Before I Go (39 page)

“I did save her horse’s life,” he says, as if this is the only explanation needed. But it’s not. I need more. So I wait.

He fills the silence. “She wanted to do something in return. She overheard me telling Ling about the other stuff I was working on, the landscaping, the caulking, and asked if she could help out. We’ve been talking about it, planning it, for weeks, but I wasn’t sure when we’d be able to get it done. Then you wouldn’t let me come to the surgery and—”

He shrugs.

He’s trying to spare my feelings. To not rub his relationship with her in my face. But I need the truth.

“And you’re”—I take a deep breath, not wanting to finish the sentence, but I don’t have a choice—“
with
her?”

“What do you mean
with
?” he says, and then his eyes grow wild, as it dawns on him exactly what I mean. “Wait.
With
with? With Pamela? Why on earth would you think that?”

I shake my head, trying to organize my thoughts, and then remember his all-nighter and, of course, the phone call. “Sunday night, when you didn’t come home. And then when I talked to you the other morning, I heard her voice in the background. She was here.”

He nods. “Yeah. I couldn’t tell if you heard. She came over early to get started on the beams. I didn’t want to ruin the surprise, so I didn’t say anything in case maybe you didn’t hear her.”

I nod, absorbing this.

“And the other night,” Jack says. “I didn’t come home because I didn’t think you wanted me here.” He pauses, as if he’s wondering how much to tell me, how honest to be. Then he shrugs. “And I was furious.” He glances into my eyes. “At you.”

The raw honesty of his emotion takes me aback because it’s so unlike Jack. But then, he does have every right to be mad.

“So where’d you go?” I ask.

“The clinic. Pamela did meet me there,” he says, and I prickle. “She was worried about Copper’s surgery the next morning, but she left around eleven and I stayed up late working and then slept on the couch in Ling’s office.”

I nod again. “So all those times you left the room to talk to her, or said it wasn’t her calling, even when I knew it was, it was because of
this
? You were talking about our house?”

“Yeah,” he says, and then as if the full weight of my accusation has dawned on him, he sputters, “You really thought . . . ? Oh, God, Daisy—no. I could never . . . I
would
never.” He reaches out to put his hand on my face and the warmth of his palm is everything.

I want to revel in his touch, but my head is still thudding. I close my eyes, trying to absorb this completely unexpected turn, when something else he said jumps out at me.
All the stuff he wasn’t able to do.
“Wait—the front garden.” I open my eyes. “Was that Pamela?

The right side of his mouth turns up, as he slowly shakes his head no.

“It was
you
?”

His crooked tooth peeks out at me.

“And
you
did the caulk?”

“Yep.”

“Jack, I thought I was going crazy.”

He pauses, as if he’s considering this. “Well, you kind of were.”

I smack him on the arm and he grabs my hand.

“But why?” I ask again. “The house has always been my thing.”

He squeezes my fingers. “I told you. You wouldn’t let me do anything else.”

I think back to every time the past few months that I shut Jack down, pushed him away, and I know that most men would have given up—that I thought Jack
had
given up. But he hadn’t. I sit back and let the enormity of his gestures sink in. He didn’t just plant some flowers or fix a couple of windows—he found a way to love me when I was doing everything I could to not let him.

I nod, a smile creeping across my face. “I guess I have been a little hard to live with.”

“Hard?” He scoffs, and a flash of anger lights his eyes again. “Try impossible. You’re so goddamned stubborn and independent.” He shakes his head, and I think he’s done, but then more words tumble out. “You stopped telling me things—not just big stuff, like how you were feeling, but little things, like what you ate for lunch or how you bought a new laundry detergent because it was on sale.” He lowers his head. “I thought—I don’t know what I thought. That you were facing your mortality and taking stock of your life, and I don’t know—regretted spending it with me or something.”

My heart, which has already been through so much, nearly cracks at this information. “
What?
Oh Jack, no. No, no, no,” I say. “You are the thing—maybe the only thing—that I’ve ever gotten right.”

And for the first time in months, I see Jack’s shoulders visibly relax as he takes this in.

But then he furrows his brow, as if he still can’t figure something out. “So what are you doing here? You really need to be in bed.”

I close my eyes and rub my temples. “Well, I really did think . . . I
mean, you and Pamela . . . And, you know.” I search, but I can’t find the right words, so I just end with: “I didn’t want you to be.”

But it’s not enough, because I still can’t shake the feeling that maybe there’s more to their relationship than friendship, that maybe Jack does harbor some attraction to her—how could he
not
?—even if he hasn’t done anything about it, so I say, “You don’t . . . I mean, you’re not . . . Do you have any feelings for her?”

Before Jack can respond, I hear laughter from behind me. “Oh my God,” she says. “Me and Jack? We would kill each other.”

I turn around to see Pamela standing in the doorway. I had forgotten she was here.

She smiles. “I mean, have you
seen
his office?”

I put my hand over my face to try to hide the flames of color that are spreading up my cheeks. “Oh, Jesus, did you hear all that?”

She nods, ducking her eyes. “Daisy, I—”

“No, stop. You must think I’m completely crazy.”

“No,” she says, but I know she’s just being nice, because that’s what she is—no matter what Kayleigh says about her.

JACK WALKS ME out to Mom’s car, where she’s sitting in the driver’s seat, her lips a thin line of concern.

“You need to go home and get some rest. You shouldn’t even be out of bed right now.”

“I know,” I say. “I just . . . I had to see you. I was so afraid that I messed everything up.”

“Daisy, c’mon. We can talk tonight,” he says, moving to open the door.

“No!” Since my surgery, I’m now all too aware that anything can happen, that I might not ever get this chance again. That I need to tell him how I feel and keep telling him and never let a
day go by without him knowing it. That I can’t waste any more time. Not a second of it. And then, for some reason something Patrick said pops into my mind. “I could get hit by a bus when I leave here.”

“What? I don’t think there’s a good chance of that happening.”

I hide a smile, confident that Jack would have hated Patrick as much as I did. “I know. I just want you to know that I’m sorry. I haven’t felt like I’ve done anything right since all this started, especially when it comes to us.”

He nods. “I haven’t either. There’s so much I wish I could go back and do differently. Like not take no for an answer when you wouldn’t let me come to your doctor appointments.”

“I guess there’s not exactly a handbook for this kind of thing, huh?”

He stares at me. “You’re kidding, right? You bought me the handbook.”

I stare back at him, confused, until I remember the self-help book I picked up for him at Barnes & Noble.

“You read that?”

“Isn’t that why you got it for me?”

“Well, yeah, but—I didn’t think you actually
read
it.”

He laughs, and then throws back his head and laughs some more, and the sound warms me from the inside out like a cup of hot cocoa.

“God, Daisy,” he says, shaking his head. “Only you.”

may

twenty-five

“I
T’S NOT SUPPOSED to be this hot in May,” Kayleigh says, fanning her face with a paper program.

We’re sitting in Sanford Stadium, and I’m leaning forward, straining to find Jack’s lanky body in the sea of doctoral candidates wearing white square caps.

I finally spot him, and a flood of warm fuzzies fills my body. Jack is finally done with school, the checklist on our house is complete thanks to Pamela, and we have days, maybe weeks, maybe months to spend together, rubbing noses in the sunshine of my favorite season. Maybe even more—who knows? At my last clinical trial checkup, Dr. Rankoff said that my tumors hadn’t made any progress—they were the same size they’d been a full month earlier. She said perhaps I was finally responding to the medicine, or that removing the brain tumor somehow shocked the other ones to behave, at least for now. And I’ve never been so happy to hear that some part of me was underachieving, not living up to its full potential. But I know they will, one day.

When the students in Jack’s section stand up and move their tassels from one side of their caps to the other, my mom hoots and Kayleigh leans over to me.

“You husband is officially a doctor. Twice over.”

I laugh. “And he still has no idea how to make canned soup.”

“He’s hopeless.”

“Nah,” I say, thinking of the door handle and the windows and the garden that he fixed. I know that Jack can take care of himself, even if he may not pick up his socks as much as I want him to, or know how to make anything other than cereal for dinner.

But there is one thing that still gnaws at my heart in the middle of the night. And there’s only one thing I can think of to fix it.

“Promise you’ll check in on him,” I say to Kayleigh.

“If you mean go over there and do his laundry, it’s not happening,” she says.

“No,” I say. “Just spend time with him. Make him get out of the house. I just—” I bite my lip and look up until my eyes feel dry again. Then I look back at Kayleigh. “I don’t want him to be alone.”

She squeezes my hand.

“He won’t be.”

I nod, satisfied that Jack is going to be all right on that inevitable day that my tumors decide to rebel again. To live up to their full potential.

I turn my face toward the sun, letting it warm my face, and allow myself to take comfort in the one other small fact I know to be true: today is not that day.

may

one year later

jack

D
AISY’S GONE. IT’S the first thing I notice when I wake up in the dark and roll toward her side of the bed. It’s empty. Is she in the kitchen? I strain to listen for the telltale sound of the fridge door opening, or the pad of her slippered feet in the hall, but all I hear is Benny’s light wheezing snores drifting up from the foot of the bed. I stop just short of calling out her name when it hits me.

Daisy’s gone.

I lay in bed, wondering when I’ll stop waking up like this. I used to be a sound sleeper when Daisy was here. But I don’t think I’ve slept a full night since her funeral.

It’s been five months since I sat wedged between a misty-eyed Kayleigh—I think it was the first time I’ve ever seen her cry—and Daisy’s sobbing mom, listening to a preacher who didn’t even know Daisy talk about what a kind person she was. I wasn’t sure what made me madder, him calling her kind when he didn’t even know her, or him saying
was
.

And then they played that stupid Sarah McLachlan song, and I thought I was going to explode until Kayleigh leaned over and said, “Wherever she is, Daisy is
pissed
.” And it lifted my anger and grief and
sadness just for a moment, because she was right. Daisy hated Sarah McLachlan.

Now it’s become a catchphrase whenever we talk about her.
Wherever she is
. And I like it because it makes me feel like she’s just at the farmer’s market or yoga and she’s forgotten to leave me a note saying which one.

For six days after the funeral, I didn’t leave the house. I didn’t even walk Benny. Not that he seemed to mind. He spent most of his time curled on Daisy’s pillow, his eyes big and sad and accusing, as if I had something to do with her absence. I lied to my mom when she called and asked if I was getting out. I definitely didn’t tell her that I was turning on the blender because it filled our empty house with the sound of Daisy in the morning. It had the added bonus of drowning out my childish weeping.

And then one rainy afternoon when I was sitting at my desk, staring at the photo of Daisy from our final vacation together—standing in front of that strange, rusty bicycle stuck in the middle of a massive tree that she insisted we go see, even though it was an hour outside of Seattle and we had to take a ferry to get there—Kayleigh appeared. She didn’t even knock.

And seeing her reminded me of the first of the two things Daisy made me promise her before she died—that I stay in touch with Kayleigh.

When I’m gone, she won’t have anyone,
she said to me.
I just don’t want her to be alone.

So I let her stay. We watched an episode of
Game of Thrones
in silence. I had never seen the show before, but sitting on the couch staring at the TV with someone else was infinitely better than sitting on the couch staring at the TV by myself. And for a moment, I was even able to pretend it was Daisy sitting beside me, which loosened the viselike grip on my chest that had been ever-present since the night she died.