Before I Go (19 page)

Now he stands up, his right knee—the one that he had to have ACL surgery on in high school, not because of sports, but because he tripped
up
a set of cement stairs—popping, at the same time that Kayleigh crawls up onto the bed and sits cross-legged on Jack’s side, facing me.

“I’ll be back soon,” Jack says. “Yell if you need anything.”

Mom follows him out of the room. “No more than thirty minutes, Kayleigh,” she calls over her shoulder. “Our patient needs her rest!”

I roll my eyes and lean into the stack of pillows supporting my back.

Kayleigh and I stare at each other, and the anger that I lit on in the yoga studio comes rushing back.

“Where have you been?”

“You just texted like ten minutes ago. I came right over.”

“Not
today
,” I say, annoyed. “For the past three weeks.”

“What do you mean? I’ve asked if you want me to come over and you keep saying you’re busy.”

Technically, that’s true. But she always texted right when I was elbows deep in my wife research or in the late evening when I’ve been too tired to respond. And besides, that’s not the point.

“So? You’ve never asked before.”

“Excuse me for trying to be polite,” she says.

“That’s the thing!” I sit straight up to allow the irritation to rise up from my belly and out of my mouth. “You’re not polite! You’ve never been polite!”

“Daisy, calm down,” she says, glancing at the door as if we’re eleven and she doesn’t want her mom to catch us watching soap operas when we’re not supposed to have the TV on. “Look, I was just trying to give you and Jack some space.”

I nod. My body’s suddenly weak from my small outburst. I lean back into the stack of pillows and take a deep breath. “I don’t want space. And I don’t want to go to the Waffle House.”

At this, she scrunches her nose and tilts her head at me. “The Waf—”

I wave my hand to metaphorically erase what I just said. “Forget it. I just want everyone to stop acting so weird.”

“OK,” she says.

“OK,” I say. But the air around us feels stretched thin, like a chewing gum bubble that’s getting ready to pop. I know it’s bad when I start wishing my mom would come in to check on me, just to break the silence.

But she doesn’t, and finally Kayleigh speaks.

“You really were not kidding about your skin,” she says. “You look like George Hamilton. I thought the stitch was supposed to fix that.”

Relief washes over me. She’s back.

“Stent,” I correct her. “It will. Doctor says it may take a few days.”

She nods. “How do you feel? Did it hurt?”

“No. It was nothing. I don’t know why Mom’s acting like I just had brain surgery.”

“She just cares about you,” Kayleigh says, waving her hand. “You’re all she’s got.”

The words fall on my chest like a wrecking ball, and it takes effort to push them away. I’m not all she’s got. She’s got Mixxy. And Aunt Joey in Seattle. Or Portland. Somewhere near where those vampire movies were filmed. I can’t ever remember. Oh, and her bird club. She’s getting out more.

I smooth my hair over my shoulder, eager to change the subject. “How’s work?”

Our eyes meet and I realize she’s just as relieved as I am to discuss something normal. Neutral. Unrelated to Dying and Cancer. She launches into a rant about her annoying co-teacher, Pamela, and the upcoming kindergarten open house. “She’s overhauling our entire classroom as if Bill Gates himself is coming to judge her teaching skills. And Pinterest. Oh holy God, the things she’s finding on Pinterest. I don’t have time to make sandpaper letter cards or any of the forty-seven stupid crafts she thinks will”—Kayleigh makes air quotes with her fingers—“enrich the learning environment.”

We ease into the rhythm of our years-long friendship, bantering back and forth like two lumberjacks gliding a saw through a felled tree trunk. I take the lead, guiding the conversation toward the reason I invited her over.

“Are you still seeing the nineteen-year-old?”

“Harrison?”

“Is there more than one nineteen-year-old?”

“No!”

“OK, then.”

She chews her thumbnail and mumbles. “I may have been at his house when you called.”

“Kayleigh!”

“
What?
”

“It has to stop. We need to get you back out there.”

“I know! I know.”

I nod, pleased that I’ve steered our chat in the exact direction I wanted it to go. Pleased that I’ll be able to get the information I want from her without revealing why I want it. I thought about telling her the truth, but every time I practiced saying it out loud, it sounded crazy. Even to me. “OK. Where do you go to meet guys?”

She shrugs. “I don’t
go
anywhere. I just meet them when I’m out.”

I lean forward a bit. “Out where? Where was the last place you met one?” Then I add, to clarify: “A man. Not a man-child.”

She pauses, thinking, and spits a piece of her nail out of her mouth. “The dog park.”

It’s my turn to pause. “You don’t own a dog.”

“I know. I took Benny. That weekend you were in the mountains.”

Oh, right. I brighten. The dog park. Why hadn’t I thought of that? Not only will there be a lot of women there, but they will love dogs, which means they’ll have something in common with Jack.

“Great. Let’s go back. This weekend?”

“You’re going to help me find a man? This should be good. You find something wrong with every single guy I date.”

“Not true!” Although it is kind of true. But only because Kayleigh has the worst possible taste in men (and men-children) ever. She always has, dating back to middle school when she was obsessed with Chris Poland, a skater boy who spent more days in in-school suspension than out of it and sent her a love note with her name spelled incorrectly. And though my plan hadn’t really been
to help Kayleigh find a guy, I might as well help her at the same time I’m helping Jack.

God knows she could use it.

That night when Jack gets home and crawls into bed and rolls his socks one at a time off his feet and adds them to the pile on the floor, I watch him. I’ve spent the time since Kayleigh left in awe of the effort it takes to meet potential partners. With Jack it was so easy. I think about the day we met—when I didn’t know he was my husband, when he was just a fellow student waiting for the university bus. I flinched when I saw a hand come at me from my peripheral vision.

“Sorry,” a voice said. “There was a bee.”

I had heard the buzzing, even seen the furry insect, but I hadn’t been concerned about it.

“I thought those big ones were friendly,” I said. “They don’t have stingers, right?”

“Common misconception.” He smiled, and I swear his face competed with the sun above us. My eyes lit on his crooked tooth. My stomach dropped to my toes. “They can actually sting more than once because they don’t have barbs like honeybees.”

I marveled as if this was the most interesting thing I had ever heard. Maybe it was.

In bed, Jack pulls me to his naked chest and I burrow my head into it, his wiry curls scraping my cheek, and I gather more memories into my growing pile. Jack memories. The terrible poem he wrote me one Valentine’s Day, using the word “zaftig” to describe me. “It means curvy! You’re curvy! Beautiful.” I laughed. “Next time just use beautiful.” Or driving to my mom’s for Thanksgiving and the wreck he nearly caused on I-85, screeching to a halt and jumping out of the car to save a box turtle that was attempting to cross all six lanes of the highway. Or when he first kissed me, my lips trembling with nerves, and he pulled his oversized sweatshirt over his head and swallowed
my small frame with it, allowing me to keep up the pretension that it was the air causing me to shiver.

I stack each memory in the suitcase of my brain side by side like neatly folded T-shirts, like I’m going on a trip and I don’t want to leave them behind.

I suppose I am. And I don’t.

Jack squeezes me tight and water fills my eyes, threatening to spill over.

“What are you thinking about?”

I want to tell him.

About the poem.

The turtle.

The sweatshirt.

And how these memories act like kerosene on the fire of my love for him. They engulf me. Scorch the innards of my being.

But I open my mouth and none of this comes out. I shut it. Swallow. Curl tighter in his embrace. Then open my mouth again.

“Did you lock the back door?” I ask.

“Yes,” he murmurs, brushing his lips on the top of my head.

I thank him, and the two words hang in the air, until his breathing grows even and his heartbeat keeps the slow time of a metronome beneath my ear.

ON SATURDAY, IT’S raining. Not a drizzle, but thick, pelting sheets of water, as if the gray sky is as angry as it appears and is taking it out on the earth below. It’s also the first official day of my clinical trial. I drove to Emory yesterday to pick up my vial of BC-4287, the miracle shrinking-rat-tumor pills and a list of instructions regarding how and when to take them (two every twelve hours on an empty stomach) and how often to come in (every two weeks for blood work and a CT scan).
The black writing also boldly instructs me not to take
any other medicines or supplements, prescription or over-the-counter, as doing so could compromise the integrity of the study and/or the efficacy of the drug.

I turn the paper over so it won’t judge me as I swallow my two pills along with an essence of yun zhi supplement. I feel guilty for undermining—and possibly ruining—a scientific study. But I’m dying. And I need all the help I can get to postpone that.

I stand at the kitchen sink, staring at the rain as it beats against the single-pane windows and—GOD-BLASTED MOTHER OF MARY. Water is seeping in through the small cracks where the windows won’t shut.

Caulk. Tubes of it are still sitting where I left them in the Home Depot plastic bags in the basement. And I really need to get them out and caulk the windows.

I walk over to the fridge and affix the trial instructions to the door with a magnet, right next to my list of keep-the-house-from-falling-down tasks. Most of the entries are neatly typed—the original list that I compiled when we first moved in—like
Caulk the windows
and
Fix the back door lock
and
Plant hydrangeas and verbena in front flower bed
. The newer additions are in my tight loopy cursive at the bottom like
Beams for the basement
. I pause. A thought is flitting at the periphery of my memory, but I can’t pin it down. There was something else I was supposed to add to this list, but I can’t remember what it was. I absolutely hate forgetting things, which is why I keep so many lists.

I’m still attempting to turn my brain inside out when the back door bangs open and Kayleigh walks through it.

“Holy fuck,” she says, her galoshes squeaking with each step on the tile.

“Morning to you, too.”

“That door sucks. And it’s crazy out there.”

“I know. I need to fix the handle. Right after I stop my windows from leaking.”

“How are you planning to do that?”

“I need to caulk them.”

“Now?”

I turn to look at her. Rivulets of water are dripping down her raincoat, and even though her hood is up, black coils of hair are plastered to her face. The floor beneath her is a Jackson Pollock of mud and water and leaves and debris.

“No. Sometime,” I say. “Soon.”

She nods. “You ready to go?”

I sigh. “Yeah. Let me just mop up real quick.”

Twenty minutes later, Kayleigh is backing her Jeep Wrangler (“total man magnet,” she said when she first bought it) into a parallel parking spot in front of Jittery Joe’s Coffee. Since the park idea was out, she swore this was the second-best place to pick up single men.

“So I’ve been thinking,” Kayleigh says once we’re inside and seated at a table, my chamomile tea cooling in front of me next to the sack of two cranberry muffins I bought to take home to Jack. I start scanning the small shop, looking for single women around Jack’s age.

“Stop,” Kayleigh hisses. “You can’t be so obvious about it. Act normal. Just talk to me.”

“Sorry.” I dart my eyes back to the table. “What were you saying?”

“I think you should sign up for that Make-a-Wish thing.”

I look at her, confused. “What? That kid’s charity?” I sneak a furtive glance at the door, where a woman has just walked in.

“Oh, it’s just for kids?” she asks.

“Yeah, what did you think?” I turn back to her, even as it dawns on me exactly what she thought. “You thought they did it for
adults
?” I start laughing. “Yeah, OK, I’ve always wanted to go to Disney World.”
I slap my knee and a snort slips out. But then I start to think about it. They should do it for adults. They should totally do it for adults.

I grin at Kayleigh. “You should start that. Make-a-Wish for grown-ups.”

“Maybe I will,” she says, puffing her chest. She takes a sip of her coffee, her lips pursed to brace for the heat. I look back up at the woman, who’s now paying for a bagel at the counter. Her legs are impossibly long in a pair of black leggings that disappear into high-heeled ankle boots, and I hate her for a second until I remember that she could potentially be Jack’s future wife. And then I hate her even more.