“How can … how did this happen?” I say when we finally pull back from each other a second time.
“It’s all because of the mostbrilliantword in the English language,” she says.“Remission.”
She asks then if I might fancy walking a bit more.
“Brilliant,” I say, trying and failing miserably to imitate her lovely accent.
We turn and head back down the trail I’d just climbed, Fiona setting a pretty brisk pace.
As we walk, she tells me that she was preparing for home hospice, honestly feeling as if she were already on her death bed, when Dr. Foyle, her oncologist, paid her a visit unannounced.
Dr. Ludwig had called with news of a brand-new clinical trial.
“Before I’d left Meier, I’d told them no more drugs, they were sucking out of me whatever life I had left and dulling my senses and making me sadder than I already was.”
Dr. Foyle explained to Fiona that this trial was not yet approved in England or the US. Then, Fiona said, he asked a hard question—“if I had the strength and the will to make one more trip back here.”
“So I finally asked my dear Dr. Foyle if he thought it was worth it. He smiled at me and said, ‘What do you have to lose, dear girl?’”
Fiona and her husband flew back here the next afternoon.
“When we arrived they gave me a lot of gobbledygook and gibberish about transductor inhibitors and, let me see if I remember properly, radiometabolic compounds and CAR T-cell therapy,” she says. “Oh, and cellular path interruption.”
“I mean, who hasn’t heard about all that?” I say.
The last rays of the sun are in our faces now. Somehow the wind has shifted and is at our backs, and the sky is suddenly the color of cobalt, and everything seems even morebeautiful than it did when I was out walking alone, because now Fiona Mills is here with me.
She pauses in her story, throws her head back, breathes in the mountain air. Then I see her eyes start to tear up. Somehow, though, she is smiling. Brilliantly.
“And somehow it all worked,” she says, before quickly making the correction all cancer patients feel the need to make. “Orisworking. I was here for a few weeks and now I’m back and for now, the gobbledygook and gibberish appears to be in perfect synchronicity, by the grace of God.”
“About time She showed up with some of that,” I say.
Then Fiona stops suddenly and takes both of my hands in hers as she faces me. “And that will be quite enough about me,” she says. “What about you? Are you here for a tune-up, or for gobbledygook of your own?”
“The latter, I’m afraid.”
I manage a smile.
“I’ll still have what you’re having,” I say.
FIFTEEN
AS WE BEGIN THE long walk back, I tell her the thought that flashed through my brain just before I spotted her today, that maybe if I was in disguise and on the run, the bad guys wouldn’t be able to find me.
“Sometimes I just worry that I’m runningoutof time,” I say.
“Rubbish,” she says.
“I wish.”
“Don’t wish,” she says. “Believe.” She is smiling again. “I didn’t die on you and you’re not going to die on me.”
She gets a few yards ahead, then stops and turns to face me.
“Am I making myself clear, Ms. Jane Effing Smith?” Fiona asks.
I told her that’s what my friends called me.
