26
AND SO NOW, under a Colorado sky so blue it hurt my eyes, we arrived at the terrible truth. You can plot your escape, you can ditch your life and your family, and you can race down a two-lane highway in a stolen car. But there are things you can never outrun.
Things like cancer. Because that comes along for the ride.
I managed to get us to a hospital forty-five minutes up the road in La Junta. Robinson lay with his head in my lap, and I ached to run my fingers through his hair and tell him everything would be all right. But because the truck didn’t have power steering, I needed both hands on the wheel.
And I wasn’t sure that everything would be all right, not at all.
The small hospital waiting room was freezing cold, lit with the kind of harsh fluorescent light that makes people look as damp and gray as fish. Robinson shivered and leaned against me. There was a bloom of dark blood on his T-shirt. He buttoned his flannel self-consciously. “Otherwise I look like I’ve been stabbed,” he explained.
“I’m not sure that’s a bad thing,” I said. There were four other people in the waiting room, and by the looks on their faces, they’d been there awhile.
Robinson shook his head. “I just need to sit down,” he said in a raspy voice.
The woman at the desk glanced at me warily as I approached. Maybe she saw the fear in my eyes—or maybe she thought I was homeless or on drugs. I could see my pale reflection in the corner of a mirror, and I couldn’t exactly blame her.
“Can I help you?” she asked. Her name tag read DEBBIE.
“My friend is sick,” I said, pointing to Robinson, who was huddled on a plastic chair in the corner. The scene in the truck played over and over in my mind. It was nightmarish.
“The doctor has been paged,” Debbie said. She inspected my face, frowning lightly. “Do you need to see him, too?”
“I’m absolutely fine,” I said stiffly, even though I felt like I might collapse from exhaustion.
I rejoined Robinson, and we sat in the corner for what felt like hours. Eventually, an old man with his arm in a cast leaned over and put his good hand on my knee.
“It’s a Saturday morning, hon,” he offered. “Most of the doctors and whatnot are fishing.”
I bit my lip, hard. We had no doctor. And when we got one, I knew what it would mean: blood workups, fine-needle aspiration biopsies, positron-emission tomography scans. … The thought of going through this again made me want to run and hide.
“Welcome to small-town America, Axi,” Robinson said, “where the bowling alley and the Elks lodge have larger staffs than the hospital.”
“Don’t worry, the doctor is coming,” I said. “Hey, in the meantime, we can watch TV. I know you haven’t been getting your daily dose lately.”
Robinson nodded. “If only you had a Slim Jim and a box of Oreos, everything would be perfect.”
I tried to wipe a spot of blood from his collar. “You really have to eat better.”
“I know,” Robinson said. “I’m in the ER because of too many Slim Jims and not enough TV.” He looked at me slyly.
Oh, if only that were true, I thought. For just a moment I clung to a wild hope that the doctor would give him a spoonful of extra-strength Maalox, and then we could be on our way to the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, or the world’s largest ball of twine. But I’d seen his blood, the way it was dark, almost coffee-colored. I knew that meant it came from his gastrointestinal tract—where the cancer had been.
Where maybe it still was.
“Why do they have to pick the Home Shopping Network?” Robinson asked.
I looked up. A lady with long red nails was selling figurines, smiling at the camera with glossy lips and blindingly white teeth. “Come on. Don’t tell me you don’t love that jade elephant,” I teased.
Why were we talking about crap made in China? About junk food? The elephant we needed to talk about was the one in the room: Robinson’s blood, his illness, which wasn’t a matter of nutrition.
On the other hand, ignoring that truth was exactly how we’d gotten as far as we had. We didn’t sit around and mope. We took charge; we took off. We laughed and we drove too fast and we stuck our heads out the window and gave cancer the finger. Because we understood that a person could be dead long before he or she actually died. And no matter what the future held for us, we didn’t ever want to be that kind of people.
Robinson blinked drowsily. “I do kind of like the elephant. I think jade’s supposed to be good luck. We could probably use a little of that.”
His voice was thick with sleep. His eyes closed, and he leaned his head on my shoulder. I squeezed his fingers, still wrapped in mine. Just like he’d said, we were in this together.
“Everything’s going to be fine,” I whispered. But Robinson had fallen asleep already, and he couldn’t hear me lie.