The booklet was only about thirty pages long. “How much time have you spent studying that?” I asked. It looked dog-eared.

“I just want to make sure that I really know what we’re doing,” my father said. “You and Freddy should probably read this as well, so we can make a final plan.”

I told him I had no intention of reading it. “I’ll do whatever I have to do, and I’ll play along with your plan, but I’m not getting any more involved than that.”

My father seemed not to hear me. “I never imagined that I could find myself in such a situation,” he said. “It’s intolerable. It’s unthinkable.”

I remembered that I had promised my mother that I would take care of him. I decided I should save such energies as I might have for the task until after she was dead. Unfairly, I began to hate my father. After so many years of confidence, he was lapsing into need, and all I did in the face of it was to hate him. I hated Bernard and I hated my father. This made it easier to love my mother.

Helen told me I was really hating myself. When she said that, I hated her.

I couldn’t tell my father how I was growing to dislike him, and so I took it all out on Bernard, whom I was free to loathe from the core of my being, from the center of my heart. I was afraid of my mother’s death and miserable that Bernard had been able to leave me, but I was really most afraid of being left in a world in which I loved no one and nothing. That October, I began to imagine my own death. I imagined it as though it were a form of vengeance.

• • •

The third chemotherapy seemed to be working just then, but we had been through two success stories already, and we knew better than to feel too happy. More than I hated Bernard or my father, I began to hate time. I’ve never stopped. Time is still my enemy. I once said to my mother that I wished that I had a fast-forward button on my life, that I could skip over the darkest hours, and my mother shook her head and said, “You’d just fast-forward your life away.”