Before I Go (30 page)

But now, Jack is doing the same thing. With Pamela.

And maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s just because he always tells me about his days at work, and this week, his days have involved Pamela and her horse whispering and her considerate cooking.

And if it’s something, well, then, isn’t that what I wanted? I mentally repeat the Martha Stewart–ish mantra that I’ve been rolling over in my head this week every time I think about Jack-and-Pamela, Pamela-and-Jack: it’s a good thing.

But if it really is a good thing, then why do I suddenly feel like I can’t breathe?

Goddamn it.

Not again.

I grip the steering wheel with white knuckles and glance in the rearview mirror before swerving across three lanes of traffic to pull my car to a screeching stop in the emergency lane. I gasp for air, but it has nowhere to go. My lungs are blocked off like a street under construction, and they burn like someone just coated them with hot tar. My heart thumps wildly, panicking of its own accord, even as I try to convince myself to remain calm. Sweat dribbles from my forehead into my eye, and only then do I notice how uncomfortably hot I am.
And light-headed. Yet somehow I still manage to open the car door in time to deposit my half-digested breakfast smoothie on the asphalt.

When my body stops heaving, I lean back and gratefully breathe in through my now-acidic mouth. My heartbeat slows. Tension drains from my shoulders and I inexplicably feel weepy. I look at the clock on the dashboard and urge myself to pull it together. I don’t want to be late for my trial workup. But I know there’s something I must do first. I reach over to my purse on the passenger seat and pull out a white business card and my cell phone. And with trembling hands, I dial Patrick, the respiratory therapist, to make an appointment.

“YOU’VE LOST WEIGHT.” Dr. Rankoff frowns as she looks at my chart. “Have you been eating?”

I immediately think of the cold, greasy Varsity burger and French fries and feel guilty that I was so reckless with my diet. I picture the cancer as a cartoon monster, greedily feeding on my irresponsibility, growing exponentially in just a few days’ time, causing my body to shut down, shedding pounds like a tourist sheds layers of clothing when they reach their balmy destination.

When I don’t answer, she peers at me, studying my face more intently. “Are you feeling OK today?”

There’s that word again. OK.

I know I don’t look OK. I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the automatic glass doors on my way in. My hair is disheveled. My face sallow from my “episode” in the car. I only had time to smooth a few errant locks behind my ears before my name was called in the waiting room.

“I’m all right,” I say.

She waits. Allows the silence to grow.

“I . . . uh. I guess I’ve been having panic attacks?”

She nods. “Dr. Saunders mentioned something about that.”

I pause. They talk about me?

“Have you made an appointment with the respiratory therapist?”

I tell her I have. And then I steel myself for her news, which isn’t really news.

The tumors are still growing. “Slowly,” she adds, but her voice is not filled with hope.

I now picture my Lots of Cancer as the tortoise in the fable race with the hare. Slow and steady. And I know Dr. Rankoff doesn’t sound hopeful because, in the end, the tortoise always wins.

“DID YOU KNOW Pamela’s brother lives in a yurt?” I ask Kayleigh as we’re sprawled on her couch half watching a weekend marathon of
The Rachel Zoe Project
on Bravo.

“What’s a yurt?” Kayleigh asks. She’s been furiously texting on her phone for most of the morning, so I know she’s not really paying attention to me.

“I don’t know. Some kind of teepee, I think.”

“Huh,” she says.

“Did you know she makes her own jam?”

I only know this because I spent most of my free time last week poring over her Facebook page and Pinterest board and LinkedIn profile. Other things I learned:

She has 684 friends.

She attended college in Florida.

She went skydiving on her thirtieth birthday.

She watches
Grey’s Anatomy
.

“Huh,” says Kayleigh.

“And I think Jack likes her,” I say. “I mean, really likes her. He’s
mentioned her a lot this week. Of course, they have spent a lot of time together, because he’s trying to save her horse. But still. It feels like he’s a little fixated. You know, like a kid with a new toy.”

I’m just rambling now, giving voice to my thoughts, more to sort them out than to get Kayleigh’s opinion, because I know she’s not really invested in the conversation. So I keep talking. About how Pamela’s ex-boyfriend looks a little like the football player with the Mohawk from
Glee
. Except he didn’t have a Mohawk. And how she sometimes reposts those Facebook statuses that promise good luck if you share them within ten seconds of reading them. And how she ate at the new Wildberry Café downtown for dinner on Tuesday night. Herb-crusted chicken and prosciutto-wrapped green beans.

She had posted a picture and the food looked really good. So good that I started to regret turning down Jack’s suggestion a few weeks earlier that we go check it out.

I glance at the TV where a Ford Motors commercial is touting some spring sale. It reminds me of something else I learned about Pamela.

“Oh, and did you know she drives a pickup truck? A gray one with an extended cab. She got it a few months ago.”

I pictured her as a Honda Civic kind of girl, so it caught me off guard. But even I had to admit, there was something sexy about a woman behind the wheel of a big rig. I know Jack thinks so. When we visited his parents for Christmas last year, I offered to run out for eggs for his mom and I had to drive his dad’s old Bronco to the corner store because Jack’s car was blocked in. He came with me.

“You look so hot,” he said, and reached over and squeezed my thigh from the passenger seat.

I smiled at him.

“You know there’s an abandoned parking lot up here on the right,” he said, with a naughty grin.

“Jack! We’re not doing it in the backseat of your dad’s car,” I said,
keeping my hands at a very responsible ten and two on the wheel, even as Jack’s began wandering up my blouse.

“Who said anything about the backseat?” He leaned over and nuzzled my neck.

“Behave,” I said, cocking an eyebrow and gently pushing him away.

Now I wish I had pulled him closer.

“Anyway, I guess it comes in handy when she’s working on her parents’—”

“Daisy!” Kayleigh interrupts me. I tear my eyes away from Rachel Zoe’s brittle frame on the television where she’s fingering a red silk gown that’s “bananas” and look at my best friend.

“What?”

She shakes her head and scoffs. “Do you even hear yourself? Pamela this. Pamela that.”

“So?” I raise my eyebrows, challenging her. Doesn’t she get it? She could be Jack’s
wife
.

“I’m just saying,” she says, her voice softer. “I don’t think it’s Jack that’s obsessed with her.”

nineteen

O
N TUESDAY MORNING, I’m twenty minutes late to my appointment with the respiratory therapist. Instead of paying attention to the seven-mile route to Athens Regional, I had been going over my mental to-do list for the day:

Grocery store to buy Greek yogurt, organic baby carrots, rice chips, toilet paper

Post office to mail Jack’s graduation announcements sitting in a box in my trunk

Clean bathroom

And one more thing—what was it?

As I was trying to conjure the missing task, I looked and realized bewilderingly that I had somehow taken a wrong turn and was on a street in Athens that I had never been on before. I slowed down, looking for clues as to where I was, my heart thudding in my chest and my lungs tightening. If I hadn’t been so frightened I would have laughed at the irony of having a panic attack on my way to learn how not to have panic attacks anymore. Finally I saw a sign that said the university campus was five miles straight ahead and it reoriented me. I took two rights and was back on Milledge and the familiar path to the hospital.

I park next door to the cancer center in the lot for the Pulmonary, Allergies, and Sleep Center, and even though I’m late, I sit in my car for a minute, hoping the motivation to walk into another doctor/specialist/cancer appointment will gather like clouds for a storm and propel me through the afternoon.

In the waiting room, I check in at the front desk, apologize for my tardiness to a woman with large gold earrings that look like spaceships, and sit down in an uncomfortable wooden chair. I grab a magazine off the table beside me, but I have no interest in reading, so I look around the room.

There are just two other patients besides me. In the corner sits a birdlike woman with reading glasses perched on the point of her nose, a beaded chain drooping from the ends of them and around her neck. And directly across from me, a balding man with a rotund belly and skinny legs taps on a BlackBerry. He’s wearing a checkered button-up that—

Shit.

He looks up at the exact same moment that I look at him. Accidental eye contact.

Don’t talk to me don’t talk to me don’t talk to me.

He talks to me.

“Pretty day outside, huh?” he says. There’s a gap so wide in his front teeth you could fit a jelly bean through it.

I nod and smile and look back at my magazine, hoping to convey that I am not available for conversation.

“Dr. Brunson’s running behind today,” he says. “Been here thirty-five minutes. Don’t know why I have to be on time, but they never are.”

If I were to respond, I would tell him that I’m not here to see Dr. Brunson, but I don’t want to encourage him. So I smile again to acknowledge that he has spoken, but that I’m so involved in this ESPN article on ultimate Frisbee that I couldn’t possibly tear myself away from it to chat.

“You got allergies? They’re terrible this time of year.”

I look at him and sigh at his inability to grasp social cues. I offer one sharp shake of my head and two words: “Panic attacks.”

“Hmm,” he says. “Woulda pegged you for allergies.” He rests his hands on his pregnant-looking stomach. “I’ve got sleep apnea myself. Lost fifty pounds ever since I died, but Doc says that’s not enough. Gotta lose fifty, sixty more.”

I’m not sure that I heard him right. “Ever since you
died
?”

He grins like a fisherman who just got a tug on the line. “Yep. Heart attack. Was gone for seven minutes until the EMT started up the old ticker again.”

I find myself grinning back at him, surprised that my annoyance has dissipated and genuine affection has taken its place. This is his cocktail party story, like my scar is my cocktail party story. And it’s a good one.

The door to the waiting room opens up. “Michael?” says a nurse in blue scrubs.

“Just Mike,” he says, hefting himself out of his seat with a groan. He winks at me. “You have a real nice day now, ya hear?”

“You, too,” I say to the first man I ever met who had died. It’s not until the door closes behind him that I wish I had asked him what it was like.