The next day, over the phone, her son-in-law bullied a prescription of methadone from the cancer doctor. She heard one side of a lengthy heated exchange while the son-in-law made a persuasive case for methadone. He came on like Clarence Darrow or F. Lee Bailey. It was a commanding performance. She’d never heard of anyone giving a doctor hell before. God bless him for not backing down! On methadone tablets a warm orange glow sprang forth and bloomed like a glorious, time-lapse rose in her abdomen and then rolled through her body in orgasmic waves. The sense of relief shattered all fear and doubt though the pain was still there to some extent. It was still there but—so what? And the methadone tablets lasted a very long time—no more of that every four hours bullshit.

Purple blotches all over her skin, swollen ankles. Pain in her hips and joints. An ambulance trip to the emergency room. “Oh,” they said, “it’s nothing…vascular purpura. Take aspirin. Who’s next?”

Who’s next? Why hadn’t she taken John’s old .38 revolver the very day she heard that voice in the can? Stuck it in the back of her mouth and pulled the trigger? She had no fear of hellfire. She was a decent, moral person but she did not believe. Neither was she the Hamlet type—what lies on the other side? It was probably the same thing that occurred before you were born—zilch. And zilch wasn’t that bad. What was wrong with zilch?

One morning she waited overlong for the son-in-law to get up, almost smashed a candy dish to get him out of bed. Was he going to sleep forever? Actually, he got up at his usual time.

“I can’t. Get. My breath,” she told him.

“You probably have water in your lungs,” the son-in-law said. He knew she didn’t want to go to the clinic. “We’ve got some diuretic. They were Boxer’s when she had congestive heart failure—dog medicine, but it’s the same thing they give humans. Boxer weighed fifty-five pounds. Let me see…take four, no, take three. To be cautious. Do you feel like you have to cough?”

“Yes.” Kaff, kaff, kaff.

“This might draw the water out of your lungs. It’s pretty safe. Try to eat a banana or a potato skin to keep your potassium up. If it doesn’t work, we can go over to the clinic.”

How would he know something like that? But he was right. It worked like magic. She had to pee like crazy but she could breathe. The panic to end all panics was over. If she could only go…number two. Well, the methadone slows you down. “Try some Metamucil,” the son-in-law said.

It worked. Kind of, but it sure wasn’t anything to write home about.

“I can’t breathe. The diuretics aren’t working.”