Thou Shalt Not (8 page)

She jabbed me in the stomach with her bony elbow and laughed.

“It wasn’t my only fantasy. Just the most calming. What was one of yours?”

I didn’t like this game, not then, not ever. I hated thinking about all the things I wasn’t going to get to experience with her. Maybe it was selfish, since she was the one who would never get to experience them. I might, someday, with someone else. But I hated even the thought of that.

“Come on, tell me.”

I hesitated some more.

“If you don’t tell me, I’m going to elbow you again. These bones are sharp!”

“Okay, okay, no need for spousal abuse,” I said. “I always imagined us having a boy, and taking him to his Saturday morning baseball games. We would sit in lawn chairs under a tree, away from all the crazy parents in the stands.”

“Would we be mocking the other parents?”

“You know it.” I smiled.

“Well, what if I didn’t want our son playing baseball? What if I decided he would make a better boy scout? Or, better yet, a jockey! You love horses!”

“Then, I am pretty sure I would have locked you up the day I took him to sign up for a sport.”

“He would have been a great baseball player. Unless he got my genes. Then he would just be tall and a complete klutz.”

We both laughed, and then grew silent. The game had its charms, but it always left the player with more sorrow than before they started. I knew she was thinking about all we would miss doing together.

“Luke,” she said, as she sat up and turned toward me. Her blue eyes looked tired, worn out, but they still shone. And I thanked God for every second there was still life in them. Her eyes were what first drew me to her back in 10th grade, and I wasn’t sure how I would live without them. I felt like I had known them forever.

“I know this stuff isn’t easy to talk about,” she continued, “but I want you to be okay. More than anything. I’ll be in a better place. I won’t be hurting like I am now. But I don’t want you to hurt. This isn’t fair what’s happening to us. I always thought we would grow old together. But, God had other plans, and I want you to be okay. I don’t have much left to pray for except that.”

I really wanted to tell her to shut up. If it had been in our earlier years, I probably would have. We fought a lot in the beginning, but we were really young.

“God brought you into my life, and gave us a wonderful time together. He knew it would be short, so I think that’s probably why He let us start so young.”

“We were so foolish,” I said. “But, we were in love.”

She smiled. “You’ll need time to move on, Luke. Time to get past this. But I need you to promise me you will. I need you to promise me that you’ll find someone new to love. You have so much love to give, and it would be a shame if it went to waste.”

The last thing in the world I wanted to be thinking about was moving on, loving another person. Love was special, but love took a lot of work. We had married right out of high school, and we had struggled. We were immature, we didn’t have much money, and we argued more than I had ever argued with anyone else before. But, we made it work. She was my best friend and we made it work. I loved her, and I didn’t want to think about anything else. Fucking cancer.

She wasn’t done. Apparently, she had planned this speech for a little while.

“I’m jealous that someone will get to spend the time with you that was supposed to be mine. But then again, it obviously wasn’t supposed to be mine. Or this wouldn’t have happened.” She held her arms up when she said this, as if they signified that her entire being was now cancer. That probably wasn’t far from the truth.

The words were taking her energy away; I could feel her slowing down. But she wasn’t going to stop, not until she was done.

“I want you to have kids. I want you to have grandkids. I want you snuggled up on a couch with someone when you’re old and gray. I just wish it could have been me.”

“I don’t want it to be anyone else,” I stammered, the tears in my throat, controlling my voice. “I hate this. I don’t want to lose you.”

We sat there the rest of the night and cried together until we fell asleep in the recliner. The next two days we would wake up early, enjoy the sunrise, listen to the river and the wind in the trees. Her parents would spend time with us until the sun went down. They would leave, and Carrie and I would return to the recliner and talk and cry and laugh some more. The third morning I woke up to one of the most majestic sunrises that I had ever seen. I shook Carrie gently to wake her up, but she wouldn’t wake up.

I made it to the morning meeting in time, and I was able to share with the rest of the faculty what had happened overnight with Robin. Everyone joined together to pray for her and Walt, but everyone was encouraged that the doctors had been able to successfully perform the surgery. Most considered it miraculous that Walt had been able to get her to the hospital in time. I was inclined to agree.

I spent the majority of the morning balancing my thoughts of Robin and the ones I was having about April. I hadn’t seen her that morning yet, and I found it preoccupying wondering what color her dress was, or how she had fixed her hair that day.

I went down to the lunchroom and sat with my coworkers, but there wasn’t any sign of April. I assumed she had been next door—no student had complained that the classroom was teacher-less. She couldn’t have been having lunch with her husband, who was of course in Boston. I ate hurriedly and excused myself from the table, pretending like I had to get back and prepare for my next period.

I walked down the hallway toward our classrooms, and her light was still on. I got close to the door and peered through the glass. She was sitting at Robin’s desk, her head buried in her arms. At first I thought she might have been sleeping, but I could see her hands moving through her hair.

Don’t go in there
, I told myself. She obviously wanted to be alone.

I ignored my better judgment and walked in.

Her head lifted slowly from her arms, and she smiled forcefully as I slowly walked toward her desk. It didn’t look like she had been crying, but her eyes looked twenty years older than the rest of her. It was startling.

“Hey,” I said. “I just wanted to check on you, make sure everything was okay.”

“Oh, I am fine,” she said, and I knew she was lying to me. “Just had a long night. Thought maybe I could get a quick nap in.”

I didn’t
buy what she was trying to sell me, but I played along.

“Well, I’ve heard turning the light off usually helps. People seem to sleep better in the dark.”

She smiled, less forced this time.

“Plus, if the lights had been out, it would have kept an idiot English teacher from barging in and disrupting your peace.”

I was mad at myself for walking in like this, but instead of making it better and leaving, all I could apparently seem to do was keep talking.

She sat up and leaned back, involuntarily stretching her upper body. She was wearing a scarlet red blouse, and when she leaned back, her small breasts pushed up against the fabric of her shirt. I tried not to look, and thankfully she hadn’t noticed me fail at my attempt.

“It’s okay, really,” she said. “Lunch is almost over anyway, and there is no way I would have passed out on this desk.”

“For future reference, you can always go lay down on the couch in my classroom. Just make sure I am not in the middle of teaching something if you are a snorer. Oh, and make sure you take a whistle.”

“A whistle?”

“In case you sink in, and need someone to come save you from the quicksand couch of death.”

“Ohhhh, right,” she said, without laughing or smiling, just looking tired.

In third grade, my teacher had given me a Mr. Cool award at the end of the school year. It had a cartoon surfer guy riding a big wave and wearing giant black sunglasses. I half expected my teacher to walk into the classroom right now and ask for the award back.

“Well, I won’t bother you anymore,” I said. “Resume your slumber if you can.”

“I’m fine, Luke, really. You aren’t bothering me. I just hope I can sleep tonight.”

“Rough night at home last night?”

“Yeah, you could say that. Some nights the kids decide they don’t want to sleep and decide to make my life miserable.”

“Yikes,” I said.

Seriously, Luke,
yikes?
What am I, a Scooby Doo character all of a sudden?

“It must be tough with Marco being away.”

“Yeah,” she nodded, “I don’t know if it’s something I will ever get used to. You basically are a single parent for most of the year, and then when he shows up the kids have a hard time adjusting to having him around full-time.”

“Well, he gets to be home when the team is playing here at least.”

“Not really, with practices and meetings and warm-ups and games, the kids are lucky to even catch a glimpse of him during the morning in passing. And once the games are over, he doesn’t usually get home till around midnight.”

“Wow, that doesn’t sound pleasant at all,” I said, being entirely sincere. “I always wanted to become a professional baseball player, but now I am thankful I chose this line of work.”

“Did you play?”

The bell signaling the end of lunch rang, but it would still be a few minutes before the kids got anywhere close to the classroom.

“Yeah,” I replied. “I played in high school and through most of college.”

She just nodded and didn’t ask any further questions about it. She probably thought I must have not been very good.

April asked about Robin, and since she hadn’t been present for the morning meeting, I quickly filled her in on what happened during the evening.

“Wow,” she said. “And here I was complaining about not getting any sleep.”

“I am assuming the surgery will take a little bit of time to heal from, so you might be asked to hang out here with us a little longer. That is, if you haven’t gotten tired of us yet.”

“I think I could probably handle a few more days here,” she said, and it looked like her face was beginning to return to normal. Maybe talking to me injected a little life into her.

“You’ll have to get more sleep, though,” I said, speaking in a mock scolding voice. “These kids don’t like grumpy teachers
.”

“I don’t know where you get your energy after sleeping so little,” she said, shaking her head.

The students for her next class began to enter the room, so I took that as my cue to head out.

I called Walt on my way home at the end of the day. He told me Robin was still a little tired and run down, but seemed to be doing better. She apparently had a pretty bad flu bug before the situation with the aneurysm arose, so it was expected for her to still be run down for a little while. He told me that the doctors expected her to be in the hospital for at least another five to seven days before they released her to go home. I promised to visit sometime over the weekend and we wished each other a good night.

Holly was sitting at the kitchen table, fully clothed, typing away on my laptop when I got home. She had texted me during the day, asking about Robin, but I had mostly ignored her, telling her I would fill her in when I got home. So, I explained the situation to her, and told her Robin seemed to be doing a lot better.

“Thank God,” she said. “I know how much she means to you.”

She then explained to me that her boyfriend Kyle had called during the day, and had begged her forgiveness for his assholery. He said she deserved for him to treat her better than he had ever treated anyone else in his life, and he was prepared to do it. She told me this with relative nonchalance, which indicated she wasn’t all that moved by his spiel.

“You didn’t bother telling him you shacked up here for a few days, did you?” I asked, winking for the second time that week.

What the fuck is going on?

“Yeahhhhh, not so much. I am fairly certain he would have cried.”

I am not sure why I thought this was funny, but I did, and laughed loudly, and probably for too long. Then I leaned over her and slipped my hand down the front of her shirt, wiping the wicked smile off her face.
You can tell a lot from a woman’s eyes. The look she gives you when she really wants you. Her eyes glaze over and there is a raw passion in that glaze. You know exactly what she wants you to do to her from that look. So you do it. Doing it to Holly’s body was my favorite pastime.

That night, we went to dinner at a hopping little tapas place, and then decided to walk to the nearby theater to check out the latest Reese Witherspoon offering. The movie was pretty lousy, but I didn’t care. I needed a night out to take my mind off of everything. April, Robin, hospitals, Carrie. That asshole Marco.

He’s probably the nicest guy in the world
, I told myself.
You’ll meet him and feel like a complete asshole for flirting with his wife.

We drove home in relative silence, and when we got back to my place, we kissed long and slowly at the door. The bed was our next stop, and after we removed all the necessary clothing, we fell into each other on top of the covers. It was one of our more intense sexual experiences together. Everything felt different that night. It didn’t feel like FWB fucking, but it definitely wasn’t “making love” either. It was somewhere in between, like we were too good of friends and too close to simply be fucking, but we didn’t quite have the romance and love for each other to actually be making love. Whatever it was, it was good. And it made me think that this round of Luke-Holly was likely coming to a close. It always did when things got too intimate.