Authors: Beck Anderson
Fix You
Cover
Title Page
Fix You
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Beck Anderson
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Omnific Publishing
Los Angeles
Copyright Information
Fix You, Copyright © 2013 by Beck Anderson
All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the publisher.
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Omnific Publishing
1901 Avenue of the Stars, 2nd Floor
Los Angeles, California 90067
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First Omnific eBook edition, September 2013
First Omnific trade paperback edition, September 2013
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The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
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Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
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Anderson, Beck.
Fix You / Beck Anderson – 1st ed
ISBN: 978-1-623420-48-2
1. Contemporary Romance — Fiction. 2. Hollywood — Fiction. 3. Widow — Fiction. 4. Idaho — Fiction. I. Title
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Cover Design by Micha Stone and Amy Brokaw
Interior Book Design by Coreen Montagna
Dedication
To the Anderson men:
Thank you for putting up with my writer-ly insanity.
I love you.
Prologue: The Long Way Around
I
T’S
A B
LUEBIRD
D
AY
. Warm spring skiing, clear skies, soft snow. On Upper Nugget, the turns come to me easily, and I feel for a brief moment like an expert skier, someone terribly suave and possibly European.
I watch Peter. He makes long, lazy turns, and they seem to rise from the bottom of his skis, as if suggested not by him but by the corduroy powder beneath him.
Turn here
, the mountain whispers, and so he does.
I try not to be exasperated. The boys are between us. Hunter looks more and more like his dad. At nine now, he has begun to stand tall in his boots. His brown-blond hair riffles in the wind.
Beau races to catch up. He looks very small on skis, a compact bundle of energy. At six, he still is a little boy, though heaven help the person who dares say that to his face. He tucks determinedly, in a constant effort to keep up with his brother and, more distantly, his father.
The wide, sunny slope begins to narrow. Now is when skiers like me start to tense up. The run begins a steady banking that will end in a slender trough called Second Chance. What had been an ego-boosting run for me quickly turns surly.
As I brace myself for the transition, I notice that Peter has pulled up at the top of the shot. I stop, grateful for the chance to gather myself and assess the risk-to-benefit ratio before me.
“Why’d you stop?” I ask him. He usually never stops, not even to let the kids catch up. The boys have shot on down the run, making tighter and more frequent turns as it narrows like a funnel. I can see the chairlift at the bottom and can almost make out the liftie with the shovel, smoothing out the ramp.
Peter holds up a gloved hand, not answering for a second. When he does, he is uncharacteristically winded. “Give me a minute.”
“Is there something wrong?”
He smiles, shakes his head no, still leaning on his poles. “I’m pretty sure it’s your fault. You keep me up at night.”
I elbow him. If it wasn’t so cold, I might blush. I shuffle my skis, trying to stay warm and ready for the next burst of skiing.
“You doing this?” Peter nods down the tight stretch of snowy hill.
I assess. The right side of the run, the side I like because the angle is more consistent, has been scraped off. I can see icy streaks of hard pack where the powder is gone.
The left side of the run is moguls. The powder has been bulldozed over to that part by the morning’s skiers and boarders. The piles of snow are menacingly uneven. The cat track leading into the trees at the edge of the run—the gentle, safe way down—calls to me.
“I’m going around.” I can see too many opportunities for disaster today.
“Okay, Miss Cat Track Fever. See you at the bottom.” Peter readies his poles for a split second and shoots down the run before I’ve even fully settled into my decision to follow the easier path.
As usual, the boys have all left me by myself, contemplating, while they take action.
I sigh, adjust a mitten, and push off to cruise my way down.
“Don’t mind me!” I say this to the pines and the crunch of snow as I leave the run for another day.
Peter sleeps, but mostly the Fentanyl has taken effect, willing the pain to leave and the body to rest. I suppose he made the right choice a few days ago. After a long five months, he’s insisted on having himself moved to the hospice center. I had no idea, standing on the slopes with him in April, that we’d be here now, making decisions like this.
His thought is that the boys do not need their home turned into a hospital wing.
I guess I could agree with him, but I can’t help the strong urge to surround him with known people, items, rooms, anything. It feels like we need to batten down the hatches and ride out the storm, and here he is insisting on taking a trip in a rowboat.
He’s warned me for weeks. About the trip part. And he’s not talking metaphorically anymore. He is planning on departing.
Again, I can’t blame him. The doctors have tried increasingly creative and desperate ways to manage his pain. They have been increasingly unsuccessful. And lately, there’ve been very few discussions about beating back the illness. It seems to have won in its effort to camp out with us. When words like
metastasized
and
terminal
began to be tossed around, we stopped fighting on that front. Now we’re in a different theater of war. I guess we could call it the Managing the End campaign.
We could call it that, but I can’t give voice to it. I hang on by a very, very tenuous grasp to full consciousness. But I haven’t let the waves of hysteria win, at least not yet. A few times I’ve found myself locked in a stall in the hospice women’s restroom, but I manage to rally enough to make it back to the room and Peter’s bed each time.
Right now I sit next to him. I’m kind of cheating about the sitting. I’ve pulled my lounger up to the side of his bed, and my head and upper torso rest forward on it. This pose looks suspiciously like the kids in their school desks when they play Heads Up Seven Up.
I listen to him breathe shallowly in and out for a while. My mind drifts, and I think about the message I need to craft to the boys’ teachers, one that explains they will start the school year late, owing to the fact that they have a gravely ill father.
I don’t know when it is exactly, but that train of thought gives way to the weight of exhaustion, and I am out. I don’t think sleep is the word, because this is the absence of anything. Total deprivation leads to blank unconsciousness.
And just as suddenly, I am upright in the chair, and I know Peter has taken the opportunity of my sleep to leave. His body, though it’s been still for weeks now, is a different kind of still. Before I’m even awake for a second, I know he is no longer breathing.
I stand and begin to call for someone in a loud wail of a voice. Thankfully the boys are away. I can pretend later for them that Peter’s passing was peaceful. Actually, his part of it was, relatively, but my reaction is proving not to be.
His eyes are closed, and in the relaxed state of death, his mouth looks strangely smaller, drawn. His hands are at his sides.
Nurse Ann comes in, alerted by my wet cries for help. She checks his vital signs or lack of them, makes a note of the time on his chart, and gives my hand a squeeze. She whispers a soft “I’m so sorry, hon” before she exits the room. Then she leaves me with myself and my grief and my gone husband.
The thing I am most acutely aware of, before I lose myself to the sobbing, is how spacious the room feels with one less soul in it.
1: The Spaces in Between
I D
ON’T
K
NOW
H
OW
to describe the time that passes next. Yes, there are stages of grief. Yes, there are plenty of abysses that seem to suck any attempt at normalcy into them.
But routine often saves me. When I feel things getting bad, I notice that the house has gotten overly bad too. Toilets need to be scrubbed, and dishes have multiplied while soaking in the sink. If I throw myself a life preserver of chores and errands and rides for the boys, not only does the house start to look better, but I’m able to hang on through the riptides of depression that want to pull me out to sea.
