body.
Thereafter, their days and nights elapsed in quiet uncertainty, both waiting for the next round of treatment or some clear-cut sign that the infusions were working, hoping for a positive outcome to the ordeal, and for the colder months to conclude so they could at last open up the windows on warmer evenings. During one of those chilly nights when they were sitting together on the living-room couch — speaking very little while the fireplace crackled nearby, lost in their own thoughts as the TV played in front of them — Debra suddenly announced she wasn't the same person anymore, that she had become someone far removed from the woman he had married and the woman she had imagined herself as always being, saying this with the softest of voices.
“Why do you think that?” Hollis asked.
“Honestly, take a good look at me,” she said. “Everything about me has changed. I'm not really me, not really me at all. I'm a complete stranger to myself.”
Meeting her eyes, he shook his head; he wished to counter her view of herself, to let her know she wasn't any different, that she was still Deb, that once the cancer and chemo were gone she would feel like her old self again, that none of the physical manifestations of her illness, or its treatment, could ever completely alter her intrinsic qualities — except he wasn't sure if that was the case. In truth, she had changed dramatically during a relatively short period of time: as opposed to her usual energetic, outgoing nature, she'd grown increasingly listless and withdrawn, her movements were sluggish, she often spent more hours sleeping than awake; hairlessness aside, her skin, too, had a shiny, almost translucent veneer; from maintaining an irregular sleeping pattern, dark circles had formed like bruises beneath her eyes, her voice had a languid, detached tone — and mirroring those retirement-home shut-ins unable to tend to their own basic needs, there was sometimes a yielding look in her stare. Hollis placed a hand on her leg and returned his gaze to the television program, saying nothing.
Debra's debility wasn't entirely unexpected or alarming; in fact, Dr. Langford had cautioned them ahead of treatment about what was likely to occur. “Chemo brain,” the doctor had called it, smiling wryly while the term was spoken. “The effect is real, but I can tell you now the medical community doesn't totally understand it.” The cognitive condition was, as Dr. Langford explained, only temporary. “You might experience some forgetfulness — dull thinking, mental fogginess, that kind of impairment — most likely during chemotherapy, although some women have reported it lingering for a while once therapy was completed. What you might notice is a difficulty finding the right words when talking, or an inability to write or phrase sentences as quickly as you're used to. If it becomes a problem, my best advice is to keep your mind engaged. Continue doing work-related tasks, reading, whatever your hobbies are. Don't stop doing what you enjoy, that's the most important thing.”
As it happened, the onset of chemo brain gradually made it impossible for Debra to fully absorb her mystery novels, or stick with the plots of her favorite TV shows, or concentrate while playing a simple game of Skip-Bo. Yet her sense of humor remained, illustrated by the Post-it notes she left scattered around the house — inside the refrigerator (
Even so, for five or six days after each infusion, she experienced other side effects which had little or no remedy: fatigue, numbness in her fingertips and toes, difficulty picking up or holding objects, ringing in her ears, aching joints, blistering inside her mouth. Now and again, her limbs behaved spasmodically — her hands twitched violently for a second at the kitchen table, her knees jerked upward while she sat upright — as if her reflexes had been tested by a ghost. These instantaneous fits weren't without consequences: twice in one evening, the table was disrupted from the swift, hard bounce of her knees — a glass of water knocked over, the salad bowls sent wobbling, the plates and silverware made askew with the earthquakelike jolt she had delivered.
“Christ almighty!” she said the second time it occurred, pressing her hands against her legs to keep them anchored.
“It's all right,” Hollis told her, going for the paper towels.
“This is so stupid.”
“Don't worry about it.”
“This is the stupidest thing I've ever known.”
From where he now stood at the counter, Hollis glanced back at her, seeing a quizzical expression appear on her face, observing how, just then, her body trembled almost imperceptibly beside the shaken table. And so, too, there was an ineffable cold, infiltrating her marrow, keeping her bundled in jackets or sweaters throughout the days — even as the heater was set higher than what it should be, even as Hollis sweated indoors and often lounged in shorts and a tank top. Regardless of the heat, the sight of her shivering, the way she kept herself wrapped up, had a contagious influence. Later that night, he enveloped her on the couch, draping her like a blanket of flesh, warming her with his broad chest. But no matter how hot it actually was inside the house, he couldn't avoid her body's insinuation of winter, feeling his internal temperature drop and his blood thicken — like frigid soil shifting underneath a warmer layer of sand — while, at the same time, his brow glistened in the living room, his forehead reflected the flames coursing above the hearth.
That bone-deep, impalpable chill would shudder Hollis awake some weeks afterward, and — absently reaching an arm under the sheets for Debra, bringing his fingers to her side of the bed — he discovered a flat, coarse slab where his wife was expected to be resting. “Deb —?” In the early morning, as their bedroom remained shadowed behind drawn curtains, he explored the rough exterior his hand had settled upon; half conscious and with eyes still shut, his palm slid across rock-hard grooves, miniature plateaus and valleys: like a topography map, he thought while gradually stirring, like a landscape. “Deb —?” Turning his body toward her side of the bed, opening his eyes and blinking within the dim room, he first perceived her orthopedic pillow, observing the empty, curved space which hours earlier had cupped her head. He scanned the bedding, and, rising on an elbow, saw no sign of her sleeping body, or of anything else which hinted at the thing he had touched beneath the comforter. With a degree of apprehension he pulled back the sheets, revealing what appeared to be a shriveled, calcified form — a dark, asymmetrical puddle of a shape, perhaps two inches in height, three feet in length, his palm resting at its approximate center. “Deb —?” he said once more, quickly retracting his hand as if his skin had been grazed by fire.
A bedside lamp soon cast its light on the mattress, illuminating for Hollis a slender, reddish piece of flagstone — taken from a pile he had stacked by the back-porch door, something he had planned to use for the garden walkway — nestled now into the bedding like it had grown there overnight, spotting the sheets with flecks of sand and dirt. The fog of sleep lifted, summoning Debra's groggy voice in his memory, speaking aloud as she had wandered out of the room at dawn, “Can't take this anymore. I'm freezing to death.” But he didn't recall her returning with the flagstone; he didn't feel the sheets being tucked, or yet understand — until after getting up to check on her, calling her name as he wandered down the hallway — she had hoped the flagstone might maintain a warm spot for her when she wasn't in bed.
Finding her awake but curled up on the living-room floor — covered by a heating blanket plugged into a nearby wall outlet, lounging like a cat where sunlight spilled through the window and brightened an area of the carpet — he breathed a dramatic sigh of relief before asking about the flagstone, mentioning the dirt in the sheets, eventually saying, “I don't understand. Why couldn't you use your heating blanket instead?”
She regarded him with confused and somehow questioning eyes and, giving the slightest of nods at his words, shut the mystery paperback she was reading, bookmarking the pages with an index finger, and answered, “That'd be fine, dear, except you forget I need my heating blanket here.”
“I'll buy us another blanket, how's that?”
At this she frowned, saying, “You'd just be wasting money.”
“Why would I be wasting money?”
“You just would.”
She smiled involuntarily but, Hollis believed, she was trying not to sob. Only then did he become seriously concerned for her mental health — that, maybe, a full-blown depression was looming, fueled in part by the haze of chemo brain. And, too, he wondered — while preparing their breakfast, while boiling water for instant oatmeal — if
