Before I Go (3 page)

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—”

“My tumor markers are up,” I say. Then I laugh a little, because it feels like I’m playing
The $25,000 Pyramid
and the answer is “How many different ways you can tell people you have cancer.”

Her head snaps toward me. “What?” The word comes out of her mouth like a dart.

“They think it’s back.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah.”

“Wait, they
think
? So it might not be, right?”

“Well, I guess they know. Just not how . . . much. I have more tests tomorrow.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah.”

“What can I do?”

“Nothing, really,” I say, and then, because neither of us has ever been big on sappy displays of emotion, I pick up the remote. “Can I watch my show now?”

“Yeah, of course,” she says, pouring more scotch into her empty glass. The move comforts me. It means—like always—she’s here to stay.

“OH MY GOD,” Jack says, stretching his long arms above his head as he enters our bedroom. “I’m exhausted.”

“I bet.” I glance at the clock on my nightstand. “It’s midnight.”

Kayleigh left about an hour earlier and I got in bed to read and wait for Jack to get home.

I slide a bookmark between two pages to hold my place and set the book beside me on top of the duvet. Jack takes it as an invitation to crawl onto the bed and lay down directly on top of me, his full body weight distributed over mine.

“You’re smushing me,” I say into the side of his scratchy face. I inhale his evening scent—it’s mostly Jack muddled with his lingering woodsy antiperspirant, a sharp contrast to his morning smell, which is all soapy and fresh and tingles my nose. I like the evening Jack best—even on days when he’s had a surgery and smells faintly antiseptic.

“Good,” he replies. It comes out muffled and his breath is hot on my neck. “Mmhungry.”

“Did you eat dinner?”

He’s silent and I know he’s thinking about it.

“Seriously, Jack. I don’t know how you forget to eat. Doesn’t your
stomach growl?” I push at his hips, heavy on my thighs. They don’t budge. “Get off. I’ll go warm you up something.”

“No, it’s fine,” he says, rolling off me. “I’m too tired to eat.”

He sits up and begins his nightly ritual of peeling his socks off one by one before shoving his feet under the covers and rolling up tight like a burrito in our sheets.

“What time is your appointment tomorrow?”

“Ten,” I say, and before he can offer, I add: “You don’t need to come.”

Although I’m not sure he would have offered. Jack’s on the orthopedic surgery segment of his clinical rotations this week, and tomorrow he’s observing a hip replacement on a German shepherd. Except when he told me about it on Monday, it sounded more like: “AND I GET TO WATCH A HIP REPLACEMENT ON A GERMAN SHEPHERD.”

“I can if you want,” he says.

“No,” I say. “You’ve got that hip thing.”

“It’s a dog. I can see that anytime.”

“Don’t downplay it. I know you’re excited,” I say. “Besides, it’s just going to be a long day of sitting in the waiting room between tests, and I won’t even be getting the results. Trust me. It will be mind-numbingly boring.”

“Well, I can come and entertain you with my fascinating wit and intellect,” he says, smiling.