The Department of Lost & Found (27 page)

“Great. Fine. But did you hear me about the tickets?”

“I told you that I did. I already said that!” He pulled his T-shirt over his head and threw it on top of the hamper. “So we’re going?

Are you two speaking yet?”

Sally and I had tacitly called an unsteady truce. Well, not really called a truce, but just stopped calling each other period so we didn’t have to tackle this irresolvable subject all over again. Because we had tackled it all over again on the phone a few days after our lunch and ended up getting nowhere. I decided to treat her like any other journalist, so I barred access to Dupris. She snorted into the phone and told me that if I thought that the only way she could get information was from the source herself, then clearly, I underestimated her abilities as a journalist. And then I raised the stakes by saying that whatever she printed that wasn’t directly from Dupris’s mouth could be considered slander. To which she yelled that if I gave her damn access to the senator in the first place, legal action wouldn’t even be an issue. We’ve endured a tense silence ever since. The truth was though, when I wasn’t busy being angry at her, I realized that I missed her.

“Yes, we’re still going. I’m her maid of honor for God’s sake.

So you marked it in your calendar? You told Sony and your agent
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and your publicist and anyone else who might urgently need you and page you back from Puerto Rico that you will be otherwise engaged that weekend because we’ll be attending the wedding of my best friend?”

“Correction: best friend to whom you’re no longer speaking.

But yes. For God’s sake, I’m not that disorganized.” He paused and examined his skin in the closet mirror. “But you know, sometimes things are out of my control. I mean, if they absolutely, absolutely need me, I have to be somewhere.”

“It’s not like you’re the president, Jake,” I said, turning around and walking back into the living room.

“Natalie, give me a break,” he said, plodding after me. “You know that I’m trying my best. And I have every intention of coming to Sally’s wedding with you. Why are you flipping out?”

“I’m not flipping out at all,” I said, as calmly as possible to indicate that I wasn’t flipping out even though I very clearly was.

“But it seems to me that you’re already offering up excuses, and the wedding is still five weeks away.”

“I’m not offering up excuses of any kind. Jesus Christ. I was just saying that sometimes shit happens, and I don’t have a choice.”

I grabbed Manny’s leash to take him out for a walk. I was out of pot and wasn’t hungry anyway.

“No, Jake, that’s where you’re wrong. Me getting cancer?

True enough, I had no choice. How you treat the ones you love?

Well, there, you always have a choice,” I said, as I slammed the door.

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Dear Diary,

Jake and I had a fight. A pret y big one too. Sort of like the
old times. When he’ d get back from a long road trip, and we’ d
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reacquaint ourselves with each other, and we’ d finally ease back
into things, and then he’ d announce that he had to leave all over
again. And I’ d simmer in my own anger, pretending that I didn’t
care that he was off to Madrid or Amsterdam or even fucking
Tucson, as if anyone actually wants to go to Tucson, until I
couldn’t pretend anymore and would finally explode. Usually
after a particularly crappy day at work. I mean, after days like
those, even Tucson sounded like nirvana.

This time, I know that not speaking with Sally and this
whole shit-show with her article is weighing on me. But I also
know that, like what Zach once said, if something didn’t work
the first time around, it’s probably not going to get much better
the second. Especially because the second time, you’re haunted
by all of the things that went wrong before.

So you look for hints, for signs, even if they’re not quite lying
on the surface. But Jake is slipping; I can feel it. I think he
thought that he could rescue me: It was romantic, it was idyl ic,
it was the way to win me back. But after all that faded, after the
heady rush of my diagnosis and his knight-in-shining-armor
entrance, we’re left with just the two of us. Me, the cancer-laden
jockey gripping the reins, and him, a budding rock star who is
dying to break free and gallop.

But that’s not really the reason I’m writing. I’m writing because I contacted Ned. Yes, you read correctly. Ned, the guy who
ditched me on the day that I was diagnosed with Stage III cancer. Ned, the weaseliest weasel who ever weaseled. (And that’s
saying a lot considering the current standing of both Brandon
and Dylan.) I’m sure that you thought that I wouldn’t bother
including him in my chronicles, since I already knew why we
broke up. Namely, that he’s the lowest scum and most spineless
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amoeba to ever have inhabited the planet. And this is true. But I
promised myself that I’ d track them all down: the five loves in
my life, and as I round the corner to the end of my treatments, I
wanted to see this through. If only to let his spineless ass know
that I’m back with Jake.

Anyway, it turns out that Ned did accept that transfer to
Chicago. I know this because when I called his secretary in New
York, she told me that he was no longer in that office and passed
me a
312
number.

I cal ed Ned at his office from my cube in the back of my own
office, but he wasn’t there, so I left a message. I heard his voice on
the recording, and I felt my blood almost literal y boil. Maybe six
months wasn’t enough time for me. Maybe this was a mistake.

But I tempered myself as much as nearly possible, and I’ d have to
say, Diary, that I left a relatively downright dignified message,
even if the undertones of my voice did not-so-subtly imply that I
thought he was pond scum. Oh wel , I can live with that.

It’s funny, isn’t it, Diary? That thin line between love and
hate? How you can go from seriously contemplating spending
the rest of your days with someone, only to discover that the
next day, you’ d be totally content should he encounter the unfortunate circumstances of having all his fingernails ripped out
simultaneously. Weird how that can happen, but it happens all
the same.

Ned didn’t call me back, which I guess isn’t surprising. He
might have been smart enough and funny enough and just handsome enough to eke out the persona of a desirable man, but he
was never particularly courageous. Maybe I don’t have to explain that to you, dear Diary, since he left me at my lowest moment rather than stick out some hard work during hard times.

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So maybe I’ l just let Ned go. Not try to pry too far into that
one because it’s too recent to see objectively, and really, what else
do I need to know? He left me for some chick in Chicago. Maybe
that’s the way to close the door to that chapter. Let sleeping
(scummy, small-penised) dogs lie.

R o u n d E i g h t

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April

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t w e n t y - o n e

f I hadn’t experienced it myself, I’d never believe it to be true.

IBut on March 28, the day of my last chemo treatment, I found myself unsure what I would do without it. The chemo and its patterns had become so ingrained in my life that I literally worried how to move past it. Strange, isn’t it? How life can play that trick on you?

I said good-bye to Susan, the receptionist who checked me in each time; hugged Mary, my nurse, good-bye as I got up to leave; and gave all of the staff who had nurtured me back to health (I hoped) gift certificates to Bloomingdale’s. It was odd to admit, but I would miss them. And it was odder still to admit that I was sad.

Whoever would have thought that the one place I’d find solace from my loneliness would be at the chemo ward at Sloan-Ketter-254

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ing, where the staff not only had championed my well-being, but also had grown to be my family.

I raised this with Janice the following Tuesday.

“It’s very normal for patients to become attached to their care-givers,” she said. “They’re the ones who looked after you like no one else could. They’re literally the ones who saved your life. If you weren’t grateful, it might be strange.”

“That’s true,” I said, nodding in agreement. “But don’t you think something’s wrong with the fact that I feel like they’re the only people I can rely on?”

“I don’t know. Do you think that something’s wrong with it?”

Janice’s doublespeak was now second nature to me, so I barely took notice.

“Well, yeah. To be honest, I do.”

“So what’s the solution?”

I knew that she wouldn’t tell me the solution because she never offered her own advice, a trait that I found as annoying as I did endearing. “If I gave you my own advice,” she once said when I begged her to actually just lay out a course of action for me, “then it wouldn’t be organic to you. You’d have less incentive to follow through. And that would defeat the whole point of our sessions.”

I supposed that she was right, but it would be helpful nevertheless.

“I’m not sure,” I said, mulling it over. “I guess that I could trust in the people in my life more, give them a chance to prove that I can rely on them.” I thought of Sally and the crossroads we’d reached. And I thought of Zach, minus that inconvenience known as my second-best friend, Lila, and his mint chocolate chip ice cream. I thought of Susanna and how I should probably return her messages.

“That’s certainly a good start,” Janice said. “What else?”

I looked around her office, at her silver-plated picture frames
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with photos of her gleaming family and just-handsome-enough husband and wondered how they’d all come out so normal. I noticed her equestrian awards on the wall behind her desk, and the books on her shelf, at least half of which had nothing to do with medicine.

“How do you find that balance?” I asked, changing the subject entirely. “The one between caring too much about your patients and the one where you get to have a life of your own?”

“This isn’t about me, Natalie. Let’s focus on you.”

“Janice, please. This is about me. And I’d like to know how you find that balance. I always seem to be off-kilter, putting too many eggs in one basket while ignoring the other one entirely. But I’d like not to do that anymore.”

She thought about it for a minute and took a sip of her coffee.

“How do I find that balance? For me, it’s not so much a struggle. I think if you give too much of yourself to any one thing—work, marriage, even your cancer recovery—you’re bound to lose sight of the other parts of yourself that need nurturing. Like a tree. If you just focused on bringing out the blossoms, you’d never see the gorgeous leaves or the age-old roots or the bark that holds all of its scars and tells its history.”

“So I should be more like a tree?” I asked.

“No.” She laughed. “But you should water every part of yourself that is thirsty.” She looked at the clock. “Our time’s almost up, and you still haven’t answered your original question.”

“What was that? I don’t remember.”

“You were answering the second part of your question. How you can come to rely more on the people in your life.”

“Oh,” I said, thinking it over. And then it hit me. “I suppose that it’s not just about relying on the people who have proven themselves, but cutting out the ones who haven’t. Because they 256

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taint it for everyone else. After all, if one person can sink me, who’s to say that the others won’t, too? Or at least that’s the excuse I can tell myself when I push them away.”

Janice smiled and rose to lead me out the door. “That, my dear, is what we call progress. That’s what we call progress, indeed.”

“ t h a n k s f o r m e e t i n g me,” I said, gingerly taking a bite of a currant scone and wiping the butter off my fingers with a napkin.

“My pleasure. I was so thrilled when you called.” Susanna Taylor waved her hand and took a sip of her tea. She paused to let the hot water go down. “I know that this isn’t easy for you.”

“The cancer?”

“The whole thing,” she said. “Calling. Asking for help. Juggling the job. Feeling alone.” She smiled when she saw my eyebrows rise. “No, I haven’t been stalking you. I’ve just been there.

So I know. That’s why I started the support group to begin with.”

When I got home from my session with Janice, I sat at my desk and turned Susanna’s card over and over again in my hands. I’d been thinking about calling her the entire cab ride home, but when I was faced with actually doing it, I tried to come up with all the reasons that I shouldn’t instead. Finally, I realized that if nothing else, she was a link to Sally, a link that could perhaps help bring us back together. So after twenty minutes, I picked up the phone and dialed.

Today, Susanna set down her porcelain saucer, the kind that my mother inherited when my grandmother passed. “So how’s work going?” she asked.