Chapter 2 The Diagnosis

The radiologist's office was painted the colour of eggshell, which is to say it had no colour at all. I sat across from a man in a white coat who was explaining, in careful and considered language, that there was a malignant tumour in my brain.

I remember thinking it was strange that the room had a window and the window had a view of a parking garage.

"The location is operable," he said. "If we move quickly, the success rate is high — above ninety percent. If we wait—" He stopped. "I would strongly recommend not waiting."

I nodded. I gathered the papers he slid toward me and tucked them into my bag. I said thank you. I walked out into a Tuesday afternoon that looked exactly like every other Tuesday afternoon, and I sat on a bench outside and called Damiano.

It rang four times. Then his voice, distracted, his meeting-voice: "What is it?"

In the background I could hear noise — conversation, laughter, the clink of glasses. And threading through it all, unmistakably, a woman's voice. Something about it prickled at me.

"Who's in the meeting with you?" I asked. "That voice sounds familiar."

The pause that followed was two seconds at most. When he spoke again, his tone had transformed into something I had never heard directed at me in eight years of marriage.

"Norma." The word was a warning. "You are overstepping. Do not interfere in my business. Don't make me say this twice."

The line went dead.

I sat on the bench for a long time. A pigeon landed near my feet, studied me with one orange eye, and left. I looked down and noticed the papers had slipped from my bag and were scattered across the pavement.

I went home.

Luca was coming in from school as I crossed the entrance hall. He was thirteen and already had his father's walk — that deliberate, unhurried pace that suggests the world can wait. He glanced at me and slowed.

"Your face is white," he said.

I opened my mouth. I wanted to say: I went to the doctor today. I wanted to say: I'm frightened. I wanted to say something true to the child I had nearly died bringing into the world.

"Luca—"

"If you're not feeling well, you should go to hospital," he said, already moving toward the staircase. "And don't use it to get Dad's attention. I hate it when you do that. You and Grandma Costa — always performing."

He disappeared upstairs without looking back.

I stood in the entrance hall alone. The diagnostic papers were crumpled in my hand. I straightened them one by one and read each line until the words stopped meaning anything.

Later, I carried them up to my studio and set them on the table beside my brushes. I stood there in the late-afternoon light, looking at the date at the top of the first page.

My birthday. The tumour had been there on my birthday.

I thought about the dinner no one had come home for. I thought about the cigarette smoke in my face in the rain. I thought about Damiano's voice going cold on the phone — that specific cruelty of a man who had decided, long before this moment, that anything I felt was probably an exaggeration.

"Is anyone home?" I said, to no one.

The house offered its usual answer: the hum of the ventilation system, the distant sound of Luca's music two floors up, and nothing else.

I sat down on the studio floor with my back against the wall and let myself be still. No one came to check on me. No one knocked. The light in the room shifted from amber to grey as the sun went down, and I remained exactly where I was — holding a piece of paper that told me I was running out of time, in a house that had long since run out of warmth.