Before I Go (28 page)

“Close your mouth. In through your nose.” Jack follows his own directions as if he’s teaching a class on breathing techniques.
Like this.

I obey. And we both sit there sniffing like dogs, until my heartbeat slows and I can match his inhales. Air fills my lungs with sweet relief and I open my mouth to gulp more.

“Slowly,” he says. I nod, my eyes never leaving his. Silence fills the room as we breathe in unison.

In.

Out.

Deliberate.

“Better?” he asks.

“Yes,” I manage.

And for a moment neither one of us moves, even though I’m clad only in a bra and Jack’s boxers are absurdly wrapped around one ankle.

I don’t notice that I’m trembling until Jack gets up to drape the afghan around me. He sits down beside me and I can feel his hand heavy on my shoulder. I cover my face with my hands, because I feel the tears welling up in my eyes, and unlike Pamela, I’m not a pretty crier. My face gets blotchy and puffy and my nose turns shiny and red. On top of that, I’m half naked and hotly embarrassed and I just don’t want Jack to see me like this. I shrug his hand off me without looking up.

“Daisy,” he says.

I shake my head into my palms. “Just go,” I whisper, my voice threatening to crack if I raise it.

“What?” he asks. I can feel him leaning closer.

“Just go!” I croak, thrusting my hands to my side but keeping my eyes clenched tight. I don’t want him to bear witness to my further humiliation. I crumple away from him and roll myself into a ball in the corner of the sofa, pulling the blanket around me tight like a cocoon. “I just want to be alone,” I say in a small voice, spent from my outburst.

The room fills with silence and everything is so still I wonder if he already left and I missed it. But I’m scared to open my eyes and check. So I lie as still as the air, until finally I feel the couch shift beside me when he stands up. I hear him slowly tug on his clothes. And then I hear his heavy, burdened footsteps as he retreats out of the den, down the hall, into his office.

But I still can’t open my eyes. I lie there, hot, salty tears leaking from them, as I replay the last few moments in my head—the craving, the urgency, the familiar touching that somehow, miraculously, felt new again. And then the sheer panic that took hold when the fire in
my belly moved to my lungs. And then I reach up and clutch my dry throat, marveling at how quickly—and without warning—everything can go to shit.

THE NEXT MORNING when I pad out into the kitchen, I’m nearly knocked over by Jack’s lanky body rushing past me back to the den. “Sorry,” he calls over his shoulder, and then: “Have you seen my keys?”

“On the dresser,” I call back, opening the refrigerator and pulling out my smoothie ingredients.

When he reenters the kitchen, I’m stuffing kale into the glass pitcher of the blender. I turn it on. The jet-engine-like whirring drowns out his next sentence.

When it goes silent, he repeats himself: “I’m late. I’m gonna go.”

I wonder if he is late, or if he’s just eager to leave. Not that I can blame him if he is.

“OK,” I say, not turning to look at him. The embarrassment of the evening before flames hot on my cheeks again. Jack doesn’t move and a thick silence settles in the air.

“Daisy?”

“Yeah?” I say, and for a second I have a crazy hope that he’ll just rush over to me and throw his arms around me, that I could melt into him and forget last night and Pamela and the Lots of Cancer and just remember Jack. Me and Jack.

But he doesn’t.

“I think you should call Dr. Saunders.”

At this, I turn and look at him. “Why?”

“You know,” he says, shifting his gaze to the floor. “Last night. Your, uh, episode.”

My
episode
? Is he talking about my
crying
? I feel the heat in my face explode, as irritation overtakes my embarrassment. Jack has always
been terrible at dealing with emotions, but Jesus, I think I have a right to be upset once in awhile. I’m
dying.

When I don’t say anything for fear of crying again—this time out of anger—Jack speaks up. “I just think you should make sure it’s not something to do with your lungs.”

Oh. He’s talking about the whole not-being-able-to-breathe thing.

“I’m sure it’s fine,” I say, even though I’m not sure of this at all.

“Still,” he says, not moving, and even though seconds before I wanted him to envelop me, now I just want him to be gone already.

“OK. I’ll call him.”

“OK,” Jack says.

I raise my eyebrows at him. “I thought you were running late.”

“Oh. Yeah,” he says, and takes a few steps toward me, closing the gap between us. He leans in to kiss me and I turn my head at the last second so he gets part of my ear and a mouthful of hair.

He takes a step back and I can feel him looking at me, so I busy myself pouring the smoothie into a cup.

“Daisy?”

“What,” I say, not looking at him.

The silence stretches as I will him to stop staring at me and just leave.

And then—after muttering a quick “nothing” under his breath—he does.

I stand at the counter for a minute, my hand clutching the cup. I concentrate on my breathing.

In.

Out.

In.

Out.

Then I walk over to where my cell phone sits and unplug it from the wall. I sit at the kitchen table with my thick drink and call Dr. Saunders. As it rings, I half hope he won’t answer. It is Sunday morning,
after all. Maybe he’s at church. Wait. Does Dr. Saunders go to church? It stuns me how little I actually know about him.

“Hello?” he answers on the fourth ring.

“It’s Daisy,” I say. And then after a few pleasantries, I tell him about the fire in my chest and how I couldn’t breathe and how I kind of sounded like a baby seal.

“Uh-huh,” Dr. Saunders says, and I picture his eyebrows nodding. “And what were you doing when you experienced this shortness of breath?”

“Um, what?” I ask, my face flushing for what feels like the thirtieth time in the past twelve hours.

“You know, were you at rest, lying down, active, walking?”

I get a flash of Jack’s naked body hovering above mine. I can feel him breathing in my ear.

“Um . . . active,” I say, hoping Dr. Saunders can’t hear the embarrassment in my voice. “I guess I was active.”

After a few more questions, he concludes that it was most likely a panic attack, but that it’s also consistent with symptoms of pleural effusion—a fluid buildup around the lungs often experienced by people with malignant tumors. He said to call if it happened again, otherwise he could run some tests on Monday.

I hang up after making yet another doctor appointment for the next morning, even though I know I should have asked more questions about pleural effusion, if only because I’m sure Jack will ask me more questions tonight and it would be nice to have the answers. But I can’t be bothered to care about my most likely panic attacks or possible pleural effusion, because all I can think about is Jack being on his
way to see Pamela. And how I can’t properly kiss my husband good-bye. And how for weeks now I’ve been a walking bingo cage, my emotions tumbling around on top of each other like balls of numbers and I never know which one is going to come out next.

I take a deep breath and try to deal in facts. Logic. Jack is on his way to see Pamela. He is going to help her with her horse. They are going to talk and probably laugh and Jack’s crooked tooth is going to peek out of his lips at something clever she says. I remind myself that this is exactly what I wanted to happen. That it’s the perfect opportunity for Jack and Pamela to let the potential spark between them grow. That Jack deserves someone who can breathe. And who’s not actively dying.

But slowly, those logical thoughts give way to the image that’s been plaguing me since Pamela invited Jack to her horse farm. It’s all romantic rugged cowboy and wind through toffee-colored hair and Hallmark movie scene, and it’s utterly absurd, but it still pangs my heart and threatens to compress my lungs all over again.

I take a deep breath to reaffirm my airways are still open.

Then I look at the green, thick sludge in my cup and find that I’ve lost all desire to drink my smoothie.

I hear Jack’s voice echo from an earlier time. A pre-Lots-of-Cancer time: Why are you still drinking those things?

And sitting here, I begin to nod in agreement to his repeated question.
Why
am
I still drinking these goddamned things?

I pick it up and watch my hand curiously—as if it’s a rebellious, petulant child that’s acting of its own accord—and heave the entire plastic cup, green liquid and all, across the room where it
smacks
the cabinet beneath the sink. Green slop sprays the maple, the fake Saltillo tile, the baseboards. The cup then hits the floor where it rolls to rest at the foot of the refrigerator.

And in the silence that follows, the stupid therapist’s voice from the stupid first time I had stupid cancer once again rings in my head:

Your anger is grief wearing a disguise.

I slump back against my chair.

My anger is all over my kitchen floor.

eighteen

A
FTER CHEST X-RAYS and more blood work and breathing into a ridiculous plastic tube connected to a loud machine, Dr. Saunders confirms that I have a small amount of excess fluid on my lungs.

“We’ll keep an eye on it, but I don’t think that’s what caused your labored breathing,” his bushy eyebrows inform me.

“OK. So what did?” I’m sitting on a tissue-paper-covered exam table. It crinkles loudly with even the slightest movement, so I try to stay absolutely still.

Dr. Saunders sets the manila folder he’s carrying down beside me and takes his glasses off. “What you’re dealing with right now is stressful, anxiety inducing.”

Stressful.

I try not to scoff.

Stressful is when you have two final exams in one day. Or when your basement floods on the same morning that your in-laws are getting in town.

This is not stressful.

This is something else.

He fixes me with a serious stare. “I think it would be helpful for you to see a specialist. Learn some breathing techniques.”

I stare back at him. “A specialist. That sounds like code for a therapist.”

The left side of his mouth turns up. “A respiratory therapist.” He taps his chest with his index finger. “Not a head one,” he says, moving his finger to the side of his skull. “There’s a difference.”

“OK,” I nod. “As long as it’s not some trick to get me to see a shrink.”

“I wouldn’t do that. I know how you feel about it,” he says, then fixes me with a pointed stare. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t think you should see one of those, too.”

“I’m sure you do,” I say, remembering it was Dr. Saunders who referred me to the single therapy session I agreed to go to the first time around. I resisted then, too, which prompted him to ask: “Don’t you want to
be
a therapist? I would think you of all people would understand the benefits of going.” I wanted to tell him that I do understand the benefits—for other people. But for me? I’m already so self-reflective, introspective, so overanalytical about everything I say and do that there’s nothing a stranger could ask me or tell me that I haven’t already asked or told myself. And really, who wants to go to a therapist who needs therapy? It’s like being examined by a physician who’s sniffling and sneezing and coughing. Not very comforting. But I didn’t know how to explain all of that to Dr. Saunders without sounding hypocritical and arrogant, so I just shrugged.

Now I look at Dr. Saunders, who’s looking back at me, his forehead crinkled, and I sigh. “The last thing I need right now is someone asking me how I feel every five seconds or trying to tell me what my anger
means.
”

The last word hangs in the air and Dr. Saunders’ wooly brows furrow together in concern.

“Are you angry?”

I pause for a minute and stare at my jean-clad knees, silently cursing myself for saying too much.

Then I look up at him: “Wouldn’t you be?”

Dr. Saunders holds my gaze for twenty long, silent seconds. Even the paper beneath me remains quiet. Then he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a handful of business cards. He looks down and shuffles through them until he finds the one he wants. He hands it to me.

“Patrick’s part of our extended patient care team,” he says. “He works in the Pulmonary Center next door. Just call the number on the bottom there.”

I take the card, stuff it into the side pocket of my bag, and tell him that I will, even though I think the notion of paying someone to teach me how to breathe is about as ridiculous as it gets.

I’d almost rather see a shrink.