After retreating from his room, his mother entered her own bedroom, and the door shut behind her. He gave her a few minutes to settle into whatever she was doing, then left his bedroom to do some eavesdropping.
He pressed his ear against her closed door. At first, he couldn’t hear words. Only sobs.
When the words came, they were halting.
“I know. I know. I’m trying. It’s just . . . I thought this was all over.” More crying. “Yeah . . . I know. They said that there’s some experimental treatment . . . No. Not covered by insurance . . . ‘Low– to mid–six figures,’ is what the doctor said . . . I’m not sure. I think we should wait until they confirm it. So next week, I guess . . . I don’t know . . .”
Owen had heard enough. He went back into his room, shut the door behind him, and put the headphones back on, turning the volume up high.
But instead of losing itself in his game, his mind ran through what his mother’s side of the conversation meant. The cancer had returned. That was obvious, and he had surmised as much by his mother’s behavior on the subway. While they were poking him with needles, someone must have told her about the recurrence.
The other part was about money. Owen didn’t know how much the chemo had cost the first time around, but his parents were always going on about drugs that cost $100 a pill, and he’d taken seven of them a day. He remembered his father saying that getting treated for acute myeloid leukemia was more expensive than four years at Harvard.
If it weren’t for health insurance, Owen knew he would have died that first year. And from what he could piece together from his mother’s call, insurance wasn’t going to help this time around.
His father was always going on about how the important things in life couldn’t be bought. But like so many things his old man said, it was wrong. The most important things always came with a price tag.
Wayne’s lunch break was between noon and 12:50 p.m. One of the perks of his seniority was that he got to eat at a normal time. The newbies found themselves having lunch as early as 10:30 a.m. or as late as 2:00 p.m.
The faculty lounge was a windowless space, furnished with the same type of Formica picnic tables that the students used. But whereas the main cafeteria must have had thirty tables lined up in rows, the teachers had two, side by side. As the joke went: one for the cool teachers and one for the losers, although which was which was also a point of dispute.
Wayne was about to tear open the cellophane surrounding the turkey and cheese sandwich he’d packed for himself five hours earlier when his phone rang. The caller ID identified his ex-wife.
Jessica had never called him at school, not even when they were married. That she was calling now meant two things. First, it was about Owen. And second, it was important.
There was a general rule among the teachers that you didn’t take phone calls in the lounge. But an exception was made if the call was short, in consideration of the fact that even teachers weren’t allowed to be seen in the hallways with a phone, and it could take ten minutes to walk outside, which meant that a two-minute call would take up nearly half your lunch break.
“Everything okay?” he whispered, conserving his words so as to not disrupt the other teachers.
“No. Everything is definitely not okay.”
Jessica began telling him that Owen’s cancer had returned and something about a possible experimental treatment. As soon as she did, the air left his lungs. He felt as if he might pass out.
Jessica did nearly all the talking, and for most of it, she sobbed. Their call ended in less than five minutes, which was still long enough that Wayne got the stink eye from Ed Weston, who had been old when Wayne joined the faculty twenty-two years ago.
Wayne knew that Owen had never been cured—that you never were cured of leukemia—but it had been easy to accept Jessica’s assurances to the contrary. The few times he had made a comment that hopefully Owen would be well enough to go to college, Jessica had glared daggers at him, suggesting that it was Wayne’s pessimism, rather than the cancer, that was making their son sick.
In the end, like so many other things, he’d been right, and she’d been wrong. It reminded him of all the times he’d said that something was not right in their marriage, and that maybe counseling would help, and she had gaslighted him into believing their problems were all in his mind. Right up until the day she left, in fact.
He tried to focus on the one positive thing Jessica had said: the experimental treatment. But just as quickly he remembered that health insurance wouldn’t cover it and that it would cost several hundred thousand dollars.
Wayne calculated the maximum amount of money he could beg, borrow, and steal. He had no assets to sell. In fact, he was in debt up to his eyeballs. He had used every last nickel he could get his hands on—which included getting cash advances on his credit cards and taking a second mortgage—to fund the $50,000 he needed to buy Jessica out of her half of the equity they had in their house during the divorce. The housing market dropped even before the ink on the divorce decree was dry. If he sold the house now, he doubted he’d net much more than thirty grand after transaction fees and paying off both mortgages, and he’d still have to find a new place to live.
His 401(k) had less than $20,000, his savings account less than $2,000.
Wayne still had thirty minutes left for
