How to Be Loved by Eva Hagberg Fisher

Author:Eva Hagberg Fisher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HMH Books

* * *

hey what are you doing can i come over tomorrow

* * *

hey do you want to watch an episode

* * *

hey i’m in your neighborhood can i stop by?

* * *

And then it was December, a month until my next MRI. Winston and I moved in together and realized that his need for alone time dovetailed perfectly with my devotion to Allison. We agreed that every Friday night and every Monday night I would sleep over at her house. She was going through another round of chemotherapy, an attempt to keep the ever-metastasizing breast cancer at bay, and she needed more help, more company than before. We put my stays on her calendar as “slumber,” which was supposed to be short for “slumber party” but was also, I knew in her poet ways, a reference to the ways in which our time together was still dreamlike, out of the world. Now that I wasn’t with Cameron I wasn’t constantly texting someone when I was with Allison. I was with her, in the time of no-time, in the in-between, in the time of waiting, me for a diagnosis and her for a final death sentence, the real one this time.

One of those nights, a few weeks after she started radiation on top of the chemotherapy, as we lay in her bed, after dinner but before the ice cream—coffee and chocolate for her, a sliver of a spoonful of vanilla Rice Dream for Sadie, a pint of something absurdly high-maintenance for me—I showed Allison a line graph of my tumor marker. It was a steadily rising line, starting in February, when we’d first measured it, and ending now, December.

“I don’t know why they’re not doing more,” I said to her. “I just want to know—I just want to know either way.”

The closer I got to the next piece of information, the more I felt I needed to prepare myself for the onslaught of pain I imagined was coming. Facing an MRI that I’d waited eleven months for and that was around the corner now was like finally being near a bathroom after hours on the train and realizing you can’t hold it for even one more minute.

“Trust me, babe,” she said. “You don’t want it to be cancer.”

“I feel like at least then I’ll know.”

“No,” she said. “It’s never good news when it’s cancer.”

Was I picking up a note of defensiveness? The infringing on her territory I’d done before was even more at the forefront now. I told everyone I knew that I had maybe-cancer, probably-cancer, that I probably most likely had brain cancer but we had to wait until January for certainty. This month of waiting for that confirmation was starting to feel interminable. I was also seriously stepping on her diagnostic toes.

“Babe, if they were worried, they would have acted by now,” she said.

“I think they’ve just forgotten me,” I said.

“If they thought that you were going to die of this, they would scoop you up, and they would put you on an ocean liner of medical help, and they would take care of you.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.