The Climb
by Theo Kogod
The woman dropped the charges against him, but
Cassie still kicked him out.
“When do you think you want to schedule to come
back in for more tests?” the doctor asked.
Reid told himself it wasn’t his fault. He made
excuses. He drank. But he couldn’t forget what he’d
done, or what people were saying about him, and he
couldn’t remember how things got this way.
“I can’t. My insurance won’t cover it,” Reid told
her, and bit back of desperation he tasted in those
words.
He picked up the phone, and called her again. She
picked up this time. It was only his third time calling.
“What is it, Reid? What could you possibly have to
say now?” Cassie snapped.
“I—“ Reid stammered. “Just, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah? You’ve told me. Listen, Reid, stop calling
me, okay? We’re done, and you need some serious
help.”
He opened his mouth to respond, but then the line
clicked. Maybe it really was over. Her words echoed in
his head.
Help? Maybe he did need help. And so he made a
call he’d been putting off for far too long.
“Cancer.”
The word struck him like a guillotine. Reid barely
heard the doctor as she kept talking, only vaguely
aware of the technical words she kept repeating and
then dumbing down for him. She said some things
about spatial awareness, vision and memory being
affected, told him speaking would become more
difficult if they didn’t “act fast” and “handle it
immediately.”
He couldn’t “handle it”—now, or ever.
“This really isn’t something you want to wait on.
You’ve already delayed coming in too long as is,” she
insisted.
“Yeah? Well, tell that to my provider. I’ve already
got more bills than I can pay,” Reid said, and turned
toward the door. However, he didn’t leave, nor did he
really stay. She convinced him to listen to what she
said, and he did, or tried to, but he was already gone
and they both knew it.
That night, he sat up in bed staring at the worn
page of an old trade paperback and reading the same
inscrutable lines again and again, trying to take his
mind off all the things he wasn’t going to miss. He’d
lost his wife and his job within a month of each other.
Not that the job was much. Reid had never enjoyed
working in sales. The numbers on his paychecks never
seemed to equal the number of indignities he suffered
earning them. When he’d been made a manager, it just
meant the company expected him to spend more time
doing things he hated but kept paying him far less
than he deemed fair. When his headaches started up,
they didn’t want him taking off, but the headaches
worsened, and he had trouble thinking straight. After
he messed up the count on two separate occasions they
let Reid go. Apparently they didn’t like getting less
money than was fair either.
But his mind had been going for a while. He wasn’t
seeing things so clearly, or perha 2