Everything Changes

in a puddle of my own sweat, my gown pasted to my gel-splattered sides as my bladder pulsates grotesquely before me, and the room starts to spin. I stare at the little spot distorted into gray nothingness by the TV monitor, and say nothing. The doctor is telling me that it could be some aggregate capillaries, nothing to worry about, and I need to come back tomorrow for a cystoscopy so he can get a better look, just to be sure, but his voice is distant and hollow sounding. He may not know yet what that spot is, but I know what it is definitely not.
    It’s not nothing.

Chapter 6
    I leave the doctor’s office in a haze, thoughts of cancer running rampant through my head. I won’t make a good cancer patient; this much I know. I won’t discover within me heretofore untapped reserves of strength, will not lift everyone else’s spirits with my courage, will not be funny and frank about my illness and wear a clever hat when my hair falls out. I am just not movie-of-the-week material. Probably, I’ll be a weeping, vomiting mess, will hide in my room, curled up pathetically in a self-pitying fetal ball as I fade into nothingness. I will be a big, fucking baby.
    I want my mother.
    My cell phone tells me that I have seven missed calls. The middleman must always be reachable. I resist the powerful, almost inborn instinct to check my voice mails. There’s no way I can work with this hanging over me. I hold up the cell phone and just look at it, wondering what the hell to do. I should call Hope. That’s what you do in these situations, right?
    But when I finally make a call, it’s Tamara’s number that my fingers dial.
    “Hey, it’s me.”
    “Zack! What’s up, babe?”
    “You feel like a visit?”
    “Sure. You coming for dinner?”
    “I thought I’d blow off work and come now. Take Sophie to the park, hang out a little.”
    “You’re going to blow off work?” she asks skeptically.
    “I do it all the time,” I say.
    “Fine,” Tamara says. “Except, no you don’t. Not ever. So what’s going on?”
    “I’m just in a foul mood.”
    “So you figured you’d bring your coal to Newcastle.”
    “Misery loves company,” I say.
    “That it does,” she says. “Come on over. I’ll do my best to make your problems pale by comparison.”
    “I’m counting on it.”
    Tamara laughs. “What a team we make. You want me to pick you up from the train?”
    “No. I’ll take Jed’s car. I’ll see you in about an hour.”
    “Good. I’ll wake the little monster up from her nap.”

    Jed keeps his car, a Lexus SC 430 convertible, in a garage around the corner from our apartment. The attendants know me by now, since, with both Tamara and my mother living in Riverdale, I tend to use the car a lot more than Jed, who never seems to go anywhere anymore. I often wonder why he bothers keeping the car at all, and paying the exorbitant monthly garage fees, but I suppose when money’s no object, you’re willing to pay just to have the option available to you, yet another case of his conspicuous consumption benefiting my freeloading ass. Before I go to get the car, though, I take a shower and touch up my shave. Tamara will kiss my cheek and give me a hug, and I want to smell good when she gets that close.

    When Rael and Tamara got married, the plan had been to stay in Manhattan, but when Sophie was born, their studio apartment became too cramped, and they bought a small split-level in Riverdale, less than a mile away from where Rael and I grew up. Although he didn’t like to admit it, Rael was thrilled to be back in Riverdale, saw symmetry in raising his daughter in his own hometown. But then he died, leaving Tamara a stranger in a strange town, with a daughter and a mortgage and no idea of where to go and what to do with herself.
    Tamara’s house. She’s sitting cross-legged on the round kitchen table in shorts and a tank top, sipping at a Diet Coke, her long dark hair partially concealing her face as she intently reads a
People
magazine. She has no interest in celebrity divorces and red-carpet fashion faux pas. Without having to look, I know she’s reading one of those tearjerkers about a child, the little girl who suffered burns on ninety percent of her body when her mother’s car was struck by a drunk driver and exploded, the young boy being treated for an exotic form of leukemia, whose classmates all shaved their heads in solidarity, the teenager from Cambodia who received a kidney from a retired postal worker