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Despite being only five hundred miles away
from one another as the crow flies, there are no direct flights between my Springfield and Jeff’s.

I consider driving to the funeral, but since I don’t think I can stand that much time alone with my thoughts, I take a connecting flight through one of those hubs whose terminals splay out like spokes on a wheel. An hour there, an hour layover, an hour to the other Springfield, and I’ll be there.

I’ll. Be. There.

But what am I even doing here, on my way to Springfield, on my way to the funeral I told Zoey I wouldn’t be attending?

The day after
the
day, after the shouting, the crying, what I hope was the worst day of my life, I managed, somehow, to pull a cloak of normalcy around me. I sat at my desk, answered my phone and emails, and processed paperwork
for the next three unfortunates who were being terminated. I pretended I wasn’t the object of stares, of whispers, of questions, of doubt. In my silence, I hoped, I’d reinforce the hasty explanations I gave on the ride home with Lori, and that would be that. If I was lucky, there’d be some other event, or someone else, to talk about tomorrow.

At midday, an email went out to the members of the HR department. It had been decided that someone from the company should attend the funeral. Be an envoy. Say a few nice things about how devoted Jeff was, how well liked. It wouldn’t be a pleasant mission, so a volunteer
would be appreciated
.

The email felt like a bomb sitting in my inbox.

Were my co-workers expecting me to diffuse it?

As the minutes ticked away and no one reply-alled their raised hand, my chest started to constrict and I worried I might start hyperventilating. I wanted to go, and I knew at the same time that it was the last thing I should be doing.

In the end, I couldn’t help myself.

I’ll go
, I wrote and hit Send before sanity restored itself.

As my email pinged into my department’s inboxes, I imagined I heard a collective sigh of relief.
Oh, thank God
, a dozen people were thinking—or so I imagined.
I won’t have to be surrounded by sad people, or search for the right words to say. Besides
, my thoughts ran on,
she should be the one to go, anyway
.

Shouldn’t she?

I waited for the right moment to tell Brian. For many reasons, but in particular because of the timing.

Because timing is everything, and the timing here was way off.

“But it’s Nationals,” Brian said once I managed to get the words out in the kitchen after dinner. I’d poured him an extrastrong drink an hour earlier, but the whole bottle wouldn’t make him forget that detail.

“I talked to Zoey—”

“What do you mean, you talked to Zoey?”

“I explained the situation and asked her whether she’d mind if I wasn’t there.”

“You explained the situation?”

“I told her it was a work thing. She said it was okay.”

He leaned against the counter, an incredulous look on his face. “Of course she said it was okay, but you know she didn’t mean it.”

“She seemed sincere.”

“She’s
eleven
. It’s not her decision. She’s competing at Nationals, for Christ’s sake. Her mother should be there.
You
should be there.”

The stab of guilt penetrated through the Ativan shield I was still hiding behind. I have one pill left, and I’m saving it for what’s coming.

“It’s not like it’s the first time she’s been there. Or that there’s any doubt she’s going to win. Besides, I almost never go anymore. It’s your thing together. Your thing with Zoey.”

He held his thoughts for a moment. “Maybe you’re right, but it shouldn’t be.”

“I thought you were fine with that? You never said —”

“Honestly? I was hoping you’d realize on your own that it wasn’t okay.”

He pushed himself away from the counter and turned to go.
I reached out to him, but my reflexes were slow and all I ended up grabbing was the edge of his shirt, right below the elbow.

“Brian.”

He half turned towards me. “Let’s drop it, all right? You’ve made up your mind anyway. But it’s not okay, Tish. I am not okay with this.”

He put his hand on the hinged door leading into the dining room and pushed it hard enough so that it slammed against the wall.

I stood there for a long time watching the door swing back and forth, thinking that it should be creaking, that its courtesy-of-Brian-oiled silence was a rebuke, evidence that his commitment to this house, this life, has always been greater than mine.

Julia agreed to drive me to the airport, but there was a thick silence between us.

She pulled up to the five-minute unloading zone. “You have everything you need?”

“I think so.”

“Will you tell me one thing?”

“What’s that?”

“Forget it. You won’t say, anyway.”

She turned towards me, her face a mask.

“I can’t explain, Julia. Not now. Can’t you understand how this might happen, even a little?”

“Understand how it might happen to someone else? Or you?”

“Why is it any different if it’s me?”

“I’m not sure. It just is.”

“I’m sorry, Jules.”

“Yeah, well.” She glanced in the rear-view mirror. Her son, Will, was asleep in his car seat, his face flushed, his head resting at an angle only a small child can sleep at. “You should probably go. Don’t want to miss your flight.”

“Right.”

I gathered my purse from the floor, checking it automatically for the hard shape of my phone.

“Can we talk, you think, when I get back?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe. We’ll see, okay?”

“Thanks for the lift.”

She nodded and pushed the button to release the trunk. “Have a safe flight.”

I collected my carry-on, and as I walked towards the entrance it began to sink in that maybe I had lost more than Jeff.

Maybe I was going to lose everything.

Aboard my second flight, I walk down the long centre aisle to my seat, and look for room for my suitcase in the full overhead compartment.

“Let me help you with that,” says a man touching forty.

Before I can protest, he swings the bag away from me and up into a space I thought was too small even for the little suitcase I’d brought with me. I don’t intend on staying any longer than I have to.

“All set,” he says.

“Thanks.”

“It’s nothing. Window or aisle?”

“Oh, window I guess. But you—”

“I insist. I prefer the aisle anyway.” He gestures at his height, which I place at six three at least.

I slide over to the window. I tighten the seat belt against my waist and rest my head against the cold, oval of plastic, noticing a row of small holes across the bottom. I’ve always wondered what these holes are for. To release pressure, or to keep us from decompressing as we rise towards the edge of the atmosphere?

Maybe I should drill a few small holes in my brain.

The city out the window looks like any other, particularly once we’ve left the ground behind. We fly over a neighbourhood that could be mine—the same curved streets and newly built houses in pastel hues. I watch the cars navigate turns, and a few tiny dots on the sidewalks.

When we’ve pushed through the clouds, I reach into my purse and take out a battered notebook, something I threw in at the last minute, thinking I might be able to write something about Jeff to say at the funeral. To do what I was sent to do.

I flip slowly through the pages, searching for a blank one. It’s an old notebook, full of half scraps of poetry, ideas, lines, an occasional finished poem. In the last fifteen years, this is the only notebook I’ve needed, and it’s only half full.

The teenaged Tish flashes before me, hunched over one of the many such notebooks lined up like forgotten toys on the bookshelf in our study. Her hand is flying across the page, unable to move fast enough to capture the ephemeral words that appear before her at regular intervals, unbidden.

One of the pages near the front has Brian’s name and number on it, written in his physician’s hand.

When I was in my last year of college, my parents were hospitalized, a week apart, in the hospital where Brian was doing the first year of his residency.

Even then, it seemed over-the-top, having both my parents on the brink of dying, so
A-Heartbreaking-Work-of-Staggering-Genius
of them. But the funny thing, if there’s anything
funny about it, is that I wasn’t that surprised. They’d done everything together my whole life, so dying at the same time seemed like one more thing they’d managed to do right.

Together, anyway. Not right by me.

He had a bad heart, my dad, the same heart that had taken his dad at forty-six. My mom had breast cancer that advanced beyond where it should because she was too busy taking care of Dad to notice the lump forming, separate the bone-weary tiredness from nursing him from something connected wholly to her. They should’ve been on different floors of the hospital, but my dad, Charming Billy, worked his magic until my mother was wheeled into his room and plugged in next to him.

Brian was working nights then, and I was spending a lot of nights at the hospital. Wandering the halls, haunting the cafeteria, scribbling in my notebook.

“You’re the Newtons’ daughter, right?” he asked me one night as I wrapped my inked-stained hands around a cup of half-burnt coffee in the cafeteria. I was sitting at my usual table, a small round of Formica tucked next to the windows where I could feel like I was sitting in sunlight during the day, and in the inky sky at night.

I looked up at him. Hospital scrubs, circles under his eyes, a face that was shaven yesterday. Twenty-six, I thought.

Handsome. Even in my fog of grief and words, I was present enough to see that.

“That’s right. And you’re …?”

“Dr. Underhill.” He said the words like they were unfamiliar. “Brian. Your parents are on my rotation.”

“Right. I remember you.”

“Can I sit for a minute?”

“Sure.”

He sat across from me. I watched him, wanting to ask what I’d wanted to ask all the others: when was it coming, really, the end? But I couldn’t manage it. I never could.

“Why do you guys do that?” I asked instead.

“What?”

“Insist on using your title all the time? The nurses don’t introduce themselves as Nurse Jones or Nurse Ramirez.”

He looked taken aback, then he grinned at me. A wide grin, full of well-taken-care-of teeth. “Because we’re the masters of the universe.”

“Pardon?”

“It’s this thing some of the jerks in my class started calling themselves after a few weeks in first year, but it’s kind of a pervasive sentiment.”

“Because of the life-saving thing?”

“There’s that, but it’s also a way to distance yourself from the patient. If we’re not on a first-name basis, then I won’t be totally shattered when I don’t save your life.”

“You told me your first name.”

“You’re not the patient.”

“Right. Not the
patients
.”

I looked down at the words written on the paper in front of me. They were blurry and nonsensical. The ever-present smell of cleaning products was giving me a headache.

“Sorry,” he said.

“About what?”

“You know … the patients.”

“Yeah, well. That’s life I guess. Or death.”

I rubbed my hand over my eyes, trying to clear the blurriness away. When I could focus, I found Dr. Brian trying to read my notes upside down.

I shut the cover of my notebook.

“Okay, now I’m really sorry.”

“No big deal.”

“You write poetry?”

“Sometimes.” I thought about it. “When things suck, or when they’re really good.”

“Kind of like the doctor thing?”

“How do you mean?”

“Writing it down distances you from it, maybe?”

“Ouch.”

“Oh, man, I shouldn’t have said that. We don’t even know one another.”

I watched him again, how his face reddened, how he really did look sorry. And even though I felt terrible, I wanted to make him feel better. There was something in that, I knew. So instead of leaving, instead of giving him any more crap, I did the opposite. I told the truth.

“Then how come this is the most real conversation I’ve had since my parents got sick?”

“Maybe it’s the circumstances?”

“I hope not,” I said, and he smiled.

My dad pulled through, in the end. My mom did not. When I finally wheeled him out of the hospital, pale as the ghost of my mother, who was his constant shadow, I had a notebook full of poems. I read them all one night a few weeks later, trying to decide if Brian was right about them being a way to distance myself from death, illness, from everything. I thought and I thought, and when I couldn’t decide, I turned to the page of the book I was writing in that night, saw the phone number he’d written there in case I needed someone to talk to, and decided I did.

“Were you having a bad dream?”

I start awake, feeling disoriented. The man sitting next to me has his hand on the armrest that separates our seats. It’s brushing my arm.

I move away. “Pardon?”

“You sounded frightened. I hope it’s all right that I woke you?”

I straighten myself in my seat, embarrassed that my old childhood habit has come back to haunt me in a public place.

“Did I say anything …”
Odd
, I guess I want to ask, but don’t.

“No. I thought it better to wake you before you became too distressed.”

Or before I said something that would be embarrassing to the both of us.

“I appreciate it.”

He holds out something. My notebook, which must have slipped from my grasp. “You’ll want this,” he says.

I take it from him, letting it rest in my lap. “Yes. I … thank you.”

“You’re a poet, then?”

“I used to be. Sometimes. I was trying to get some ideas down. For work.”

My words seem to stick in my throat. But I don’t owe this man any explanations. I don’t have to say anything, really.

He smiles briefly. “Once a poet, always a poet.”