Chapter 40 The Week Before
MIA
The week before the championship was the longest week of the year in the specific way that weeks were long when they were carrying too much inside them to move at any normal pace, each day arriving already full of everything it needed to get through and the days somehow still managing to feel like they were going too fast simultaneously, the countdown and the slowdown happening at the same time and producing a kind of time that did not have a name.
Monday was practice and film and Caleb icing his shin at Eli's while I sat at Eli's kitchen table finishing the supplemental essay for Hamilton Regional that I had rewritten four times because every version either said too much about Mom or not enough, and the line between the right amount and too much kept moving every time I thought I had found it.
Tuesday was Mom's appointment and Dr. Patel used the word responding for the first time in fourteen months, not remission, not clear, but responding, and the word arrived in the room with a specific weight behind it that I had not heard in her voice before, and I sat in the chair beside Mom and held my hands still in my lap and let the word just be what it was without immediately calculating what it required or cost.
I did not count anything in the waiting room.
That was the first time.
Wednesday was Jamie's playoff game on the east side and I took the bus and stood at the boards with my scarf pulled up and watched my brother play defense with the concentrated ferocity of someone who had decided the sport was worth every serious thing he had put into it. He scored twice. His face when he came off the ice had the specific brightness of someone who had done something they were genuinely proud of before they had learned to be careful about showing pride.
Caleb arrived at the end of the second period without telling me he was coming.
He stood beside me at the boards and put his arm around me without making any announcement of it and I leaned into it the way I leaned into everything about him this year, without planning to and then not wanting to stop.
After the final buzzer Jamie found us outside and looked at Caleb's arm around my shoulders.
Finally, he said.
That is what Eli says, Caleb said.
Eli is observant, Jamie said, and went back to his team.
Thursday was the interview.
I wore the same black jeans and clean blouse I had worn to Richard Kessler's building two months earlier, deliberately, because I wanted to wear something that had already been in a difficult room and come out the other side intact and still itself.
The panel was three people. A program director and two senior nurses, one of whom had been in oncology for twenty two years. They asked why nursing, why oncology, what I thought the field most needed and what I thought I could specifically contribute to it.
I told them about Mom.
Not everything. Enough. The chemo and the pill organizer and the specific education that came from navigating a medical system for two years when you had no choice about whether to navigate it.
The senior oncology nurse asked what I thought patients in that ward needed most that they did not consistently receive.
I thought about the cancer center receptionist who called Mom by her first name. I thought about Thomas standing in the doorway.
To be seen as someone who is fighting, I said. Not dying. Fighting. The difference matters more than anything clinical.
The panel thanked me.
I walked out into the cold Thursday afternoon.
Caleb was leaning against his truck in the parking lot.
I stopped on the steps.
You did not have to come, I said.
I know, he said.
I told you I was okay.
You said same time tomorrow, he said. Today counts as tomorrow.
I walked down the steps.
He met me at the bottom.
How did it go, he said.
I think well, I said. The senior nurse, the one who had been there twenty two years, leaned forward when I answered the last question. I did not plan the answer. It just came out of the right place.
He looked at me.
What was the question, he said.
What patients needed most that they did not get.
And what did you say.
I told him.
He was quiet for a long moment.
That is why you are going to be exactly the kind of nurse this world needs, he said.
I pressed my lips together.
Do not make me cry in a hospital parking lot on a Thursday afternoon, I said.
I am just telling you the truth.
I know you are. I looked at him. Do it inside.
He smiled.
We got in the truck.
Caleb texted at nine that night.
Ready for Saturday.
I thought about October and an equipment room and tape thrown at a chest.
I have been ready for a while, I typed back.
His reply came immediately.
Me too.
I put the phone down.
Mom's breathing was steady through the wall.
Still fighting.
Same as all of us.
And for once, the waiting did not feel like something happening to me. It felt like something I was already inside, already part of, already moving through whether I liked the pace of it or not.