SUMMER of FEAR by T. Jefferson Parker

a lead-lined
cap to keep the radiation from damaging anyone but her, trying to move her
toes, then her ankles, then her knees. "Well," she said, always
thought those wheelchairs with motors were nice. Can you get me one in a hot
pink, Dr. Nesson?"
    "We'll get one in any color you want," he
said quietly.
    We settled on black, motorless. When it came time to actually get a
wheelchair, the concept of hot pink had lost its charm.
    Isabella
looked at him now, then back at the colorize PET scan pictures. The tumor was a
dark mass outlined in red and yellow. It was no longer round: The powerful
radioactive implants had contorted it into a lumpy asymmetrical mess.
    "What do we do?" Isabella asked.
    "How's your leg function?"
    "Pretty bad."
    "More weakness?"
    "Yes."
    "Speech?"
    "It's g-g-getting worse. Want to see my tricks
now?"
    Nesson did his usual neurological exam: reflex in the leg (almost none),
nystagmus in the eyes (plenty), facial symmetry (good). He asked to see her
walk. Isabella labored out of her chair, took the handle of a quad cane in each
hand, and picked her way across the room with excruciating slowness, patience,
and concentration. Nesson and I followed on each side of her, ready. She made a
turn, came back to her chair, and slumped into it.
    "Why don't I feel any better, doctor?"
    Nesson said nothing, looked up at the scan pictures again, his hands
deep in the pockets of his white coat, his head cocked a little to the left.
For a moment, he stood there without moving.
    "I think it's time to go in and debulk the tumor, clean out the
necrosed tissue," he said.
    "Cut my head open?"
    "That would be necessary, yes."
    "If you d-d-didn't want to operate a year ago,
why now?"
    "It's a different situation, Isabella. I believe that now we have
more to gain."
    "You mean less to l-lose."
    "I suppose you can look at it that way."
    Nesson outlined the procedure, its risks and possible benefits, what we
might gain and what we might lose.
    "What are my chances of waking up a spat-spat-spit-dribbling
vegetable?"
    Nesson said that 90 percent of these procedures were done without that
kind of damage.
    "Well, my chances of getting a brain tumor in the first place were
one in about two hundred thousand. Your odds one in t-t-ten. Not g-good, if
you're me."
    "I'd like you to think about it. Any surgical procedure has its
risks. This is not urgent. Yet."
    I rolled Isabella back to the car in silence. When we were inside, she
turned to me. "Does the insurance cover it?"
    "Of course."
    "But I don't want them in my head."
    "No. That's okay."
    "It terrifies me, Russ, worse than anything in the world. I don't
think I'd ever out come of it."
    "Then I won't let them take you in."
    We spilled from the dark parking structure into the dazzling sunshine of
early July.
    "Will you do me a favor, R-R-Russ? Take us to the grove? We could
get some sandwiches, okay?"
    "My
pleasure," I said, smiling, heart heavy, hands tight on the steering
wheel. I wanted to crush things and cry a curse the Maker at the top of my
lungs, but this was not the time. It was never the time.
    The grove was an
orange grove—Valencias, in fact—one of the last still owned by the SunBlesst
Company, once operated under the hard scrutiny of my father, Theodore Francis
Monroe.
    What
made the grove important to Isabella and me was a Sunday evening six Septembers
ago, after a day I had spent making the ranch rounds on horseback with my
father—checking the irrigation, the fruit sugar levels, the poacher and pest
damage.
    It had been a typical day for me and my father: polite, given mostly to
the exchange of professional complaints, which for him always meant the
shrinking acreage of SunBlesst Ranch. The day was, on my part at least, less
than fully felt. I loved him, but there was a cynicism in my father that he
cultivated as carefully as he did his citrus crop, a hardness that left him
somehow both unlikable and untouchable. He had tried to pass along those things
to me, as if they