All You Could Ask For A Novel - By Mike Greenberg Page 0,89

Katherine was laughing, she was healthy, she was whole. It didn’t happen enough because it isn’t always easy to find space to laugh when you are fighting for your life, but on the occasions you do, it makes all the difference in the world.

She was only in the hospital for three days. I was excited when we moved her back home; in fact, I think I was more excited than she was. We had wonderful, deep, far-ranging talks in her apartment in those days, we talked about her life and mine. We talked about men and work, about fashion and about family. And we talked about cancer, in a way that only those of us who know it can talk about it. Because until you know it, there is no good way to explain it so anyone else can understand it. It’s sort of like trying to recount to someone who wasn’t there the details of an event where you almost got killed, like the time the engine caught fire and your flight had to make an emergency landing, or the time you were camping in the woods and you came across a bear and you had to lie down and play dead and pray the bear sniffed you and strolled away rather than mauling and eating you. Any experience you are recounting to anyone can never be as scary as it was when it happened, because the very fact that you are the one doing the talking means you survived, when what made the whole thing scary in the first place is that you didn’t know for sure you would. So no situation can ever be as scary in the retelling as it was in the moment.

Except for cancer.

Cancer doesn’t just land like a plane, or walk away like a bear. Even for me it didn’t, and for Katherine it wasn’t ever going to. Knowing that makes every moment a little like the one on the plane before the landing when you are crossing yourself and holding the armrest so tightly you emerge with bruised fingers, or when you are lying silent on the ground while the bear sniffs your hair. Not that every moment I had with Katherine was like that, but those feelings are always there, no matter how hard you try to pretend they aren’t.

When she talked about cancer, she seemed more sad than scared; I think because she was so filled with regret. It’s one thing to fear illness, to fear dying, and another entirely to wonder why you did the things you did and didn’t do the ones you could have. I think when Katherine thought about the end of her life, she thought about how differently she would have lived it if she could have done it over, practically every minute of it since Phillip, and that made her sad.

But not nearly as sad as when she talked about Stephen.

“All my life,” she told me, “I never believed in love at first sight.”

“But you were wrong,” I said.

“I was.” She smiled. “The instant I saw him I knew. It was like being struck by lightning, except the feeling was warm and gooey and wonderful, like my insides turned to hot fudge. In one day I realized nothing in my life was what I wanted it to be. And, more important, I acted on it. I told him I’d be back in two weeks and I was really going to do it. I left my job, I was going to put my apartment up for sale, I was all in on this man. And then . . .”

Her voice trailed off there. Cancer does that sometimes, too. It makes it hard to finish your sentences.

“I’m going to go to Aspen and find him,” I said. “If you won’t tell me his last name I am just getting on a plane.”

Katherine got deadly serious then. “Listen to me,” she said. “I know you are saying that for all the right reasons and you’d be doing it for the right reasons, too, and if I were sitting where you are I might do the same thing. But I’m not, and you aren’t lying where I am. I need to know you aren’t going to go to Aspen, or try to find Stephen on the Internet or anything. I need you to promise me that. Because if every time you walk in the door I have to worry that he’ll walk in behind you, I won’t be