The Last Good Morning

The chemotherapy had taken her hair first, then her appetite, then what remained of their marriage. David watched Elena from the doorway of the bathroom, her back to him, as she applied mascara with trembling hands to her naked face. The wig they'd spent four hundred dollars on lay on the counter like a sleeping animal, more porcelain than person.

"Did you let Buster out?" she asked, not turning around.

"Yeah. Had to drag him from the neighbor's yard again. That dog has no sense of boundaries."

"Neither do you."

The words hung between them, heavier than the silence that followed. David thought about the vitamin supplements lined up on the kitchen counter — C, D, B12, zinc, a rainbow of capsules and tablets that promised what medicine couldn't: certainty. Control. The illusion that if you just consumed enough of the right things, your body would obey.

He'd started taking them too, in solidarity, then in desperation, as if his own health could somehow transfer to hers through osmosis or shared bedtime.

"The oncologist called," she said finally. "The scans showed progression."

The air left the room. David found himself gripping the doorframe until his knuckles whitened.

"What does that mean?"

"It means we stop pretending. It means—" She turned then, and he saw that she'd been crying. Mascara tracks cut through her foundation like wounds. "It means I want to spend what's left with people who don't look at me like I'm already dead."

"Elena—"

"You flinch when you touch me now. I see it. You treat me like something that might break, or worse—something that might contaminate."

"I'm scared."

"I know. But your fear has become a wall between us. I can't climb over it anymore."

Buster scratched at the door, whining to be let back in. The sound broke something loose in David's chest. He crossed the room slowly, each step an act of courage, and wrapped his arms around her. She stiffened, then softened against him.

"I don't know how to do this," he whispered into her shoulder. "I don't know how to love you without losing you."

"Nobody does," she said. "But fear is worse than dying, David. It's worse because it makes the living impossible."

Later, he would sweep the vitamins into the trash. But for now, he held his wife and breathed, and for the first time in months, he didn't check the time, didn't calculate the months they had left, didn't try to control anything at all.