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“Sure,” I said. “Power . . . power something-or-other?”
“Power morcellation,” she said. “Remember the tool the surgeon used? Looked like my handheld blender, the one I call the ‘Wand of Power’?” I stared, not quite following the thread. I was miles behind, but she didn’t wait for me to catch up. “Turns out power morcellation wasn’t such a great technique. The blade chopped up the fibroid, like they said it would. But it wasn’t just an ordinary fibroid. And they didn’t get out all the pieces—all the morcels—when they flushed me out afterward.”
“But the pathology report came back clean,” I reminded her. “Not cancer.”
“Not in what they looked at,” she said. “But there must have been tumor cells hiding in there somewhere. That’s what Spitzer thinks, anyhow. And the tool they used to cut up the fibroid—the power morcellator? It scattered those cells like seeds.” She shrugged. “And now, those seeds have taken root, all over the place, and I’ve grown a bumper crop of tumors.” She gave a short, bitter laugh. “Funny thing,” she said. “That surgery was supposed to help me, but instead, it killed me.”
“Kathleen, stop talking like that,” I said. “We’ll fight this. We’ll beat this.”
“We can’t, Bill. It’s not beatable. It’s too far along. The CT scan at Vanderbilt showed cancer all over my abdominal cavity. It’s already in my lungs, too. Spitzer said radiation and chemo might—might—give me an extra few months—”
“Can we do it here, or do we need to go to Vanderbilt?”
“No,” she said.
“No, what? No, we don’t need to go to Vanderbilt?”
“No, we’re not doing it. Either place. Any place.”
“What are you talking about? Of course we are. How soon can we start?”
“No.” Her face was no longer slack; it was now set, as hard as I’d ever seen it. “You don’t get to decide this, Bill. This isn’t we, this is me, and I say no.” She shook her head, her expression resolute. “Listen to me. Spitzer said the treatment would be brutal, and any extra time it gave me would be pure hell.” I started to argue, but she cut me off again. “Pure hell. Those were his words. I won’t put myself through that, Bill. And if you love me, you won’t try to make me.” She gave a wry half smile. “Funny, I was always so sure you’d be the one to die first. I figured some ex-convict would come gunning for revenge, or maybe you’d have a heart attack from working so hard. I never once thought I’d go first. And I sure never thought it’d be so soon.”
“Tell me this isn’t happening, Kathleen,” I pleaded. “Tell me this is a bad dream.”
“I can’t, honey. I wish I could, but I can’t.”
“Don’t leave me, Kathleen. Please. I can’t bear it.”
“Yes, you can.” She gave me an appraising glance. “It won’t be easy for you, though. You’re going to miss me when I’m gone.”
I knew she was right, because I could already feel a deep, black fissure cracking open within me—a fault line zigzagging down to depths I could not even begin to fathom.
KATHLEEN HAD FINALLY PERSUADED ME TO LEAVE her office—“I have a lot of things to take care of,” she’d said as she propelled me gently into the hallway—and I’d made my way in a daze back to the dark quietude of my private office, where I sat staring out the window at the stadium’s crisscrossed scaffolding of gritty, rusting girders. My own scaffolding—the underpinning of my life—suddenly felt old and rusty, too, though in hindsight the rust had been eating away at it for quite some time.
Through the grimy window, a faint flicker of movement caught my eye: a small, oblong shape twitching slightly atop a grayish-white lump. I stood up and walked to the window for a closer look. On the other side of the glass, six inches from my face, a paper wasp was scrabbling around, atop a small nest suspended beneath an I-beam. The wasp’s antennae and mandibles and forelegs twitched as it bustled across the shallow structure. The nest, about the same size as the face of my wristwatch, contained several dozen open hexagonal cells. Inside the nearest cells, I saw small, glistening larvae, and as the wasp moved from cell to cell, it darted its head briefly inside cell after cell, dispensing tiny taste treats: a dollop of chewed-up caterpillar, perhaps, or a masticated maggot—maybe even a maggot plucked from a corpse across the river, at the Body Farm. To one side of the nest, a dozen other wasps sat motionless, like airplanes parked on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Just beyond the small nest—no more than six inches from it—hung the prior year’s nest, empty and abandoned, like some entomological version of a blighted suburban strip mall. As I watched, I heard a sharp hissing sound, and suddenly a powerful jet of water shot up from somewhere below, swooshing and fanning across my window. Every few years, the university’s maintenance crews pressure-washed the windows of Stadium Hall, and today, it seemed, was the appointed day. The stream made several passes back and forth, sending sheets of muddy water cascading down the glass and off the sills. As the view cleared, to the extent that the view from these windows ever cleared, I looked out at the girder I’d been studying minutes before. The wasps—along with their new nest—were gone: swept away in the blink of an eye. Six inches from the obliterated construction site, the old nest hung, dripping but undamaged. In my mind, I seemed to hear the words of some Old Testament prophet, his voice as harsh as wormwood and gall and my own bitter heart: Vanity, vanity—all is vanity—and we are as dust in the wind.
MY CELL PHONE RANG FOR THE UMPTEENTH TIME OF the agonizing afternoon, and for the umpteenth time I reached for the “ignore” button. A moment earlier, I had ignored a call from Carmelita Janus—I felt bad about that, since I had promised to try to help her, but I also felt as if I were drowning in a sea of my own troubles, unable to haul her to safety. I glanced at the display, to see if Mrs. Janus had hit “redial,” but the display showed me a different name: “KPD Decker.” I had already ignored two calls from Decker shortly before lunchtime; I didn’t think I should ignore a third, given how precarious his mental state had seemed the last time I’d seen him. Feeling edgy, I answered the call. “Hey, Deck. How you doing?”
There was a brief silence on the other end, then a male voice I didn’t recognize said, in an oddly businesslike tone, “Hello? Who is this, please?”
“This is Dr. Bill Brockton,” I answered. “At the University of Tennessee. Who are you, and why are you calling me on Captain Decker’s cell phone?”
“Dr. Brockton, did you speak with Captain Decker this morning?”
The question seemed to come out of nowhere. “Excuse me?”
“I asked if you spoke with Captain Decker this morning.”
“No, I didn’t. Why?” I felt confused, and in the back of my head, an alarm was beginning to sound.
“His cell phone shows that he called you twice. First at 10:23 Central Time, for twenty seconds, and again at 10:54, for five minutes.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, feeling testy now. “Who are you? Why are you calling me? And what business is it of yours who calls me, and
when?”
There was another silence, then: “Dr. Brockton, this is Special Agent Henry Fielding with the TBI. I need to know whether you spoke with Captain Decker this morning.”
“No,” I said. “I think he tried to call me, but we didn’t talk. I have a backlog of voice mails I haven’t listened to yet. There might be one from him. I can check, and call you back, if you want.”
“Not right now,” he said. “Right now I need to ask you a few questions.”
The alarm bell in my head was almost deafening now. “Tell me what’s happened,” I demanded. “Is Deck hurt? Has he been in an accident?” The word “suicide” flashed into my mind, but I didn’t want to say it, because the act of saying it might somehow make it real. Suddenly a phrase the TBI agent had used connected with a circuit in my brain, and I felt a jolt that was almost electric. “You said ‘Central Time.’ Decker was calling me from Middle Tennessee this morning?” I prayed that it wasn’t so, but deep down, I knew that it was.
“Yes, he was.”
“Jesus. Please tell me he wasn’t calling me from Clifton,” I said. “Please tell me he didn’t go to the prison.”
“What do you mean, Dr. Brockton?” The agent’s question—and his tone of voice—couldn’t have been more casual if he’d been asking about the weather. And that told me, beyond a doubt, that something was badly wrong.
“Is Deck hurt? Is he in some sort of trouble?” The agent didn’t answer, and I snapped. “Goddamnit, Fielding, what the hell is going on? Quit playing games with me. If something’s happened to Captain Decker, tell me what it is, and tell me how I can help.”
