I Want to Show You More (9780802193742) (11 page)

The doorbell rings and the kids fight over who gets to open the door. “
I'll
get it,” I say.

Meg is standing on the front porch, holding up her left hand. “Ta da,” she says.

“Congratulations,” I say. “Neil didn't tell me you had a boyfriend.” I examine the ring, a single emerald-cut diamond set in platinum. I notice a pale freckle just above the ring. I notice Meg's French manicure, her long nail beds, the dozen or so silver bangles on her wrist.

“Yeah, he's in school back home.” She pulls a thick bride magazine out of her backpack. “Can Myra stay up to help me look at dresses?”

“How come Myra gets to stay up?” Grady says.

Myra says, “I get to wear my mom's dress when I get married.”

My wedding dress is dated: the sleeves puff and the train gathers underneath an enormous blush-pink bow. Myra loves it now. But I know the only way she'd come to wear it would be as a tribute.

Neil takes me to Tony's. They serve garlic bread with whole cloves baked in, and pastas like pumpkin Gorgonzola ravioli.

“You need to eat,” Neil says. “Force yourself.”

But I'm thinking about Myra at the end of some flowered aisle, holding Neil's arm, wearing my wedding dress. “Make sure Myra knows she doesn't have to wear that dress,” I say.

“You make sure,” Neil says. “You're going to be there.”

“She's been coming in to sleep with me during the night,” I say. “This morning I woke up and found one of her hairs in my mouth.”

Neil pulls his chair around to sit next to me. It's an awkward arrangement. The waiter stumbles on Neil's chair leg when he brings us the dessert menus. Neil pulls me to him, cups his hand around my upper arm, a single parenthesis. “Tell me what to do,” he says. “How to act.” Against my back, his arm is shaking.

“I don't know. Take it seriously. Help me tell the kids.”

He puts his lips to my ear. “What's thin, brown, and sticky?” he whispers. The sensuality of his lips and breath is startling, incongruous. I don't answer. “A stick,” he says. He takes off his glasses. Then, sliding his wine out of the way, he leans over and rests his forehead on the tablecloth. He reaches for my hand. I can tell he's crying by the way his shoulder blades keep contracting beneath his shirt.

I lean into him, press my breasts into his back. Before, I would not have believed that it's possible to feel arousal and despair at the same time. That you could want to straddle your husband across a restaurant chair, open your blouse, rock in his lap and cry with pleasure, cry because now you know, you
know
how much you love your body and his. Only they're less and less yours every day. You cry because this last raw thing—fucking—has become a consolation. You cry because when your husband first makes love to another woman, it will be a consolation. And then, later, it won't.

On Sunday morning I wake up early—there's a chocolate Lab barking at a squirrel in the crab apple. I go out front and check its tag.
Missy, 406 Peter Pan Rd
.

Anita, still in her nightgown, is sitting on her front porch. She waves and pats the chair next to her. “Wouldn't you like to come sit?”

It's warm out for February; Anita's barefoot. We talk about the Georgia dogs. Her husband used to be mayor on the Tennessee side, and were he still alive he'd push for a leash law in Georgia. “The way they get things done in Tennessee,” she says. “Tennessee's a man's state, Georgia a woman's. Well, just look at the names.”

I mention all the monuments in Tennessee, the obelisks engraved with
Ohio, New York,
and
Illinois
. I ask, “Why do they hold on to the whole Confederate thing? When it's all defeat?”

“Well now,” she says. “But isn't that just like a man, to ignore his own surrender?” Her feet are smooth and white against the porch's brick floor.

“I'm dying,” I say to her feet. “I have skin cancer and it's spreading. Neil wants me to do a clinical trial in Birmingham.”

“Oh darlin',” Anita says. I feel her hand on my back. “Your husband told me you had cancer when you all moved in. I was wondering if you might not mention it sometime.”

Beneath the crab apple tree, Missy has not stopped barking. She circles the trunk until the squirrel leaps onto the limb of an oak and climbs out of sight.

When you're young, no one ever tells you that underneath everything you'll ever do—school, job, parenting—is appetite. That someday you will look at a seventy-two-year-old widow in her nightgown and think,
She is the winner; I am the loser
. And you would come out of your skin, you would crawl up into the sweaty warmth of her armpit just to be inside all that pulsing life.

What would you think of me if I told you that I'm jealous of my own daughter—the ropy muscles in her legs, her thickening hair, her
becoming? What if you knew that if you and I met somewhere—in the produce aisle, at the ATM—I would imagine cutting your insides out and sticking them into my own body? Would you think differently about me if you knew I would do this in order to breathe the scent of Grady's skin for another morning?

When the pastor announces a death in our congregation, he uses Saint Paul's metaphor: “Tom Huskins finished his race last Wednesday.” As a runner, I have always liked the image. That would be the thing to think, on your deathbed—that at the end of yourself, you still had control. But now I see the metaphor only works for people who live to old age. They get to run the whole course.

I have started writing out my prayers, word for word, in a journal. Yesterday I copied down a psalm because it was easier than coming up with my own words. “Unite my heart, that I may fear your name” is what the psalm said. But when I opened my journal this morning, I saw that I'd written “Un
tie
.” So what does that mean? Am I coming together, or splitting apart?

Sunday evening we tell the kids.

From small children, the question “Where do dead people go?” may not be a question about the afterlife, but about the physical body. First, try to answer with “They go into the ground at the cemetery.”

We take Myra and Grady to the downtown aquarium. A shipment of penguins arrived two weeks ago, and we stand in front of the new Plexiglas, shivering. The penguins jostle each other. Some shimmy through the water like silk. The children laugh at the way the penguins walk. They pull their arms inside their sweatshirts and waddle, shouldering one another into the rail.

When we come out, the sun over the Tennessee River is lowering behind a haze of shifting clouds. Filtered this way, it looks like the moon. “Bright for nighttime,” Grady says. We don't correct him. We walk down to the riverfront and sit on a flat rock next to the water taxi.
Rides, $3.00.

“Can we ride it?” Grady asks.

“Okay,” Neil says. “But first Mommy and I want to talk with you guys about something.”

“It says
No Fishing
.” Myra is pointing to a shirtless man fishing halfway down the bank. Three poles are wedged between rocks, lines cast out and dragged sideways in the current. The man casts and reels a fourth line. “Here, kitty kitty,” we hear him say. He looks up. “Goin' to catch me a big cat,” he calls up to us.

Neil pulls Grady into his lap. Myra sits cross-legged, facing us. “Remember last summer, when Mommy had to get stitches in her arm?”

“Lemme see the scar,” Grady says.

I pull up my sleeve to show him, and he traces the pink line with his index finger. I cannot feel his touch.

“That was cancer,” Myra says. “They took it out.”

“Well, last Thursday the doctors found some more. And this time they might not be able to take it out.” Myra's eyes go wide.

“There's a doctor in Alabama who wants to try some new medicine,” I say. “Daddy and I are going to drive down three days a week. We thought we'd have Sandra walk you home from school.”

I'd assumed it would be Myra who asked the question, but it's Grady: “Are you going to die?”

I think of everything I could say. I knew a lady once who beat it. Breast cancer, stage four, lived fifteen years longer. I think of the story of Hezekiah, God prolonging his life, making the sun retreat up the steps.

Neil tells the truth. “Anyone here who
isn't
going to die, raise your hand!” Both their hands shoot up. Then Myra pulls hers down. “That's not the right answer,” she says, and starts to cry. I take her onto my lap. We hold them and watch the man bring in a fish. He twists out the hook with a pair of pliers, then tosses the fish into a bucket.

Tell me if you think this is true: it is easier to accept defeat and try to make the wreckage look beautiful than to keep fighting and lose. It feels true to me.

“Battling” cancer is only a small, daily choice you make to live with dissonance, the melody of your life running one way, the bass of your thoughts running another. Someone says
tomorrow
, you hear
if
. Forgetting is a blessing you have to manufacture.

When I blow them kisses at bedtime, Myra and Grady snatch them out of the air and tuck them under their pillows to save till morning. And on our drives home from Birmingham, I make Neil take the back way up the mountain. Nickajack Road starts in Flintstone, Georgia, and winds up behind the college. It takes twice as long as 58 South. But there are no signs about battles. You're in Georgia the whole time.

Sinkhole

When the camp director introduces God, he reminds us the man is just an actor.

“His real name is Frank Collins,” the director says. “He lives in Knoxville and has a wife and three grown-up children.” He looks down at the little kids on the benches up front. “I want to make sure you know this, so you don't get scared.”

God comes out from behind a screen set up at the front of the open-air gym. He's wearing a dark navy sheriff's costume. He's short and muscular with a thick gray beard and buzz cut. He asks the kids in the front row to move—they scramble to the wood floor—then drags the bench forward and stands on it. He pulls a sheriff's hat from behind his back, molds the brim, and sets the hat on his head. From where I'm sitting, fourth row, I can see the tips of his white sneakers sticking out from beneath his pant legs.

“The name's God,” the sheriff says. “You all don't need to tell me your names 'cause I got 'em written down in my book.”

He hooks his thumbs over his belt. “Will you look at me up here on my cosmic cloud? A-peerin' down with my eagle eye at all of
you
.”

On
you
, he quick-draws a pistol from inside his waistband. It's a cap gun, silver paint flaking off the barrel. He makes a show of opening and inspecting the cylinder, then snaps it into place and squints, his jaw moving like it's working tobacco.

“You there, sister,” he says, aiming at a girl in my row. “How'd you like to have the flu, honey?”

He fires. Bodies jump.

“And I got cavities for
all
you all,” he says. “This'll teach you not to mess around doing your homework on the Sabbath.” He waves his gun over us like a wand, opening fire.

In my head I repeat the line my therapist gave me: I am my own Great Physician.

The tingling in my chest starts up anyhow.

I look around to try to spot Wren. Sometimes even just seeing her helps. But I can't find her, so I move my hand up to the airspace in front of my pecs, in case I have to do the Gesture. It looks like I'm doing the air Pledge of Allegiance. This is my ready position.

This is not the Gesture.

Doing the Gesture = failure.

Doing the Gesture = letting the sinkhole be the boss of me.

Frank Collins twirls the gun around on his finger, then shoves it back into his waistband. “Remember,” he says. “I got your names written in my big ol' book. And lemme tell you something: I wrote most of you off a long time ago.”

He steps off the bench and backs away, frowning, until he's behind the screen.

The camp director says that Frank Collins—an actor, you remember—will be a bunch of different gods this week. Campers in grades 1–6 will vote on which god is the real one. The older campers will talk about the faulty theologies behind the fake gods. I'll be a sophomore this year, so the faulty theologies group will include me.

During the closing prayer, the tingling goes away. I keep my hand in the ready position, just in case.

I'm an amazing runner. The most amazing runner in our city, the absolute best the city of Chattanooga has ever produced. Benjamin Mills, one of our own, the newspapers say. We've never seen the likes of it. The length of his stride, the way he sucks oxygen, form and function melding in thrilling new ways. Whatever it is, it moves in him the way wind moves in trees.

And to think he's only fifteen!

I'm supposed to get even more amazing. I'm supposed to get so amazing that people will say, We have never seen this before in a human being, there has never been another distance runner like Mills, he's the best in the state of Tennessee and when he goes to college we'll say best in the nation, and someday, when we see him on television with the American flag wrapped around his body (look how amazing, he's not even sweating!) we'll say, We knew it, we've always known it: Benjamin Mills has given us a glimpse of the limitless perfections of God Himself.

The thing that will stop me from being amazing is this dime-sized spot of skin between my pecs. This spot of skin is like a scar that cannot be touched by anyone or anything. If anyone or anything puts even the slightest amount of pressure on this spot—if I even think about someone or something touching it—the sinkhole opens. The sinkhole is black and spirals down and open like a whirlpool: first through my skin, then through the tissues and pectoral muscles and on into the bones of my sternum, and if I don't lie down and do the Gesture to make it stop, it will get all the way to my heart and wrap around it and clamp down until my heart stops beating and I die.

What I do to make the sinkhole close is, I press my fingers together the way swimmers shape their hands into paddles. Then I lie down and massage the airspace an inch above the spot of skin. I move my hand in what you would call clockwise circles if you were standing above me, watching. It's like wiping down a counter. The faster I wipe, the faster the hole shrinks back into the dime-sized spot of skin.

The first time my parents caught me doing the Gesture I was twelve. I was bringing in the garbage pail and trying not to think about the spot on my chest. But trying not to think about something is the same as forcing yourself to think about it, and I ended up lying down right there in the driveway.

My parents took me to the emergency room, where the nurses hooked me up to heart monitors that showed everyone I wasn't having a heart attack. But because of my little brother Sam—born with a hole in his heart that four surgeries in eighteen months couldn't fix—they did all kinds of tests. They taped wires to my chest and attached them to a monitor I hooked onto my belt. I had to wear it around for a week. If I felt anything funny—
flubbing,
the doctor said, or
racing
—I was supposed to push a button on the monitor to start recording. When I got three recordings, I was supposed to unhook the monitor from the wires and dial an 800 number, then hold the phone up to the monitor and push
playback
so the monitor could send the sound of my flubbing and/or racing heart into a computer that would write down the patterns with one of those jittery robotic arms.

I never called the 800 number. I never felt any flubbing or racing.

I felt the sinkhole opening, but the doctor didn't say
spiraling
or
clamping down
.

For another test, I had to run on a treadmill set at a steep incline until my heart rate was 200 beats per minute. It took me a long time to get there. Dr. Logan, the cardiologist, kept calling me Lance Armstrong. “Faster, Lance,” he'd say. “I'd like to get out of here before next week.”

When my heart finally reached 200, I had to jump off the treadmill and lie on my back on a padded table. Dr. Logan said this is the most taxing thing you can do to a heart: take it from one hundred percent exertion to one hundred percent inertia. A nurse injected a dye into a vein in my arm. The dye made me taste metal and lit up all the pathways running in and out of my heart. An EMT was in the room, holding a defibrillator, just in case.

Dr. Logan said my pathways were clear as crystal. He said, “I've never seen a heart resume its resting rate that quickly.”

My resting heart rate is 46 beats per minute.

In my prime it could drop into the 30s.

It's when I'm running that I feel God wants to tell me something. I feel he wants to tell me the Big Thing he has for me to do. It's like this secret mission that only someone who has been touched by the divine could possibly understand.

Writing down the words I hear during my runs is my assignment. Not God's assignment, the therapist's. My parents made me start seeing him every week when they found out about the Gesture. So far I've only written down one word:
You
. And I keep trying to tell my therapist that “heard” isn't right. I don't say “heard” because the sound isn't in my ears. It isn't a sound. It's this pulse or rhythm just below the prickling in my chest that I know has some meaning, and one of these days—if I can figure out the rest of God's words before the sinkhole takes over—I will know exactly what it is God wants me to do. The important thing is not to think about it. When I feel the words start to pulse in my chest, if I think about them, they disappear and I feel the sinkhole spiraling into my sternum, getting ready to wrap around my pumping heart. I have to figure out how to listen sideways, out of the corner of my eye.

My therapist says the worst thing I can do is fight the sinkhole, or pray that God will take it away. He says the way to be the boss of my sinkhole is to a) accept it; b) have compassion for it; and c)
let it happen
. He says if I do this, I'll find out the sinkhole doesn't have the power I think it does.

Sometimes my therapist has me play out my worst-case scenario: what do I think will happen if I don't do the Gesture?

“Easy,” I tell him. “The sinkhole will squeeze my heart to death.”

He says that is my surface fear.

“Okay,” I say. “Then my deeper fear is dying, period.”

After the sheriff-God, on the way back to our cabins, I see Wren at the snack table with some other freshman girls. She's wearing a tank top and jeans. Her bare arms start out in the darkness, white and smooth as the inside of a shell.

“Hey, Wren,” I say.

“Benjy,” she says. She says my name like she wants to keep it inside her mouth; I imagine the letters all curled up together on her palate. Wren's hair is the kind of silky blond that shouldn't be thick but is, so thick it's like a sheepskin rug you want to dig your toes into. When she goes back to her cabin I imagine she'll put on a white nightgown and kneel beside her cot to pray. Her prayers at Ethos are always humble and straightforward: Help us to see others as you see them. Give us your kind of love for people.

“So that sheriff's a no-brainer,” Madeline Simpkins says. Madeline's one of these girls all the guys like—big chest, heavy eye makeup, obviously ready for whatever it is you want to do with her. “You'd think they'd want to, like, challenge us.”

Wren is holding a little Styrofoam cup filled with popcorn. “I imagine Him that way sometimes,” she says. “Like He's just . . . I don't know. Waiting to fire.”

I don't say anything. Neither does Madeline. Wren and I have lived on the same street on Lookout Mountain since we were five, the year her parents found out she had a tumor in her uterus the size of a lemon. Some weird kind of cancer with a name like
mezzanine
. They had to take out all her reproductive parts plus her colon. After her surgeries her dad got her a new bike with training wheels. She'd ride around our neighborhood, bald-headed, a catheter bag dangling from her wrist. The next summer, she pulled me into the empty girls' bathroom at the Fairyland Country Club and lifted her shirt to show me the cloth-covered bag sticking out of a hole in her side. “This is how I go,” she said. “I don't even have to sit down.” Every summer after that, her parents were flying her somewhere to get a new surgery to try to fix her insides so she could at least have that bag taken off. None of the surgeries worked. I'm pretty sure they've given up. When we were in seventh grade, everyone started asking everyone else to go out. No one asked her. She told me that if Protestants had nuns, she'd sign up.

To look at her, you wouldn't know a thing had happened if it wasn't for the compression stocking on her leg. Something to do with the radiation killing all the lymph, or messing with the mechanism that makes the lymph move around. When she walks she has to kind of drag her leg along with her, one swollen foot pointing out to the side. That foot makes me want to lift her up and carry her anywhere she wants to go.

“A bunch of us are going down to the waterfront at midnight,” Madeline says. “Swimsuits optional.”

I look at Wren and raise my eyebrows up and down a few times, like, Hey baby
hey
.

“Right,” she says, laughing. Which is exactly what I thought she'd say. Wren's the whole reason I came to camp. I'm in love with her. She doesn't know it and wouldn't believe me even if I told her, because of her missing parts and her swollen leg. But I'm so in love with her that I've decided to ask her to do a faith healing on me.

This is called being the boss of my sinkhole.

Because of the sinkhole I've never been with a girl. Never even hugged one close. Wren's the only girl I know who I think might be safe; who would treat me the same, even if she saw me doing the Gesture, because of what she's been through. Here's how I'm hoping things will go. I drop hints all week, tell Wren I'd like to talk to her about something. The last night of camp, I ask her to meet me somewhere private, maybe down at the waterfront late at night. She agrees. I tell her everything. She says she wants to help if she can. I take off my shirt and lie down. I say, Please don't touch my chest until I ask. She starts praying. I imagine she'll get her mouth down next to my chest, right above the dime-sized spot. Her breath will be warm and moist, a sweet citrus smell to it.

When I tell her I'm ready, she'll take a drop of the oil I brought in a tiny Advil container and place it, lightly, with just the tip of her pinkie finger, onto the spot. The most delicate laying-on-of-hands. She'll say, In the name of Jesus I command you. I might ask her to say some Latin I found on a Catholic website about exorcism—
In nominus Christos, Dominus ­vobiscum
. When she's finished I'll touch the spot with my own finger, to be certain it worked. And when I'm certain—when I can tell the sinkhole isn't going to open—I'll lay my entire hand on top of my chest and take a few deep breaths. Then I'll place Wren's hand over mine, to prove to myself I can handle the added weight, and to show Wren what she did for me.