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okay?” she asks.
    â€œI feel good,” I tell her as my trembling hands attempt to open the car door.
    On the way home, I continue to sing “I feel good” as loudly as I can. I am crying and shaking with my terrified child in the passenger seat. When we get home, I sink into a hot tub of water filled with lavender bath powder while Hank, who never really believed I was sick until tonight, takes care of our daughter.
    I am so delirious that I am not sure what year it is. That night I relive my years as a junkie. I am baptized in the waters of the past, immersed, drowning, former comrades and forgotten crimes resurfacing to leer at my beaten body. When dawn finally arrives, I have new respect for the phrase “dark night of the soul.”
    After that I give myself the shots at night so that I will sleep through the side effects. I never get the crazy chills again, but I need to sleep extra on the day after the shots.
    At least my fatigue is predictable during the treatment. I know which ones will be good days and which will be “bed” days. More importantly, the six-month treatment gives me time to forgive myself. Perhaps the side effects of the medication—fatigue, shortterm memory loss, skin rash, and hair loss—create some sort of unconscious penance for the irresponsible way I once treated my faithful body.
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    In October 2000 my friend Kitty from Tallahassee visits us because she needs to see the doctors at Duke University for some experimental stem cell treatment. Kitty, who is in her early thirties, has
stage four breast cancer. In Tallahassee, it was a tradition for Kitty to wear a witch costume and give out candy on Halloween while we took Emmy trick-or-treating. She’s the only one of my friends accepted by Hank, the only one with whom he feels comfortable enough to actually let her stay in our house overnight.
    While Kitty stays with us in Charlotte, she and I spend our days sitting on the couch and watching the leaves fall outside the tall windows that look out onto the woods behind the house. Kitty says we’re wearing lead suits. But this time with her is one of the most peaceful interludes of my entire life.
    Kitty, whose curly dark hair is only now growing back from the last round of chemo, dresses up as “chemo-witch” for Halloween. Emmy, who is also dressed as a witch, could not be happier. We come home from trick-or-treating, make caramel apples, and share the spoils. Jaxson snatches a candy bar and eats it, wrapper and all. When Kitty goes back to Tallahassee, she strides onto the plane, wearing a mask that she has decorated with cat whiskers, to protect herself from germs.
    I probably should do the same thing, but I don’t have her panache. The hepatitis C drugs mess with my immune system. For Thanksgiving we go out to California to be with Hank’s family and I catch a cold on the way out. I am pretty sure I am going to die in the land of the shopping mall as I lie comatose in the guest room. I don’t die. But I do get numerous sinus infections, my fingernails grow ridges, and every time I take a shower, handfuls of my hair pile up over the drain. I get a cut on my finger that won’t heal for months. But I never, ever get depressed, even though depression is supposed to be a major side effect of the treatment. I just keep counting off the shots.
    Three months after I start treatment, I take a blood test. The technician screws up, causing blood to bubble out of my vein like a fountain when she takes out the needle. Emmy looks on, horrified.
That’s probably the day she decides she will never take drugs. I survive the blood lab people, and a few days later I get the results in the mail.
    That Christmas we go to see my mom in Edenton. One of Mom’s friends has gone away for the holidays and we’re staying at her gorgeous house on the Albemarle Sound. Christmas Day I give my mother the piece of paper with the results in a