Forever, page 2
Lydia waited until he took a break halfway through to catch his breath. “I want to know how much time. And enough with the I-don’t-answer-questions-like-that and every-patient-is-different bullshit. We’re way past that point now, and you know it.”
She turned back to the view out into the laboratory. All those brilliant minds working around the clock, trying to create a future that wasn’t going to come fast enough. At least not for the person she cared about.
As Gus came across to her, she braced herself, but all he did was glance over his shoulder at all the drinks like he desperately wanted to bring something to her.
Crossing her arms, she nodded at the laptop on the table. “FYI, I will launch this thing at you if you try to offer me an orange juice.”
“Vitamin C is important for a good immune response.”
“Then let’s infuse Daniel with twenty gallons of Tropicana. How’s that for a protocol.”
Gus finished his Coke, and when he put the can down, there was a declarative sound to the impact. “I’d say two months. Tops. He tolerated the immuno-therapy like a champ. The chemo as well. He’s extraordinarily healthy, except for the cancer.”
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play.
And “tolerated”? That was not a word she would use to describe the way the man she loved had had to endure the brutal side effects of all the courses of drugs.
“Is there anything else we can try?” She put her hand out. “Except for… well, you know he doesn’t want Vita-12b.”
“I told you, I’m not going to argue with him about his decision.”
“You’re a better man than I,” she muttered. And yet could she blame Daniel?
“Here’s the thing.” Gus picked up the can and brought it back to his mouth, a hissing sound rising into the silence as he tried to find another sip in the empty. “He should be able to choose whether or not he wants to be a guinea pig—”
“I’ve never said the choice wasn’t his—”
“—but now that we’re out of conventional options, maybe he changes his mind. Or maybe he doesn’t.”
Drowning in frustration and sorrow, Lydia ripped the tie out of her hair. Then she recaptured everything she’d just freed and wound the loose bun right back up.
Sometimes you just had to do something with your hands. Other than throw things.
“Daniel has to make the call soon, though, right? I mean, he’s as good as he’ll be today—”
“Actually, he’s going to rebound some now that the immunotherapy’s going to be stopped. As I said, he’s a healthy man in his prime underneath it all, and we’ve always been on top of his symptoms and complications. And we can do CyberKnife on his liver again and put in a stent if we have to. The bone mets in his spine and hip are what they are, but they haven’t gotten much worse. Of course, his lungs are the real problem. Bilateral is a bad new development.”
No, shit, Dr. St. Claire.
Lydia pulled out one of the executive chairs and all but fell into the baseball-mitt-like seat. As she stared at the laptop screen, she wanted to cry, sure as if she were already at Daniel’s wake. She wanted to weep and gnash, pound the glossy table with her fists, stamp her feet, kick the glass wall, throw the computer so hard that it splintered into a Dell-branded jigsaw puzzle. But you only fought what you did not accept, and as a numb helplessness started to wrap her in cotton batting, she realized that she was finally putting down her sword.
How had it come to this, she wondered. Then again, if the pair of them were walking down the aisle together, her in a white dress, him all tatted up in a tuxedo, she would have had the same sense of confusion. Awed, rather than awful’d, of course.
“Do you tell him or do I,” she said softly. Then she looked up sharply. “And if it’s going to be a doctor, it has to be you, not one of those other… well. Anyway.”
“Not one of those über-compassionate, windup toy researchers? I’d be touched by your request, but they set a low bar at the bedside, don’t they.” He held up his forefinger. “They are exactly who you want in the lab, however.”
“I believe that.” Lydia shook her head. “I need to go tell him. Probably best coming from me.”
“You want me to be with you?”
“It’s not going to be a news flash.”
When Gus got quiet, she glanced over. The man was staring off into the distance between them, his eyes not really focused, like he was reviewing the case for the seven millionth time in his head and looking for something, anything, they could try.
“It’s not your fault,” she said.
“Sure feels like it is on my side.” He fired the Coke can across the space, pegging the wastepaper basket at the far end of the credenza like it was a basketball rim. “I’m going to grab a break. You can always text or call, ’kay?”
“You, taking some time off?” She tried to smile. “Unheard of, even if it is ten at night.”
“I’m going to get shit-faced, actually. Care to join me? You can invite that boyfriend of yours.”
“I’ll take a rain check, if you don’t mind.”
“Fair enough. And remember, call me. Day or night.”
As he headed for the exit, she murmured, “You’re a good man, Gus.”
He stopped with his hand on the door. As he looked over his shoulder at her, his dark eyes were grave. “But not good enough to save him.”
Before Lydia knew what she was doing, she was up and out of the chair. When she embraced the doctor who had been right on the front lines with her, there was a split second—and then he hugged her back.
“I’m sorry.” He cleared his throat. “This is not the outcome we want.”
A moment later, they parted, and he squeezed her shoulder before leaving. Out on the far side of all the glass, he made his way down the rows of workstations—and the other researchers stole glances at him, like he was a rock star striding through a public place, a unicorn among mortals.
The back of the t-shirt had a series of faded dates, like Pufnstuf was on tour. It was hard to know whether the top was an actual vintage one or something created to look period. Knowing Gus, it was probably the former. He seemed like the type who would blow off steam by collecting relics he’d hunt-and-pecked for.
Returning to the laptop, Lydia went through the chest images again, looking at the clear evidence of disease progression. There were other locations on Daniel’s body that had been scanned, but she had no interest in going through them, at least not right now. If there was nothing more to be done, it didn’t really matter how much things had advanced in his spine and hip. In his liver. The only good news was that there was still nothing in Daniel’s brain. The doctor with the anonymous features had led with that announcement, as if it had been preplanned. Or maybe it was just alphabetical, “brain,” starting with b, before “hip,” “liver,” and “lung.”
“Dr. Walter Scholz. That was his name,” she said absently as it came back to her.
Lydia closed the laptop.
When the best case was that you didn’t have cancer in your brain—yet—that pretty much said it all, didn’t it.
She needed to go find Daniel.
And tell him it was over.
TWO
A-B-AB-ABTHTH-THAAT’S ALL FOLKS!
As Porky Pig’s sign-off Looney-Tune’d around Daniel Joseph’s head, he poured himself a couple fingers of whiskey, and then tried to get the top back on the liquor bottle. As the cork-seated disk skipped around the open neck, he thought back to two months ago, when the tremors had started. The neuropathy in his hands was the kind of thing that had arrived without preamble, the side effect of the chemo like a houseguest who’d moved in without invitation for the holidays.
And was apparently staying through ’til New Year’s.
What he remembered most about the initial salvo of this particular concession of normal functioning was his frustration at its appearance. The trembling had kicked in at dinner one night, when he’d been trying to get a forkful of peas to his mouth. When the little fuckers had jumped off the tines and made like green casino dice on the plate, he’d rolled his shoulder and realigned the angle of his elbow. That had done nothing to help on his second try—and over the next couple of days, the extent of the disability had revealed itself. Each new discovery, from struggling to text on his cell phone or put the cap on his toothpaste or lace up his boots… had royally pissed him off.
Ah, the good ol’ days. When he’d had the energy to spare on shit like being cranked over something he couldn’t change.
Now? He wasn’t much older, but he was definitely wiser. Or tired-er, as the case was. So yup, standing at the counter, he just sat back and watched the jittery show, feeling nothing at all. It was simply one more thing to endure, and, given the à la carte menu of physical crap he had to deal with, not worth getting worked up about.
And hey, who needed an electric toothbrush now, right? Fuck Oral-B.
When he finally hole-in-forty-seventh’d things, he added some soda and turned away from the little setup of squat crystal basins, bottles of Seagram’s, and the amber anchor of his favorite brand of whiskey. In the midst of the professional-grade kitchen, he’d come to think of the modest stretch of alcohol and accoutrements as his personal bar, a pocket of cocktails in the midst of a setup Gordon Ramsay would have gotten a case of the hot cross buns for. From the Viking wall ovens and sixteen-burner gas top, to the pair of Traulsen refrigerators and the three deep-bellied sinks, you could feed an army out of the square footage.
And as he thought about the owner of the conference-center-sized house, he reflected, not for the first time, that C.P. Phalen was the only private citizen he knew in the continental United States who could really live up to that hyperbolic vernacular: “army.” As in uniformed, professional, armed men in squadrons who were a point-and-shoot for whatever she wanted. There were no women in the ranks, and after having watched C.P. in action for the last six months, he had a feeling it was because she liked to be the only female anything in the room. But whatever, it was her gig, and like everything else on the estate, went by her rules.
Bringing the liquor to his mouth, he took a sip and knew he was going to pay for the tipple later. His digestive track was iffy on a good day, the rotating wheel of constipation, diarrhea, nausea, and vomiting the kind of game show he played on a regular basis. But fuck it. Sometimes, he just had to mimic the habits he’d enjoyed before his own personal time bomb had gone off. The rogue experiences were always more appealing in theory than fact, but they were a compulsion he needed to scratch, even though he knew things were going to turn out badly.
Shoring up his energy, he started for the sliding glass doors that opened out onto a terrace the size of a soccer field—
And made it about five feet.
The walking cane he’d begun to use was back where he’d left it, leaning up against the stainless steel cabinet, the hook of the grip linked onto one of the pulls. For a split second, that old familiar fury at how much he had lost hit him, but the flash of anger burned out fast because he just didn’t have the resources to hold anything for very long, whether it was an emotion or something as basic and physical as his balance.
Or even a rocks glass.
Shuffling back over, he locked his hand around the crook, and fell into what had become his new-normal of walking, the cobble, cobble, cobble together of swinging legs and arms kind of seasonal given that it was November: Gobble, gobble, gobble.
Maybe he should have put pumpkin into his Jack Daniel’s.
At the slider, he hung the cane on the wrist of his left hand and opened the sheet of glass. Minding the lip at the base of the frame so he didn’t catch a toe and die facedown on the flagstone in a shatter, he stepped out into the cold, moonlit night.
Upstate New York was beautiful in the fall, but it was no longer autumn, the chill in the air having gone from the nip of a golden retriever puppy to the chomp of a Belgian Malinois—and nature had responded accordingly. On the far rim of the meadow behind the mansion, everything was off the tree branches and browning to a crinkle on the ground. Funny, with time running out, he was noticing the seasons more.
The spring, the summer. Now the fall. Would he see another snowfall?
He thought of the scans that had been done on him. He had the feeling Lydia was getting the results right now because she’d made some deliberately offhand comment about going down to the lab “for a quick sec.” Like she had any other reason to take that elevator deep into the earth? No doubt it was a pregame for when they broke the bad news to him, but like he didn’t already know? He was living in his body. He knew his breathing was worse, and when he sorted through the symptoms he’d been dealing with, he was pretty damn sure that some of the fun and games was the cancer getting a further jump on him rather than just side effects from the pharmacy’s worth of shit they’d been pumping into him.
Closing things up in his wake, he looked past the discreetly lit terrace and winterized pool to that ghostly tree line. It was about a hundred yards away.
It might as well have been a matter of miles.
Going on a catty-corner angle, navigating by the heavens’ blue light, he eighty-year-old’d it over the cropped grass, all of which had turned a uniform brown, none of which was disturbed by any weed growth. C.P.’s lawn was kind of like him, medicated for better performance, although in its case, the metastases were kept at bay.
Maybe he just needed some Miracle-Gro.
Halfway to goal, he took a breather, bracing himself on the cane, opening his mouth, panting in a way that, as recently as the spring, would have only come from a full-out sprint. Glancing over his shoulder, he considered giving the security detail a little wave. The estate was up-the-ass with high-tech infrared cameras, no privacy to speak of inside or outside or anywhere—but he didn’t think anyone was going to come rushing after him like he was a toddler who’d wandered off. He’d been doing these after-dark wanders for the last couple of weeks. If someone had had a problem with them, he’d know about it by now.
Did the men who watched him hobble off feel sorry for him? he wondered. Was he a cautionary tale to all of those who were where he had been as recently as April?
He’d been a highly trained soldier, too. He’d had weapons and strength and cunning—and a secret mission. Granted, he’d worked for the government, and been sent here to wipe out C.P.’s lab… but then just like the way his body’s cells had betrayed him, he’d learned that all was not how it seemed on the surface.
And now that laboratory was fighting for his life.
Like a camera lens being focused, the house in his rearview suddenly registered with clarity. The massive stone structure was gleaming in the soft illumination of its security lights, the multitude of windows and doors covered with a reflective film that meant there were one-way mirrors all along the various elevations, nothing but the dark, barren landscape projected back at him, all that white furniture and art hidden from view.
The people, too.
As he scanned the glass panels, he wondered who might be looking back out at him and his conscience squeaked a protest somewhere below his conscious thoughts. What the hell was he doing, sneaking out to the woods again? Especially considering what he was bringing with him.
Turning back around, he kept going, and when he finally reached the trees, he penetrated their ranks in a random location so he didn’t create a trailhead that might show in the daylight. And then, as he continued along, he did what he could to leave the foliage undisturbed. Just like the whiskey and soda in his hand, and what was in the pocket of his jacket, this whole covering his tracks thing was a holdover from his old life, the one he had lived for twenty-nine years, five months, and twelve days.
A gunshot wound that should have been fatal had been the gateway to what was actually going to kill him—or his knowledge of what was cooking under his surface. That cough that wouldn’t go away? The one that sometimes came with a little blood? The tiredness? The weight loss?
Not allergies, as it turned out. Not his bad diet, his lack of sleep, or the stress that came with keeping Lydia from becoming collateral damage while he executed his mission.
When the docs at C.P. Phalen’s had X-rayed his chest to assess the damage… that was when they’d seen the cloud in his lung. The secret his body had been keeping from him was out, and the second era in his life had begun.
Daniel had to go slower now that he was in the woods, and it was hard to believe that there was a downshift below “snail’s pace,” but there it was. As a buffering fog set into his mind, his disorientation in what should have been a familiar landscape made him panic, everything suddenly looking foreign even though he could see quite well, the trees forming no pattern that he recognized even though he’d been tromping around in here for at least two weeks, the ground cover an obstacle course he couldn’t remember how to get through.
Getting his phone out to use the flashlight seemed like a lot of work, especially because he wasn’t sure how more illumination was going to help his—
He was saved by a broken branch.
The inch-thick, five-foot-long maple shooter had been split by a pair of hands, the messy crack in the wood no longer fresh, the angle pointing in a direction about seventy-two degrees to the right. A little farther on, he found another that was propped in the juncture of a birch, and as he kept going, he crossed paths with a third.
He’d left the arboreal arrows because chemo brain was real, but also because working a plan, even if it was as simple as designing an orientation system that covered only a hundred and fifty feet, made him feel like he wasn’t completely useless.
And there it was.
The fallen tree had been an old one back when it had still been up on its root system—not old-growth old, but its thick trunk had suggested a good fifty years’ worth of four seasons, and the proliferation of branches at the top made it seem like it had been healthy for a good, long period. Something had happened that had cut its life short, however, and as he came around to where it had broken free of its base, he shook his head at the ragged scarring that was obvious even in the moonlight. There was rot in the core, some kind of black staining of the wood in an invading pattern, maybe a fungus? He wasn’t sure. He’d never been into nature much, except as it provided coverage in situations when either he needed to defend himself or because he hadn’t wanted to be seen.
