track me down here? Can I ever go home again? But of course I will go home. I have to. “How are you?” I ask. “How are you feeling?”
She coughs again, a muffled sound, as if she’s trying to hide it in her sleeve. “I’m OK. No appetite, though, and I’ve got that bloat again. Mostly I’m just so tired all the time. It’s like, you finish a marathon and you’re exhausted and you look up only to realize you’ve just landed at the starting line of another marathon, and you have no choice but to start running again. You know?”
Another wave of cramps passes through me but I try to ignore them, stoic in the face of my mother’s greater suffering. “Oh, Mom,” I whisper. “I should be there with you.”
“Absolutely not. You take care of yourself for once, OK?” she says. “Dr. Hawthorne has been very nice, he wants me coming in after Thanksgiving to start treatment. A first round of radiation. And then the new protocol. But maybe I shouldn’t….I don’t know.”
“Jesus, Mom, why wouldn’t you?”
“But, Nina—the cost. I don’t know where you are—and I’m not going to ask, darling. I know all about plausible deniability—but you’re clearly not minding your antiques store here, so…How are we going to come up with the money? It’s going to be a half-million dollars, once you add in the radiation and the fancy drugs and the doctor visits and the home care and the hospital stay. I talked to my insurance company again, they still refuse to cover anything but basic chemo. Said this was an ‘experimental’ protocol they won’t approve.” Another muffled cough, her voice going fainter, as if this conversation has fatigued her. “But I can just do chemo. It will probably be fine.”
“No,” I say. “Chemo didn’t work the first time around. So you’ll do whatever the doctor is recommending you do. I’ll have the money by the end of the year. Maybe even sooner. All of it. Just—do what he says. Start the protocol.”
She is quiet on the other end of the line. “Honey, I hope you’re being careful, whatever it is you’re doing. I hope I taught you that much. You should always be thinking three steps ahead.”
I try to say something reassuring but something horrible is happening in my gastrointestinal tract that requires urgent attention. I gasp a goodbye to my mother and stumble to the bathroom for another round at the toilet, and then collapse into bed and fall, feverish, to sleep.
* * *
—
I dream that I am at the bottom of Lake Tahoe, swimming frantically through the freezing water toward a faint light above, my lungs bursting as the surface keeps receding away. There is someone swimming up there above me, a black shadow against the blue, and I’m trying to call for help but then I realize that they aren’t there to help me. They’re there to keep me from surfacing. When I finally startle awake I am slicked with sweat and disoriented. But my stomach is no longer twisting in knots, although I still feel shaky and queasy.
I lie in bed listening to the storm howl around the cottage. The rain has turned to hail, and it rattles the windows so violently that I wonder if the glass will break. When I reach for my phone and look at the time I see that three hours have passed. Where is Lachlan? What are they doing?
Eventually it crosses my mind that I can easily get the answer to this question. I rouse myself from bed and stagger into the living room to find Lachlan’s laptop, and then collapse on the couch and boot it up.
When his computer leaps to life I see that there are now eleven live camera feeds on his desktop. One I recognize as the downstairs office, anchored by a presidential desk. One camera is in the upstairs foyer, angled just so, to take in the sweep of the halls. Other feeds display the library, and the games room, gazing over the billiards table; plus the front parlor, and a few other rooms I’m not familiar with. A final feed shows what must be the master bedroom. I study this last