He looked at her. I could see his whole demeanor change. There was going to be no sugarcoating as long as Roxy was there. He was back to being a scientist.
“I can’t give you an exact prognosis yet.”
“What stage is she in?” Roxy demanded.
He looked at me again and then back at her. “She’s stage four.”
“The worst,” Roxy muttered. He nodded. “Did she neglect herself, her symptoms?”
“I’m not her primary,” Dr. Hoffman said. “You’d have to speak to her gynecologist, but I wouldn’t jump to any conclusions. Everyone’s different.”
“Yes, everyone’s different,” Roxy said dryly.
“We’ll do the best we can. She’ll be here a while,” he told me. “Right now, she’s still in recovery. I’d say give her a few hours before trying to visit. We’ll keep her there a few days before moving her.”
“How long do you give her?” Roxy asked.
His face hardened. I was sure he didn’t like Roxy’s tone. The children of most of his patients were nowhere as cold or as tough and surely didn’t ask such a question so quickly. For a few fleeting seconds, he was probably wondering about the relationships, but I could see he didn’t want to spend any of his time on that. It wasn’t the world he worked in. He looked at me again, obviously deciding whether to be evasive. Something told him that Roxy wouldn’t let him get away with it.
“Fifteen percent at stage four make it to five years,” he replied. “I can’t tell you much more than that.”
“That’s enough. Thank you,” Roxy said, rising.
Dr. Hoffman nodded. I looked up at Roxy. I was feeling a bit dizzy. All of these terrible things had been said so quickly. I think she saw it and reached down to take my arm to get me to my feet. None of it felt real to me. It was as if I were in a dream.
“C’mon, M,” she said.
I glanced at the doctor. I could see his eyes narrow, his face fill with disapproval.
Roxy didn’t speak again until we were almost back to the lobby. “If I didn’t push him, he’d have you believing in Santa Claus,” she said.
“I don’t understand.”
She stopped and spun me around. “What don’t you understand, M? Mama might have been sick quite a while. Maybe if she had taken better medical care of herself, it would have made a difference. I don’t know, and neither does he. You see how quickly he came to the defense of another doctor. Everyone’s different, he said. What a catchall for everything.”
“But what was all that about five years?”
She softened. “Where are you going now?”
“Going? I don’t know. Where would I go?”
“Right. Where would you go?” she asked herself. She looked at her watch. “I’ve got to see someone. Go home and take a shower or something. Fix yourself up a little. You look too drab. We’ll be back here in two hours and visit her, and then I’ll take you to dinner.”
“Dinner?”
“We’ve got to eat, M, and if you go in to visit her looking so overwhelmed and terrified . . .”
“Okay, okay, I get it,” I said sharply.
“Maybe you do. Maybe you’re smarter than I was at your age.” She looked at her watch and said, “I’ll meet you in the lobby again in exactly two hours.”
“Okay.”
She started away. Suddenly, she paused and turned back to me. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve been on my own so long that I forgot what it was like to have someone you cared about and who cared about you. I don’t mean to sound so insensitive.”
She walked on.
That was the nicest thing she had said to me since we had met again, I thought, and I walked after her, but she was going too fast for me to catch up.