All my novels are densely plotted, and I have never once planned out a novel in advance. I always start with the narrator, the basic trajectory of the story, the central dilemma, and (intriguingly) the novel’s last scene. Everything else happens during the course of writing the damn thing. And even after ten novels it’s a mystery to me why this methodology (or lack thereof) works. But it does—and I don’t question it.
9. You have two children. How difficult was it for you to write in such painful detail about the loss of a child?
Of course I was articulating my worst nightmare. And that was one of the more intriguing things about writing about such an unspeakable subject—how to make it “speakable,” how to examine one of the most appalling things imaginable, and how to watch my narrator, Jane, find a way through her agony. A word I truly despise is “closure”—because it gives lie to the idea that, in time, you can slam the door on something terrible and move forward. My preferred word is “accommodation”—and the notion that, in the wake of a tragedy, you learn how to coexist with its aftermath, but your life is inexorably altered by it. There is no closure. There is only accommodation.
10. In an interview with The Independent in 2007, you spoke of how you kept a Post-it note above your desk with the mantra, “It’s the Story, Stupid.” How did this come to be your motto?
When I decided that I wanted to be the sort of novelist who could be serious and popular at the same time . . . and when I also worked out that what I disliked in so much literary fiction was the abandonment of narrative drive, and what I disliked in so much popular fiction was a lack of nuance and shading when it came to character development, and a tendency to see the world in a simplistic, two-dimensional way. I have a very nineteenth-century view of the novel: it is, first and foremost, an entertainment . . . but one which can also speak volumes about the human condition.
11. While working at the library in Calgary, Ruth, one of Jane’s coworkers, comments: “. . . that’s the thing about other people’s lives. You scratch the surface, you discover all this dark stuff. We’ve all got it.” (p. 345) Do you think this is why people love to read stories about other people’s struggles?
During the course of a book-signing session in Paris recently, I was approached by a woman who told me: “In the course of reading your new novel I realized that I wasn’t alone . . . that my doubts, my fears, my griefs, were shared ones.” I informed this woman that this was the nicest compliment imaginable—because we all read to discover that we aren’t alone.
12. Can you tell us a little about your next project?
It’s a novel called The Moment. It’s a love story set in Berlin back when it was a divided city. And as I am in the middle of it right now, I think I won’t say anymore about it. Except: watch this space . . .
DOUGLAS KENNEDY is the author of eight previous novels, including the international bestseller The Pursuit of Happiness. His work has been translated into twenty-two languages, and in 2007 he received the French decoration of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He divides his time between Maine, London, and Paris and has two children.
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ALSO BY DOUGLAS KENNEDY
FICTION
The Woman in the Fifth
Temptation
State of the Union
A Special Relationship
The Pursuit of Happiness
The Job
The Big Picture
The Dead Heart
NONFICTION
Chasing Mammon
In God’s Country
Beyond the Pyramids
ATRIA PAPERBACK
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2009 by Douglas Kennedy
Originally published in Great Britain in 2009 by Hutchinson, a division of Random House UK.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
First Atria Paperback edition June 2010
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Excerpt from THE COLLECTED STORIES OF LEONARD MICHAELS by Leonard Michaels. Copyright © 2007 by Catherine Ogden Michaels. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
Excerpt from Part V of “The Hollow Men” in COLLECTED POEMS 1909–1962 by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1936 by Harcourt, Inc., and renewed 1964 by T. S. Eliot, reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London, on behalf of the Estate of Elizabeth Bowen. Copyright © Elizabeth Bowen 1935.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kennedy, Douglas, date.
Leaving the world: a novel / by Douglas Kennedy. —1st Atria paperback ed.
p. cm.
First published: London : Hutchinson, 2009.
1. Women college teachers—Family relationships—Fiction. 2. Women college teachers—Psychology—Fiction. 3. Motherhood—Fiction. 4. Missing children—Fiction. 5. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PR6061.E5956L43 2010
823.914—dc22
2009042377
ISBN 978-1-4391-8078-5
ISBN 978-1-4391-8081-5 (ebook)
Five Days
From the #1 internationally bestselling author of The Moment comes a remarkable new novel that explores how and why we fall in love.
Laura works in a small hospital on the Maine coast and is well versed in the random unfairness of life, a truism that has started to affect her personally. With a husband who has become a stranger since losing his job, a son in college and a daughter set to leave home, she wonders how the upcoming empty nest will affect the disconnected state of her marriage.
While attending a conference in Boston she meets an outwardly drab, fifty-something salesman, also from Maine. When a chance meeting brings them together again, Laura begins to discover a far more complex and thoughtful man behind the flat façade. Like her, Richard ponders his own life and wonders if the time has come to choose desire over obligation.
Five Days is a profoundly moving love story that will have readers reflecting deeply about the choices made that so shape all our destinies. Featuring Kennedy’s trademark evocative prose and his brilliant ability to delineate life the way it is truly lived today, it is a novel that speaks directly to the many contradictions of the human heart.
Read on for a look at Douglas Kennedy’s
Five Days
Currently available from Atria Books
Excerpt from Five Days copyright © 2013 by Douglas Kennedy
ONE
I SAW THE CANCER immediately. It was right there in front of me. As always, I found myself taking a sharp intake of breath as the realization hit: I am looking at the beginning of the end.
The cancer was shaped like a dandelion. Sometimes this sort of tumor look
s like a cheap Christmas decoration—a five-and-dime star with ragged edges. But this specific one was more like a minor-looking flower that had been denuded, stripped down to its seeds, but with an insidious, needle-like structure. What radiologists call a “spiculated structure.”
Spiculated. When I heard that word for the first time I had to look it up. Discovered its origins were actually zoological: a spicule being “a small needle-like structure, in particular any of those making up the skeleton of a sponge” (I’d never realized that sponges have skeletons). But there was also an astronomical meaning as well: a short-lived jet of gas in the sun’s corona.
This last definition nagged at me for weeks. Because it struck me as so horribly apt. A spiculated cancer, like the one I was looking at right now, may have commenced its existence years, decades earlier. But only after it makes its presence known does it become something akin to the burst of flame that alights everything in its path, demanding total attention. If the flame hasn’t been spotted and extinguished early enough, it will then decide that it isn’t a mere fiery jet stream, but rather a mini supernova which, in its final show of pyrotechnic force, will destroy the universe that contains it.
Certainly the spiculated species I was now looking at was well on its way to explode—and, in doing so, end the life of the person within whose lung it was now so lethally imbedded.
Another horror to add to the ongoing catalog of horrors that are, in so many ways, the primary decor of my nine-to-five life.
And this day was turning out to be a doozy. Because, an hour before the spiculated cancer appeared on the screen in front of me, I had run a CT scan on a nine-year-old girl named Jessica Ward. According to her chart she’d been having a series of paralyzing headaches. Her physician had sent her to us in order to rule out any “neurological concerns . . .” which was doctor shorthand for “brain tumor.” Jessica’s dad was named Chuck—a quiet, hangdog man in his mid-thirties, with sad eyes and the sort of yellowing teeth that hint at a serious cigarette habit. He said he was a welder at the Bath Iron Works.
“Jessie’s Ma left us two years ago,” he told me as his daughter went into a dressing area we have off the CT scan room to change into a hospital gown.
“She died?” I asked.
“I wish. The bitch—’scuse my French—ran off with a guy she worked with at the Rite Aid Pharmacy in Brunswick. They’re livin’ in some trailer down in Destin. That’s on the Florida Panhandle. Know what a friend of mine told me they call that part of the world down there? The Redneck Riviera. Jessie’s headaches started after her ma vanished. And she’s never once been back to see Jessie. What kind of mother is that?”
“She’s obviously lucky to have a dad like you,” I said, trying to somewhat undercut the terrible distress this man was in—and the way he was working so hard to mask his panic.
“She’s all I got in the world, ma’am.”
“My name’s Laura,” I said.
“And if it turns out that what she has is, like, serious . . . and doctors don’t send young girls in for one of these scans if they think it’s nothing . . .”
“I’m sure your physician is just trying to rule things out,” I said, hearing my practiced neutral tone.
“You’re taught to say stuff like that, aren’t you?” he said, his tone displaying the sort of anger that I’ve so often seen arising to displace a great fear.
“Actually, you’re right. We are trained to try to reassure and not say much. Because I’m a technologist, not a diagnostic radiologist.”
“Now you’re using big words.”
“I’m the person who operates the machinery, takes the pictures. The diagnostic radiologist is the doctor who will then look at the scan and see if there is anything there.”
“So when can I talk to him?”
You can’t was the actual answer, because the diagnostic radiologist is always the behind the scenes man, analyzing the scans, the X-rays, the MRIs, the ultrasounds. He rarely ever meets the patient.
“Dr. Harrild will be talking directly to Jessica’s primary-care physician. I’m sure you’ll be informed very quickly if there is—”
“Do they also teach you to talk like a robot?”
As soon as this comment was out of his mouth, the man was all contrite.
“Hey, that was kind of wrong of me, wasn’t it?”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said, maintaining a neutral tone.
“Now you’re all hurt.”
“Not at all. Because I know how stressful and worrying this must be for you.”
“And now you’re reading the script again that they taught you to read.”
At that moment Jessica appeared out of the changing room, looking shy, tense, bewildered.
“This gonna hurt?” she asked me.
“You have to get an injection. It sends an ink into your veins so we’ll be able to see what’s going on inside of you. But the ink is harmless.”
“And the injection?” she asked, looking alarmed.
“Just a little prick in your arm and then it’s behind you.”
“You promise?” she asked, trying too hard to be brave, yet still so much the child who didn’t fully understand why she was here and what these medical procedures were all about.
“You be a real soldier now, Jess,” her father said, “and we’ll get you that Barbie you want on the way home.”
“Now that sounds like a good deal to me,” I said, wondering if I was coming across as too cheerful and also knowing that, even after sixteen years as an RT, I still dreaded all procedures involving children. Because I always feared what I might see before anyone else. And because I so often saw terrible news.
“This is just going to take ten, fifteen minutes, no more,” I told Jessica’s father. “There’s a waiting area just down the walkway with coffee, magazines—”
“I’m goin’ outside for a bit,” he said.
“That’s ’cause you want a cigarette,” Jessica said.
Her father suppressed a sheepish smile.
“My daughter knows me too well.”
“I don’t want my daddy dead of cancer.”
At that moment her father’s face fell, and I could see him desperately trying to control his emotions.
“Let’s let your dad get a little air,” I said, steering Jessica into the scan room, then turning back to her father who had started to cry.
“I know how hard this is,” I said. “But until there is something to be generally concerned about . . .”
He just shook his head and headed for the door, fumbling in his shirt pocket for his cigarettes.
As I turned back inside I saw Jessica looking wide-eyed and afraid in the face of the CT scanner. I could understand her concern. It was a formidable piece of medical machinery, stark, ominous. There was a large hoop, attached to two science fiction–style containers of inky fluid. In front of the hoop was a narrow bed that was a bit like a bier (albeit with a pillow). I’d seen adults panic at the sight of the thing. So I wasn’t surprised that Jessica was daunted by it all.
“I have to go into that?” Jessica said, eyeing the door as if she wanted to make a run for it.
“It’s nothing, really. You lie on the bed there. The machine lifts you up into the hoop. The hoop takes pictures of the things the doctor needs pictures of . . . and that’s it. We’ll be done in a jiffy.”
“And it won’t hurt?”
“Let’s get you lying down first,” I said, leading her to the bed.
“I really want my daddy,” she said.
“You’ll be with your daddy in just a few minutes.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
She got herself onto the bed.
I came over holding a tube attached to the capsule containing all that inky liquid, covering with my hand the intravenous needle still encased in its sterlized packaging. Never show a patient an IV needle. Never.
“All right, Jessica. I’m not going to tell you a bi
g fib and say that getting a needle put into your arm is going to be painless. But it will just last a moment and then it will be behind you. After that, no pain at all.”
“You promise.”
“I promise—though you might feel a little hot for a few minutes.”
“But not like I’m burning up.”
“I can assure you you’ll not feel that.”
“I want my daddy . . .”
“The sooner we do this, the sooner you’ll be with him. Now here’s what I want you to do . . . I want you to close your eyes and think of something really wonderful. You have a pet you love, Jessica?”
“I have a dog.”
“Eyes closed now, please.”
She did as instructed.
“What kind of dog is he?”
“A cocker spaniel. Daddy got it for my birthday.”
I swabbed the crook of her arm with a liquid anesthetic.
“The needle going in yet?” she asked.
“Not yet, but you didn’t tell me your dog’s name.”
“Tuffy.”
“And what’s the silliest thing Tuffy ever did?”
“Ate a bowlful of marshmallows.”
“How did he manage to do that?”
“Daddy had left them out on the kitchen table, ’cause he loves roasting them in the fireplace during Christmas. And then, out of nowhere, Tuffy showed up and . . .”
Jessica started to giggle. That’s when I slipped the needle in her arm. She let out a little cry, but I kept her talking about her dog as I used tape to hold it in place. Then, telling her I was going to step out of the room for a few minutes, I asked:
“Now is the needle still hurting?”
“Not really, but I can feel it there.”
“That’s normal. Now I want you to lie very still and take some very deep breaths. And keep your eyes closed and keep thinking about something funny, like Tuffy eating those marshmallows. Will you do that for me, Jessica.”
She nodded, her eyes firmly closed. I left the scan room as quietly and as quickly as I could, moving into what we call the technical room. It’s a booth with a bank of computers and a swivel chair and an extended control panel. Having prepped the patient I was now about to engage in what is always the trickiest aspect of any scan: getting the timing absolutely right. As I programmed in the data necessary to start the scan I felt the usual moment of tension that, after all these years, accompanies each of these procedures I conduct; a tension that is built around the fact that, from this moment on, timing is everything. In a moment I will hit a button. It will trigger the high-speed injection system that will shoot 80 milligrams of high-contrast iodine into Jessica’s veins. After that I have less than fifty seconds—more like forty-two seconds, given her small size—to start the scan. The timing here is critical. The iodine creates a contrast that allows the scan to present a full, almost circular image of all bone and soft tissue and internal organs. But the iodine first goes to the heart, then enters the pulmonary arteries and the aorta before being disseminated into the rest of the body. Once it is everywhere you have reached the Venus phase of the procedure, when all veins are freshly enhanced with the contrast. Begin the scan a few critical seconds before the Venus phase and you will be scanning ahead of the contrast, which means you will not get the images that the radiologist needs to make a thorough and accurate diagnosis. Scan too late and the contrast might be too great. That’s why this small block of time still fills me with dread, even after the thousands of scans I have conducted. If I fail to get the timing right the patient will have to go through the entire procedure again twelve hours later (at the very minimum), and the radiologist will not be pleased. Which is why there is always a moment of tension and doubt that consumes me in these crucial seconds before every scan. Have I prepped everything correctly? Have I judged the relationship between the diffusion of the iodine and the patient’s physique? Have I left anything to chance?
The Douglas Kennedy Collection #2 Page 124
