You Take It From Here (29 page)

I
must’ve woken Smidge close to fifteen times to make her walk around the airplane during those flights home. The doctor told me of her elevated risk of blood clots, and I wasn’t taking any chances. I could just hear the gossip in Ogden if something happened.

Smidge was fine until she went to California. Then Danny brought her body back dead with a tattoo.

Smidge engaged in a gentle form of calisthenics at the front of the plane, chatting up the flight attendants until she came back with a plate of warm chocolate chip cookies.

“They’re real nice ladies,” Smidge said. “They’re also bringing over some champagne. I think they’re being all Make-A-Wish.”

“They kinda are.” I stared at the foundation-caked lump on her forehead and wondered for how much longer we were going to keep her secret.

Smidge told me about the weeks leading up to finding out about the cancer’s return. She’d been under a lot of stress, and almost ended up in the hospital with pneumonia, which
settled into a cough she couldn’t shake. At the time she’d been hoping to run a marathon with a couple of her friends from down the street, but when she could no longer keep up with them after mile eight, she knew something was more serious. She went to her doctor, who confirmed her deepest fear. Her cancer was no longer in remission, and it had metastasized. Maybe a year, maybe less.

“I didn’t tell anyone for a while. When I went to see you that last time I already knew. I didn’t want to pile on to your divorce sadness, but I was also in a panic, Danny. I thought maybe if I never mentioned it to anybody, it would go away. I went crazy not telling Henry, since I saw him every day and he knows when something’s bothering me, but the hardest was keeping it from you. It felt like I’d started cheating on you, having an affair with my disease.”

I thought about telling her right then about Tucker, how I’d been doing the same kind of hiding. But I didn’t want to risk a new fight. I wrapped an arm around her and pulled her toward me. I kissed the top of her head, resting my face in her hair. “Hey, I’m sorry we never got on that cruise ship.”

She admitted, “I already did it with Jenny.”

I pulled back in surprise. “You did? When?”

“Right after the diagnosis. It was a tiny trip, just for a few days, right when she got out of school for the summer. I told her not to tell you.”

“She didn’t.”

She laughed. “I told her you’d be mad.”

“I wouldn’t! But I would’ve known something was up.”

“Exactly.”

“How was it?”

“How do you think? Trapped on a boat with a bunch of strangers and only one real place to eat. It was awful. And, Jenny can’t drink, so she was pretty useless.” Then she added, “I don’t really mean that. I’m the worst mother.”

“What do we do now?” I asked. “I mean, I know I’m in charge, but say that I wasn’t. What’s next?”

She studied her fingertips like she was debating getting a manicure. “Well,” she said. “
Palliative care.
That’s what we’re doing now. It means make sure I’m constantly happy until I’m dead.”

“Then you’ve been in palliative care pretty much since you were nine.”

“My birthday is coming up. Can I have a party?”

“Are you asking me for permission to do something?”

The overhead light dinged. The flight attendant informed us that we were prepping for our initial descent. Smidge nodded.

“Okay. Then I grant you permission to have a birthday party.”

She smiled, and that’s when I had that familiar rising in my stomach, the one that meant I’d been tricked again. “And guess what will happen when the party is over?” she asked casually, staring down at her seat-back button.

“Tell me,” I said, my tongue heavy with dread.

She sat up, fidgeted with her T-shirt, fluffed out her hair. She popped her knuckles at the middle joints, one at a time. “You ever searched ‘dying of lung cancer’ on YouTube?”

“No.”

“Nothing but a bunch of withering, gasping zombies praying for death. There’s no way I’m putting Henry and Jenny
through that. I can’t let that girl remember her mother that way. I’m going to die with a little dignity. Just as soon as everything’s in order, I’m going out like a rock star. And you’re going to help me.”

“You’re asking me to commit murder.”

She tossed that aside with a grunt. “Don’t be so dramatic. I’ll find a way to make sure you don’t get in trouble. But I like how you’re immediately making this all about you.”

“It’s not about getting in trouble. Morally—”

“Soooooo,”
she sang as she lifted the shade on her window to watch the landing. “I don’t think you get to have an opinion about this.”

“Of course I do,” I said to her back.

“You don’t.” She didn’t look at me when she said her next sentence, and that’s how I knew it was the most honest thing she’d ever say to me. “You skipped out on me last time, Danielle. You weren’t there. I’ve said nothing for years. I know you feel guilty, so here’s your punishment. This time it’s on you. You said you’re in control of my life now? Then you have to be the one to end it.”

I lurched forward to grab the paper bag from the seat back in front of me, flipping it open just in time before I threw up all over myself.

Smidge went back to studying her nails. “So dramatic.”

TWENTY-SIX

I
t seemed like everybody in Ogden had a secret they were keeping both with me and from one another. I felt like the center of a sticky web. Surely it was only a matter of time before something got caught in it, but I had no idea how I was going to react when that happened.

I felt like all of you were in denial. I kept assuming someone would ask, someone would say something,
someone
had to make the truth come out. But when nobody wants to know anything the truth stays hidden much longer than it deserves. I was desperate for one of you to turn to me and ask, “What exactly is going on?”

I knew Tucker had said something to Henry, because both of them were carefully avoiding me. Tucker wasn’t calling, and Henry would find an excuse to leave the room the second I entered it. I didn’t know what to say to either of them, but I felt like it was time to start preparing people.

There was a new sound in Smidge’s cough, a lurch right in the middle of her hacking that was followed by a quick sniff, a gasp. Her doctor gave her an oxygen tank, but she would sneak
away to use it, driving to the parking lot behind the library. She chose a place where Ogden’s homeless gathered, as it was the only spot she knew she wouldn’t run into anybody. But someone had to have seen her, if not in her backseat, pulling breaths from a plastic tube in her nose, then when she was hauling an oxygen tank out of the Ogden Medical Center. I bet she told people she was volunteering at a senior citizen home.

“I’m trying to get some morphine off the internet,” she told me. “And I wrote up a DNR.” Her voice was icy with decision. “Not long now.”

Something had shifted in Smidge since we got back. A hardening. She had a look I recognized from when she drank too much. She could get mouthy; a careless fearlessness would overtake her, ensuring she would piss off at least one person in the room. I knew she had the potential to be even more unpredictable.

“Henry isn’t happy to see you,” Smidge admitted.

“I bet not. He doesn’t know why I’m here. You need to tell him. You need to tell him first and then everyone else. It’s time, Smidge.”

She folded her arms as she stared at the floor. “You’re right,” she said. “I will do it right after the party. Let me get one last memory of everyone happy before they all start looking at me differently, okay?”

I decided to give her that one last request. A
last
last request. At the time, it didn’t seem to be an outrageous one. I also knew Smidge would find some comfort in the process of planning. Party prep always made her happy. She got adrenaline jolts from crossing things off a list. Any list. And this party had
lists.
The invitations, the decorations, the food.

Since she didn’t have the stamina to run these errands, she’d send me out to do the work. If I wasn’t heading toward Lavender’s Flowers and Stems ordering a massive delivery, I was at Brandy’s Baked Goodness making a deposit on a cake. Often I was on the phone with Smidge listening to her mentally process which runner would look best on the entryway table.

I faded out during a particular one-sided phone conversation as I watched dark clouds swirling overhead. The skies turned an ominous green color, making me wonder if I was about to become the center of a natural disaster. I knew if I returned to Smidge empty-handed, having to inform her that a tornado stole the helium tanks, she’d spin me right back out with her own funnel of energy.

A thunderclap so loud it sounded like someone had shot up my car interrupted whatever it was Smidge was saying.

“I am going to die!” I shouted into the phone.

“Not before you go get cupcake papers!” Smidge shouted back. “I need them pronto!”

The world overhead broke open as the storm hit. Sheets of rain pelted my car. It sounded like I was inside a popcorn maker. Visibility shot, I dropped the phone into my lap and slowly made my way to the side of the road.

I checked my e-mail, and was shocked by the number of requests and questions. Rainey must have put out some kind of call for new clients.

A mother who “desperately needed” me to help her solve a problem with her daughter biting other kids on the playground asked if I would e-mail her toddler a video request to behave. “She responds well to things she sees on the computer,” she had written.

Before I had a moment to second-guess myself, I wrote back, “I’m sorry. My best friend has terminal cancer and I am unable to attend to your request.”

Send.
I just did it, before I could stop myself.

Trembling, I pulled up another e-mail. This client was furious that I hadn’t called her florist to stop her weekly delivery. “You can tell me that I can’t afford it, but you can’t find the time to make it stop? You want me to humiliate myself by admitting to this flower-pusher that I can’t have nice things?”

I wrote back, “I’m sorry. My best friend has terminal cancer and I am unable to attend to your request.”

Send.

I went down the list, sending the same response to client after client, feeling nothing but the empty ache of freedom that comes with the truth. From food issues to construction woes, from the parents who felt pressure to have cloth diapers to the parents who felt pressure to tell their neighbors to have cloth diapers, I e-mailed each and every one, “I’m sorry. My best friend has terminal cancer and I am unable to attend to your request.”

This decision was final. I couldn’t do those things anymore. I didn’t want to. I didn’t care about them because my best friend had terminal cancer and I was unable to attend to their requests.

I’d never made a peanut butter sandwich without the crusts for a small child. I’d never carried a feverish baby to the hospital in the middle of the night, terrified that something was wrong. But I went on television with these opinions on homemaking and childraising like it was easy. I made money
off people who were feeling lost and helpless, and I never thought before about why people were willing to do that.

When you feel that helpless, that useless, you desperately want to find a right answer. I’d told married couples how to work out their sex lives when I knew next to nothing about the sexual history of either person. I had no training in therapy whatsoever, and yet at one point I felt qualified to create calendars for people with date nights and “sexy time.” I recommended lingerie and games. How bold I was, thinking I knew anything about the lives of strangers, as if coupons and chore wheels were all anybody needed to save their relationships. I sold a fantasy and even worse, I made it seem like any life could be had, if you just chose it.

Maybe it’s true I never asked for the job, that originally I was just trying to help a friend, but as my client list grew and people had more and more outrageous requests, I tried to fake it until I made it. I should’ve stopped when I knew I was bluffing. People just kept thanking me, and then referred me to their friends. Why could I do what Smidge did, but only if I was talking to people who weren’t really in my life? And why didn’t I ever see I was being exactly like her?

The culture I’d created for myself as someone who knew how to make hard things look easy was just that: an illusion.

I couldn’t fake it anymore. Real life was much harder than achieving perfection.

I pressed the button for my website app on my phone and began drawing up a new entry. It was an open letter to my clients, past and present. I let them know that I had a newfound respect for what they’d done to get this far with each other, how they stay together even though life gets scary and sad.
That while I appreciated our time together, and it’d been an honor coming into their homes, getting to know them, they had the power to fix themselves. They always did. They just forgot to trust it.