Like Family by Paolo Giordano Page B

fracture wrists, ankles and sacra. Given the overcrowding in the emergency rooms, Civil Defense has recommended that everyone stay home, and Mrs. A. is among the few to obey.
    None of the tenants has bothered to shovel the snow from the courtyard; rather than exert themselves, they prefer to park along the street. She was the only one who shoveled as long as she had the strength, as long as there was a good reason to go out, and that good reason was us. When it snowed, we tried to persuade her to stay over for the night—a folding cot was ready and waiting in Emanuele’s room—but Mrs. A. wanted to go back to her own home, maybe because Renato’s spirit awaited her for dinner, so she braved the slippery roads to Rubiana in her minuscule car. “She comes to us despite the storm,” Nora would remark, surprised each time by such dedication. “My mother, on the other hand, won’t drive if there’s a trace of fog. When I was little, she wouldn’t take me to thedentist because of the fog, so now all my teeth are in bad shape. What a witch.”
    Anyone outside who glimpsed Mrs. A.’s silhouette at the window would wonder if it was a man or a woman. Her gauntness has obliterated her feminine attributes: on her bald, seemingly shrunken head, she sports the mint green nightcap—during the third cycle of chemotherapy she suddenly lost all her hair—and by this time she routinely wears a dark sweater and slacks that are loose on her, like a prison uniform. That’s exactly what she is: a prisoner. The soft layer of snow on the ground, a sight that has always enchanted her, now seems like an insuperable impediment.
    Bad weather has kept her trapped in the apartment for fourteen consecutive days. Twice Giulietta’s husband has done her shopping for her, a basic list very different from what she would have bought for herself. People who take care of us are almost never able to do things the way we’d like, but we have to make do: they’ve already done enough. A little clump of snow falls off the man’s boots as he asks her the obvious questions, then melts on the floor of the entryway,going no further, a thin puddle that she doesn’t bother to wipe up.
    Her visits are limited to this. Her hermitage is difficult to reach. Cancer, her worst enemy, is the only company still left to her. She no longer cares about anything except the clinical schedule that marks the days, weeks, months. By now she spends entire afternoons in bed, with the TV on, dozing in front of images of glowing girls talking about their numerous boyfriends—to her, a woman who has remained faithful to the same man all her life. Mrs. A. doesn’t judge them harshly, she doesn’t envy them. They simply belong to a new breed; they’re extraterrestrials, and their adventures leave her indifferent.
    _____
    The truth is that the PET scan and the second CT scan reveal a complete failure. The cancerous tumor has grown three millimeters in diameter, as if the toxins had scattered everywhere except where they were needed. The hair she’d sacrificed, the nearly thirty pounds she’d lost and the disgusting vomiting were allin vain. The oncologist who has been in charge of her case from the beginning doesn’t show the slightest emotion as she pronounces all this; she never shows emotion, and it’s an aspect of her character that Mrs. A. has come to appreciate, though earlier it seriously bothered her. The doctor has the Teutonic iciness of a military strategist, a coldness that goes well with her thick, wavy, auburn hair. She can’t worry about the emotional fallout of every report she provides, or otherwise, with thirty patients hovering on the brink of survival or death, her frame of mind would be a constantly spinning centrifuge. “But there’s a positive side,” she added, “for the moment no other metastases have appeared. The tumor seems . . .