The Bridge by Rebecca Rogers Maher Page A

from me.”
    I wanted him to come to the doctor appointments with me. I wanted him to do some reading about what breast cancer is, about other survivors. I wanted him to support my decisions. I wanted him to be able to
look
at me.
    And Tanya? I wanted her love for me to be stronger than her need for a drink. I wanted her to be able to sit still for five seconds in the hospital room. I wanted to not have found our mother dead of cardiac arrest in her dingy apartment with a fucking crack pipe in her hand.
    No, it was never enough, what I had. I wanted so much more than that, and would never get it.
    “What if you told a friend,” Henry asks, “and she offered to go with you for the treatments? Wouldn’t that change things? You’re not even giving anybody a
chance
to help you, if they don’t even know.”
    It’s then that I say something really stupid. It tumbles out of my mouth before I can prevent it.
    “Why don’t
you
go with me?”
    That stops him cold. He goes still and stares at me dumbly for what feels like seventeen minutes.
    “Christa.”
    “Never mind.” I yank the blankets off my lap and clumsily stumble off the bed. “I’ve had enough talking, haven’t you? Let’s go for a swim.”
----
    I close the bathroom door behind me and lock it. The edge of the bathtub is comfortingly cold. It brings me back down from the fantasy cloud I was floating in. That post-sex mist that made me think asking Henry to be my nursemaid was a good idea. I feel again for my breast, palpating the flesh until I find the lump—familiar and totally irrefutable. It was a mistake to get naked. A padded bra and clothes make the fact of my body a lot more remote. Without them, I am too aware.
    It was just a momentary vulnerability that made me ask. A reaction to the shock of feeling. I think of Henry’s hands, of his hips moving against mine. It was all so…beautiful. I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know what to do with a world that can be so painful and so lovely at the same time. I don’t know what to do with the fact that it keeps trying to kill me.
    Yesterday, the answer seemed simple. I could take control of it somehow and end things on my own terms. But if I’d succeeded, if Henry had climbed that ladder just ten minutes later, I wouldn’t have had this day and neither would he.
    Those guys helping the old lady on the bus. Leaning over the railing of the ferry with Henry. The taxi driver. The monks. Dumplings and ice cream and sleeping in the grass. Teenage girls fretting about Frodo and Gandalf. My jade hairpin. Making love to Henry. I’d have had none of that if I hadn’t waited.
    He’s right that I was impulsive. I was swinging wildly in the wake of the diagnosis, just lumbering around like a bear with an arrow in its chest. I didn’t stop to
think
.
    These moments do pass.
    But maybe I don’t want them to. Maybe I don’t want to go through another cycle of hope either. Because frankly, this is just as bad. The ache I feel for Henry right now—the rawness of it—that’s awful, too. I don’t know where it ends or begins, and I don’t know how to fight it.
    And I should fight it, because I’m not going to change his mind. I see that. I could use my cancer against him if I wanted to. I could tell him I’ll only stay alive if he helps me. But what kind of life would that be, for either of us? Holding him hostage with my sickness. It’s bad enough that I’m a hostage to it.
    One of the last times I saw Tanya, she was trying to hold my hand in the hospital room. But I was sick to my stomach, and her hands were shaking—she hadn’t had a drink that day, and it was almost evening. She kept getting up and down out of her chair, and asking me what I needed, and I was so irritated, I told her to go get a gin and tonic already and stop being so fucking useless.
    She stood as though I’d slapped her.
    “I was just trying—”
    “Don’t,” I told her. “Look at yourself. You can’t make it one