Page 23 of Hard to Kill

When I’m alongside her I ask, “Would you like some company?”

She’s wearing a rainbow-colored bandana to cover what can only be a chemo-bald head and protect it from the high afternoon sun.

She smiles as if her day suddenly got a lot better and answers in a British accent. “Well, wouldn’t that be brilliant?”

Her name is Fiona Mills. She lives in London, informs me that her husband is a news “presenter” for ITV. They have two teenage daughters, around the same age Brigid and I were when Mary Smith was losing her own battle with cancer.

She asks me about myself. I tell her I’m a lawyer from New York.

“Married?”

“Twice. Divorced twice.”

“Did you love them?”

I smile back at her. “I thought I did.”

She laughs. Laughter, like just about everything, sounds better with a British accent.

“Without prying,” she asks, “is there a man in your life now?”

“Yes.”

“Do you lovehim?”

“More than my husbands.”

She laughs again. “Have you opened your heart to him completely?”

It is a serious question, one that demands a serious answer.

“Not as much as I should. There’s still a lot he doesn’t know about me.”

“Don’t wait too long to tell him.”

We walk and talk. I tell her that I’ve been dreaming about my mother almost every night. All of it. She tells me that when she got sick, she used to have the same kinds of dreams about her father, who died of pancreatic cancer when she was ten.

“I used to sit with him and hold his hand and not want to let go,” Fiona says.

“I used to sit with my mom and listen to her talk about her life,” I say. “Herdreams. Until the day when she closed her eyes and never opened them again.”

Fiona Mills talks about her children then, how the younger daughter is the strong one. I tell her I played the same role in my family. I tell her we can turn around whenever she feels herself start to tire. She says she’s fine, that this is her favorite time of day and she’d rather lengthen it than shorten it.

I tell her I feel the exact same way.

“I get up here and pretend that I’ve left cancer down the hill,” she says.

I tell her I feel the same way about that, too.

“Maybe,” I tell her, “we should consider making a run for it.”

“I’m afraid it’s a smidge late for that.”

Even with her head covered, and as thin as she is, she is quite lovely. Her eyes are this lovely combination of green and hazel, as if they can’t decide.

“Sadly,” she continues, “this is the end for me here. My last visit to Meier. They’ve done as much as they can do. At this point they can’t make up their minds whether it’s weeks I’ve left, or months. However much time it is, it will bloody well be spent with my family.” She drinks in mountain air. “Life really is so damned precious. I realized that before I got sick, if not as well as I should have.”

I tell her that my mother used to tell me the same thing, when there wasn’t a place like Meier for her to buy more time.

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