A Parallel Life Read Online Free PDF

went into the pizza place, which I knew would be dark and empty at that time of day, and ordered a large Coke, which, although I sat in the booth for over an hour, I never managed to drink.
    In the library, I began my research. Stage Four meant that the cancer was advanced. Stage Four could mean that the tumors were over a certain size, or that the tumors had extended to the chest wall or the skin, or that there was evidence of cancer in the lymph nodes, or that there were distant metastases present. Or any combination of the above. None of these conditions held out much hope for an excellent prognosis.
    Roxie, the woman in the scarf, the woman buying the wig, had no doubt already endured radiation, then chemotherapy. Both were awful treatments in which the patient was subjected to assaults that were only narrowly nonlethal. The success rates for all of these methods of treatments were displayed on the various pages as a smorgasbord of bar graphs and pie charts, all of which offered survival rates as percentages, degrees, and fractions.
    Over the next few days, I read everything I could find on the subject and then tried to make myself forget what I had read. If Roxie had gone in as soon as she had found the lump, the buried deadliness, she’d have had great odds. But Roxie had waited and I didn’t want to know her reasons. I only wanted Roxie to live—to recover. I wanted her to recover and Jack to fall in love with her all over again.
    â€œShe’s just fine,” he said when I asked about her the next day. It was the first time I’d brought her up since the day he lay fully clothed beside me. “The drugs made her hair fall out, but that’s to be expected. It will grow back.”
    â€œWhat color hair does she have?” I was unable to control myself. I wasn’t sure what I had felt when I saw them together but it was like the time Jonah had realized that I had a daughter. It’s a device of self-protection to pretendthat the other lives of people you’re having affairs with are fictions. Before that day I had allowed myself to believe in Roxie’s existence to the same extent that I believed in Moby Dick. Now she existed. She had brushed by me. I’d heard her laugh. I’d heard her suck air between words.
    â€œIt’s a real honey blonde,” he said. “Thick and blonde. It was the first thing I noticed about her. She was sitting at a table in a restaurant having lunch with a girlfriend and I couldn’t take my eyes off her hair. It was long, almost to her waist. Of course, she’s cut it since then.” He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling as if watching a movie of Roxie’s long blonde hair there. “The funny thing in the wig shop was that we couldn’t decide what color wig to buy. She wanted to think about another color, you know. There was this long blonde wig and I wanted her to try it on but she wouldn’t. I guess I understand that.”
    â€œIt would be too close to what she’d lost.”
    â€œThat’s it. That’s what I was thinking. But you know something very weird happened in there—something I wouldn’t have expected.”
    I waited. I had, after all, asked the initial question.
    â€œShe tried on this dark wig—dark and wavy to her shoulders, and when she did she looked like herself and also like someone completely new at the same time. And I got aroused—right there in the store.”
    â€œOh God,” I said and rolled away from him. “Oh God.”
    â€œI know,” he said, sitting up.
    The apple tree in the backyard bloomed. The hillside at the end of our street flared with yellow mustard flowers. Amy’s final cast came off. Mandy’s twelfth birthday party was a success. Bill found a tennis racquet for her, and I bought her a sweater she’d admired that made her look likea small turtle in a very large shell. Amy gave her a Bon Jovi tape. My father