Before I Go (25 page)

Now, remembering that ache—that hole—that my dad left behind, my heart seizes. And I know it’s not just someone to make the sandwiches and the bed and the dentist appointments that I want for Jack. It’s someone to fill that hole.

George and his handlebar mustache did that for my mom, though it was years overdue. But she hasn’t dated anyone seriously since.

“Was the sandpiper tattoo guy there last night?” I ask during a commercial.

When she doesn’t respond, I look over in time to see Mom sniffle, a tissue clutched to her face.

“Mom?” I ask, alarmed. “What’s wrong?”

“Oh, honey,” she says, between gasps. “I’m just glad you’re home. I miss you when you’re gone.” She tries to smile. “You know what a weepy willow I am.”

I roll my eyes, playing into her charade. Pretending that it’s not the announcement I made over dinner that the clinical trial wasn’t working that’s got her all choked up. “You really are. I can’t believe you haven’t cried your tear ducts off by now.”

“You’re lucky. You inherited your dad’s strength.”

I’ve always basked in these comparisons.
You have your dad’s eyes. His laugh. His ability to read people.
Like I’m a quilt with patches of him sewn into me. And I’ve never questioned them. But now, in my stoic position on the couch, I wonder, if I really am so tough, then why am I overwhelmed with the urge to crawl into my mom’s arms, to feel her fingers smooth my hair? I can’t remember the last time I allowed her to really hold me. And I feel childlike in my craving for it.

I sit still until the feeling passes.

Then I turn my attention back to the TV where a contestant has just uncovered a Daily Double.

I’d like to bet it all, Alex.

OK, that’s $16,200. Let’s look at the clue.

He answers incorrectly. The audience groans.

But I silently cheer him.

I admire his courage.

WHEN I GET home, it’s late, but Jack’s car isn’t in the driveway, and I hate to admit that my fingers loosening a bit on the steering wheel and the knots disappearing from my stomach are signs of relief. That I’m
relieved
that my husband isn’t home. The tension that sprouted between us on the couch last night only grew stronger after I rebuffed his advances and it began to feel as if we were two strangers who inexplicably share the same bed at night.

As I walk up the back steps and slip my key into the kitchen door lock, guilt begins to overtake my relief. I know the distance between
us is my fault. That I’ve been pushing Jack away—maybe without intending to—but pushing him away nonetheless. And I wonder what’s wrong with me. What’s wrong with
us
? Isn’t cancer supposed to bring couples closer? Aren’t we supposed to be spending all our time petting each other’s fingers while we whisper I love yous and regrets and hopes as recklessly as teenage girls whisper pieces of gossip?

I push open the door and step into the house, where Benny greets me with his typical happy yips. I let him out into the yard, and then scoop him up and carry him under the crook of my arm to the bedroom. I turn on the light and walk toward the bed where I intend to flop Benny on it and then my tired body, but I trip over something on the floor and end up falling instead. Benny leaps out of my arms and lands safely on the comforter, leaving my hands flailing for something to break my fall. I grasp the corner of the bed just in time, the weight of my forward motion jarring the mattress and creating a chain reaction of items toppling to the floor.

I land awkwardly on my knees with a thud and lay there for a minute, taking inventory of my body. When I conclude that nothing is broken, I slowly push myself up, feeling much older than my twenty-seven years. I know it’s the cancer making me brittle and weak and I know I’m lucky that I didn’t snap a bone in half, or worse.

I look at the floor behind me to see what caused my fall, but there’s nothing and I feel a flash of embarrassment at my own clumsiness. Then I walk over to Jack’s side of the bed where the mattress collided with his nightstand, causing everything on it to crash to the ground, including his lamp. I pick that up first and put it on the table, straightening the crooked shade. Then I reach for his glasses and place those in the same spot where he leaves them every night. Last, I pick up a book that fell facedown and I know what it is without turning it over, because it hasn’t moved since the day I placed it on his nightstand.

Preparing for the Death of a Loved One

As I run a finger down the uncracked spine, I get a flash of irritation at Jack.

Why aren’t you
preparing
?
I want to yell at him. But he’s not here to yell at. I glance at the clock: 1:23
A.M.

It’s late, even for Jack.

Sighing, I set the book back onto Jack’s nightstand and crawl over his pillow to my side of the bed, snuggling under the covers. Benny curls up behind me, warming my back, and I lie there thinking about Jack and the tension and the distance. And as much as I hate it, as much as I want us to be that couple that pets each other’s fingers and faces down my Lots of Cancer like a couple of caped superheroes, I know that it’s better this way. I’m pushing him away because I’m preparing him for the inevitable—even if he refuses to prepare himself.

Because I understand what’s ahead for him, even if he doesn’t. I think about my dad, and the truck that so swiftly erased him from our lives. And I wonder, had he known four months earlier about his fate in that intersection, if he would have prepared my mom. I buzz with the idea that it’s something else we have in common. If he could have found George for my mom years earlier, if he could have mitigated her pain, wouldn’t he have? Wouldn’t anybody?

The sudden urge to email PW147 overwhelms me and I sit up trying to remember where I left my laptop. But then I hear Jack’s car pull up to our house, and I quickly reach up to turn off my lamp.

I wait in the dark silence for Jack to open the back door and walk into our bedroom, but minutes tick by and he never comes. I start second-guessing myself. Was I hearing things? Was it not Jack’s car that pulled up, but a neighbor? Maybe Sammy? I get out of bed and tiptoe out of the room and down the hall toward the den and its row of large, single-paned windows that face the street.

I pry apart two of the white wooden slats covering the glass, careful not to stir the entire set of blinds, and then laugh at myself for my
attempts at being stealthy. Jack’s obviously not out there or he would have come in by now.

I stop laughing when I see his car parked at the curb in front of our house. Just ten yards away from me sits Jack in the driver’s seat of his Ford Explorer. At first I think he must be on the phone, dealing with some emergency back at the clinic, but in the soft light shining from the streetlamp, I can see that there is no phone. His hand isn’t up to his ear. He’s just sitting. Staring straight ahead into the dark night in front of him, the light reflecting off the corneas of his eyes. And I’m struck, not just by his stillness, but by how tired he looks. No, not tired—he’s always worn out after a long day at work. He looks . . . defeated.

And it occurs to me for the first time that maybe Jack doesn’t want to be home any more than I wanted him here when I pulled into the driveway tonight. And even though I can’t blame him, I still find myself indignant at this information. I’m
dying
! Shouldn’t he want to be with me?

I take a deep breath, willing myself to calm down and be logical. I’m the one who’s been pushing him away—eventually that’s got to cause someone to start pulling, right? I can’t very well expect him to keep trying, like a mangy dog following a kid home no matter how many times he’s been told to scram. And shouldn’t that make me happy? That Jack’s
preparing
, even if he’s not reading some stupid book?

Yes, it should.

So I can’t explain why for the next twenty minutes I stand at the window quietly willing him with my mind to come inside and erase the distance between us.

sixteen

T
HE LETTER BOARD planted in front of Lexington Elementary School announces the date of a PTA meeting that has since passed, a Congratulations to the Student of the Mont (the “h” mysteriously missing), and the Kindergarten Open House on Tuesday at 6
P.M.

Jack checks his phone with one hand as he maneuvers the car into the parking lot with the other. I know he’s anticipating a call about a bluebird that someone brought into the vet hospital after finding it flopping around in their backyard. Jack set the injured wing, but for two days has been unable to get the bird to eat. He left it in Charlene’s care with explicit instructions to call him if she had better luck.

I know all these details because Jack told me Sunday night when he got home from a long day at his office. It was the only real conversation we had all weekend.

“Thanks again for coming,” I say. “Kayleigh insisted and I know it means a lot to her.”

He nods and pushes the gearshift into park. “Speak of the devil—”

I look up to see her making a beeline toward us. Jack’s cell rings as I open the door. “Gotta take this,” he says, already sliding his thumb across the screen. “I’ll catch up to you.”

“I was supposed to be here thirty-five minutes ago,” Kayleigh says, grabbing my arm before I even have a chance to shut the car door behind me. “If anyone asks, we’ve been chatting in the parking lot.”

I follow her to the front door and when we enter the lobby, Kayleigh’s eyes dart around, taking in parents and teachers in name tags, chatting to each other.

“OK, I think we’re good. If anyone approaches, just ask me something about the school,” she says.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. If we teach Mandarin or something.”

I nod, and as I take in the sea of faces around us, I notice the smaller humans weaving in and out of the crowd. “Is it weird that we don’t have a kid with us?”

“No,” she says. “Babysitter.”

Of course. Jack and I have an about-to-be-kindergartener and he or she is with the babysitter. Got it. I glance around at other parents to glean cues of how they stand, carry themselves, like I’m in a method acting class. My eyes light on a woman carrying a baby strapped to her chest like a bomb. Her lithe hand clutches the wrist of a purple-frocked girl who’s whining and struggling to get out of the wrestlerlike hold, and without warning the entire scene unfolding before me is like a serrated knife in my heart.

Before, when I used to see an obnoxious, demanding child, I’d feel a quick breath of relief that it wasn’t mine. That I still had time and freedom and years before that was my burden to bear.

But now.

Now, I’ll never have a child, whiny or otherwise. I’ll never know the warmth of those tiny fingers in my palm wriggling to get free of my motherly hold. And the unfairness of it all threatens to liquefy my body until I’m nothing but a puddle on the linoleum floor. I try to swallow the lump in my throat that sits there like a ball of wet cotton, while Kayleigh drones on about other programs the school offers and
questions I could ask, while the child’s whining becomes more shrill, its pitch matching the emotion swelling in my body.

It’s so all-consuming that I don’t understand how Kayleigh hasn’t noticed it. How she’s still talking.

“Daisy,” she says.

I exhale. She has noticed it. She’s recognized the mistake in asking me to come here. “Yeah,” I say, already forgiving her. How could she know how I would react to all of these kids? I didn’t even know.

“Did you email her?”

She hasn’t noticed.

“Who?” I ask, trying to come back to myself. To push the purple-frocked girl and her tiny fingers to the far corners of my mind.

“Seriously? The girl you’ve been mooning over all weekend. You’re like a lovesick puppy.”

“No. I still don’t know what to say.” I spent the last four days typing at least thirteen different drafts of emails—and berating myself for signing up for online dating without thinking it through. If I sent her a missive pretending to be Jack, then eventually the two would have to meet, and he would have no idea who the woman was. If I emailed her as myself and just explained the situation, she would probably think I was clinically insane, hopelessly pathetic, or both.

I shake my head. “It was a stupid idea.”

“I’m telling you. The fake profile thing. It will work.”

On Sunday, Kayleigh suggested that I create a bogus profile (“Find a pic of a hot guy online”) and set up a date with PW147, then somehow get Jack to be at the same place at the same time. When she inevitably gets stood up because the guy doesn’t exist, she and Jack will meet.

“I don’t know. It’s a little too
Catfish
for me. Too deceitful.” Not to mention it’s a lot of work with no guarantee that the two will actually speak to each other.

Kayleigh scoffs. “You’re setting up your husband with another woman behind his back, but
this
is too deceitful.”

I shush her as I see Jack walk through the front door. I wave at him.

“Sorry,” he says when he gets closer.