The Falling Woman: A Novel Read online

  His own flying career started out like gangbusters. Though his family could hardly afford vacations, his parents didn’t flinch at paying for his flying lessons. He soloed at sixteen, obtained his pilot’s license on his seventeenth birthday. He bagged groceries to pay for fuel and flew almost every weekend. But then disaster struck; almost as quickly as he soared through those early milestones, he came roaring back to earth. On summer break from college, he flew a check ride with an instructor. He’d taken a Cessna up to almost nine thousand feet when the world before him went black. He couldn’t see. The instructor grabbed the control wheel, cursed at him, and flew back home. Two hours later, a doctor said his heart valve wasn’t closing properly. Radford didn’t care about his health; he just wanted to know what could be done to fix it so he could get back to flying.

  “Son,” the doctor said, “with this condition, you can’t fly.”

  The blow felt tragic, a thunderbolt deadly enough to demolish his dreams. It was Wendy who saved him. At the time, they weren’t even dating. They just played intramural softball together. She was the team’s second baseman, and seemed to him off-limits, a nursing student with a serious boyfriend. They had talked quite a bit, so she knew about his passion for flying. Then, when an NTSB recruiter came on campus one spring day, she grabbed an application, brought it to his apartment, and waited for him to fill it out. Shortly after that, her boyfriend was out and she was dating Radford.

  At the NTSB, he poured his love of flying into studying crashes, a grotesque reincarnation of his original desire, but if he couldn’t fly, at least he was working in the aviation field. He had a nose for it too, a clarity of focus and detachment that let him thrive amidst the chaos of an accident. But behind his competence, behind the macho facade and bureaucratic bullshit that went into the work, was a boy who still dreamed of flying.

  Quartering out of the southwest, the simulated wind pushed the simulated plane’s nose off the simulated centerline. Radford applied more rudder to the slip. Bright green trees swayed and silvered in the breeze as ground rose up to meet the descending plane.

  One more approach, and he’d feel confident signing off on the report. The hour was almost up. His phone buzzed again. The wings shuddered in an updraft of simulated air. He pressed the rudder harder, but the plane slowed toward stall speed. Don’t let out the slip, he thought, refusing to ease up on the approach. The stall warning horn blared in the cockpit. Fifty feet above the ground, a football field away now. Radford killed the power. Ground rushed toward the lowered wing. Sunlight blared through the slowing propeller, creating a shimmering distraction, beautiful but vertiginous. Did the kid see this too just before the end? Did his eyes and thoughts drift just long enough to lose sight of the mark? The plane leveled off, the nose straightened, twenty feet above the trees.

  Radford fought the urge to push the throttle, resisting a deep instinct. The stall warning blared. The control wheel shook. Then the nose dropped and the simulated plane hit the branches. The propeller snapped, and clods of dirt, leaf, and bark raced past the computer screen.

  3

  That spring morning, Erin and Doug Geraghty sat in the oncology conference room at Johns Hopkins, waiting to see her doctor. She was thinking about Tory and trying not to dwell on the news she was soon to hear. Her older daughter (their inside joke; Tory arrived two minutes before her twin sister, Claire) had called the night before, asking to hire a tutor to help her get through the last month of college algebra. Doug had grabbed the phone and suggested she just have her sister help: “Christ, sweetie, Claire has had straight As in math since seventh grade.” His suggestion sent Tory into a rage, which Erin had to placate. But for all the tears and shouting, Erin had welcomed the distraction. Anything to feel normal again, anything to get her mind off her illness. But like all distractions, it was short-lived. This morning, her scans were back.

  It was all a bit much, the two of them waiting in this empty room meant to hold fifty people. No one had even offered them coffee or water. Doug paced along the perimeter of the horseshoe-shaped table while she tried to pull up Lehigh’s academic tutoring web page on her phone. If the news was bad, as she expected it would be, she and Doug would drive the three hours up to Pennsylvania and take the girls out to their favorite Mexican restaurant for dinner. Erin made her husband promise, if that was the case, they wouldn’t say a word. They would just spend the night with the girls and pretend like nothing was wrong.

  “This room is absurd,” she said, trying to sound light, sound confident. “Why couldn’t we just meet in an exam room or in the cafeteria?”

  Erin looked around the large room as if noticing it for the first time. On the walls, framed photographs of patients—she presumed these were the ones who made it—smiled down at her. Their cheerful optimism only mocked the twenty-pound ball of dread sitting in her stomach.

  “I’m scared,” she said to Doug.

  He went to the window and pried open the blinds. She knew her husband was terrified too, but that he would never reveal it to her.

  Had something eluded her in life? Had some vital piece of her existence been left out? She’d been telling herself she was ready for whatever was coming. For months she’d girded herself against the worst news. But it was all a lie. Every second they waited only added to her terror.

  The tutoring-center web page appeared on her phone, but when she clicked on the “Schedule Services” tab, the page crashed.

  “God damn it,” she said. “They don’t even have decent Wi-Fi here. How can we expect them to cure cancer?”

  Doug didn’t even laugh. She’d have felt better if he’d only laugh a little, but he kept pacing behind the table.

  “Think positively,” he said, which was all he ever said anymore, as if good thoughts and a positive attitude could overcome the cancer. He’d read all the books, studied journals. His belief in miracle cures rivaled any preacher’s, though neither of them was religious at all.

  After another ten minutes, the door opened and a young doctor entered the room. The man looked like he belonged in a freshman comp class with their daughters rather than holding the charts that would determine her future.

  “I’m Dr. Orenstein, the oncology chief resident,” he said. The young doctor glanced at Doug and then held out his hand to Erin. She had never seen him before but noticed that his skin was cold and clammy and that his breath smelled like stale coffee. A small stain on his lab coat’s lapel needed to be daubed with bleach. She resisted the urge to ask him how old he was. She smiled.

  “You must be tired from carrying all my charts,” she said, trying to put him at ease.

  Dr. Orenstein apologized for the delays and then asked her a few questions about side effects, which she answered mechanically. Since the last round of chemo, she’d been feeling better, almost normal again, she said. There’d been a low-grade infection in her right lung, but other than that, the postchemo time had been a welcome reprieve. She was tired of medical questions, sick to death of what she spoke of as “doctor talk.” The doctor finished his inquiry and told them that the staff oncologist would be joining them shortly.

  “Do you know the results?” she asked.

  Dr. Orenstein said only that they would have to wait to go over her results with the attending physician.

  “All those charts and data points and blood tests,” Doug said, “but no one will give us a straight answer.”

  “There’s a protocol,” she said, interceding on behalf of the young doctor. She knew it did no good to be unpleasant to the overworked doctors and nurses. “The same way there were protocols for any transaction.”

  Doug frowned. “This isn’t a commercial transaction.”

  Dr. Orenstein quickly glanced down at the charts.

  How many times had she and Doug sat in similar conference rooms over the years? Buying a car. Selling a house. Listening to a career counselor talk about the girls’ SAT scores. But this time, they wouldn’t leave with an extended warranty on a shiny
new SUV. This time, they wouldn’t wonder about when they’d close escrow. This time, they wouldn’t walk across the street for a drink. No, this conference room, however similar it looked to the others, carried finality. And she knew, even without Doug’s angst, that the protocol meant the chief resident had to wait until the staff physician arrived.

  The young doctor adjusted his gold-rimmed glasses on the bridge of his nose. Faint acne scars were visible on his forehead. She wondered about him, about where he’d studied, why he’d chosen to go into cancer medicine. She tried to picture him as a child, before the serious work of life and death became his routine.

  “Do you read much poetry, Dr. Orenstein?” she asked. “Lately, it’s almost all I read.”

  The chief resident looked up but didn’t answer her question.

  “They say that the soul reaches for language at the end,” she said. “The scariest things in life, those we can’t describe. It’s why children are so afraid at night. The demons and monsters in their dreams have no names.”

  The doctor remained mute. Doug continued to pace.

  When had she become a person who spoke that way? She honestly didn’t know. But lately, she’d stopped caring about what people thought, stopped filtering herself. There was a profound freedom to being on the brink of death, one of the unexpected fringe benefits.

  Doug fiddled with the plastic wand attached to the window’s blinds. When he twisted the wand clockwise, the room darkened, and when he twisted it the other way, the room brightened.

  “Will you sit with me?” she said, firmly enough that Doug moved away from the window and sat next to her. “God, I could use a drink. I’d give anything for a glass of wine or a splash of whiskey.” Finally, the doctor laughed, and even Doug managed a smile.

  Her husband had taken the whole day off from work, expecting, no doubt, that the news, when it came, would ripple across the rest of their afternoon, if not the rest of their lives. But she didn’t want to spend the day dwelling in sadness. Were she not so physically weak, were she not so uncertain of what was ahead, she’d have much preferred to do this alone.

  “How much longer?” Doug asked. His voice was sharper this time. She squeezed his hand tightly. The young doctor glanced at his watch.

  “Any minute now,” Dr. Orenstein said.

  How many patients had he already lost? She imagined his career running out in front of him. She pictured him at parties, smiling, laughing, and telling stories about his successes and failures. Her father had been a doctor. She understood how death became routine. Growing up, she hated the way her father’s voice would change when he took a call in their living room. How he could be watching a ball game and cursing at an umpire one second and then delivering terrible news the next. Your mother has gone into congestive heart failure, he’d say, standing in the kitchen in his flannel pajamas. That false gravity, that rented solemnity, emotion cut off from genuine empathy. She loved the man but hated his work.

  Doug fiddled with his phone. The doctor stared at the charts. She wished someone would tell a joke, anything to lighten the heaviness in the room. She tried to think of one, but nothing came to mind. Doug looked old, tired, like a shadow of the man she’d married.

  Had they just grown old too fast? Or were they always this way? She tried to recall a time when she and Doug had fun together, a time when she saw passion from this man she’d spent half her life with. Nothing came to her. All along, there were hints, uncomfortable silences. Gaps hidden behind busy schedules and bedroom doors. A long time ago, long before she became sick, she started to feel stuck, trapped in a life that had taken on momentum of its own but that she felt detached from. More and more she wrestled with doubts. Was this it? Why were her passions constrained by protocols? It wasn’t Doug’s fault alone; that she knew. He’d been a saint through all this. But now, facing the end, she wondered about all that could have been.

  The door finally opened and her oncologist appeared.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” Dr. Shi said.

  Dr. Evelyn Shi shook Doug’s hand, gave Erin a small hug. The doctor was reed thin and short, with long straight hair that always reminded Erin, inexplicably, of a witch. The woman had no sense of style. Red ankle boots, nylons, and a skirt that seemed more suited for a picnic or a yard party. Her makeup was too thick, her glasses too cheap, her teeth too yellow, her voice far too chirpy. She looked like she worked at a nail salon, but she’d done her residency at Sloan Kettering, research at NIH. No doctor in the state came more highly recommended for treating non-functioning pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors. And Erin loved her. In a strange way, Erin wanted to get better so as not to disappoint her doctor.

  Dr. Shi glanced at her notes. Was she just seeing them for the first time now?

  Erin squeezed Doug’s hand. She’d told herself again that she was ready, ready for whatever was coming. But she wasn’t. Her calm demeanor, her brave face, it was all an act. Maybe it always had been. Maybe the whole goddamn thing was one great big act.

  Dr. Shi studied the chart as if it were a sacred text, an Assyrian scroll dug from a cave after two thousand years. The oncologist’s dark eyes scanned the pages from behind mocha-framed glasses. At last, she looked up.

  “I’m cautiously optimistic,” Dr. Shi said. The thinnest, palest smile broke across the doctor’s lips. “The tumor has responded well to the chemo. Your scans look clean.”

  The words came as if from a great, long tunnel. Erin blinked. Waited for a “but.” Instead, Dr. Shi offered another thin smile.

  “We aren’t out of the woods yet,” she said. “But these results are encouraging.”

  What the hell was this woman, with her ruby-colored boots, actually saying? Inexplicably, a fiery rage swelled in Erin’s chest. She felt the way a mouse must when tossed by a cat. She’d prepared for bad news, for the worst news. But this? It felt like hope had just tackled her to the ground.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “I’m in remission?”

  “No,” Dr. Shi said. “Remission is very different. This is a plateau. A truce. Full remission is extremely rare with your type of cancer. But we have bought you some time, which will allow us to try some other treatments.”

  As the news began to sink in, a blanket of meager optimism spread over the cold, grim reality of the past six months. Doug had questions, and began asking them in rapid-fire mode, without pausing for answers. Erin didn’t even hear what he was saying.

  “I know I’m not making much sense,” he said.

  “Dr. Orenstein will answer all of your questions,” Dr. Shi said. “But you have to know, while the news today is good, this isn’t over.”

  Goddamn oncologists. Were they ever happy? A dragon hid behind every word, every test. She wondered what these two doctors were like in real life. But still, she would walk out of that room without receiving a final death notice. Something shifted, deep within, a tectonic plate of her soul.

  “But the news,” Doug said. “This is good news?”

  “This is as good as it gets with pancreatic cancer,” Dr. Shi said.

  And Dr. Orenstein, the young chief resident, looked delighted. These doctors were like inquisitors, Erin thought, pleased that six months of their medical torture had paid off. She was converted. Dr. Shi closed the file and stood. Doug thanked her, and the doctor touched his shoulder, the feeblest expression of compassion. Erin said nothing, too stunned to speak.

  “Congratulations,” Dr. Orenstein said, turning to her like she’d just won a medal. The news filled the room like the milky light from a full moon. A governor’s commutation, the execution stayed at the stroke of midnight. What came next?

  Doug peppered Dr. Orenstein with questions. Would they start another cycle soon? Did she need more radiation? What were the five-year survival rates? The interrogation continued for a solid ten minutes, but Erin had stopped listening. She knew one thing with certainty now, a conviction forming in her gut even before she had the words to explain. It was time to sor
t out her life, figure out how to use what was left of it.

  “No more,” she said at last. “Let’s go.”

  Doug and the young doctor both turned, as if they’d forgotten she was in the room.

  “I have more questions,” Doug said.

  “Now,” she said. “We are leaving now.”

  She had to get out of the room, out of the hospital. She needed to breathe real air. When they exited the hospital, a brilliant Maryland sun scorched her eyes. She’d forgotten and left her sunglasses in the car.

  “What should we do?” Doug asked. She knew what he meant. He wanted to celebrate, to drive up to Pennsylvania and take the girls out to dinner.

  “Take me home,” she said. “Just take me home.”

  4

  After a week of long nights to finish the report, once again Charlie Radford arrived home almost two hours late. Yeager greeted him at the door, the dog wagging his tail. A dinner plate sat on the counter, wrapped in plastic. Wendy was nowhere in sight, and their two-bedroom condo sounded eerily still. He grabbed a beer and microwaved his dinner.

  She was angry, and he knew that he deserved his wife’s ire, but at that moment, he needed her compassion more. Tomorrow, he’d present his work to Dickie Gray, and he was as nervous as a teenager taking the SATs. Only Wendy could settle his nerves. She was the person who could set his world back on its axis. He carried his plate and beer toward the stairs. Yeager followed at his heels.

  Cardboard boxes lined the living room of their Alexandria condo. As with most things, Wendy raced ahead of herself, packing up their belongings before they’d even put an offer on a house. They’d lived in this condo for three years, and he thought of it as their home. But Wendy didn’t intend to spend her life in a two-bedroom walk-up, despite its easy access to the restaurants and bars of Old Town. She wanted a house, with a yard and a cul-de-sac and an elm tree, a place for their future child to ride a bike, sell lemonade, play hopscotch on the sidewalk, and jump through sprinklers. And as much as he loved the idea, such a vision also meant a longer commute, a yard to mow, a basement to clean, a leaky roof, paint to deal with, wood chips, weeds, and dirty diapers. Moving meant an end to the life he’d come to enjoy. What’s more, he still hadn’t agreed on having a kid. Once upstairs, he could hear water running behind the closed bathroom door.