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I drink my last bottle of water, get behind the wheel, toss the rifle onto the back seat, knowing my real gun, the Glock, is locked safely in the glove compartment. I have a second one at home. A girl can’t have too many.
I feel like I used to feel in college, the night before a big game. I think about what the room will look like tomorrow. What it will feel like. Where Rob Jacobson will be and where I’ll be and where the jury will be.
I’ve got my opening statement committed to memory. Even so, I pull up the copy stored on my phone. I slide the seat back, lean back, begin to read it over again, keep reading until I feel my eyes starting to close.
When I wake up, it’s morning.
Five
SHIT, SHIT,SHIT.
I look at my watch.
Six thirty.
I am putting the car in motion before I’m even fully awake. I have enough time, barely, to get back to the house, shower, get into my sincerity suit, and still make my eight o’clock appointment in Southampton before heading to court.
When I get to Southampton, I pull up to the small, one-story building across from Town Hall where I am meeting with one of my best friends in the world, Samantha Wylie.
Sam has been my best friend since we attended the same junior high school up-island in Patchogue before my father couldn’t take it any longer and moved us back to the city.
She is a truly great beauty, tall and blond and happily married—the bitch—with two kids, both in college, one in pre-law and the other in pre-med. Even more annoying, at least to me, and just to make her picture more perfect, she and her husband have two labradoodles.
“You’ve never been much of a dog person,” she once said. “But what do you possibly have against labradoodles?”
“I don’t know,” I told her. “There’s just something about them that’s always pissed me off.”
We both laughed that day at how silly I sounded. I’m not afraid to do silly with her. And I’d done more laughing, about more silly stuff, with Sam Wylie than with anybody who’d managed to stay in my life for very long, including two ex-husbands.
But there’s something wrong today—I know it from the moment I am inside her office. And I find myself, in the moment, wishing Ihadrescheduled.
She isn’t my pal Sam today; she’s not the girl with whom I used to sneak beers on sleepovers.
She’s Dr. Samantha Wylie.
Six
TODAY’S APPOINTMENT IS SUPPOSEDto be strictly routine, the follow-up Sam, being Sam, has always mandated to review test results after my annual physical. I keep telling her that the only reason she makes me come back is because she misses me.
“How are Rusty and Dusty?” I ask when I sit down.
Rusty and Dusty aren’t the labradoodles’ names. Just what I’ve always called them.
No reaction. “I got your test results back.”
“You don’t have to tell me,” I say. “I’m in better shape than Wonder Woman. The new hot one.”
She opens the folder in front of her and spreads out x-rays and lab reports. Sam had finally taken some pictures and done her tests because of what I had originally described to her as a persistent pain in the neck. And a bump back there that I hadn’t noticed until a couple of weeks ago. The one she biopsied.
I feel the small, dark, cold place inside me begin to grow.
Then she starts to talk. And I wish, for the life of me, I could process, evenhear,everything she is saying.
But I don’t hear very much after “brain and neck cancer.”
She pauses.
“It’s further along than I’d prefer.”
