Chapter 7: Twelve Months
The treatment started on a Tuesday in October.
I drove him.
He hadn't asked me to — he'd mentioned the appointment the night before in the careful way he'd been mentioning things since the kitchen conversation, like he was still learning how much space to take up in his own marriage — and I had simply said, "What time do we need to leave?"
He'd looked at me for a moment.
Then said, "Seven-thirty."
The clinic was forty minutes away.
We didn't talk much on the drive.
He had a thermos of coffee and I had one of tea and the radio played something neither of us was listening to.
At one point he reached over and turned it off.
"Better," he said.
"Better," I agreed.
The waiting room had chairs with thin cushions and a television mounted too high on the wall showing a morning news program with the sound off.
A man in his sixties sat across from us reading a paperback.
A younger woman — late thirties, maybe — sat near the window with her eyes closed and her hands in her lap.
Austin watched her for a moment.
"She looks calm," he said quietly.
"Maybe she's been here before."
"Maybe that's what calm looks like after a while."
I didn't answer.
I put my hand over his on the armrest.
He turned his hand over and held mine.
The months that followed were not linear.
That was the thing nobody told you — that illness doesn't move in a straight line, that there are weeks that feel almost normal and then a Tuesday that undoes all of them.
Austin had good days and difficult ones.
He had a stretch in December where he was so exhausted he slept twelve hours and still woke up tired, and a week in January where something shifted and he seemed almost like himself again, and I learned not to trust the good weeks too completely because the difficult ones always came back.
Kathryn called on Sundays.
She had started calling first, which she had never done before — always waiting for Austin to call her, as if reaching out first was a concession she wasn't prepared to make.
Now she called at eleven on Sunday mornings, and sometimes she and I talked for ten minutes before Austin even got on the line.
Small things.
The garden she was trying to start in her backyard.
A book she'd read that she thought I might like.
Once, carefully, an apology — not a formal one, not a speech, just: "I want you to know I've been thinking about what I said.
About not trusting you.
I was wrong about that."
"I know," I said.
"I wanted to say it plainly."
"I heard you," I said.
"Thank you."
It wasn't forgiveness, exactly.
It was something more practical than forgiveness — an agreement to be different going forward.
To try.
Austin's brother came to visit in February.
He arrived with a bag of groceries and cooked dinner without being asked, and afterward he sat with Austin in the living room while I cleaned up, and I could hear them talking through the wall — not the words, just the rhythm of it, easy and low, the way brothers talk when they're not performing for anyone.
I stood at the sink and listened and felt something loosen in my chest that I hadn't realized was tight.
In March, Austin had his first round of follow-up imaging.
We drove to the clinic in the same silence as the first time.
Same thermos of coffee.
Same thermos of tea.
The radio off before we reached the end of our street.
The waiting room had the same thin-cushioned chairs.
A different man with a different paperback.
The same television too high on the wall.
We waited an hour and forty minutes.
When the doctor came in, she sat down across from us and set the folder on the table between us, and I watched Austin's face and not the folder because his face would tell me everything I needed to know before she said a word.
His shoulders dropped.
Not in defeat.
In relief.
"The imaging shows a significant response to treatment," the doctor said.
"Better than our most optimistic projection at this stage."
Austin exhaled slowly through his nose.
I kept my hand on his arm.
"What does that mean for the next phase?" I asked.
She explained.
I listened carefully and asked three more questions and wrote the answers in the small notebook I'd started keeping for appointments.
Austin watched me write and didn't say anything, but when we stood up to leave he put his hand briefly on my back — just for a second, just a touch — and I understood what it meant.
In the car on the way home, he was quiet for a long time.
Then he said, "I want to take you somewhere.
When this is over.
Somewhere you've always wanted to go."
"You don't have to do that."
"I know I don't have to." He glanced over.
"Where would you go?
If you could go anywhere."
I thought about it.
"Somewhere with a coast," I said.
"Somewhere I can hear the water."
"Okay," he said.
"That's it?
Just okay?"
"I'm already looking it up when we get home." He almost smiled.
"I have a lot to make up for."
May you like
"You do," I said.
But I was almost smiling too.
