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of the most powerful women on the Hill, you might have thought you’d inadvertently walked into an Ethan Allen catalog.

I pulled out her chocolate leather chair and sat down, grabbing the gold calligraphy pen that was perched on the right corner.

Senator Dupris—

I’m sorry that I missed you. I know that you don’t check
e-mail, so wanted to leave you a note. I strongly urge you to reconsider your stance on the birth control referendum. I know that
we can avoid the Mississippi contingent—I looked into it and
have some tactics and information to quiet them.

Please keep this in mind.

—Natalie

PS—Thanks for the orchids last week. They are wonderful
and thriving in my living room.

“Good God, Blair,” I said as I left Dupris’s office. “How can you even work with this rancid smell?”

“You get used to it. I can’t even smell anything, actually.” She burrowed around in her purse. “Want a piece of gum?”

“No. Thank you.” I craned my neck around to peer into the cubes. “Where’s Kyle? Did you give him my message?”

She folded the piece of gum into her mouth and turned the color of a spring beet. “Um, I forwarded your e-mail to his BlackBerry, but he hasn’t been in all morning, and he didn’t write me back. I wasn’t sure what to do.”

I inhaled and exhaled just like Janice told me to do. But this deep breathing thing really didn’t seem to be working. So after three goes of it, I slammed my hand down on her desk and stared until she pressed herself as far back as was humanly possible to 38

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press oneself into a swivel chair without actually becoming one with it.

I started to open my mouth, to chastise her for a job so inadequately done, but all at once, I was exhausted. Bone-crushingly exhausted. Crawl-under-the-desk exhausted. I broke my gaze from Blair, massaged my temples with my now-stinging hand, and leaned back into her desk.

“Natalie, are you okay?” Blair asked meekly, cocking her head to the side and putting on a worried face.

I blew out my breath and stood up straight, tugging at my jacket to ensure that I didn’t wrinkle.

“Fine, Blair. I’m fine.” And with that, I turned and walked toward the elevator before it became apparent to anyone besides me that I wasn’t fine at all.

R o u n d T w o

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◆

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October

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◆

f o u r

had the dream again. The same one I had during the first week Iof my first cycle. I was at a deserted amusement park at dusk, and when I looked out from my perch atop a roller coaster, I saw that the only people left on the grounds were the clowns.

Thousands of them. Bright red wigs bobbing up and down, silly plodding shoes leading their way. I sat on the roller coaster and at once felt my car, one in the very back, lurch forward, and soon I was flying so fast that tears unwillingly came to my eyes. The car slowed as it approached the big incline upward, and suddenly (because this can happen only in dreams), I was squished in my seat by dozens of clowns. Overflowing even. Pressed like sardines up against me with a saccharine smell of cotton candy. I tried to undo my seat belt to jump, to release myself before my claustrophobia 42

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set in, but it was as if the ride itself wouldn’t set me free. We reached the top of the climb, and I felt it—the panic that comes right before a dead drop, the kind that I imagine pilots sense when a plane has gone into a nosedive.

“Please,” I shouted to the clowns below. “Please, pull the lever and make it stop!” But all I heard was merry-go-round music, oompa-loompaing in the background, my voice bouncing off it and echoing back. And besides, it was already too late. We’d crossed the hump of the hill, and gravity was already pulling us down. I tried to grab hold of the clown pressed up to my right, but my grip went right through him, like he was an apparition and bore no weight. The car was flying, and I was going with it. We went fast, faster, faster still until we tore off the track, skidding against the paved grounds and leaving smoke in our wake. We landed on a mound of sand, a flattened beach in the middle of the park, and though I should have felt relief, what I felt was only increasing panic. Because all at once, like a tentacle around my calves, a sucking force pulled me down, deeper, deeper until I was in the sand up to my thighs. I frantically flailed over crimson clown wigs, oversized buttons, and suffocating cotton candy, but no matter how much I willed it to be so, I couldn’t gain solid footing. And I couldn’t make it stop. Just as I was about to give up, just as I was about to surrender to my fate, a hand reached out and pulled me up. I tried to see who it was, see who saved me, but all I saw was a faceless shadow, and then, even that was gone.

i w o k e u p on my couch with the ladies from
The View
yammer-ing in the background, and moved my hand up to feel my pulse nearly beating through my neck. Gingerly, I swung my legs to the
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floor, wiped the film of sweat off my forehead, and reached for my Nikes. The waves of nausea had mostly passed, at least for this week and this round, so I propelled myself out the door. Dr. Chin had urged me to be kind to my body, not to push it, but also to keep it vibrant, let it know that it was still living. My four-mile-run mornings were out, but walking, breathing in the throbbing vitality of the city all around me, I could do.

October had set in, and it had always been my favorite month: the one where the air still captured the warmth of the previous season but also hung with the promise of the fall chill. When the light on Seventy-third Street turned red, I stopped and nuzzled the wet nose of a black lab standing beside me with his owner, and in exchange, he lapped my face in a warm bath. I wiped down my cheeks and smiled. As I cut over to Central Park, the sun bounced off the crimson and golden leaves, and other than the passing dog-walker, it was just me, the nutmeg-scented air, and the autumn hues.

When Jake first moved in with me, we took lingering walks each weekend. It was our thing. Some couples play poker, some love to bowl; we loved to explore the park like we might have when we were nine: It was our private playground. We’d stumble over the roots in the Rambles, roam up to the ball fields and watch Little League, or sit on the swings at dusk and split a bottle of merlot.

Eventually, our buzz for each other faded, as one’s buzz inevitably does, and I spent more weekends holed up on the thirty-first floor, and he spent more weekends racking up frequent flier miles, in hopes of becoming the next Mellencamp or Petty or Clapton or whomever he’d deem cool enough to emulate that month.

Today, because I was on the slow upswing of my chemo cycle, I felt well enough to follow the looping path down past the ice rink and around the carousel. I stopped and watched the little kids, 44

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mostly with their nannies, grab the fiberglass horses as tightly as their tiny fists could hold, and squeal with delight as they went up, then down, then back up again.

That summer, the one before Jake and I came down from our heady romantic tornado, he’d convinced me to sneak into the carousel after dark.

“This can’t be a good idea,” I’d said, citing the potential political damage to the senator if we were arrested. “I can’t imagine that bailing out one of her senior-most aides will be looked kindly upon in the papers.”

But he grabbed my hand and picked the lock and led me in anyway. And it was amazing: It was truly as if we were three or four or five, like those kids I saw today. It was a cloudless night, and though you can’t see the stars in New York City, in the darkness of the park, it’s almost as if you can. We sat on the jester-colored horses and stared up at the sky, watching the lights from the skyscraping buildings bounce off the clouds and listening to a nearby Summerstage reggae concert. We didn’t speak for nearly an hour, and then Jake slipped off his perch on the horse and circled around mine and kissed me. And then we fell into each other in ways that we definitely wouldn’t have if we were five.

This afternoon, the carousel slowed to a halt and the music wound down. As the kids scattered and a few cried, I took my cue to exit as well, pushing my hands into my pockets and wrapping my scarf tighter around my neck. I wasn’t sure if the sudden chill were noticeable to anyone but me. Or if there were a sudden chill at all, really.

I was nearing the park exit when I heard my name echoing behind me.

“Natalie? NAT? Is that you?”

I spun around to see Lila Johansson, my sophomore- and
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junior-year sorority roommate, and by more current definitions, my second-best friend after Sally and a fellow bridesmaid in Sally’s wedding, waving at me from beneath a towering maple tree. With her crisply straight, perfectly highlighted blond locks, dark den-ims that just skimmed over her gazellelike legs, and her man-crushing stilettos, Lila was the embodiment of a celebrity, even though the only place she was famous was within our inner circle.

And she was really primarily famous for putting those stilettos to use. And often. We first met our freshman year. We’d sat down next to each other after receiving our bids from our sorority and were promptly assigned to go to lunch together. I looked down at my monogrammed turtleneck and fingered my pearl bracelet and wondered what on earth a girl like me would have in common with a gal like her. Turns out that over chicken kung pao we discovered that hair color and inseam length have little to do with the true testament of who you are. True, she would happily desert you for a glass of wine with a budding Armani model, but her faults were clearly laid out from the get-go. At least those I could see.

“Oh my God, I thought that was you!” Lila ambled closer.

“What are you doing out in the middle of the day? I was on my lunch break and . . .” And then she blanched. “Um, how
are
you?”

I forced a smile. Clearly, Lila’s gut instinct to hail me down took hold before she thought of the consequences of having to actually
speak
to cancer-riddled me.

“I’m fine.” I nodded. “Really, I’m fine.” I looked down and kicked some crisp leaves with my foot.

“I’m sorry,” she said, as she pulled me in for a hug. “I should have called. Sally told me a few weeks ago, and I’ve been on the road for work, and . . . oh
shit
. There’s really just no excuse.”

“It’s okay. Honestly, it is,” I replied into her cashmere-blended wool scarf and then stepped back.

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“I just . . .” She raised her arm and let it drop. “I just didn’t . . .”

“Know what to say? I know. Really, it’s okay, Li. A lot of people haven’t called. In fact, most haven’t. You’re not the only one.” I shrugged and looked down at my sneakers. Breaking news to friends that you had cancer wasn’t in the etiquette guidebook—

truth be told, I’d reached out to as few people as possible. Conse-quentially, supporting said friend when she’s diagnosed with life-threatening illness isn’t exactly a paint-by-numbers situation, either. I’d told Sally that she was allowed to spread the news to a few choice people, but that they wouldn’t be hearing the ghastly info directly from me. Besides, other than an intimate group of friends, of which Lila was a part, true enough, I hadn’t exactly been stellar about keeping in touch over the years. So it was no surprise that, since I faded out of my old friends’ lives, they weren’t exactly bounding to get back into mine.

“Oh God,” she whined. “Now I feel even more horrible. I just, I don’t know. There’s no excuse. But I was just worried I’d say the wrong thing or make it worse or somehow look like an asshole.”

I grabbed her hand. “Lila, really. We’re okay. Come on, walk with me. I was thinking of going around the loop one more time.”

Lila and I had nearly finished my second lap when the wave of vertigo overtook me. I felt the pavement tilt below me, and suddenly the trees stood on a diagonal. I clenched her arm to keep from falling, but it didn’t help much. Instead, I dragged her down with me, both of us just barely landing on the dying grass just off the sidewalk.

“Oh my God, should I call someone?” Lila panicked and reached into her leather buckled Prada bag for her cell phone.

“Nat, look at me, look at me! What’s wrong?” Dr. Chin had warned
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me about dizzy spells and about pushing myself too hard. As Lila rubbed my back, I stuck my head between my knees, something I remembered from high school first aid, and muttered at her, “No, no, this is just a side effect. I’m fine.”

I’m not sure how long we sat there, my friend and I, in the autumn glow of a perfect New York afternoon, but when my breathing evened out and my eyes seemed to steady, I slowly rose and told her I wanted to keep going. I wanted to finish what I’d started, even though it was just a silly walk with my old friend five weeks after I’d been diagnosed with cancer.

“Nat, you’re too exhausted. Your face is, like, the color of my walls. Let’s just hail a cab.” She put her arm up to nab a taxi as it cruised through the park.

“No,” I said firmly. “I’m walking home.”

“Natalie, don’t be ridiculous. You’re going to pass out on Central Park West. We’re stopping. This can’t be good for you!”

“Don’t tell me what isn’t good for me! And don’t tell me to stop,” I screamed, as Lila took a step back. “How the hell can anyone know what’s good for me! I mean, I work out, I eat relatively well, I’m not a bad person, and it appears that none of it, none of it, is good for me! So how the fuck does something like this happen to someone like me?” Without warning, I squeezed out fat teardrops that fell as if from the storm earlier that week. Lila pulled me close and held me up until I stopped shaking.