“Uh-huh,” she said. “Well you should have heard back by now. Let’s check this out.”
More tappity-tap and she said, “Um, Mr. Cole, can I put you on hold for a moment?”
It felt like ice was gathering around my heart. “Go right ahead.”
So I was put on hold, some elevator music started swooning in my right ear, and I took a breath, looked out at the wide and cold and endless Atlantic. A good place to be, no matter what.
Click.
“Uh, Mr. Cole.”
“Still here.”
“It seems we have a situation concerning your biopsies.”
“Go on.”
“The reports haven’t come back yet.”
“I already know that.”
“It seems that … there was an error.”
“Go on.”
“Uh, the samples were supposed to go to one of our associated testing laboratories in Massachusetts.”
“All right.”
“But they were sent to California. It appears that one of the attending physicians checked off the wrong box on the pathology request, and the samples were sent to our facility in San Diego.”
“In California? The Golden State? The one on the West Coast? The Pacific Ocean?”
“Uh …”
I tried to take a moment to calm down. I failed. “Let me get this straight. My tumor samples, the ones that are going to tell me if I have cancer or not, they could have been hand-delivered to your testing lab a few streets down—and now they’re in California?”
“Er, not really.”
“What do you mean, not really? Isn’t that what you just told me?”
“Not exactly, Mr. Cole. They were sent to California. The tracking number indicates that they haven’t yet arrived. It looks like … they were misplaced.”
I hung up the phone.
I was still on the couch when Felix came into my house, one arm in a sling, his good arm carrying a large grocery bag with twine handles. He caught my eye and said, “I’ll remind you that I’m the one that’s supposed to be blue, the one with a bullet wound in his arm.”
“And I’ll remind you that I’ve also been shot.”
He snorted in disdain, put the shopping bag on the counter. “Yeah. In the lower leg, by a professor from UNH using a .22 pistol. When it comes to shooting and other complex tasks, most UNH professors couldn’t pour the proverbial piss out of a boot with the instructions printed on the heel. I got hit by a pro.”
“How’s your arm?”
He pulled it free from the sling. “Doing great, and thanks for bandaging me up. I was able to locate my freelance physician late that night. Got everything cleaned up and stitched.”
He started pulling packages from the bag. “Barbecue sound okay?”
I looked outside. “Might start raining.”
“It’s all right.”
“Could you get the sliding glass door opened? I tried … well, the stick I use to block the runners was stuck.”
“Sure,” Felix said. He walked around the kitchen counter, bent down, and flipped it out with one motion.
Using his wounded arm.
He spotted my look and said, “I’m sure you loosened it.”
“Yeah.”
I got off the couch, limped my way to the sliding glass door, unlocked it, then slid it and the screen door open. I stepped out on the deck, breathed in the cold salt air. It felt good. There were wooden chairs and a square wooden table out on the deck, as well as my gas barbecue grill. Felix went to the grill and took the cover off, lifted up the lid, and lit it off.
There was sand all across the deck. Any other day I would take a push broom and clean the sand off, but yeah, this wasn’t any other day. To the south was the bulk of Weymouth’s Point, and the houses scattered on top, as well as the seawall leading up to it. Not much traffic on Atlantic Avenue. Out on the waters the sharp forms of the Isles of Shoals were as clear as ever, and up to the north, the woods and grassy mounds of the Samson State Wildlife Preserve. Decades before it had been a Coast Artillery Station, and this little house of mine had been converted from a lifeboat station to officers’ quarters, and now, according to an amateur historian and genealogist from New York, it had been something else for a year or two, during the Korean War.
Felix came to me and said, “You look cold.”
“I’ll be all right.” I leaned over the far railing, noted the large rocks and boulders, the dark waves rolling in and splashing up and roaring, moving to and fro, the waters out there sliding to Hampton Shoals, the Gulf of Maine, and the Atlantic … all those constant waves, all the endless motion, year after year.
“This will be a good place,” I said.
Felix stood next to me. “What kind of place?”
“When the time comes, to spread my ashes. Be part of the ocean. Forever.”
“Pretty grim talk,” Felix said.
“Sometimes it’s necessary. Have you thought about what’s going to happen to your remains?”
“Sure,” he said. “I have it all figured out. I’m going to die in bed at a hundred and ten years old, after a fine meal and sponge bath by two sweet nurses, and then I’ll be buried in a large lot with a headstone so years afterwards, sobbing women will throw themselves down upon the ground and mourn me.”
“Mine sounds simpler.”
“Mine sounds more fun, more fulfilling,” Felix said. He looked up to the darkening and thickening clouds. “Going to rain soon.”
“Yeah.”
“You get the pathology report back on your tumors yet?”
“Nope.”
“What’s the holdup?”
“One of my attending physicians checked off the wrong box on a form. Instead of going a few blocks down in Boston to be tested, my tumor samples are in San Diego.”
Felix went over to check the grill’s temperature, came back. “In California?”
“No, Vermont,” I said. “And even with the tracking number, they’ve lost them. Still some waiting ahead.”
“So there’s a part of you getting a free trip to California.”
“Some guys get all the luck.”
He stood quietly and said, “You should go back in. It’s cold.”
“My first time out on the deck in
