The Perfect Stranger (18 page)

Cancerversaries = Bullshit

I don’t commemorate Suspicious Ultrasound Day, Biopsy Day, Diagnosis Day, Mastectomy Day. No offense to those of you who do. But for me, those dates are just uncomfortable to remember and always will be. It’s certainly easier to look back with some perspective years later, but I’m not sure anything is gained by marking those days as an anniversary. To me, it’s more the whole journey that matters and how far I’ve come overall.

However, there is one milestone I’d like to mention. The Boobless Wonder turned one last week. As my first grade students like to say, “That’s cool, right?”

When I started this blog, I never considered how long I’d keep it up. I went in thinking “One day at a time,” because honestly, sharing intimate details with the cyber world seemed batshit crazy. Looking back now, I see that it was never the world I was reaching for, but one person that might relate to my experiences. Maybe I’d find someone else going through the same crap and we could support each other.

In the aftermath of my diagnosis, my brain was still so cluttered with all things cancer, I’d lost the ability to go about my days. It was one thing to have a calendar full of appointments, a million never-ending questions, pain from expanders, then implants, but it was quite another to talk about it all the time to my fellow teachers, my friends, even the jerk I was dating at the time. I mean, who wants to listen to it?

Even those closest to me needed a respite once in a while. Which I totally got, but that didn’t change the fact I was on overload, my emotions consistently raw.

I realized I needed an outlet. A way out of my own head, some breathing room from those oppressive walls of cancer.

This is where I found it. And so, Happy Blogaversary to me! Sharing personal crap on the Internet turned out better than I ever hoped.

PS That doesn’t mean I think cancer is a gift! I don’t!

PPS No offense to those of you who do!

—Excerpt from Elena’s blog,
The Boobless Wonder

Chapter 8

Bright sunshine and clear blue skies in Northern Kentucky—where the Cincinnati airport is located—catch Landry off guard.

The weather had been so gloomy at takeoff after a nonexistent sunrise in Mobile, and it poured nonstop in Atlanta. Somehow, she didn’t expect to be greeted by a dazzling summer day upon reaching her destination, but there it is, beyond the wall of plate glass in the terminal. Somehow, it makes her feel slightly reassured about whatever lies ahead.

As she makes her way to the ladies’ room, she finds herself scanning the faces of passing strangers, and of the women waiting on the long line to use the stalls. Among them she might just find Elena, whom she knows should also be landing here right around now.

Landry knows what she looks like, having seen the photos posted on Elena’s blog. Dark hair, round, pleasant face, in her early thirties . . .

Which describes many of the women she’s encountered so far in the airport.

Stepping out of the stall, she makes eye contact with one.

“Elena?”

The woman looks at her.

“Are you Elena?”

She shakes her head, shrugs.
“No habla ingles.”

Landry apologizes, conscious of the curious stares of other women in the line. She wonders what they’re thinking, then decides not to care, tired of fretting about . . .

Well, just about everything.

What would Meredith do? She’d move on without a backward glance.

Landry dries her hands and does just that.

It’s probably better that she hasn’t run into Elena here at the airport, she decides, having caught a glimpse of her reflection in the mirror. She’s definitely looking travel weary. The sooner she can get to the hotel and pull herself together, the better.

At the car rental counter, she finds another long line and busies herself calling Rob from her cell phone while she waits.

“So you made it.”

His familiar drawl makes her aware of just how far from home she really is.

“Yep—I made it.”

“You doing okay?”

She hesitates. “Sure.”

“Good. Listen, I was just talking to John, and he used to have a client up there. He said that if you get a chance, you should try the chili at Skyline.”

“Did you tell him this isn’t a pleasure trip? I mean, I’m walking into a funeral for a friend who was murdered . . .”

And they haven’t caught whoever did it.

“I know you are,” Rob says quickly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“No, it’s okay. I know.”

He’s back there at home, where everything is nice and normal, instead of here in a strange place worrying that whoever killed Meredith might turn around and come after her.

Because of course there’s no reason to think that.

Is there?

She stares at the blond hair of the woman standing directly in front of her and idly speculates about whether it’s a wig. It looks like one. Fashion choice by a brunette who thinks blondes really do have more fun, Landry wonders, or is she just yet another woman who’s lost her hair to cancer treatment?

“Next!” calls the counter agent, and the woman steps forward.

“I’m going to have to hang up in a minute,” Landry tells Rob. “It’s almost my turn.”

“Okay, wait—do you have any idea where the new car insurance cards are? Because I need to put them into the glove compartments and I can’t find them anywhere.”

Of course he can’t.

She reminds him—again—that she thumb-tacked them to the bulletin board in the kitchen.

“I looked there.”

“Look again.”

“But I didn’t—”

“Next!” calls the rental counter agent, finished with the woman ahead of Landry.

“Trust me,” she tells Rob, “they’re on the bulletin board. I’ve got to go.”

She hurriedly hangs up, steps forward, and pulls out the folded papers containing printouts of her reservations.

“Thank you, Mrs. Wells. Are you a member of our frequent renter program?”

“No, I’m not.”

“Would you like to join?”

“No, thanks.”
I’d like to get into a hotel room with a hot shower, that’s all I’d like right about now.

“Are you familiar with Cincinnati?”

Feeling more impatient by the second, she admits, “No, I’ve never been here before.”

“You’ll want a GPS system in the car, then. And I’ll get you some maps.” The agent briskly steps away from the counter.

“I can tell you how to get where you’re going,” says a familiar voice behind Landry.

She turns to see Bruce Mangione, Private Investigator and Personal Security.

They hadn’t done much more talking for the duration of the flight. He’d gotten busy on his laptop after takeoff, and she’d finally managed to lose herself in the celebrity biography she’d downloaded to her e-reader the other night. The other passengers seemed equally subdued, probably thanks to having risen in the wee hours to make an early flight, then spending several mind-numbing hours at the gate. No one—not even the flight attendants—seemed to be in a conversational mood anymore.

After they landed, Bruce Mangione lifted Landry’s bag down from the overhead bin, she thanked him, and that was that. She lost track of him amid the mass exodus that began when the door opened onto the jetway.

“Hi,” he says. “I’ve been standing behind you but you seemed busy and I didn’t want to interrupt.”

“Oh . . . thanks . . . I just—that was my husband.”

“I just called my wife, too. She gets nervous when I fly. Sounds like your husband is worried about you, too.”

“He . . . not really. I mean . . .” She wonders how much he heard. “He just likes to make sure I’m okay.”

“I don’t blame him. Crazy things can happen. Trust me—in my line of work, I’ve seen it all. So where do you have to go now that you’re here?”

“I think it’s a Residence Inn . . . or maybe a Fairfield Inn. One of those Marriott chains . . .” She starts to reach for the reservation paper she left on the counter.

“You’re going to the hotel before the funeral?”

Caught off guard by his mention of the funeral, she turns back to him in surprise—then remembers that she told him about it on the plane. Still, she wonders again how much he overheard of her conversation with Rob just now. She wasn’t exactly whispering.

Not that it matters . . .

Does it?

“The hotel is right down the road from the funeral home,” she tells him with a shrug, “so—”

“All right, Ms. Wells, here you go . . .” The counter attendant is back, handing over a couple of maps and a contract. “The shuttle driver will wait for you if you hurry, right through those doors, if you’ll just sign here, here, here, initial here and here . . .”

“Thank you.” She scans the contract, signs, signs, signs again, initials and initials, and turns quickly to Bruce. “I’ve got to run. It was nice—”

“Are you sure you don’t need directions?”

“I don’t think—”

“Next!”

“Go ahead,” Landry tells him, gesturing at the rental counter and grabbing the handle of her bag. “I’ll be fine, thanks. Nice meeting you.”

“You too,” he calls as he steps up to the counter.

It isn’t until Landry has stepped out of the shuttle at the rental lot that she realizes she left the paper containing her hotel reservation back on the counter. And she isn’t sure of the name of the hotel chain, let alone the address.

Dammit. She’ll have to go back.

Wait a minute. She received an e-mail confirmation when she made the reservations. She should be able to find that in her phone . . .

She turns toward the shuttle as the doors close, but at the last second the driver sees her and opens the door. Two minutes later she’s behind the wheel of a rental car, typing the hotel’s address into the GPS.

There. See that? I can take care of myself just fine,
she silently tells herself.
No reason to worry. Not at all.

A man raps gently on the driver’s side window, and Jaycee jumps.

She hadn’t even seen him approach the car. She’d been too busy watching BamaBelle drive off in her mid-sized rental, which had—as luck would have it—been parked in the spot adjacent to hers.

Then again, perhaps that’s not as big a coincidence as it seems. Bama had, after all, been standing directly behind her in the line back at the counter.

Jaycee was so caught up in her own problems that she wouldn’t have even noticed her there had she not overheard that distinct southern drawl talking on the cell phone. Even then, she wasn’t positive it was Bama—or rather, Landry, as she’d introduced herself a few days ago when Jaycee spoke to her from Los Angeles.

But when Landry mentioned Meredith’s name, Jaycee knew for certain.

Sure enough, she snuck a glance over her shoulder and recognized a slightly older, more worn-out-looking version of BamaBelle’s official blog site photo.

Bama didn’t even notice, caught up in whatever she was saying to her husband—it had to be her husband—on the phone. Mostly, she seemed to be trying to convince him not to worry about her.

Even if Landry had given her a second glance, she’d of course still have no clue who she was, because she doesn’t use a head shot on her blog.

From time to time she’s toyed with the idea of posting a photo—though not her own image, of course. It would be easy enough to steal a stranger’s digital snapshot and claim it as her own.

But there would be a certain level of risk involved with that, and why tempt fate?

After handing over the ID Cory had arranged for her years ago, the one that bears her real name and a drab, barely recognizable photo of her—Jaycee finished her own rental papers and headed out to the shuttle as Landry took her spot at the counter. The bus was almost full. Jaycee sat in one of two empty seats up front and willed the driver to pull away before Bama could get on.

It almost seemed like that was going to happen—he waited a few more minutes, then pulled the doors shut. But before he could pull away, he spotted Landry coming out of the terminal and opened the doors again.

Landry sat down right next to her, of course—it was the only empty spot on the bus. Jaycee held her breath on the ride over, but Landry didn’t give her a second glance; not then, when they were shoulder-to-shoulder, and not when they found their way off the bus to cars parked right next to each other.

“Excuse me? Ma’am?” The man knocks again on Jaycee’s window and gestures for her to roll it down.

She hesitates—courtesy of a decade’s worth of New York street smarts—then obliges. Clearly, he works here—he’s wearing a jacket and name tag emblazoned with the rental car company’s name. Besides, nothing terrible is going to happen to her in broad daylight in a public place, right?

“Yes?” She regards him from behind her sunglasses.

“I just wanted to ask . . . and you probably get this all the time . . .”

She sighs inwardly as he talks on, fighting the urge to roll up the window and drive away.

Few things irk her more than strangers without boundaries.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have begun our initial descent into the Cincinnati area. Please turn off and put away any electronic devices you’ve been using. If you’d like to use your cell phone right after we land, please make sure you keep it handy, because you will not have access to the overhead bins until we reach the gate.”

Hearing the flight attendant’s advice, Elena remembers her cell phone. The battery was almost drained when she turned it off back at Logan. No need to turn it on now; she’ll charge it as soon as she gets to the hotel.

She forces her eyes open and lifts the shade covering the window beside her seat. Brilliant sunshine spills into the cabin. Leaning into the glass, she sees a network of roads, waterways, houses, and forests far below. Almost there.

After guzzling her beverage service Bloody Mary, she spent the duration of her flight either dozing or pretending to be asleep—anything to avoid conversation with the chatty elderly man in the aisle seat. He was perfectly friendly, but she wasn’t in the mood for conversation. Not after what happened with Tony.

She couldn’t get out of his car fast enough back at the airport, still insisting that he needn’t meet her flight tomorrow night. She didn’t give him the correct information, but for all she knows, he saw it posted beneath a magnet on her refrigerator and will show up.

Of all the men she could have chosen for a one night stand . . .

She still can’t quite grasp that it really happened—and now, of all times, on the heels of the week from hell, leading into what promises to be one of the most heart-wrenching funerals ever?

But then again, is it any surprise? She’s never dealt very well with this kind of pressure. Her response to stress has always been to run away or self-medicate—preferably both, simultaneously. Which is why she ordered a double Bloody Mary as soon as the plane took off, much to the amusement of the man in the aisle seat.

“Nervous flier?” he asked.

“No—tough day,” she said, only to be met with one of those
You think you’ve got problems? Listen to mine
spiels.

She tuned him out while pretending to listen, inserting comments in all the right places. You get very good at that, being a first grade teacher. Her students like nothing better than to give her blow-by-blow recaps of their favorite cartoons, and self-editing is hardly their forte.

Right now she keeps her forehead fastened to the window, not wanting to engage in another round of Good Listener. Her head is still pounding and she might be tempted, this time, to tell the old guy to keep his problems to himself. She’s got enough of her own—Tony being the most recent, but hardly the least troubling.

Again, she thinks back to last night. Her skin crawls when she thinks of it.

So don’t think of it!

That’s what Meredith would say—and famously did, in the blog post where she asked,
Why dwell on the past when you can focus on the future?

Some followers slammed her for being insensitive.

Not Elena. She couldn’t agree more. Her own past was no picnic.

The plane banks and she loses sight of the ground. They’re getting ready to land.