People Who Knew Me (29 page)

I keep thinking about Claire's request for total honesty. If Dr. Richter has bad news, if the much-feared end is near, I need to tell Claire about New York, about what happened. I owe it to her.

*   *   *

When I go to see Dr. Richter, she repeats the same thing she did before starting me on Taxol: “It's not working as well as I'd hoped.”

Hearing her words, I'm not so much sad as I am angry.

“The chemo is doing
nothing
?” I say, incredulous.

She tilts her head from one side to the other, as if she's evaluating the first sip of a glass of wine someone's just poured for her.

“The swelling in your breast has gone down a little, the breast tissue isn't as thick, the redness isn't as bad. So the chemo hasn't done
nothing
,” she says, defensive of the drugs. I guess she has to be.

“So what now?”

“Well, I'd consider this a partial response to the chemo. I want to do the mastectomy and radiation, see how much we can get that way.”

Her corny parting words this time: “Stay hopeful.”

The Internet tells me that hope is for fools, that even if I get through this round of treatment, the cancer will likely come back somewhere else. I'll be playing a game of chemotherapy Whac-A-Mole until my body gives up completely.

*   *   *

I've been talking more and more to Paul. It's gotten to the point that we have each other's phone numbers and text when we're going to the infusion center. Chemo dates, Nurse Amy says. Paul's my first friend in California. Al and JT are different. They started as necessities and are like family now. I suppose I've gone all these years without friends because I haven't needed them. I've had moments of needing them, but those moments just pass. Cancer doesn't just pass. And if you don't talk to someone about it, you'll go crazy. I could see a shrink, but what I picture is someone speaking to me in a soft voice—as if anything above normal volume would disrupt my peaceful dying process—using a bank of psychological terms to explain away the basic fact that I'm fucking afraid of dying.

So I have Paul. And, occasionally, Nurse Amy. She's on vacation now—Hawaii. People's lives go on.

Paul finishes chemo next month and he should be in the clear, for good. It's hard not to resent him, and it's hard not to hate myself for resenting him.

“I wish I had prostate cancer,” I tell him.

“That would make you a man,” he says, “which would be far less appealing for me.”

I'm never sure if he's flirting. Amy says he is. Whatever he's doing shouldn't be allowed in infusion centers.

“I don't even know why I'm sitting here,” I say, disregarding his potential flirtation. “The chemo is barely doing anything.”

“I bet the surgery and radiation kill it,” he says.

“Maybe,” I say. “And then it could come back. I might make it this year, but die next year.”

“Isn't that true for anyone?”

It's a valid point. I hate when Paul makes valid points.

“I'm doing the genetic testing,” I say, changing the subject. Nurse Amy's fill-in, an all-business Latina named Desi, comes to check on me. She doesn't make small talk. She must overhear us chatting, but she never chimes in. She doesn't get involved. It's a good skill to have in her line of work.

“Are you? That's a good decision, I think,” Paul says.

I've hemmed and hawed about it before. I've been avoiding the test, but now, in the name of honesty with Claire, I have to do it. It's strange to think there's a gene for cancer, that I may have been destined for this. Could it be that I was walking around New York all those years ago, blissfully deaf to the ticking clock buried in my body, thinking that I had everything under control? I've put off the test this long because I don't know how I can live with myself if I have the gene, if I pass it on to Claire. But the thing is, if the Internet is right, I may not be living with myself that much longer.

“Claire should know,” I say. “It's selfish of me not to find out.”

“Ignorance is bliss, as they say.”

“Until it isn't.”

“When are you doing it?” he asks.

“This week.”

“Look at you, taking the bull by the ol' horns.”

“Reluctantly,” I say.

Getting my affairs in order
. That's what people say. I did a living trust online. It's not so difficult when you don't have a lot of things, and when you have only one person to leave them to.

“I'm also thinking about contacting that person in New York.”

I figure if I have to be honest with Claire from here on out, I can use Paul as practice. I decided this morning that I would tell him the story—the messy, strange story.

“The infamous person,” he says, an eyebrow raised.

“She should know,” I say. “If I don't tell her and I die, she'll never know.”

He lowers his eyebrow.

“Then contact
that person
,” he says.

“It's kind of complicated,” I say.

“Complicated how?”

“Well, the person is Claire's father.”

“Oh,” he says, a little more intrigued. “I thought he was out of the picture.”

I never said that, exactly. I just told him once, when he asked, that I had full custody of Claire.

“He is out of the picture,” I say.

“I'm confused.”

“He doesn't know about Claire.”

He shifts in his chair, turns to look me in the eye. Normally we just talk to the air, facing forward.

“Go on,” he says.

I finally let go of my breath.

“I used to live in New York. I left a week after 9/11. Came here to start over.”

“Left the guy behind?”

The way he says it—
the guy
—rattles me, as if Claire's father meant nothing or, worse, as if he was an awful person, a drug addict, a convict, a deadbeat.

“It's not what you think,” I say. I'm defensive even though I have no right to be. Paul doesn't know anything.

“I read in
The New York Times
that lots of people left the city after 9/11,” he says.

Oh, Paul
. He's trying to give me a pass I don't really deserve.

“I was pregnant with Claire.” That's not the reason I left, or not the only one. It's all so convoluted now.

“I was married in New York,” I say. “Drew was his name—my husband.”

“Oh,” he says. He shifts in his chair again, noticeably uncomfortable. Maybe, in his eyes, I am just a woman who left her husband. Like his ex-wife.

“So you just left without saying anything?”

This, the judgment, is what I feared.

“It's a long story,” I say.

And then I tell him about Drew and me, from the time we fell in love to the time I fell out. I tell him about the night we met, about the fateful date I canceled to stay up talking to Drew until early morning. I tell him how we got married so young—too young. I tell him about our little apartment. I tell him about my career in advertising, about Drew's failed taco shop and his subsequent career in taking care of his sick mother.

“That's hard,” he says, when I elaborate on the part about his sick mother.

“I know,” I say. “It is. It was. But that's the thing. Love is supposed to survive hard. It's supposed to withstand hard.”

“Ideally, I guess. That's not always the case.”

There's a slight tension to his voice. I think of his wife leaving him after he was diagnosed. I think of how that was probably a long story, too.

“It gets worse,” I say.

He grips the armrest like he's bracing himself. Maybe it's selfish to tell him all this, to attempt to exonerate myself like this.

“You know how I said I ditched a date the night I first met Drew? In college? That date was with a guy named Gabe,” I say. “Well, years later, Gabe and I crossed paths again.”

I make it sound happenstance, even though the truth is somewhat different. “Gabe and I ended up getting close.”

I've never told this story to anyone. It feels just like that—a story, someone else's life.

“Oh,” he says. I wish he would stop saying that.

“One thing led to another?” he ventures.

He's packaging up my story into something so ordinary, when there is nothing ordinary about what actually happened.

“To put it simply,” I say, jumping, leaping, skipping over so many details.

“And then you got pregnant.”

I nod sheepishly.

“Connie, Connie, Connie,” he says. He doesn't know I used to be Emily. The more I tell him, the more I realize how little he knows. He's shaking his head disapprovingly, the way you shake your head at an adorable child sneaking an extra cookie off the kitchen counter. He's making light of it, for my sake but also his own, I think. Paul wants to like me, for some reason.

“Gabe was Puerto Rican—brown skin. If I had the baby, Drew would have known everything. It would have killed him.”

“So you didn't tell either of the guys.”

The guys
.

I shake my head.

“And then you made a case for moving out here to start over.”

This isn't how it went down, exactly, but I'm swept up in the momentum of his conclusions.

“And now I'm dying.”

“Stop saying that,” he says.

I've learned through this whole experience that some people cope by denying the possibility of death and some people, like me, cope by talking their way into apprehensive acceptance of it.

“Okay, well, regardless, I realize there are things Claire needs to know.”

“What does she think happened to her dad? She must've asked.”

“I told her he died in a car accident.”

He grimaces. “Fuck,” he says. I liked it better when he was saying “Oh.”

“So you're going to have to contact the guy and then talk to Claire,” he says.

“Right.”

“What are you going to say?”

“To Claire?”

“To either of them.”

“I have no idea,” I say. “I suppose I'll start with apologizing for being a horrible person.”

I say this earnestly, not in the hopes of getting him to contradict me, but he does anyway: “You're not a horrible person, Con.”

But, see, he doesn't know the half of it. Or maybe he knows about half—just about.

He reaches over and gives me a hey-cheer-up nudge in the arm. Then we sit there in silence for what feels like an hour.

“You should Google ‘How to talk to my baby daddy about his kid,'” he says finally.

Maybe it's the stress of all this, but hearing him say “baby daddy” puts me in hysterics. And when I start laughing, he starts laughing. We fold over in our chairs, tears in our eyes, IV bags swinging with our movement. A couple other patients glance up from their books and magazines to see what we could possibly think is so amusing while our cells are being killed, one by one. Desi walks by and gives us a look like a librarian gives teenagers making a ruckus when they should be reading. We recompose ourselves, our laughter dying down like a crackling campfire after everyone has roasted their marshmallows and retired to their tents for the night. Claire and I should go camping this summer—the two of us in sleeping bags under a huge starry sky.

“I've never told anyone any of this,” I say when the laughter is gone.

“Why the hell did you choose me?” he asks.

Because you like me, for some reason. Because you always smile. Because you make me feel better about things
.

“I don't know,” I say. “Should I have spared you?”

“Nah,” he says. “I judge you a little, but I'll get over it.”

It's hard to hear that he judges me, even if it's just a little, and even if he'll get over it.

“I'm a coward, huh?” I say.

He looks over at me. “You've got poison running through your veins,” he says. “That's pretty brave.”

 

TWENTY-FOUR

Gabe had thick, expensive silk curtains. Burgundy. They were so long that the excess fabric gathered at the floor beneath the window. I overslept that morning because of those curtains. When I finally woke up in his bed, the darkness deceived me into thinking it was early—before six. But Gabe was gone, the sheets on his side of the bed pulled tight, his pillow sitting against the headboard just so. The clock said eight o'clock. It was the best sleep I'd had in months.

I lay in bed luxuriously, enjoying the feel of the six-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton sateen sheets against my bare skin. My stomach growled. If Gabe had all the ingredients, I'd make pancakes—a big batch. I'd freeze the leftovers so he'd have something to eat in the morning, while running out the door on the way to work. He always claimed coffee was his breakfast. When I protested, he said, “I put cream in it.”

It was a little after eight o'clock when I stretched my arms up toward the ceiling, the way bad actors do in scenes showing them “waking up.” I made my side of the bed, set my pillow against the headboard to match Gabe's. He was clean, something Drew wasn't. I wouldn't have to pick up after Gabe in the life I envisioned for us. I pulled back the curtains and the room filled with light. It was a beautiful day—not a cloud in the very blue sky.

Gabe's shower had one of those showerheads on the ceiling that dropped water like rain. We'd stood together underneath it once and I'd closed my eyes, pretending I was in the middle of a Costa Rican rain forest with him during a passing storm. The shower at my apartment was barely big enough for one person. I nicked myself while shaving on a routine basis because there was no bench; I just had to balance on one foot, my other foot stamping the shower wall while I attempted to shave as quickly as possible—without soap or gel. Gabe's shower had a bench. I took the time to lather up, to shave properly, to feel like a woman.