I said I’d have to work out a schedule, and got off the phone, and put on a new shirt Bernard had bought me. We were going to dinner with Claire and Michael. We were going to celebrate quite satisfactorily.

When I spoke to Freddy, the next day, we laughed about it all. “My professor told me we should be really thrilled about this. Seriously. So now it’s back to full-time medical school,” he said. “No more excuses for bad exam results. No more crazy trips to New York for dinner. We’re free!”

• • •

If the following year seemed to go by in ten minutes, that first winter of chemotherapy lasted a decade. My mother’s test results (there were results every two weeks) continued to point to her being cured, and I did not entertain the possibility that they were lying. We all felt sorry for my mother because of the discomfort of her therapy, but gave little weight to the fear of her disease. The knowing doctors told us that it was virtually certain that the cancer would not linger, and so death itself, to which we had begun to become accustomed, seemed to shrink and recede. At least it shrank away from me. Only my mother held on to the thought of her own death with what I took to be a morbid fixation. She operated at a low level of depression, like a cloud-swelled weather system. She hated her doctors, and she hated the hospital, and she hated her treatments, and she hated all the disciplined isolation. She hated the chemicals. “You should see the stuff they’re giving me now,” she said. “It’s the most hideous shade of orange, about the color of those beach chairs we had when you were little. Remember? The ones that discolored in the basement? You just watch it drip into your arm and wait to see whether you’ll change color yourself.”