First, there was the dream. Vicki couldn’t remember it completely. It was a surgery dream, the doctors were going to perform Vicki’s surgery right then and there and not on September first as they had planned. There was urgency, secrecy—somehow Vicki was told, or perhaps she discerned, that what they were removing from her lungs wasn’t tumors at al , but rather, precious jewels. Huge rubies, emeralds, amethysts, sapphires—the biggest in the world, right there inside Vicki’s chest, embedded in the healthy tissue of Vicki’s lungs. The doctors weren’t doctors, they were thieves of some international acclaim; they were planning on doing the surgery, she learned, without any anesthetic. Vicki would die from the pain; they were planning on kil ing her.

She woke up. Not with a start, like in the movies, not sitting straight up in bed gasping for breath, but quietly. She opened her eyes and felt tears on her cheeks. Ted was beside her, breathing like a man on vacation. With a crook of her neck, Vicki saw both her children asleep on the mattress on the floor. It hurt to breathe. Vicki wondered what the inside of her chest would look like after the surgery. Would there be a big hole where her lung used to be?

The surgery, now that it was a reality, was newly terrifying. It has to be done, obviously, Dr. Garcia had said months ago. If you want to live.

Funny how the surgery was what Vicki had wished for, it was the goal of the chemotherapy, and yet it frightened her beyond al comprehension. It made her insides twist, her pelvis tighten, it made her shoulders and wrists stiff with anxiety. The anesthesia alone was nearly impossible to come to grips with. She would be out, way out, for more than six hours. It was different from sleep, she understood that. It was forced unconsciousness, a place between sleep and death. Vicki would be kept there, in that purgatory of nothingness, while they cut through her chest muscles, spread open her rib cage, col apsed her lung, and then removed it. It was worse than a horror movie. A hundred things could go wrong during the surgery and a hundred things could go wrong with the anesthesia. What if the surgery was a success but they pushed her too far under with the anesthetic and she drowned in it? What if she crossed to the other side?

She lay in bed, ticking like an overheated engine. Was it any wonder she couldn’t sleep? Was it any wonder she had nightmares?

Next came the headache.

When Vicki woke up in the morning she felt like she was wearing a lead helmet. There was not only pain, there was pressure. Blaine launched himself onto the bed as he did every morning when Ted was there—no need to worry about Mommy not feeling wel when Dad was around—and Porter whined to be lifted up. He was stil too little to climb. Vicki opened one eye. This wasn’t intentional; it seemed, for whatever reason, that she could only get one eye open. And even that took a Herculean effort. And it hurt—sunlight coming in around the edges of the shades hurt, and Porter’s whining hurt. She tried to extend a hand to the baby, thinking she might haul him up onto the mattress with one arm despite the fact that he weighed nearly twenty pounds, but she couldn’t sit up to get leverage. She couldn’t lift her head.

“Ted?” she said. Her voice was dry and papery. She was just dehydrated, maybe. She needed water. She reached for the glass she kept on the nightstand, but her arms trembled and she could not lift her head to take a sip. Ted was busy with the kids, tickling and teasing, roughhousing and kicking—and he didn’t hear her. The glass slipped, or she dropped it, it got away from her somehow, and fel to the floor, spil ing everywhere, though it didn’t break.

“Jesus, Vick,” Ted said.

“My head,” she said.

“What?”

“My head,” she said, “is kil ing me.” This sounded col oquial—it was, after al , a popular turn of phrase—and hence there was no way Ted would know Vicki meant it literal y. Her head was kil ing her. Her head was trying to kil her.

“The light,” she said. “The kids.” She pul ed the sheet over her head but it was as effective at blocking out noise and sunlight as a Kleenex.

“Do you want aspirin?” Ted said. “Some chocolate milk?”

As if she had a hangover. There had been some wine the night before—wine every night since her CT scan—but this was not a hangover. Stil , Vicki wasn’t hearty enough to turn down the offer of medicine.

“I might have painkil ers left,” she said. Just eking out this sentence hurt.

Ted sloughed the boys off the bed and scooted Blaine out the door of the bedroom. “Go out. Mom doesn’t feel wel .”

“Again?” Blaine said.

Ah, the guilt. Blaine would probably end up in therapy due to Vicki’s cancer, but she couldn’t worry about that now. Get better, she thought. Then worry about it.

Ted held Porter in one arm and checked the prescription bottles on Vicki’s dresser.

“Percocet,” he said. “Empty.”

“Shit,” she said. She was pretty sure there’d been three or four left. Brenda? “Would you cal Dr. Alcott?”

“And tel him what?” Ted was like Vicki used to be: supremely uncomfortable around doctors. But since Vicki had begun regularly relying on doctors to save her life, her attitude had changed.

“Cal in more,” Vicki said. And then she became confused. Why was she asking Blaine to cal the doctor? Would he, at the age of four and a half, be able to do it? He wasn’t even good at talking on the phone with his grandmother. “Magic words,” Vicki reminded him.

Who knew how many painful moments passed? It felt like forever. Vicki moaned into her pil ow. She could hear noises from the rest of the house, domestic noises—the frying pan hitting the stove, eggs cracking, the whisk chiming against the side of the stoneware bowl, the butter melting, the refrigerator door opening and closing, ice in a glass, Porter crying, the rubber squeal of the high chair sliding across the linoleum, Blaine’s constant stream of chatter, Ted’s voice—yes, on the phone, thank God. So much noise—and al of it as loud and unpleasant to her ears as a jackhammer in the room. Vicki grabbed Ted’s goose-down pil ow and covered her head.

The pain was a hand squeezing water from the sponge of her brain. Let go!

There was a tap on the door. Brenda. “Vick, are you okay?”

Vicki wanted to scream at her sister for stealing her Percocet, but screaming was beyond her.

“Headache,” Vicki mumbled. “Unbearable pain.”

“Ted just cal ed Dr. Alcott. He wants you to come in.”

Come in where? Vicki thought. Come into the hospital? Impossible. The whole idea of getting out of bed, getting into the car, driving through the eyebal -bursting sunny day to the hospital, completely preposterous.

Ted’s voice was alongside Brenda’s now. “Dr. Alcott wants to see you, Vick.”

“Because I have a headache?” Vicki said. “What about the Percocet?”

“He’s cal ing them in,” Ted said.

Vicki felt something like relief, though it was difficult to identify under the blanket of pain.

“But he wants you to come in,” Ted said. “He wants to take a look at you. He said it might not be a bad idea to have an MRI.”

“Why?” Vicki said.

“I don’t know.”

That was a big, fat lie. Metastasis to the brain, she thought. Dr. Alcott’s suspicions were correct; she could feel it. The cancer was a hand, fingers spreading through her brain, pressing down. The cancer was a spider, nesting in her gray matter. The pain, the pressure, the increased sensitivity to sound, to light. This was what a brain tumor felt like; she had heard someone in her cancer support group describe it, but she couldn’t remember who. Alan? No, Alan was dead. It wasn’t Alan. Vicki said, “I had too much wine last night.”

“One glass?” Ted said.

“Water,” Vicki said. “Magic words. Please. Thank you.”

The pil ow was lifted. Vicki smel ed Brenda—what was it? Noxema. Piña colada suntan lotion.

“You’re not making sense, Vick. Open your eyes.”

“I can’t.”

“Try.”

Vicki tried. The one eye opened. There was a very blurry Brenda. Behind her, a form Vicki knew to be Ted, but could just as easily have been an international thief, come to cut her open and take the jewels.

“You stole my Percocets,” Vicki said to Brenda.

“Yes,” Brenda said. “I’m sorry.”

“I need them,” Vicki said. “Now.”

“I’m going, I’m going,” Ted said. “I’l take the kids.”

“I’l get you water,” Brenda said to Vicki. “Ice water with paper-thin slices of lemon, just how you like it.”

“No hospital,” Vicki said. “I’m never going back.”

Brenda and Ted left the room. The click of the door shutting was like a gunshot. Brenda said to Ted, “Her pupil was real y dilated. What do you suppose that means?”

There’s a spider on my brain, Vicki thought. Brenda was whispering, but her voice reverberated in Vicki’s head like she was back at CBGB at a B-52’s concert standing next to the chin-high speaker, which was blaring at a bazil ion decibels. Quiet!

“I have no idea,” Ted said.

The drugs helped, at least enough so that Vicki could limp along through the next few days. Dr. Alcott had prescribed only twenty Percocets, and Vicki found that by taking two pil s three times a day the pain was ratcheted down from unbearable to merely excruciating. Her left eye final y did open, though the lid was droopy, as though Vicki were a stroke victim, and both of her pupils were as big as manhole covers. Vicki wore her sunglasses whenever she could get away with it. She didn’t want Brenda or Ted to know that it felt like she was wearing a Mack truck tire around her neck, she didn’t want them to know it felt like someone was trying to pul her brain out through her eye socket, and she especial y didn’t want them to know about the hand squeezing water from the sponge of her brain or the spider nesting. She wasn’t going back to the hospital for any reason, she would not agree to an MRI, because she absolutely would not be able to handle the news of a metastasis to the brain.

And so, she carried on. They had a week left. Ted was trying to cram everything in at the last minute; he wanted to spend every waking second outside. He played tennis at the casino while Josh had the kids, and he took Vicki, Brenda, and Melanie to lunch at the Wauwinet, where Vicki spent the whole time trying to keep her head off the table. Ted wanted to go into town every night after dinner, to walk the docks and ogle the yachts

—and one evening, impulsively, he signed himself and Blaine up for a day of charter fishing, despite the fact that the captain eyed Blaine doubtful y and told Ted he would have to come prepared with a life jacket for the little guy. Ted bought a sixty-dol ar life jacket for Blaine at the Ship’s Chandlery, seconds later.

Whereas Vicki once would have staged a protest ( he’s too little, it’s not safe, a big waste of money, Ted ), now she stood mutely by. Ted didn’t ask her how she felt because he didn’t want to hear the answer. There were only seven days of summer left; surely Vicki could hang on, could act and pretend, until they got home.

Vicki cal ed Dr. Alcott, Mark, herself, for more drugs.

“Stil the headache?” he said.

“It’s not as bad as before,” she lied. “But we’re so busy, there’s so much going on, that . . .”

“Percocet is a narcotic,” Dr. Alcott said. “For extreme pain.”

“I’m in extreme pain,” Vicki said. “I qualify as a person who needs a narcotic, I promise.”

“I believe you,” Dr. Alcott said. “And that’s why I want you to come in.”

“I’m not coming in,” Vicki said.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Dr. Alcott said.

Oh, but there was. Vicki said, “Is there anything else I can take?”

Dr. Alcott sighed. Vicki felt like Blaine. Can I have a hamster when I’m six? A skateboard? Bubble gum? “I’l cal something in.”

Later, out of desperation, Vicki cal ed the pharmacy. “Yes,” the pharmacist said, in a way that could only be compared to the Angel Gabriel announcing the impending birth of Christ to the Virgin Mary, “Dr. Alcott cal ed in a prescription for Darvocet and six-hundred-mil igram Motrin.”

“Is Darvocet a narcotic?” Vicki asked.

“No, ma’am, it’s not.”

“But it is a painkil er?”

“Yes, indeed, it is, and it can be taken to greater effect with the Motrin.”

Greater effect. Vicki was mol ified.

Ted lobbied for another beach picnic. He wanted to use his fishing poles one more time, he wanted lobsters again. This time Vicki could organize, right?