But it wasn’t a real question. Even if she’d come back, it would have been too late. Even as she stood by the side of the highway in Arkansas deciding what choice to make, I had already made choices of my own.

There was no changing it. There was no possibility of a different story.

There was only what had happened. And how to carry on.

I looked up to see Josie smiling at me. Then she reached out and tucked a wisp of hair behind my ear. “She believed you’d be okay,” she said again. “And she was right.”

* * *

JOSIE WAS BARELY out of sight when a doctor appeared beside me.

“You’re the fireman?” he asked, looking me over.

“I’m the fireman,” I said, looking him over right back.

“She told me about you.”

He had a couple of black nose hairs poking down out of his right nostril. “What happened?” I asked, staring at them.

“Fairly common, in her situation,” he said. “I’m surprised it hasn’t happened before.”

I looked up. “You mean the eye? The blindness?”

“It was an occipital seizure,” he confirmed. “That explains the hallucinations and the blurred vision afterward. Also the headache. All very common with this region.”

Hallucinations? Blurred vision? “I don’t understand how blindness in an eye could cause seizures.”

He frowned at me. “It’s not the eye causing the seizures. It’s the tumor.”

I stopped breathing.

Didn’t breathe, didn’t blink.

The tumor?

The doc walked me over to a computer station in the hallway and pulled up her CT-scan images on the screen. He circled a white area inside my mother’s skull about the size of a Ping-Pong ball with his pen—as if anyone with eyes could miss it. He motioned for me to lean in. If he had any qualms about doctor-patient confidentiality, or the fact that she clearly had not told her daughter the fireman about the situation inside her skull, he did not mention them.

“Holy shit,” I said, and I realized I was having the same feeling I’d had back at the station when Josie had called. Not clarity, but the opposite.

He nodded. “It’s a doozie.”

I didn’t know what to say. But I felt like I should have something to say. Professionally, anyway. I scanned through my knowledge of types of brain tumors. “Glioblastoma?” I finally asked.

He shook his head. “It’s not primary. It’s secondary. A melanoma recurrence many years later. But it’s large enough now to impact the brain.”

Wait—she’d had a melanoma? Hospitals mixed up charts all the time. Maybe this doc was thinking of another old lady with a homemade calico eye patch.

“Is it malignant?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” the doctor said. He looked almost excited about it. And I got that. When you see these things all the time, sometimes the people behind them start to seem like a whole different story.

I shifted back a little.

“I’d say she has a few months,” the doctor said, still staring at the screen. “A year at the most.”

I felt a sudden collapse in my chest. A year at the most.

The doctor glanced over at me, read my face, and seemed to remember he was talking to a human. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess she hadn’t told you.”

“She had not told me,” I confirmed, keeping my eyes on the films in front of me, like I was studying them. Which I wasn’t.

It seemed impossibly rude that he hadn’t bothered to trim his nose hairs before delivering information like that—as if it were just some ordinary moment in some ordinary day.

The doc stared at the films alongside me, but I got the feeling he wasn’t studying them, either.

I felt sorry for him, in a way. He never expected, popping in, that he’d be delivering this kind of news to an unsuspecting family member. I knew what it felt like, how it jolted the system. I knew how you had to gird yourself for it—go in fully armored. It was always the moments you didn’t expect that haunted you the most.

I’d given bad news to hundreds of people over the years. Sometimes they collapsed to the floor. Sometimes they screamed, or erupted into sobs. Sometimes they went eerily silent. One woman had slapped me across the face.

For a second, I thought more about what that doctor must have been feeling in that moment than what I was.

Until he said, “Well. The good news is, she seems to be otherwise healthy. As far as we can tell.”

I felt sorry for him right then, trying to come up with some good news. But I felt sorrier for me. Because there really was no good news.

* * *

THE DOCTOR WENT into the room after that, but I stayed in the hallway. I don’t remember saying good-bye to him, or thank you, or whatever I must have said. I just remember the most searing feeling of cognitive dissonance. A total stranger, with one unexpected sentence, had just irrevocably changed the story of my life.

On the way into the hospital, I’d thought I might ask for an X-ray, but now my ankle was forgotten. I’d worry about it later, if it didn’t get better. It was all I could do to soak the news in. My brain couldn’t understand it. It was like a white fog inside my head where the comprehension should be.

A year at the most.

She’d known this whole time. She’d known, and she hadn’t told me.

I felt my knees start to tremble, and because I wasn’t ready to face her, I found a sitting area in the hallway. My brain didn’t understand, but my body did.

Why hadn’t I tried harder? Why hadn’t I demanded to look at that eye? All the clues clicked into place, and I felt like an idiot for not having put it all together sooner. I had seen all the pieces, but I had refused to assemble them.

Maybe I hadn’t wanted to. Things were different sometimes when the heart was involved.

But now I knew. There was no way to unknow.

I needed the details. I needed charts and histories and information. I wanted to see all her films, get the records of the surgery. I wanted to gather it all up and spread it out on the dining table like a code that I could read just right—better, smarter, than anybody else—and crack for her. I needed to know what was going on. How could I help her if I didn’t have the full story? But maybe not even she had the full story.

I noticed, the way you might with a patient, that my breathing was accelerated.

Some part of me understood that she was beyond help. That doctor had not said, Get her into surgery, stat! He hadn’t talked about any treatments at all. If this were something that could be cured—they would be trying to cure it right now. The fact that we were crocheting baby blankets for preemies at the hospital instead of going there for radiation treatments seemed to confirm that there weren’t any treatments left.

It all made sense now.

How thin she was. How vague she’d been on all the details. The goofy collection of eye patches. This was why she’d called me here. This was why she’d asked me to give up my entire life. This was what we’d been doing all this time.

We were saying good-bye.

Why hadn’t she told me? It seemed so unfair—that I hadn’t been informed.

I might not have done anything differently. But I might have thought about things differently. I might not have wasted so much time.