Sixteen

SIXTEEN

AS SOON AS I'M awake at the Meier Clinic, every morning, first thing, I check my hair.

My nose is nearly pressed against the bathroom mirror after I've made what I consider to be a full forensic examination of my pillows, making sure I haven't backslid, hairwise, overnight.

It doesn't mean I'm getting better, necessarily. But still having a full head of hair makes me feel better.

About me.

My father was born on the West Side of Manhattan, Hell's Kitchen, but grew up in Seaford, Long Island, and finally went to high school there, with the old basketball coach Jim Valvano. And the more Valvano won in college basketball, including a national championship, the better friends my father and the coach had been when they were kids. At least, that's the way my father told it. Valvano later died of cancer himself, young, at forty-seven. At the time it was treated like a death in our family.

But when Valvano did finally pass, he still had a full head of hair. I read up on his final days, an old cover piece from Sports Illustrated .

One line stayed with me:

"His hair, against all medical logic, had survived massive chemotherapy."

So has mine, at least so far.

I'm undergoing another round of what the Meier team describes as "gentle" chemo, along with a daily multidrug cocktail they call multitargeted immunotherapy. They are even trying intense, experimental nerve therapy in the area on the back of my neck where the tumor was first discovered.

"Perfect," I tell Dr. Ludwig. "A pain in the neck for a pain in the neck like me."

He's German, maybe as much as one person could possibly be. Dr. Stone Face. Head of hospital. I get no reaction out of him.

"Tough room," I say.

Still nothing.

"Come on, doc. You know I'm funny."

He responds in his thick accent. "Ya. But maybe I'm just not sinking you are funny."

Five days in, and I might be feeling a little less weak, but maybe that's just me wishing to make it so. I'm a little less tired. Less like a daytime drunk by the time I've finished my various treatments. Afterward, I make myself go for a long afternoon walk, even when I'm not feeling up to it, picturing Dr. Ben and Rip and wishing they were with me, pretending I'm at some kind of five-star Swiss hotel instead of one of the world's leading cancer clinics.

I talk to Ben Kalinsky almost every day. Jimmy, on the other hand, has told me that he'll call me at the end of my first week.

He's never been much of a phone person.

"Even if something develops?" I asked him.

"The only development I'm interested in is you telling me the Swiss cheese heads are getting my girl better," he said.

It's on Day Six that Dr. Ludwig informs me that my numbers have improved, with as much emotion as if he were announcing a change in the lunch menu. Not a big improvement. He shows me the charts, and the pretty pictures. But for the first time in months, a doctor gives me some legit good news. The tumor has shrunk, if ever so slightly. It ain't nothing, as my father used to say.

There's a gym here, and I force myself to work out with weights and on the machines at least every other day, whether I feel the energy or not. All this means I'm fighting the way my mother did, and the way Brigid is fighting, in a way I hope would make my ex-Marine Pops proud, even if I always knew I was the jock daughter he really wanted to be a son. He never came right out and said it, but we both knew it was true.

As far as he ever went was to tell me, "Show some balls," when he thought somebody had pushed me around in a hockey game.

He was brave growing up with gangs all around him in Hell's Kitchen, brave enough to take a bullet to the shoulder for a friend when he was a teenager, in the middle of some gang beef that didn't involve him. He never talked much about it, never told us the kid's name, the way he never talked about being in the Corps. Just that his friend would have done the same for him. It was, he said, what friends did for each other.

If they had the balls.

But my mother was brave, too. Even at the end, when she had nothing left and weighed hardly anything and barely had the strength to get out of bed, it was as if she were still the strongest of all of us. And the bravest. As brave as the Marine she'd married. Never whined. No woe-is-me. Never complained even when her last house became a hospice in the end, because there wasn't enough money to send her across the world to some fancy clinic and buy her more time.

Through it all, I never saw her cry.

I don't cry here, even when I'm alone. At least not yet. And never in front of strangers.

Tonight is another night when I'm wide awake at a little after four. And even though I've been telling myself since the moment I arrived to stay present, stay even, follow coaches' orders about not getting too high or too low, out of nowhere I feel overwhelmed suddenly, about everything that's happened and everything that might still happen.

Now I feel the tears coming.

I squeeze my eyes shut, like slamming a door.

I try something else I'd learned in sports. I try visualization, try to take myself away from here. Picture myself at Atlantic Beach, or Indian Wells, with Dr. Ben and Rip. Or at the end of Jimmy's bar, watching a ball game with him. Any ball game.

I picture myself in the courtroom in Mineola, walking and talking and playing to the jury and the judge and even the gallery, back in my element, totally.

And the tears don't come.

And then I'm talking to God again, softly but out loud, hoping that this is the night when She's really listening.

"You've got my attention, okay? You've had Your fun. I've clearly cleaned up my act. Gotten my priorities in order. Now how about You go bother somebody else?"

No answer.

At least I'm finally starting to feel my eyes get heavy with something other than tears, sleep finally on the way. It's a good thing. Some nights rest never comes and I feel even more like shit the next day, all day.

"Eff cancer," I say, cleaning up the language just in case God does happen to be listening tonight.

It would be, on Her part, about effing time.