Outer Banks by Anne Rivers Siddons

Abrams are up here.”
    â€œIs that what you think I’m doing?” I said. “Refusing to look ahead?”
    â€œI know you are,” he said. “You’ve been doing it for almost five years. I could understand it for a while, even if I didn’t think it was exactly healthy, but there’s just not any reason to do it now. You’re virtually well. You need to get on with your life. We need to make some plans. We need to get you out of this fortress back here. It’s beautiful, but it doesn’t make a life, Kate.”
    A little cold wind breathed up out of the abyss, that I had buried deep these past months in a grave of flowers and solitude.
    â€œDon’t push me, Alan,” I said. “I want to wait a little while. It hasn’t been five years yet.”
    â€œKatie, dear love. It’s been okay for four and a half years. It’s going to be okay this time. Why is it that you can accept bad news so much more easily than you can good?”
    â€œLet’s just see what happens,” I said, and he left it at that. Alan is one of the other half, the ones who have never walked the bridge over the abyss. He listens with fierce sympathy when I talk of it, and tries with all his good, bright being to impart to me his innate feelings of safety and optimism, but he simply does not know what I know, what the abyss-walkers know.
    One thing I have always known, since they found the cancer, is that the Pacmen were ultimately going to get me, and I am fairly sure now that it will be sooner rather than later. It’s how I always pictured the cancer cells inside me, like those maniacally teeming, ravenous little round heads in the witless electronic game, all blind gobbling mouths. In the beginning I actually thought I could feel them there, darting and shooting about like terrible reverse sperm, bearing death rather than life, gobbling, gobbling. Even after the surgeries and the rounds of chemo, I fancied that they were still at it in there, down in that fertile red darkness. Then, gradually, I simply stopped feeling them or much of anything else; as the years and the exploratories and the checkups passed and the results came back negative, the garden and the still, suspended white peace claimed me and I had no sense of them at their busywork.
    But one morning this July I woke and thought, simply, They’re back, and by nightfall I was convinced of it, and I have known it ever since. There are no other symptoms, but it is my body and my abyss, and I know what I know. The Pacmen are on the march, and I do not think I can go through it again. Not another surgery, not another of the terrible, wracking rounds of chemotherapy, not another siege of baldness, not another night spent staring into thick, dead darkness, not another day swingingfrom hope to despair a hundred times between sunup and nightfall. I can’t and I won’t.
    I have not told Alan. He would not believe me, anyway.
    â€œYou have no way of knowing that without seeing McCracken,” he would say, and he would have me there, in that airy, elegant office on Madison that still stinks, to me, of that first terror, before I knew what had hit me. So I will not tell him. This way, there are almost two months left before my checkup. Two months of the autumn light that is so magical out here, the clear golds and blues, the high, honey sun and nights literally swarming with stars, and the great sweeps of space and emptiness without the summer crowds. Two months of just the darkening blue of the sea and the bright, hot tan of the sand and the great autumn skies, with the last butterflies teeming in the sun and the migratory birds sweeping over on their way south. Two months of the garden. It will be wonderful; it will be enough.
    I finished with the witch grass and started in on the dodder that threatens always to choke the daisies and zinnias. The sun beat down on my head and the tops of my shoulders; from the angle