The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry(51)

He puts on his running clothes, does a few halfhearted stretches, throws a headband over his ears, straps on his backpack, and prepares to run to the store. Now that he no longer lives above the store, his route takes him in the opposite direction of the one he used to take when Nic was alive, when Maya was a baby, in the first years of his marriage to Amelia.

He runs past Ismay’s house, which she once shared with Daniel and now shares improbably with Lambiase. He runs past the spot where Daniel died, too. He runs past the old dance studio. What was the dance teacher’s name? He knows she moved to California not too long ago, and the dance studio is empty. He wonders who will teach the little girls of Alice Island to dance? He runs past Maya’s elementary school and past her junior high and past her high school. High school. She has a boyfriend. The Furness boy is a writer. He hears them arguing all the time. He takes a shortcut through a field, and is almost through it to Captain Wiggins Street when he blacks out.

It is twenty-two degrees out, and when he wakes his hand is blue where it had rested on the ice.

He stands and warms his hands on his jacket. He has never passed out in the middle of a run before.

“Madame Olenska,” he says.

DR. ROSEN GIVES him a full examination. A.J. is in good health for his age, but there’s something strange about his eyes that gives the doctor pause.

“Have you had any other problems?” she asks.

“Well . . . Perhaps it’s just growing older, but lately I seem to have a verbal glitch every now and again.”

“Glitch?” she says.

“I catch myself. It’s not that bad. But I occasionally switch a word with another word. Child for chive, for example. Or last week I called The Grapes of Wrath “The Grapefruit Rag.” Obviously, this poses a problem in my line of work. I felt quite convinced that I was saying the right thing. My wife thought there might be an antiseizure medication that could help?”

“Aphasia,” she says. “I don’t like the sound of that.” Given A.J.’s history of seizures, the doctor decides to send him to a brain specialist in Boston.

“How’s Molly doing?” A.J. asks by way of changing the subject. The surly salesgirl hasn’t worked for him for six or seven years now.

“She’s just been accepted to . . .” And the doctor names a writing program, but A.J. isn’t paying attention. He is thinking about his brain. It strikes him that it is odd to have to use the thing that may not be working to consider the thing that isn’t working. “. . . thinks she’s going to write the Great American Novel. I suppose I have you and Nicole to blame,” the doctor says.

“Full responsibility,” A.J. says.

GLIOBLASTOMA MULTIFORME.

“Would you mind spelling that for me?” A.J. asks. He has not brought anyone to this appointment with him. He has not wanted anyone to know until he was certain. “I’d like to Google it later.”

The cancer is so rare that the oncologist at Massachusetts General Hospital has never seen a case other than in a scholarly publication and once on the television show Grey’s Anatomy.

“What happened to the case in the publication?” A.J. asks.

“Death. Two years,” the oncologist says.

“Two good years?”

“One pretty good year, I’d say.”

A.J. goes for the second opinion. “And on the TV show?”

The oncologist laughs, a noisy chain saw of a laugh designed to be the loudest sound in the room. See, cancer is hilarious. “I don’t think we should be making prognoses based on nighttime soap operas, Mr. Fikry.”

“What happened?”

“I believe the patient had the surgery, lived for an episode or two, thought he was in the clear, proposed to his doctor girlfriend, had a heart attack that was, apparently, unrelated to the brain cancer, and died the next episode.”

“Oh.”

“My sister writes for television, and I believe television writers call this a three-episode arc.”

“So I should expect to live somewhere between three episodes and two years.”

The oncologist chain saw laughs again. “Good. A sense of humor is key. I should say that estimate sounds about right.” The oncologist wants to schedule surgery immediately.

“Immediately?”

“Your symptoms were masked by your seizures, Mr. Fikry. And the scans show that this tumor is quite far advanced. I wouldn’t wait if I were you.”

The surgery will cost nearly as much as the down payment on their house. It is unclear how much A.J.’s meager small-businessperson insurance will cover. “If I have the surgery, how much time does it buy me?” A.J. asks.

“Depends on how much we’re able to get out. Ten years, if we manage clean margins. Two years, maybe, if not. The kind of tumor you have has the annoying tendency to grow back.”

“And if you’re successful removing the thing, am I left a vegetable?”

“We don’t like to use terms like vegetable, Mr. Fikry. But it’s in your left frontal lobe. You’ll likely experience the occasional verbal deficit. Increased aphasia, et cetera. But we won’t take out so much that you aren’t left mostly yourself. Of course, if left untreated, the tumor will grow until the language center of your brain is pretty much gone. Whether we treat or not, this will, in all likelihood, happen eventually anyway.”