Chapter Sixteen

THE HYPOCHONDRIA HOTLINE was a burgeoning success. The phone rang often, people calling with the most fascinating ailments and symptoms. Lots of repeat customers—Nan wasn’t surprised about that. She knew all too well that every day brought new symptoms to dedicated hypochondriacs such as herself, who woke up worrying about that cramp in her leg being an embolism and went to sleep convinced she might stop breathing in the night and never wake up again.

Nan created a spreadsheet to keep track of the questions so she could report on the project. Maybe she’d be featured in a national library magazine, leap right over the state library magazine. That would be so cool, to be famous in Libraryland.

The only problem was that Nan spent so much time reading symptoms and diagnoses in the initial rush of the service that her own hypochondria soared to an all-time high. Her stomach felt as if she’d swallowed a boulder. Not only that, everything near her stomach felt awful too—the top of her thighs, her lower back, even her sides. That was crazy. There were no organs in the sides of a body, were there?

She studied all the books on stomach problems. Maybe it’s my reproductive system acting up. Maybe it’s mad that I never used it, so it’s going to give me a hard time now.

She whined about it to Immaculata, shocking herself. The me who moved in here would never have told a landlady anything as personal as this.

“It’s gas, I bet,” Immaculata said. “Just about everything wrong with us is usually gas.”

“It’s not gas. I never get gas,” Nan said.

“Yeah, but you were never fifty before, were you? Skip a meal; you’ll be fine. That’s what I do. That, and suck on a lemon. The acid cancels out the acid.”

“Lots of women with these exact symptoms end up diagnosed with a terrible disease,” Nan said.

Immaculata shook her head. “Don’t say it. You’re asking for trouble if you say the word out loud.”

“That’s ridiculous. Saying a word out loud does not bring a disease on you.” Nan wished she believed that herself.

“Your funeral.”

Just in case, Nan refrained from even assigning any diagnosis to her symptoms. Over the next week, she skipped meals as often as she could without fainting, but it didn’t help at all. She felt so full and uncomfortable, as though something massive was lodged inside her.

She tried all her hypochondria-fighting tricks: telling her body she was listening, that it didn’t have to poke at her to make her pay attention; that she’d do whatever it was telling her to do, the minute she figured out what the hell was going on down there.

She tried distraction by reading thrillers and watching scary movies, but that never worked for long. She tried meditating to online videos guided by female voices, but it was hard to find a voice she could relax to, one without a strange chirpy tone or an unpleasant insistent joyfulness. She tried blunt-force realism, telling herself if she did have a terrible illness, she’d know soon enough.

She reviewed her hypochondriac history, the three decades she’d spent fearing that the persistent twinge under her right arm was her death knell, when it was only her overreliance on using her right hand for everything, for never letting that strained muscle heal fully. All those years of worrying that the twinge was the C-word, all those wasted nights lying awake focused on that twinge and what it meant, dreading the treatment if she’d even get treated, which she probably wouldn’t. When she finally got it checked out and they found nothing, she couldn’t believe it.

It was always nothing, she told herself. It was nothing now. She tried to yank her mind away every time she thought about her stomach and this feeling that she’d swallowed a boulder.

She forced herself to walk home as usual. Main Street looked great at night, beautiful even. The old-style lamppost streetlights, the clean streets and sidewalks, the appealing store window displays. A long-haired calico cat trotted alongside her companionably.

Suddenly, she found herself soaring above the sidewalk, flying without ever deciding to fly or flapping her wings. She heard church bells pealing in the air above her and wondered if she had made that happen somehow. Then she landed hard on the hood of a huge black Cadillac and found herself peering in the windshield at an old man’s head bent over the steering wheel. Nothing hurt, but she couldn’t move. She struggled to understand what had happened to her. Her arms were pinned under her body, and her legs were hooked over the edge of the hood like a deer hit while trying to cross the road.

I’m roadkill. That was her last thought before she passed out.

*

IN THE EMERGENCY room, she was able to move her arms and legs, answer all the questions they asked her, and blink up at everyone who came in—an endless tide of radiologic technologists, nurses, doctors, and assistants, each with a specific purpose for a part of her body. One of her ribs was bruised, the medical chorus finally informed her. Nothing to do but let it heal. A few weeks, and she’d be totally fine.

She realized she’d never seen this coming; she’d neglected to worry about getting hit by a car. She’d worried about cancer; she’d worried about liver failure from drinking too much wine; she’d worried about every freckle and every bump on her skin turning lethal; she’d worried about her reproductive system taking revenge on her for not using it. But not this.

“Did the man who hit me die?” she asked.

“Iggy Ianucci? No, no, he’s home already,” a nurse explained.

“Did the cat die? He was walking me home.”

The nurse looked skeptical, but she called someone named Gary and asked him before reporting back. “Gary was with the first ambulance crew and says he didn’t see a dead cat. Was it your cat?”

Nan shook her head no. She was so relieved. The thought of the calico cat flattened beneath the black Cadillac was awful. She pictured the cat walking another woman home right then, and she felt better.

“What happened? I didn’t see anything,” Nan said.

The nurse hesitated, whispered. Her face was flushed and her mouth set in clenched disapproval. “I’m not really supposed to talk about it, but between you and me, that’s his third accident this year. He runs that car right up on the sidewalk because he can’t see out of one eye at all and the other one only a little bit. They fined him, took his license away last year, but he keeps finding the keys and taking off again. He’s ninety-two. He’s going to kill somebody the next time. I think they should lock him in jail and throw away the key, if his family can’t keep him off the streets.”

Nan felt like she’d won the lottery. She’d survived getting hit by a car. Hey, that was one death sentence she’d never even worried about. She’d worried so much about the boulder in her stomach and so many other ailments over her whole life—instead, she was the victim of a two-ton car aimed at her by a blind ancient.

This was cosmic proof that you never see your real death coming; it was always a surprise. If that didn’t teach her not to worry, nothing would.

Everything felt different to her now. Her stomach felt normal, the boulder inside her rolled away. She still had time, she was ready, and her whole future life danced in front of her.

*

“GUESS WHAT?” NAN called both her sisters at the same time, she was so excited. That was rare. One at a time was usually the most she could handle.

“Is it something bad? Oh no.” Franny the Fearful strikes again.

“Give us a clue.” Regina could be the star of a Name That Illness TV show. She could name that disease in one symptom.

“I got hit by a car.”

Nan heard a loud thump, like one or both of them had collapsed to the floor.

“It’s fine,” she continued. “I’m good. I didn’t even get that hurt. Just a bruised rib. They don’t even do anything for a bruised rib. They just send you on your way to live your precious life. Isn’t that fantastic?”

“What’s fantastic about it? You could have died,” Franny said.

“You almost died,” Regina said.

“I lived,” Nan said. “The point is that I lived. I got hit by a huge car, thrown onto its hood, and survived with only a bruise.”

For once, Regina and Franny were quiet. Nan didn’t expect them to understand, really. All that mattered was she’d been given another chance, and she knew it.

The old Nan was a (sorry to say this, but self, you need to face it) loser. She chased women as if she were a dog running after cars but with as little chance of catching them as the dog had. She’d fallen into her first job as if falling into a kiddie pool and stayed there for twenty-five years, splashing around and never learning how to swim laps like the grown-ups. She applied for random jobs based on their titles and locations as if she was picking horse race winners by their cute names, not by their record or chance of success.

She didn’t know who her new self was exactly, but she most definitely knew her first step. She had to delete the letter T from her alphabet.