Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(145)
“What I need,” Bibi replied, “is two cheeseburgers and a pizza. I’m starving. A glucose diet sucks. Sorry I smell so bad.”
“You don’t smell bad,” the nurse assured her.
“Well, see, I still have a nose, so while it’s kind of you to say I don’t smell, I really do. By the way, I don’t have brain cancer anymore. We need to do all those tests again, so you can let me go home.” She winked at Pax and said, “You look delicious. What are you grinning about?”
Just then a night-duty intern arrived, as did another nurse, and a discussion ensued about whether or not Bibi still had cancer, who had the authority to order the tests, and whether they would have to wait until morning. Technicians were on duty to do everything from X rays to MRIs; they had to be there for the ER, which never closed. Murphy and Nancy somehow got the idea that the problem was related to insurance-company reluctance to pay for off-hour tests, and they declared that they would pay cash, to hell with the insurance company. Pax said he would pay for the tests, and Pogo said he would sell his damn car to pay for them. But finally everyone was made to understand that the insurance-company thing was a misunderstanding and that no one would have to pay cash. The head nurse on that shift reached Dr. Sanjay Chandra by phone. He expressed doubt that Bibi could know that she was cancer-free, doubt that it was even possible for gliomatosis cerebri to go into remission, but he ordered the catheter removed and the tests performed after Bibi spoke with him and told him she was symptom-free.
When she got out of bed, her mother grabbed her, embraced her with the ferocity of a Realtor who never let a client get away. Nancy was crying and laughing, and her kisses were wet, and she said, “How can this be, how can this happen?” And Bibi said, “After all, it won’t be what it’ll be,” and into her mother’s confusion, she said, “I love you so much, Mom, I always have, I always will.” Murphy was there, it became a group hug, and he was a bigger mess than Nancy. In spite of all his thrashing the waves, lacerating and shredding and riding the behemoths with no fear, Big Kahuna of his generation, he was nonetheless a softie, all heart and as tender as a kitten. He couldn’t speak, except to say her name, over and over, as if he had thought he’d never say it again to her alive. Pogo, too, looking at her with those blue eyes that melted other women, but with a love as pure as any that anyone had ever known, her brother from another mother, adoring her as she adored him. “Beebs,” he said, and she said, “Dude,” and he held her just long enough to convince himself that she was as real as she had always been.
In sweaty and rumpled pajamas, hair wild and tangled from being scrunched under the electro cap, certain that her breath could put a coat of rust on polished iron, Bibi nevertheless fell into Paxton’s arms, and he folded her to him so that the hospital room seemed almost to disappear. She said that she was a mess, and he said that she was the best thing he’d ever seen, and she said she stank, and he said she smelled like springtime, and damn could that man kiss.
When an orderly arrived with the gurney and Bibi was transferred to it, along with her IV rack, she said to him, “I’m sorry I stink,” and he said, “No, hey, I’ve smelled a lot worse.”
Pax and Pogo and Nancy and Murph violated hospital rules by accompanying Bibi to every test venue, although they couldn’t all fit in the same elevator with the gurney and the hospital personnel. Without asking permission, the four of them gathered with the MRI technician and watched through the big window as Bibi was conveyed into the ominous tunnel, waving at them as she disappeared headfirst.
Everything went pretty much this time as it had when she had imagined being cured by the night visitor with the golden retriever and had imagined being retested with astonishing results. When Dr. Chandra came to her room past midnight with a retinue of fascinated physicians, he said nearly the same thing he had said when she had imagined this meeting: that nothing in his medical experience had prepared him for this, that he wasn’t able to explain it, that it wasn’t possible, but that she was entirely free of cancer.
She hugged him as she had done before, though this time she apologized for reeking like a pig. He told her that given her impossible brain-wave patterns and now this miraculous remission, all manner of specialists would want to study her. Although she knew the reason for her cure, and though she intended to keep it secret within her little family, she agreed to make herself available in the weeks ahead. After apologizing in advance, she hugged him again.
Dr. Chandra looked happy and wonderstruck when he said, “On Wednesday, when I told you that you had at most a year to live, you said, ‘We’ll see.’ Do you remember?”
“Yes. Yes, I do.”
“It’s almost as if you knew then that you’d be going home soon.”
A post-midnight discharge was not unprecedented, but nearly so. Nevertheless, by 2:25 in the morning, Bibi was at her parents’ home in Corona del Mar and in the shower, the water cranked up as hot as she could tolerate. Bliss.
No one was sleepy, least of all Bibi, who’d had days of sleep or something like it. Pax and Pogo had stopped at a twenty-four-hour market on the way, to buy ground sirloin, hamburger buns, tomatoes, lettuce, and Maui onions. Because she’d been without solid food for more than four days, Bibi had been warned to start with a soft diet, but she refused to think that gastric distress could lay her low when cancer couldn’t. By the time she came downstairs to the kitchen, her parents, her beau, and her best friend were singing along with the Beach Boys, drinking Corona, and grilling monster burgers with all the trimmings.