Good Harbor Read Online Free PDF Page B

pre-op visit with the anesthesiologist, and to meet with one
     of their nurses. She’d also need to get a clean bill of health from her own internist.
    “See you soon, Mrs. Levine,” said Ellen, sounding as if Kathleen had just booked a
     haircut.
    She wrote down her assignments and then put the receiver down a little harder than
     necessary. “This must be my lucky day.”
    Driving to school, she was suddenly furious. She counted all the ways she was angry.
     About having cancer, about being too scared to sleep, about having to disrupt everything
     in her life. And it was going to ruin the whole summer.
    It would have to happen now , she fumed. Summers in Gloucester could make you forget the miseries of winter, just
     like those drugs. What were they called? Amnestics.
    Summers on Cape Ann erased the cumulative assault of January darkness, the relentless
     February chill, the raw misery of March, and the final heartbreak of April, when the
     light returns but the wind still stabs you in the back.
    In May, there are birds everywhere, and by the end of June the beach roses bloom and
     the supermarket fills with sun-stunned vacationers loading their carts with chips
     and lemonade.
    In June, every wave and rock and gull is lit up from inside, the sky is a daily miracle.
     But I won’t be able to enjoy it, Kathleen thought bitterly. The margins won’t be clean.
     They’ll find invasive cancer cells on the margins. There will be more surgery, and
     radiation and chemotherapy, and God knows what. I’ll be too weak and nauseated to
     sit up, much less have energy to pull weeds or plant bulbs.
    Kathleen loved the steep, rocky hill behind the house. It had been a “nature preserve”
     — her own euphemism for scrubby and neglected — while her sons were growing up. But
     once they left home, she fortified the worn-out soil with coffee grounds and manure,
     and now there were flowers everywhere, daylilies mostly, in and around the ten granite
     boulders on the hillside. A few years ago, Buddy had hired a cherry picker so she
     could get up to the top, and she had planted a big stand of yellow Stella d’Oros up
     there. They bloomed the whole summer.
    She wouldn’t be planting anything this summer. No new lilies. No tomatoes. Nothing.
    By the time she pulled into the parking lot, she was in a rage. “Damn it!” she shouted.
     “Damn it all to hell.”
    She leaned back in the seat and calmed down enough to walk into the building, retrieve
     her date book, and tell the principal that she would be out the rest of the week.
     He put his arm around her shoulder and said, “You take all the time you need.” Then
     he got that look on his face and Kathleen knew what his next words would be. “My sister
     had breast cancer.”
    Back home, she called Buddy to tell him the news. She called Hal and Jack. She talked
     to receptionists at medical offices. “We can fit you in Friday, but it may be a long
     wait,” said the woman at the internist’s office. “Bring a book.”
    Kathleen sat in one waiting room after another, unable to read. She picked at her
     cuticles and wondered what had happened to the woman who had canceled her surgery
     with Dr. Truman. Had she come down with the flu? Found a better surgeon? Did she decide
     she’d just rather die?
    The last stop was at a lab for a final blood test to rule out anemia. A child’s outraged
     wail filled the silence in the waiting room outside the lab. The grown-ups in the
     chairs around her smiled at each other and shook their heads in sympathy. “Poor thing,”
     said the woman sitting next to Kathleen.
    Danny hadn’t cried. He was knocked unconscious by the car. And then they had put the
     tube down his throat. Pat had promised Kathleen that her little boy wouldn’t remember
     the pain or the disgusting procedures they did on him — because of the drugs. Amnestics.
    Buddy and Kathleen spent the Sunday night before surgery at a motel near the hospital
     in Boston.