I DON’T KNOW HOW any of us managed to sleep that night. After the ER doctor urged Alex to come in the next morning for a consultation with a neurosurgeon, after Alex stared at her and demanded to know exactly what she saw in the MRI, and after the doctor weaseled out of our barrage of questions by repeating, “I’m not qualified to make a diagnosis,” we finally left the hospital.
We drove Bradley home first, and I waited in the car while Alex walked him inside. She wasn’t gone for more than five minutes. It seemed like an eternity. I leaned back against the driver’s seat headrest, trying to escape my relentless vision of the two of them standing in Bradley’s living room, holding each other.
When Alex came back to the car, I asked, “Should I take you back home?” I frowned. God, the entire world had careened upside down tonight.
Was
that even her home anymore?
Alex shook her head. “Can I stay with you at Mom and Dad’s? I don’t want to be alone. Gary’s out of town, and I haven’t moved out yet.”
“Of course,” I said, even though I desperately did want to be
alone. But in the hierarchy of emotions, my pain over Alex and Bradley couldn’t compete with Alex’s terror. Even I knew that. Bradley did, too; I’d seen the conflict play over his face when she’d jumped out of the car after him to walk him inside his house. He hadn’t wanted to hurt me, but how could he push away Alex? Somehow I’d managed to give him a brief nod, to let him know I understood what he needed to do.
“I don’t want Mom and Dad to know anything,” Alex said now. She took a deep breath. “Not until we know.”
We’d been at the hospital for hours, and now it was close to midnight. The roads were empty and slick from the light rain that had fallen while we were in the ER. Everything felt surreal, as though we were on a deserted movie set where the houses were nothing but pieces of painted cardboard and the trees were made of papier-mâché. We drove through the darkness, watching our headlights flash against the streets.
“Think that’s Dad’s raccoon?” Alex asked, breaking the silence. She pointed to an animal scurrying by on the side of the road.
Dad had been waging an all-out assault against a raccoon that had a fondness for his trash. He had set up motion-sensitive lights, invested in two different kinds of trash cans, and was talking about building a fence before I finally bought him a three-dollar bungee cord and secured the trash can’s lid.
“I swear that man was one step away from buying a shotgun,” Alex said. “What are the odds that he’d shoot off his own toe?”
“About even,” I said. “But in a few years, the story would’ve been that the rabid raccoon wrestled the gun away and shot Dad before they fought to the death.”
Alex tried to smile, but she couldn’t pull it off. I tried to think of something else to say, but I came up empty. She turned to stare out the window. We drove the rest of the way in silence, each of us locked in our own thoughts.
“I’ll make up some excuse for why we have to leave tomorrow morning,” I said as we crept inside quietly so we wouldn’t wake our parents. I handed Alex one of my T-shirts to sleep in.
“Thanks,” she said.
“Can I get you anything?” I asked. “Some tea?”
“I think I’m just going to sleep,” she said. “I’m exhausted.”
“Take my bed,” I offered. Dad had inexplicably taken over Alex’s bedroom as an “office” on the day he retired, so there weren’t many sleeping options. I grabbed a pillow off my bed to take to the couch.
“Linds?” Alex hesitated. I paused, my hand on the doorknob, and turned back to her.
“Stay with me?” she finally asked. “The bed’s big enough for both of us.” She gave a half smile. “I swear I don’t snore.”
What could I say?
“Sure,” I replied.
I lifted up one side of the covers and climbed in, and Alex got in on the other side. She fell asleep so quickly it was like she’d been picked up and dropped into it, but I lay awake for hours as images tormented me: Bradley’s face when he told me he was involved with someone else; Alex’s and Bradley’s hands side by side on the white hospital sheet; the technician’s fingers moving across his chest as he looked at Alex.
On my last night in New York, Matt had accused me of pushing away my emotions. Well, he should see me now, I thought as I rolled over, trying to find a comfortable position. I’d ping-ponged wildly back and forth from exhilarated to devastated to enraged to terrified in the space of a few hours. I felt sorry for my sister for the first time in my life—and I was more jealous of her than ever. I hated Bradley, but I still loved him.
Emotional enough for you, Matt? I wondered, staring up at the ceiling. Because right about now, those sixteen-hour days at the ad agency looked pretty damn good.
I sighed and flipped over again. In a few hours we’d meet a neurosurgeon and we’d find out what the scans had revealed. Maybe it would all be a mistake. Maybe the technician was a religious whacko who blessed everyone who crossed his path. Maybe the doctor would say Alex had an eye infection or a pinched nerve. He’d probably hand her a prescription for a bottle of drops and tell her to scram so he could get to the patients who really needed his help.
I looked over at Alex, the curves of her face peaceful and relaxed in sleep.
I knew the neurosurgeon wouldn’t say any of those things.
The next morning I gulped three straight cups of black coffee, hoping to chase away the lingering haze from the eerie dreams that had plagued me during the hour or two I’d actually slept. I deliberately waited until my mouth was full before I mumbled an excuse to Mom and Dad about Alex and me going shopping together.
“Shopping?”
A furrow appeared between Mom’s brows, and she stopped spooning Equal into her coffee. “Don’t you have to work?”
I probably should’ve come up with something more believable, like a tractor pull. Alex and I had never, ever gone shopping together.
“Actually, yes,” I said. “I have to, um, check out some ads in the mall to make sure they’re displayed correctly.”
“You’re going to the mall?” Dad asked, peering out from over the top of the sports page. “What I would do is take the Beltway. Normally you should avoid it at all costs—too many morons on the road—but at this time of day it should be safe.”
“Are all the morons at work?” Alex asked innocently.
She had almost pulled it off. Her jokes, the way she’d casually hoisted herself up to sit on the kitchen counter—to a casual observer, she seemed utterly carefree, a girl with nothing on her mind but finding the perfect sundress for summer.
Then she got down from the counter and walked over to Dad.
“I love you,” she said. She wrapped him in a giant hug that lingered a few beats too long. Then she hurried out of the kitchen, but not before I’d seen silent tears streaking down her face.
“Lindsey?” Mom called as I started to follow Alex.
I froze.
“I’m glad you girls are going shopping together,” Mom said. She hadn’t seen Alex’s face after all, I realized with a rush of relief. The frown was gone from Mom’s face. She believed my story. “It’s just so . . .
nice.
”
I left my parents like that—sharing the paper, refilling their coffee mugs from the fresh pot I’d brewed, kvetching over the forecast on the Weather Channel—glad that they could have one more ordinary day.
An hour later, we were sitting in the office of a neurosurgeon whose silvery hair and deep, authoritative voice seemed straight out of central casting. Even his name, Dr. Steven Grayson, seemed like it was created by a Hollywood agent with an eye for the marquee.
First we’d stopped at Alex’s so she could change clothes, then we’d swung by to pick up Bradley on the way to the hospital. I kept my eyes straight ahead when he got into the car and somehow managed to say hi in a normal-sounding voice. The three of us were ushered into the neurosurgeon’s office at
exactly our appointed time. That made me nervous; weren’t doctors supposed to run late? Was it a bad sign that he
hadn’t
kept us waiting?
Alex had barely said a word since we’d left Mom and Dad’s, as if she’d used up all her energy trying to act normal at breakfast. Now she looked like a fearful flier listening to the captain of the plane announce that severe turbulence lay ahead. Her face was ashen, and her hands turned into claws as they gripped the armrests of her chair.
“There’s good news and bad news,” Dr. Grayson began.
“Just tell me quickly,” Alex said. I could see her chest rising and falling rapidly under her thin T-shirt.
“The scans show a tumor pressing on the optic nerve,” the doctor said. “That’s what’s causing problems with your peripheral vision.”
Everything shrank down around those five letters.
Tumor.
“We don’t think it’s malignant,” Dr. Grayson said. His voice was reassuring and calm, like he did this every day. He
did
do this every day, I realized with a jolt. How could someone do this every day? How could he deliver this kind of news again and again with the bland authority of a weather forecaster?
“The medical term is
adenoma
,” Dr. Grayson said. “It’s located under the optic nerve and pushing up against it, which is typically how these tumors present. That’s why you were having vision problems.”
“It’s not cancerous?” Alex asked.
“We won’t know for sure until we get in there,” Dr. Grayson said, steepling his fingers. “But I’m fairly certain it’s benign. Pituitary tumors usually are. Typically we like to access them through the nose. But because of the size of the mass and its location, we need to do a craniotomy.”
“A craniotomy,” I said. This was all happening so fast; my
mind was churning to keep up. “You mean you’re going to have to open . . .” My voice trailed off.
“We’ll need to access the mass by opening the skull,” the doctor said.
It was as if by using impersonal language—“the mass” instead of “your tumor”—the doctor was trying to soften the news. But all it did was take it a second or two longer for the meaning to hit, like the brief delay between a foreign speaker’s words and his translator’s interpretation.
“When?” Alex whispered, like getting out that single word took everything she had.
“As soon as possible,” Dr. Grayson said. “We can schedule surgery for Thursday. You should know that there’s a chance I might not be able to get out the entire tumor. If it would risk damaging the optic nerve, I may have to leave a tiny bit behind, in which case, we may need to follow up surgery with a course of radiation. But I’m hopeful radiation won’t be required.”
“You want to operate in three days?” Bradley said. “That’s so soon.”
“Why so soon?” I asked, looking up from the blue spiral notebook I’d been using to frantically scribble down the unfamiliar terms. “You said it’s not fatal—an adenoma, right? So why do you have to operate in three days?”
“This type of tumor presents a lot of secondary complications when it presses against the optic chiasm,” the doctor said, looking directly at Alex. “Your vision may be permanently impaired if we wait. As the mass grows larger, your vision will get worse and worse, and it will be harder to salvage. Right now, the tumor is the size of a walnut. In another few weeks, things will become more . . . complicated.”
I saw Bradley reach for Alex’s hand, and I hated myself for noting it, for feeling a white-hot pang in the center of my
chest. I averted my eyes and looked behind the doctor, to his wall of pride. University of Pennsylvania medical school. Yale for undergrad. Board certifications and professional awards and commendations. I took notes on all of it so I could check him out.
“Am I going to go blind?” Alex asked.
“It’s highly unlikely,” he said. “I can’t say for sure until we get in there and see what we’re dealing with. But most patients recover most of their sight, if not all.”
“But some go blind,” Alex said.
“Few,” the doctor acknowledged. “I don’t expect that to happen to you. Worst case, your vision may be compromised.”
“So what’s going to happen?” Alex said. “You’re going to take out the tumor and then everything will go back to normal?”
“Eventually, yes, that’s the goal,” the doctor said. “As I said, you may need radiation following surgery. And I’m going to prescribe steroids to hold down inflammation.”
“Okay.” Alex exhaled loudly. She lifted her chin. “Let’s do it. Get this thing out of me. I want you to do it as soon as you can.”
“I’ll need some more scans and blood tests,” Dr. Grayson said. “I’ll want you to see an endocrinologist this week, too. And I want you to come to the hospital immediately if your vision worsens or if you have any other symptoms. Vomiting, loss of balance, that sort of thing.”
“Hey, can you tell that to the cop who wanted to test me for DUI?” Alex said. She was smiling, a big, happy trademark-Alex smile; how could she possibly be joking around now?
“Pituitary tumors are the next it thing in Hollywood,” Alex said in her TV voice. “Whenever Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan drives over some paparazzi or falls down in a nightclub, they can just pull out their MRI scans and they’ve got a get-out-of-jail-free card. Hey, I’m starting a
trend.
”
Dr. Grayson and I just gaped at her. Was Alex making fun of this? I didn’t know what to do. But Bradley did.