Then there was a lull in the waiting. The doctor came down to tell us that the news was good, and as he spoke the sun poured in like butterscotch. He came to tell us that my mother’s cancer had almost entirely disappeared. He came to tell us that only a rigorous search on his part had located the few resistant cells. He came to tell us that there was no tumor mass, that you could not be closer to being healthy without being in perfect health. He came to tell us that what was left would wash away with a little bit more chemotherapy, the tiniest bit of chemotherapy, minor, easy, nearly unnoticeable chemotherapy. How can I describe the glowing enthusiastic optimistic vocabulary that doctor used when he came into the enormous bright hospital room with its roses all in bloom and told us that my mother was still dying? Because this much was clear to us all: if some of the cancer was left after that agonizing nine-month treatment, then all the good predictions that had been made over those months were wrong. If so much as a shadow of the cancer had survived those traumatizing attacks, then we had been living in false hope. “What’s left will wash away in no time,” said the doctor, and we all remembered hearing him say those words after the first surgery. We knew how often first-line chemotherapy works, and how seldom second-line chemotherapy works. The upbeat tone the doctor had used was not far from the tone that someone in an older profession could have used to say that souls in heaven are happier than those on earth. All I know for sure is that the slow minutes that had seemed like prisons until that moment seemed now to be inside of us instead of out, to be pressing from the center, like a sustained and ripping explosion, like some multiplication of our own flesh, like cancer itself.