To My Romeo, with Love novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Eight A.M.

Alone in the oncologist's office, Laurel hears Hodgkin lymphoma and the odds and agrees to everything except telling anyone; Marge arrives with a pie and says Fraser has sat on her porch since five.

Fraser didn't argue.

He stood very still with his hand still in my hair.

Then he took it away and said, "Okay."

It was the quietest word I had ever heard him say.

I dressed with my back to him and my hands fumbling on the buttons.

He leaned in the doorway and watched the floor.

"You don't have to go out the back," he said. "Nobody's up."

I went out the back anyway.

I walked home down Pembroke Lane at half past seven on a Sunday morning, with my cardigan buttoned wrong and my mouth still tender from his.

The rose on the trellis outside my window had dropped most of its petals on the grass.

I got into my room and sat on the floor with my back against the bed until it was Monday.

The oncologist's office was on the fourth floor of Wornall Cancer Center, down a hall that smelled of hand sanitizer and old coffee.

I went alone.

The nurse had said to bring someone, and I had no one I was willing to bring.

The oncologist was a small woman with silver braids who shook my hand and didn't let go quickly.

"Laurel, I'm going to say it plainly, because I think you'd want that."

"Please."

"The biopsy shows classical Hodgkin lymphoma."

I heard the words and none of them stuck to anything.

"It's a cancer of the lymph system. Yours is in the nodes of your neck and your chest, which makes it stage two. You've had night sweats and itching and lost weight, so we call it two B."

"I thought it was a cold," I said. "For a month, I thought it was a cold."

"Most people do."

She turned her screen toward me.

There was a picture of my chest, and two bright patches where my body had gone wrong.

"This is one of the most curable cancers we treat. With the chemotherapy I'd start you on, eighty-five to ninety out of a hundred people in your situation are cured."

I held onto the number.

It was a good number.

It was a number my mother had never been given.

"Six months of treatment," she went on. "Every two weeks, in the infusion center. You'll lose your hair. You'll be sick, and tired, and your blood counts will drop. But you would come out the other side."

"What do I have to do first?"

"Two things, and fast. A small port goes under the skin of your chest so the drugs go into a large vein. And before we start, I want you to see the fertility clinic."

My throat closed.

"The drugs can damage your eggs," she said. "You have about nine days to freeze some if you want that choice later. It's your decision, and it's not a small one."

I thought about a baby with sandy hair and gray-green eyes.

I thought it, and then I put it down as fast as I could.

"Yes," I said. "To all of it."

"Who's going to be with you for treatment? A partner, family?"

"My dad."

"Does he know?"

"Not yet."

"And is there anyone else?"

I could still feel a mouth on my ribs.

"No," I said.

She wrote something down.

She didn't tell me the thing I was waiting for, that I should tell people.

She only said, "Then you'll have my team. We're very good."

In the fertility clinic a nurse put a folder in my hands with three kinds of injections in it.

She said I'd start the next evening.

She said the whole thing would cost eleven thousand four hundred dollars, and my insurance would pay none of it.

I nodded.

I sat in my car in the parking structure for twenty minutes with the folder on my lap.

Then I started the car and drove home, because I had children's choir at four and I could not call in sick.

I taught thirty-one kids in the second grade to sing a round about a big red barn.

They were loud and off key and they hugged my legs.

I smiled the entire time.

When I pulled into the driveway at six, there was a pie on my porch railing.

There was also a person.

Marge McCracken, Fraser's mother, sat on my steps in her church cardigan with her purse in her lap.

She had been my second mother since I was six.

She had held me at my own mother's funeral.

She stood up when she saw me and her face did something I didn't like.

"Hi, honey," she said. "I brought a pie."

"Marge, you didn't have to."

"I know I didn't." She came down two steps and stopped. "Laurel, my son sat on my porch from five o'clock yesterday morning until supper. He won't tell me what you said to him."

My keys cut into my palm.

"Nothing," I said. "It was nothing. We just, it was a bad idea."

Marge looked at me for a long time.

"I raised that boy," she said. "And I've watched you grow up in that window for twenty years. Whatever you're carrying, you're carrying it wrong."

I took the pie out of her hands because I could not look at her face.

"Thank you for this," I said.

She didn't move out of my way.

"He said one thing," she told me. "He said, 'Mama, she's scared.' And then he wouldn't say another word."

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