6
The long scar on Debra's body starts at her pubic bone — running about ten inches in length, its design zigzagging a bit — and concludes right below her belly button. But whereas the scar had previously looked inflamed and swollen, it is now considerably less raw and broad, appearing whiter than the rest of her abdomen's skin. Much to her annoyance, though, the hair which had been shaved away prior to the incision being made has never grown back, likely stunted — she decided — by the eventual rounds of chemotherapy which had shed every single strand of her body's hair. Regardless, Hollis has become strangely fond of the scar — fixing his eyes upon it whenever Debra undressed near him, occasionally bestowing it with a quick kiss — as if that injured tissue was a sort of cellular medal: an emblematic reminder of a hard-fought battle, one in which the war itself had never achieved an uneasy truce.
“We're almost twins,” he'd told her once when they were in bed, bringing his left leg from under the sheets, pulling the knee toward his stomach while he traced a finger along his old war wound — a crooked, slender trail of discolored skin, a former gash which had cleaved the inner thigh to just above the kneecap.
“Almost,” she said, regarding his wound briefly before returning her stare to the pages of a Sue Grafton mystery.
Yet Hollis can't quite forget his shock when first seeing her incision — the flesh all tender and red, the ragged seam stapled together — or hearing Dr. Langford's pragmatic voice telling him, “It's important you realize your wife has a disease that will probably shorten her life,” while Debra recuperated from surgery. During her entire hospital stay he had kept a vigil beside her bed, half awake on a cot for four nights, listening to her labored breathing as air escaped around a drainage tube which had been inserted through her left nostril, taking note of what she wouldn't fully recall later on — the machine monitoring the draining of her body fluids, an IV bag sending drop after drop after drop into her veins, the electrical hum of an inactive hospital past midnight. Exhaustion overtook him on the third night, and he promptly submerged into the landscape of familiar dreams — that slow procession of cattle, then that formation of wandering, listless people — only to be jolted back by a handful of flung ice cubes grazing his neck, chest, shoulders.
“You'll wake the dead, Hollis,” Debra said, lowering her head to the pillow, gripping a clear plastic drinking cup. “Lord, you're snoring something awful.”
“Sorry,” he mumbled, turning himself toward her, blinking lazily while she fished an ice cube from the cup and deposited it in her mouth. She chuckled for a second, closing her eyes, sucking the ice with cheeks drawn in, the cup still held tightly.
Now and again, the morphine played its tricks, sending her straight to sleep and, just as effortlessly, waking her — where she gazed about the room as if lost, as if she had suddenly been revived from a prolonged coma, sometimes addressing him with lucid words, sometimes uttering nonsense he didn't always comprehend (“It's in the drawer — better take care of it, okay?”); even so, she administered the drug herself, pumping it into the IV at those few moments when the pain rose to a level of recognition. The daytime hours at the hospital, aside from the day of the operation, were uniform, uneventful: they managed walks up and down the corridors, the IV bag and tubes in tow; they watched TV; they enjoyed small talk, avoiding the topic of cancer if possible; they slept within reach of each other, as had been done without fail since their honeymoon.
They were sent home on the fifth day, departing St. Mary's with a prescription for pain pills and their own uncertainty about what lay ahead. But upon returning to Nine Springs, Debra soon realized she didn't need the pain pills after all, simply because there wasn't any continual ache left to drug; in fact, other than the initial discomfort immediately following surgery, she suffered most in the minute or so that it took for the drainage tube to be removed — pulled from her stomach through her chest, through her throat, through her nostril, making her cough and gag. Eventually, it struck Hollis as being odd that the cancer hadn't immediately manifested in a clear-cut manner — no wasting away, no feebleness, no cinematic swift demise — odd, too, that the obvious signs of infirmity Debra had displayed were brought on by what was meant to help her: the surgery and, subsequently, the side effects of chemotherapy.
However, the presence of the cancer itself remained elusive, even as it continued to mutate, increase, and spread like dust motes transported in an afternoon breeze. Under such circumstances, though, she often conveyed greater energy on her worst days than Hollis did on his best days — driving herself to the library, shopping for wigs and eyeliner, refusing to let him do her laundry or fold her clothing. “I'm fine,” she told him. “I'm not an invalid, you know.” As if to underscore her resolve, Debra wouldn't allow herself an ounce of self-pity or a tearful outburst, although Hollis had succumbed to both emotional states on four occasions, always reserving his solitary breakdowns for his garden and the confines of his tiki hut.
Perhaps it was the absence of tangible death which bolstered Debra, to the point where she decided her sister in Texas shouldn't learn of the illness unless, of course, all her options had been exhausted and the endgame became imminent. But her innate fortitude was also tempered by the situation's undeniable gravity, not to mention the chemotherapy, and everything else she had researched at the library or was told about stage-III ovarian cancer. She knew, for example, the prognosis was far from good: seven of every ten cases were diagnosed after the cancer had already spread beyond the ovary; with stage III only one out of four women survived beyond five years. But — as Dr. Langford had repeatedly suggested — there was at least reason to believe Debra might join that 25 percent grouping.
Even so, nothing Dr. Langford said seemed real to Hollis, none of it seemed possible. The data and medical jargon, the new expressions and unheard-of treatments, the frightening odds of survival — all of it felt like some elaborate hoax at their expense, and a very cruel joke. There were a few other things which nagged his mind, things he was too ashamed to admit, not the least of which was his own ignorance about the purpose, exact physical location, and function of a woman's ovaries. So during one of Debra's library excursions, Hollis joined her on the ride, claiming he needed to do research for his autobiography. But rather than find books relating to Korean history, it was a long-out-of-print hardcover with a plain maroon cover which preoccupied his time, keeping him seated at a table away from where Debra read; when a page was turned, he glanced around to make sure she wasn't coming toward him, and then, discreetly, resumed studying the book he cradled against a forearm, hunched low over the text as if he were guarding answers to a test.
It was, in fact, the sole book found on the computer catalog which corresponded to the keywords “ovaries” and “female reproduction” — although the title raised an eyebrow, for it was called
While staring at the ovary drawings, Hollis thought: So this is what you look like. This is what you are, and this is where you were hiding inside Deb.
Then he couldn't help but smile, especially as the book and its drawings were published the year before he had met and fallen in love with Debra. Those intricate drawings of male and female forms — the colorful sex organs, the facsimiles of naked and dissected bodies from a different era — belonged to their generation, striking him as lost representations of his and Debra's younger, healthier shapes and body parts. Only later, after leaving the library and heading home, did something else tug at his mind, a notion of humans as little more than cells in a larger social superorganism; and, as such, it stood to reason that individuals, like cells, might outgrow their usefulness, eventually withering and dying off. Maybe, he wondered, it was a myth about our evolutionary instincts being fully geared toward the survival of ourselves and our own kin — because if that were truly the case there wouldn't be cancer swarming within so many people as a preset, intrinsic suicide program. But if you remove the human disposition for war and destruction, he imagined, our cells would have no choice except to mirror such a change; they would adapt, evolve accordingly, shunning any self-destructive impulses. There would be, under those
