AFTERWARD, SHE DROVE—PAST BARS, restaurants, coffee shops, the library. She crossed the river, back and forth. She drove past her apartment in Brownes and finally she parked outside the Baby Bar, and that’s when she decided to call Boone. She fingered the screen but before she could call him the phone buzzed and the word Mom flashed. She let it go to voicemail.
She had erased Boone’s contact information in a fit almost a year ago—but she had the number memorized. Two rings.
“Hey there,” he said. “Long time no fuck.”
“I need to see you,” she said.
“I like to hear that.”
Then she told him.
“Ah shit,” Boone said.
He met her at the Baby Bar. He hugged her and she lost her breath when his arms roped around her.
They ordered. Beers came but when he reached for his wallet, he came up empty. “Ah shit, Myra.”
“It’s okay,” she said, “I got it.”
She paid with a ten and they took their cans of Rainier to a booth. The Baby Bar was empty and dark. She loved the place: best juke in town.
“Look, whatever the doctors say, do it,” he said. “Just do your fuckin’ treatment, whatever it takes. When it’s over, me and you, we’ll go on a trip.”
“Go where?”
“America.”
“We’re in America, Boone.”
“You know what I mean. We’ll just go.”
“What about Carla?”
“I really think it should just be the two of us.”
She laughed. “You know what I mean.”
“This has got nothing to do with Carla.”
“You and I going on a trip has nothing to do with your wife?”
“Not this time.”
Boone’s hair was long again, curly in front, the way she liked it. He ran his hand through it, pushed it back, but it fell forward over his eyes.
“I always liked your hair like that.”
“Shit.” He riffled his hair again. “I’m an old shoe.”
She smiled. “What does that mean?”
“Most of what I say don’t mean anything.” He waved for another beer, then seemed to remember he didn’t have any money.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I got it.”
He was twelve years older than her, thirty-six. His birthday was April 9. His favorite food was tacos. He still rode a skateboard. He worked in construction for his uncle, who was a concrete finisher; Boone built the wooden forms. He said that in an earlier time he would’ve made his living as “an outdoorsman,” but it seemed to Myra that his idea of being outdoors was to buy a case of beer, drive into the woods, build a fire and sleep in his car. He had been on-and-off with Carla for a decade. They had a little boy together, Dylan. Boone and Carla happened to be off, or so he said, when he met Myra in a bar almost four years ago. That night, she couldn’t look away from him. He had thick brows and a dent above his cheek from a fight he didn’t remember. People always said he looked like a younger, scruffier version of a famous actor but they could never come up with the name, even though it was obvious to her. After they broke up, she watched Clive Owen movies and wondered if two people could look more alike and be more different.
“Isn’t there a good kind and a bad kind?” he asked her now.
“Yes,” she said, but that was all she said about it.
“Shit, Myra. I’m sorry.” He looked down at the beer can again. He seemed to see something in the beer, her future maybe.
“Are you high, Boone?”
“Oh yeah.”
THE SURGEON SEEMED pleased with himself.
THE SECOND WEEK of radiation, she didn’t think it would be so bad, dying.
SHE WOKE NEXT to the toilet. She couldn’t breathe. Everything was on fire. Spinning. She clutched at her hair and it came out in a fistful. She retched fire, like lava through her esophagus. Each jagged breath was a prayer: please don’t puke; please don’t puke.
Her stomach buckled but nothing came up. She gagged and a dribble of bile fell from her lip. She spat. Panted. Spat. Panted. One time with Boone she’d had a bad reaction to shrooms and vodka and had been up all night, vomiting, but that was like a warm bath compared to this.
“Myra?” Her mother stood in the doorway.
She panted over the toilet. Her mother set a glass of water on the floor. “Thank you.”
Her mother’s eyes drifted to the clump of hair on the floor. “There’s a nurse on twenty-four hours. I can call.”
“I’m fine.” She sipped at the water, but it was like lighter fluid going down. Her mom set something else on the ground next to her. Her phone.
“You left this upstairs.” On the screen it said Message and Boone’s phone number.
“Myra, I hope you’re not getting back into it with him—”
“Mom—”
“Do you remember how unhealthy that whole time was for you—”
“Of course I do. I just wanted to tell someone. He’s checking to see how the surgery went.”
She waited until her mother went back to bed to open the message. Before this, the last time she’d heard from Boone was more than a year ago, when she’d texted to tell him she’d gotten into law school, and he texted back a blurry picture of his dick. He’d typed, Your witness counsler, misspelling counselor so badly it took her a minute to get the joke. When they were together, he had teased her about wanting to be a lawyer. He said he was using her, not for sex, but for future legal representation.
Now, lying on the floor sick, she opened the new text. It was a blurry picture of his ass. He’d written, thinkin of u.
THE LAST TREATMENT nearly wiped her out. She slept for two days afterward. When she woke, she imagined the terrible heartburn was the cancer itself, even though she knew better. But it was helpful to have some feeling—this burning—to think of as the cancer. It hurt more than she could imagine was possible, like someone pulling a hot wire brush up and down her esophagus. She wanted water, but water made it worse. She wanted milk, but milk made it worse. This is cancer, this is love, this is everything: it makes it worse.
She slept in the basement of her parents’ house. She’d given up her apartment downtown right after she was diagnosed. Her dad must have taken care of the lease because she never heard from the landlord. This was her father’s way, the old litigator working behind the scenes—he would deal with her surgeon, her oncologist, her landlord, her supervisor at the law firm where she’d worked as a paralegal, her advisor at Gonzaga. All taken care of. This was her dad’s way: take care of everything but her.
While her parents were both at their offices Myra went upstairs and watched TV, but by mid-afternoon she’d make her way back downstairs, into the guest room. The rest of the night she’d pretend to sleep. She’d hear her mother’s footsteps on the carpeted staircase and then in the doorway, and she’d breathe heavily in the dark until her mother went back upstairs. Then she’d hear her father come home, talk to Myra’s mother and the rest of the evening would be noises from upstairs: phone ringing, doorbell, dinner dishes, TV, the creak of her father’s shoes. Morning and her mother’s light steps on the stairs again.
“Myra?”
“Mmm.”
“I made a quiche. Are you hungry?”
“No.”
“You should eat.”
“I’ll have some cereal later.”
Her mother came over, sat on the bed, and put her hand on Myra’s forehead. Myra puffed out a little laugh. “Are you checking to see if I have a fever? Think I should stay home from school?”
Her mother laughed, too, and then covered her mouth. “Oh baby,” she said, her voice cracking into tears, “I don’t know what else to do.”
“I know, Mom.” Myra sat up. She reached over and put her hand on her mother’s forehead. “I don’t know what to do either.”
MYRA TRIED ON clothes but nothing fit right. She settled on a pair of striped tights. Her hip bones jutted like holstered guns. Her boobs were empty wind socks. She fingered the scar. She put on a sports bra and pulled a dress over the tights, and a sweater over the dress and a jacket over the sweater. If she just kept layering maybe she could build a whole person. Her sister had given her a reddish-brown wig, as close to her own color as she could find. She put it on. She looked like a pencil with an eraser cap.
The heartburn had cooled to a hard, metallic thing in her throat. Nothing tasted right; she was swallowing foil. This was the cancer now: a cold blade from tongue to lung.
She came upstairs and saw the pills her mother had left out for her. She took them with orange juice and felt them slide by the icy knife. She poured herself a bowl of cereal. It seemed like all she’d eaten for two months was cereal.
Her father came in straightening his tie. “You feeling better?”
“I think so,” she lied.
“Well, you look good,” he lied.
“Thanks, I feel good,” she lied.
“I made a lunch for you,” her mother said. As if to prove that here, finally, was some truth, she held up a sack lunch. “A sandwich.” Like Myra was nine.
“Thanks, Mom. I’ll put it in my cubby with my mittens.”
Her mom laughed. “Are you going out today?”
“No.”
She watched her parents leave for their separate offices. One day she overheard her mother say that “Myra’s sickness” had aged her ten years. When she was sure their cars had pulled away, she texted Boone.
The rest of the morning she watched TV. The View. Family Feud. It was crazy—if you died, these shows would just keep going. New hosts. New commercials. New credits. The mail would come just like yesterday.
Her phone buzzed. It was a text from Boone. It read: guess who and contained a picture of what she finally figured out was his blue-jeaned crotch.
Myra got up quickly and felt dizzy. She sat down, took a deep breath and stood again. She felt something else in her stomach—anticipation.
HE WAS DRIVING a beat-up 1970s El Camino, a car with a pickup bed. She slid in. She liked the feel of the cracked bench seat. She liked the old-school window crank and she put the window down and up and down again. “I like this!” she said.
“And . . . it plays cassettes,” Boone said. “I had to scrounge some old tapes from my brother.” He reached in a box between them and held up a few: Pearl Jam, Blind Melon, Gin Blossoms, Sting. It was a 1993 time warp. He laughed. “I fuckin’ hate Sting.”
He drove them west on I-90, toward Seattle. They came out of the valley and up Sunset Hill, trees giving way to hunks of basalt jutting from wheat fields. She reached down and felt her hip bones again. She’d packed only a couple of things. Another dress and a pair of tights. Toothbrush. Makeup. Antinausea medicine. At the last minute she’d grabbed the lunch her mother made.
A little lake appeared out her window. Right next to the freeway. There was only one house on it, a rancher built on rocks above the shore. “You think those people own that lake? Their own lake? How wild would that be?”
“That would be fucked-up,” Boone said.
“I think it would be peaceful.”
“Peaceful. Fucked-up. Same thing.”
“Peaceful and fucked-up are not synonyms.”
“Cinnamon?”
She laughed. “You’re stoned.”
“Asked and answered, your honor.”
He had a six-pack of Miller High Life at his feet, and he offered her a can. She shook her head. He opened it, took a swig and put it between his legs.
She leaned back, her head on the bench seat. She closed her eyes. She could feel the freeway beneath them, rolling away, like they were gathering it up and spitting it out behind them. The door didn’t quite seal right and there was a hiss of wind at her temple. Miles passed.
She opened her eyes. They were driving past Sprague Lake, a big acidic-looking lake with basalt boulders and no trees around it. It looked like some mysterious Scottish loch. Boone had opened another beer. He offered her a drink.
“What did you tell Carla?”
“I said”—he took a swig of beer—“so long, sucker!”
THE CAR BEGAN to overheat. They were almost to the Columbia River gorge overlook, where Boone said he wanted to stop anyway. “I think we can make it.”
As it got hotter, the car started making a kind of grinding noise. To cover the sound he cranked the volume on the Sting cassette. Little wisps of smoke came from under the hood.
“Ooh, I kinda like this one.” He started singing, “I’ll have the fish and chips, man. A bottle of Dewar’s and some oats and chives.”
She fell against the car door. “Those aren’t even close to the lyrics.”
He had this way of laughing, eyes going slack and one corner of his mouth rising. Like nothing in the world was worth taking seriously. “Sting doesn’t sing real words,” he said. “He just makes noises.”
She opened the tape case and unfolded the liner notes to read the lyrics: “There’s a bloodless moon where the oceans died.”
“That’s what I said.”
She fell forward, and when she could talk: “You said oats . . . and . . . and . . . chives.” It hurt her chest to laugh this hard. She thought: fuck you, knife.
“And Dewar’s. You forgot the Dewar’s.”
THEY SAT ON a boulder overlooking the canyon and far below, the massive slate-colored Columbia. The river snaked below cliffs, twisting toward Oregon, toward the bloodless moon where oceans die. They ate the lunch Myra’s mom had packed.
He offered her a pull on his beer. Then he put his arm around her.
“Boone, I don’t know . . . I don’t think we should . . . I mean, I don’t even know if I can . . . and . . . and Carla.”
“Hey, I ain’t trying to fuck you. I’m just putting my arm around you. Trust me, you’ll know when I’m trying to fuck you.”
“Yeah. How?”
“Well, for one, it will involve my dick.”
“Wow. Sounds dreamy.”
He squeezed her shoulder. “I’m just doing this. This is okay, right?”
“Yes.” She leaned her head on his shoulder. “It’s okay.”
She had a geology teacher once who told her to think about geology as the science of time. This mountain range, this river gorge—they were clocks. The whole world was a clock face, with a gliding osprey rising on a secondhand updraft, as if being called to heaven.
“I’ll have the fish and chips, man,” she said.
SIX CARS IN the overlook parking lot, three with Washington plates, an Oregon, an Iowa and a Montana. “See, America,” Boone said. He had the hood up, and eventually a trucker came over with radiator sealant and a few extra gallons of antifreeze.
Boone paid the man in home-grown weed. A fuzzy bud from a freezer bag full of them in a black backpack behind his seat. The only thing he’d packed.
And just like that they were back on the road, sun over the river gorge. Boone had finished most of his six-pack and so Myra volunteered to drive. She knew he couldn’t afford another DUI. She wrestled with the wheel; the car pulled hard to the right.
“Yeah, sorry. Alignment’s for shit.” Boone flicked his cigarette ashes out the open passenger window. “Dude warned me that it was in rough shape. But what do you expect for eight hundred bucks? It’s a classic.”
Myra’s phone kept buzzing. Her mom must’ve come home for lunch. And she would have called her dad, her sister. All of them calling now.
Her iPhone vibrated on the seat between them. “Can you turn that off for me?”
He swept it up and tossed it out the window.
“Boone!”
He opened his hand. The phone was still in it.
She looked down at the screen. The words Missed Call and Mom.
“Do it,” she whispered.
His eyebrows. Jesus, those thick black brows. They rose just a fraction of an inch, his eyes widening—that dark mischievous thing he could pull off with nothing but his eyes. He held the button down until the phone went off, Mom the last thing she saw on the screen.
“That’s an expensive phone,” he said. “I ain’t throwin’ it away. Your parents hate me enough.”
She used to bait him sometimes—play against their roles, usually after he called her rich girl or counselor, or your honor, or genius or whatever. He set the phone down again on the bench seat between them, facedown so she couldn’t see the screen. Then he took a drink of his beer and looked out at the steak-knife peaks of the Cascade Mountains.
“Pussy,” she said quietly.
He swept her phone up again and this time it went right out the open window.
THEY GOT TO Seattle around seven. He had her drive south on I-5, then take the bridge into West Seattle. But they got lost trying to find his buddy’s house. “It’s by a community college,” he said.
“That’s helpful,” she said.
Boone’s flip phone was dead, so he couldn’t call his friend. They tried to find a pay phone but there didn’t seem to be one anywhere.
They finally found one outside a convenience store, but Boone remembered that his friend’s cell number was on his dead phone. “Shit.” He sat outside the store asking everyone who pulled up if they had the right kind of phone charger, but no one did. Myra watched him sit on the hood of the car, drinking a beer, as happy as if he were on a deck chair on that little private lake. Maybe that was why she’d wanted to see him after she got sick, that quality. No one could make more of a disaster than Boone.
Finally, a girl in a Subaru Outback had the right car charger for Boone’s phone. Boone climbed in her car while they charged it up. Myra watched them talk. The girl played with her hair and chewed her lip. Boone told some story and the girl put her hand on his arm and laughed. Myra thought it was like watching herself four years ago. The girl in the Subaru wanted to sleep with him. Girls always wanted to sleep with Boone. He had that quality.
In the girl’s car, Boone leaned forward, made his call with the phone still plugged in, gestured, and then closed his crappy old flip phone. He nodded thanks to the girl and started to get out of the car, but the girl said something, and he stopped. They talked for another minute. Boone shook his head and gave that easy smile of his, and the girl said something else. Then she handed over her car charger. He shook his head, tried to say no, but she wouldn’t hear of it, and he nodded his thanks again and took it.
He walked around the car and climbed back in the El Camino. Myra glanced over at the girl in the Subaru—thick brown hair and lots of makeup, no more than twenty. Myra tried to look unthreatening, like Boone’s sister or something; because she didn’t feel threatening, not like she used to, when she would get bent out of shape about Boone sleeping with every other girl in Spokane. He wasn’t hers. He wasn’t Carla’s either. How strange, this desire to possess people. Myra thought about tipping her wig, showing her bald scalp. But the girl had already looked away.
“We’re in business! Tony lives just a few blocks from here. I knew we were close.” He held up the car phone charger. “What am I gonna do with this?” Then he cracked the last beer. “Gonna be some earthshakin’ tonight.”
BOONE’S FRIEND TONY had also been a concrete worker, but he’d moved back to Seattle, gotten married, gone to trade school and was getting certified as a journeyman carpenter. They lived in a duplex.
Myra thought the carpenter’s wife was beautiful: tall, blond and full-figured, with bright red cheeks. She didn’t catch her name.
“Couch okay?” Tony asked.
“Okay for you,” Boone said. “Fuckin’ A, I didn’t teach you nothing about entertaining, man? You always give the guests the bed.”
The carpenter grinned. “How about I give the guest a boot up his lazy ass.”
Boone gave the carpenter’s blond wife his most charming smile. “Thank you for your hospitality. Myra here will sleep on your very comfy sofa. Maybe you can bring me a sleeping bag and I’ll crash on the floor?”
The wife went to get a sleeping bag.
Boone hit Tony in the shoulder with the heel of his hand. “Dude, she’s fuckin’ awesome. How long you been married?”
“Year and a half.” He lowered his voice, chewed his lip. “She miscarried.”
“Aw right.” Boone seemed to recall his friend’s hasty wedding. “I forgot about that . . . right. Shit.”
THE CARPENTER AND his wife had four plastic chairs around a Formica kitchen table. They sat with kitchen glasses of red wine, all but the wife, who apparently didn’t drink. She kept looking sideways at her husband.
Myra sipped at the wine, but it tasted metallic and bitter.
“Once you get the van, you could maybe get some jobs over here,” Tony said to Boone. “Pay’s better. I could probably hook you up.” His wife cleared her throat.
“I mostly want the van for camping,” Boone said. “But yeah, maybe.”
BOONE AND THE carpenter went to pick up the van.
The wife sighed deeply and looked at Myra across the Formica. “Look, this might not be my place.”
Myra wondered if Tony’s wife knew Carla. They were probably friends.
The wife sighed again. “I just want to say, I know what you’re going through. I was drinking by the time I was twelve and was using at fifteen. This disease stalks you. It becomes you, right? And you think you’re keeping it together . . . but you aren’t. You get to a place where you can’t enjoy life anymore. Not like other people do. It’s messed up.”
Myra stared across at the carpenter’s wife. She was so pretty. Her cheeks seemed to have little bulbs in them, and her eyes were bursts of blue and green; she was so alive. Myra had never wanted to kiss a girl before, but she imagined kissing the carpenter’s wife, drawing her healthy breath from those big apple cheeks.
“What are you on?” the wife asked.
Myra opened her mouth to say she wasn’t a junkie, but a little noise came out, like a laugh, or a whimper.
“Look, I’m not judging you,” the wife said. “I just wanted you to know . . . if you want to go to a meeting, or just talk, I’m here.”
“Thank you,” Myra said.
“The first thing is to admit that you’re powerless over it.”
Myra smiled. “Oh, I feel that.”
“MYRA? YOU AWAKE?”
She rolled over.
Boone was sitting up in his sleeping bag. “I’ve been meaning to ask. Are you gonna go back to law school?”
“Yeah. I hope so.”
“You should.”
The house was quiet.
“Your mom called me,” he said.
“Oh.”
“I told her you were fine. I said we’d be back tomorrow.”
“Will we?” she asked. It was dark and she couldn’t see his face, but she imagined it, those devilish eyes doing the caring thing. That’s what had gotten her. At first, it had been the dark eyes that drew her in—the adventure, some negation of the way people saw her: the smart, careful, responsible one—but once she’d seen those other eyes of his, that’s when she got hooked.
“I should get back, too,” he said. “I’m supposed to pick Dylan up after preschool. Carla’s gotta work.” And then a laugh. “He lost a tooth.”
“Did he?” Sure, Dylan was old enough to lose teeth. Of course he was. “Sure. We should get back.”
“Cool.” Boone put his head back down.
She kept staring at him, a lump on the floor. “Thank you, Boone.”
From the floor, he gave her the thumbs-up sign.
IN THE MORNING, the men walked around the van that Boone had bought. They were drinking Bloody Marys. Myra folded up the blankets and put them on the couch. She watched through the front window as Boone danced around the van. She tried to see him dispassionately, like a stranger: the floppy long hair, the Vans, the leather jacket. It would not end well, this look; he was straining at the very edge of it now, flecks of gray in that bushy hair. Skate-dude was not a good look to take into your forties, fifties, sixties.
The carpenter’s wife came in behind Myra and handed her a cup of coffee. “God, I am so, so sorry for what I said,” she said. “Tony told me—”
“It’s fine.”
“No, I can’t believe I thought you were—” She covered her mouth. “It was so wrong of me.”
“I should have corrected you.” Myra turned and faced the carpenter’s wife, looked into those blue-green eyes, arched in the center, warm and wet at the corners. “As soon as you say that word, people look at you like you’re a ghost. They tell you how their mother survived breast cancer or how their friend had it and now she’s fine or now she’s dead, or I don’t know.” Myra felt herself run out of steam. “I just . . . I get tired.”
“No. I totally understand.” The wife smiled generously. “I didn’t even know women so young got it.”
It was the same thing Myra had said to her oncologist. It’s becoming more common, he’d told her, or more commonly diagnosed anyway. And then he told her the rest: the aggressiveness, and even if you beat it, low fertility rate, high rate of reoccurrence, early menopause, bloodless moon where the oceans die.
The carpenter’s wife swallowed hard and put her hand on Myra’s arm. “Can I ask . . . the prognosis?”
“Good, I think,” Myra said, more for the carpenter’s wife than because she knew that to be the case. Even though it was small and localized, the surgeon had wanted to do a full mastectomy, but Myra had talked her into just taking the lump, what the doctors euphemistically called breast-conserving surgery. “It’ll be a few weeks or maybe months before they know. And they have other options.” More arrows in our quiver, as her oncologist said.
The carpenter’s wife opened her mouth to say something but stopped.
Myra smiled. “You were going to tell me that your sister had a mastectomy and now she’s fine.”
“My sister-in-law! I’m sorry.”
They both laughed.
And suddenly the woman pulled her into a hug. It was jarring, and she almost spilled her coffee. But she felt this other body through her layers of clothes, felt her arms, her heavy boobs, her warmth, and she breathed in the woman’s shampoo and felt dizzy. She cried into the woman’s shoulder.
BOONE HAD APPARENTLY paid for half of the van using his deceased stepmother’s prescription drugs. The van had no license plates. The back had nothing in it, just the metal ribbed floorboards covered with awful stains; Boone said the owner had used it to haul butchered meat. It was gray and white and rust-colored and dented and pocked like it had been in a hailstorm. Boone made a phony temporary license plate by tracing the carpenter’s plate with a Sharpie. He taped it to the window.
“There,” he said.
In front of the carpenter’s house, they hugged goodbye. The wife put her warm hand against Myra’s cheek. “Come back sometime.”
Myra said she would.
It was four and a half hours from Seattle to Spokane. “I’d let you drive the van, but it doesn’t have heat,” Boone said.
So she drove the El Camino and they left West Seattle in the rain, the city falling away into a blur of suburbs and lakes and then the sudden tree-blanketed mountains. Myra drove behind the van, wrestling with the El Camino’s bad alignment, listening to Sting sing about kingdoms turning to sand, and suddenly he seemed like the greatest lyricist in the world: I’m mad about you.
She looked down and noticed that the gas gauge was on empty. She flashed her lights at Boone and he pumped his brake lights and they drifted together over to the side of the road. He walked backward on the shoulder from the crappy van, ignoring the semis blowing past him in wet bursts. They were on their way up Snoqualmie Pass, probably twenty miles from the peak. There was a little swirling snow, nothing serious yet.
He stuck his head through the open window and looked at the gauge. “I think we can make it,” he said. “There’s a gas station at the summit.”
“We’re going uphill,” she said. “We’ll use a lot of gas. Maybe we should go back to North Bend.”
He nodded, chewed that lip. She remembered that he wanted to get back to pick his son up at school and she was suddenly filled with sweetness for that little boy, whom she’d never seen. She pictured a little Boone, losing a tooth, stuck with this hapless father and his dangerous eyebrows.
“We can make it,” she said.
Boone grinned. “I tell you what we’re gonna do. You’re gonna draft off me.”
“What?”
“Draft. Like race cars. Or bike racers. Get real close, like three feet, so you can’t see any road between our cars. Just stay right behind me, and draft off the van. You’ll use, like, half the gas. We’ll go slow, exactly fifty.”
It was a terrible idea. It was surely illegal. Maybe insane. “Okay!” she said.
He winked. And then he leaned inside the car, and for the first time in probably three years, Boone kissed her. He smelled like beer and pot, smelled like Bloody Marys and cigarettes; he smelled great.
Just before they left the carpenter’s house, his wife had asked Myra what she saw in Boone. “You do know that everyone thinks he’s kind of—” She didn’t finish.
“A fuckup?” Myra said.
The carpenter’s wife had laughed.
So Myra told the carpenter’s wife how, during radiation, there was a moment when she thought it might be okay to die. “In fact, it was like I was already gone—like I was looking back at my life. And I could see the whole thing laid out, like, I don’t know, a straight line. You’re a kid. You go to school. And you see where the line is supposed to go: boyfriend, job, husband, baby, whatever. But when I really looked at the line . . . the only parts that really meant anything to me were the jagged parts . . . the parts that everyone else saw as mistakes.”
There was something else, too. In the El Camino she hit rewind on the cassette player and settled in behind the van. During treatment, it was as if she had gone away somewhere, out of necessity, and now she needed to be yanked back, pulled back into the world. She got closer to the van. Closer. Closer. At first she could see Boone in the side mirror, nodding, Yes, yes, and she inched closer, closer, and then she was so close she couldn’t even see the side mirror anymore, or him, just the back of that crap-van, and the whole world became the back of that chipped, pocked gray van. People in other cars kept passing them, and looking over, probably assuming the van was towing the El Camino, then seeing that it wasn’t. Myra glanced over at one man in a Jeep and smiled. That’s right, motherfucker; we are doing this! And the snow swirled and he pulled her up the hill and Sting sang, I’m mad about you! and she rolled down the window to keep the car from steaming up, and the cold air burst inside of her, into the hole where the knife used to be, and she sang in puffs of steam as they ascended together, the road fell away and the cold clear summit rose into view.