Read Online Like Family by Paolo Giordano - Free Book Online Page B

that time had already darkened Renato’s field of vision to some extent, were advancing toward Mrs. A. and her husband was aware of it. Looking at the newspaper clippings he’d so meticulously preserved, I wondered if he’d had a premonition about his wife’s end. Perhaps he feared it more than his own—and in those seemingly disconnected accounts he had been searching for a way to save her.
    Instead, thirty-five years later, Mrs. A. is offering her left arm to a needle that contains an alarming concentration of unstable isotopes of fluorine. She has always had thin, fragile blood vessels, making injections torture, but today she is full of optimism and isn’t bothered by the nurse’s clumsy attempts. If she goes by how she’s been feeling for a couple of weeks—energetic and spirited, with smooth skin and a bit of appetite that has quickly allowed her to regain more than four pounds—she can’t help but be convinced that she’s cured or has at least embarked on the road to rapid improvement. The PET scan will confirm it for sure. The thought never crosses her mind that the upturn is entirely due to the abnormal doses of cortisone she’s been taking for months; the doubt doesn’t arise even when, at the endof the scan, she meets the uncomfortable gaze of the technician who, from inside the protective lead-walled cubicle, has seen her diaphanous body displayed on the monitor, the ghost of a woman who has lit up in several areas besides the lung: the L1 vertebra, the ileum and the right femoral neck. The cancerous cells have emitted packets of positrons that in annihilation with their negative twins have been converted into light, a clear sign that the cancer has now entered the bloodstream and is taking full possession of the body.
    But Mrs. A. doesn’t know it yet, and for the moment she’s relieved, a relief motivated also by something beyond her physical well-being and of which she feels somewhat ashamed. A week ago the painter died, quietly, in his sleep. That evening he ate and drank heartily, and in the morning he did not wake up. What this means, in addition to the inexorable shortening of the list of people with whom she’s shared the past, is that the bird of paradise had not come for her: they’d both been wrong about that. It’s good news, no use pretending otherwise, and in any case the painter had nothing to complain about. “For a midget he went far beyond what could be expected,” is Mrs. A.’scursory summation, “and he enjoyed it, all that glory and those women. He enjoyed every minute of it!”
    _____
    I think that at the time of the PET scan, before being informed of its disastrous verdict, Nora may have shared Mrs. A.’s unfounded optimism; she may even have encouraged it in some way. When I asked her, though, she denied it, saying that in any case the idea of acupuncture hadn’t been hers but her mother’s.
    â€œAcupuncture? Did you seriously take her to have acupuncture? When exactly?”
    â€œBefore the report came.”
    â€œShe had an advanced-stage cancer, and you two . . . I can’t believe it.”
    Nora’s tardy confession came one night when we had a couple of friends over for dinner: not very close friends, a daughter the same age as Emanuele, a similar lifestyle and an acceptable geographical proximity. It happens more often than we’d like that certain omissions between us emerge while we are in the company of others, as if we wanted to make sure we had witnesses or accomplices—or, even more cowardly, asif we were trying to mitigate the other’s possible reactions by having an outsider present.
    Nora went on the defensive. “If it’s as ineffective as you say, then it makes no difference.”
    Her reasoning was impeccable, yet I felt there was something wrong with it—that falling into the trap of superstition, convincing herself that