The Post-War Dream

by Cullin Mitch

  The new doctor was younger than Debra's former California physician in Arcadia, and, as well, the woman specialized in internal medicine. “Maybe that's why she's so thorough,” Debra had told him after receiving her exam. “She's certainly a breed apart from old Dr. Baker, that's for sure. Seriously, Hollis, I haven't felt that poked and probed since our honeymoon, I mean it.”

  “You sure it's not something else, Deb?” Hollis had asked. They were reclining near the swimming pool at dusk, seated in matching green deck chairs. “Sounds like an awful lot of trouble. I've had hundreds of physicals but never got sent to a radiologist.”

  “Well, your plumbing isn't as complicated as mine is, dear.”

  “Just doesn't sound right to me, all those tests.”

  “You know, it's my fault to begin with. I asked for a gallbladder exam and I guess she decided to give me the whole shebang. Could've done without that barium drink though. It's like I've been snacking on chalk.”

  Other concerns also had been at play, minor worries which soon felt greater than previously imagined. Upon settling in Arizona, Debra's weight had begun to increase, despite the fact that she exercised regularly, ate smaller portions, and refused fatty foods; the weight gain was most noticeable along her abdomen — ”fluid weight,” she had called it, “sort of like feeling waterlogged” — and she was convinced it had something to do with her gallbladder (a common source of discomfort for her throughout the years, the gallstones routinely getting purged with a fast which relied on a lemon juice and olive oil concoction). Then there was copious sweating, saturating her skin when she relaxed within their air-conditioned home and making her hair wringing wet, yet dismissed as a side effect of the hellish Sonoran weather while also seeming uncharacteristic for such a dry climate (the perspiration normally evaporating cleanly from Hollis's neck and forehead as he worked in his garden). Lastly, she had complained of an overall blahness, a general malaise since departing California; this indefinite ill-being, however, wasn't too terribly surprising, especially when put in the context of a stressful move, some weight gain, brutal desert heat, and gallstones needing to be passed. Nevertheless, it was difficult to perceive her as anything other than healthy.

  But immediately following Debra's physical, Hollis couldn't shake that lurking fear of something possibly being amiss with her, although he never voiced those thoughts aloud — channeling his bothersome ruminations into gardening and a morning round of golf, while she continued operating in her upbeat manner, going about her errands and chores without a hint of despair. Even with Dr. Taylor's phone call, the typical pattern of their day didn't lend itself to panic. They ate dinner as always, saying very little during the meal. They watched TV together, saying very little during the commercial breaks. They went to bed together, briefly hugging and kissing before killing the lights. Neither one dared mention the imminent appointment, lest the conversation feed whatever irrational thoughts were brewing between them; yet their respective silences spoke volumes, and Hollis couldn't keep himself from gripping her hand for a second when they sat down to eat, or snuggling her against him while they watched TV, or enveloping her in his arms once the bedroom had become dark.

  It was a restless night, to be sure. Hollis fell in and out of sleep, nodding off only to be stirred awake by Debra's gyrations, the sheets tugged this way and that, the pillow readjusted. “Are you all right?” he finally asked, rubbing a palm on her shoulder blade.

  “I'm fine,” was her terse reply.

  “You want a melatonin?”

  “No, it won't help. I already took one.”

  He slid a hand down the curves of her nightgown, stopping just above her plisse-covered abdomen, his palm pressing flat as his fingers fanned out. Prior to falling asleep again, he imagined he had the power to rid her body of whatever might be harming it. And as sleep resumed, he believed that that power had been effectively conjured, drawing the suspected ailment from her stomach, transferring it fully into his palm — where his hand entrapped it in a fist, and brought it to dangle over the edge of the bed, and, with fingers uncurling, sent it sailing to the floor. Sometime later, he woke to the sounds of her sniffling, her nasal passages emitting deep, punctuated inhalations.

  “Deb?”

  He felt her shift in the sheets, her body turning toward him. “You smell it?” she asked, and with that he realized she wasn't crying.

  “What?”

  “Can't you smell it?”

  He lifted his head, sniffing the air. “Yes,” he said, detecting a burning, somewhat aromatic odor.

  “You know, I left the living-room windows cracked,” she said, climbing from bed. “I'll go close them. I think the winds must've changed direction, or else the fires have gotten worse.”

  “Let's hope not,” he said, a smoky, charred flavor materializing in his mouth like an aftertaste.

  The next morning, they drank their coffee in the kitchen, sharing sections of a newspaper which placed the Catalina Mountains wildfires on the front page. But they didn't need to look any farther than their own backyard to understand how far the fires had spread overnight; for now a murky, whitish haze drifted where glaring sunlight and clear skies normally prevailed — floating among the gardens, hanging above the swimming pool area — recalling the Los Angeles smog they had left behind (a widening ring of pollution which skirted the wealthy beach enclaves and, instead, traveled inland to Riverside and the less affluent cities of San Bernardino County). The accompanying smokehouse aroma, too, had increased since dawn, tainting everything, mingling with the strong coffee, mixing with the frying pan's sizzling combination of eggs, chopped onions, diced ham, and chipotle sauce.

  In due time, they entered that gauzy, scorched-smelling atmosphere, driving the thirty miles to Tucson as a classic-country radio station played. Hollis drummed his fingertips on the Suburban's steering wheel. Debra silently stared from the passenger window. Yet both were aware all the while of the plume of gray-black smoke rising like a mushroom cloud from the distant mountaintop, the desert landscape around them subdued and dull in color. With each mile the haze became more pervasive, as did their mutual, unspoken nervousness regarding the appointment. Then it seemed like the Suburban was being propelled forward by the smoke — the thickening vapor directing them beyond Oro Valley and the west end of the mountain range, speeding them past the Tucson Mall before ushering them across the parking lot of the medical center — and dissipating at last in Dr. Taylor's narrow examining room but still inhaled when the young doctor appeared wearing a long, thin face (longer and thinner than Debra remembered the woman's face being, somehow longer and thinner than faces ever were), saying right away the news wasn't good, explaining without a moment of hesitation, “You have ovarian cancer.”

  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 min
ute, 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.

  6

  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.

  “You'll wake the dead, Hollis,” Debra said, lowering her head to the pillow, gripping a clear plastic drinking cup. “Lord, you're snoring something awful.”

  “Sorry,” he mumbled, turning himself toward her, blinking lazily while she fished an ice cube from the cup and deposited it in her mouth. She chuckled for a second, closing her eyes, sucking the ice with cheeks drawn in, the cup still held tightly.

  Now and again, the morphine played its tricks, sending her straight to sleep and, just as effortlessly, waking her — where she gazed about the room as if lost, as if she had suddenly been revived from a prolonged coma, sometimes addressing him with lucid words, sometimes uttering nonsense he didn't always comprehend (“It's in the drawer — better take care of it, okay?”); even so, she administered the drug herself, pumping it into the IV at those few moments when the pain rose to a level of recognition. The daytime hours at the hospital, aside from the day of the operation, were uniform, uneventful: they managed walks up and down the corridors, the IV bag and tubes in tow; they watched TV; they enjoyed small talk, avoiding the topic of cancer if possible; they slept within reach of each other, as had been done without
fail since their honeymoon.

  They were sent home on the fifth day, departing St. Mary's with a prescription for pain pills and their own uncertainty about what lay ahead. But upon returning to Nine Springs, Debra soon realized she didn't need the pain pills after all, simply because there wasn't any continual ache left to drug; in fact, other than the initial discomfort immediately following surgery, she suffered most in the minute or so that it took for the drainage tube to be removed — pulled from her stomach through her chest, through her throat, through her nostril, making her cough and gag. Eventually, it struck Hollis as being odd that the cancer hadn't immediately manifested in a clear-cut manner — no wasting away, no feebleness, no cinematic swift demise — odd, too, that the obvious signs of infirmity Debra had displayed were brought on by what was meant to help her: the surgery and, subsequently, the side effects of chemotherapy.

  However, the presence of the cancer itself remained elusive, even as it continued to mutate, increase, and spread like dust motes transported in an afternoon breeze. Under such circumstances, though, she often conveyed greater energy on her worst days than Hollis did on his best days — driving herself to the library, shopping for wigs and eyeliner, refusing to let him do her laundry or fold her clothing. “I'm fine,” she told him. “I'm not an invalid, you know.” As if to underscore her resolve, Debra wouldn't allow herself an ounce of self-pity or a tearful outburst, although Hollis had succumbed to both emotional states on four occasions, always reserving his solitary breakdowns for his garden and the confines of his tiki hut.

  Perhaps it was the absence of tangible death which bolstered Debra, to the point where she decided her sister in Texas shouldn't learn of the illness unless, of course, all her options had been exhausted and the endgame became imminent. But her innate fortitude was also tempered by the situation's undeniable gravity, not to mention the chemotherapy, and everything else she had researched at the library or was told about stage-III ovarian cancer. She knew, for example, the prognosis was far from good: seven of every ten cases were diagnosed after the cancer had already spread beyond the ovary; with stage III only one out of four women survived beyond five years. But — as Dr. Langford had repeatedly suggested — there was at least reason to believe Debra might join that 25 percent grouping.