The Geography of Love by Glenda Burgess

Author:Glenda Burgess
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780767929134
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2008-08-05T00:00:00+00:00

Two hours later, waiting over coffee and lumpy broccoli-cheese soup in the hospital cafeteria, I rang Drayneau’s office on my cell phone and asked after Ken’s MRI results.

Patsy, Drayneau’s oncology nurse, promptly answered. “Doctor’s out, but maybe Radiology sent something up. Lemme check.”

She raced back to the phone. “All clear! Ain’t nothin’ in his noggin’ that shouldn’t be there!”

Thrilled, I shared the news with Ken.

He grunted, his head gripped in his hands, battling a fierce headache that had set in after the brain scan. Abruptly, he doubled over in a sudden coughing spell, twisted to his side, and coughed so hard the spasms triggered a bloody nose.

He looked up at me, hands full of bright red blood, holding the bridge of his nose in disbelief. “Well!” And then he swore. Even, calm, precise invectives.

There was nothing else to say, so I hugged him and ran to the cashier for paper towels.

A sandy-haired woman in her early fifties in a physician’s jacket walked by as we were mopping up, and seeing us, stopped.

“Glenda? Ken? What are you two doing here?” She smiled, curious.

“Hello, Rachel.” I recognized her from school parent meetings. “We come for the food, don’t you? Killer Jello.” The joke fell flat. I shrugged. “Ken’s having some diagnostics done. A PET scan.”

“A PET? That’s pretty serious.”

I looked down at the floor, and Ken squeezed my arm gently. He explained his diagnosis to Rachel, and even though we did not know the woman well, we both assumed a broad doctor-patient confidentiality. After all, we were in the hospital, the woman was a doctor.

We were wrong. The next day news of Ken’s cancer was all over the children’s school as the physician’s daughter whispered to her friends behind Katy’s back. The news quickly spread down the grades until even David’s sixth-grade friends, no more interested in gossip than grammer exercises, knew the Grunzweig kid’s dad was “sick.” That encounter marked the beginning of a painful public exposure for the children, for all of us.

After a four-hour wait, Ken was ushered through the underground corridors of the hospital into a semitrailer—the mobile PET unit. I waited in reception, my only company an unconscious elderly man on a gurney. I occupied the time considering the science of nuclear imaging, the use of chemical markers and radiation maps at the level of our cells. How like the darkroom image, the reversals of light and dark.

What if, as Dad had always described the galaxy to me, our cells were also bits of chaos and engineering, roped together by some impossible scheme of order? Could just one cell, one falling star, really bring the whole circus act crashing down?

Ken had pinned a cryptic note above his darkroom sink.

Where am I? It is time to stop waiting to do things. Now is the only time. I think this is what they call self-actualization, because actually, if you don’t do it now, you may be too old to ever do it.

There was a story in Ken’s family, which

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