“Not one worth taking.”

In that moment, it seemed like she wasn’t trying. “You have to try it! Call them back! Tell them you’ve changed your mind! You can’t be a quitter. You have to keep fighting!”

She shook her head, infuriatingly calm. “I am fighting. In my own way.”

“How?” I said. “How are you fighting?”

She looked me straight on. “I’ve been meditating three times a day since my last checkup.”

“Meditating? You’re fighting recurrent melanoma with meditation?”

“I think it’s working,” she said.

“What’s working?”

“I should have had many more seizures by now, in fact. That’s a very promising sign.”

“What are you talking about?”

My mom gave me a smile. “When I first got the prognosis, I read everything I possibly could about it—like you do.”

I nodded.

“And one of the articles I read was about a French woman with basically my same situation who had managed to halt the growth of her tumor through creative visualization.”

I shook my head. “What did she visualize?”

“She mediated three times a day, and she very specifically imagined a hard shell growing around her tumor—so hard that it was compressed inside and couldn’t get any bigger.”

I made a conscious effort not to roll my eyes.

“It worked,” Diana said. “She’d been going downhill rapidly—but then her decline slowed, then stopped entirely. She didn’t die for another seven years, and that was in a car crash. Totally unrelated! When they autopsied her tumor, guess what they found?”

“What?”

“A shell. A hard shell around it. And it hadn’t grown at all.”

I shook my head. “That’s urban legend. That can’t be real.”

“It is real. It’s documented.”

“You can’t just imagine a tumor away!”

“Maybe not,” she said. “But there’s certainly no harm in trying.”

Twenty-three

AND SO WE went home. And made supper. And sat in the garden while the sun went down. There was nothing else to do.

It hit me in strange waves. There were moments when I felt gutted, and moments when I felt almost normal; moments when I felt at peace with Diana’s acceptance, and moments when I felt panicked to do something; moments when I felt like somehow, when all was said and done, everything would be okay, and moments when it seemed like nothing would ever be okay again.

Remember when I was all about trying to keep my life from getting destabilized?

Yeah, that whole concept got shot to hell.

I had four days before my next shift. Four days to figure out how to face the rest of my life. So I just helped Diana weed her garden, and I helped her make supper. We looked through old photo albums and sang Christmas carols, even though it wasn’t Christmas. She showed me her old diaries and old portfolios from art school. She walked me through her jewelry box and tried to educate me about which long-gone relatives had owned which rings and necklaces and charm bracelets. We drank a lot of coffee and made a lot of tea. We made sure not to miss the sunsets.

I tried, with at least partial success, to savor the time we had left. That was the goal, anyway—to enjoy her living presence near me and not fixate so much on the sorrow to come that I forgot to pay attention. To learn to make the best of things. As fast as I could.

Every night that week, after supper, the rookie showed up at the front door, wanting to check on us, or do something for us, or help.

But I wouldn’t answer it.

He came anyway, though, and left tubs of scones and muffins and cookies for comfort.

We brought them in later and arranged them on the kitchen table. But I couldn’t eat.

Finally, on the last night before our next shift, he knocked—and kept knocking.

“Me again,” he said, when I finally opened the door.

He’d been texting me, too—to see how my mom was, and how my ankle was, and how I was doing about the brick. He’d left a few messages. But I hadn’t answered anything.

I wasn’t ignoring him, exactly. I just had no idea what to say.

How could I put any of this into words?

The sight of him there, in the doorframe, felt like salvation. I wanted to grab onto him like a life preserver in an empty ocean.

Instead, I made myself keep treading water. If I stopped, I’d never start again.

“You can’t be here,” I said to him, like the threshold was some great barrier neither of us would ever cross.

“I need to talk to you.”

“I can’t. You know? It’s too much.”

“I know. You just got this stalker thing dealt with—I hope—and the last thing you need is me showing up like a pain in the ass.”

“It’s not that.”

“I just need to see you.”

I shook my head.

“Five minutes. Please.”

I’d been afraid to leave the house since finding out about my mom. Afraid she might … disappear, maybe. But she’d gone to bed for the night already—cranked up her white noise machine and closed her door. What was I going to do? Sit in the hallway and guard the stairs while she slept?

I could give Owen five minutes.

I hung the dish towel on the coat rack and stepped over the threshold.

Owen backed up less than he should have, and then there we were, standing way too close.

“What now?” I said.

“I just want to see you.”

I held my arms out like, Voilà.

“Can we just … talk? I have questions for you.”

“Fine,” I said, and started down the front walk. I didn’t even limp. I wondered if he’d forget about my ankle.

“How’s your ankle?” he asked then.

“Fine,” I said. “I’ve been off the crutches since yesterday.”

“Actually fine?” he asked. “Or firefighter fine?”

“Firefighter fine,” I conceded. “But it’s much better than it was. I’m being careful.”

“You’re limping a little.”

But I disagreed. “I’m not limping at all.”

“You’re walking gingerly, then.”

Funny to start with the ankle. It was the least of my worries now. “Next question.”

“Okay,” he said, following. “Tell me how your mom is.”

I took a deep breath. Then I just said it, fast, like ripping off a Band-Aid. “She has a brain tumor. That’s what caused the seizure. It’s a recurrence of melanoma. It’s malignant and very aggressive. She has a year to live at the most.”

The rookie had not been expecting that. He was quiet for a minute.

I intended to keep walking, but when I got to the garden gate, I slowed to a stop.

The rookie stopped beside me. “Did you know?” he asked, his voice softer.

“I didn’t know anything. She didn’t tell me. She actually told some fibs to throw me off. But I knew something wasn’t right.”

“How is she?”

“Weirdly, she’s okay most of the time.”