I arrived home, my briefcase full of nano-notes, to find Matt with a new brochure and notes of his own. External Beam Radiation Therapy. Not a science fiction topic, but Matt’s choice of treatment.
“I think this is going to be it,” he said, waving the thin pamphlet. He handed me a cup of espresso and the booklet.
I sat next to him and leafed through pages of glossy color photographs of the linear accelerator that would generate high-energy X rays and focus them on Matt’s body. For many years I’d lived about an hour away from SLAC, the famous linear accelerator at Stanford University in California. To me linear accelerators were the tools of physics—forcing collisions that would break particles apart and reveal their inner structure. Or create little parts that weren’t there before the collision, some said.
Now I was forced to remember another use of the accelerators, a tradition begun by E. O. Lawrence himself, inventor of the cyclotron. I recalled reading an anecdote about how he often kept the machine running all night to produce enough radioisotopes for California hospitals. Lawrence’s mother was one of the first to benefit, receiving radiation treatments for her uterine cancer. The end of the story made me hopeful—Lawrence’s mother was cured and lived another twenty years, into her eighties.
“The treatment is five days a week,” Matt said. “It’s outpatient, over seven or eight weeks. They take about fifteen minutes, and it’s painless.”
I breathed deeply, absorbing the information. “Good. When do we begin?” I tried to make it sound like just another item on the scheduling agenda, still wrestling with the right tone to show Matt support, as opposed to needing it myself.
“There’s some preliminary work, they call it a simulation, where they pinpoint where the problem is. Check out the centerfold … they’re going to make a Styrofoam cast just for me.” Matt opened the leaflet, still in my hands, to show me the mold that supports the patient’s back, pelvis, and thighs. “I hope they have a big enough piece of material to take care of me. What’s that stuff made of anyway?”
“I think it’s an extruded polystyrene material. I can check.” Not that I was tense, missing facetious questions.
“Come here,” Matt said, patting his lap. I hadn’t been able to sit on anyone’s lap since the age of seven. But the gesture did lighten my mood.
Jean arrived sooner than originally planned, before Matt’s scheduled simulation appointment with Styrofoam. I’d never gotten around to calling her, but I tried to welcome her warmly. I’d set up the guest room with meticulous detail. I cleared out two dresser drawers and half a closet for her two-night stay; I dusted thoroughly, put fresh flowers on the bedside table, and pencils and paper by the phone in case she needed to keep her real estate business going. I plugged a hair dryer into her bathroom socket, fluffed the towels, and installed a night-light. Worthy of a four-star rating, I thought. I quickly learned there were five-star arrangements, and I’d fallen short.
“I thought you’d have an extra robe,” she said, checking the closet. Strike one, but I rushed to get her one of mine, happily out of the laundry. Too big, she let me know, with a make-do shrug. “And I never use perfumed soap.” She used her thumb and middle finger, her pinky sticking up at a forty-five-degree angle to her knuckles, to pick up the bar. I’d paid more for that one bar of soap than for the six-pack of the grocery-store brand I used myself. Nevertheless, strike two.
Jean was ten years younger than Matt and slightly taller than both of us, or it might have been her more slender build that made her seem so. Or her towering personality. Otherwise, she had the same dark, Italian, baggy-eyed look, expertly de-emphasized with makeup Rose would have approved of.
She’d brought photos of her children, even though we’d seen them only a month or so earlier. “We just don’t see you as much anymore, Matty,” she said, her heavy-lidded eyes drifting in my direction. Nasty Gloria, cheating Jean’s children out of their only uncle.
Matt gave her a brotherly smile. “You’ve always said that, Jean.”
My hero.
“Well, you know what I mean, big brother. Delicious dinner. All my favorites,” she said, patting her enviably flat stomach, fully aware that Matt had prepared the meal. I was convinced that if she’d seen me line the vegetables next to the beef in the ceramic roasting pan, she would have choked on a parsnip fiber.
Strike three came with coffee after dinner, prompting me to walk off the field.
“I’m not happy that you’re still working, Matt, with your … health … and all,” Jean said from her post in our best easy chair.