He Missed Every Chemo For Her Chapter 10

He Missed Every Chemo For Her Chapter 10

I saw his eyes move to the screen. I watched him read it upside down.

“Nora.” All the color left what little was left of his face. “What is that?”

“It’s nothing.”

“Nora.”

“It’s a routine surveillance scan,” I said, standing, taking the phone. “They call. It’s usually nothing.”

“Usually.”

“Grant, go back to your hostel.”

“No.”

“Go back to your hostel.”

He stood up so fast the bowl rattled. “Do NOT do this to me. Not this time. Not again. I will sit in that waiting room, I

will sit in the hall, I’ll sit in the car, I don’t care, just let me be in the building-”

“You want to be in the building,” I said, “so you can feel like a good man.”

He stopped like I’d hit him.

“That’s what this is,” I said quietly. “You’re not trying to take care of me, Grant. You’re trying to take back the eighteen.

And you can’t. That’s the whole thing. There is no version of this where you get to fix it, because those eighteen days

already happened, and I already got through them, and I got through them without you.”

He stood in the middle of my tiny living room with tears running down his face and nothing to say.

“Go home,” I said. “Not to the hostel. Home. Boston.”

He left at 1 a.m. I heard him get to the bottom of the stairwell before the sound came–raw, muffled, a grown man sobbing into his own coat.

I sat on the sofa and looked at the closed door until the sky went from black to that Danish six–in–the–morning navy.

Then I called Radiology.

They wanted me in at eight.

Here is what nobody tells you about surviving: the fear does not leave when the cancer does. It just gets quieter

It sits in the corner of every room for the rest of your life and every six months somebody in a lead apron gives it

permission to stand up.

I went alone. Obviously.

I sat in the grey chair outside the scanner in a Copenhagen hospital gown that tied at the front instead of the back,

which felt like an entirely different civilization, and I filled in the intake form.

Nærmeste pårørende. Next of kin.

I looked at that line for a long time.

Then I wrote: Nora Quinn.

The nurse checked it, glanced up, and paused.

“You have written yourself,” she said, in careful English.

“Yes.”

“That is-” she searched for the word, “-allowed. But is there no one?”

I thought about Maeve, five time zones away, who would get on a plane in her pajamas if I asked. I thought about

Lars, who was three floors up. I thought about Richard Marsh in his hat.

“There’s people,” I said. “I just want it to be my name.”

She smiled at me like she understood something I hadn’t said, and wrote it in.

The consultant came out at 11:40.

“Dr. Quinn.” She had my films on a tablet. “The flagged area is post–surgical scarring. Fibrosis. It has not changed

since August; the new radiologist simply had not seen your previous imaging. I am sorry for the alarm.”

The room went very bright and very far away.

“So I’m clear,” I said.

“You are clear.”

I walked out of the hospital into the snow and I stood on the steps and I cried harder than I had at any point in eight

months of treatment, in a manner that alarmed at least two Danes.

And then I did the strangest thing.

I got out my phone and I typed a message to Grant.

[It was scar tissue. I’m clear.]

I looked at it.

Old me sent that message. Old me needed him to know, needed him to be relieved, needed to hand him a piece of my

life so he could hold it.

I deleted it.

Instead, I called Maeve and screamed, and she screamed, and then I called Richard Marsh, and he cried, and then I walked to the bakery on Værnedamsvej and bought every cardamom bun they had left and took them upstairs to the surgical unit and told the nurses it was my birthday, which, in a way.

That night, a text arrived from Grant.

[I’m at the airport. Going home like you asked.]

[Whatever the scan says, you don’t have to tell me. You don’t owe me your body or your bad news ever again.]

[I just need you to know: I’m not waiting outside your door anymore. I understand now that it was for me, not for you.]

I read it three times.

[But I’m doing something with the eighteen. I’ll tell you when it’s real.]