Before I Go (14 page)

Everything about my Monday morning is like that still-standing house.

I watch Jack shove his legs one at a time into his green scrub pants.

He eats Froot Loops; I make a smoothie.

He kisses my cheek good-bye.

I dutifully drive to campus in my Hyundai Sonata.

A tornado has ravaged my life, but everything around me—from the throngs of students loping to class to the sturdy brick buildings rooted to the ground—remains untouched. Everything is different, but nothing has changed. This paradox flummoxes me.

I walk into Gender Studies and head toward my usual seat in the front, but at the last second I turn and walk toward the back of the class, sliding into a desk in the last row, if only to prove to myself that not everything is the same.

“Good morning!” Dr. Walden chirps as she enters the door, clutching a travel mug of coffee with her right hand, a manila folder bursting with papers stuffed under her armpit. A few students respond with mumbled greetings.

She deposits her belongings on the old wooden teacher’s desk at
the front of the room and straightens her tiny frame. Her eyes scan the class and light on me. If she’s surprised to see me—or at my change in seating—she doesn’t show it. “Welcome back, Richmond,” she says, with a smile. “See me after class to schedule your makeup exam.” She moves toward the desk and picks up the thick folder that she just set down. “As for the rest of you, I’ve finished grading the tests—and let’s just say some of you are lucky we’re on a bell curve. You can come get them at the end of class.” She sets the folder back down with a thud. “OK, let’s talk about Julia Kristeva. Who can tell me about her?”

This is the point in class that I would typically raise my hand or open my laptop to studiously take notes, but the tornado has changed everything. Now, even though class and Dr. Walden are the same, I’m different. And how can she just be casually discussing the theories of a Bulgarian feminist philosopher as if I’m not sitting in the back of the classroom actively dying?

My eyes burn. What am I doing here? Why did I promise Jack I’d come back to class, resume playback in my life as if nothing had changed? I take a deep breath and scan the room, taking in the backs of women’s heads (there’s only one guy in the class, a lone crew cut in a sea of curls, messy buns, and Beyoncé-like weaves) and wondering how many people would notice if I just slipped out the door.

But where would I go? What would I do?

My heartbeat revs and my hands are shaking like they did the first time I took the car out by myself at sixteen and narrowly missed being flattened by a semitrailer while merging onto the highway, swerving at the last second and slamming the brake with both feet, screeching to a halt in the emergency lane. The desk/chair combo I’m sitting in suddenly feels constrictive. Why does the chair need to be attached to the wooden tray? It strikes me as some Communist one-size-fits-all design, and I desperately want to saw through the metal pole that joins the two pieces and push the chair back to allow for more breathing room.

I’m like an eighteen-year-old boy breaking up with a girl for the first time: I need space.

Dizzy, I stand up, forcing the metal pegs on my chair to scrape the linoleum, emitting a short high-pitched squeak into the air. A few heads turn. Dr. Walden frowns at me but continues her lecture. I glance at the door again, but my feet are glued to the floor.

I sit back down.

Tears spring to my eyes and I’m furious at Jack. For pushing me to go to class. For wanting everything to go back to normal, when everything is
not normal
.

There was a tornado!
I want to shout. To tell the back of everyone’s heads, to slow their typing fingers and quiet their glowing computer screens.
Didn’t you see the tornado?

I reach down into my shoulder bag on the floor, blindly groping for my cell phone. I need to text Jack. To tell him I can’t do this. I can’t just pretend that nothing has changed.

And then I stop.

Jack.

Who’s only back at clinic because
I
pushed
him
to go. Because he has to graduate. Because he has to keep living.

Even after I’m gone.

I slip my phone back into the pocket of my bag and straighten my spine.

Jack.

Who can’t scratch the middle of his back. Or remember to eat dinner.

Jack.

Who doesn’t separate whites and colors. And leaves half-drunk coffee cups on floors and bathroom counters.

I pull my laptop out of my bag and open it on top of my Communist desk. I open a Word document and stare at the cursor blinking on the white page. A slew of adjectives fill my head: kind, funny, smart,
thoughtful—but those are a given. You never ask somebody what they’re looking for in a partner and they say “dumb and uncaring.”

So I dismiss the obvious and settle on the first couple of characteristics that are a must for Jack’s new wife.

1 Organized

2 Likes to cook

3 Loves animals

I ponder the third one for a minute and then add the word “all,” especially the ones people usually don’t love, like rodents, because Jack often comes home with lab rats and mice—and one time even a snake—after his colleagues are done conducting experiments with them. That’s how we got Gertie.

While I read over the short phrases I’ve tapped out, I exhale a long stream of air from my lungs.

My heartbeat slows.

My hands unclench.

Lists always make me feel better.

march

eight

I
’M ORANGE.

As in, the color of an Oompa Loompa.

I stare at my skin in the mirror and my face stares back at me with a look that’s a cross between horror and keen curiosity. Like I’m witnessing a science experiment that’s gone badly awry.

Last night when I went to bed, I was a normal shade of pink.

Now . . . now. I run the pads of my fingers over my cheeks. Gently at first, and then harsher, scrubbing the skin with my nails, as if I can rub this strange color off and return it to normal.

I wonder if Jack noticed it when he was fumbling around in our shadowy bedroom this morning looking for his keys and trying not to wake me. But then, that’s probably something that’s worthy of waking someone up to tell them. “Psst. You are orange.”

I run into the kitchen and grab my phone off the counter to call him, but I hesitate when I see the time: 9:06. Jack’s in surgery this morning to help remove a spoon from an overeager rottweiler’s stomach—the first big procedure Ling is letting him scrub in on since he went back to clinic two weeks ago—and I don’t want to bother him.

So instead, I scroll to Dr. Saunders’ name and wonder how many other people have a radiation oncologist’s cell number on their speed
dial. He gave it to me right before Jack and I left his office. “Call if you need anything,” he said, his eyebrows thick with sympathy. “Really. Anything.” Most people would probably be comforted in the knowledge that their doctor is at their disposal twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. All it did was remind me how dire my condition was.

But now I’m glad to have it.

He answers on the third ring.

“Dr. Saunders,” I say. “It’s Daisy. Richmond.”

“Daisy. What can I help you with?”

“Well, um,” I stutter, not sure what to say. “I woke up this morning and my skin is—it’s not right. I look kind of . . . orange.”

It sounds ridiculous to say it out loud, and I wonder if I’m exaggerating. Maybe it’s not as bad as I thought, or maybe I’m just not fully awake. I walk back into my bathroom, cradling the phone to my ear and stare into the mirror. I blink back at myself. Once. Twice.

Yep. I am definitely orange.

“Mm-hmm. I see.” He clears his throat. “Sounds like jaundice. The met in your liver has probably blocked a bile duct.”

“OK,” I say, as if this is a perfectly reasonable explanation, but I have no idea what a bile duct is or what happens when it’s blocked. Except, apparently, you turn orange.

“Any itching?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Your skin, does it itch?”

“No,” I say, and then my hand travels to my right arm. “Well, my scar, sometimes.” I’m not following the significance of this line of questioning.

“Good,” he says. “Where are you with the clinical trial? Have you gotten your workup yet?”

“Yes,” I say, flashing back to last week when I drove down to Emory and met Dr. Rankoff for what she called my “screening visit,”
which was just a fancy term for another MRI, CT scan, and getting poked and prodded with a thousand needles and metal instruments. My mom came with me, but only after I made her promise she would leave the room anytime she felt like crying. She did surprisingly well. So well that at one point I felt myself wanting to scream, “Mom! I’m dying! Why are you acting so calm?”

“When will you start the medication?”

“Dr. Rankoff said if I’m a good candidate, I could begin next Friday.”

“A week from today?”

I nod. “Yes.”

“OK, I’ll check with her, but I think getting a stent won’t preclude you from the study.”

“A stent?”

“Sorry, a plastic tube inserted in the duct to open it up. I can set you up with a gastroenterologist next week. It’s a quick procedure and it’ll relieve your jaundice.”

Next week. Which means I will remain orange for the foreseeable future, which includes Jack’s annual spring awards banquet for the veterinary school.

Tonight.

My head is spinning.

I could stay home from the banquet. Of course I could. Except I can’t.

Jack’s new wife could be there.

OPPOSITES DON’T ATTRACT. The notion that they do is one of those culturally imbedded ideas that’s actually not true at all, like the old wives’ tale that going to bed with wet hair will bring on a cold. I know this because for the past two weeks I’ve been poring over my
back issues of
Psychology Today
and
Journal of Social and Personal Relationships,
studying what makes a marriage work. It would have been faster to go on the Web and type “marriage” into the search engine on livescience.com, but it felt like cheating. Too easy. I’m searching for a life partner, not a pair of shoes. It deserves a marked effort.

On my breaks from thumbing through the monthly tomes and squinting at the black print, I’ve been haphazardly going to class—partly because I promised Jack I would, but mostly because there are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of available women on campus at any given moment. I’ve begun to feel like an anthropologist, studying their actions, trying to attach meaning to them. Reapplying a dark burgundy lipstick to your pout while waiting for the bus—high maintenance. Checking your smart phone every three minutes—clingy, desperate. Wearing flannel pajama pants to class—too immature. Wearing heels to class—too much. I assign faults and pass judgments as if I’m a Manhattan prep school queen bee, deciding who to let in my clique with the point of a finger and flick of my hair.

After days of studying women in the flesh, at night I’d dig back into my stacks of journals, trying to get into their brains and discover what makes someone a good mate, what the defining characteristics of long-term healthy couplings are.

Turns out, my near-master’s in psychology isn’t useless after all. Though I do wonder if I should have been more proactive in this research before Jack and I said “I do.” In the eyes of science, we’re not a picture-perfect duo. For instance, according to a study by Florida State University, fighting makes for a happy marriage. It’s unhealthy for couples to internalize their anger, the researchers concluded—which is really all that Jack does. Getting him to talk about his feelings is like trying to make it rain on a cloudless day.

But dwelling on Jack’s shortcomings wasn’t going to get me any closer to finding him a wife, so I tucked that nugget of info into the
far back of my brain and added to my growing list of qualities Jack’s wife should possess. Number twenty-four? Someone who has similar personality characteristics to Jack, because studies show that people who are alike have lower divorce rates. I need a nerd. One who’s logical, even-keeled, and looks before she leaps. And where better to find someone who’s like Jack than at his veterinary school? All those cerebral, doctors-to-be gathered in one place.

I look over my list one last time and close my laptop. Then I stretch my neck and slip my feet into a pair of red heels. I’m hoping the pop of color in contrast with my black dress will attract people’s attention downward—away from my carroty skin.

I hear the screen door in the kitchen creak open, then slam shut, and Benny goes scurrying out of the room to greet Jack. Gertie chimes in with her own squeaky salutation.

Seconds later, Jack fills the door frame of our bedroom and stops.

“Beautiful,” he says, almost under his breath.

I look up at him, ignoring his mandatory compliment, and meet his gaze. It took me a few days to get used to the new intensity with which Jack’s been looking at me. As if he’s memorizing every detail of my face and filing it away for later. Later is, I realize, when he won’t be able to see it anymore, but neither one of us has given voice to that inevitable future.