Local Gone Missing(50)

But in one piece? And without a conviction? I’ll drive myself next time.

Ronnie fidgeted beside her in the waiting room, where couples sat, heads together, whispering, their fear echoing off the walls.

“Oh, I meant to say Karen’s doing a cut and highlights half price at the moment,” Ronnie chirped up.

Elise ran her fingers over her still-unfamiliar scalp. She’d gone to Karen’s Hair and Beauty salon to get her post-chemo wisps shaved in May. Karen had talked about wigs, getting out a well-thumbed catalog of synthetic styles, but Elise had decided she wasn’t going down that route.

“I don’t want to look like my mum,” she’d tried to joke. “I’ll stick to scarves and hats until it grows back.”

Karen had clearly shared the conversation, no doubt with a “Bless her!” thrown in, and the sympathetic smiles in the High Street had started. Elise hadn’t been back since.

“I don’t need a haircut.” Elise tried to laugh. “Look at it!”

“It’s growing,” Ronnie said.

It was but it was coming back a different color. Gray, thick, and coarse instead of dirty blond. Elise tried not to care but some mornings she found herself sitting in front of the mirror searching for her old self. It was never a good idea. The stranger staring back at her had dark smudges under sunken eyes and her nose and mouth looked too big for her face. Mrs. Potato Head.

“Anyway, it suits you short,” Ronnie added. “It brings out your eyes—you look gorgeous.”

“Enough!” Elise said, a lump in her throat. “I’m fine.”

“You look low today,” Ronnie replied.

“I’ll do some yoga later—that’ll help.”

“If you say so, but I’m not sure how doing a downward-facing dog is a comfort to anyone.”

Ronnie rummaged in her bag for a tissue, offering to get coffee, a paper, a sandwich, a muffin, until Elise took a deep breath and said: “Okay, a cup of tea, please.” She didn’t want it—the only thing she wanted was five minutes’ peace to get her head together.

“Right, then,” Ronnie said. “Back in a jiffy.”

Elise closed her eyes and breathed deeply until she heard her footsteps fade away. It’s going to be fine, she repeated in her head. But she didn’t know.

She’d found the lump when she caught the pucker of skin near her left nipple in the mirror. She’d stared for a couple of seconds, thinking it was a trick of the light, then reached to touch it. Beneath was a thickening of her flesh.

Her doctor had sent Elise straight to have a mammogram at the specialist clinic. She’d sat cold and numb behind the thin curtain of a cubicle before submitting her poor diseased breast to be squashed between two sheets of glass until she’d yelped.

It’d meant making a new file in her head.


Mammogram



     Needle biopsy



     CT scan



     Hormone therapy?



     Drugs?



     Chemo?



     Surgery?





She’d put off telling anyone in case it was all a hoax. A cyst with a wicked sense of humor. But in the end, she’d had to. She’d taken the train home to Norwich in the sleety rain back in February and told her mum and dad. Her dad had left the room to make them a cup of tea while she and her mum had cried. She’d felt terrible telling them—Mum had so much to cope with already; Elise’s brother’s messy divorce and his childcare crises and her washing machine on permanently to keep up with Grandad’s “little accidents.”

“I’m going to be fine, Mum,” she’d said when her mother started talking about coming down to Ebbing to hold her hand during the treatment. “You’re needed up here. And you’ll be on the end of a phone.”

At work, Elise had gone for black humor—the policeman’s friend—and tried not to see the pity in colleagues’ eyes as they laughed along.

They think I’m going to die, rang like a bell in her head.

“It’s not metastasized,” she told her boss in his office, blindsiding him with the new vocab she was mastering. “Spread, I mean. It’s treatable but I’ll need chemo and surgery.”

DCI McBride had tried not to look at her breasts but his gaze kept slipping to the guilty parties.

“Take as much time off as you need, Elise,” he’d said, his arm round her shoulders as he walked her to the door of his office. “But no malingering . . .”

And they both laughed too loudly and leaned together for support.

Elise had suddenly wanted to tell him not to write her off. But that would have been admitting it was a possibility. But she needed to say it.

“I’ll hurry back, Graham. Don’t worry,” she said at the door. “Don’t write me off.”

“As if.” He’d smiled back. “Ring me when you’re ready.”

She hadn’t made the call yet. Maybe tomorrow.



* * *



—

The Oncology registrar leaned against his desk while he was speaking to her as though he were chatting her up in a bar. Elise wanted someone older, with serious glasses and a white coat. But the consultant was elsewhere giving someone bad news. Elise’s results were all good, so she got the one with a holiday tan and a braided bracelet. Elise tried to concentrate on what he was saying but her mind kept slipping away.