The Breaking Point: A Body Farm Novel (25 page)

AFTER THE CALL ABOUT DECKER, I LEFT CAMPUS—AS
if by leaving my office, I could leave my worries—and headed toward home. But as I turned west onto Kingston Pike—toward the mansions that signaled the boundary of Sequoyah Hills—I felt myself slowing, and then turning into the parking lot of Second Presbyterian Church.
Our
church: the church where Kathleen and I had worshipped for years, first as young marrieds, then as young parents, then as youth-group leaders for Jeff and his friends.

The church, a soaring neo-Gothic structure of tan sandstone, sat high on a green rise, looking timeless and serene. Blessedly, the sanctuary was both unlocked and empty, its stained-glass windows ablaze with afternoon light. Slipping into a pew near the back, I bowed my head and prayed—or
tried
to pray. But the words felt lost in space; they echoed in my heart as loudly as they might have echoed in the vault of the nave, had I shouted them at the top of my lungs.

Tucked into racks on the backs of the pews, alongside well-worn copies of the
Presbyterian Hymnal,
were copies
of the Bible, not so worn. Slipping a Bible from the nearest rack, I flipped through it until I came to the Book of Job. I’d never actually read it, but I’d heard the story countless times over the years: Job was a good and pious man, brought to the breaking point by an onslaught of misfortunes. Through it all—tragedy upon tragedy, all of them undeserved—Job’s faith held firm, and in the end, God rewarded him. Maybe I could learn something from Job, I thought, as I began to read. Maybe Job could help me make sense of what was happening, or at least help me face it with faith and peace. Maybe Job could even teach me how to do the real trick: to snatch True Happiness from the bloody jaws of tragedy.

The story’s opening was much as I had expected: God praises Job’s piety to Satan, and Satan responds by taunting God—challenging God. “He’s rich and happy,” Satan sneers. “Of
course
he’s pious.” And so begins a contest, a wager, between God and Satan; a tug-of-war, with Job as the rope, tested by a torrent of tragedies. In the space of a single chapter, a series of messengers arrives, one on the heels of another, reciting loss upon loss—all Job’s possessions—7,000 sheep, 3,000 camels, 500 teams of oxen, 500 female donkeys—as well as the demise of all of his farmhands, shepherds, and servants.

But worse—far, far worse—is yet to come. Another messenger arrives immediately, informing Job that his seven sons and three daughters, feasting together in a son’s house, have all perished in a fierce, house-leveling windstorm. Like each of the prior bearers of bad tidings, this one concludes by saying, “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”

The litany of his losses complete, Job stands up, rips his clothes, and shaves his head. Then, a sentence later—to my astonishment—Job gets over it. In what struck me as the world’s swiftest resolution of grief, he simply shrugs it off.
“Naked came I out of my mother’s womb,” he says, “and naked thither I shall return: The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”

Baffled, I reread that passage—reread it several times, in fact; it didn’t take long. I stared and squinted at the page. “Them’s the breaks,” Job seemed to be saying. “Easy come, easy go.” By the time I’d read his words enough times to memorize them, I was no longer just puzzled; I was also, I realized, angry. I could understand, and I could admire, Job’s tranquility in the face of material losses. Stuff, after all, is only
stuff,
if you ignore the countless corpses of servants and livestock littering Job’s property. But to suffer such slight, offhand pain—a torn robe, a shaved head, and an “oh well”—at the death of his children? His
ten
children? I didn’t get it. I didn’t believe it. Was Job a man—an actual flesh-and-blood father? Or was he something else, some colder-blooded creature masquerading as a man?

I decided to give Job the benefit of the doubt, or at least to try. After all, I’d read only the first chapter. Maybe Job would get more real; more believable; more human.

Instead, Job got clobbered again.

In round two, God gives Satan permission to ruin Job’s health. Before you can say “Jack Robinson,” Job breaks out in boils from head to toe. Sitting in a pile of ashes, he’s reduced to scraping his scabrous, oozing skin with a shard of pottery.

It was there, midway through Chapter Two, that I came to an electrifying expression of humanity—but not from Job himself. From his wife. “Curse God and die,” she tells him, practically spitting the words through her tears. As I read those bitter words again and again—“Curse God and die”—it dawned on me that the bitterness must have poured directly from the fissure in her heart: a heart broken not just by her
children’s deaths, but also by their father’s offhandedness and aloofness. In just four words, Job’s wife expressed deep, primal pain. Facing the loss of Kathleen, the person I loved best in all the world, I understood and liked and
believed
Job’s wife, in a way that I didn’t understand or like or believe Job.

And what is Job’s response to his anguished wife? He tells her to shut up. And then he begins to talk. And talk. And talk. For
forty chapters,
Job and four other guys talk. They argue about God, about suffering, and about Job himself. Why do the righteous suffer? Why do the wicked get off scot-free? How come God’s being such a jerk when I, Job, have played by all the rules?

As I read the debate—as Job kvetched ad nauseum about his undeserved suffering and his spotless conscience (“I’m pure gold,” he says at one point)—I found myself getting madder than ever.

Eventually even the Almighty has had enough of Job’s self-righteous whining. Speaking from a whirlwind in a mighty voice, God puts Job in his puny place, pointing out in no uncertain terms what a tiny, trivial, know-nothing Job is compared to God, the creator of the universe. Job apologizes, and at that point God rewards him: God cures Job’s pox, makes him richer than ever, and gives him a passel more kids. All’s well that ends well.

I closed the Bible, still confused, and still mad—furious, in fact, for reasons I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Tucking the book back into the rack alongside the hymnals, I stood up, stretched my back, and looked around at the magnificent architecture: the high, vaulted nave; the mighty stone columns; the graceful arches; the stained glass, its blues deepening to indigo in the waning light, its reds darkening into wine and blood.

I stepped outside and let the sanctuary door sigh shut. As
it closed, I heard a latch snapping into place with a metallic click. Reaching back, I gave the handle a tug. The door, which had been open when I’d arrived, was now locked tight. Was it an omen? A punishment—banishment—for my cynical response to Job? Or was it simply a spring-loaded piece of steel popping into place, as it was designed to do?

It was after six when I pulled into the garage at home, but Kathleen’s space was still empty. I called her cell, but the call went straight to voice mail, which meant either that she was on a call or that her phone was switched off. She hadn’t left a note on the kitchen table, the usual place for notes; when I checked for messages on the home phone, I found voice mails from half a dozen reporters—including Athena Demopoulos of Nashville’s Channel 4 and Mike Malloy, Fox 5 News!—and, at the end, a message from Kathleen: “Hi, honey. I’ve gone to a meeting at the Wellness Community. A support group for people with cancer. I’ll call you when I get done.”

I listened to the message three times. Its matter-of-factness baffled me; from the brevity and the tone, she might just as easily have been telling me that she was at the grocery store, or swinging by the public library to return a book. I hung up the phone and wandered back to the bedroom, thinking,
How did this happen? How did we become the cancer family?
I half expected the doorbell to ring, and to find myself face-to-face with a neighbor delivering a casserole and pity.

Sitting on the bed to take off my shoes, I noticed the nightstand drawer slightly ajar. I reached out to close it, but then—instead—I slid it open. Nestled deep in the drawer, hidden beneath a wavy, outdated telephone directory, I found it: the nine-millimeter pistol loaned to me by Decker—Decker, who had foolishly, and perhaps fatally, put himself within striking distance of Satterfield’s fangs.

CONTRARY TO HER MESSAGE, KATHLEEN DID NOT
call; she simply came home, unannounced, sometime after nine. “Tell me about the support group,” I said, anxious—desperate, perhaps—to reconnect with her; to feel that I was somehow a part of the experience, a part of
her
experience, a partner.

“I’m not ready to talk about it yet,” she said, and I felt hurt and excluded. “I’m exhausted. What I’d really like is to take a shower and go to bed. Can we do that? Could we just curl up and go to sleep?”

“Of course,” I said. “Whatever you want.”

But I’d promised more than I could deliver. I lay awake for hours, trying to sort out the tailspin that was now our life. When at last I fell asleep, I dreamed of Job—a pair of cynical, sacrilegious dreams, both of them set at the end of Job’s tribulations.

In the first dream, God bent down and ruffled Job’s hair, scratching him behind the ears as if he were a dog, cooing, “
Who’s
a good boy?
Job’s
a good boy!
What
a good boy!” Then God lobbed a treat into the air, whereupon Job leapt into the air and caught the morsel in his mouth.

The second dream was even stranger than the first. In this one, God looked like a TV game-show host—specifically, like the host of
Let’s Make a Deal
—and Job was a contestant who had just won. To celebrate Job’s victory, the angel Gabriel gave a loud blast on his trumpet, and the Almighty beamed beneficently as the heavenly hosts clapped and cheered. When the applause subsided, God commanded, “Gabriel, tell Job what he’s just won!” The angel lowered his horn and said, in a silky announcer’s voice, “God, Job’s Grand Prize package starts with
one thousand
fertile female donkeys. But that’s only the beginning. To work the fields, Job gets a thousand teams of oxen—a
total of
two
thousand oxen!” A woman in a skimpy robe led a donkey and an ox out to stand on the cloud beside Job. “To travel the deserts in style,” Gabriel went on, “Job receives
six thousand
new top-of-the-line dromedary camels! And to round out his livestock portfolio: how about
fourteen thousand
fluffy sheep!” As another woman led out a camel and a sheep, Job raised his arms exultantly, and the angels cheered again. “But that’s not all, God,” continued Gabriel. “To make sure he has plenty of time to enjoy his new prosperity, Job gets another
one hundred forty years of life
!” More ecstatic applause ensued, along with a chorus of strumming harps; Job gasped and wiped away tears of gratitude with the sleeves of his robe. “Last but not least, Lord, Job gets a
fabulous new family
—ten new kids,
twice
as smart and good-looking as the old ones!” As the children appeared, all ten of them, Job whooped and hollered, pumping his fists in the air triumphantly.

I woke up at that, shocked from sleep by the irreverent image. As I got my bearings—lying beside Kathleen, outwardly in the same way I had for the past three decades, but with everything between us now changed—I found myself thinking about the one key character who had not appeared in my sacrilegious dreams: the same character who hadn’t, I suddenly realized, appeared in the Bible story’s happy ending.
Job’s wife,
I thought.
Where’s the woman with the broken, bitter heart?
I also thought of the ten new children. Were the new children conceived and carried by the same old wife? Did they fill the void left by the ten dead ones? Or are some losses beyond recompense or redemption?

I lay still, listening—listening for a whirlwind, and a Voice within it offering eloquent answers—but all I heard were crickets and cicadas, and the waning wail of a freight train keening somewhere in the distant dark.

I DIDN’T PRESSURE KATHLEEN TO DROP HER OPPOSITION
to treatment—not overtly, at least—but I did persuade her, through a combination of cajoling and browbeating, to let me speak with Dr. Spitzer, the Vanderbilt specialist who had diagnosed her cancer. At the appointed time, we called him from our living room, sitting together but listening and talking separately, each on our own cordless phone. Kathleen spoke first, sounding oddly formal and slightly embarrassed to be imposing—or to have
me
imposing—on Spitzer’s time. Brushing aside her apology, he asked how she was feeling. “Pretty good, I guess, for a dying woman,” she said, and her matter-of-fact fatalism made me wince. “I get short of breath when I go up stairs. Also, I feel really bloated now, as you predicted, and I can’t eat more than a few bites before I feel stuffed.”

“I’m not at all surprised by any of those things,” he said.

“Why not?” I asked him. “What do they mean?”

“The bloating is ascites,” he said. The word—it rhymed, in some slantwise, cruelly ironic way with the festive-sounding “invitees”—was familiar to me. A few years before, I’d witnessed
a murder victim’s autopsy—an alcoholic who would have soon died of liver disease, if his son hadn’t crushed his skull with a cinder block first. That man’s belly had been grotesquely distended, as if he were eight months pregnant. “The peritoneal cavity—that’s the abdominal cavity, but you probably know that . . . ?”

“I do,” I said.

“In advanced leiomyosarcoma,” he resumed, “the peritoneal cavity fills with cancerous fluid.” I looked at Kathleen in alarm, but she was looking out the window, carefully avoiding eye contact with me. “Kathleen, you might want to consider having that drained,” Spitzer added. “It won’t change the course of your disease, but it might make you more comfortable.”

“Would I have to be at Vanderbilt for that?”

“Oh, certainly not,” he said. “It’s an outpatient procedure. You could have it done in Knoxville. Think about it, and let me know if you want a referral.”

“I will,” she said. “Thank you.”

“What about the shortness of breath, Dr. Spitzer?” I asked. “Is that also caused by the fluid? Pressure on the diaphragm or lungs?”

“No, I’m afraid not,” he answered. “What it means is that the tumors in the lungs are blocking or crushing the bronchii. Closing off the airway. Kathleen, are you coughing up any blood?” I stared at her, horrified.

“A little,” she said. “Is that going to get worse?”

“It’s possible. You could start to hemorrhage,” he said. “Or you could throw a clot.”

“Jesus,” I said. “What do we do, if one of those things happens?”

“Frankly? Unfortunately, Dr. Brockton, there’s not much
that can be done, if that happens. As I’m sure Kathleen has told you, her disease is quite advanced, and it’s not amenable to treatment.”

I stared across the room at her, her face in profile and silhouetted against the window, and said, “How the hell did this get so far before we found it?” I wasn’t sure which of them I was asking—both, perhaps—and the question sounded almost like an accusation. But if either of them took offense, they did a good job of masking it.

“Thing about the uterus,” said Spitzer, “is that you don’t need it to live.” I was puzzled by the statement. “It’s not essential to staying alive,” he explained. “Not like the heart or the brain or the lungs. The only time it’s essential is during pregnancy, right?”

“Right,” I said, suddenly struck by how ironic it was that Kathleen’s uterus—the organ whose sole purpose was to nurture life—had become the agent and angel of her death. “But I’m not sure I’m following you.”

“Well, because it’s not essential,” he went on, “it’s not immediately apparent when something’s going wrong. Women tend to overlook things like bloating or unusual bleeding. Some of that just goes with the territory.” After thirty years of Kathleen’s monthly cycles, I recognized the truth of that. “Even if the bloating is fairly severe,” he said, “they might think they’re just gaining weight. Also, uterine leiomyosarcoma is pretty rare. Some ob-gyns never see a single case. I’ve seen a lot, but that’s because patients get referred to me from all over the country.”

“Dr. Spitzer,” I asked, “are you married?” For the first time, Kathleen turned toward me, looking startled and possibly angered by the question.

“I am,” he said. “I’ve been married to a lovely woman for thirty-two years.”

“If
your
wife got this diagnosis, what would you do? What kind of treatment would you want her to get?”

He thought for a moment. “The best treatment I could give her,” he said. “I’d make sure she knew how much I loved her. I’d make the most of whatever time we had together. And I’d get ready to grieve like hell.”

“YOU CAN’T JUST SIT AROUND AND WAIT FOR ME TO
die,” Kathleen said finally. We were still sitting in the living room long after the call had ended. She had been looking out the window, into the fading light; I had been looking at her, watching as her features softened and grew less distinct in the gloom. “I need you not to hover,” she went on. “Hovering over me—tiptoeing around, watching me like a hawk for any little signs and symptoms? That would drive me crazy. It’d be the worst thing you could do for me.”

The comment stung, and I started to object, but Kathleen knew me too well—it
would
be my way to hover. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll try not to.”

“Thank you.”

“It won’t be easy for me, Kath.”

“It won’t be easy,” she agreed. “But it’ll be important.” After a moment, she added, “Don’t shut down after I’m gone. You’ll probably want to, but you can’t. Or shouldn’t, anyhow. And don’t pull away from Jeff and Jenny and the boys. You’ll need them.”

“I need
you,
” I told her. “You’re the one I need.”

“Well, we can’t help that,” she said. “You’ll need to keep busy, too.” I started to protest, but she held up a hand to keep me from interrupting. “Don’t get discouraged about these setbacks you’ve had lately. The politics. The grandstanding and
game-playing. Stand up for yourself. Stand up for your work. Stand up for the Body Farm.”

“They can have the damn Body Farm if they want it, Kathleen.”

She shook her head. “You don’t mean that. You’d better
not
mean it. You’ve put too much into that place. And so have I.”

I didn’t quite follow that last bit. “I’m not . . . How do you mean?”

She turned, and even in the dim light, I could see the impatience in her eyes. “All those nights and weekends you spent working—at the Body Farm and in the morgue—instead of home with me? You think those didn’t cost me anything?” The words felt like a knife in my chest, but she waved her hand to shoo away my guilt. “I’m not trying to make you feel bad, honey. I know I wasn’t always gracious and generous about it, but I tried, because I knew it mattered so much to you. It must’ve mattered to me, too, or I wouldn’t have put up with it. So don’t you dare give up on it. If you do, I swear I’ll come back and haunt you.”

She forced a smile, and I tried to laugh at the brave joke, but the laugh got tangled up somewhere between my heart and my throat.

“One more thing, while we’re on the subject,” she said. “I see how miserable this Richard Janus thing has made you. You’ve had this cringing, hangdog look ever since the FBI and Fox News made it sound like you’d screwed up. Get over it, Bill. That, or get back into it.”

“I can’t get back into it,” I said. “They’ve shut me out.” I held out my hands, palms up, and gave a shrug.

“See?” The sharpness of her tone startled me. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. What on earth has happened to your backbone?”

In spite of myself—in spite of wanting to be so kind and loving that I could somehow magically keep Kathleen alive and well—I felt a flash of anger. “Gee, I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I lost my backbone out there on that mountainside. Or maybe it’s tied to the whipping post.”

“Well, untie it, then,” she snapped. “Or go find it. Or grow another one, if you have to. ’Cause being without it sure doesn’t become you. I’m the one who’s dying, Bill. Quit acting like it’s
you
that’s nailed to the cross.” I drew back, stunned, but then she reached over and squeezed my hand. “You’ve always made me so proud, Bill. Don’t stop now. Don’t stop when I’m gone. That would just make it sadder, don’t you see?”

We sat a while longer; by now the room was growing dark around us, but something had shifted—eased, at least for a moment—and we sat in a sort of companionable isolation, each absorbed in our own thoughts and feelings.

When the streetlights outside came on, Kathleen leaned over to the end table between us, took a box of matches from the drawer, and lit the thick white candle—her wine-drinking candle, she sometimes called it. “One more thing,” she said. I braced myself for more scolding, but she smiled, her face glowing in the warm light of the flame. “I wouldn’t consider it hovering if you brought me a glass of wine.”