Thursday, January 12, 2:30 AM. Amy.

I can’t sleep. I don’t know how I’m going to write this, but I have to.

I think Brewer has cancer. He’s been in denial about it, but after what he told me today…

Oh God.

I will tell you what I knew before and what I learned this evening. Damn him for keeping this from me. How could he do it? Why would he do this to me?

We found out about the baby last July. I whispered the news to him while we were watching the fireworks in the town square, surrounded by friends. I didn’t know how he would react. He was shocked, but happy. We both were.

But even that night I could tell something wasn’t quite right with him. And now looking back…

He had a headache. His eyes looked funny, uneven. He said it was the noise and the heat. He walked home early and I brought the kids a little later. I would have forgotten about that, but today he said that’s when it started.

For me they were happy weeks, telling my mom, Kelli, friends at the college. But he seemed distracted, distant. I remember thinking he looked older somehow. I was afraid that jealousy was eating at him. I know the baby is his, but it would be understandable if he wasn’t as confident.

In July he mentioned headaches several times, I now remember. Once I found him lying in the grass in our front yard. It was odd. He said he was just relaxing, but later I noticed a big bruise on his elbow. I suspected he had fallen—had stumbled somehow—and was too embarrassed to admit it. It was concerning, and I didn’t know what to make of it. Then, after the Vanishing, he seemed all better and I had other things to worry about.

All this I knew last summer.

What I learned today was that in July he was feeling even worse than it seemed. He was often dizzy. He saw double. He was nauseous. He didn’t tell me, but he took himself to the doctor—very unlike him—and they did a scan. They saw something under his scalp but thought it might be an old basketball injury.

They sent him to an oncologist. I can’t believe he did that without telling me. He says he figured it was nothing serious and didn’t want to spoil “our joy.” The oncologist said it was probably nothing or else something easily operable, “it usually is.” But they’d do a biopsy to make sure. He gave him some extra strong painkiller and some medicine for nausea and told him to rest. They scheduled the biopsy a few weeks out, August 10th.

He began to feel better. Our hiking trip was already scheduled, so he decided to go ahead with it.

What an idiot.

He says the headaches were mild in Colorado and he didn’t suffer dizziness or vision problems. What would we have done if he had, I asked, all alone up in the mountains? He figured he’d been under stress in the summer and getting away was already making things better.

By the time August 10th rolled around, the oncologist, along with the rest of humanity, had taken a leave of absence. There would be no biopsy, no diagnosis, no prognosis, no treatment.

And Brewer says he felt fine. So he never felt the need to tell me anything. True to form, he compartmentalized the experience and forged cheerfully onward. And he did seem fine, and feel fine, all autumn.

I noticed at Christmas that he wasn’t 100%. Again it was that “old man” effect. Quick to sit down, slow to rise. Going to bed too early and getting up late. Complaining of headaches. And I’d look into his eyes and they were again uneven, one pupil bigger than the other.

Then one day last week I heard him throwing up in the bathroom. He said it must’ve been something he ate.

Yesterday at Trevor’s party I knew something was wrong. I don’t think the kids noticed, but Brewer was green, and sweating, and leaning on the backs of chairs to keep himself upright. He left after the singing. That evening I asked him how he was feeling. He brushed it off.

This afternoon I cornered him while he lay on our bed, and I wouldn’t take “fine” for an answer.

He told me all this.

Is it cancer? I don’t know. I know he’s sick and has been increasingly sick for the past month. I know it’s the same kind of sickness he suffered last summer. I know that an oncologist thought it was worrisome enough to plan an excavation of his head to make sure.

Maybe it really is just stress—certainly we’ve been through enough of that lately. Maybe it’s a “benign” tumor—whatever that is. But don’t benign tumors still grow? And isn’t a growing thing on your brain a really serious problem? Maybe what is harmless and “benign” in a civilized society is crippling and chronic in a primitive one.

Maybe even fatal.

I feel so helpless. We have faced a lot of hardship in the last six months—we performed surgery on our own son, for Christ’s sake—and we’ve made it through them all. But this is new. I don’t have a fix for this. I’m not about to begin trepanning my own husband. But he’s in pain, he’s in danger, and there’s nothing I can do.

God, he’s such a fool. Why did he hide this? Why didn’t he trust me with this? I could have helped. I could have been prepared, at least. Why doesn’t he trust me with anything? What’s he trying to do to me?