Same blank stare.
“Easy for you to say,” I tell her, and then head for my room.
I end up with the same one I had on my first visit. Two rooms, actually—like a one-bedroom suite at a five-star hotel—with a lovely view of the grounds and of the mountains in the distance.
After a long plane ride followed by a long car ride and then a morning filled with the poking and prodding, I want to breathe in the incredibly cool, clean mountain air.
And try to feel alive.
It’s a walk I know well by now, looping up toward the mountains, around a lake whose name I can’t recall, down toward a lush green valley, and finally back toward Meier. I would tell myself that I feel close to heaven up here, but that’s a gameIdon’t like to play.
A major part of the reality of being a cancer patient is the waiting game, going from one test to another, with hours of waiting overnight for good news.
Or at least not more bad news.
Waiting and wishing and hoping that this is the time when the governor calls, before it’s too late, to tell you that your sentence has been commuted.
So I walk into the late afternoon.
I walk and replay the proposal from Dr. Ben inside my head. And immediately start second-guessing myself all over again, wondering, if I really do only have a handful of months left, why I would be more willing to spend them defending Rob Jacobson than with a man who loves me as unconditionally as Ben Kalinsky does.
Not just having Ben as my boyfriend, even though that word sounds sillier than ever to me, but as my husband.
Until death do us part.
After I have walked what must be a couple of miles from the clinic, I’m hit with my usual late-day fatigue or jet lag or both. I turn back and walk toward the sunset, my eyesshielded by my ancient, faded blue Mets cap and sunglasses. I pull the hat down tighter to cut down on the glare and suddenly feel a laugh escape my throat, imagining myself to be in disguise, even this far from civilization.
They’ll never find me up here,I tell myself.
They’ll never take me alive.
Then I’m laughing uncontrollably, not sure why, unable to stop myself, before I feel more coming on, despite all the beauty around me.
I’m heading up the last hill back to Meier when I see the ghost walking toward me.
FOURTEEN
THE GHOST IS QUITE lovely, speaking to me in a familiar British accent, one I never expected to hear again.
“Fancy meeting you here,” Fiona Mills says.
I cover the distance between us so quickly that it must be a tackle she’s expecting and not a hug.
“You’re not dead!” is the best I can blurt out.
“Funny, that,” she says.
I met her on my previous visit to Meier, when the two of us took this same walk together, when she was deathly pale and thin and had lost her hair. The doctors had run out of treatment options, and Fiona Mills was sure that when she left for England, she was going back home to die. The day I said good-bye to her, I was certain it was forever.
But now here she is. In the brief time I’ve known her, I’ve found her to be both kind and wise and even brave the way Ben Kalinsky is. I step back then and take a closer look at her. She has put on what looks to be ten much-needed pounds and probably even more than that.
Fiona Mills notices me staring at her hair.
“Want to give Goldilocks’ new bob haircut a tug?” she says, pulling on it herself. “I can assure you that it’s all mine, even if it’s not coming back nearly as fast as I’d like.”
“I’ll take your word,” I say, and then our arms are around each other again.
This makes me believe in miracles.
