Author: Kaira Rouda
Publisher: Real You Publishing Group
Pages: 214
Genre: Women’s Fiction
Format: Paperback/Kindle
What choices would you make if you knew you
might die soon?
From the multi award-winning, best-selling
author of four books, including Here, Home, Hope, a gripping and heart
wrenching novel about a young mother who has it all. The only problem is she
may be dying.
In her previous works including All the
Difference, Rouda's characters "sparkle with humor and heart,"
and the stories are "told with honest insight and humor" (Booklist).
"Inspirational and engaging" (ForeWord), these are the novels
you'll turn to for strong female characters and an "engaging read" (Kirkus).
In the Mirror is the story of Jennifer Benson, a woman
who seems to have it all. Diagnosed with cancer, she enters an experimental
treatment facility to tackle her disease the same way she tackled her life -
head on. But while she's busy fighting for a cure, running her business, planning
a party, staying connected with her kids, and trying to keep her sanity, she
ignores her own intuition and warnings from others and reignites an old
relationship best left behind.
If you knew you might die, what choices
would you make? How would it affect your marriage? How would you live each day?
And how would you say no to the one who got away?
Book Excerpt:
Rolling over to get out of bed, I caught a
glimpse of myself in the mirror and cringed. My reflection said it all.
Everything had changed.
I looked like death.
I blinked, moving my gaze from the mirror, and
noticed the calendar. It was Monday again. That meant everything in the real
world. It meant groaning about the morning and getting the kids off to school.
It meant struggling to get to the office on time and then forcing yourself to
move through the day. It meant the start of something new and fresh and
undetermined. But Mondays meant nothing at Shady Valley. We lived in the
“pause” world, between “play” and “stop.” Suspension was the toughest part for
me. And loneliness. Sure, I had visitors, but it wasn’t the same as being
surrounded by people in motion. I’d been on fast-forward in the real world,
juggling two kids and my business, struggling to stay connected to my husband,
my friends. At Shady Valley, with beige-colored day after
cottage-cheese-tasting day, my pace was, well –
I had to get moving.
I supposed my longing for activity was behind my
rather childish wish to throw a party for myself. At least it gave me a mission
of sorts. A delineation of time beyond what the latest in a long line of cancer
treatments dictated. It had been more than 18 months of treatments, doctor’s
appointments, hospitalizations and the like. I embraced the solidity of a
deadline. The finality of putting a date on the calendar and knowing that at
least this, my party, was something I could control.
I noticed the veins standing tall and blue and
bubbly atop my pale, bony hands. I felt a swell of gratitude for the snakelike
signs of life, the entry points for experimental treatments; without them, I’d
be worse than on pause by now.
I pulled my favorite blue sweatshirt over my head
and tugged on my matching blue sweatpants.
Moving at last, I brushed my teeth and then
headed next door to Ralph’s. He was my best friend at Shady Valley—a special
all-suite, last-ditch-effort experimental facility for the sick and dying—or at
least he had been until I began planning my party. I was on his last nerve with
this, but he’d welcome the company, if not the topic. He was paused too.
My thick
cotton socks helped me shuffle across my fake wood floor, but it was slow going
once I reached the grassy knoll—the leaf-green carpet that had overgrown the
hallway. An institutional attempt at Eden, I supposed. On our good days, Ralph
and I sometimes sneaked my son’s plastic bowling set out there to partake in
vicious matches. We had both been highly competitive, type-A people in the
“real” world and the suspended reality of hushed voices and tiptoeing relatives
was unbearable at times.
“I’ve narrowed it down to three choices,” I said,
reaching Ralph’s open door. “’Please come celebrate my life on the eve of my
death. RSVP immediately. I’m running out of time.’”
“Oh, honestly,” Ralph said, rolling his head back
onto the pillows propping him up. I knew my time in Shady Valley was only
bearable because of this man, his humanizing presence. Even though we both
looked like shadows of our outside, real-world selves, we carried on a
relationship as if we were healthy, alive. I ignored the surgery scars on his
bald, now misshapen head. He constantly told me I was beautiful. It worked for
us.
“Too morbid? How about: ‘Only two months left.
Come see the incredible, shrinking woman. Learn diet secrets of the doomed,’” I
said, smiling then, hoping he’d join in.
“Jennifer, give it a rest would you?” Ralph said.
“You don’t have to be so testy. Do you want me to
leave?” I asked, ready to retreat back to my room.
“No, come in. Let’s just talk about something
else, OK, beautiful?”
Ralph was lonely, too. Friends from his days as
the city’s most promising young investment banker had turned their backs—they
didn’t or couldn’t make time for his death. His wife, Barbara, and their three
teenage kids were his only regular visitors. Some days, I felt closer to Ralph
than to my own family, who seemed increasingly more absorbed in their own lives
despite weekly flowers from Daddy and dutiful visits from Henry, my husband of
six years. Poor Henry. It was hard to have meaningful visits at Shady Valley,
with nurses and treatments and all manner of interruptions. We still held hands
and kissed, but intimacy—even when I was feeling up to it—was impossible.
So, there we were, Ralph and I, two near-death
invalids fighting for our lives and planning a party to celebrate that fact. It
seemed perfectly reasonable, at least to me, because while I knew I should be
living in the moment, the future seemed a little hazy without a party to focus
on.
“Seriously, I need input on my party invitations.
It’s got to be right before I hand it over to Mother. I value your judgment,
Ralph; is that too much to ask?”
“For God’s sake, let me see them.” Ralph snatched
the paper out of my hand. After a moment, he handed it back to me. “The last
one’s the best. The others are too, well, self-pitying and stupid. Are you sure
you can’t just have a funeral like the rest of us?”
I glared at him, but agreed, “That’s my favorite,
too.”
Mr. & Mrs. E. David
Wells
request your presence at a
celebration in honor of
their daughter
Jennifer Wells Benson
Please see insert for your
party time
Shady Valley Center
2700 Hocking Ridge Road
RSVP to Mrs. Juliana Duncan
Wells
No gifts please—donations to
breast cancer research appreciated.
#
At first,
I had been incredibly angry about the cancer. Hannah’s birth, so joyous, had
marked the end of my life as a “normal” person. Apparently, it happened a lot.
While a baby’s cells multiplied, the mom’s got into the act, mutating, turning
on each other. Hannah was barely two weeks old when I became violently ill. My
fever was 105 degrees when we arrived in the ER. I think the ER doctors
suspected a retained placenta or even some sort of infectious disease, although
I was so feverish I can’t remember much from that time. All I remember was the
feeling of being cut off from my family—Henry, two-year-old Hank, and newborn
Hannah—and marooned on the maternity ward, a place for mothers-to-be on bed
rest until their due dates. That was hell.
At 33, I was a pathetic sight. My headache was so
intense the curtains were drawn at all times. I didn’t look pregnant anymore,
so all the nurses thought my baby had died. That first shift tip-toed around
me, murmuring. By the second night, one of them posted a sign: “The baby is
fine. Mother is sick.” It answered their questions since I couldn’t. It hurt my
head too much to try.
By the third day, my headache had receded to a
dull roar. Surgery revealed that there was no retained placenta after all. I
was ready to go home to my newborn and my life. So with a slight fever and no
answers, I escaped from the hospital and went home to a grateful Henry and a
chaotic household. I was weak and tired, but everyone agreed that was to be
expected. I thanked God for the millionth time for two healthy kids and my
blessed, if busy, life.
And then, not two weeks later, I found the lump.
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