One foot in front of the other. Up the stairs. Wake the boys. I can do this.
I have to do this.
I dreamed it. Or I hallucinated it.
The flowers in the living room are real. The ashes in the urn are real.
Last night wasn’t real.
Sarah walked over the bridge every night for two months, knowing her one last perfect night with Sam had been a trick of her mind, but hoping against hope that it hadn’t been. Hope died hard.
But it did die.
She marked the moment of its death in her memory.
“Up,” she told Jim, who was curled under his blankets, his head under the pillow, just one bare foot hanging over the side of the bed.
Mike, who had been in the boys’ bathroom, came out and said, “He doesn’t want to go to school today. I don’t either.”
Sarah said, “You have to. You know your dad wouldn’t have wanted the two of you to end up in trouble for skipping school.”
And then Mike looked at her, eyes narrowed. “Are you all right?”
“I haven’t been sleeping too well,” she told him.
“You look . . . kind of sick, Mom. You need to eat more. And get some rest.”
“I haven’t been eating much, either.”
But it was more than that. When she saw the boys onto the bus, she stepped on the scale again, wanting the news to be good. But she was down eighteen pounds from the day Sam died, and it wasn’t just because she wasn’t eating. She was dizzy all the time, weak and queasy. She couldn’t eat: she could barely drink. She couldn’t stay awake. Her lower abdomen hurt and it was bloated. Her back hurt. Everything hurt.
She’d tried to tell herself it was grief, but her symptoms kept getting worse.
So she made the appointment with Dr Gruber and kept it. He was a family friend, and had been her doctor since she was in
her early teens. He’d watched her and Sam grow up. He’d attended the funeral. She had a pretty good idea what was going wrong, but he would help her figure out what to do.
Ben Gruber looked at her over the top of her chart and said, “You told Beth you’re afraid you have ovarian cancer?” He studied her chart while she sat on the exam table.
She nodded, unable to say those words aloud to him.
“You’ve lost eighteen pounds in two months.” He shook his head. “Not good. But not unheard of after the death of a loved one.”
“I know. But I’ve been eating. It’s just that everything comes back up. I can barely stomach broth.”
“Sleeping?”
“All the time during the day. Not much at night, though I’m exhausted even then. It’s just that. . . Sam’s gone, and at night, I hear everything.”
She lay on the bench while he listened to her heart and lungs with a stethoscope.
“You’ve been feeling like this for how long?”
“Since Sam died.”
“The vomiting and abdominal pain, too? The bloating?”
“No, the vomiting and pain both started not long after the funeral. The bloating and the having to go to the bathroom all the time are more recent.” She said “Ouch,” as he pressed his fingers into her lower abdomen. “All the symptoms have been getting worse.”