Before I Go (35 page)

As I gaze at Jack’s profile, his BlackBerry rings from the cup holder it’s sitting in and he grabs it with his right hand. And I’m not sure if I’m imagining it, or if he’s turning the screen from me on purpose. He pushes a button on the side of the cell, silencing it, and places it back in the cup holder.

It takes all my effort to keep from picking it up and ending my curiosity.

“Who was that?” I ask, hoping I sound indifferent, and not as if the balance of my entire world hangs on his answer. I keep my eyes trained on the trees and telephone poles passing outside my window.

He hesitates for a split second before he answers. “Work,” he says, and the one word coupled with the hesitation makes my heart
plummet to the pit of my stomach, and the warm fuzzies that had just bloomed there grow cold and steely.

Because I know he’s lying.

ON SATURDAY MORNING, Jack gets called in by his Wildlife Treatment Crew to help treat a flock of poisoned ducks from a local pond. “And then I might head up to the farm to check on Copper, since I won’t be at his surgery on Monday,” he says before he leaves the house in his scrubs, and my heart falls, because I know it’s not just Copper he’ll see.

I swallow my trial pills, a yun zhi, and the tiny white pentagon of a steroid with a glass of water, and then settle into the couch with my laptop. I need to email Dr. Walden and let her know about the surgery and apologize that I won’t be able to continue helping her. But when I open my computer it’s dead. And I can’t remember where I left the charger.

Stupid brain tumor.

After a futile search of my shoulder bag and every socket in every room of the house, I decide I must have left it in Dr. Walden’s office. Sighing, I walk into the study and sit down at the desk, giving the mouse a shake to wake up Jack’s computer.

His school email fills the screen and before I click on the X to close out of it, a subject line catches my attention. I hesitate for a second—just enough time to suppress the sliver of guilt from snooping—and then click on it.

Subject: Absences

Jack,

I’m sorry to hear about Daisy. I certainly understand that you need to be with her. But I hope you understand I can’t make an exception to the absence policy, as it wouldn’t be fair to the other students. If you’re not in attendance next week, your total of absences for this semester will far exceed the three allotted. (You’ve already missed six, if my records are accurate.) When you return, we will discuss whether we can set you up to graduate in December or if you’ll need to wait until next May.

Best,

Dr. Samuel Ling

The blood in my veins runs cold. When was Jack going to tell me this? But I know the answer before I even formulated the question in my head: he wasn’t. I sigh. Part of me is touched. I know Jack thinks he’s doing a Nice Thing. A Husband Thing. That he thinks being with me at my surgery is more important than graduating. But it’s not. And the rest of me is annoyed that Jack has made this executive decision without telling me. That the Lots of Cancer is ruining one more thing and I have no control over it.

I email Dr. Walden and then go into our bedroom to pick up Jack’s socks and make the bed. And then I notice the accumulation of Benny’s hair rolling like tumbleweeds across the hardwood and I get out the broom. And then the mop. And then I can’t stop cleaning. I wash the baseboards and scrub the bathroom grout with a toothbrush and spray every mirror and window in the house with vinegar and water and do four loads of laundry. And in the silence of my dusting and washing and scrubbing, my irritation at Jack rises.

I’ve only asked him for one thing—
one thing!
—since my Lots of Cancer diagnosis. I want him to graduate on time. To not let the sacrifices we’ve made—
I’ve
made—go to waste. And he can’t give me that? Worse, he’s
lying
to me, telling me Ling will understand, allowing me to believe that he will still graduate in a few weeks. What, was he hoping I’d just die before then and would never know?

But you’re having brain surgery
, a small voice pipes up.
And Jack just wants to be with you.

I tell that voice to shut up and forge forward with my anger because Jack’s with Pamela and her Pantene hair and I’m alone with wrinkled fingers and a bucket of bleach water that I’m now crying into. I lie down on the half-wet floor and let the tears roll off my cheeks, tickling my earlobes before they drop into the hair sprawled out behind my head.

I stare at the ceiling in the hallway and practice breathing until the floor dries and my face dries and my heart hardens a little bit more.

WHEN JACK COMES home that evening, I’m sitting on the couch waiting for him, calm and collected. Before he can open his mouth to say hi, I tell him that I found the email from Ling and that he can’t come with me to the surgery.

His face goes stony.

“You have to graduate,” I say.

“I will,” he says.

Oh. I lean back. I didn’t expect it to be that easy.

Then, he adds: “In December. Or next May.”

“No!” I sit back up. “Don’t you get it? I won’t
be
here in December or next May.”

He shakes his head. “You don’t know that—”

I cut him off. “I
do
know that. And you do, too. You just don’t want to admit it.” I take a deep breath and fix him with a pointed stare. “Jack. I’m dy—”

“
I know you’re dying!
” he thunders, and I feel as though I’ve been slapped across the face.

Everything goes still. Even Benny sits like a statue at Jack’s feet, no longer whining to be petted or acknowledged.

And in the hollow silence that follows, I’m surprised to find not only did I expect Jack to deny it, I
wanted
him to deny it. Because maybe Jack believing I was going to live was the only thing that was keeping me alive.

His voice is raspy and quiet when he speaks again: “Sue me if I want to be there for you while you do it.”

It’s so sincere and he looks so broken, like a marionette without its puppeteer, that I waver. So what if he doesn’t graduate on time? I shake my head. No. He has to. And I have to be there to see it. And though I’ve sat in this conviction for months, it’s only now that I really begin to understand why. Because everything in our life the past seven years has revolved around and been hurtling toward this one moment.

We’ll spend more time together
when Jack graduates.

We’ll go on vacation
when Jack graduates.

We’ll have babies
when Jack graduates.

And I have to know that all those moments we didn’t share, that all the time we didn’t spend together—that it meant something. We were working toward a goal, and I need to check it off my list.

But I don’t know how to explain that to Jack. So I just repeat what I’ve already told him, with as much conviction as I can muster.

“I don’t
need
you to be at the surgery,” I say through gritted teeth. “I
need
you to graduate.”

He shakes his head and opens his mouth and I know in the split second before he speaks what’s coming—the inevitable push back, the beginning of hours of circular conversation this will turn into before someone finally caves. The anticipation of it exhausts me, and I have the overwhelming urge to end it before it begins.

“Daisy, I—”

“
I don’t want you there!
” I yell. The harsh words cut Jack off as sharply as a guillotine blade.

It’s mean. I know it’s mean as soon as I say it. But I also know, in
the moment after it leaves my mouth, that it’s true. I don’t want Jack at the surgery, not just because it will keep him from graduating, but because I don’t want him to see me woozy and gauzy and brittle. I want him to remember me—the real me. The pretty me. The strong, capable me. The me that he fell in love with.

But again, I don’t know how to explain it. How to give voice to the insecurities that have blossomed in my once confident brain, seemingly overnight. How to admit how deeply inadequate I’ve felt next to Pamela’s aliveness.

So I wait for Jack to break the sharp silence, but he just stares at me. I search his eyes for an emotion, expecting to see pain, defiance, or even defeat, but what I find is more terrifying. There’s nothing. His eyes are empty, as he offers a simple nod and palms his keys and leaves the house without saying a word.

I’ve won.

But when I lean back into the sofa and turn on the TV and wait for the feeling of triumph to wash over me, it never comes.

twenty-two

T
HAT NIGHT, I lay awake in bed straining to hear Jack’s car pull up out front, the key in the door, but before I do, night overtakes me. And when I wake up the next morning, he’s not there.

I walk into the kitchen, rubbing sleep out of my eyes, half expecting to see Jack sitting on the counter in his boxers, slurping a bowl of Froot Loops, but the room is empty.

I stand in the doorway, stunned by his absence.

Where is Jack? Why didn’t he come home?

It’s so unlike him, I think fleetingly that my brain tumor is to blame. Surely he called last night to tell me about a squirrel or a skunk or a sparrow that he needed to nurse every two hours and wouldn’t be coming home, and I just don’t remember. I check my phone, but his number doesn’t appear in my call log.

I set it down on the counter and let the full weight of what I’ve done settle on my shoulders. My words from last night haunt me on repeat in my brain:

I don’t want you there.

I don’t want you there.

I don’t want you there.

But I know what Jack heard was:
I don’t want you.

And I know it was the last straw. That I’ve pushed him away so thoroughly that he’s out of my grasp, like the moon or the stars.

Still, I spend an hour packing, refolding T-shirts, taking a pair of shoes out, only to put it back five minutes later. I know I’m drawing it out, expecting him to come home at any second, laughing that he fell asleep on his desk right in the middle of working late.
Ha-ha-ha! Can you believe it?
But when I finally close my suitcase, I shut the lid on my hope.

WHEN I GET to my mom’s house that afternoon, she’s still at work. I let myself in the front door, drop my suitcase in my old bedroom, and walk into the den to lie on the couch. And remember throwing myself onto this sofa in tears the day Simon Wu turned down my request to go to the school dance and crying until nightfall. By the time Mom got home, my eyes were red and swollen, but when she asked me what was wrong, I mumbled
nothing
and sulked off to bed. Now, as I pull a blanket over my legs, suddenly exhausted, I wish I had confided in her.

What feels like seconds later, I wake up in the dark to a hand smoothing my face.

“Mom?”

“Yeah,” she whispers.

I sit up mildly confused until I remember where I am and why. I squint at Mom’s face in the dark and see that it’s eye level with mine and I realize that she had been holding my head in her lap.