Ninety-Six

NINETY-SIX

SOMEHOW, AND AGAINST ALL odds, I'm still a member in good standing of the people who haven't lost their hair in the chemo club.

At least not yet I haven't.

Doesn't mean I won't. Still having my hair isn't some kind of marker that I'm winning my cancer battle. Or that I won't end up back in Switzerland someday, maybe in the next room over from my sister.

Doesn't make me less of a cancer patient than she is.

I just still don't look like one, even when I'm having the worst week of chemotherapy I've had yet. Which I am. By the end of every session, and by the time I leave the Phillips Center in Ben Kalinsky's car, I feel sicker than I did the day before. When I get home every day I lie down on my couch and struggle to get off it until it's time to try to keep food down or try to sleep. Ben keeps offering to stay after he drops me off. I keep telling him that as much as I love him, and I do love him dearly, right now I'm only fit company for Rip the dog.

"Because your dog doesn't keep asking you how you're feeling?"

"Because he doesn't need to ask."

I try to work on the trial in the brief intervals when I'm not feeling sick. But I can't focus for very long on the work that's still ahead of me, the case making my head spin ever more because of the DNA evidence against Rob Jacobson, the neighborhood security video, from more than one house, of my horny client leaving the Carson house on multiple occasions in the middle of the day.

That's the short list.

The rest of the things on the list only make me feel sicker than I already do.

No help at all is that some of the blood that was found on the scene is AB, the rare type that just happens to belong to Rob Jacobson himself.

I've promised myself I won't change my mind again about staying on the case, that I won't go back on my word. But there are times this week when I want to.

As much as I want to live, sometimes I'm so sick right now I feel as if I want to die.

After what has blessedly been my last treatment, at least for the time being, I'm right back on the couch, trying to watch a Mets game, and there is a knock on the door.

I'm too weak and too tired to even stop for the Glock in the front hall on my way to answer it. If McKenzie and Eric Jacobson are here to kill me, I may just let them tonight.

It's Brigid.

She's wearing a blue Duke baseball cap to cover a bald, wigless head. She looks thinner than ever.

But she's smiling like, well, Brigid.

And having her in front of me makes her even more beautiful to me than ever.

"You look like crap," she says.