The Me You See (4 page)

“What’s wrong?” I asked and brushed the pad of my thumb
under her eye to wipe away a tear.

She sniffled and then coughed and when she recovered said
she couldn’t decide if she was angry or sad.

“What about?”

“Wasted time.”

I held her and she blew deep puffs of air at my chest,
hiccoughing on tears and snot as they came faster.

“She looked so happy,” she said finally.

“Who?”

“Stefia.”

“What?”

“On stage. She looked so happy.”

I didn’t know if we’d started a new conversation or if
Stefia on stage somehow tied into wasted time so I listened before commenting
because words are so precious when you know time is running out.

“She’s doing what she loves,” she continued. “She hasn’t
wasted time.”

A frenzy of ice sloshed through my veins. Had we reached
the part where my wife would come clean and admit she had hated everything
about our life together? Would she walk to the closet and collect her things
before she danced out to a life that didn’t feel wasted?

She didn’t.

“I want to see the show again,” Lindsey said. “I need to
see it again.”

The final performance of the show was the following night.
It also happened to be completely sold out, but I mentioned something to the
box office manager about “being family” and “six weeks to live.” I thanked him
profusely when he said they would set up two additional chairs off an aisle and
make room.

“Can I ask one other favor?” I said.

“Anything,” he responded.

“Don’t tell Stefia about this, okay?”

I could almost hear his wink over the phone, like he was
happy to keep our little secret.

When you see a play more than once, you pick out things you
didn’t get the first time. So when we saw it again, I paid much closer
attention. Our seats had been added to the end of the third row and we were so
close I could see the spray of spit from lines delivered, the bubbles of sweat
collecting as the spotlight warmed Stefia’s skin. Sitting so close to the stage
sucked me further into Stefia’s world of make-believe, further and further
until the boundaries between actor and audience blurred and I felt as though
I’d been pulled from chair and wrapped around her feet.

What my wife had said was true—Stefia really was the
brightest star on that stage.

When the performance was over, the cast members bounced
their post-show adrenalized selves into the lobby. They set themselves against
the wall like a receiving line at a wedding, shaking hands and accepting
accolades from their adoring fans.

So glad you enjoyed the performance!

Thanks for coming!

You’re too kind, really. I just enjoy being on
stage.

I thought we were going to blast past the niceties of the
actor line, like we had the first time we’d seen the show, but Lindsey grabbed
me by the arm.

“I need to say something to her. I just need to say…”

“Say what?”

“Something.”

It was so not like my wife to have to say anything. She was
a master at letting things lie. But things are different when time is finite
and suddenly you find that your mouth has filled up with all the things you
never got to say.

We waited in line through all the congratulations, well
dones, and good jobs, shaking hands with the fifteen actors who had poured
themselves out on stage for the last two hours. Since Stefia was one of the
leads, she was towards the end of the line. So my wife waited. And waited.

“Are you getting tired?” I asked after a few minutes. “Do
you want to sit?”

“No,” she said and shook her head. “I just need to say
something to her.”

And just like that, it happened. The line shuffled ahead
and they were standing right in front of each other.

It’s funny how the elephant never really goes away, you
know? Four years of discomfort passed between the two of them in a glance that
took less than a second. It was all there in that look, the mixture of surprise
and disbelief and
oh my god what do I say?

Stefia refocused with a swallow and squared her shoulders.

“Aunt Lindsey,” she said, with emotion that wasn’t easily
named. “How nice of you to come to the show.”

“I just need to say something,” Lindsey continued. “Hear me
out.”

Lindsey grabbed Stefia’s hands and stared into her eyes
with a severity I was noticing more often as her time on earth ticked away.

“Okay…” Stefia said, oddly uncomfortable with the
attention.

“Stefia, you are talented. You are so talented, baby girl.
You are like…a hidden pocket of glitter.”

“Oh, Lindsey…”

“No, please let me finish. You shine up there on stage like
those lights at the softball field. The ones that let you see for miles around?
That’s you, Stefia. You are showing people their way. Don’t ever stop doing
this. You’re amazing.”

Stefia was starting to blush, which I didn’t understand
because Lindsey wasn’t telling her anything different than what the hundred
people before her in line had said. But she squeezed at Lindsey’s hands and
politely said, “Thank you, Lindsey. Thank you for coming.”

“There’s one more thing I need to tell you,” Lindsey said, cutting
her off.

I saw my wife look down at floor, then sigh and close her
eyes. After a moment, she opened them back up and looked straight into Stefia’s
eyes for the second time.

“You, sweet Stefia,” she said, “you are nothing like your
mother. And don’t ever let anyone tell you differently.”

For a second, a seriousness pulsed between them; a
connection that tied them up in something I couldn’t see. Then Stefia’s lips
warmed into a smile that spread slowly across her face as she pulled Lindsey in
for a hug.

“Thank you, Lindsey,” she whispered into my wife’s ear.
“Thank you for coming.”

And it somehow seemed to me that the second time Stefia
said it, she meant something entirely different than the first.

**

Immediately after seeing the second show, my wife
completely fixated on Stefia. Not really Stefia the person, because we didn’t
ever see her again. It was more the idea of Stefia that my wife was hyper-focused
on. It was as if because Stefia did what she wanted and took things the
direction she chose to go, it inspired my wife to do even more in her last
days. And as we passed that six weeks to live mark and headed into eight weeks,
ten weeks, three months, five months, I found myself thankful that we had sat
in the audience watching Stefia paint her magical pictures that my wife
interpreted as
everyone can be happy if they just follow their dreams.

Stefia was the inspiration. She aroused the need for my
wife to continue. She sparked an interest in daily life and made my wife look
at everything from the simple to the infinitely complex to everything in
between and figure out what she loved. My wife grew to believe more each day
that doing what she loved was important not because she was dying, but because
she was still alive.

My wife told me she wanted to drive a car with the top down
to someplace she’d never been before. She wanted to take an old rusted out baby
blue farm truck, find a deserted intersection where two gravel roads come
together, and make love right there. She wanted to visit a city so big we had
to take a taxi to get around and then she wanted to tip the driver with a
hundred dollar bill. Just because she could. Because she wanted to. Because it
was something she loved.

She bought a croton house plant and transplanted it into a
piece of pottery she fashioned with her own sweet hands. She stopped drinking
coffee and started drinking chai tea. She painted her nails a different color
every single day. She volunteered at a women’s shelter. She shopped for
Christmas three months early. She celebrated Hanukah. She wrote poems. She
baked rye bread. She used china and gold plated silverware to eat peanut butter
and jelly.

And I watched her in wonder. I watched as she spun around
in a mad frenzy, doing all the things she had always wanted to do, wondering
why had she waited? Why had she wasted so much time before?

And then I wondered the same thing of myself.

Was I waiting?

Had I wasted time?

Was I doing what I loved?

I wondered.

Things look different when you are contemplating the end.
And I spent a lot of time wondering if it was easier to be at the end knowing
you had time to think on it, or if it was harder to deal with if it snuck up on
you suddenly.

One night we sat in the warmth of conversation and a
fireplace, celebrating what would have seemed to most people to be the very
least of things. We’d had a bottle of wine between the two of us—mostly me,
because she couldn’t handle it well—and she told me to stop being so whiny
about life.

“I’m doing the things I’ve always wanted to do,” she said.
“I’m crossing everything off my bucket list.” Then she took another sip of her
wine. She was gorgeous and tipsy and I loved her more than anything and
everything in the world.

“What will I do when I run out of things to do?” she said
with just a hint of a happy slur. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. When I run out
of things on my bucket list, I’ll kick the bucket!”

She held her wine glass up and toasted to the winter sky
outside our bay window, tossing back what was left in the glass.

“When I die,” she said, setting the wine glass next to her,
“don’t write an obituary for me.”

“What?”

“Obituaries are all the same. They’re like a written
participation ribbon for having shown up and breathed. It’s all the same
phrases.
She loved her family
or
she was a light to those around her
.
Nice, neat phrases. Like…a brassy ribbon tied around an existence that might or
might not have been worth the space and air it took up.”

“Don’t talk like that,” I said.

“Like what?” she said. The wine had filled her with
cynicism by the bucketful and she had grown weary of hiding anything that
should have stayed hidden. “Let’s not pretend. It doesn’t help anything.”

She’d lost so much weight and yet her face was puffy from
all the medication she was on.

“I’m not pretending,” I said. “But it doesn’t help anything
to keep pointing it out either.”

“You know, Shawn,” she said, “you could be worse off than
me.”

“What?”

“Here I’m trying to get through this bucket list before I
kick it because I know the end is coming. You…you could die in a car crash
tomorrow. You could die suddenly without even knowing what your bucket list
is.”

There was something eerie about her words, something
strange about her even bringing it up. And I didn’t like thinking about it
because she was telling the god’s honest truth.

“I am doing everything right now that would be on my bucket
list if I had one,” I said.

“Like what? Watching your dying wife get drunk?”

“No. Just spending time with the person I love more than
anything in the whole world.”

I would have stayed there watching her for forever. I just
couldn’t suck in enough of her. I felt like I spent every day wildly running
after her with a cup, trying to catch the overflow of who she was before there
was no more of her to catch.

“Things look different when days are numbered,” I finally
said.

“They shouldn’t.”

I knew she was right. I knew we weren’t supposed to save
things for looking different or mattering for when the reality of finite days
punched through our skull. But it seemed to be one of the more stupid human
tricks we were all guilty of performing.

“I love you,” I said. The wine and the soft crackle of the
cedar log in the fireplace made everything about me warm and tingly, even my
eyeballs and the tips of my fingers. “I have always loved you.”

She looked so small and insignificant in her rocking chair,
the quilt around her seeming to swallow her whole. But she beamed and sparkled
with a glittery light on her upturned lips as her eyelids grew heavy and she
inched closer to sleep.

“I have always known that,” she said. “Always.”

**

I dreamed last night of heaven. I woke up in a brilliant
fog and tried to sketch what I had seen: a silver blue sky with cedar trees the
color of warmth lining a gravel path that rounded into a gentle bend. Just
enough that you couldn’t see around the corner. But you knew what was coming:
pure brilliant beauty.

In the dream, my wife was standing on the path. I couldn’t
see her as a solid thing and yet I knew she was there. In my wakened state, I
furiously tried to sketch a figure that wasn’t really a figure. I tried to
sketch the liquid fluid notes of her voice that had come out as ribbons of
shimmering silk when she spoke. I tried to sketch it all, everything I had
seen. Because in the dream, it was beautiful. In the dream, it was peaceful.