27
THE BITTER IRONY of my life was that two years after my sister, Carole Ann, died in a pediatric oncology ward in Portland, Oregon, I became a patient in the same wing. I recognized all the nurses, who’d shaken their heads in disbelief. “Both Moore babies?” they’d whispered. “Both?”
If God or fate or karma has decided you’re going to get cancer, though, you cross your fingers for a kind like mine. Hodgkin’s lymphoma is not uncommon, which means that doctors know a lot about it, and by now they’re pretty good at curing it. That’s the glass half-full.
“Yeah, the glass half-full … of shit,” Robinson used to say. I’d met him for the first time in that place, and every time he’d curse, I’d sort of punch him in the arm, because I didn’t like it. But I did like him, which made being there a little bit easier.
Don’t get me wrong. Even a highly curable cancer is no walk in the park. Yes, the hospital walls were painted pretty colors, the nurses wore Winnie-the-Pooh scrubs, and some of the older kids pretended the ward was a boarding school complete with uniforms of thin blue gowns, fuzzy slippers, and bald heads covered in colorful scarves. But being there and being sick totally sucked.
Until the day I met Robinson. Until the day he found me.
If life were a movie, we’d have had what they call a “meet cute.” Sort of like this: I’d knock into Robinson while carrying a giant stack of magazines I’d borrowed from the waiting room. And all those good, trashy weeklies like Us, People, and Life & Style would slide everywhere on the floor. I’d make a joke about studying for my pop culture quiz, and he’d laugh as he helped me pick up the mess. By the time the magazines were back in my arms, we’d have realized we were totally hot for each other, and hilarity and romance would ensue for the next ninety minutes.
In real life, it went like this: in a narcotic haze from a bad reaction to a chemo treatment, I was staring at the TV, convinced that Barney the purple dinosaur was speaking directly to me. When I failed to decipher his message, I fell asleep, waking later to see a beautiful dark-haired boy sitting next to my bed. I knew then that I had died, because unless I had been transported to heaven, there was no way a guy that hot would be smiling at me.
But I wasn’t dead. It was Robinson, and he was real. He said to me, “You look like shit. I feel like shit. Let’s be friends.”
And just like that, we were. That’s how magnetic Robinson was: he could tell you that you looked terrible, and you’d still adore him.
Robinson was sicker than I was, but he didn’t act like it. He had a rare kind of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma called Burkitt’s. The non means it’s worse.
“Burkitt was the doctor who discovered the cancer in equatorial Africa,” Robinson informed me. “It’s a lot more common there.” He sounded almost proud of his strange and exotic cancer. Then he grinned. “Burkitt also had this whole elaborate theory about the right posture for taking a crap. He said if you squatted—you know, like a baseball catcher—you’d never get colon cancer. Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up.”
I looked up Burkitt’s immediately. For patients with Robinson’s numbers (his cancer was Stage IV) the survival rate was 50 percent.
There were kids on the ward who’d only have to have a foot amputated or a mysterious lump removed, and then they’d live to be a hundred. Why Robinson? Why this disease? But Robinson was philosophical. He said, “Fifty percent? I’ve seen worse.”
We all had.
A 50 percent chance of surviving was a flip of a coin. So the night after I learned what the odds for him were, I sat up in my adjustable hospital bed, held a penny tight in my palm, and squeezed my eyes shut. “Heads, he lives,” I said. I didn’t even whisper what tails meant. I threw the penny into the air, and when I caught it, I had to breathe deeply for a long time before I could look.
It was heads.
I can’t tell you how much weight I put on that coin toss. I believed in it with every single cell of my body. Our luck would not run out. That’s what I told myself.
But they were only words. My mom could predict rain by the dull ache in her knee. My childhood dog, Sadie, could sense the mailman when he was still two blocks away. In this weird, quiet way, they knew what was coming.
And now, so did I.
Now, in the cold, cold waiting room, Robinson leaned against me. I could feel his breath. I imagined I could see the faint, precious pulse of his heartbeat, fluttering beneath the skin. He was so beautiful, so alive.
But for how long? I didn’t need a doctor to tell me what I already knew. Robinson—my better self, my heart, my life—was very possibly dying.
Our luck would not run out? Please, Axi. Everything runs out eventually. Everything.