We’ll Finally Go to Switzerland

he says, as soon as this is over. She lists the names of towns she’s always wanted to see, foreign and sticky on her tongue, Lauterbrunnen, Lucerne, Zermatt, as they sit abreast at the infusion center in Tucson, the thick heat of July pressing on the glass, the long shadow of a Saguaro stretched like Dali’s clock in the late afternoon. 

They Google pictures of snow-capped Alps, fields of cool white edelweiss and Alpine aster, cerulean lakes. We’ll ride the lift up from Grindelwald, see Lake Bachalpsee, skinny-dip in turquoise water. She shivers, touches his hand, laughs—See, I’m practically glacial. He gentles the blanket they’d brought from home around her matchstick frame, swipes cherry Chapstick along her fissured lips. Her strawberry-gold strands long gone, she wears a headscarf printed with cumulus clouds against an azure sky—blue is her favorite color. 

After, he says, maybe we’ll see tulips in the Netherlands? They’ve always wanted to go. They’d seen pictures of the fields near Amsterdam in travel magazines placed on coffee tables around the center, each glossy shot a rainbow of color, rows of Skittles against a cloudless sky. Or the windmills in Zaanse Schans. She wouldn’t need to walk a single step, he could pull her along behind his indigo bicycle, tip his Dutch cap, Where to now, M’lady? 

We’ll have to go in April, it’s the only month the tulips bloom, she reminds him. He counts the months from now to then, gazes out the window and rubs his eyes. Excuses himself to the restroom.

The drip of Red Devil burns through her veins as she waits for his return, the liquid moving through a port placed directly into her chest, below her jutting collarbone and above the place where teardrop breasts used to hang. A flame-colored blotch colors her chest near the port. She watches the poison slide into her body, reflects that the bright, clear drip happened to be exactly the shade she’d picked to paint their bedroom last year just before her diagnosis, Pantone 19—Chili Pepper. Had it been an omen? She’d challenged herself to move beyond the blues she loved, hoped the color might spice things up after twenty-five years. The thought of sex, now, so remote; when was the last time she’d been well enough? The fuzzy, floating thought teases, dissipates. 

Her eyes droop and flutter, then open again as she senses his return, feels his weight shift next to her, smells the home of him—Irish Spring and sweat and pine shavings from his shop. 

What about Iceland? she murmurs. He takes her hand. He’d been there once with his parents before they met, when he was just twenty-three. 

Tell me about the ice caves again. 

He tells her how he’s never seen any place as beautiful, the ice clear and aquamarine, how it glows as if lit within. How you get so cold it hurts, but only for a moment, how quickly the numb kills the pain. How the ice crystals seem to stretch on forever. How the blue never ends.