I watch my doctor’s eyes, try to read them. I’ve always wondered how her face might change if she found something. Today, I see. Her eyes sweep up to the fluorescent light as though to avoid the spot on my breast where her fingers have stopped.

“Hm,” she says.

I want to leap out of my body—this body of breasts and bones and brains—and float out of the high window into the heaven of my bed with its homemade quilt and my lover warming me.

“Here, feel this,” she says, lifting my hand to the spot I least want to touch on my whole body. I imagine this probing might jar errant cells, which break loose and run scattershot through my body.

I pretend to the feel the lump. I can’t feel anything right now. Only fear. In a hopeful, yet skewed attempt, my thoughts surface the names of my friends who paved the way: Susannah, Marie, Melinda, Joan, Catherine. All alive and well. And two who aren’t: Jan. Aunt Edrie.

“This may be just a premenstrual breast, but I need to be sure,” she says. A piece of her brown hair, woven with gray strands, has escaped her ponytail and is grazing her cheek. Dr. McFinney always looks a bit disheveled, as though she wears her hectic life-with-two-year-old-twins-and-a-medical-practice on her wrinkled sleeve.

She tells me I need to come back in ten days. If the lump has disappeared or changed, it’s benign.

At home I kneel on the bedroom floor and bury my face in my cat’s gray fur. Her pleasure purrs up. She is always so present, responding immediately to everything: my touch, a patch of sun on the carpet, a sparrow jumping on the other side of the window. Compared to a human life, hers is on the fast track. Does she see everything differently from the dimension of cat years? Are her perceptions as different from mine as mine are from a redwood tree whose lingering years swirl slowly inside?

An echo of my doctor’s touch rushes back. My right breast burns, the bright spot on a mammography, the embers of a campfire. I envy solid redwood existence and my cat’s nine lives. Everything is a likely poison. My three daily cups of coffee. The pipes in our 100-year-old house. The fruit I didn’t wash. My mother’s genes. The four times I dropped acid. And all those hangovers and second-hand smoke. Months of living mainly on Top Ramen and Doritos. Ten years on the pill. Even an old chestnut: An underwater kick to my budding breast at age eleven in the public pool. Why did I think I’d somehow escape? No one does. Life is a summer swimming pool where you’re kicked by a rowdy kid, then you get cancer, then you die.