“Oh, Jack,” I said, tears clogging my voice. “I haven’t stopped loving you for one minute. Even when you told me not to, when you told me to accept philia, when you told me you loved blondes.” I laughed and he did too, an absurd humor in a room smoked with fear.
Jack rested his cheek against mine. “I’ve kept you close, needing you as air and water, as garden and forest even while I told you no. When you aren’t with me, I think of you. When you are gone, I miss you. I’ve been a tosser, keeping you near and yet pushing you away. You’ve become the other part of me. You’re the very first person I want to share a thought or a moment with. Oh, the fool I’ve been.”
He dropped his head onto my chest, and I placed my hand in his thinning hair, ran my fingers across his neck and then his shoulders under his shirt, felt the skin of the man I loved. “How can a woman be happy and fearful in one same moment?” I asked. “I have dreamed of us in this way for all these years. Here I am at my most ugly and there you are, loving me.”
He lifted his face and smiled at me. That grin that had caught me at the Eastgate, the one he gave when I told a great joke or edited a mangled line or quoted a poem from memory or beat him at Scrabble with a Greek word he’d forgotten.
“Is it the pain meds?” I asked with a laugh.
He kissed me again. “Everything I’ve written since the day you walked into Eastgate has been tangled with you. How could I have not seen it at all?”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s now,” I said. “You see now.”
Then his face changed; the seriousness was etched in every line. “Let me get the doctor for you, Joy. We have so many decisions.”
“For just a few moments, before we hear the death knell they might bring. Will you just hold me?” I paused. “Do you remember the poem I wrote, the poem I wrote when I was young and healthy? ‘What will come of me; After the fern has feathered from my brain . . .’” I trailed off. “It was about my death, which seemed impossible, merely a concept.”
“‘Yet One More Spring.’ I remember.” He pressed both his warm palms onto the top of my head as the door swished open and two doctors entered with clipboards and stern expressions. “You will have many more springs . . . many . . .”
Jack lifted his hands, and I asked him without yet looking to the doctors, “My sons. Have they been told?”
“Not yet. I’ve sent for them. They’ll arrive on the train tomorrow, and I’ll collect them from the station and bring them here.”
“Warnie?”
“Yes, and he’s devastated. He loves you too. He could not even accompany me here; he returned to the Kilns.”
The doctors shifted their weight, but I kept my eyes fixed on Jack. “When can I go home?”
“There’s no going home to Old High Street, Joy. You’ll be here for a long while, and then you are coming home with me. I’ll never be apart from you again.”
The first doctor stepped up then, and the long litany of my ills began.
It could be leukemia, but they believed it was another cancer, and that it had spread. My left leg bones were dust, and there was a lump in my left breast. There would be surgeries, and if cancer, then radiation.
“It’s a dire diagnosis,” the second doctor said. “If it’s breast cancer, as I believe, then it has gone undetected for far too long.”
“I’ve been to the doctor,” I said. “I’ve been telling them how tired I am, how unremittingly tired I am. I’ve told them about the lump in my breast. About my heart doing funny jumps. About the pains in my bones. About my nausea. They said it was middle age and stress.” Anger prodded my body to attempt to sit, but a great pain exploded, down my leg, up my side. “I told them,” I wailed.
“How long has it been there? The lump. How long?” Doctor One looked at Doctor Two.
“At least seven years. I told my doctors in America about it, and then again Dr. Harvey here.”
I looked to Jack, desperate to turn back time, to have someone tell me to take out the ticking time bomb in my breast. “Remember when I told Humphrey about it? At dinner that night? And he too said it was nothing to worry about. And then the eight doctors who prodded me in London and told me again that it was my thyroid. It can’t be cancer. They would have known then.”
“We can’t change that,” Doctor One said. “But we can do everything to treat it now.”