Rocking the Pink

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Selected Titles from Seal Press

  Copyright Page

  For Brad, my love.

  For Sophie, my compass.

  For Chloe, my future coconspirator.

  Throughout the telling of this story, Laura Roppé references several of her self-penned songs, either as a plot point or as a lyrical window into her thoughts in a particular situation. To find out how to download some of Laura’s music for free, go to www.rockingthepink.com.

  Chapter 1

  On a sunny morning in mid-October 2008, a whiplash-inducing phone call from my surgeon hijacked my life to the hinterlands of hell. It was a startling reversal of fortune: That very day, the Los Angeles Daily Journal had featured a two-page article about me entitled “In the Long Run, San Diego Lawyer Decides to Face the Music,” and I was squealing with delight as I devoured every complimentary word. The article detailed how I’d been inspired to follow my midlife musical dreams after running my first full marathon.

  I’d had an implausible stretch of good luck since I’d released my album two months earlier—my new record label was about to fly me to England to shoot a music video!—and now here was my elated face, smack on the front page of a respected newspaper. The photo was flattering, thankfully—my Jay Leno chin was barely noticeable as my body leaned over the impressive control panel in the recording studio. I reached for the phone, bursting at the seams to share this triumph with my husband, Brad.

  Just as I was about to dial, my surgeon called.

  Oh, yeah, that whole thing.

  Three days earlier, mostly to placate Brad, I’d gone in for a biopsy of an “almost certainly” benign lump in my left breast. I wasn’t alarmed. I knew I didn’t have cancer. Even uttering the C-word sounded melodramatic, like an attention-seeking stunt. I was only thirty-seven, and there was no history of the disease in my family. Plus, I’d just run a marathon, for Pete’s sake.

  “Oh, hi, Doc,” I greeted him. “How are you?” I paused, expecting to hear his relieved chuckle.

  “Laura,” the doctor began. He wasn’t chuckling. My stomach lurched unexpectedly as he cleared his throat. “I’ve got some bad news . . . ”

  I didn’t recognize my own voice as I let out a rasping wail. My legs gave way, and I collapsed onto the couch.

  The doctor was still talking. His words came to me in fragments, as if he had bad cell phone reception: “ . . . down to my office right away . . . treatment plan . . . so sorry . . . ”

  My brain was melting down. Had he just used the word “cancer”? About me?

  Brad. That was all I could think, over and over again. I struggled to remember his phone number at work, a number I’d called a million times. I finally got through and heard his familiar, unsuspecting voice.

  “Brad,” I gasped. My voice sounded garbled and foreign to me.

  “Babe, can I call you right back? I’ve got to—”

  “It’s cancer, Buddy. Come home!” I was bawling. “Come home. Right now!” I was shrieking.

  “I’m on my way,” he said, panic raging underneath his controlled voice.

  I couldn’t remember who I’d been before I loved Brad. I had to go way back—to memories of losing a tooth or hanging Duran Duran posters on my bedroom walls—to conjure a firm recollection of my pre-Brad self. I’d met him twenty-three years earlier, at a summer party when I was fourteen years old, though I’d lied and said I was fifteen. Not the best way to start off one’s relationship with a future spouse, but who knew I was meeting my future husband at fourteen years old? And, in my defense, I was just two months shy of my birthday, so I was practically fifteen.

  Brad was sixteen years old, and in the prime of health and fitness, when I first laid eyes on him. He had just competed in a triathlon, and he had the eight-pack abs to prove it. He stood six feet, four inches tall and had blond hair and blue eyes—a classic California surfer boy. He would have caught any girl’s eye. Except mine. No, I didn’t notice Brad at first, because I had my eye on an age-inappropriate lifeguard at the party (who, to his credit, wasn’t the least bit interested in a fourteen-year-old child). While my boy-crazy eye was trained on that curly-haired lifeguard, Brad approached and invited me to walk on the beach. I figured, why not?

  As we ambled along the waterline, I noticed his wildly patterned, electric blue, baggy pants.

  “I like your pants,” I said in earnest.

  “Thanks. My grandma made ’em for me.”

  Well, that was adorable. And sort of . . . rogue, in a perverse way. And, coincidentally, that very night, I was sporting bright yellow shorts dotted with pineapples, paired with a mismatched Hawaiian shirt—my own way of railing against the ubiquitous preppy look of the day. We looked good together, in a Jackson Pollock sort of way.

  Brad was a year ahead of me in school. He’d been class president. And he loved to surf and spearfish. Spearfish? Like Christopher Atkins in The Blue Lagoon? He told me my brown eyes were hypnotizing him. I blushed.

  “Are your parents married?” I asked, changing the subject.

  “Divorced. When I was nine. I live with my dad and brother.”

  “Mine, too. When I was seven. I live with my mom and sister.” Our symmetry was obvious. We just fit.

  Out of sheer glee, I spontaneously rolled down a sand dune on the beach, just for the fun of it. He thought that was funny, and he let out a silly, high-pitched laugh that cracked me up. And then he kissed me, and the resulting tingles shot all the way down to my toes. An hour of talking and kissing later, Brad asked, “Can I give you a lift home in my ’Vette?”

  “Sounds great.”

  When we had reached Brad’s car, a short distance away, I was surprised to find a worn-out, steel gray Chevy Chevette sitting in front of me. “Nice ’Vette,” I giggled. This was not the sparkling Corvette I had envisioned. And that suited me just fine. Considerably charmed, I got into the car.

  After Brad had dropped me off at home, I crawled into bed, exhausted but floating on cloud nine. Five minutes later, before I could even drift off to sleep, my phone rang. It was Brad, calling to say good night, a romantic gesture in the age before cell phones.

  “Can I see you tomorrow?” Brad wanted to know.

  “Of course.” I smiled into the phone. “Good night.”

  Who on earth has her actual, han
dwritten diary from the day she met her future husband, at age fourteen? Well, I do. I must be one of, like, seven people in the history of the world. At any rate, my diary entry from August 20, 1985, states:I have met someone who [sic] I really like . . . . Brad is the most wonderful, thoughtful, sincere, loveable, sensitive, cute person I’ve ever met. . . . He’s so wonderful, I’m positive you’ ll be hearing about him for a long time to come.

  Supernatural psychic? Probably not. Despite my apparent gift for prophesy at age fourteen, I had no idea what “a long time to come” meant. One week was an eternity for me. I could not have predicted that eight years later, Brad and I would vow to love, honor, and cherish each other, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part. I had no idea that ten years after that first night, Brad and I would toss our law school graduation caps into the air—or that I would later ditch my successful but unfulfilling legal career in a late-blooming effort to become a rock star. And, especially inconceivable to me on that first, magical night in 1985, at the tender age of fourteen, was the fact that, twenty-three years and two months later, I would clutch Brad for dear life, sobbing into his arms, having heard the doctor say “breast cancer” and “aggressive” and “chemotherapy.” No, I didn’t know any of those things on that first night. All I knew then, deep in my bones, was that I loved that boy.

  Chapter 2

  I sat trembling on the couch as I waited for Brad’s arrival. His voice had flipped into commando mode when he’d said he was on his way. Why wasn’t he here yet? I was starting to feel numb.

  Call Dad, I thought. I need to call Dad.

  I dialed Dad’s cell phone.

  “Dad,” I began. I sounded pretty calm, actually. “Dad, it’s . . . c—c—can . . .” I couldn’t finish the word. I howled into the phone.

  But Dad knew exactly what I was saying. “Oh, honey,” he soothed. “I’m coming right now.”

  I told Dad not to come, that Brad would be home soon enough. But Dad knew his office was ten minutes closer than Brad’s to my house, and he ignored me. Fifteen minutes later, I opened my front door and gratefully melted into his open arms. Later, he told me he’d had a horrible premonition a few nights earlier when I’d casually mentioned the biopsy; he’d had a feeling this was coming.

  Fifteen minutes later, when Brad finally lurched through the front door and loped across the family room, scooping me up into his arms like a rag doll, I melted into his embrace. Brad.

  How the hell did I get here?

  Only two weeks before, a mere week before the biopsy, I’d signed a contract with a London-based record label for release of my music. At the ripe old age of thirty-seven! It was a dream come true, particularly since I’d spent the better part of the prior decade kicking someone’s ass or having my ass kicked in courtrooms on a daily basis.

  I hadn’t mentioned The Lump or the biopsy to my new record label because I hadn’t thought there was any chance I’d have a problem. Like Scarlett O’Hara—“fiddle dee dee!”—I didn’t want to think about it. I had bigger fish to fry—like my imminent trip overseas to shoot a music video.

  The record label had lined up a top-notch director with impressive credits: Paul McCartney! Lenny Kravitz! Annie Lennox! When John from the record label in London had talked about the “storyboard” for the video and “securing locations,” I’d covered the telephone receiver with my hand to muffle my amateurish squeals of excitement.

  “Act like ya been there before,” Brad had coached me for years, usually after I’d spazzed out, yet again, in response to some trivial accomplishment.

  But nonchalance just wasn’t my strong suit.

  And so, one week earlier, as we had driven to the hospital to biopsy the pea-size lump in my left breast, I hadn’t been even a little bit concerned.

  I’m not gonna get cancer just as my dreams are within grasp, I had thought. Real life isn’t a predictable Hollywood movie.

  And, anyway, bad things didn’t happen to me.

  Or so I had thought then.

  Of course, later, I learned differently. Months later, after chemo had ravaged my hairless body, after I’d been reduced to frantically checking my fingernails each morning to see if they’d curled up and off during the night, after searing pain in my head and bones had caused me to cry out in a voice I did not recognize, I learned that, oh yes, bad things really did happen to me. But in the beginning, when scary words like “cancer” and “chemotherapy” had not yet attached themselves to my body in any tangible way, had not yet implanted their fish hooks in my flesh, I simply continued to float, uninterrupted, through the Hall of Scary Words like the Pollyanna I’d always been, those mean words bouncing off me like darts from a Nerf gun.

  But Brad, unlike me, understood the gravity of the situation right from the start. During the biopsy procedure a few days before that stunning phone call from the surgeon, poor Brad sat anxiously in the waiting room for hours, all by himself, wringing his hands with worry and dread, as I drifted carelessly through the ether under general anesthesia.

  According to Brad, when the surgeon finally emerged from the operating room, still dressed in green scrubs, the expression on his face made Brad’s stomach drop.

  “What is it?” Brad asked when the surgeon approached.

  But the surgeon was noncommittal. “I don’t know what that was. I’ve sent it to the lab for analysis.”

  Brad dusted off every trick in his long-abandoned lawyer bag, trying to pry a definitive answer from the surgeon. “Have you ever seen anything like it before? Was there anything about it that caused you concern? If you had to assign a percentage chance . . . ”

  But the doctor refused to elaborate.

  And now, here we were, just a few days after that biopsy, driving to the surgeon’s office in a haze of numbness, our worst fears realized, steeling ourselves to talk about my treatment options for . . . cancer? Brad drove the car, his white knuckles gripping the steering wheel as if we might veer uncontrollably off the road at any moment, while I blathered on and on in a state of shock, clinging desperately to my Teflon-coated reality.

  “I’m going to be like Sheryl Crow,” I proclaimed. “I’ll have radiation, which will suck, but then I’ll be cancer-free.” And then, out of nowhere, I declared in a defiant tone, “You know I’m quitting the law, right?” I was daring him to contradict me. “I’m quitting the law,” I said again for emphasis.

  How could he possibly argue with me this time?

  “Yes, baby,” Brad said. “You just be a mommy now. You do whatever you want to do.”

  Even through my fog, I registered massive relief at his concession, the first of its kind after years of exhausting arguments on the topic. “I wanna quit law,” I’d groaned (or whined, or yelled) through the years, to which Brad had always retorted, “Suck it up,” or “We can’t afford for you to quit,” or “Stop being a wuss.”

  And now—how about that!—all it took was a little cancer diagnosis, and victory was all mine! You do whatever you want to do, he’d said!

  I could finally kiss my law career goodbye!

  Wow, I thought, snickering to myself, Brad is gonna be annoyed with himself for backing down when we get to the surgeon’s office and he confirms I have cancer lite.

  I returned to my blathering: “Radiation will suck,” I continued, “but I’m going to be just fine. Just a bump in the road.”

  By the time Brad and I reached the surgeon’s office, we had pulled ourselves together pretty well. We could handle this. I would be just like Sheryl Crow.

  The surgeon informed us that it appeared we had caught the cancer early on.

  See, just like Sheryl Crow.

  The lump was very small, he said. So small, in fact, it was a medical marvel that I had been able to feel it at all. In a second surgery, he said, he’d remove more breast tissue and determine if the cancer had spread outside the breast and into the lymph nodes. If not, good! If yes . . . bad.

  I just
knew, without a doubt, there was no chance of a yes. It was simply out of the question.

  “Do I need chemotherapy?” I wanted to know. This was his cue to pooh-pooh my question and tell me I was overreacting, to say I needn’t worry, because, lucky for me, I had cancer lite.

  But he didn’t. “It’s my guess you won’t need chemotherapy, Laura. But you’ll need to talk to an oncologist about the specifics of your treatment plan.”

  All I heard him say was, “You won’t need chemotherapy.” Whatever else he said, if anything, sounded like popcorn in a microwave. Pop, pop, pop.

  When I got home from visiting the surgeon, I called my office to talk to my law partner, Pete. For the past year, I’d been working in a small firm with Pete and another lawyer, old friends of mine from law school. Both guys, fathers themselves, genuinely supported my part-time schedule, knowing it afforded me irreplaceable time with my little girls. If ever I was going to enjoy being a lawyer, then working with these two sweethearts would have been the time. But even among such wonderful law partners, I still felt like a square peg in a round hole.

  Over the past year in particular, my chosen career had turned me inside out with anxiety and insomnia. My biggest client, a loud-mouthed real estate developer named Frank, had been sued for millions of dollars by multiple investors in a new office complex, who claimed that Frank and his partners had bilked them out of profits on the deal. The lawsuits were threatening to run Frank out of business and into personal bankruptcy, too. On top of that, a few weeks earlier, as I’d defended Frank in this high-stakes contract dispute, he had been criminally indicted for allegedly defrauding investors in the same deal (which he vehemently insisted was a railroad job, and I actually believed him), his high-maintenance wife of fifteen years had filed for divorce, and, just to cap off the death-spiral trifecta, audited by the IRS.

  I wasn’t qualified or interested in defending Frank in criminal, divorce, and tax proceedings; I was a civil litigator. So he hired an army of legal specialists to fight his battles in each of his many lawsuits, the perfect storm of which would have sent a lesser man leaping off the nearest bridge. And now Frank’s army of attorneys, coordinated by me, was fighting tooth and nail to preserve any shred of his life. Frank, understandably, called me multiple times per day in a state of utter panic, wanting to know his legal team’s latest efforts. Every time I looked down at my phone, there was another voicemail from Frank, usually calling to inform me of yet another catastrophic turn in his life. I didn’t know how this guy had avoided a heart attack up to this point; I felt like I was going to have one on his behalf, and it wasn’t even my own life that was imploding so spectacularly.