“I think the reason boys and young men die as foolishly as they do is a man has to prove he’s a man. A woman has nothing to prove. So all one man or a group of boys have to do is taunt one another. You know, he wants to drink white wine and one of the guys at the table says, ‘Would you like a box of tampons with that?’ That sort of thing. So it’s the way men control other men. Make them insecure, and they’ll really do stupid things.” Annalise put her hands on her hips.
Cory considered this, his handsome features composed. “I agree, but don’t you think you compete with other women?”
“Sure, but competing for me means I want to win at something. Not proving I’m a woman.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He smiled broadly. “Being beautiful, you have no competition.”
“Ha!” She kissed him on the cheek.
“How’s everything else?”
“Good. It’s been a slow couple of weeks. Not too many harvests. But business is steady.”
“I’m operating Thursday morning, if you’d like to observe. Do you good to observe living tissue,” Cory invited her.
“I’ll be there.” Annalise, a circumspect individual, looked around even though she knew no one would be there for another fifteen minutes. “Any more pieces of skull on your desk?”
Cory had called her about this once he’d settled down. “No. But it worries me.”
“I’m not happy about it, but if I were you,” she wryly said, “I’d be a lot more worried if it had been a fresh set of male genitals.”
A sea of asphalt dotted with colored metal gumdrops was how the vast parking lot of Central Virginia Medical Complex might appear to someone with an imaginative streak. To Mrs. Murphy, Pewter, and Tucker, it was just ugly. No grass, rocks, or snakes—although bugs crawled on windshields. Animals burrowed in the greenbelt surrounding all this. Birds flew overhead and made nests in the Bradford pears that lined the streets.
“Boring,” Pewter complained.
“She’ll be out soon.” Tucker curled in the fleece-lined bed Harry had put in the back of the Volvo.
Harry had outfitted the station wagon for her animals’ pleasure as well as her own. She kept the second row of seats down. The XC70 had no third row, a wise decision. With those seats flat down, Harry covered the cargo area with a heavy rubber mat, better to handle those wet, muddy paws. She put down three very cushy beds, fastening them to the mat with small double-eye hooks. She’d put small U-fasteners in the heavy rubber to hold the double-eye hooks. The beds wouldn’t slide, so the thick, heavy-duty carpet on the cargo area would be protected. She could haul the heavy rubber mat out to wash it. Always organized when it came to physical spaces, she felt quite proud of herself. The animals liked it but still rode up front with her.
“Cool day,” observed Mrs. Murphy, intently watching out the window.
Happy to make polite conversation, Tucker agreed.
“If it’s cool, why does Harry put the windows down a crack? I don’t like it,” Pewter grumbled.
“Fresh air.” Mrs. Murphy noticed a chipmunk shoot across the beltway road.
“Bother.” Pewter vacated her bed to crawl in with Tucker. “You take up so much space.”
“It’s my bed, Fatso.”
“Oh la.” The gray cat ignored this, curling her back to Tucker’s white stomach.
• • •
As these edifying conversations were taking place, Harry lay down for her first radiation treatment, the killer beams focusing on the former tumor site marked with ink.
The process, explained to her in detail, caused no pain, but she needed to remain still on the special table. Staying motionless was more difficult than Harry had anticipated. She wanted to scream and run out of there. The nurse told her the first treatment wouldn’t be so bad. But in case nausea developed, there were drugs for that. A slight possibility existed for burns on her skin, which would be uncomfortable.
Harry refused drugs. She wanted her mind to be clear. What she’d do down the road, she didn’t know. She’d find out when she got there, but the first treatment was okay, apart from staying still.
The support group had prepared Harry. Medicine, with its many protocols and restrictions—courtesy of one’s government—could be as baffling as a peasant landing in the court of Catherine II of All the Russias. There were way too many complications, too many forms to fill out and papers to take home and read. Basically, all the forms boiled down to one thing: letting the hospital off the hook, should something go awry. In turn, the hospital feared gargantuan lawsuits if so much as one bent needle was used or someone was not properly swabbed, according to a potentially litigious patient.
Harry hated all of that. As she lay on the padded table, oddly grateful for the interlude on a busy day, she felt as though she’d stepped through a door into a prison without walls. Her body no longer belonged to her. The hospital accepted her body and the money in her purse. She was told what to do and when to do it. The insurance companies would try to kill her with paperwork, calls, and the need for intense documentation of every little thing done to her. She pitied Jennifer Potter. If Harry, a patient—well, actually a number—faced towers of paper and constant concerns about liability, what did her surgeon face?
Harry paid little attention to medicine. Although married to a vet, she exhibited zero curiosity about human medicine. Thrilled with the miracles stem cell treatments did for horses, she didn’t give it a thought for people.
Yet here she was in the cancer factory. She still didn’t really care. If she hadn’t been married, she wouldn’t submit to radiation. Thanks to his medical knowledge, Fair had insisted, as did Susan, BoomBoom, Alicia, Rev. Jones, Franny, and every single person with whom she came into contact. Part of her felt she’d caved to the pressure. Part of her figured she’d get through it and then everyone would shut up. She’d be forty-one in August; she hoped she had a lot of life left.
If nothing else, cancer introduced her to her own mortality. Intellectually, she knew she was eventually going to die. Now she knew it emotionally, and it was okay. She didn’t want to go now, but she was a farmer. She’d lived with nature in a way few Americans did anymore. She accepted death, including her own. When that Dark Angel knocked on her door, she prayed she would accompany him with dignity. She resolved during that first radiation session that once done with this, she’d avoid this or any hospital if she was ill and the survival chance was less than fifty percent. If injured, sure, let the doc fix your bones or whatever. Injury is different from illness. She hated being ill. She could put up with injury.
“How do you feel?” asked Corrine, the nurse.
“Okay.” Harry smiled up at her. “Did you always want to be a nurse?”
Corrine nodded. “I used to bandage my dolls.”
The two laughed, and Harry understood why men fall in love with their nurses.
Once finished and back outside, Harry flipped up the collar of her fleece-lined denim jacket. Hard to believe it was full spring. If the dogwoods—now in full bloom—weren’t in sight, she’d think this was early April. You never could know about the weather in central Virginia, or maybe the fickleness of the weather was true in most places.
As she reached the Volvo, she clicked the open button.
“Harry.”
The voice made her turn around and brought the animals to the windows.
“Thadia.” For years Harry hadn’t seen her, and now twice in short order. She wasn’t sure she liked that, but being a Virginian to the marrow of her bones, she appeared thrilled at the sight of Thadia Martin.