“Aren’t those pretty?” the nurse said, using her bandage scissors to cut away the cellophane.
“I’m the husband,” Marcus said. “How’s she doing?”
“Hello, husband. She’s a star patient. Need more pain meds, hon?”
“I’m all right for now,” Alice said.
Alone again, Marcus pulled up a chair.
“You going to take your coat off?” she said.
It was a week before the winter solstice—it was as cold in Washington as it was in Paris. He removed his wet overcoat and draped it over his chair. Through the window, the darkening sky reminded Marcus of a poorly erased, streaky chalkboard.
“The weather sucks,” he said.
“You came right from the airport?”
“Yeah. Do they have the results of the biopsy yet?”
“I’m expecting the doctor to tell me on his evening rounds.”
“I’ll wait, if you don’t mind.”
“Why would I mind? You’re the husband.”
The husband. A statement of fact. It was, perhaps, the best way to describe him with respect to her. He wasn’t an attentive husband, or a loving husband. Their marriage, their relationship, had become transactional and flying four thousand miles to visit her on her sickbed was a transaction, something required.
“That would make you, the wife,” he said, instantly regretting it. He detected a flicker of a grimace, but wasn’t sure if it was a reaction to him or physical pain.
“How long will you be here?” she asked.
Before he could answer, she had a painful coughing fit. He rose and she pointed to a plastic box with an attached tube.
“What is it?” he asked.
She took it from him and breathed into it hard, lifting a row of four balls on columns of air.
“I’m supposed to use it every hour,” she said. “It keeps my airways open.”
“A week,” he said. “I’m on leave for a week.”
“That’s not very long.”
“It’s as much as I could get. There’s something going down.”
She didn’t ask anything about it. She was well trained.
“I’ll take the week. I could use some help at the house. I was thinking of moving a bed into your study so I could avoid the stairs. Bill’s got a bad back, but Janie could help you.”
“Is that necessary?”
“I’m just making contingency plans.”
“How are they?”
Janie and Bill—her sister and brother-in-law. Not his biggest fans.
“They’ve been great. They’ll be in later.”
They talked about banal, household matters for a while before Alice made an offhanded comment about craving a cigarette.
“Really?” he said with equal measures of amazement and anger. “You’re not planning on kicking the habit?”
“It depends,” she said. “If it’s good news, I’ll quit. I’m not stupid. If it’s bad news—fuck it—why deprive myself of my few pleasures?”
His typical response would have been to tell her that she was stupid for smoking all those years, but he censored himself. “Well, hopefully, you’ll be quitting. It’s about time.”
“You should talk,” she said.
The surgeon swept in, accompanied by his surgical residents and medical students. He was big and tall with hands the size of beavers’ tails. Marcus would have bet the farm that he had played college ball.
“Brought the whole team,” Marcus said.
The surgeon winked but otherwise ignored him and went straight to Alice’s bedside.
“How’re you feeling?” he asked.
“The tube’s a little uncomfortable.”
He checked the drainage bag. “The x-ray looked good. We’ll plan on getting it out tomorrow morning.”
“Can I leave then?”
“Probably. We’ll make the call in the afternoon. So, you’re probably on pins and needles about what we found.”
“More like swords and daggers,” she said.
“Good one,” the surgeon said. “I might steal that. Look, it shouldn’t be a shock as we talked about this pre-op. The MRI was very suggestive of a malignancy, especially with your smoking history. The biopsy has confirmed that it’s lung cancer. It’s a type called non-small cell cancer, which is the most common one in smokers.”
“Did you remove it?” Marcus said.
The surgeon half-turned to include him in the conversation. “Are you Mr. Handler?” he asked. “If we’ve met, I apologize.”
“I just got here. I work in France.”
“I see. I did remove the mass. It was fairly large.”
“Did you get it all?” Marcus asked.
“Ninety-plus percent. We call that de-bulking. We’ll treat the rest with radiation and chemo.”
“Can it be cured?” Marcus asked.
The surgeon turned back to the bed and didn’t answer him. Marcus felt vestigial. He wondered if his wife had given the impression that she was functionally single.
“Alice, we biopsied a number of lymph nodes in your mediastinum—the central core of the chest—and we had a colleague from the abdominal surgery team come in and do a needle biopsy of that suspicious area in your liver. All the biopsies were positive for non-small cell cancer originating from the lung. The chances are overwhelming that the mass in your brain is the same.”
Marcus felt wobbly. He steadied himself with the chair-back. She hadn’t told him anything about masses in the liver and brain.
Alice simply said, “Oh.”
“The medical oncologist is going to see you, hopefully tonight,” the surgeon said. “I expect that you’ll be started on an aggressive cocktail of chemotherapy and targeted radiation therapy to the lesions in the chest, liver, and brain. I’ll see you in the surgery clinic in a week, but the oncologists are going to take over from here. Okay?”
“What’s the prognosis here?” Marcus demanded.
The surgeon showed some white teeth, put one of his huge hands on Marcus’s shoulder—Marcus wondered how he could do his job with those paws—and said, “Let’s see what the oncologist says. Those folks have all the stats at their fingertips.”
They had their answer a few hours later. Marcus almost missed the visit. He had gone down to the cafeteria for a bite and when he returned, the oncology attending, a bird-like woman with clipped and precise speech, was already there.
The outlook was grim. She didn’t sugar-coat it. The surgeon hadn’t mentioned that her bone scan was also positive. The cancer was pretty much everywhere.
“Yours is a very extensive malignancy,” she
