Free MARY AND O'NEIL by Justin Cronin Page B

her mind adrift in the past, a tiny ball of fire ignites within her. It rockets through her body with a nauseating rush, leaving her hands and feet tingling, her brow glazed, her throat constricted with bile. The room lurches below her; she reaches one hand outward to brace herself, but finds nothing to hold, to stop her fall. The wall, she thinks. The wall will save her. Three more steps and she is there.
    Then someone has taken her by the elbow: it is Sandra, standing beside her. Wasn’t she just onstage?
    “Mrs. Burke?”
    But Miriam cannot speak; she knows if she doesn’t leave the room immediately she will be sick, or faint. The gymnasium seems like an enormous fishbowl, colors and shapes bending in the crooked, swirling light. At some impossible distance she sees Arthur and Eliza dancing, like two figures swimming on the far side of a lake.
    “I’m ill,” she manages.
    “I know. I’ll help you.”
    A pair of metal safety doors, then the sudden white light of the hallway: guiding her by the elbow, Sandra leads her away, though Miriam is barely aware of any of this. All she knows is that the music is gone, sealed away behind her. Another door opens and she finds herself in a small room full of instruments; she is backstage, where the band keeps its supplies. Relief overwhelms her, like oxygen to the lungs. She realizes that she is sitting on a bench of some kind, and that Sandra has gone, but the moment she discovers this she looks up and sees that Sandra has returned, carrying her purse. She holds a paper cup of water before Miriam’s face.
    “Drink this,” she says, and guides her hand around the cup.
    Miriam lifts the water to her lips. It is cool but not cold, and she sips at it, thinking only of the water’s taste, and her own pounding heart. The pain is gone, but in its wake it has deposited a kind of tingling numbness, scattered throughout her body like a luminous dust.
So this is what it will be like,
she thinks.
    A few moments pass. She finishes the water, and Sandra takes the cup. “Do you need the bathroom?” Sandra has pulled a chair up, and is sitting directly in front of her.
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Do you want me to get Mr. Burke?”
    Miriam shakes her head. “You’ve done more than enough. I just need to rest here a minute.”
    Sandra’s eyes search her face. They are very blue—the blue of sapphires.
    “He doesn’t know,” Sandra says then.
    But before Miriam can say anything, Sandra goes on. “I didn’t mean to surprise you. You haven’t told Arthur, have you? Or O’Neil.”
    Miriam shakes her head. “No.”
    “And it’s cancer? A kind of cancer.”
    Miriam nods, amazed beyond words. “Yes. I think so. I have a tumor in my breast. How did you—”
    “It’s all right.” Sandra takes her hand. “I just do.”
    For a while they just sit there, their hands together. And Miriam is glad she has said it. Finally, she has used the words.
    “I’ll tell you how,” Sandra says gently. “I don’t know if it’s the real reason, but I’ve always thought so. I was six years old, and I was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Do you know what that is?”
    “I think so.”
    “Most people don’t. I spent most of two years in the hospital. Little kids who get it nearly always die, but I didn’t know that at the time. My parents sure weren’t going to tell me. But I found it out, later. Chemo, radiation, things they’d never tried on anyone before. I had it all. And when it was over, I could always tell when someone was sick, even if they didn’t know it yet. I guess I’d been around cancer patients so long, I could just read the signs.”
    “When did you know about me?”
    “Well, when we first met, at the race, I thought it.” Sandra tips one shoulder and frowns; Miriam can tell she has returned to the moment, to feel what it was like. “At dinner too. It was just an inkling. You’ll probably laugh. Sometimes it’s lights, or a sort of ringing sound.