Every Little Thing (12 page)

“To be honest, the pain never really goes away. It just goes between bearable and really bad. Yesterday, I sat upside down in a chair because it was the only position I could get into that made the pain go away. And when I go to piss, it's like my tubes are all tied up. Don't know how else to explain it. It's like I can feel—”

Not looking up at Lee, and running a knuckle between the bird's eyes. “You've got kidney stones.”

Lee went silent. Winced. Knew what that meant. Birthing stones through his dick. Cohen looked up and saw Lee processing the pain to come. “Just because you can sedate a bird doesn't mean you're a doctor. And what the hell are you rubbing its eyes for?”

“I'm aging it. Mature murres, they have a bony ridge between their eyes, and this guy doesn't. This one's immature. It takes years for a murre to mature, and that slow rate of reproduction is what makes them susceptible to getting wiped out in...”He looked up and Lee was entirely not listening. He had his hand on his back, staring at his toes, his face flushed with a fever. He had a look on his face like maybe Cohen was right, he should head to a hospital. A look like a man who really didn't want to piss kidney stones.

“Lee. If you don't go and get those stones blasted with one of those sonic blaster machines at a hospital, they're going to be even more excruciating to pass. Pack a bag. Come into town. Crash on my and Allie's couch, before and after the hospital is done with you. I'll call Allie, to meet us at the hospital. I'll drop you off, and I'll go deal with this bird. We both know that's what Allie is going to arrange if I pick up the phone and call her, so don't fight with me about it. Don't end up pissing out a kidney stone the size of a grape when the hospital can blast them up into,” he laughed, “something more…manageable. Like a grape
seed
.”

Lee nodded his head. “I can handle a few grape seeds, but definitely not a whole fuckin' grape.”

RISE
TO A FALL

THERE WAS ANOTHER weeknight phone call to come watch the stars with Matt. Decipher them. Except it wasn't that at all. Matt opened his front door, to let Cohen in, and almost fell into Cohen's arms.

“Come in,” he said, and he walked them to the back door. Matt pointed to a cupboard as they walked through the kitchen, “Take a glass. I have some wine poured. Bunch of stuff poured. Whatever you want.”He felt around for the door handle like he was blind and trusted his hands more than his eyes. It took him three tries to grab hold of it. “I'm going to need your help with something. I'm going to need, n-need you to say yes.”

He took Cohen out back and there was a bottle of Jameson's, a bucket of ice, and a bottle of red wine, but it was empty. He waved a hand over the top of the bottles,
Take your pick
, and he fell into the chair like he wanted to break it. Cohen wanted to leave before he knew why; before Matt said something Matt couldn't take back. And Matt was too drunk and distressed to gently ease Cohen into the news.

“This. I—I mean—” Matt stopped talking to pour a drink, even though he'd just laid a full one by his chair, and forgot about it. Didn't even notice when he knocked it over with an errant foot.

“Are you...”

“No. I'm not okay. Not at all. Are you? Are
you
happy?”

“Yes—”

“And what does that mean to you, Cohen? That you're fucking
happy
?What does that take?”

“I don't know, I don't feel like there's anything missing in my life. I'm content that way, but what's—what's going on, Matt?”

Matt stood up, grabbed his telescope off its stand, and swung it like a golf club at a can of beer in the grass, driving it into a neighbour's yard.

Cohen got up and grabbed Matt by his wrist, yanking him back to his chair. “What are you doing? What's going on here?” He sat Matt down as a light came on above the neighbour's patio door. A woman turtle-headed her face out of the doorframe and looked around.

Matt looked at Cohen, steely, “Can you
guarantee
me you'll make her world feel right? My daughter's? Don't crap out on her, the way men do, years into a relationship. She's—”

“Matt, c'mon. Back up. What's going on?”For some reason, Cohen imagined it having to do with Allie. Something she couldn't bear to tell Cohen herself: that she's got Lou Gehrig's disease now, something degenerative a man might run from, or that she cheated. “Is Allie alright? Are you?”

“Everything's wrong!” He grabbed at his drink again. Big, consecutive gulps, and his throat looked like he was guzzling baseballs.

“Give me one specific thing—”

“One,
hah
!”

“Yes. One. Let's start there.”

“How about pancreatic cancer? How about esophageal cancer? Or is that
two
things? I'm sorry, is that
two
things, or is that the same thing?” He was throwing the words at Cohen like buckets of cold water, like stones. “I'm dying. I've got cancer.

Bad. My pancreas. My esophagus. It's...everywhere.”He rubbed a hand up and down his chest, tracing the warpath of the cancer treading through him.

A tear dangled from Matt's chin, but Cohen hadn't seen it form, never saw it slide down his face, and Matt's eyes weren't red. His voice was not shaky, it was notably steady. So maybe it wasn't a tear.

He was coldly certain and matter of fact about his plan. “I'm dying and you can't tell my daughter. We went through this shit, together, with her mother, and she won't be going through it again. Not with me.” He shook his head, determined, settled on it. “Matt, statistically,we...cancer is how most people…it's not...I don't…want to be—”

“
Sta-tis-tically, hey
?”Matt batted the word away with a hand. He reclined in his chair, shaking his head more than necessary.

“She saw her mother
die
, slowly, day after day, night after
fucking
night, and I watched her watch every bit of it. Buckling knees and eyes wet with tears, and you're talking statistics? Have you watched a person you love do that? Die a little more every day, for half a year? Allie could take that pain once a day, but after twenty days. After forty slaps in the face. Sixty. Ninety.”He stopped, let out a big sigh punctuated by a drunkard's belch.

“Fuck your
sta-tis-tics
, Cohen. I'm talking effects here, emotional damage. I'm talking about how her mother was a bottomless hole, and pieces of Allie were falling into Kristen as Allie stood over her crying.” Matt tapped his chest three times as he said
pieces of Allie
. “Or it was like her mother needed to take some of her daughter with her, wherever she was going.” He looked up at Cohen. “She's not the same now. You don't realize that, because you never knew her before her mother died. Her eyes dried out, I dunno. There's less life there now. The glow's gone, the sheen's been rubbed off.” And he wiped his own eyes with the palm of a hand. “She used to paint too, did you know that? Always going around with globs of paint matted into her hair and her clothes and her face and everything. It was beautiful, somehow, seeing your daughter so passionately lost and engrossed in something, that she'd skip meals or she'd run out for food not caring how she looked. But…
Pfft
.”He threw his hands up in the air like an explosion.

Matt straightened up in his chair. Unnaturally perfect posture. “It'd be toomuch for her to lose both parents that way. That's what I'm saying. I won't watch her watching me go. I won't do that.”

Matt was too drunk or he was desperately sad. But he wasn't Matt Crosbie. He wasn't
there.
A harder man was. A clumsier man: waves of his drink splashed from his glass and over his jeans whenever he moved.

“If you're sick, Matt…she…she has to know. She
will
know. You'll be in hospital and she'll be camped out in a chair next to you. Or you'll be at our house, and we'll be there for you, with you. You're scared, and you're worried for Allie, and that's perfectly natural.”

Staring at the fence, not Cohen, not even the fence really, just staring. “Not the case. She has to see me die, but she doesn't have to see me die of cancer, not over the course of however long this takes.”

Cohen was heartbroken. Words were catching in his throat like sticks, choking him. He was trying to keep up with the conversation on top of processing Matt's cancer: that Matt was going to
die
. His jaw felt like a struck bell, and the weight of the news made him realize how much he'd come to love this man. “What are you saying, Matt?”His throat was dry in the way it gets before tears. “And how long have you known? I mean,
Jesus
.” Shaking his head, not knowing what to do with his hands, freefalling still. “How long—”

“Look. I have a plan. I've thought it through. It's best for me, and it's best for my daughter.”He looked away from the fence and poured another drink, missing the glass at first. Puddles all over the tabletop. “I've made up my mind about this. You're going to have to help me. For me, and for my daughter.”

“
Matt!
”Cohen leaned forward and waited for Matt to look him in the eyes, and their eyes crashed. “If you're saying what I think you're saying, no. You don't get to kill yourself.”He wiped his palms on his jeans. “She won't understand suicide. She won't understand
why
you did it. She'll spend forever grappling with that, not understanding that, and I'll fucking tell her why, Matt, that you had cancer, so you killed yourself, so what'll be the point of...of—”He just shook his head,
no. Don't
.

Matt looked up at Cohen like a handful of salt in the eye. Cohen blinked and one tear fell out of each eye, racing each other down his cheeks.

“Because she won't have had to sit and watch me die. That's why. And I'm not talking suicide. I'm talking about an accident.”

Matt slid up in his chair and said, “You can tell her what you want after it's done. But if you tell her before it's done, and I love you, Cohen, I do, but if you tell my daughter beforehand, it's a war between us, do you understand? Are we clear on that?” He glared at Cohen until Cohen nodded yes. “I don't want any trouble between us, and I don't want this to be any harder than it's gonna be. Allie wouldn't understand. She'd want me to fight it, fight the cancer like it's a bad flu. All throughout Kristen's struggle I watched the look on Allie's face, like there was still some hope, even after her mother's eyes had sunk back into her skull. Even when she stopped eating and food had to be pumped into her. But you don't know that.
I
do. There are parts of my daughter's life you'll never know like her father does. Things about her you won't understand. She'll believe I can fight it. I can't. There's nothing to fight, just a mess of pain. She'll say,
but we can go through this together
, spend those last few weeks together, and I don't want to feel like an asshole for denying her that.”

“But you're okay with putting me in this position to lie? To live with keeping this from her? To know I helped,”he waved his hands around, at a loss for words, “with this?”

“Look. Sorry. And it's not all about Allie here. I don't want to die slowly, painfully. In agony, waiting to go. That's my choice to make. I'm asking you to respect
that
. And yes, I'm asking you to trust that I know what's best for my daughter. You have to trust that. You'll have your own kid someday, you'll understand. This is too much, I know, but I'm gonna tell you my plan and you're role in it....”

Cohen had his face held in one hand, and tears were piling up along the fingers he had spread across his face. Matt couldn't look at him once the tears had started. Their eyes were opposing magnets. And Cohen's hand felt like it was sinking into his face. No plan Matt was about to share was going to feel any less harsh than jamming a shotgun down Matt's throat and blowing a hole in the back of his neck.

HE PULLED HIS car over, halfway home from Matt's house, under a tortured-looking oak tree on someone's yard. He turned off his headlights and the windshield wipers. There was rainwater on every window, and the wind was blowing it the way a carwash does. Streetlights splashing yellow across his dashboard, and sometimes a passing car would spray his with the red of brake lights. He was cold and he liked it. Puffs of air when he breathed out. Condensation on the windows, and he was drawing in it: thoughtlessly, mindlessly, circles.

He couldn't go back home that night because he wouldn't know how to look at Allie or what to say when she'd ask,
How's Dad?
He couldn't look at her without thinking about
how
he was looking at her. He wouldn't be able to talk to her without considering the tonality of his words. Matt's news, and his expectation of Cohen's compliance, had flatlined his voice and his facial expressivity. Allie would see and hear that, ask what's wrong, and he didn't want to lie. Not right to her face like that. It was the first time he had to keep his thoughts so far away from her. The only way he knew how was to physically distance himself. Parked there, by the curb. Teeth chattering. He sat in his car, alone, with thoughts of Matt's death, and how it might change everything. He pictured Allie at the wake, crumbling in his arms, wondering what parts of her she'd bury along with her father. What parts of her would go out like busted lights.

The rain was falling harder now; galloping horses on his bonnet. Violent claps. He went to drive home, but he couldn't. The car was running, his foot on the pedal, gently pressing it to hear something other than his thoughts. A mild revving of the engine. Soothing, somehow. He pulled his cellphone out of his pocket. Opened it and closed it. Laid it on the dashboard and picked it back up. Dialled her number and talked too formally. “Allie, sorry to wake you up. Hi. Listen. Matt and I,we had a few more drinks than I realized. I should sleep here.”