Free Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent by Anthony Rapp

that monitored her pulse and administered her pain medication and emptied her bowels and massaged her limbs. Staring at all the tubes in her nose and belly and arms.
    Standing there and trying to absorb what I was seeing, as if I were at a museum gazing at an abstract painting. Trying to look at her misshapen, wracked, bloated body and face and still see Mom.
     
    We had a meager Christmas celebration in the ICU a couple of days later, bringing our presents to the ward and opening Mom’s for her. Her swelling, which we found out later was a result of all of the fluids they had pumped into her, had gone down. Though she still looked horrible, she had begun to resemble her old self. But I saw in her eyes a new tinge of terror, which flashed around their edges as she adjusted her body ever so slightly to get more comfortable, or turned her head to stare at the wall.
    Given the trauma her body had undergone, her recovery was incredible, and incredibly swift: within a few days she was out of intensive care, and within a few weeks she was back at work. She said later that Anne and Adam and Rachel and I had seen her through that horrible night; we had kept her there. “I wasn’t ready to leave you guys,” she said.
    We soon learned that the whole incident was caused by a cancerous tumor that had been growing undetected on one of her adrenal glands; it was actually the tumor that had burst, not the gland itself as originally thought, although the gland was destroyed in the process.
    Dr. Anderson felt confident that the entire cancerous mass had been removed from Mom’s abdomen in the surgery, but wanted her to continue getting tested every three months, just in case.
    Mom had always named inanimate objects in her life—her homes, her cars—so it was only fitting that her tumor would have a name too: Wild Bill. She imagined Wild Bill as an out-of-control gunman who’d galloped in from nowhere and ripped a piece of her away. She visualized herself facing this gunman in the middle of the street and blowing him off the face of the earth.
     
    For the next two years, we all thought she was out of danger. Every three months she went to the hospital for the afternoon and drank barium, a foul-tasting, radioactive dye, so her oncologist could scan her body for any growths that shouldn’t be there. And every three months her oncologist found nothing. As time went on, and each scan resulted in good news, I buried the possibility that anything more would come of Wild Bill.
    Adam and I lived together back in New York, and after a while we stopped speaking about what happened that night and about Wild Bill. We went about our lives in the city, Adam working on getting his novels published and his plays produced, and me auditioning and occasionally getting cast in something. I hardly thought about Mom’s health scare until the Christmas following it when I went home for a visit, and saw taped to the side of the refrigerator a laminated copy of a notice she’d had printed in the Joliet Herald-News:
    ON THIS WINTER SOLSTICE
    It is a year since my near fatal encounter with “ WILD BILL .” There are so many people who helped in so many ways. I’ll always be grateful & openly want to thank the following:
The Paramedics
Dr. Allan Anderson & Dr. Phil Meyer [Mom’s anesthesiologist], who clearly saved my life.
My dear sisters, especially Roberta & Gracia, who were there for me when I needed them most.
All of my wonderful friends, especially Kathy, Marna, Gloria & Sarah.
My Coworkers at Joliet Correctional Center, who continue to give me emotional support laced with humor, & all the people who donated blood which is truly the gift of life.
And most of all I want to thank MY girls, Anne, who held my hand when I was terrified, and Little Rachel, who still thinks she dialed 911.
    I made it for them.
    MARY RAPP
    I stood and read this ad over and over every time I opened the refrigerator during that visit, lingering at the kitchen counter with my