Yolanda’s lips part, and she seems about to say something, then to change her mind. She holds her hand out for the flyers. “I’ll take them.”
Yolanda drives herself to her appointment at the Cancer Center, sits tethered to the IV for hours while toxic fluids are pumped into her. Some people sit in recliners, but because she can’t bear to make conversation, Yolanda prefers to lie on one of the raised beds with the pink curtain shut around her. Beyond, a man murmurs weakly while his daughter encourages him. A television chatters. Two women—sisters?—with similarly robust voices complain about the parking, the facilities, the care. “I’m getting me an appointment at Mayo in Phoenix.” Very close, the pages of a magazine turn. Here you can almost convince yourself that chemotherapy is as routine and harmless as a trip to the hair salon.
She settles against the pillow, arms limp. The sleeves of her sweater are rolled. She’s weightless and warm under the cotton blanket. Her last sensation is of the pull of the tape on the back of her hand, and then she’s gulped under into a black sleep.
When Yolanda wakes to the clinic’s cool light and whir, Anthony is standing at her bedside. Not Anthony as he was when she last saw him, paunchy, face bloated with addiction and unhappiness, but as he was when he was a teenager, when Yolanda was still a kid looking up to him and her cousin Elwin: athletic and slender, his hair a mop.
After Elwin’s Rosary, as the old people dabbed at their eyes and sipped coffee in Fidelia’s living room, Anthony, in his new suit, found her. Without a word, he drew her to him and did not let go, sobbing into her hair. She’d stroked his back, murmuring, and had felt, beneath her sadness, a swelling sense of herself as a woman, offering comfort. After, her dress had been creased where it was pressed between them.
Anthony’s hand rests on the blanket near her shoulder, a crescent of white under each clean nail. He watches her with steady brown eyes. His lips are chapped.
“You’re here,” she says with surprise.
He tips his head, gravely considering.
The breath stills in her chest. She’s afraid of what he will say to her.
He reaches toward her and slowly runs a single nail along the back of her hand, along where the needle pierces her skin. Yolanda wants to flinch, to jerk her arm away, but she only watches, sickened, as his nail scrapes up the crepey skin of her arm. It doesn’t hurt, but everything in her shrinks from his touch. He moves slowly, watching her face all the while, until he’s reached her elbow. Her heart gives a sick thump. Eyes widening, he pushes his finger under her sleeve, then grins, his stretched lips taut and pale.
Yolanda’s eyes are dry and burning. When she blinks, Anthony is gone.
A moment later, the technician comes with a paper cup of water to detach Yolanda from the tubes. “You’ve got someone to drive you, hon?” Yolanda nods and pushes through the pink curtain and makes for the hallway, not even bothering to fluff her flattened hair.
Without allowing herself to think, Yolanda gets behind the wheel, bilious and shaking, the sweat seeping from her cold skin. Her flesh is tight under the tape and the gauze where the needle was withdrawn.
Anthony was a dream, Yolanda tells herself. No: a hallucination. Dr. Konecky warned her that hallucinations would come. Or he was the son of one of the other patients, or even a patient himself, a creepy young man who slipped behind Yolanda’s pink curtain, and Yolanda, in her haze of sickness and exhaustion and emotion, the tumor threatening to smother her clarity, jumped to the wildest possible conclusion. Her husband is dead, and therefore not wandering the halls of the Cancer Center.
But while there isn’t a mark from his touch on her skin, she can still feel the prickling shadow of the scratch, the pressure of his nail as it traveled up her arm, the eerie violation of his finger under her sleeve, and she knows that his presence was real.
Anthony, the father of her children, her one love, her one ruinous love. Yolanda sucks in air noisily as a wave of nausea passes over her.