Chapter 36

Two hours later we sat at the small table in his little cabin in the woods. It was a one-bedroom caretaker’s cabin located a hundred yards from a much larger custom log home. The big house belonged to a tech executive who was rich enough to afford it but too busy to use it much, according to Jack. He had the run of the place so long as he kept an eye on things and made sure the cupboards stayed stocked. He’d offered to prep and serve dinner up at the main house, but I wanted to stay in the little cabin, in his space.

I glanced around as I twirled the fettucine on my fork. Jack had made alfredo sauce while I prepped a salad, but I suddenly didn’t have much of an appetite. My eyes wandered the cabin for the hundredth time, trying to ferret out more details about Jack, who he was, what went on in his mind. But the small living room and kitchenette told me no more than what he’d shown me weeks ago on FaceTime.

“Something wrong?” he asked, and my attention snapped back to him. His expression was neutral except for his watchful eyes. I had a feeling they didn’t miss much—now or ever.

“I’m waiting to hear the story of why you don’t cut your hair.”

He sighed. “Dinner probably isn’t the time for it. It’s sad.”

“Is there ever going to be a good time for it?”

“I guess not.” He pushed his noodles around on his plate. They were good, but he didn’t seem to have any interest in the food. “You know I was a pediatric oncologist. I picked that specialty when I was young and dumb because I thought I could make a difference. When I was a kid, I had this best friend named Lucas who lived three houses down, and he died of kidney cancer when we were nine. It sucked. When I did my oncology rotation, something clicked for me. I was young and full of energy and most importantly, wildly arrogant. You have to be to succeed as a specialist.”

He took a few bites, lost in his thoughts. I ate quietly and let him wander until he was ready. “I was willing to take risks that older and more seasoned doctors wouldn’t. I pushed for experimental treatments that patients could only get at the elite hospitals in the country, but I wanted them here, in Oregon, for kids whose families couldn’t uproot everything to go to the Mayo Clinic or Johns-Hopkins. And it worked more than it didn’t. The board quit fighting me and started giving me free rein in trying these experimental protocols. It went to my head. I started to believe that I could work miracles.”

“Because you were working miracles?” I interjected softly.

He shook his head. “There are no miracles. Only science, and only statistical anomalies that broke my way a few more times than they should have. But I didn’t see it at the time. I was unstoppable, and we were sending kids into remission in cases where no one thought we could. Then we got Clara.”

He reached up to smooth a hank of hair with the mindless distraction of someone who had made the same gesture a thousand times. “Clara was ten when she came in with an osteosarcoma. Bone cancer,” he said, when I shot him a questioning look. “She was a tiny thing and already obsessed with gymnastics. She came to her first appointment in a leotard because the mass was in her hip and she said it would make it easier for us to examine it without having to show everyone her underwear every time.” He smiled. “She was a pistol. And gifted. Her mom told me that Clara had already been placed on her gym’s athlete development track because her natural talent was so raw that they could already see it.”

I knew how this story ended, how it had to have ended for him to go hide on a rural mountainside. But even if I wasn’t sitting in the place he’d escaped to, I would have known the outcome because it was carved into every line of his face.

“It was bad,” he said. “The conventional protocol was clear. Cut it out, then treat the area with radiation to kill anything that was left behind. But it would have meant taking enough of her hip that she would have to keep getting hip replacement surgeries for the rest of her life.”

“And no gymnastics.”

“No gymnastics. So I did an insane amount of research, convinced one of the most brilliant surgeons from the hospital where I did my residency to come and operate in a way that left the greatest amount of bone in place, and then put her in a clinical trial for a new immunotherapy treatment. I was convinced it would work. I could have taken a safer route that would have killed the cancer, but this was going to cure her and let her keep competing.” He pushed the noodles around his plate some more. “Have you ever known anyone with cancer?”

“No one close to me. One of my high school teachers died of breast cancer a couple of years ago, but no one in my family.”

“You’re lucky. Like wildly lucky, statistically. I’m glad you haven’t seen how ugly this disease is up close. It eats people up. That’s what it does. It eats away everything healthy and good inside of them, and it is so evil that it will do it even when winning means it kills its own host, and it dies. So it was my job to kill it first. That means my patients are miserable and so sick from the medicines I give them that sometimes they beg to die.”

He pushed his plate away and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes for a minute, the way I sometimes did when I got tension headaches. “Clara, she was terrified. She had this huge mop of curly brown hair, and when it started falling out, I found her crying in her room one day. She told me that the only two things that made her pretty were her gymnastics and her hair, and now she was losing both. So I told her hair was stupid anyway, and I would shave mine off until hers grew back. She said, ‘No way. One of us has to stay pretty,’ and she made me promise I wouldn’t cut mine until hers grew back, and that for every inch hers grew, I’d cut an inch off mine.”

“But hers never grew back,” I said, guessing the end of the story. I reached over and slipped my hand into his. There was nothing else to say.

“No. Because I was arrogant. Because I didn’t follow the protocol that could have saved her. Because I believed I could heal her and keep her competing. And now she’ll never do any of it.” He pulled his hand from mine and rose, scooping up a light jacket as he reached for the door. “I’m sorry. I need some air. Stay as long as you like, but I understand if you decide to leave.”

The door shut behind him, leaving me at the table with two half-eaten meals and a salad neither of us had managed to pick at. I cleared the dishes and put all the food away.

I sat on the sofa to wait for him, studying the sparse cabin again. He’d fled here for refuge, but it had become his prison. He was trapped on this mountain by his pain and his guilt.

I had no idea if and how that would ever change. All I knew for sure was that it needed to. But as long minutes stretched into hours with no sign of Jack and my texts unanswered, the less sure I was that it ever could.