Final possibilities.
You might call it justice. Or liberty. Or merely opportunity.
Whatever it is, it’s how I happened to be planning to murder a woman I have never met.
I certainly didn’t think this would be my life when I was twenty-nine. As a teen and college student, I anticipated an interesting career, maybe a husband, possibly a child, certainly a bright and burning future. I got the first one, and for a while I also had the last, and maybe it’s just as well that the two in the middle never came to pass.
Because not long ago, I sat across the desk in a generic doctor’s office in an anonymous three-story medical building across from Scripps Hospital in Encinitas, getting a death sentence.
It wasn’t put in those terms, of course, and I was given to believe initially that there was a great deal more hope than actually turned out to be the case, once I pulled myself back together after a few days of hysteria and started doing my own research. I’m a researcher by trade, a writer and editor of web content, and it didn’t take long to discover exactly what the doctor had failed to mention.
It was very, very bad. As in invariably fatal. Palliative measures could extend my life a bit, of course. There was even an upcoming protocol for an experimental drug that I could and did apply for, but that was on the East Coast and only accepting a handful of patients. Also, I’d probably be dead before it began.
The diagnostic process had been going on for so long by then that I was ready for a definitive prognosis, even a bad one. Or so I thought until it happened.
I’d endured what felt like hundreds of needle pricks and biopsies and humiliating procedures. I’d been poked, X-rayed, lasered, MRI’d, biopsied, ultrasounded—everything but dunked in a vat of water to see if I swam or drowned, the way they used to test witches in the Massachusetts Colony.
Sometimes I think it would have been easier if we’d just started with dunking, except that as a native San Diegan, I’ve been in the water all my life and could certainly swim, which would have declared me guilty. Or, in this case, afflicted. Whereas a decision by drowning would have meant that my body actually wasn’t in its final hours, not even close, and that I didn’t need to die at all.
This is way beyond catch-22.
Instant Karma came about because of a dreadful illness contracted by my high school friend Molly Donovan, a young woman whose talents and gifts would have been really depressing and intimidating if she hadn’t been such a genuinely nice person.
Molly died two years ago of a brain tumor. A glioblastoma multiforme, the baddest of the bad in a family of outlaw cells I have always found particularly horrifying. Brain tumors are terrorists who attack your centers of insight and reason, who fly straight into the control tower supporting your motor skills, who reprogram the axis of your body’s global communication systems. And glioblastomas do it really, really fast.
Molly was a lawyer on the fast track at a small but powerful Los Angeles firm that specialized in environmental law and had won a couple of significant cases for the good guys. But being on the fast track meant she was a workaholic with no personal life, and when her health blew up on her, she moved back home, spending her final months in the pool house at her parents’ Rancho Santa Fe estate. I was living just down the coast in Pacific Beach and it felt entirely natural to devote a lot of time to somebody who had once been a good friend.
Also scary as hell. But we became close again, closer than we’d ever been, and had some fine times in those last few months despite everything. I learned a lot about dying with style from her.
I just I hadn’t intended to put it into effect quite so quickly.
Like so many great ideas, ours was born by accident.
Ever the overachiever, Molly had found herself a support group of other young adults facing terrifying diagnoses, facilitated by a La Jolla psychologist with a breathtaking coastal view from her sixth-floor offices. The only glitch was that Molly couldn’t drive because she had the occasional grand mal seizure. So I served as chauffeur and while the group met, I waited in the coffee shop on the ground floor with my netbook and my latte.
Early on, a few of them broke off and continued to hang out when the sessions ended, and I was easily absorbed into that group. The common denominator, beyond age and mortality, was a very black sense of humor.
The default clubhouse became Molly’s place, which offered privacy and space and a reasonably central location. One clear fall evening, with breezes off the ocean, glittering stars, and the occasional cry of a night bird or coyote, five of us sat on the patio outside her pool house. We might have been alone in the universe, nestled in this private little valley with its scents of eucalyptus, night-blooming jasmine, and money. Molly’s parents were probably home, but their Spanish-style hacienda was enormous and whatever wing they might have been occupying at the moment, we couldn’t see or hear them. The housekeeper’s lights were out over the garage, and as for neighbors, the property had been landscaped decades ago to assure that nobody else would ever be visible from Casa Donovan. Yes, that’s what it said on the sign by the locked gate down at the road. Multicultural to the max.
Ours was a pretty motley crew. Kenny Peters, an accountant with a rare and raging form of lymphoma. Adam Hillinger, a born salesman with multiple melanomas and an inability to go more than five minutes without sneaking a peek at his phone. Katherine Connelly, a third grade teacher and terrible exception to the rule that breast cancer doesn’t strike the young. Molly. And me, the token healthy person, at least for the time being.
Kenny picked up the lament he had apparently brought to group earlier, excoriating the insurance company jackasses who had restructured their formulary and denied him the incredibly expensive chemo that appeared to be his best—and possibly only—hope. Kenny always struck me as pragmatic to the point of fatalism, a man whose chest might be increasingly sunken but whose tone remained mild-mannered and calm. However, he and his employer had been paying premiums to this insurance company for his entire career and he was well and truly pissed.
“I want to line those malevolent morons up against a wall and shoot every last one of them,” he announced. Kenny wasn’t eating or drinking anything because the outdated chemo regimen that his insurance
“There’d just be more bureaucrats lining up to take their place,” Katherine responded mildly. “Like one of those video games where you kill three aliens and another twelve rise from the dust. A kind of bureaucratic whack-a-
