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Jimmy

JIMMY AND JANE DRIVE in separate cars to Southampton.

“You really don’t have to go with me,” Jane says to Jimmy.

“Yeah, I kind of do,” he says.

Jane calls Sam from her car and then calls Jimmy as they are passing through Water Mill, telling him that the results expected first thing still haven’t come in.

Jane says she wants to be in the room when Sam gives her the news.

She plans to wait as long as she has to, short of making herself late for court.

He waits in his car, parked next to Jane’s, in the small parking lot outside Dr. Sam Wylie’s office. Jimmy has done this before, in this same lot. And can’t remember a time, not a single one, when Jane has come out of that office with good news.

It’s always the same feeling out here, like he’s about to get hit.

All he knows today is what she told him before they left the beach, that she had undergone her latest CT scan on the tumor in her neck late yesterday afternoon, when Sam Wylie and Jane’s oncologist, Dr. Gellis, put in a fix at Southampton Hospital, and allowed her to be hooked up to the machine much later in the day than was usually allowed for computed tomography which, Jane explained to Jimmy, is where the “CT” comes from.

She then tried to tell Jimmy about what the machine actually does. He stopped her when she got to IV contrast agents and dyes. Actually begged her to stop.

“As long as you understand it, kid,” he said.

Her next CT scan was scheduled for two weeks down the road. But she decided just like that, being Jane, that she wasn’t going to wait, that she wanted the new pictures right freaking now.

Sam has fast-tracked the results, too, ahead of the usual twenty-four hours. No surprise that these two have been friends since high school. They both want what they want when they want it.

Jane has already caught one break—the trial is starting an hour late today, at eleven instead of ten. The court clerk called her last night to tell her that Judge Horton has a long-scheduled doctor’s appointment of his own.

It is an established fact that Jimmy is better at waiting than Jane is, even if she’d also been a cop, where being as good at waiting as shooting a gun was part of the job description.

But he can’t imagine what the waiting must be like with cancer, going from one test to another.

Jimmy doesn’t listen to the radio while he waits.

He doesn’t drive up to the CVS on Main Street and buy a newspaper, as much as he still likes having the paper in his hands.

He just sits in the quiet of the front seat and remembers something he read in the Times the other day about manifesting, and how if you believe in something hard enough and well enough that you can allow it to come into form.

Jimmy sits here and manifests Jane getting some good news today for a change, manifests like that’s the most important thing he’ll do all day.

Eight o’clock now.

She needs to get on the road soon.

They both do.

The dashboard clock says 8:06 when she comes walking out the door and straight for Jimmy’s car.

He can see right away that she’s crying.

Now Jimmy is the one who can’t wait any longer, gets out of the car, walks toward her.

When he’s right in front of her, he stops and says, “Whatever it is, I’m here.”

She’s crying hard enough, making a complete mess out of her makeup, that she can’t get any words out right away. The tears just keep coming, her chest keeps rising and falling.

So it turns out Jimmy does have to wait a few seconds more.

“It’s bad?” he says.

She gets some air into her.

At last, she shakes her head.

Finally, she says, “It shrunk.”