drawing the suspected ailment from her stomach, transferring it fully into his palm — where his hand entrapped it in a fist, and brought it to dangle over the edge of the bed, and, with fingers uncurling, sent it sailing to the floor. Sometime later, he woke to the sounds of her sniffling, her nasal passages emitting deep, punctuated inhalations.
“Deb?”
He felt her shift in the sheets, her body turning toward him. “You smell it?” she asked, and with that he realized she wasn't crying.
“What?”
“Can't you smell it?”
He lifted his head, sniffing the air. “Yes,” he said, detecting a burning, somewhat aromatic odor.
“You know, I left the living-room windows cracked,” she said, climbing from bed. “I'll go close them. I think the winds must've changed direction, or else the fires have gotten worse.”
“Let's hope not,” he said, a smoky, charred flavor materializing in his mouth like an aftertaste.
The next morning, they drank their coffee in the kitchen, sharing sections of a newspaper which placed the Catalina Mountains wildfires on the front page. But they didn't need to look any farther than their own backyard to understand how far the fires had spread overnight; for now a murky, whitish haze drifted where glaring sunlight and clear skies normally prevailed — floating among the gardens, hanging above the swimming pool area — recalling the Los Angeles smog they had left behind (a widening ring of pollution which skirted the wealthy beach enclaves and, instead, traveled inland to Riverside and the less affluent cities of San Bernardino County). The accompanying smokehouse aroma, too, had increased since dawn, tainting everything, mingling with the strong coffee, mixing with the frying pan's sizzling combination of eggs, chopped onions, diced ham, and chipotle sauce.
In due time, they entered that gauzy, scorched-smelling atmosphere, driving the thirty miles to Tucson as a classic-country radio station played. Hollis drummed his fingertips on the Suburban's steering wheel. Debra silently stared from the passenger window. Yet both were aware all the while of the plume of gray-black smoke rising like a mushroom cloud from the distant mountaintop, the desert landscape around them subdued and dull in color. With each mile the haze became more pervasive, as did their mutual, unspoken nervousness regarding the appointment. Then it seemed like the Suburban was being propelled forward by the smoke — the thickening vapor directing them beyond Oro Valley and the west end of the mountain range, speeding them past the Tucson Mall before ushering them across the parking lot of the medical center — and dissipating at last in Dr. Taylor's narrow examining room but still inhaled when the young doctor appeared wearing a long, thin face (longer and thinner than Debra remembered the woman's face being, somehow longer and thinner than faces ever were), saying right away the news wasn't good, explaining without a moment of hesitation, “You have ovarian cancer.”
Hearing those words, Hollis sensed himself shrinking on the chair, becoming drawn up, shriveled, numb, blank — then momentarily deaf. He glanced at Debra who, in the same instant, glanced at him. But whereas Hollis felt stunned and immobilized by Dr. Taylor's diagnosis, Debra never lost her composure; rather, her intent eyes shot to the doctor, her head nodding confidently when she asked, “Okay, so what do I do now?” And with that, Dr. Taylor directed their immediate course of action: while sitting in the examining room, Debra was handed the doctor's cell phone and instructed to call her gynecologist to set up an emergency appointment; shortly thereafter, she and Hollis were sent racing to the nearby University Medical Center, where they retrieved her sonogram and CT-scan axial images from the radiologist; then they sped to the southwest side of town, entering the gynecologist's office twelve minutes ahead of schedule.
Dr. Langford, the gynecologist, was a no-nonsense, heavyset redhead, a woman who — as Debra had described her to Hollis — would have made a good detective on
Hollis's stomach dropped. Debra released his hand and leaned forward, asking, “How bad is it?”
Dr. Langford shrugged and set the axial images down on her desktop. “Without the written report or an MRI scan, it's difficult to say for sure. What these show me, however, is that the tumors are clustered on the ovaries like clumps of salt, or like fistfuls of sand grains. Everything else — kidney, spleen, liver, pancreas — these appear unremarkable.”
“Unremarkable? Is that good?” Hollis asked.
“That's good,” Dr. Langford said. “As for mesenteric cancer, we won't know what we're really dealing with or what can be done about it unless we get inside you and see. To be totally fair, I can't accurately call it ovarian cancer until we take a look at it and pathology confirms it — and that's what I highly recommend we do.”
“All right,” Debra said emphatically, as if she were acquiescing to something no more complicated than a back rub. “Let's do that.”
“Okay,” Hollis mumbled, unsure then of everything which had just been said, hearing his own mouth speak but feeling apart from the situation. In hindsight, there was much he would forget about, much during those weeks which had flashed by him like an incomprehensible blur — various reports, laboratory data, medical jargon. Yet even now, he remains aware of his complete and utter helplessness throughout, watching when Debra was wheeled on a gurney into surgery, half smiling while she joked, “If I die on the table, put ‘She wasn't ready’ on my tombstone,” and fighting tears once the gurney had rolled beyond swinging metal doors. And, too, he came to understand the havoc the disease had created within his wife, how it had managed to spread into the peritoneum — to the uterus, the lymph glands, the bladder, the gallbladder — how surgery could eliminate 95 percent of the cancer, while the remaining 5 percent was inoperable (hundreds of microscopic tumors continuing to ravage the serous membrane of her abdomen, seeking a home, some building a thriving colony on the delicate surface of her bowel).
“Stage-III–C ovarian cancer grade two,” was Dr. Langford's ultimate determination, revealed in the hours following Debra's operation. “Abdominal implants more than two centimeters in diameter and positive retroperitoneal or inguinal nodes.”
“I don't understand,” Hollis had said. “It isn't making sense.”
“Papillary serous cystadenocarcinoma,” the doctor replied. “That's the cancer your wife has.”
“I still don't understand. What does it mean?”
But amidst that growing confusion, as he had felt overwhelmed by cryptic terminology or frightened by the possibility of losing the person he loved the most, Hollis brought his mind to the short-lived gray area — the fleeting period between not knowing for certain and knowing too well (after Dr. Taylor's diagnosis and prior to Dr. Langford's surgery) — when he and Debra had left Tucson at dusk and drove back to Nine Springs, and he told her while they went, “It'll be fine, you'll see. We'll survive this.”
“I have no doubt, dear,” she had said, gazing ahead at a reddish-orange-hued horizon masked behind a veil of smoke. “In fact, I'm positive of it.”
Several minutes later, Debra requested he stop at a roadside Circle K, where she purchased a six-pack of Tecate and a bag of gummy worms. Arriving home, she surprised Hollis by avoiding the house altogether, preferring instead to walk the perimeter of their property, leading him along the gravel pathway which guided them into the backyard. Soon they sat inside his unlit tiki hut as if in hiding, drinking beer and savoring the nighttime. She had never shown an interest in the hut before — nor had she done so since — but on that evening she seemed to regard it just like he often had: as a kind of a refuge from the larger world, a place devoid of fear or complications.
“This is nice,” she said, angling to one side in order to pat his right knee. “I think I can see why you like it out here.”
“Gives you a whole different feeling, right?”
“I'd say so,” she said, her obscured form readjusting, moving upright on the deck chair.
And for a while they stayed there — finishing the gummy worms and Tecate, their fingers eventually interlaced — breathing the carbon-laden air, observing the jagged line of fire snaking across the far-off, imperceptible mountaintop and appearing like a savage fissure in what was usually a starry sky.
