Georgia
Dr. Patel’s office had a window that looked out over a parking lot, and Georgia would remember, for the rest of her life, however long that turned out to be, the exact number of cars in that lot the moment the doctor said the word. It had been just over a year since she’d signed the papers at that conference table, fourteen months she hadn’t been consciously counting until this exact moment, when the counting started again and never fully stopped.
“Ovarian,” Dr. Patel said. “I’m sorry, Georgia. The biopsy confirms it. It’s advanced. We’re looking at Stage Four. It’s spread to the lymph nodes, and there’s involvement in the—”
Georgia heard the words as if underwater, arriving a half-second late. She counted the cars in the lot. Fourteen. She would always remember fourteen.
“—the standard approach would be a combination of chemotherapy and—”
“How long,” said Georgia.
It was what she had asked Benjamin across the kitchen table, in the same voice. She had never imagined the number coming back this small.
Dr. Patel was quiet for a moment, the quiet of someone who has delivered versions of this sentence many times and has never once found a way to make it easier.
“With treatment, we’re realistically looking at extending things, but I want to be honest with you about what we’re facing. Without treatment, or if the treatment doesn’t respond the way we hope, approximately six months.”
Six months.
Georgia sat very still in the small, clean office, looking out at fourteen cars in a parking lot, and felt something go off behind her sternum, silent, leaving no visible wreckage.
She had spent the last year mourning twenty years, a debt she’d catalogued and recatalogued in hotel bars and on long midnight drives, a wound she’d assumed would take the rest of her natural life to grieve.
She had, it turned out, been assuming a rest of her natural life.
“Georgia?” Dr. Patel’s voice, gentle, from a long way off. “Do you have questions? Do you want me to go over the treatment options again, or would you like some time?”
“Time,” said Georgia, and heard the word land in the office, and did not laugh. “I think I need some time.”
She drove home with no memory of the drive, forty minutes gone, the car apparently navigating itself.
She parked in her driveway and did not go inside. She sat with the engine off, hands in her lap, and looked at the house she’d bought with the divorce money, the fresh start, the beginning of the twenty more years, thirty more, however many she’d been assuming were hers.
Forty-five. She had thought forty-five was the tragedy.
She sat in the driveway for nearly an hour. The light shifted. A neighbor’s dog barked once and fell quiet. She watched a leaf detach from the maple near the curb and drift sideways in a current she couldn’t feel from inside the car. Then she took out her phone and called Marnie, who picked up on the second ring.
“It’s bad,” Georgia said.
Marnie didn’t ask what. “I’m getting my keys.”
“Don’t. Not tonight. I need one night.”
There was a silence in which Georgia could hear her sister standing in a kitchen six hours away, deciding whether to obey.
“Tomorrow,” Marnie said. “By noon. I’m not asking.”
“Okay,” said Georgia.