“Can we go back to the room?” he said to me quietly. “Please. I’ll tell you everything. I swear to God, Erin. But not here.”
We walked back through the lobby in silence. Past the animatronic bear. Past the fudge shop and the arcade. Dripping on the carpet.
Dylan held my hand the whole way. He hadn’t held my hand in public since he was seven.
In the suite, I turned on the TV in Dylan’s little cabin nook and put on a movie. Some cartoon about talking cars. I gave him a juice box and a bag of chips from the vending machine and pulled the little curtain across the nook.
“Mom and Dad need to talk for a few minutes,” I told him. “Grown-up stuff. Okay?”
“Is Dad going to die?”
It came out of him so fast and so plain that I couldn’t breathe again.
“I don’t know what’s happening yet, baby,” I said. I wasn’t going to lie to him. “But I’m going to find out. Right now. And then I’ll tell you. Okay?”
He nodded. He looked at the TV without seeing it.
I went into the bathroom, where Mark was sitting on the closed lid of the toilet in his wet board shorts and his wet white shirt.
I closed the door.
“Take it off,” I said.
He looked up at me.
“Take the shirt off, Mark. I want to see all of it.”
He pulled the shirt over his head slowly. Wincing a little when he lifted his right arm.
He turned around on the toilet seat so I could see his back.
In the bright bathroom light, it was worse.
The long scar on his shoulder blade. The patch of grafted skin in the middle of it, smooth and strange. The smaller scar under his arm, where you could still see the tiny dots from the stitches. The rash spreading out across his skin, red and angry, all the way down his spine.
There was a small round bandage on the inside of his left elbow. The kind they put on you after they draw blood. Or after an IV.
I sat down on the edge of the bathtub. My legs wouldn’t hold me up.
“Tell me,” I said.
He stayed turned around. Facing the shower curtain. He couldn’t look at me.
“It’s melanoma,” he said.
He told me everything, sitting on the toilet lid in a hotel bathroom in Sandusky, Ohio, with his back to me, while our son watched cartoons on the other side of the door.
In February, I’d been in the shower, and I’d noticed a mole on his back. A dark spot on his right shoulder blade, a little bigger than a pencil eraser, with uneven edges. I’d said, “You should get that looked at.” I remembered saying it. I didn’t remember ever asking him again.
He went. In March. To a dermatologist I didn’t know about, a Dr. Kessler, on his lunch break.
Dr. Kessler took a biopsy. It came back on March 18th.
Melanoma.
“She called me at work,” Mark said. “I was standing in a crawl space under a Wendy’s in Grove City with a flashlight. She said I needed to come in. Right away. With my wife.”
“But you didn’t bring me.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
He didn’t answer that. Not yet.
The dermatologist sent him to a cancer center. Franklin Cancer Institute, at the medical pavilion on the north side. Garage B. Level 3. A surgical oncologist named Dr. Bennett did more tests. A scan. A biopsy of a lymph node under his arm.
The lymph node had cancer cells in it.
“Stage three,” Mark said. “That’s what they call it when it’s spread to the nodes but not anywhere else. Not to the organs. Not yet.”
“Not yet,” I repeated.
“That’s the word they use. Not yet.”
He had surgery on April 9th.
I knew exactly where I’d been on April 9th. I’d been at work, at a district benefits fair, handing out brochures about vision insurance in the high school gym.
Mark had told me he was driving to Indianapolis for a three-day electrical contractors’ conference. He’d packed a bag. He kissed me goodbye at six in the morning. He called me that night from what he said was his hotel room and said the conference was boring and the buffet was terrible.
He’d been at his brother Kevin’s apartment in Columbus. Fifteen minutes from our house. Lying on Kevin’s couch with a drain in his back and fifty-two stitches.
Dr. Bennett had cut out the melanoma and a wide circle of skin around it. That’s the long scar. The hole was too big to close, so they took skin from his thigh and grafted it over the wound. That’s the patch. Then they took out the lymph nodes under his right arm. That’s the second scar.
When he came home three days later, he was moving stiffly. I’d asked about it.
“Pulled something carrying a crate of fittings into the van,” he’d said. “It’s fine.”
I believed him. I’d rubbed Bengay on his lower back. The wrong part of his back.
He let me.
“And the rash?” I said. My voice sounded like it was coming from somewhere far away.
“Immunotherapy,” Mark said. “That’s the treatment. After the surgery. It’s an IV. Every three weeks. For a year. It helps your immune system fight off whatever cancer cells might be left. So it doesn’t come back.”
“Every three weeks.”
“Thursday mornings.”
The late meetings. The parking receipt. Entry 7:42 a.m. Exit 12:16 p.m.
“The rash is a side effect,” Mark went on. “And the tired. And the chills. And they told me to stay out of the sun. With my history, my skin’s never supposed to see the sun again without protection. Ever. The scar especially.”
“So you wore a cotton T-shirt in ninety-five-degree heat.”
“I didn’t want you to see,” Mark said. “I didn’t want him to see.”
I stood up. I don’t remember deciding to. I was just standing.
“Mark, turn around.”
He turned around on the toilet lid. He finally looked at me.
“Why?” I said. My voice cracked down the middle. “Why didn’t you tell me? Four months. Four months, Mark. You had cancer surgery. You’ve been getting chemo—”
“It’s not chemo. It’s immunotherapy. It’s different.”
“I don’t care what it’s called! You’ve been sitting in a chair at a cancer center every three weeks with a needle in your arm, and I’ve been at home making grocery lists! I rubbed Bengay on your back! The wrong part of your back! And you just let me!”
“Erin—”
“You lied to me about Indianapolis. You lied about the Wendy’s. You lied about the mosquito bite and the softball knee and the sunburn. And Kevin knew? Kevin knew, and I didn’t?”
“Kevin drove me,” Mark said quietly. “Someone had to drive me.”
“I should have driven you!”
My voice bounced off the bathroom tiles.
On the other side of the door, the cartoon cars stopped talking. Dylan had turned down the TV.
I put my hand over my mouth.
Mark stood up. He took a step toward me. Then he stopped, like he wasn’t sure he was allowed.
“I didn’t tell you,” he said, very quietly, “because of your mom.”
My mother died of ovarian cancer eight years ago.
It took three years. From the diagnosis to the end. I was her only daughter. My brother lived in California. My father had died when I was in college.
So it was me.
Every chemo appointment. Every scan. Every night she called at two in the morning because the pain medicine wasn’t working. Every insurance denial letter. I fought her insurance company for eleven months over a drug they said was experimental. I won. She died four months after I won.
I was pregnant with Dylan during the last year. I drove her to her last chemo appointment when I was eight months along, with my belly pressed against the steering wheel.
Dylan was born five weeks after the funeral.
For the first year of his life, I don’t remember much. I remember being so tired I couldn’t think. I remember crying in the shower so the baby wouldn’t hear me. I remember Mark taking the night feedings so I could sleep, and coming home from work at lunch to check on me, and holding me on the kitchen floor one night when I couldn’t stop shaking.
“I watched what it did to you,” Mark said now, in the hotel bathroom. “Your mom’s cancer. I watched it take three years of your life. I watched you lose twenty pounds and stop sleeping and fight with insurance companies on the phone until your voice gave out. I watched you sit next to her bed with Dylan inside you and I thought, She’s never going to come all the way back from this.”
His eyes filled up.
“And you did. Slowly. You came back. You started laughing again. You started making those color-coded calendars. You were you again.”
“So you decided not to tell me.”
“When Dr. Kessler called me in that crawl space under the Wendy’s,” Mark said, “the first thing I thought wasn’t I’m going to die. The first thing I thought was, I can’t do this to Erin again.”
He wiped his face with his wet shirt.
“So I figured if I could just get through the surgery, and the treatment, and the scans came back clean, then I’d never have to tell you at all. You’d never have to sit in another waiting room. You’d never have to be scared. It’d just be over, and I’d have a weird scar, and that would be it.”
“And if the scans didn’t come back clean?”
He didn’t answer.
“Mark. If they didn’t come back clean. What then?”
“Then I’d have told you,” he said. “When I had to. When there was no other choice.”
I looked at him. My husband of twenty-two years. Standing in a hotel bathroom in wet board shorts with a scar across his back and tears on his face.
“You were going to protect me,” I said, “right up until you were dying.”
He couldn’t answer.
“When are the scans?” I asked.
“Tuesday. A week from Tuesday. August fourth. It’s the first big scan since surgery. CT and brain MRI. Dr. Rao says that’ll tell us a lot.”
“Who’s Dr. Rao?”
“My oncologist. Anita Rao. She’s—she’s nice, Erin. You’d like her.”
I laughed. A horrible, wet laugh.
“I’d like her. Mark, I don’t even know her name.”
Then I realized something.
“The water park,” I said slowly. “The suite. The season passes. You booked all of it three weeks ago.”
“Yes.”
“Before the scans.”
He looked down.
“Dr. Rao said she couldn’t make promises,” he said. “She said the scans would tell us if it’s come back somewhere else. And I just—I thought, if it’s bad news, I wanted Dyl to have this. One really good trip. With his dad on the Tornado slide. Something to remember.”
I sat back down on the edge of the bathtub.
I put my face in my hands.
And I cried. For the first time since the lazy river. Ugly, shaking, silent crying, so Dylan wouldn’t hear it through the door.
Mark sat down beside me on the edge of the tub. He didn’t touch me. He was waiting to see if I’d let him.
After a long time, I reached over without looking and took his hand.
He held onto it like it was a rope.
“There’s something else,” he said.
I lifted my head.
“I need to tell you now. All of it. Before you find it on your own. Because you will. You find everything.”
“What else could there possibly be, Mark?”
He took a breath.
“The life insurance policy,” he said. “The one with Midland Heritage. The seven-fifty.”
I knew the policy he meant. We’d bought it when I was pregnant with Dylan. A twenty-year term life policy on Mark, for $750,000. I’d picked it out myself. I’d compared nine different companies. I’d filled out the paperwork at our old kitchen table, before we moved to the new house.
“What about it?”
“It lapsed,” Mark said.
The bathroom went completely silent.
“It what?”
“It lapsed. In February. February fourteenth. Five weeks before the biopsy.” He swallowed. “The premium came out of my old business checking account at Huntington. Automatically. Every quarter. When I switched the company’s banking to the credit union in December, I closed that account. I forgot the policy was attached to it.”
I stared at him.
“There’s a grace period,” he said. “Thirty-one days. They’re supposed to send notices. But they sent them to the old house. On Maple Street. We moved two years ago. I thought I’d changed the address. I swear I did. But they never got it, or I never did it, I don’t know anymore. I didn’t get anything. Nothing. Not a letter. Not a phone call.”
“When did you find out?”
“March twentieth,” he said. “Two days after the diagnosis. I called Midland Heritage to make sure you and Dyl would be okay. If something happened. And the woman on the phone looked it up and said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Delaney, this policy is no longer in force.’”
He laughed. An awful sound.
“I asked about getting it back. She said I’d have to apply for reinstatement. With a new health questionnaire. And a medical exam.”
“With a melanoma diagnosis,” I said.
“With a melanoma diagnosis,” he said. “Nobody’s going to insure me now, Erin. Not for seven-fifty. Not for anything. I tried four other companies in April. Every single one said no.”
I sat on the edge of the hotel bathtub and did the math in my head. I couldn’t help it. It’s what I do all day.
Our mortgage. Two hundred and sixty-one thousand left on the house in Westerville. Dylan’s college. My salary. Fifty-eight thousand a year from the school district. Mark’s business, which would be worth almost nothing without Mark.
If he died.
“Seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” I said quietly. “That was supposed to pay off the house. That was supposed to send Dylan to college. That was supposed to make sure I never had to—”
