I wanted to scream, but I didn’t know exactly why or at what. Instead, I felt myself go cold inside, the way I had trained myself to do when I was working, and I asked, “How long?”
“The doctors say that if I’m lucky, I might have as much as three more months. I’m more likely, though, to have only three or four more weeks. I’ve done a living will and worked everything out with my doctors and my family, because once my brain is gone I want them to let me go.”
Jim appeared lost, staring into space, not able to look directly at her. “Have you tried everything?” he said.
“Everything I’m willing to try,” she said. She stood. “And that’s all I want to say about that. Now, if you can stand to be with the world’s thinnest hairless woman, I’ve ordered some tasty Chinese take-out, and we can eat. I’m really enjoying my food now that the drugs and chemo have worn off, though my throat is still sore. I definitely don’t worry about calories anymore.”
I don’t remember much about that dinner. I know I didn’t eat much, and for all her talk of enjoying food, Louise ate even less. Louise and I did most of the talking, and Jim either listened or pretended to listen as he stared off into space. We talked about her house, about places I’d seen, about old times, and when she got tired, Jim and I cleaned up for her and headed for our cars.
He stopped me at the door to my car, grabbed my arm as I was reaching for the door handle. “Are you just going to let her die?” he asked.
The question uncorked the rage I’d bottled when she first told us, and I wanted to scream at him and hit him. Instead, I kept my voice level and asked, “What else can we do?”
“We can make her try more treatments, keep fighting, not give up,” he said.
“No,” I said, “we can’t. We could try to talk her into it, but you heard her: she’s endured all she’s willing to take, and none of it has done any good. She’s made her choice, and she’s at peace with it, and that’s it, that’s all there is.”
He threw my arm aside in disgust. “I cannot believe you’re just giving up like that,” he said. “You want to watch her die because you blew it with her and she dumped you? Is that it?”
I grabbed him by the throat and took him down to the road before he could even raise a hand to stop me. I fought to keep myself from crushing his larynx and quickly released my grip. “Jim, you know better than that, and you’re lucky, very lucky, that I know you know better. Yeah, I blew it with her, but I’ve never wished her harm, and I never will. I don’t have any choice but to respect her choice—and neither do you.” I got into my car and drove off.
* * *
The truck I had seen in the security video at The Cat House was right where R.C. had said it would be, so I parked behind it and sat for a moment.
“Don’t blow this, Greg. Wait for me, and I’ll come back.”
“And if you do not?”
“Then do what you want with him. The only way I won’t come back is if I can’t.”
The truck was tucked under an overhang that had once protected a loading dock. The wall in front of it had provided rolling doors for the loading dock, but now boards covered where the doors had been. I carried the gym bag around to the right side, where I knew some courts stood outside one of the center’s side doors, and walked over to the nearest hoop. I put the bag just off the court under the basket, grabbed the ball, and started shooting.
I was just beginning to work up a light sweat from some lay-up drills when Jim, dressed in some still-new gym clothes, came out of the door. He was more muscular than I remembered, but after his time in jail that only made sense. He rebounded one of my shots, dribbled out past where the foul line had once been, and took a shot. His form was as beautiful as ever: effortless leap, good extension at the ball’s release, wrist held too long forward in the playground show-off mode he’d never outgrown, great rotation on the ball. Swish. I caught the ball as it was coming through and tossed it back to him. You make it, you get to take another; playground rules, the way we’d grown up.