“Hey, I’m fine with waiting,” I say.
Ben turns to look up at Sam. “What can I tell you?” he says to her. “The impatience comes and goes.”
“Oh, trust me,” she says. “I know.”
“I just want to go home and see my dog,” I say. “Who’s looking after him, by the way?”
“Kenny,” Jimmy says. “World-class bartender and world-class friend to dogs. It’s people he’s not very good with. Evenfora bartender.”
“So we’re going to find out if the tumor has grown or shrunk since the last imaging?” I ask Sam.
“Quickly,” she says.
“And if it has shrunk a little more?”
“Then we throw another party,” she says. “Just without the extra glass of wine.”
I know the drill by now. “CT scan?” I ask.
She nods.
Now the only thing I can hear in the hospital room is the beating of my own heart. I look over and see a little jump in the needle on the monitor.
I want the tests and I don’t.
“What if ithasgrown?” I say finally.
“Shut it,” Sam Wylie says.
ONE HUNDRED TWENTY
THEY DECIDE TO KEEP me another night at Southampton Hospital.
Sam Wylie says it’s strictly precautionary. I tell her before she leaves that I’m sorry, but I have to call BS on that. When you are living with cancer, when that’s your reality and your world, you don’t think any part of the process is precautionary. If your life were a movie, you’d be sure that in the very next scene somebody would be coming through the door with a gun.
“Dr. Gellis wants to wait until tomorrow and back up the CT scan with an MRI,” Sam says.
“Why does he want an MRI, too?”
“Because he wants to be sure,” she says.
“Of what?”
“Of all the things we need to be sure of before we tell you where we are,” she says, and promises me that they will fast-track the results as soon as the tests are finished in the morning, or several people at Southampton Hospital will be ripped a new one.
I tell her what I always tell my sister, Brigid, whom I spoke to from Switzerland a few hours ago, where she’s hooked up to her own machines, and undergoing more tests of her own, because we’re both a couple of lucky ducks.
“And people think you’re the nice one,” I say to Sam Wylie.
She gives me a kiss of her own on the forehead then and leaves me with Ben.
When it’s just the two of us I say, “I’m scared about tomorrow.”
“I know.”
If his chair were any closer, he’d be in the bed with me.
Neither one of us speaks then, for several minutes. He just sits there and holds my hand and seems content to do it all night. Somehow this good man has made me more comfortable with unspoken thoughts, and silences like this, than I’ve ever been in my life, with anyone.
