“Gee,” I say, just to say something to alleviate the tension, at least for me, “that didn’t take long.”
“We wanted to be sure before we talked to you,” Sam Wylie says.
“Sure,” I say. “You guys are doctors. You’re not like lawyers.” I laugh nervously. “You can’t make things up.”
She smiles. “Let somebody else talk for a change.”
“I’ll shut it now,” I say.
Ben comes over and stands next to me and takes my hand. Jimmy is on the other side of me.
“When we looked at the CT scan, we thought there had to be some kind of mistake,” Mike Gellis says. “But then the MRI confirmed it.”
I look across the room and see Sam Wylie start to cry.
“Tell me, Sam,” I say.
She takes a deep breath and keeps crying.
“The tumor is gone,” she says.
I feel all the air go out of my body.
The best I can do in the moment is this: “Gone where?”
And the esteemed Dr. Michael Gellis, whom I have neverheard ever utter anything resembling a bad word, smiles and says, “Beats the shit out of me.”
Then I am crying, and starting to slide down the wall, until Jimmy and Dr. Ben Kalinsky each grab an arm to catch me.
“We got you,” Jimmy Cunniff says, and then I can see that he’s crying, too.
ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-TWO
IT IS TWO DAYS later.
By now I feel as if I could pass a spot quiz about the spontaneous regression of tumors, and how the body can sometimes trigger its own response against specific antigens on the surface of cells, in combination with the drugs and the treatment a patient has received. The patient being me, in this case, and the chemo treatments I had already received, and most recently the antibody drug conjugants I received at the Meier Clinic.
“In the end,” Dr. Sam Wylie told me, “what just happened to you is difficult to quantify.”
Then she hugged me and said, “The best way for me to explain it in a way you can understand is that sometimes all the shit you’ve been taking actually works.”
On this particular morning Dr. Ben Kalinsky is in surgery. But we are planning dinner tonight, our first night out since I got my news at the hospital, at Page in Sag Harbor. We may even show up early for a drink at Jimmy’s.
Eric Jacobson was arraigned this morning at the same courthouse in Mineola where his father had been on trial for murders that Eric and Edmund McKenzie had committed, out of hate and madness.
Thomas McGoey, bless his heart, was at Eric’s side for the arraignment.
When Thomas started to speak to reporters outside the courthouse, I dove across my couch for the remote and shut off the TV in my living room.
“Best defense his daddy can buy,” I say to Jimmy Cunniff.
“Well,” Jimmy says, “almostthe best.”
Then we put Rip into Jimmy’s car and drive to Indian Wells Beach, where I plan to think about living and not dying, for a change.
It is an almost perfect autumn morning, the sun high in the sky. Jimmy keeps throwing a tennis ball for Rip to chase down.
“I keep forgetting to ask,” Jimmy says. “How’s Brigid doing, really?”
