As per usual, she could feel multiple tiny lumps in her breast. None stood out. Was that reassuring? Partially, but she didn’t know which of the various irregularities she could always feel was the lump that had the radiologists alarmed. It made her feel betrayed that her own body could turn against her.
Throwing back the covers, Laurie sat up and wriggled her feet into her slippers, which were exactly where she had left them. She’d been up in the middle of the night after having essentially passed out from sheer mental and physical exhaustion soon after she and Jack had had their supper. For a while she’d wandered around in the dark apartment, going room to room while mulling over the difficult question of what to do about dealing with her worrisome breast lump. Unable to come to any conclusion with such an existential question, she’d eventually gone into the study, turned on the light, and got out the architectural plans for the new OCME Forensic Pathology building. Despite her personal concerns about her health and mortality, she knew that the plans had to be finalized in the near future before getting a final cost estimate and then presenting them to the City Council. To her surprise, she actually was able to concentrate enough to make some progress, or so she thought. It wasn’t until she’d felt sleepy enough that she’d turned out the desk light, returned to the bedroom, and climbed back into bed.
After donning her robe, she glanced at Jack. He looked as peaceful as he had yesterday morning, lying on his back with his hands clasped on his chest. He wasn’t actually snoring, just breathing particularly deeply. Laurie assumed he was dreaming as his lidded eyes were clearly darting about. As close as she felt to him, it was moments like this that emphasized they were in reality two very separate people who thought of themselves as the center of the universe. It was a fleeting thought that made her figuratively smile since it was proof that she had no way of knowing what was going on in his mind.
Just as she did the previous morning, Laurie silently left their bedroom, walked down the hall, and entered Emma’s room. Again, peering down at the angelic four-year-old girl, she had an abrupt epiphany. Her children, particularly Emma, needed her, which answered the difficult question of how she should handle the breast lump. Since she was positive for the BRCA1 mutation, which raised her chances for both breast cancer and ovarian cancer, she had to take the most conservative choice even if doing so challenged her self-image as a woman. She had to follow Angelina Jolie’s lead and have the mastectomy and the oophorectomy. The choice was suddenly completely clear.
“Thank you, my child,” Laurie whispered under her breath. Emma and her autism had shown her the way to deal with the current problem. Feeling suddenly relieved of an oppressive weight, she walked out of her daughter’s room, and the moment she did so, she could see that the sun had cleared the horizon, again bathing that water tower on the neighboring building in golden light. To Laurie it seemed symbolic of having come to a decision.
When she entered the bathroom for a shower following a quick visit to JJ’s room, she wished she could pick up her phone that very instant and call the surgeon and the oncologist to get the whole issue of the breast situation out of the way now that she had made up her mind. She felt that as soon as she’d made the call, she could relegate the problem to the back of her mind, thereby allowing herself to concentrate on all the other things that needed her attention, like writing up the death certificate for Kera Jacobsen. Laurie again smiled to herself as she turned on the water from outside the shower and adjusted the temperature. With all the other, bigger-picture things on her mind involved with running the OCME, it seemed pathetic that she would single out a particular case. Yet she understood. The personality of the pathology resident aside, she had enjoyed doing the autopsy, which again underlined how much she missed the mental rigor of forensic pathology. Was she really cut out to be an administrator at the expense of having to give up doing her own cases? She didn’t know. The pregnancy discovered during the autopsy had been a surprise, and she wondered if it might have the significance in regard to the manner of death, as Dr. Nichols had suggested. Laurie doubted it purely from a statistical basis, but she wasn’t going to restrict Dr. Nichols from pursuing it as Laurie probably would have done the same if their roles were reversed. One thing that was clear: The hour or so doing the autopsy had been the only time that the breast situation hadn’t been at the forefront of her consciousness since the moment she’d gotten the bad news from the radiologist reading her MRI.
As she climbed into the shower and allowed the water to cascade down onto her head and from there onto all the curves and creases of her body, she remembered one other important thing she had to do prior to eight o’clock. She had to call the Brooks School and tell Miss Rossi that they had decided to have JJ evaluated. Hopefully the school psychologist could recommend someone to do the evaluation, particularly a male psychiatrist or psychologist. The more Laurie had thought about the issue, the stronger she felt that receiving a professional opinion would only help her and Jack make effective parenting decisions.
Chapter 17
May 9th
6:45 A.M.
It was hard for Madison to remember how cold it had been during the winter on her three-minute walk from her apartment on 73rd Street to the subway entrance in Verdi Square. Now that spring had truly sprung, it was a pleasure to be outside to smell the fresh morning air, even in the middle of the city, and hear the birds sing, especially in the tiny park’s trees. Only a month and a half previously it had been so cold and raw one morning, with a mixture of snow and rain, that she had been willing to call a rideshare. She only did that on average of once a month during January and February.
Her normal route, which she had been doing twice a day since September, was to take the number 2 or 3 express train down to 42nd Street, transfer to the number 7 that took her to Grand Central, and then hop on the Lexington Avenue 6 line down to 33rd Street and Park Avenue. From there it was a pleasant twelve-minute walk in decent weather to the hospital. Despite having to take three trains, the whole trip was usually a bit less than a half hour door-to-door provided there were no train delays.
When she had first arrived in the city from St. Louis, she’d been intimidated by the subway. It seemed like such a scary netherworld, often filled with unpleasant smells, occasional random ear-splitting screeches of metal against metal, and strange-looking people that ran the gamut from the well-dressed to the apparent homeless. But over the months she’d become immune, and now she hardly batted an eye at the varying cavalcade of people she encountered. And like so many travelers, she could read one of her professional journals on her phone if she felt motivated to better herself, or the Daily News if she didn’t. That morning she’d brought a spiral notebook she’d filled with her genealogy notes over the previous two years. Madison’s method of studying was to write things down. Once she did, it was generally committed to memory. If she wanted to review, like in her present circumstance, the notes served as a superb way of doing so.
When she reached the subway entrance, an architecturally interesting head house in Verdi Square, she girded herself for the general subway smell. It wasn’t particularly unpleasant, just unique. As usual, she had plenty of company as millions of New Yorkers relied on the subway to commute to their places of work. It gave Madison a sense of belonging to a grand, common enterprise.