Before I Go Page 2

  I let out an audible sigh. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice a half-empty, sweating glass on Jack’s nightstand. I pick it up, rub the water ring off the pressed wood with the palm of my hand, and walk the glass into the kitchen.

  When we first moved in together, I balked at Jack’s lack of order and cleanliness. We were a newlywed cliché, though we weren’t even married yet.

  “I’m not your freakin’ maid!” I spat during a particularly heated argument.

  “I never asked you to be,” was his cool reply.

  We were opponents on a battlefield, neither one wanting to lose ground. Jack’s stance was that clutter and mayhem didn’t bother him; he wasn’t opposed to cleaning, he just didn’t think about it. I argued that if he cared for me, he would think about it and pick up after himself. Every dirty plate that I came across, every jacket or pair of shoes that didn’t make it back into the closet, was a tangible insult. “I don’t love you! I don’t care about your feelings! I’m purposefully leaving my coffee cup on the bathroom sink to get under your skin! Ha! Ha-ha-ha!”

  But like most people who decide to stick it out for the long term, I slowly learned to accept that his messiness was just that—messiness. It wasn’t a personal attack. And Jack made a halfhearted effort every now and then to straighten the mountain of papers on his desk in the study that threatened to avalanche onto the scuffed wood floor—and on really good days, he even remembered to return used dishes to the kitchen.

  But they never quite make it into the dishwasher.

  A cool draft greets me as I pour the dregs of multicolored milk from Jack’s impromptu cereal bowl into the sink and load it into the dishwasher. I look up at the row of windows over the faucet, admiring their aged beauty while lamenting their inefficiency. Not only do they have the original glass panes from 1926, the year our house was built, the wooden frames around them have been painted so many times that many of them don’t close all the way, leaving cracks where air sneaks in. They need to be completely replaced, but until we can afford that costly solution, I’ve just decided to caulk them shut. Job number thirty-seven on my interminable list of tasks to keep our Spanish bungalow from being deemed uninhabitable.

  When we were house hunting two years ago, I immediately fell in love with its rounded doorways, red-clay-tile roof, stone front porch with black ironwork handrails, and yellow stucco exterior. I pictured myself lazily eating hunks of Manchego cheese and drinking wine under the large olive tree in the backyard. Jack wasn’t as charmed.

  “That’s not an olive tree,” he said, shattering my fantasy. “And this house needs a lot of work. The townhome was move-in ready. Fresh paint and all.”

  I shook my head, thinking of the arched nook in the hall and the antique phone I would find at a flea market to set on the recessed shelf. “This is it.”

  “I’m not going to have the time to do everything this house needs,” he said. “You know what my schedule’s like.”

  “But I do. I have time. You won’t have to lift a finger. I promise.”

  He tried again. “Did you see the yard? I don’t think there’s a blade of grass to be found in all those weeds.”

  “I’ll fix it,” I said quickly. “You’ll see.”

  He sighed. Jack knew me well enough to know once I set my mind on something, I wouldn’t be deterred. He shook his head in defeat. “Only you,” he said.

  I smiled and snaked my arms around him, pleased with my victory.

  “It will be perfect,” I said.

  But it was not perfect. Shortly after we moved in, I realized what Jack had first intuited (though I never would admit he was right)—it wasn’t just a little TLC that the house needed. It was a lot. After I painted all of the interior cake-icing walls, got new air filters, pulled weeds in the yard, pressure washed the exterior, hired a handyman to build a new set of stairs on the back deck, and scrubbed, polished, and dusted everything in sight, our heater exploded. Into flames. Five months later, the air conditioner followed. Then a pipe burst, flooding the basement, and that’s when we uncovered a mildew problem that had just been lying in wait behind the walls. And after putting out all those fires (literally, in the case of the heater), I still have a laundry list of little tasks I need to complete that I keep on the door of our fridge, like hiring an electrician to come install GFCI outlets, putting a new backsplash in the kitchen, buffing the original hardwood floors, and of course, caulking the won’t-shut windows.

  I finish loading the dishwasher and sponge down the counters. Then I grab a bag of baby carrots out of the fridge along with the lunch I had packed the night before and my daily to-do list and put it all into my shoulder bag, which I ease over my head and sling across my sweater-clad chest. Winter has behaved more like an early spring this week, so I leave my favorite black down coat in the hall closet, even though it’s February.

  I exit the house the same way Jack did, opening first the heavy wooden door with the handle that sticks and then pushing my way out the screen door. I let it slam behind me, delighting in the squeak of the rusted hinge, as I do every day. It sounds like summer, which has always been my favorite season.

  I walk down the back steps to our one-car driveway. Whoever gets home last has to park on the street—usually Jack. I glance next door to Sammy’s house. Her porch light is still on, so she probably stopped somewhere for breakfast after her shift. I’m a little relieved, because as much as I like her, she talks a blue streak, and a simple hi always turns into a fifteen- or twenty-minute fairly one-sided conversation (hers). And today I have just enough time to drive to campus, park my car, catch the university bus, and make it to the psychology building before class starts.

  I navigate my Hyundai Sonata through the backstreets of my tree-lined neighborhood until I get to the baseball stadium. In the spring, if we’re in the backyard, we can sometimes hear the crack of leather meeting wood and wonder if it was one of our Georgia Bulldogs or the opposing team that swung the bat. Neither one of us cares about sports enough to ever check and see who wins. It’s one of the first things I loved about Jack—that unlike every other guy in this town, he didn’t spend his Saturdays in the fall tailgating and guzzling beer and saying things like, “Coach has got to stop running that blitz every third down.”

  Like most other southern universities, Athens is a football town. It’s also a college town by every sense of the definition. The thirty-five thousand students who attend the university make up a third of the city’s population. When summer comes and the students pack up their belongings to head home or to study abroad in Amsterdam or the Maldives, the frenetic energy that fills every coffee shop, bus stop, and bar from September to May dissipates. The city seems to breathe, luxuriating in the space it has to stretch its arms until school is back in session.

  But today, the energy is full and present as I slowly drive past throngs of kids loping to their classes, filling sidewalks, haphazardly crossing streets. I marvel at how young they look. At twenty-seven, I’m only a few years apart from the seniors, so I can’t explain why it feels like lifetimes. Is it marriage that’s aged me? The cancer? Or the realization and acceptance of mortality—something most college kids haven’t quite wrapped their still-developing brains around?

  Fortunately, I’m not the oldest in my master’s program. A graying forty-something woman named Teresa sits near me in my Advanced Theories of Stress Management class. I imagine she’s a divorcée and this is her Eat Pray Love experience. She’s going back to school! Getting her counseling degree! Making something of herself! Jack says that’s unfair. That maybe she just lost her job in the recession and is trying out a new career path.

  Whatever the reason, I guess everyone has their story for why they are where they are. Mine, of course, has to do with the cancer. I started chemo right after graduating, and deferred my acceptance to my master’s program for a year. But the next fall, when my treatment had long been finished, I still wasn’t ready. My body was tired.

  “Take a few yea
rs off,” Jack said. “We’ll get married. Have some fun.”

  That’s how my husband proposed to me.

  I accepted.

  Then I got a job at a credit card call center where I wore a headset and flipped through psychology medical journals to pass the time. When a tone beeped in my ear, I pleasantly said, “Thank you for calling AmeriFunds credit.” My job was to help people make balance transfers onto a new credit card with zero percent APR for twelve months. “After twelve months, the variable APR will be fifteen-point-nine-nine percent to twenty-three-point-nine-nine percent based on your creditworthiness,” I explained to faceless voices on the other end of the line.

  But my favorite part of the job wasn’t really part of the job at all. Or it wasn’t supposed to be. It was when customers would explain why they were opening the new credit card, giving me a glimpse into their lives. There were the happy clichés: “My daughter just got engaged. There goes the retirement fund!” And the abruptly sad: “My Herman usually took care of this kind of stuff. But he’s gone now.” I wasn’t supposed to veer off the script, but if a supervisor wasn’t hovering, I’d probe deeper (“How old’s your daughter?” or, “When did he pass?”). And it occurred to me that most people just want to talk. To be heard. Even if it is by a stranger. Or maybe, especially if it’s a stranger. I felt like I was doing a public service. Or that’s what I told myself in order to feel better about my menial minimum-wage job. Either way, I liked it. The listening.

  Until then, I had been going through the steps in becoming a psychologist. Checking off boxes on the life plan I had made when I was thirteen years old and watched Prince of Tides for the first time. I wanted to be Barbra Streisand, in a cushy chair and expensive diamonds, unlocking the mysteries of men’s brains and irresponsibly falling in love. It all seemed so grown-up and glamorous. And though, like most thirteen-year-olds, I already thought I was the former, I desperately wanted to be the latter, as well.

  After two years, when my manager wanted to promote me to the other side of the call center—the one that actually placed calls, instead of received them, I decided it was time to go back to school. I didn’t want to be “a goddamned telemarketer” (my mother’s term). I wanted—really wanted—to be a therapist.

  I get to Gender Studies with five minutes to spare. I slide into a desk and take a pack of empty index cards out of my bag so I can fill them with concepts that I need to memorize for the exam we have next Tuesday. I delight, as I always do, at the idea of crossing something off my to-do list. But before I can put pen to paper, my cell buzzes.

  It’s my best friend, Kayleigh, who’s a kindergarten teacher and isn’t technically supposed to be using her cell phone during school hours while children are in her class. But Kayleigh doesn’t give a fuck. In fact, when she dies, I’m 90 percent sure that’s what her gravestone will read: “I don’t give a fuck.”

  I silence my phone, sending Kayleigh to voicemail, because I do care, and because my professor, Dr. Walden, a tiny woman who’s five feet tall on a good day, has taken her position at the front of the classroom and cleared her throat. I smile, anticipating what Kayleigh’s message will say. Probably a diatribe about the nineteen-year-old UGA basketball player she’s inappropriately sleeping with, or a bitchfest about her goody co-teacher, Pamela, who wears pearls and sweaters with animals on them. Then I frown, because I have this feeling in the bottom of my stomach, like I’ve forgotten something. Did I turn the stove off ? Did I remember to grab my lunch from the fridge? Is my car overdue for an oil change?

  And then it hits me all at once, and I can’t believe that I forgot, even for a second.

  My cancer is back.

  two

  I’M NOT INDECISIVE. If someone asked Jack to pick out four adjectives from a list of characteristics to describe me, that would not be one of them. Stubborn? Yes. Organized? To a fault. Independent? Of course. Indecisive? Absolutely not. Which is why it’s baffling that I have yet to decide on a thesis topic for my master’s degree. I blame it on my adviser.

  “Pick something that interests you,” she said while I was trying to decide if I should tell her she had lipstick on her coffee-stained teeth. “You’ll be eating, sleeping, and breathing it for a year.”

  Instead of being helpful, it paralyzed me. A lot of things interest me, but enough to garner my attention for a year? How do I choose?

  That evening, I’m contemplating this for what feels like the thousandth time and mowing through a plate of roasted root vegetables on the couch when I learn from PBS NewsHour that a decorated soldier, who returned home to Wisconsin from Afghanistan with one less leg than he deployed with because he threw himself onto an IED saving the lives of two Afghani boys and their dog, is now in prison for shooting his wife and her sister in the head three times each. As Judy Woodruff interviews a psychiatrist on the effects of PTSD, I pause midchew. That could be an interesting thesis topic. PTSD and soldiers? No, I’m not especially interested in the military. But PTSD and its effect on children’s cognitive development? Maybe. I like kids.

  The familiar creak of the back door opening interrupts my thoughts. Benny, warm against my thigh on the couch, lets out a yip, but then lays his head back down, too comfortable to greet the intruder.

  “Jack?” He’s rarely home during NewsHour and my heart does a middle-school skip that I might get to see him before I expected tonight.

  “Nope, just me,” I hear before I see Kayleigh’s wild spirals of hair and hunched shoulders fill the door frame of the den. Kayleigh rarely knocks, even though I’ve told her that one of these days she could regret it.

  “Why?” she asked. “I might walk in on you and Jack mopping the kitchen floor with your naked bodies?”

  “Maybe,” I said. We actually did have sex in the kitchen once. I was boiling water for tea and Jack came in looking for a snack. It was right after we moved in and Jack had joked it was our homeowner’s duty to consecrate every room of our house.

  “Don’t you mean consummate?” I asked him. He smiled and slipped his hand down the front of my jeans, and I let him, no longer caring about vocabulary or the kettle screaming at us from the stove.

  “Ew,” she frowned as if she, too, could see the memory replaying in my mind, and then: “When his car’s here, I’ll knock.” But between his classes, clinic, and volunteer work, his car was rarely here.

  “Oh,” I say, sliding my empty plate onto the coffee table. “Hey.”

  “Nice to see you, too.” She plops onto the couch beside me and props her skinny ankles next to my dirty plate. Everything about Kayleigh is geometric, from her cylindrical hair to her right-angle elbows and stick-straight parallel legs. In middle school, when curves sprouted on my body like an unwanted fungus, I envied her still-flat chest and protruding hipbones.

  We sit in a comfortable silence that only people who’ve known each other for most of their lives can share, while the news show moves on to a story about vaccines.

  “Do you have any microwave popcorn?” Kayleigh asks on a commercial break.

  “Are you serious?” I look at her. “Do you know how terrible that stuff is for you?”

  “Oh, Jesus, here we go,” she says, and rolls her eyes.

  “It’s got this chemical, diacetyl, that causes lung scarring. The factory workers who make it? They get this disease called popcorn lung from working around the fumes all day.”

  “I’m not planning on huffing it,” she says, shaking her head. “You watch too much news.”

  “Whatever. Hey, can you still take care of Benny and Gertie this weekend?”

  “Yes! You’ve already asked me three million times. I promise I won’t forget.” She picks up the remote and clicks off the TV. “So, you’ll never believe what Pamela did today.”

  “She took off all of her clothes and ran from classroom to classroom screaming ‘the British are coming!’ ”

  “No.”

  “Then you’re right. I’ll never guess.”

  “Do you
have scotch?”

  I nod toward our bar in the corner of the room. “Help yourself.”

  She stands up and pads over to the liquor cabinet, forgoing the Dewar’s for Jack’s good bottle of Glenlivet, and then starts in on her coworker’s latest misdeed. “She found some conference in Kansas on this teaching method she’s all obsessed with. Reggius? Reggio. I don’t know. And she suggested to Woods that all the kindergarten teachers should go. To Kansas. What the fuck do I want to go to Kansas for? Why can’t these conferences be in someplace awesome?” She takes a thoughtful sip of the scotch. “Like Vegas. I would totally go to Vegas.”

  As she’s talking, I sit back in what Jack calls my “therapist pose” and wonder if Kayleigh’s projecting: Freud’s theory of rejecting your negative personality traits and attributing them to others. But Pamela’s personality traits don’t seem to be that negative. She’s kind of a go-getter. Maybe a little bit of a suck-up, sure. But she’s passionate and obviously loves her job. Of course, I don’t say any of this to Kayleigh because Kayleigh hates her, which means I should hate her, too, out of solidarity.

  That’s something Kayleigh’s good at. Not hating people, but loyalty. In the second grade when I had the chicken pox, she came over and watched Karate Kid with me over and over until her mother called and made her come home. It was summer, which meant she could have been out riding bikes or lying in her backyard trying to turn her ghostly pale skin pink and then red (she never tans), but she was holed up with me and Ralph Macchio. And when I had cancer, she was there again. While most of my friends faded away during the treatments—just like the cancer books and blogs had warned me—Kayleigh showed up more often, armed with gossip magazines and details of her latest torrid affairs to keep my mind off the pain.

  Shit.

  The cancer.

  “Kayleigh,” I say.

  “I know, I know, it could be worse,” she says. “I could be unemployed, the grass is always greener, blah, blah, blah—”