to,” Ruby said.
“We can’t leave this place for six months.”
“Six months? What are you talking about?”
“Well . . . I sort of rented our apartment.”
“Rented our apartment?”
“To a couple of professors from Barcelona.”
“What? Why?”
“Because I couldn’t sell enough equipment to afford both places.”
“So what? We move here starting now? We just start living our lives as Elliot and Tanya Uretsky?”
I nodded and then said, “Hey, at least it’s a short walk to the movies.” Ruby shrugged that benefit off. “There’s more,” I said.
“More?”
“You’ve got to get rediagnosed. And, of course, we’re going to have to find another dermatological oncologist to see.”
“What do you mean? Start this whole process all over again? The MRI? PET scans? Needles? Oh God, John. You can’t be serious.”
“It’s the only way. We’ll tell them that we just moved to town. We don’t have any primary care doctor, because we haven’t needed one. We’re young. Young people don’t always go to the doctor. They’ll believe us. There’s no primary doctor for anybody to contact. Dr. Lisa Adams essentially no longer exists. They’ll run the tests over again. They’ll come to the same conclusion. Think of it as a very thorough second opinion.”
Ruby scoffed and threw up her hands. “Yeah, maybe the results this time will show I’m cancer free.”
“Let’s hope they do.”
Ruby put her hands on her hips and gazed absently out the windows directly behind the futon. Her fifty-thousand-yard stare reminded me that I needed to buy curtains for those windows. I wanted to rent a first-floor apartment because of my acrophobia but couldn’t find one furnished in our price range. Light spilling inside through those very windows lit her hair, giving the appearance of an angelic glow. Ruby stood still for a long, tense moment. When she looked back at me, there were tears in her eyes.
“I don’t want to do it, John,” Ruby said, taking steps toward me. “I don’t want to.”
I opened my arms, and Ruby fell hard into me. I held on to her, rocking back and forth on my heels as Ruby wept onto my chest. Eventually, I started to cry as well. I tried to speak, but I’m sure it was hard for Ruby to understand me, as I was struggling to catch my breath.
“I can’t risk it, Ruby,” I said, my voice cracking and quavering. The tears were flowing freely now. I don’t often cry, and I could sense my tears were bringing Ruby closer to me. “I don’t want to trust our lives to the kindness of strangers. I don’t want to wait for the cheaper drug to miraculously become available. I don’t want to waste time chasing grants and assistance programs. I want you to take the medicine you need without having to worry about how we’re going to pay for it. You have a right to live. This isn’t your fault. This is just how it is. And I’ve got a way to fix it. Please, baby. Please let me fix this—this one thing, the only thing about your cancer that I can control. Please, don’t say no. Please.”
Ruby pulled away, her eyes ringed black with running mascara. She sniffled and forced a half smile. “I’m not okay with it,” she said. “But if you think it’s the only way, I’ll do it.”
CHAPTER 9
We’d been living as Elliot and Tanya Uretsky for six weeks, a milestone for sure, but tomorrow would be the biggest day of this ongoing charade. Tomorrow we were getting a progress report from Ruby’s new oncologist, Dr. Anna Lee.
As far as Dr. Lee’s practice was concerned, Ruby was just a new patient, Tanya Uretsky, who had no primary care physician, no past medical history to share, who appeared to be afflicted with an aggressive melanoma caused by a mutation in the BRAF gene. Dr. Lee had prescribed Ruby a course of Verbilifide, not knowing Ruby had been taking the drug for weeks. Surgery would follow once Dr. Lee saw how the nodes were responding to the treatment. We worried that traces of Verbilifide might show up in her blood work, but apparently that wasn’t the case.
Ruby, dressed in spandex workout clothes, was on her yoga mat in the downward dog position, and I was on my computer, debugging code and occasionally leering at Ruby. A knock on the door startled us.
Ruby sprang to her feet with a graceful motion. She flashed me a nervous look. “What do we do?” she whispered.
“Um, we answer the door,” I said, without glancing up.
Ruby came