Episode3
1109 Words
The motel on Fifth Street smelled like old carpet and recycled air.
The room cost sixty two dollars a night. I had one hundred and thirty dollars in my wallet because my joint account card had stopped working at the gas station on the way over and when I called the bank the automated voice told me the account had been frozen pending a legal settlement.
He had done it before he even told me.
I sat on the edge of the bed in that small room and I looked at the water stain on the ceiling and I felt the illness doing what it always did when I was stressed. A low persistent throb behind my eyes. The familiar ache in my joints that was always worse when I was tired. My lower back talking to me in that steady unhappy way it had been for weeks.
My body never let me forget it was sick. Not even for one afternoon of personal catastrophe.
I called Audrey.
She picked up on the second ring.
"Hey Nora, wassup”
"I need you," I said. That was all. My voice cracked on the second word and I couldn't add anything else.
“Are you okay dear?” She asked but I didn’t answer
"Address," she said.
I gave it to her.
She didn't ask another question . That was the thing about Audrey James. Fourteen years of friendship and she had never once made me wait for her.
She arrived forty minutes later with a bag of warm food and the particular look on her face that meant she was prepared to destroy someone on my behalf. She sat beside me on that cheap mattress and I told her everything. The doctor. The diagnosis, not the time I have left, I haven’t told her that. Coming home. The ring on Vivienne's finger. The frozen account. The papers I had signed.
She sat very still through all of it.
Audrey went quiet when she was truly angry. The louder the injustice the stiller she became and right now she was extremely still.
"He froze the account," she said. "Before."
"Before."
"And she pushed you first."
"She did."
"That good for nothing b***h" She nodded once, slowly, like she was making a decision. Then she turned to face me fully. "Now tell me what the doctor said. You said it was important."
My throat tightened.
I had been so consumed by everything else that the actual news, the news that had started this whole horrible day, had almost receded. Almost.
"Audrey." My voice broke straight down the middle. "He said I have three to six months."
Her face crumpled.
She grabbed my hands hard.
"No," she whispered.
"The lupus. My kidneys. He said the treatments stopped working."
"Nora." She pulled me into her arms and I let her because I was so tired of holding myself upright. "No. That is not the end of your story. I refuse. I absolutely refuse."
I cried into her shoulder like I had not cried with another person in a very long time. The full ugly weight of it. The diagnosis and the divorce and the room that smelled like other people's sad days.
When I finally pulled back my whole face was wet and I probably looked terrible and I did not care at all.
"There are experimental treatments," I said, wiping my face with the back of my hand. "The doctor gave me a pamphlet. The cost is something I cannot even look at directly."
"How much."
I told her.
She winced. Then she sat up straighter.
"I know a doctor," she said.
"Audrey."
"Listen to me. His name is Dr. Steven Nakamura. He came back to town about two months ago. His mother is American, his father is Japanese, he trained abroad for years and he specializes in exactly this kind of thing. Autoimmune complications. Experimental regenerative treatment." She leaned forward and her voice had that particular urgency it got when she was certain about something. "People are talking about him, Nora. Real results. Not pamphlet results."
"I can't afford a regular doctor right now."
"We open a fundraiser."
"No."
"Nora."
"No." I pulled my hands back. "I am not putting my illness on the internet for strangers to feel sorry for me. I still have some dignity left. I'd like to keep it."
"You have your dignity and you have sixty dollars and a disease that doesn't care about either." She was not unkind about it. She just looked at me with the steady honesty that I loved and occasionally hated about her. "Asking for help is not weakness. You have given so much to other people. Let people give to you."
I looked at the ceiling stain.
I thought about the notebook in my bag. About the three story investigations I had been building before I got married, before the illness took most of my energy, before Damien convinced me quietly and consistently that chasing those stories was not practical right now.
There was a pharmaceutical investigation in that notebook that I had been building for eight months before I set it down. Sources. Documents. A drug approval timeline with holes in it that had never been properly explained. A story that could change things for the kind of patients I had become.
I had put it down.
I had put everything down.
And now I had three to six months and a notebook and nothing left to lose.
"Open the fundraiser," I said.
Audrey had her phone out before I finished the sentence.
I looked down at my hands. The joint swelling was worse today, I could feel the tightness of it. My ex husband had a new fiancée. My body was failing. I had sixty two dollars and a motel room.
But I also had stories that nobody had told yet.
And I had a very specific score to settle with the version of myself I had allowed to disappear.
"Audrey," I said quietly.
"Still here." She was typing.
"I'm going to get better." My voice was low but it was not small. "I'm going to find a way to pay for the treatment and I am going to get better and I am going to finish everything I put down when I married him. The career I abandoned because someone kept telling me it wasn't practical." My jaw tightened. "I had a whole life before I became Damien Green's wife. And I want it back."
Audrey stopped typing.
She looked at me.
Then she smiled. Small and fierce.
"There you are," she said.
She went back to typing.
- Writer
