Page 24

AS LOUSY AS I feel, I don’t go straight home.

I drive to the beach instead, telling myself I would apologize to Rip the dog later for not stopping to pick him up.

They told me before I left Meier that the drugs I am taking affected everybody differently. I assured them that I had learned how to manage chemo and that I would certainly be able to learn what I was calling my ADCs. Antibody drug conjugates. Such a joy and a comfort.

I didn’t really start feeling sick until after I returned home. Nausea. Fatigue. Vomiting. So far it’s all been no better than chemo, I’m just not hooked up to any machines. But now I am feeling sick just about every damn day.

Being in the presence of Paul Harrington hasn’t helped matters much.

I haven’t said anything about this to Jimmy or Ben Kalinsky or Dr. Sam Wylie, or even my sister, who understands what I’m experiencing more than any of them.

But I’m starting to wonder, every damn day, how I’ll be able to get through jury selection if I don’t start to feel better.

Or more like myself, whatever that means anymore.

Much less a trial.

For now, though, for tonight, I just want to breathe in some clean air, the cleanest air I’ve ever known, even as close to the sky as I was in the mountains of Switzerland.

My air, near the ocean.

I don’t drive to Indian Wells, because even alone out here in the night I know I’ll see the scene I’ve been playing and replaying inside my head: Ben kneeling in the sand and proposing to me all over again. I feel no need to return to what I now think of as the scene of my crime.

I drive the extra mile east to Atlantic Avenue Beach instead, get out of my car, take off my sneakers as soon as I reach the end of the parking lot. I feel the sand underneath my bare feet, am breathing in that air, listening to the waves.

Suddenly I don’t feel as sick.

Another miracle drug.

When I’m here, especially at night, alone or with Rip, I can almost convince myself that I’m going to beat this thing.

Almost.

I tell myself that I’m going to find my way to the word that Fiona Mills had called the most beautiful in the English language.

Remission.

I joked with Sam Wylie and Dr. Ludwig that they needed to use all of their technical medical terms in any given sentence.

I just want to use “remission.”

Alone on the beach in the night I say, “I’m in remission.”

Then I’m shouting it, all the way back to the car, glad I am alone out here in the night.

“I’m in remission!”

It does make me feel a little better.

I tell myself not to think about Rob Jacobson and Edmund McKenzie, and the terrible things they might have done, in Jacobson’s own home, thirty years ago. Tell myself not to think about all the people, some of them innocent people, who have died since Jimmy and I took on Rob Jacobson as a client.

I turn and look at the water and then the full moon, and the kind of big sky full of stars you get out here on clean, moonlit nights like this.

There will, I know, be plenty of time to think about dying, maybe when I am once again wide awake in the middle of the night, and sleep can’t find me because the night terrors have gotten to me first.

As soon as I pull into the driveway, I see that all the lights are on in the house.

I see that my front door is wide open.

I shut off the car and lean over to where my bag is on the passenger seat and take out my Glock. Then I am covering the distance between the car and the house, moving along the front of the house, crouching as I move toward the door, keeping myself below the windows.

Invariably, when I drive up to my house, Rip is waiting for me just inside that door, and when he hears the car, somehow knowing it’s my car and not someone else’s, barks out a greeting, jumping up and trying his best to knock me over as soon as I open the door.

But there is no sound coming from inside the house now.

I press myself against the outside of the doorframe, two hands on the gun now, and yell Rip’s name as I wheel around and step inside, immediately seeing that the place has been trashed.

Cushions pulled out of the couch, coffee table turned over.

Like that.

Just no barking dog.