“I lost my breast,” she kept saying over and over as she cried. “I have cancer …” Sam listened without saying a word, he just held her, and cried along with her. It was much more than he could cope with.
“I'm so sorry …it's going to be all right. He said he thinks they got it.”
“But he doesn't know” Alex sobbed uncontrollably, “and I probably have to have chemo. I don't want it. I want to die.”
“No, you don't,” he said sharply. “Don't even say that.”
“Why not? How are you going to feel when you look at my body?”
“Sad,” he said honestly, which only made her cry more. “I'm very sad for you.” He said it as though it was her problem, and not his. He was very sorry for her, but he didn't want this to become his problem. He didn't want it to kill him, as it had his father, once his mother had cancer. In his mind the two deaths were linked and he was fighting now for his own survival.
“You'll never want to make love to me again,” she sobbed, concerned with lesser problems than he was.
“Don't be stupid. What about blue day?” He tried to make her smile, but he only made her feel worse as she looked up at him in anguish.
“There won't be any more blue days. I have a fifty percent chance of being sterile after the chemo. I'm not supposed to get pregnant for five years, or it could cause a recurrence. And five years from now, I'll be too old to have a baby.”
“Stop thinking the worst about everything. Why don't you just relax and try to look at the bright side?” he said, trying to show an optimism he didn't feel. But Alex wasn't buying.
“What bright side? Are you crazy?”
“He says that losing the breast could mean saving your life. That's goddamn important,” Sam said firmly.
“How would you like to lose one of your testicles? How would that be?”
“It would be miserable, just like this is. I didn't want this to happen, neither did you. But we have to make the best of it.” He was trying, but she didn't want to hear it.
“There is no ‘best of it,' there's me too sick to move for the next six or seven months, disfigured for the rest of my life, and unable to have more children. And then maybe too there's a recurrence.”
“Is there anything else you can think of to depress yourself? How about hemorrhoids and prostate? For chrissake, Alex, I know this is terrible, but don't make it worse than it is.”
“It couldn't be much worse. And don't tell me how to look at it. You're going to walk out of here and go home tonight. You're going to be with Annabelle, and I'm not. You're going to feel fine all year, and when you look in the mirror tomorrow morning nothing will be different. Everything in my life has changed. So don't tell me how to look at anything. You don't understand it.” She was shouting at him, and he had never seen her as miserable or as angry.
“I know. But you still have me, and Annabelle, and you're still beautiful. And you still have your career, and everything that matters. Okay, so you lost a breast. You could have had an accident too. You could be crippled. You can't let this destroy you. You can't do that.”
“I can do anything I damn well want. Don't make me speeches.”
“Then what do you want from me?” he asked, exasperated finally. He didn't know what to say to her. This was not his forte, or the place he wanted to be, or the situation he wanted to be in.
“I want some reality, some sympathy. You wouldn't even listen to me for the last two weeks when I told you this could happen. You didn't want to know how I feel, you don't want to know how scared I am of everything that's going to happen to me. You just want to mouth a lot of platitudes and feed me a lot of bullshit. You weren't even here for chrissake when they told me what had happened to me. You were at your office, making deals, and at home, watching fucking TV with our daughter, so don't tell me how to feel. You don't know shit about what I'm feeling.”
“I guess not,” he said quietly, stunned by her venom. She was furious, at anyone, and everything, and him, because nothing would change this. “I don't know what to say to you, Al. I wish I could change it, but I can't. And I'm sorry I wasn't here.”
“Me too,” she said, and started to cry again. She felt so alone, and so scared, so vulnerable, and so helpless. “What am I going to do?” She looked at him pathetically. “How am I going to work, or be a wife to you, or take care of Annabelle?”
“You just have to do what you can, and let the rest slide for a while. Do you want me to call your office?”
“No.” She glared at him miserably. “I'll call them myself in a few days. Dr. Herman says I might be able to work when I'm on chemo, it'll just depend on how I feel. Some people do, but I don't think they're trial lawyers. Maybe I can do some work at home.” She just couldn't imagine how she was going to manage. Six months of chemo seemed like an eternity to Alex.
“It's too soon to think about all this. You've just had surgery. Why don't you take it easy?”
“And do what? Go to a support group?” The doctor had told her about those too, and she refused even to consider it. She wasn't going to sit around with a lot of other misfits.
“Why don't you just relax?” he said as Alex bristled, and the nurse suddenly appeared and offered Alex a shot for the pain, and some sleeping medicine. The doctor had left orders for both, and Sam told Alex he thought she should take it.
“Why?” She glared at him. “So I stop yelling at you?” She looked like a kid to him and he bent down and kissed her on the forehead.
“Yeah. So you'll shut up for a while, and get some sleep, before you drive yourself crazy.” Everything she had feared had happened to her, in a single morning. And now she had to learn to live with it.
She had a rough road ahead of her, and she knew it. She understood perfectly what lay ahead. Unlike Sam, who still wanted to deny it. “I love you, Alex,” he said gently after the nurse gave her the shot, but Alex didn't answer. She wasn't sleepy yet, but she was too miserable to tell him she loved him. And then, a few minutes later, she started to doze off. She didn't speak to him again, she just fell asleep, holding his hand, and he stood there and cried as he watched her. She looked so tired and so sad, and so broken, all covered in bandages, her beautiful hair like flame, and her body so badly injured.
He tiptoed quietly from the room once she was asleep, and signaled to the nurse that he was leaving. And as he rode down the elevator, he thought of what Alex had said to him. That he could walk away from this, and go home. It wasn't happening to him, just to her. And as he walked slowly home, he couldn't deny it. He was still whole, he wasn't in danger. He had nothing to fear, except losing her, which was so intensely frightening, he couldn't face it. He looked at himself in a store window on the way home, and saw the same man he had always been. Nothing had changed, except that he knew he had lost part of himself that afternoon, the part that was irretrievably bound to Alex. She was leaving him, bit by bit, just as his parents had left him, and he wasn't going to let her take him down with her. She had no right to do that to him, to expect him to die with her. And as he thought of it, he walked home as briskly as he could, as though there were muggers running after him, or demons.