Near Death by Glenn Cooper Read Free Book Online

feeling ill, how did she feel now—anything to change the subject; but she came back to it with innocent insistence.
    “Why did you tell Emily she couldn’t see me anymore?”
    “You heard me say that?”
    She nodded as emphatically as she could, lifting her head from the pillow.
    “I’ll talk about it with Mom. Where is she?”
    “She left when Emily came. She said you were coming to stay with me. Do you have your pen?”
    He nodded.
    “Do you have paper?”
    “I can find some. What for?”
    “Tic-tac-toe?” Her favorite game and he was happy to shut up and play.
    When she finally drifted off to sleep, the page filled with
X
s and
O
s, he crept out and silently shed his gown. At the nurse’s station, he left a message for Tara’s mother to find him in the cafeteria.
    He grabbed a tray of food without giving the choices much thought and found an isolated table. He didn’t want to listen to young doctors and nurses talking about their patients or hear the nervous whispers of families in crisis.
    What he did hear was the distinctive cadence of Marian’s high heels spiking the cafeteria tiles. He didn’t have to look up. He knew that urgent walk cold. She had always moved fast with self-important small quick steps, the swing of her legs constrained by her hip-hugging skirts. He looked up from his soup and instead of the plaintive eyes of a worried mother he saw a hot anger he had come to expect.
    He knew how her mind worked: every time Tara had a relapse or a complication it was
his
fault. There was cancer on
his
side of the family. His cousin’s son had brain cancer. The bad genes were from
his
bloodlines.Everything he had ever done had consistently fallen short of her expectations and now he was killing their daughter. Many child brain cancers were curable; hers wasn’t. The tumor was too high grade. One debulking operation slowed the inexorable course but the tumor was growing again. Chemotherapy was buying time now, but at a cost. She was sustained by transfusions and antibiotics.
All this horror because of my inferior O’Malley gene pool
.
    Of course, if he’d ever vocalized these thoughts she’d accuse him of being delusional and have her lawyer file another motion with the court questioning his fitness to maintain joint custody, but he could tell from those damned eyes of hers burning like little hot coals that
she
was the crazy one.
    Marty, the new husband, was dutifully at her side, looking his usual prosperous self, every inch the successful in-town commercial banker. They made a nice couple, Cyrus scornfully noted—both spent a lot of time on personal grooming and wardrobes. Since Tara was often too ill to return to his apartment for custody visits, his lawyer was able to wrest a court-ordered accommodation allowing Cyrus to spend the occasional evening or weekend day staying with Tara at their house while Marian and Marty stepped out for a few hours. While his daughter napped,Cyrus would wander around their five-bedroom, plush carpeted spread as though he were at a crime scene, prurient, checking out their lives. Marty had a lot of nice clothes, a closet full of Italian suits and cashmere sweaters.
    But it was the guy’s sink and bathroom cupboards that really got Cyrus going. Marty certainly used a lot of product! A real metrosexual’s trove: with as many tubes and bottles for his skin and hair as Marian. She’d always been irked by Cyrus’s spare grooming habits—a bar of soap, a stick of deodorant, toothpaste—that was pretty much it. With Marty, she’d landed herself a real spa hound, just what she’d always wanted.
    Good for her.
    Marty was ten years older than she, graying temples, fairly fit, a good tennis player but Cyrus chuckled the first time he saw a Viagra prescription in his medicine cabinet. He seemed to refill it regularly.
    Good for her.
    “Care to join me?” Cyrus asked.
    Marian shook her head vigorously. She had so much spray, her shiny black hair didn’t rustle.