Cullin Mitch - The Post-War Dream

Hearing those words, Hollis sensed himself shrinking on the chair, becoming drawn up, shriveled, numb, blank — then momentarily deaf. He glanced at Debra who, in the same instant, glanced at him. But whereas Hollis felt stunned and immobilized by Dr. Taylor's diagnosis, Debra never lost her composure; rather, her intent eyes shot to the doctor, her head nodding confidently when she asked, “Okay, so what do I do now?” And with that, Dr. Taylor directed their immediate course of action: while sitting in the examining room, Debra was handed the doctor's cell phone and instructed to call her gynecologist to set up an emergency appointment; shortly thereafter, she and Hollis were sent racing to the nearby University Medical Center, where they retrieved her sonogram and CT-scan axial images from the radiologist; then they sped to the southwest side of town, entering the gynecologist's office twelve minutes ahead of schedule.

Dr. Langford, the gynecologist, was a no-nonsense, heavyset redhead, a woman who — as Debra had described her to Hollis — would have made a good detective on Law amp; Order ; furthermore, she was also a gynecologist and surgeon, her expertise highlighted by the fairly prominent Phoenix medical family in which she had been raised. Behind her desk at St. Mary's Hospital, Dr. Langford studied Debra's axial images for a minute, lifting each one to the fluorescent light above her, expressing no emotion as Hollis and Debra sat on the other side of the desk holding hands. “Well, these seem straightforward enough,” Dr. Langford concluded, peering through her bifocals. “It looks like we're dealing with ovarian cancer.”

Hollis's stomach dropped. Debra released his hand and leaned forward, asking, “How bad is it?”

Dr. Langford shrugged and set the axial images down on her desktop. “Without the written report or an MRI scan, it's difficult to say for sure. What these show me, however, is that the tumors are clustered on the ovaries like clumps of salt, or like fistfuls of sand grains. Everything else — kidney, spleen, liver, pancreas — these appear unremarkable.”

“Unremarkable? Is that good?” Hollis asked.

“That's good,” Dr. Langford said. “As for mesenteric cancer, we won't know what we're really dealing with or what can be done about it unless we get inside you and see. To be totally fair, I can't accurately call it ovarian cancer until we take a look at it and pathology confirms it — and that's what I highly recommend we do.”

“All right,” Debra said emphatically, as if she were acquiescing to something no more complicated than a back rub. “Let's do that.”

“Okay,” Hollis mumbled, unsure then of everything which had just been said, hearing his own mouth speak but feeling apart from the situation. In hindsight, there was much he would forget about, much during those weeks which had flashed by him like an incomprehensible blur — various reports, laboratory data, medical jargon. Yet even now, he remains aware of his complete and utter helplessness throughout, watching when Debra was wheeled on a gurney into surgery, half smiling while she joked, “If I die on the table, put ‘She wasn't ready’ on my tombstone,” and fighting tears once the gurney had rolled beyond swinging metal doors. And, too, he came to understand the havoc the disease had created within his wife, how it had managed to spread into the peritoneum — to the uterus, the lymph glands, the bladder, the gallbladder — how surgery could eliminate 95 percent of the cancer, while the remaining 5 percent was inoperable (hundreds of microscopic tumors continuing to ravage the serous membrane of her abdomen, seeking a home, some building a thriving colony on the delicate surface of her bowel).

“Stage-III–C ovarian cancer grade two,” was Dr. Langford's ultimate determination, revealed in the hours following Debra's operation. “Abdominal implants more than two centimeters in diameter and positive retroperitoneal or inguinal nodes.”

“I don't understand,” Hollis had said. “It isn't making sense.”

“Papillary serous cystadenocarcinoma,” the doctor replied. “That's the cancer your wife has.”

“I still don't understand. What does it mean?”

But amidst that growing confusion, as he had felt overwhelmed by cryptic terminology or frightened by the possibility of losing the person he loved the most, Hollis brought his mind to the short-lived gray area — the fleeting period between not knowing for certain and knowing too well (after Dr. Taylor's diagnosis and prior to Dr. Langford's surgery) — when he and Debra had left Tucson at dusk and drove back to Nine Springs, and he told her while they went, “It'll be fine, you'll see. We'll survive this.”

“I have no doubt, dear,” she had said, gazing ahead at a reddish-orange-hued horizon masked behind a veil of smoke. “In fact, I'm positive of it.”

Several minutes later, Debra requested he stop at a roadside Circle K, where she purchased a six-pack of Tecate and a bag of gummy worms. Arriving home, she surprised Hollis by avoiding the house altogether, preferring instead to walk the perimeter of their property, leading him along the gravel pathway which guided them into the backyard. Soon they sat inside his unlit tiki hut as if in hiding, drinking beer and savoring the nighttime. She had never shown an interest in the hut before — nor had she done so since — but on that evening she seemed to regard it just like he often had: as a kind of a refuge from the larger world, a place devoid of fear or complications.

“This is nice,” she said, angling to one side in order to pat his right knee. “I think I can see why you like it out here.”

“Gives you a whole different feeling, right?”

“I'd say so,” she said, her obscured form readjusting, moving upright on the deck chair.

And for a while they stayed there — finishing the gummy worms and Tecate, their fingers eventually interlaced — breathing the carbon-laden air, observing the jagged line of fire snaking across the far-off, imperceptible mountaintop and appearing like a savage fissure in what was usually a starry sky.

The long scar on Debra's body starts at her pubic bone — running about ten inches in length, its design zigzagging a bit — and concludes right below her belly button. But whereas the scar had previously looked inflamed and swollen, it is now considerably less raw and broad, appearing whiter than the rest of her abdomen's skin. Much to her annoyance, though, the hair which had been shaved away prior to the incision being made has never grown back, likely stunted — she decided — by the eventual rounds of chemotherapy which had shed every single strand of her body's hair. Regardless, Hollis has become strangely fond of the scar — fixing his eyes upon it whenever Debra undressed near him, occasionally bestowing it with a quick kiss — as if that injured tissue was a sort of cellular medal: an emblematic reminder of a hard-fought battle, one in which the war itself had never achieved an uneasy truce.

“We're almost twins,” he'd told her once when they were in bed, bringing his left leg from under the sheets, pulling the knee toward his stomach while he traced a finger along his old war wound — a crooked, slender trail of discolored skin, a former gash which had cleaved the inner thigh to just above the kneecap.

“Almost,” she said, regarding his wound briefly before returning her stare to the pages of a Sue Grafton mystery.

Yet Hollis can't quite forget his shock when first seeing her incision — the flesh all tender and red, the ragged seam stapled together — or hearing Dr. Langford's pragmatic voice telling him, “It's important you realize your wife has a disease that will probably shorten her life,” while Debra recuperated from surgery. During her entire hospital stay he had kept a vigil beside her bed, half awake on a cot for four nights, listening to her labored breathing as air escaped around a drainage tube which had been inserted through her left nostril, taking note of what she wouldn't fully recall later on — the machine monitoring the draining of her body fluids, an IV bag sending drop after drop after drop into her veins, the electrical hum of an inactive hospital past midnight. Exhaustion overtook him on the third night, and he promptly submerged into the landscape of familiar dreams — that slow procession of cattle, then that formation of wandering, listless people — only to be jolted back by a handful of flung ice cubes grazing his neck, chest, shoulders.