Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
It was after the party at the Jessabelle House that Oriana and Reese found themselves in the Nantucket Hospital, waiting to hear from the doctor.
Oriana gripped Reese’s hand tenderly and bit her tongue to keep from crying.
She knew that many of her Coleman family members were in the waiting room, refusing to return to the party or to their respective houses until they learned that Reese was stable.
The strange thing was that Reese seemed pretty dang stable right now.
He sat up in bed and looked curiously around the room, his color brighter than it had been that morning.
His cheeks were still sunken from his dramatic weight loss, but he cracked jokes every few minutes and seemed to delight in Oriana’s smile.
He’d collapsed out of the blue, but maybe it was simply exhaustion.
He kept talking about how tired he was. For the first time—perhaps ever—Oriana wondered if they should talk more seriously about early retirement.
“I think we should head home,” Reese was saying, rubbing his thin thighs beneath the sheets. “I don’t want to waste any of these doctors’ time. I feel fine. Honestly.”
Oriana’s chest throbbed with worry and sorrow. How could she tell Reese that she didn’t think he was fine, that she wanted to stay at the hospital and demand every test? She didn’t want to worry him more than he already was. She wanted to be light, comical, and breezy.
But this was the love of her life, there in the hospital bed, exhausted and thin. She needed answers.
“Baby,” Oriana whispered, lacing her fingers through his, “let’s tell the doctor what’s really going on. Okay?”
It took Reese a long time to meet her gaze. When he did, Oriana saw a flicker of anger, up against an unending tunnel of sorrow and fear. It was clear he didn’t know what to say, nor how to face this. He’d always been healthy. He’d always been a clean-eating, exercise freak.
“You’re going to be fine,” Oriana added.
When Dr. Miller came in to talk to them, he was friendly, easygoing, and open to their suggestions.
When Reese tried again to get out of any future testing, Oriana gave him a hard look that forced him to say, “Well, I have been tired lately. And I’ve dropped maybe twenty pounds.
Rapidly.” He looked embarrassed, like he’d done something wrong.
The doctor ordered a number of tests, all of which could be done back on their home island of Martha’s Vineyard.
He had his secretary make a series of appointments for them.
Oriana felt as though she were deep underwater, watching and listening as things happened around her, and she struggled to maintain her position in the black wet darkness.
When Reese got dressed and was wheeled out of the hospital, she walked beside him, keeping her chin up.
The Coleman family stragglers ran after them and stood in the blinding October sunshine.
They seemed not to want to overwhelm Reese and Oriana, but their eyes searched for answers.
“Everything is fine,” Reese informed them. “Except it seems that I’m getting old. Who knew that would happen?”
Meghan and her husband, Hugo, chuckled nervously. Sam and Hilary crossed and uncrossed their arms in disbelief.
“Do you want to come back to the house and rest?” Sam asked. “We’ll disband the party and keep it down.”
“You can always come to my place,” Hilary interjected. “There’s no party there. You could rest in the guest bedroom.”
But Reese wanted to get back to Martha’s Vineyard. “My bed is calling my name,” he said.
Their daughter, Alexa, drove them from the hospital back to the Jessabelle House, where Oriana helped Reese into the passenger side of the car they’d brought.
It felt as though they’d only just arrived at the Coleman party, as though they hadn’t soaked up enough of the goodness that they’d been looking forward to.
Oriana panged with loneliness, despite being surrounded by people she loved so much.
When she entered the Jessabelle House to collect her things—her Tupperware, her bowl — Samantha put one of the bottles of wine she’d brought into her arms and whispered, “Take this. You didn’t get to enjoy it! ”
At this act of tenderness, Oriana nearly burst into tears. She felt like a breakable glass bowl.
Their daughter, Alexa, and son, Joel, hugged her goodbye and followed her to the car, where they hugged their father again. Reese reminded them that everything was fine. Nobody believed him.
When they returned to Martha’s Vineyard, Reese went upstairs and fell asleep immediately.
Oriana wrote all of his appointments in their shared family calendar and sat on the back porch, listening to the autumn leaves whistle in the wind.
Maybe by Thanksgiving—when Isabella would be on the East Coast with her research about Larry Calvin Johannes—she and Reese would be joking about these incidents.
Maybe the doctor would give him some medication and clean this up.
She prayed harder than she’d ever prayed before.
The test results came back the first week of November.
Their Martha’s Vineyard doctor, Dr. Randall, sat across from them with his hands folded on his desk and a look of blank kindness on his face.
Oriana wondered how many times in his storied career he’d had to deliver bad news.
She wondered if he’d practiced delivering bad news over the years, or if he got better at it with each devastating loss.
“It’s prostate cancer,” he told them firmly. “Stage three, which means we need to act quickly and get treatments started right away.”
Oriana gripped Reese’s hand and was surprised to find it limp and loose, as though he wasn’t panicked at all. She couldn’t bring herself to look at him. This was the big C, and it was happening to them. It felt impossible.
The doctor outlined the strategy and plan of attack.
He spoke about surgery and radiation and chemotherapy, about how Reese would feel during the treatments and how he would feel after.
Oriana felt the world crumbling around her.
With Thanksgiving and Christmas on the horizon, she’d been looking forward to joyous celebrations with the Coleman family, from watching their grandchildren open their presents to eating their long-held family recipes to laughing together.
Now, she knew that she and Reese would spend much of that time in hospitals and cancer treatment centers. She panged with a sense of loss.
That night, Oriana ordered their favorite Indian food and had it split into two large plates.
Reese had lost even more weight, and she wanted him to regain some of his strength before his treatments began.
He was calm and quiet, his hands folded on his lap and his eyes on the television.
They were playing a college basketball game.
Everything felt surprisingly normal, as though it were any other November during their long and beautiful marriage.
For a moment, Oriana let herself imagine that Reese wouldn’t make it, that she’d be spending the holidays as a widow for the rest of her time.
Tears sprang to her eyes, and she ran to the kitchen to hide them.
Stop thinking like that, she told herself. He’ll be able to tell.
As they ate, Reese chewed slowly and often used his napkin to moisten his dry lips.
She’d never seen him eat so carefully. After a few bites, he set down his fork and looked at her.
He’d hardly said anything since his diagnosis, and Oriana ached for some form of emotion, something to show her what was on his mind.
He said, “I’m sort of relieved to have an answer to all this.”
Oriana set down her fork with a clatter. She hadn’t considered that. “We have a diagnosis,” she agreed, nodding. “We have a plan of attack.”
Reese smiled. “This isn’t a war. It’s just my body, playing tricks on me.”
Oriana was no longer hungry. She wanted to tell him that they weren’t at war with his body. They were at war with cancer, and they would fight it till it relinquished its hold.
“Thank you for being there through all this,” Reese said softly. “I imagine I won’t always be easy to deal with. I imagine I haven’t been easy to deal with since all this began. I remember when we went out to Colorado. I thought I was going to faint. Numerous times.”
Oriana felt crushed. She’d known he was tired. She hadn’t known it was so bad. She felt she should have been able to tell. She took a bite of Indian food and felt that it tasted of sand.
“I love you,” she told him. “We’re going to get through this, like we’ve gotten through everything else.
” She remembered their difficulties with their son, the long-ago fire, their daughter’s struggles, their few marital arguments, and their lifelong struggles.
Living alongside someone and loving them meant being in the mess of them at all times.
She loved Reese. She loved the mess they’d made.
She was going to cling to it as long as she could.
Treatments began in earnest a week and a half before Thanksgiving.
Oriana was consumed with their cancer treatment calendar and hardly gave a thought to her own work.
What she knew was that several buyers had received paintings by the newly beloved Larry Calvin Johannes, and that Larry’s name was being whispered through the artistic circles.
The paintings were celebrated. More and more buyers wanted to get their hands on one.
Oriana had her assistant, Kendra, manage a few sales for her, thanking her profusely for taking over when things were so grim for Oriana.
“It’s what I’m here for!” Kendra reminded her.
And then, a few days before Thanksgiving, Oriana heard from Isabella again.