez, left for the weekend, she usually made sure the place was stocked with lots of suitable salad makings. Fighting to keep her figure newsroom thin, Ali survived on salads. Right now what she really wanted was one of her father’s Sugarloaf special chicken fried steaks. Unfortunately that wasn’t an option.
Using the kitchen clicker-Paul had one in every room-she turned on Paul’s new Sonos sound system to play a full program of Mozart piano concertos. Then she busied herself at the granite countertop, whacking up lettuce, tomatoes, radishes, cucumbers and onions, as well as a perfectly ripe avocado. She added a few hunks of rotisserie grilled chicken and a thimbleful of dressing. Lots of calories in dressing. Then, she took her salad and a glass of chilly Chardonnay (Paul’s current favorite, Far Niente, the 2002 vintage, of course) to the glass-topped umbrella table situated beside the sparkling heated pool with its unobstructed view of the city.
The sweet scent of orange blossoms wafted through the air. The bougainvillea climbing the side of the stuccoed pool house was just starting to blossom. The colorful pots arranged around the patio overflowed with the fat petunias and lush snapdragons that Jesus Sanchez, the gardener, somehow always maintained in wild abundance. Now that the rains had finally stopped, spring had arrived in southern California with a vengeance. Meanwhile it had snowed five inches in Sedona two days ago-the same day Reenie had been reported missing.
ALS, Ali thought. What would I do if it were me?
She thought about Reenie’s kids, Matt-red-haired, freckle-faced, and serious beyond his years-and about Julie-a bright, blond, blue-eyed, perpetual-motion machine who seemed to dance rather than walk wherever she went. Wouldn’t Reenie have wanted to spend every possible moment with those adorable children of hers, or had she made some other choice, one she hoped would spare them the worst of the dread disease that was bearing down on all of them?
That line of questioning took Ali back to a very dark place of her own. In October of 1982 her first husband, Dean Reynolds, had come home from work one night, complaining of a headache. Ali hadn’t thought that much about it. He was twenty-four years old, for God’s sake. How serious could it be? He had gone to bed. In the middle of the night, she had heard him retching in the bathroom. A few minutes later he passed out. She had heard him fall-a dull thump on the wooden floor of their two-bedroom apartment. Leaping out of bed to help him, she’d had to shove his body out of the way with the bathroom door before she could get inside to reach him. In the confined space of the tiny bathroom, she hadn’t been able to gain enough leverage to help him to his feet. Instead, she left him lying on the floor and called an ambulance.
Two days later, in Dean’s hospital room, the doctor had given them the bad news-glioblastoma-a word Ali had never heard before and wouldn’t have known how to pronounce. She and Dean, holding hands, had listened in stunned silence as the doctor-a resident oncologist-delivered the bad news. The tumor was large, inoperable, and probably fatal within one to two years. They could try chemo they were told, but glioblastomas were aggressive and generally resistant to treatment. A few months later, Dean was dead and Ali was not only a twenty-three-year-old widow, she was also seven months pregnant.
The baby was born on a bright June day two months after Dean’s funeral. Ali named her newborn son Christopher Dean Reynolds. Ali’s mother had left Bob and Aunt Evie in charge of the Sugarloaf. Even though Edie Larson had never been on a plane before in her life, she had flown out to Chicago to be with her daughter and her new grandson and to help Ali get organized.
Surprisingly enough, Dean’s company benefits had provided a fair amount of group life insurance. Their apartment was anything but extravagant. Using the life insurance proceeds and by carefully managing the social security survivor’s benefits, Ali had managed to keep the apartment, hire a live-in baby-sitter, and go back to school to finish her Masters. (She’d had to drop out that one semester because Dean was so sick.)
Dean had died in 1983. More than twenty years later glioblastoma was still a grim diagnosis, but there were now some new promising treatments-particle-beam radiation and chemo protocols-that had only been a gleam in some cancer researcher’s eye back in the eighties. Ali wondered if there was a chance things were a little more hopeful now with ALS as well.
With half of her salad left uneaten, but with her wineglass empty, Ali stood up. The sun was still shining in the west, but she felt a sudden chill. Dean had fought so hard to live long enough to see his son-to have a chance to be with him. Faced with ALS, surely Reenie would do the same for her kids, for Matt and Julie, wouldn’t she?
But as Ali made her way back into the house, she realized she didn’t know the answer. The only person who did was Reenie Bernard herself, and she wasn’t talking.
After rinsing her dishes, Ali went upstairs to the little study off the master bedroom that was her own private domain. She logged on to her computer and Googled ALS. After spending an hour or so poring over what she found there, Ali finally realized that as far as Reenie and her family were concerned, it could just as well have been 1983.
As Yogi Berra said, “It’s deja vu all over again!”
Chapter 3
cutlooseblog.com
Monday, March 14, 2005
First of all, let me thank you once again for the kind wishes that continue to pour in. I’m astonished by your response. I’ll try to answer as many as I can-after all, I no longer have to go to work-but please forgive me if I don’t get back to all of you in a timely fashion.
When bad things happen, it’s easy to fall in a hole of self-pity and wallow around in it. Losing your job counts as a bad thing, and I would have been wallowing if I hadn’t had all those e-mails lifting my spirits.
Tonight, though, when I was channel surfing, I happened to catch a promo for the new news team at my former station-a team that now includes my very youthful and very blond replacement. Seeing her sitting and smiling out at the camera from the anchor chair that used to be mine and flanked by all the guys who used to do the news with me, it would have been easy to turn on the waterworks and go screaming down the street yelling that life isn’t fair. But I didn’t. Couldn’t. Because there are things in life that are lots worse than losing a job-losing a friend, for instance.
Because one of my friends is lost. Reenie, my best friend from high school, went missing on Thursday after going to a scheduled doctor’s appointment. On the day before I lost my job. No one knows where she is. Her family is baffled. Her husband and children are lost without her.
In the past two weeks, Reenie has received some devastating news about her health. In her forties and with
