Good Harbor

“I think so, too,” Kathleen agreed. “They say it’s not going to hurt, and I’m usually pretty good at putting things like this into perspective, but I’m dreading this tattooing thing so much, I can hardly stand it. Is that silly?”

“Nothing about how rotten you feel is silly. You’re not going to a day spa, for God’s sake. The whole thing sucks.”

Kathleen giggled.

“Excuse my language,” Joyce said. “But even the littlest part of this sucks. And don’t let anyone try to tell you different.”

Kathleen felt better after she hung up. She hadn’t told anyone else how upset she was about the tattoos. Thank goodness Joyce hadn’t tried to cheer her up.

Joyce knew she’d said the right thing — or at least that she hadn’t said the wrong thing. After her first miscarriage, people had said nothing but the wrong thing to her. One ex-friend patted her hand and said she should be glad “Mother Nature was taking care of her mistake.”

The doctor who did the D&C said, “Don’t worry, hon. We’ll get you past this and within a year you’ll have a healthy baby and forget this ever happened.” After he left, the nurse snorted in disgust. “What a crock of horse manure,” she’d said, crossing her large arms. “Losing a baby is a heartbreak that you never forget.” Nurse Phyllis Burkey was a woman Joyce remembered with fierce affection. “It sucks,” Phyllis Burkey said, “and don’t let anyone try to tell you different.”

JUNE

THIS IS ridiculous,” Kathleen said when Buddy insisted they leave two hours before her first appointment. “I don’t want to sit there any longer than I have to.” But when he crossed his arms and lowered his head, she knew he wasn’t going to back down.

She slammed the car door too hard, and they drove through the morning fog and over the bridge without speaking. Just past the Ipswich exit they ran into traffic, and the radio announced a four-car accident a mile ahead. Buddy glanced over, but Kathleen refused to meet his eyes and admit he was right.

She looked out her window and tried not to think of the crash as an omen. Buddy wiped his palms on his pants.

Once they passed the backup, the silent breach between them closed. “The trees are beautiful,” she said softly, staring at the woods, filled in and fully green for the summer.

“It was all that rain we had,” he said, squinting into the rearview mirror.

Dr. Truman had recommended this doctor, but the building did not inspire confidence in Kathleen or Buddy, who remembered its earlier incarnation as St. Jude’s Hospital for Incurables. Metro-North Medical Center was a brutally ugly, low-slung, yellow-brick building. “It still looks like a tire factory,” Buddy muttered.

Inside, the crucifixes were gone and the lobby alcove where Saint Jude had once held court had been turned into a spiky garden of flowering bromeliads. The blue plastic pond was carpeted with pennies. They followed the signs to the elevators and down to the basement, where the gray carpeting exuded the faintly toxic smell of renovation. The magazines were up-to-date, and there wasn’t a speck of dust on the silk flower arrangements. Someone had tried to soften the light in the waiting room by unscrewing a few of the fluorescent bulbs and adding some table lamps, but they only cast weird shadows on the acoustic-tile ceiling.

Kathleen thought she had never seen a bleaker place. Like the waiting room for the best-behaved residents in hell, she thought, and decided Joyce would get a kick out of the image. Maybe Joyce would write a novel and dedicate it to her, as a posthumous memorial.

Kathleen was surprised by that morbid turn in her train of thought. After all, the prognosis was, officially, “excellent.”

Five pairs of eyes looked up as they walked into the waiting room. Two women in their sixties — one

wearing a head scarf against a naked skull — interrupted their whispered conversation and looked first at Kathleen and then at Buddy, trying to work out which one was the patient. An elderly man in a pressed shirt and clip-on tie leaned forward on his cane and smiled a weary welcome. A young black man — a teenager — stared blankly. Beside him, his mother glared protectively. Buddy put his arm around Kathleen and steered her to the desk, where the receptionist greeted them as though Kathleen were a long-lost girlfriend.

“Oh, hi, Mrs. Levine. Marcy will be right out for you.”

“Marcy?” asked Buddy.

“She’s your nurse. She’ll set you up before you meet with Dr. Singh. I’m Carla.” Carla handed them a clipboard. “You can get started on these in the meantime, okay?”

Sitting next to Buddy, Kathleen saw that the forms asked for the same information she had supplied a dozen times in the past weeks: her insurance policy number, her weight, her height, her family history, her social security number, her primary care physician’s name. She couldn’t concentrate and handed Buddy the pen.

Kathleen kept her eyes on the floor. The young man wore an enormous pair of gleaming white Nikes; his mother, a pair of cracked black patent leather flats. The two other women wore identical pairs of sneakers with short white socks. The older man’s tasseled loafers looked expensive.

Buddy’s tan work boots were the same ones he’d been buying at Sears ever since she’d met him. Each pair lasted between three and four years. Kathleen calculated that this would be his eighth or ninth pair since they were married.

Her own blue, beaded moccasins, bought years ago at an outlet store in Maine, suddenly seemed ridiculous. Hal had teased her about them when they were new.

Kathleen wished Hal didn’t live so far away. Her hands were icy, and she could feel her heart pounding. She didn’t know how to manage this fear. She was supposed to feel fortunate. Noninvasive tumor and clean margins. DCIS is barely cancer at all. It was the right breast, so the heart is clear of the ray. And she was left-handed. All good news.

Then she recalled Joyce’s “This sucks” and smiled grimly.

“Mrs. Levine?”

The voice caught her by surprise, and she sprang to her feet. A pretty Asian woman wearing a red dress introduced herself as Marcy Myers and extended her hand, holding on to Kathleen’s until the meaning of her grasp was abundantly clear. Oh, for heaven’s sake, Kathleen silently scolded herself. She’s just being nice.