He Missed Every Chemo For Her Chapter 12

He Missed Every Chemo For Her Chapter 12

I did not go in.

I stood in that corridor holding a paper cup of terrible coffee, and I watched my ex–husband–my never–husband- wipe an old woman’s mouth with a paper towel, and I turned around and walked back the way I’d come.

I found Lars in his office.

“There is an American volunteer in adult oncology,” I said. “Blue vest.”

Lars looked up slowly. “Ah.”

“Ah?”

“He came in December, before Christmas. He filled in the forms like everybody else.” Lars took his glasses off. “Nora. He did not use your name. He did not mention you. I found out who he was in February, from a nurse who recognized

him from the internet.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you would have thought it was about you,” Lars said. “And I have watched him for three months, and it is

not.”

I sat down.

“He drives the transport van,” Lars said. “The patients who have nobody. That is the specific job he asked for. He picks them up, he sits with them for the entire infusion, he takes them home. Twelve hours, four days a week. He is not paid. He is licensed in America but he asked for no clinical role at all; he told the coordinator he did not deserve one yet.” Lars put his glasses back on. “In January he sat eleven hours with a man from Malmö who died two weeks later. He was the only person at the funeral.”

I stared at the floor for a long time.

“Do you want him removed?” Lars asked. “It is one phone call. I will make it and never mention it again.”

I thought about it. Honestly. Seriously.

“No,” I said.

That night, I finally texted him.

[I saw you.]

The reply came in under a minute.

[I know I saw you see me.]

[Nora, I swear on my life this isn’t a tactic. If you want me gone from this hospital I’ll go tonight. There are cancer

centers everywhere.]

[But I’m not going to stop doing it. Not here, then somewhere else.]

I typed: Why?

[Because I can’t sit in your eighteen. They’re gone. You survived them without me and that’s yours, not mine.]

[So I sit in somebody else’s. Mrs. Kirk has round nine on Thursday. Her son lives in Australia. She likes the chair by

the window even though it sticks.]

I put my hand over my mouth.

[You told me it sticks. That’s how I knew which one to fight the coordinator for.]

The next Thursday, I went down at two o’clock.

I stood in the doorway of the infusion suite in my scrubs, and the whole grey vinyl room turned to look at me, and I

understood, standing there, exactly how it feels: seventeen people in chairs, chemicals dripping, and everyone very

quietly clocking who came with whom.

Grant was in the chair beside the window, next to a woman in her seventies, holding a paperback.

He saw me and started to stand.

I shook my head.

He sat back down and kept reading to her.

I watched for maybe ninety seconds. Then I went back to work.

That night he texted:

[Thank you for not making me leave.]

And I typed the sentence I had been carrying, unsaid, since a rooftop bar and forty–one seconds and a nurse named

Denise

Comme

D) forgive you]
The dots appeared Vanished. Appeared Vanished for four full minutes.

[Does that mean-]

[No] I sent before he could finish. [It means I’m putting it down. It was heavy and it was mine to carry and I’m done

carrying it.]

[You don’t get to pick it back up for me.]

[Okay.] he wrote. [Okay. Thank you.]

And then, a minute later.

[Nora. There’s one thing I have to give you. In person. Fifteen minutes, and then I’ll never ask you for anything again as long as I live.]