“Shep, I need to see him again. Don’t I have anything to say about this? It’s wrong to have Brendan make this decision without me.”
There was a silence on the line and I was afraid Shep would hang up on me. Finally he spoke. “I promised him. You’re putting me in an untenable position. Oh hell, Jennifer… He’s on his way to the Mayo Clinic.”
I couldn’t believe what I’d heard. “What did you say? He’s going to the hospital?”
“Mayo’s the best place for this,” Shep told me. “He’s having experimental surgery in the morning.”
Sixty-five
MY STOMACHwas heaving, just as it had been a year and a half ago when I went to the hospital in Oahu to see Danny’s body. Only now I was in my car, shifting gears literally and figuratively as I sped south on I-94 until the road split. Then I took I-294 toward O’Hare.
I called Sam on my cell, explaining what I could, and she told me I was the best fighter she knew and said she was proud of me. Then the two of us were crying over the phone, just like old times.
I’m sure people were staring at me as I boarded the American flight to Rochester, Minnesota. I was stiff-faced and distracted, and my eyes were swollen and very, very red.
A little over an hour and a half later, I drove a rented car toward the Mayo Clinic. I was going to see Brendan, I hoped, and he was just where I wanted him: at one of the best cancer hospitals in the world.
Sixty-six
A REVOLVINGglass door deposited me into the cool green lobby of the main building of St. Marys at the Mayo Clinic, a vast space with high marble walls and freestanding columns. This was where Brendan was to be operated on. I walked to the admissions desk, explained who I was, and asked how to find his room.
I was told that “Dr. Keller preregistered earlier today. He’ll be checking into the Joseph Building at six o’clock tomorrow morning. He isn’t here.”
The crushing disappointment must have showed on my face because the twenty-something woman at reception opened a three-ring binder. She ran a finger down a list, then looked up at me.
“He said there was a possibility someone might come.”
I didn’t know what to say. “Well, I did. I’m here.”
“Dr. Keller is staying at the Colonial Inn, one-fourteen Second Street, Southwest,” she said.
I got directions, and soon the rented car and I were back on the road. The minutes whizzed by even as rush-hour traffic pinned me in place. Finally I broke through the logjam, which I wouldn’t have expected in Rochester. A few minutes later I was at the Colonial Inn, and I was shaking like a leaf.
I found room 143 and knocked. There was no response from inside.
“Brendan, please,” I said. “I came all this way. It’s Jennifer… the prettiest girl at Lake Geneva?”
The door opened slowly and Brendan was standing there, all six foot one of him. His shoulders were still broad and he looked solid. His eyes were as blue as the northern sky on a day in July. He opened his arms and took me into them.
“Hey there, Scout,” he whispered. “Prettiest girl in Rochester, Minnesota.”
Sixty-seven
“I WAS MADat you,” I finally admitted as I held Brendan tightly.
“And now? What are you feeling now, Jennifer?”
“You’re charming me out of it.”
“I didn’t realize I was being charming,” he said.
“I know. It’s just part of your personality. It’s something in your blue eyes.”
We swayed together in the doorway for a moment or two, then broke apart. It was only now that Brendan’s eyelids drooped and his movements became noticeably slower and a little shaky—from pain medication or from the tumor? We sat down on the couch and I tousled the wave in his hair.
“Happy now?” he asked.
“Yep,” I answered.
