Before I Go Read online

  “Jack, it’s freezing in here!”

  With his empty hand, he casually scratches the back of his shaggy scalp and I notice he’s overdue for a haircut. He yawns. “That’s why I was just about to take a hot shower. Thought I could use some help.”

  “Did you?” Jack and I rarely shower together. It’s nice in theory, but someone is always left out of the water stream, standing like a wet dog in the freezing air. But I quickly dismiss the downside of the practice because Jack looks so devilishly cute. “You must be really dirty,” I say, playing into his charade.

  His smile spreads wider. “You have no idea.” He casually crosses his arms, and in the process sloshes hot coffee onto his bare stomach. I swear I can hear it sizzle when it touches his flesh, but he doesn’t flinch.

  I suppress a laugh. “That really hurt, didn’t it?”

  “Immensely,” he says, still not giving in to the pain.

  I stand up and walk toward him, holding his gaze. When we’re parallel, I reach my hand out to the now-red skin on his stomach and gently wipe the dripping mocha liquid off his abdomen. Then I lean close to his face, so close that I can see the soft downy fuzz on his cheeks, and whisper in one quick burst, “First one to the bathroom gets to stand under the showerhead.” I take off like a shot and can hear Jack lumbering behind me. Just as I get to the bathroom door, his arm encircles my waist, throwing me off balance, and I shriek. We stumble to the ground, both laughing, Jack’s naked hindquarters landing with a smack against the hardwood floor. Out of breath and still laughing, he leans over to kiss me. My T-shirt disappears over my head and Jack cups my left breast with his hand. He rubs the pad of his thumb over the small scar.

  And though I don’t believe in ESP, I know we’re both thinking the same thought: Somewhere in there is another tumor. Olly olly oxen free. Come out, come out wherever you are.

  Then Jack’s thumb moves slowly to my nipple and I sharply inhale, grateful for the distraction.

  Later, when I’m in the bathroom alone, pulling my hair up into a ponytail elastic to create a messy bun, I hear Jack in our bedroom next door, cursing. “Have you seen my jeans?” He owns three pairs, but I know he’s referring to the only ones he wears in public, a dark blue wash from American Eagle. A purchase he made when I finally dragged him to the mall after trying to explain to him for months that holey, ripped-up jeans might have been a good look in high school when he was listening to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on cassette single, but now it just makes him look homeless.

  “In the dryer,” I call back. I cringe thinking of the drawers that I’m sure he’s rifled through and left looking like a half-off bin at Ross. It amazes me that as smart as Jack is, it never occurs to him to check various places in the house when he’s searching for something. Isn’t laundry the next logical step if you can’t find an article of clothing in the dresser?

  Jack passes the bathroom in his boxers and thunders down the rickety wooden steps to our dungeon of a basement in search of his pants. I take one last glance in the mirror and then walk into our room to start refolding all the clothing that’s askew. A few minutes later, Jack returns wearing his freshly laundered jeans. “Babe, stop it,” he says when he sees me. “I’ll do that. You go relax.” He takes the T-shirt out of my hands, and I have to physically stop myself from snatching it back from him. Jack doesn’t fold shirts. He kind of rolls them up like individual sleeping bags and stuffs them haphazardly into the dresser.

  I turn and perch myself on our king bed, trying to ignore Jack’s imprecise method. “Did you pack your razor?” I ask.

  “Yep.”

  “Boxers?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What about your—”

  “Daisy,” he cuts me off. “I got everything. You worry too much.”

  After he pulls his socks on and stuffs his feet into a pair of scuffed brown boots that he’s owned for as long as I’ve known him, he leans over to kiss my cheek.

  “I’m gonna take our stuff to the car,” he says. “You ready to go? Meet me out there?”

  He leans over to zip the suitcase and hefts it out of the room.

  As soon as I hear the back door creak open and slam shut, I hop off the bed and open the drawer where his shirts are smushed together like bulging Tootsie Rolls. One by one, I quickly pick them up and crease them in the exact center, then make a series of near-origami folds until each shirt is a perfectly rectangular cotton parcel. Satisfied, I close the drawer and grab my shoulder bag from the hook on the closet door. In the hallway I pause at the bathroom, then duck inside and pull back the shower curtain. I scan the tub, the vanity, and then open the medicine cabinet. And that’s where I spot it. Jack did remember his toothbrush and razor, but his contact solution stands like a lone soldier left on the battlefield. I tuck it into the side pocket of my sack and yell “Coming!” when Jack calls to me from the back door.

  “ARE YOU GOING to tell me where we’re going?” I ask from the passenger seat of the Ford Explorer Jack has been driving since he got his license thirteen years ago. The air coming out of the vents hasn’t warmed yet, so I tuck my cold hands under my thighs.

  “It’s a surprise,” he says.

  “Did you get a cabin in Ellijay?”

  He laughs. “OK. Maybe it’s not a surprise.”

  “You left the Web page up a few weeks ago.” And then, even though I promised myself I wouldn’t ask, that I would trust Jack to plan everything out, I say, “What are we doing for food?”

  He drums his thumb against the steering wheel to the beat of the song coming through the speakers. Something by the Lumineers.

  “Daaaaa-isy,” he says, drawing out the “a” like he does when he teases me. “It’s under control.”

  His BlackBerry sitting in the cup holder between us starts buzzing. He turns down the volume knob on the CD player in the dashboard.

  “This is Jack,” he says, holding the phone up to his ear.

  My shoulders immediately tense as I recognize the formality of Jack’s professional voice. Please don’t let this be an emergency, I silently plead. This is the first time I’ve had Jack all to myself for a weekend in months and I don’t want anything to ruin it.

  “Do you have her on her stomach? OK, clamp your hand on her muzzle . . . Now start rubbing her back. Is she sucking?”

  He exhales a breath. “Good. Now, if she sneezes, you’ll need to clear the formula out of her nose. It means she’s eating too fast . . . OK, call me if you need anything else.”

  He hangs up and runs his hand through his in-need-of-a-haircut mop.

  “Is everything OK?” I ask.

  “Yeah, that was Charlene. I literally just explained to her step-by-step how to feed Roxanne yesterday afternoon. I don’t understand how she’s made it this far in the program.”

  Jack belongs to the Wildlife Treatment Crew, a volunteer group for vet students at the university. When he was on call last weekend, someone brought in a baby raccoon after they had accidentally killed its mother with their car. Jack immediately dubbed it Roxanne and has been nursing it back to health at the vet hospital—feeding it every three hours, weighing it daily, and keeping it warm with heating pads. I had stopped in to bring him dinner one night and seeing him with the bottle, cradling the little creature, made my ovaries hurt.

  “Well, it was sweet of her to take over for you while we’re gone,” I say, aiming a vent, now full of hot air, so that it blows directly on me.

  “I just hope she doesn’t screw up.”

  After driving for a few hours, Jack turns the car into the cracked parking lot of a strip mall desperately in need of renovations. He pulls into a parking spot in front of a glass door with a sign that reads: Sky Blue Cabin Rentals. The parking brake screeches as he sets it with his foot, then he turns to me and nods his head in the direction of the Ingles next door. “Do you want to run in and stock up while I check in and get the keys to the cabin?”

  “Ah!” I say, vindicated. “I should have known th
at ‘under control’ meant I was going to be getting the food.”

  He smiles and leans toward me, pecking me on the nose. “That’s just because you’re so good at it.”

  I sigh, because I can’t deny the truth.

  While pushing my squeaky-wheeled cart full of questionable chicken breasts, half-wilted vegetables, and a four-pack of toilet paper—who knows what the cabin stocks and doesn’t?—I’m cursing Jack under my breath for not giving me a heads-up so I could have properly prepared and packed a cooler full of my organic, healthy foods. In the spirits aisle, I pick up a dusty bottle of pinot noir. It appears that the locals don’t drink too much fine wine in these parts. I wipe it with my sleeve and place it into the cart next to the only three zucchini I could find that weren’t rubbery to the touch.

  “Daisy!”

  I start and am grateful that I had just put down the wine or I would’ve dropped it.

  “What, Jack?” I say, irritably.

  “Don’t be mad.”

  “Oh, Jesus. What is it?”

  “Promise you won’t be mad.”

  “Fine.” I put my hand on my hip to wordlessly convey that my promise actually means nothing.

  “They can’t find our reservation.”

  “What?” I roar. “Why not?”

  “Well”—he drops his head and averts his eyes from my direct gaze—“I may have kind of forgotten to make one.”

  I open my mouth to speak and then close it. I’m not mad. I’m furious. That’s two years in a row he’s forgotten to make a reservation on my Cancerversary, but now we’re two and a half hours from home, in a backwoods mountain town without organic vegetables, oiled shopping carts, and—most important—a place to sleep. I look at Jack and silently wonder if he can see the steam coming from my nostrils.

  And that’s when I realize that he’s laughing.

  “What. Is. So. Funny.” My teeth are clenched so tight I can almost feel the enamel wearing off them.

  “Man, you should see your face.” He holds the cabin keys up at my eye level and jingles them. “Daisy, I’m joking. We’re all set. I can’t believe you bought it.”

  I tilt my head and cock an eyebrow at him. The tension has fled my body, but my stomach is still roiling.

  “OK, I guess it’s not that unbelievable,” he mutters.

  Even though the trees are naked skeletons from their winter slumber, the view of the Blue Ridge Mountains from the cabin’s cold wall of windows is still striking. Jack is crouched in front of the fire, knocking the hot embers around with a metal poker. Flames pitifully spit from between the lengths of wood. “Wonder what I’m doing wrong,” he says, half under his breath. He’s palming his BlackBerry in the other hand, studying the screen where he’s Googled “how to make a fire.”

  I smile at the back of his frustrated head from the couch, where I’m sitting on my feet and cupping a goblet of wine. I often revel in Jack’s inability to grasp such simple, everyday tasks because his advanced intelligence intimidated me so greatly when we first met. So much so that in preparation for our third date, I had mentally practiced an entire soliloquy based on Dr. Helen Fisher’s science of love research that I had just studied in my Psychology of Human Sexuality class. I wanted so desperately for Jack to find me his intellectual equal.

  “It’s really fascinating,” I said. We were sitting close on a worn velvet couch in an independent coffee shop, our mismatched china touching on the tiny table in front of us alongside a half-eaten cranberry muffin. His thigh was pressed against mine, and it unnerved me in the best possible way. “Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, she studied the brains of people in love and found that it’s actually just this heady mix of chemicals. Dopamine floods the posterior dordate causal—”

  “Dorsal caudate,” Jack corrected me, smiling his crooked smile.

  Heat crept into my face. “Right, that’s what I meant. And, um, the prefrontal cortex.” I was flustered from my mistake, and groped for the right words, determined to impress him. “It’s really a motivation, or reward system—not an emotion. Like a drug addiction. In fact, the brain chemistry of those in love is the same as people who are on cocaine. It stimulates the same neurotransmissions.”

  “Transmitters,” he said gently.

  “What?”

  “Neurotransmitters.”

  Ugh. Why did his undergrad degree have to be in biology? And what was I doing on a date with a double-doctoral student anyway? I was a lowly junior majoring in psychology—a degree I had realized most people settled on when they didn’t know what else to do because it sounds good—and I didn’t even know what a neurotransmitter was, exactly.

  I took a sip of my coffee, hoping that my shaking hand wouldn’t betray me and slosh the hot liquid over the side, although I was already positive that I had ruined my chances for a fourth date. I steeled myself and took a deep breath. I might as well finish my speech, I thought. There wasn’t much more damage I could do. Except when I searched my brain for all the other scientific terms and interesting factoids I had memorized, they weren’t there. My cheeks were positively on fire at this point, so I just sort of waved my hand and concluded my botched minilecture with this: “So basically, it’s not real, you know.”

  Jack tilted his head, obviously amused—and confused—by my stupidity. “What isn’t?” he asked.

  “Love.” I couldn’t look at him as I said the word. I was afraid the definition of it was written all over my face.

  He was silent, and I felt rather than saw his body lean closer to mine. He smelled clinical, like someone who spent the day in close proximity to formaldehyde would, and I found it intoxicating. I glanced up at him and thought wildly for a second that he was going to kiss me, and my stomach flipped at the anticipation alone. Our second date had ended with our first kiss, and I was eager to pick up where we had left off. But this time, he stopped inches from my lips. “You have a crumb,” he said, wiping the side of my mouth with his thumb. He sat back, and I put my fingers up to my face where he had touched it.

  “Thanks,” I said weakly. I looked up at him and he was grinning, as if he were having a secret laugh at my expense. My embarrassment flared, and an irritable “What?” escaped my lips.

  “Nothing,” he said, shaking his head. “I just think Dr. Fisher might not know what she’s talking about.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked, still fuming.

  “Because,” he said, taking a bite of the muffin we were sharing, an avalanche of crumbs cascading down his shirtfront. But instead of finishing his thought, he changed the subject to something he had studied that day—influenza in fish or something equally ridiculous—and left me reeling with the notion that I had just blown it with him. It wasn’t until months later that he confessed it was at that moment he knew he loved me.

  My belly warms at the memory and I call to my husband from my perch. “Leave it. It’s plenty cozy in here.” He doesn’t turn and I know that he hasn’t heard me. Like a caveman, he is singularly focused on conquering fire.

  Later, at the pine farm table in the kitchen, when I’m a little woozy from my two glasses of wine and so much unadulterated time with my husband, Jack interrupts our comfortable silence.

  “Are you worried? About the cancer?”

  The air leaves the room, like he’s announced “Voldemort!” in the middle of Hogwarts.

  I stare at him and we have a mini conversation with our eyes.

  So we’re talking about this? mine ask.

  We’re talking about this, his answer.

  I take a deep breath. “A little,” I say, and I’m relieved to admit it, since I’ve spent the last three days pretending otherwise.

  “Me, too,” he says. He runs his index finger around the rim of his wineglass and stares into the plum liquid. I wait, and let him put his thoughts in order. When it comes to serious topics, Jack doesn’t like to speak until he knows exactly what he’s going to say. He takes a deep breath. “I know the lumpectomy isn’t a big deal,
but what if you have to do chemo again? I graduate in three months and I thought we were going to finally start trying for a”—he clears his throat and looks at me—“a baby.”

  Maybe Jack can surprise me, after all. “You did?”

  “Yeah. I want a little dude to buy telescopes for and rocket kits and ant farms.”

  “Or little dudette,” I say, raising my eyebrows at him.

  “Or dudette,” he concedes, sighing heavily.

  I laugh and the full sound comes straight from my gut.

  A baby. Jack and I had always talked about becoming parents in that vague way that most couples do—“One day when we have kids . . .”—but we had never pinpointed a date. I assumed that Jack didn’t really think about it. That he had enough on his plate getting both his DVM and PhD concurrently. And then I thought when he graduated, he would have another checklist of excuses to delay parenthood—Just let me get board certified. Maybe you should finish school. Let’s wait and see about the tumor. Or maybe those excuses are mine.

  But the thing is, sitting across from Jack and seeing the sweet eagerness in his eyes, the justifiable reasons to not have children melt away, and all I can see is a phantom tot with Jack’s flat feet and erratic wisps of my chocolate hair, Jack’s eagerness to laugh, and my eagerness to line up matchbox cars in parallel rows.

  “That sounds . . . perfect,” I say. “I mean, everything but the ant farms.”