What We Leave Behind (31 page)

“You’ve always found a way to sabotage things, the good things.”

“How did I sabotage Jonas?”

“He was hardly a good thing.”

“And Marty was?”

“Marty
is
, and Marty’s
willing
, and Marty’s
capable
of giving you everything you’ve ever wanted. Just let him. Let him do it.”

“Whatever,” I said, brushing her off because I simply wanted the conversation to come to a close. My mother didn’t understand.

“
Whatever
is not going to put your life back together.”

“I love you, Mom,” I said. “I do.”

“I know,” she said. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do.” And we said good-bye, and I returned to Jared Thompson and his mother’s pain, so that I wouldn’t have to think about my own.

When you’re dealing with sickness, I learned, life as you once knew it is barely recognizable. Instead of doing the things you had done before like going to work, laughing, and sleeping, you find yourself in a trance, robotic-like. Each day blends into the next, a merging of the mundane: waking up, brushing your teeth, dressing in the dark, and seeing what you’ve become in the mirror. Sadly, a stranger stares back. Your hair isn’t combed. The lines under your eyes grow more defined. The clothes you put on are the same you wore the day before, and still you walk out the door and head toward the hospital. When you’re finished there, you head back home, and you remember that you haven’t eaten all day, and the mail has piled up, and the newspapers, and you get into bed to sleep and are awakened by dreams. You don’t know which are worse, the ones with your loved one sick or the ones that feel even more nightmarish, where they are well, and you awaken to the truth. I walked into New York Memorial after a two-day absence, tired and angry. I couldn’t recall if I’d brushed my teeth. I ran my tongue across them and reached for a Tic Tac.

“Jess, what happened to you?” asked Jonas when we ran into each other in the hallway. “You haven’t answered my calls.”

“I turned my phone off.” He did not need to know that I had cried myself to sleep the past few nights, dreaming of Jared Thompson, stifling the urge to call Mrs. Thompson with my condolences.

“I think I’ll take you up on that dinner invitation,” I finally said, reluctant to deal with the issues at home. “I want to talk to the Sammlers.” I had questions for them. “Can we grab something to eat after that?”

We agreed to meet outside Michelle’s room in an hour, but my visit upstairs was cut short when Jill Sammler grabbed hold of me in the hallway to tell me that her daughter had been having a bad couple of days. I saw through the door that the machines were pumping chemo into her veins.

“You look terrible,” she told me.

I said, “No worse than you,” and a laugh escaped us, drawing comfort from our shared unease.

I could see the black bags under her eyes, the deep worry that burrowed its way into her hollow cheeks. She was tired and going through everything that parents of sick children go through.

“I miss her,” she said. “The chemo’s exhausting her body. She’s either sleeping or throwing up.” I reminded her that there were machines pumping supplements into her, not just the life-saving toxin. I had seen the alternative. This was nothing compared to that.

“She’ll be back,” I said.

“We have to accept that one day she might not. Maybe these little absences are preparing me for that.”

I wanted to tell her that nothing ever prepares you, not for that, but I didn’t, because it was accepting an inevitability I didn’t want to think about.

“Be strong, Jill. Michelle needs that from you.”

“I’m trying, Jessica, I’m really trying.”

“I’m so sorry you have to go through this, really, I am.”

“She’s all I’ve got.”

Mr. Sammler approached with some people that could have been friends or relatives and steered his wife away. I could tell she wanted to stay and talk to me more. I liked her. It was improbable that we’d ever be friends, in the broader definition of the word, but I would have liked to have known my daughter’s mother. If friends were an option, I would have explained the reasons I had to give her up and then maybe she’d tell me why she couldn’t have kids, why they didn’t adopt more children, and what it was like the day they brought Michelle home.

“I’ll be back tomorrow,” I told her, and she thanked me in a way that reminded me I held the life of her child in my hands, and that I wasn’t wrong about her wanting to stay.

Jonas came up from behind me and started talking. We were standing there in the stale, sterile hallway while the hospital players in the drama called disease walked by. We were standing so close to one another, I could feel his breath on my cheek. He was saying something. His lips were moving. Did I smell toothpaste on his breath? I had to stop myself from reaching for that hair that fell in his face, hiding one of his eyes.

“Are you listening to me at all, Jessie?”

This time I looked up at him. I wasn’t.

The tone of his voice was what grabbed me, the familiar way he said my name,
Jessie
, firm, but forgiving, telling me his anger had passed. He heard it too, and the silence was laden with ambiguity.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

“Yes.”

I followed him down the hallway, watching his hunched-over shoulders, knowing better than to ask where we were going. We reached the elevator without uttering a word. When the secluded space filled with other passengers, we didn’t let on that we had once mattered to each other. We were strangers like everyone else on the elevator, which is a phenomenon that has always fascinated me. You think about the millions of people in the world and amid a crowded elevator of people, two souls can be standing side by side with this
thing
between them, this
I know what you look like with your clothes off
, and no one else knows. It’s your secret. And it happens every day, in office buildings and darkened movie theaters—there’s someone we were once connected to, and we pass like strangers, and no one could ever guess that we had once meant so much to one another. It was terrifying to me how life could go on without acknowledging what I had invested in, just masking what had once been the true love of my life.

I searched the eyes of the other passengers looking for an indication that one of them was on to us, some recognition, but there was none.

Only when we reached the lobby floor did Jonas address me, and it was to tell me to wait out front, that he would bring the car around and pick me up. I found myself wanting someone to have overheard the dialogue.
There
, I’d say,
see that? We’re not strangers
.

The cold air sidled up against me as I walked out the front door of the hospital. It was a refreshing change from the stagnant air of the building. Staring up at the stars in the sky, I found the biggest and the brightest, and quietly said a prayer.

He honked, on purpose, scaring the life out of me.

“You didn’t have to do that,” I said, settling into the car. He just laughed and pulled away from the hospital. Old habits urged me to look over my shoulder as I had years before, this air of mystery and discretion that followed us; but I resisted it, reminding myself that we were older now, different, changed, married, with children. There was nothing to hide from anymore.

“There’s a great restaurant right outside the city. Do you mind taking a ride?”

“That’s fine.”

He fiddled with the radio station until I grabbed the dials and found what I was looking for. “You still love your music,” he said.

“Uh huh.”

The barrier was there between us, even though neither of us could see it. I crossed my arms closer to my chest, prompting him to turn up the heat. I could have told him that I wasn’t cold, just protecting myself, but I was waiting for him to say something first. I didn’t want things to be like they’d been that summer, with me doing all the talking and Jonas filling in blanks with vague inconsistencies.

“Fill me in about your life,” he finally said.

“Besides this mess?”

“Besides this mess,” he repeated.

Phases of my life flashed in a fleeting montage. Was I supposed to sum that all up?

“We live in LA. Our son, Ari, is three.” I paused and then told him his father knew my husband. I didn’t tell him what Adam had done for me, how he carried me on his shoulders and led me to my husband and career, only to end up back where I started.

“I think I met Marty once, a long time ago,” he said. “Which did you end up in, film or music?”

“I’m a music supervisor. I’m the one that puts the music to the movies.”

“You get to do both. How lucky for you.”

“Lucky,” I said, “Now there’s a word I’ve never been.”

“I don’t get out to the movies very often these days. If I’m not in the hospital, I’m commuting back and forth to the hospital.”

“You’re missing out.”

“You’re probably very good at it.”

“I was, but I’ve taken some time off.”

He drove down 34th Street and parked in a lot adjacent to the water.

“The ferry’s here. We’ve got to hurry.”

“Where are we going?” I asked, as we ran across the street and boarded the small vessel, but he didn’t answer. Not until we reached the other side and he was guiding me through the doors of the restaurant did he finally say, “You’ll like it here.”

It was loud and noisy, packed with people and a piano player. From any window, there were dramatic views of the city.

“Dr. Levy, it’s so nice to see you,” said the hostess. “Will your wife be joining you tonight?”

“No, Marcella,” he said, stepping aside so she could see that I was there and I wasn’t his wife. “She’s back in Boston. Are there any seats at the bar? We can eat there.”

Marcella nodded and led us to two seats at the end of the bar. The bartender dropped two white napkins in front of us.  I immediately asked for a glass of white wine.

“Water for me,” he said, and then to me, “I have to go back to the hospital tonight,” as if he needed to explain.

“I’m sorry about the other day,” he continued.

“You had every right to be mad,” I said.

“You caught me off guard. I didn’t know how to react. Having a daughter all this time…it incensed me that I didn’t know about her.”

“I thought I was doing you a favor. I didn’t want to spoil your plans.”

“It was only a matter of time,” he said, gulping the water. “Maybe I will have a drink,” he said, calling the bartender over and ordering a glass of red wine. When it landed in front of him, he brought it to his mouth. “What’s the difference,” he asked, “messing my plans up then, messing my plans up now?” His elbows rested on the table. He seemed tired, apprehensive. “We’re ready to order,” he called out to the server who walked by.  I hadn’t even picked up the menu.

Reading through the entrees, he stared at me until I told the man what I wanted.

“I’m glad you agreed to meet me,” he said. “I thought I had forgotten how much I could miss you.” Then he finished the wine in one last swig while I reached for the basket of bread to help absorb what he was saying. “Jessie Parker. It seems like yesterday…”

“It was a long time ago,” I said. “Who even remembers?” He turned to me, to be sure I meant what I was saying; when he saw that I was, he let what he was about to say disappear into the air and reverted to a role he was accustomed to, the revered doctor.

“What’s the bottom line?” I asked.

“Like Mr. Sammler said, our best option is to consider having another child, a sibling for Michelle.”

“I was afraid you were going to say that.”

“If you want to maximize the possibilities for a match, she needs a full-blood relative.”

“I can’t,” I responded. “I won’t do it. It’s unethical. It’s immoral.”

He eyed my defiance with interest. “I agree with you, but it’s not a question of ethical. It’s how far are we willing to go to save Michelle?”

It was a proposition I hadn’t wanted to explore.

“Put away your moral compass for a minute,” he said. “There’s a gray area, and I think it’s worth looking into.”

“Moral compass?” I asked. “Fortunately, one of us has a moral compass.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“If the baby’s a match,” I said, ignoring his response, “and again, that’s a big if, what happens to him? Do you take him? Do I? Does he have a relationship with Michelle? Do we tell him why he was created, for what purpose? And what if we end up with twins? Or triplets? How exactly does it work?”

He sat stonefaced silent. I hadn’t even mentioned to him what I knew happened to kids after bone marrow transplants. Then he shook his head. “I don’t have all the answers.”

“You don’t even have one of them,” I snapped back, angrily. “You have a family. Have you thought about what it’s going to do to them?”

“It’s just me and Emily.”

My detective skills had not seen this coming. “No kids?”

The monosyllabic response was full of regret. “No.”

“Let me get this straight. You don’t have kids, and you claim to know how I feel or how Jill Sammler feels, or how you’re
going
to feel about a baby?”

He shuddered; he did. For one hurried moment, he dodged what probably felt like a bullet to his normally guarded exterior. Wanting to discuss anything other than the idea of our procreating, I honed in on this delicate subject.

“Did you forget to have them?” I asked.

“I love children,” he said.

“According to your plan, you should have had about three or four by now.”

He was getting angry. I was treading on thin ice, and I didn’t care.

“That’s none of your business.”

I laughed. “You want to have a child with me, but it’s not my business why you never had any of your own?”

It would have been much nicer to hear that he had never loved her and that he never had children with her because I had always been the one he wanted to practice being fruitful and multiplying with, but he didn’t. I couldn’t tell if I was saddened by that or relieved. Whether he couldn’t, or she couldn’t, or they couldn’t, wasn’t my concern, lest it were he couldn’t, but that was impossible. Jonas finally blurted out, “Emily didn’t want children,” and put an end to the string of questions