My Oxford Year by Julia Whelan

Author:Julia Whelan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2018-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face . . .

William Butler Yeats, “When You Are Old,” 1891

Jamie doesn’t seem surprised to see me on his stoop. He opens the door (I knocked this time) and steps back, gesturing me in. He’s wearing flannel pajama bottoms and a ratty Christ Church College T-shirt. I’ve never seen him in clothes like this. In my experience, he’s either dressed like he’s just stepped out of a photo shoot or he’s naked. As I walk past him, I notice that his coloring is off. He somehow looks thinner than he did yesterday, hollowed out.

He silently leads me into the kitchen, crossing to the sink. I hover at the island. He pops the tab on the electric kettle, the British assumption of tea. Then he turns back around and we look at each other.

“How are you feeling?” I ask.

He shrugs, crossing his arm over his stomach, rubbing his other forearm. “I believe Happy Thanksgiving is in order. Happy? Is that how you say it?”

“Yes. It is. Thank you.”

We’re stiff together. Formal. For the first time, I feel more English than American. I watch my hand run along the island’s marble top, studying the white and gray and black veins. “So, I’m sorry.”

“As am I.”

I look up at him. He’s looking at the floor. “For how I reacted,” I say.

He looks up at me. “I’m sorry for everything.” We assess each other, these people we thought we knew. His eyes tell me that the simple apology is enough for now, and I agree. The problem is, now I want to go to him, hug him, hold him. But I stay where I am. I don’t know who we are to each other anymore.

The kettle begins to hum, heating up.

“Will you tell me the story?” I ask.

Four years ago, Oliver was diagnosed with multiple myeloma at the age of twenty-one. Two years after that, he died. Although there can be a genetic component to the disease, Jamie says it’s rare, and he had been tested when Oliver needed possible stem-cell donors and his results were clean, so he didn’t think he needed to worry. Within a year of Oliver’s death, Jamie—then in Cambridge and helping a friend with her doctoral research in biology—got a blood test. This is how he found out. Jamie’s case is just as aggressive as Oliver’s was, but was caught earlier. He explains that he immediately began treatment, doing what Oliver had done: stem-cell replacement therapy. This entailed a few rounds of chemo, the harvesting of his own cells, and an implantation procedure that required him to stay in a hospital, completely isolated, for fear of his contracting an infection, for a month. It bought him a year of remission.

The day I arrived in Oxford happened to be the day Jamie found out the myeloma had come back.

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