mysterious way related to the death by brain cancer that she now faced.
In the Hours Before the Crisis
BIBI WAS SITTING ON THE EDGE OF HER BED, making a list in the spiral-bound notebook, when her parents arrived with the intention of lifting her spirits as best they could, although they did not succeed in this. The moment that they walked through the door, the stricken look in their eyes was poorly synchronized with their smiles.
They didn’t fail her; they never could. Only she could keep her spirits up. Anyway, she wasn’t depressed, certainly not despairing. She didn’t have time for that. Or the inclination. Even as grim as it sounded, her prognosis was a challenge, and the only reasonable way to respond to a challenge was to rise to it.
She was still the girl whose mind was always spinning, and now it spun out tasks for her mother, which she added to the list in the notebook. “They’re keeping me here until tomorrow, maybe even till the day after. Dr. Chandra needs to do a few more tests to plan a course of chemo and radiation. The choice is mine, and I’m going to fight. I need you to go to my apartment, bring my laptop. I’m going to research the crap out of this. I need changes of underwear. And socks. My feet get cold. Some of my nice soft towels. The ones here are scratchy. And all my vitamins. My iPod with the headphones. I’ll have to use headphones in here.” Because she maintained a post-office box, she needed her mail to be collected and brought to her. She described a few other errands as she appended them to the list, and then she tore off two pages and handed them to her mother.
Grateful to have something to do other than dwell on his daughter’s situation, Murphy said, “We’ll split up the work, Nancy. You take the apartment stuff. I’ll do the other running around.”
Bibi said, “No, Dad. Let Mom take care of it. You get back to business.”
He looked perplexed, as if he had forgotten that he was anything other than her father. “What business?”
“The one Pogo is this very minute running into the ground.”
He shook his head. “But I can’t—”
“You can. You must. If I’m going to devote all my time to this battle, I won’t be writing. My income will dry up. Mom’s commissions will probably go to hell while we’re fighting this. You’ll have to support me as if I were ten years old again. You have to, Daddy.”
Hugs and kisses. Declarations of love. Clumsily expressed covenants to face the future together with resolution, to win in spite of the terrible odds. And then her parents were gone.
After using the bathroom, while washing her hands at the sink, Bibi studied her reflection in the mirror—until her vision blurred and one face became two, smeary and distorted. Vision problems were a symptom of gliomatosis cerebri. She gripped the sink with both hands, taking slow deep breaths, wondering if she would go blind. Not yet. Her vision cleared.
Something Bad and Something Worse
BIBI TOOK HER LUNCH BY THE WINDOW. SHE ATE every bite. Other than surgery, treatments for cancer often caused prolonged bouts of nausea and a depressed appetite. She needed to forget about being svelte and pack on several pounds of reserves to get her through the coming battle. She supposed that eventually she should shave her head instead of waiting for her hair to fall out in a mangy fashion. The more she took control of her appearance, the better.
Poor Paxton would come home from war to find that his fiancée had morphed into a bald sumo wrestler. Well, he said he would always love her, through the bad times no less than the good, and she believed him. If she had him all wrong—which she didn’t, but if she did—then she was better off knowing the truth sooner than later. The only plus to having brain cancer might be that it provided the ultimate test of your guy’s true intentions. Given a choice between putting herself through gliomatosis cerebri and putting Paxton through a lie-detector test, she would of course have chosen the latter; but she hadn’t been given a choice.
A perky blond volunteer in a candy-striper uniform, smelling of a lemony perfume, came to collect the lunch tray. Bibi arranged for the girl to go to the cafeteria and buy a supply of PowerBars in various flavors. “I want to look like John Goodman by next week.”
“Who’s John Goodman?”
“A large actor. He played Roseanne Barr’s husband on TV.”
“Oh, yeah. He’s in lots of movies. He’s cute.”
A nurse arrived to get a urine sample. A phlebotomist drew five vials of blood. A woman “from legal” had papers to be signed.
Bibi engaged in only minimal small talk with them, though for most of her life she had been a fountain of words. Everything in this world amazed and fascinated her—from the fragile beauty of a lily to the mysteries of quantum mechanics—and she usually had to share her wonder or burst. Being named Bibi had encouraged her to chatter away because, even as a child, she had been determined to impress upon everyone that, in spite of her name, she wasn’t a toy, not frivolous, but a keen observer of the world, a philosopher by the time she graduated from the potty chair. She had never been for long struck speechless—until she received a diagnosis of brain cancer.
Her mother returned at five o’clock with everything that Bibi had requested, and her father phoned minutes later to say that the three of them should have dinner together in her room, not hospital food, but whatever outrageous high-calorie fat-rich takeout she wanted. Cheeseburgers and milk shakes. Burritos. Four-cheese pizza. Anything, anything.
“No, Dad. Mom’s exhausted.” Nancy began to protest, but Bibi raised one hand to quiet her. “You both are. These two days have been hard on all of us. You and Mom have dinner, just the two of you, with a good bottle of wine. I’m okay. I’m not going anywhere. I just want to do some research on my laptop while I eat, then early to bed. I hardly slept last night. I’ll ask for a sedative. I want to be dreaming about a certain Navy SEAL by seven o’clock at the latest.”
To get Nancy out of the room and off to dinner, Bibi had to escort her along the hallway to the elevators. Alert for any tendency of her left foot to drag, determined not to become Quasimodo with boobs, she walked with her shoulders back and her head up.
“What about the tingling?” her mother asked. “The fifty-cell-phones-on-mute head-to-foot thing?”
“It’s quieter. And I haven’t had that rancid taste all day.”
“Baby, I can see your left hand’s still weak.”
“So I’ll use the other one to scratch my butt.”
In the elevator alcove, the doors to one of the cabs slid open. Nancy didn’t get aboard. “This is so wrong. I can’t just leave.”
As the doors started to slide shut, Bibi blocked them. “Mom, we have to stay
