“No!” Annie nearly shouts. As soon as she hears his intake of breath, she stops. “Okay,” she concedes. “Maybe. Though I need to think this through first. I can’t make this big a decision so fast. But I can promise you this: the minute I feel sick, the minute I develop symptoms I can’t excuse, I’ll do everything. Tell Sam, see a specialist, have surgery, sign up for a shrink, undergo chemo, radiation, acupuncture. I’ll meditate, write a blog, guzzle carrot juice—whatever. But for right now, for the time being …”
“Annie …”
“I have to sleep on it.”
“Annie …” he repeats.
She cuts him off. “If you have a problem with that, let me remind you of HIPAA rules. Of doctor-patient confidentiality.”
Chapter Four
Annie drops onto the sofa. She scoops up the newspaper crumpled underneath the coffee table. In the lower corner, a headline catches her eye: Ninety-Year-Old Couple Die Within the Same Hour. She reads about a husband and wife, inseparable since meeting as teenagers, who “held hands at breakfast every morning even after seventy years of marriage.” Tears spill over as Annie pictures the pair’s gnarled, nonagenarian fingers clasped over their Shredded Wheat. She studies her own hands, not yet and never to be liver-spotted with age, sporting only a scattering of scars chalked up to workplace injuries.
She considers opening a bottle of wine. Too early. And what good would it do? Dull senses that are already numbed? Depress reactions that are already slowed?
Tell Sam, Dr. Buckley said. There are a million reasons not to tell Sam, ones she should have presented to Dr. Buckley. No wonder she dropped out of debate club. She could never summon an argument on the spot, only after the fact. What the French call l’esprit d’escalier. She tried, but he wouldn’t listen. Clearly she can’t do it. At least not now, when she doesn’t have a real diagnosis, when she has no facts. She must protect him, has always protected him. More so since all lioness instincts have been deflected from her nonexistent cubs and onto her spouse. Sam will support you, Dr. Buckley promised. What kind of support can Sam offer her in this case? There are no buttresses for dying, only the prospect of knocking the scaffolding out from under both of them.
Sam is incompetent, Ursula complained. That’s Ursula’s adjective. Annie herself would choose a tad bungling, a bit clueless. She sighs, a drawn-out sigh that ends in a cough. What is the word for holding two opposing thoughts in your head? she wonders. Paradox? Cognitive dissonance? Doublethink? Once she knew the precise term, but her formal education is now too far in the past and too blunted by daily life. Yes, Sam gives her support. (How can she live without him?) Yes, Sam is, well, bungling. (How can he live without her?)
Another paradox: as exasperating as Sam’s foibles are, they’re also endearing. Especially when his apologies make you want to apologize for causing the need for him to apologize in the first place. Annie can always forgive Sam’s absent-minded-professor quality because it’s impossible to stay mad at him.
Not that she doesn’t get annoyed. She scrolls through examples that might forever infuriate a less tolerant, less grudge-bearing spouse. For instance: his hypochondria, his fear that every splinter requires a tetanus shot, his tendency, despite repeated disasters, despite an inability to learn from his mistakes, to leave items on the roof of the car while he’s loading the trunk. How many times has he fetched cartons of freshly laundered shirts from the cleaners only to arrive home without them? Retracing his route, he’ll either discover the box untouched at the side of the road or flattened by a semi, the shirts inside embossed with the tread of big-rig tires; or worse, he’ll find nothing, all missing contents most likely recycled into the wardrobe of a stranger whose neck measures fifteen and a half and whose arms are a perfect thirty-four.
“Maybe whoever swiped them needs those shirts more than me,” Sam will note, turning an act of neglect into an act of charity. How can you not love somebody who, except for his own health catastrophizing, sees the glass not just half full but brimming? Yet even the most unrepentant Pollyanna must acknowledge that there are certain things that cannot be changed by a positive attitude.
Annie recalls the coffee mugs plunked on the roof of the car, thus requiring a constant backup of thermal replacements. She remembers the ring of house keys, shop keys, and car keys flying off a bridge and into the river underneath, resulting in a comfortless night at the Comfort Inn because it was too late to get a new key made or contact the neighbors who kept their extras.
And what about the novel Rachel lent her for the trip to a convention of food purveyors in Portland? Stopped at a red light in Monument Square after a three-hour drive on the Turnpike, they were startled by a man pounding on their windshield.
“Ignore him,” she warned, “he’s probably a squeegee scammer.”
Sam rolled down the window.
The man held up the novel. Intact except for a dusting of gravel. “This fell off your roof back there on Exchange Street,” he said.
Did Sam feel sheepish? Embarrassed? Ashamed?
No. “Imagine,” he marveled, “that book made the whole trip at sixty-five miles an hour along Ninety-Five and only toppled a block away. A feat worthy of the Ripley’s Believe It or Not.”
She turns her attention to what happened after the baby—the one time when Sam could not weave straw into gold. A nurse had ordered her into a wheelchair, even though she’d been pacing the corridor relentlessly for the three days she was incarcerated in the maternity ward, tortured by the cries of healthy newborns and the chatter of excited mothers debating breastfeeding techniques and diapering skills.
Discharged, she was rolled to the hospital lobby as Sam hurried to get the car. She and the nurse waited and waited. When the nurse checked her watch for the seventh time, Annie suggested she return to her other duties. “Go,” Annie ordered. “I’ll be fine.”
The nurse seemed dubious. “You sure?”
People came and went. Solicitous husbands and attentive family members helped the newly released to their still-running, double-parked cars outside the entrance. Some patients cuddled babies; others clutched overnight bags, pink plastic sick bins, balloons and flowers, and folders of post-surgery instructions. “You still here?” asked a man she’d seen earlier carrying a beribboned fruit basket and now wrapped in his overcoat.
After what seemed like an eternity, Sam appeared, face furious. “You won’t believe this,” he said.
“Try me.”
“They lost our keys.”
“Let’s call a taxi. I can’t bear to stay one more minute in this place.”
“Of course not, Annie.” He stroked her hand. “How could they …”
A man wearing a blue uniform with Hospital Parking embroidered on the pocket came up to them. “I’ll drive you. We are so sorry. They have never mixed up the keys in the twenty years I’ve been parking-garage manager. For some strange reason, the key we found left with your Volvo is marked Toyota. I can’t imagine how …”
“Toyota,” Annie said.
“Toyota,” Sam repeated.
“Check your pocket,” Annie demanded.