Will & I (15 page)

In the third year I was there, I had the same eight students every time, a few of whom I'd had previously. Because they could get away with almost anything, my class had become somewhat of a club to them. One day we were doing an exercise I had seen about feeling like an outcast, called the Black Sheep. As I was explaining the exercise, asking if they'd ever felt that way and how you would convey such a feeling concretely, it hit me how inherently wrong this sounded. I became embarrassed. Suddenly, the kids all started talking as if I hadn't said anything, and I blushed without telling them to stop. An eighth grader who sat to my right chuckled and said, under his breath, “You mean like every day.”

Still, my confidence increased exponentially. Interacting with frank critics was helping my voice as well. I found I liked being able to say I taught, even though it was voluntary and only part-time. When I came into town for it, I went to my mother's house first to drop off the dogs, and the change in atmosphere was so abrupt it felt like the two places were on different planets. I liked moving between them however.

 

26

I sat on top of Will in our mother's womb, causing me to be born with too much blood and him not enough. That was the first time they took blood out of one of us and put it in the other. The other time being my surgery in New Orleans. As babies, Will and I would stop crying only if our parents put us in the same crib.

Every stage of life we'd gone through not just together but as a unit, as a unity. Which makes it less surprising that after my stroke—and especially after my predicted death—things changed. Our twinship wasn't broken, but it was redefined, physically and in ways that were harder to pin down. For one thing, Will had prepared himself for me to die, and you can't completely backpedal from that once you've done it. He wouldn't say that, necessarily, but how could he not have done so? His abrupt reactions when I was in the hospital—that was part of his separating himself. His reality changed: all the outside hopes and expectations, familial and otherwise, that people had felt about us, that had been distributed equally between us, were now all on him, with the added burden that he couldn't avoid feeling responsible for me.

As I became more patient—in an effort to preserve my sanity—Will became more impatient. After he entered the workforce, he started having panic attacks. He got past them, but while they lasted, I knew they had something to do with feeling alone. He wasn't used to it.

And yet the more life told him he was now an isolated individual—Will loves to tell the story of how, after our parents discovered my enthusiasm for writing, they gave me a signed first-edition copy of Faulkner's
The Reivers
as a Christmas gift, and gave him a picture book titled
The World of Beer
—the more biology told him he wasn't. His ending up with an ex-girlfriend of mine gave him, I think, a strange sense of calm. It suggested that biological destiny might be more powerful even than something as traumatic as what had happened to my body. The accident opened him up. We got to a place, after a period of years, where we were able to discuss what had happened to me, with a candor that would have been unfamiliar to both of us before my stroke. He let go a little.

For me, although I had always loved Will as a brother (or maybe I shouldn't even say that; it would be like pointing out that I'd loved myself), I came to value him in a more conscious way, because thanks to him I had someone in my life who knew me so well, so exactly, that he could see into my interior self, regardless of what shape my body was in. Because of Will I still felt known. He could see the world through my eyes. This kept me from total despair.

I distinctly remember a period of about five seconds, when I was in a wheelchair at one of the treatment centers, thinking how much easier it would be to just become what a lot of strangers already thought I was. Overly friendly, mentally challenged. People would be nicer. I've noticed that a lot of people feel more comfortable around me the more handicapped they think I am; I suppose it's because I represent no threat. Often when I tell them something positive about myself, such as that I've had my work published or that I teach creative writing, they instantly become less friendly, as if I've forgotten my place. It would be so convenient, in a way, to go along with that attitude. But having Will there—someone who saw me as I saw myself, who knew I hadn't become someone else—gave me the strength not to take the idea too seriously, to let it pass unexplored. It can be hard to explain how frustrating it is, in my situation—someone's who's mentally there, but physically hampered, his voice changed—to have to be constantly proving yourself, insisting on what you are, and because of Will there's always one person with whom I never feel the need to do that, to waste time breaking even. Besides myself, that is. When I'm alone, I forget.

 

27

My sister called on a Friday in March—the twentieth, according to my journal, though when I look at the calendar, that was a Saturday. I must have been confused about either the day or the date. She said she was calling to tell me not to block the garage if I came home. But she knew I wasn't coming home that day. The real reason for her call was that she and my mother were on their way to the doctor's office, to discuss my mother's MRI results. The doctor had called and requested the meeting. Her leg had been hurting her for a while—she'd even begun using one of my father's old canes—and either we or the pain had finally convinced her to go to a doctor. They didn't know anything more, my sister said, than that he wanted to see her in his office. At first I thought, how typical of her, to get me worried over nothing. I was imagining the laugh Will and I would have over yet another example of my sister's thriving on bad news, when she called back crying. My mother had a mass on her hip, she said, and tumors up and down her spine.

I don't want to sound callous—as if the news of my mother's cancer wasn't the most jarring part of my sister's call—but I had been through so much loss in my life by then, and among my first thoughts was
I can't believe this is happening to me
. Or, worse than that,
Again?
Partly it had to do with control. Placing this new shock in the unbelievable pattern of things that had happened to me before I'd even turned thirty-seven was a way of distancing myself, making it into a story. Whatever it was, I knew that my life had just entered another new phase. I couldn't speak for a minute. I said, “I'm on my way home.”

It didn't take me long to pack a few clothes and load the dogs up, but when I got to the house, her lawyer had already visited. He was just leaving. I wanted to scoff but didn't. She was simply trying to stay on top of things. I regret what I said as soon as I saw her almost as much as I do that time when I told her thanks for life and money. I think I was trying to lighten the moment. I know that I wasn't trying to be cruel. “Well,” I said, “at least now you know you're not in ultimate control of your body. Are you scared?” She stared at me for a second before she started crying. “I don't want to die,” she said.

My sister motioned for me to step out in the hall. She said, “Dr. Jones wants you to call him.”

Dr. Jones was my doctor as well as my mother's. We were well acquainted, thanks to my many falls. He said they were going to biopsy the mass on the following Tuesday, and that we really wouldn't know anything more until then. But he also said he would be surprised if it was not malignant, quickly adding that there are many different grades of malignancy. “This could be easily treatable.”

The distance that began to develop right away between my mother and reality nauseated me. She was now the patient. It put me in mind of my own days in the hospital and how much I'd hated such a designation, other people putting it on me, whereas she seemed almost to embrace it. Before she went in for the biopsy, which would require a few days' stay in the hospital, she hired a sitter and had a hospital bed installed in the front study of her house. All of it felt like a performance.

The sitter went with her to the hospital. I went back to the farm after the procedure, which they described as successful. She was recovering in the hospital. I tried rereading some of my favorite stories and essays, trying to get back into the mind-set where this wasn't the end of the world. My mother's condition was harmless. I told myself that I knew it, deep down, but I was caught up and scared. With her gift for looking the other way, you would have thought she was on vacation, having whatever she wanted brought to her and gossiping on the phone. But I knew she was scared as well.

One day the previous fall, after I'd moved from the lake to the farm, I got an e-mail message from Eleanor. She had a different last name, but I knew right away it was her. “I bet you thought you'd never hear from me again,” she wrote. She told me generally about her life over the past years. She was married to a guy she'd dated in college, who was from Chicago. She lived there with him and their two daughters. He was also a graduate of NOLS, the same program she and I met on—he'd done a semester in the Rockies in 1989. She told me she now ran marathons competitively. “Okay, now your turn,” she wrote. The phrase seemed like a jolt of her former assertiveness and trust coming through. The news that she was married with children didn't bother me. I would have been surprised to learn otherwise. Mainly I was just ecstatic to hear from her.

We began trading e-mails. At first they held a sense of possibility for me, a feeling that maybe the past wasn't completely past. Not that I hoped she'd leave her husband or anything like that, but it seemed there could still be something between us. Soon, though, our back-and-forth started to feel obligatory. With the perspective of years, the fact that we'd only ever spent a little more than a month in each other's presence became apparent—especially given the consequences of the stroke. We were “different people.” Neither of us seemed upset about this. It was the way things had unfolded.

But stubbornness was something she and I had in common, so we made plans to meet in Chicago, where my college roommate lived and where I would occasionally visit. We chose the dates months in advance, before I knew anything about my mother's illness. But now she was sick, or we feared so—she'd been released from the hospital where they'd performed the biopsy, but we hadn't yet gone to see the oncologist about the results. The approaching weekend with Eleanor took on ominous overtones. I made sure before the biopsy that my mother was still okay with my going. She said, “Don't be silly.”

When I came into town on the Thursday before I left, I heard her hysterically laughing as soon as I walked in the front door. It was the middle of the day and the sun was shining. She was sitting up in the hospital bed watching the TV, and the uniformed sitter was knitting obliviously in a recliner opposite her. On the screen was one of the first commercials for Progressive Insurance, the ads in which the supposed customers stand on the white floor of a mock showroom with a white background. A jaunty, apron-wearing actress was leading the group around to the different policies and trying to be clever. The setting gave the whole thing an ethereal, idea-of-heaven feel, but the humor played to the lowest common denominator—it played on the premise that everyone was ignorant except for you and Progressive—and wasn't even funny for that. My mother had tears in her eyes.

“Have you seen this?” she said.

As I was leaving to go to the airport the next day, when I went in to tell her bye, she said, “Where are you going?” My automatic thought was to wonder if her brain had been affected as well, then to remind myself how much had been on her mind recently.

“Chicago,” I said. “Remember? It's just for the weekend.”

She looked scared. “You're not really going, are you?”

I told her it was too late to change my plans, though we both knew it wasn't. I then said that Eleanor had made dinner reservations for us, as if those, too, would be binding. Finally, I said, “Mom, please don't do this to me.”

The last bit of resilience seemed to leave her. I'd beaten her, but suddenly I wasn't sure I shouldn't have let her win.

“Do you really want me to stay here?” I said.

With a crinkled nose, she just shook her head.

I knew as soon as Eleanor got to my roommate's apartment to pick me up that whatever had been between us wasn't there anymore. She knew it, too, and I could tell by the way she hurriedly began talking, asking my roommate questions without waiting for the answers, that she had expected me to look more like I'd used to (and my letters had apparently led her to believe). She was trying not to betray her disappointment. She didn't look identical to seventeen years before, either—she was skinnier (from running, she said), and more angular—but the change in my appearance was a lot more drastic. Living alone and rarely seeing people who hadn't seen me in a while, I could become unaware that I'd once looked different. I didn't feel different.

Throughout our uneventful meal and then at a local coffee shop afterward, we both seemed to be trying to make the present and the past cohere. But they were just too distinct. A few inconsequential confidences were shared, but I think we both knew that this was it. When we said goodbye, I kissed her cheek. At least I think I did. I'm sure I did. We promised to stay in touch, and kept it up for a while, but in a way you could tell was going to fade.

When I got back home that Sunday, my mother was a different person. I noticed it in how she dealt with the on-call nurse. Whereas before, when the woman had first shown up, my mother had uneasily laughed about it, saying probably she wouldn't need too much help, now the assistance was necessary. My mother was in pain.

That night, I got into a physical confrontation with my sister, who to my mind was acting like a newly appointed matriarch, addressing me as if I were her son. Having learned from my mother, she treated the whole thing like a performance, and now she had the lead. I told her that she was a terrible sister, and she slapped me in the face. The sitter called Will to come break us up. We hadn't even been to see the oncologist yet, and already the end seemed near.