The Actor and the Housewife

by Shannon Hale

  Melissa knew the many secrets of the hospital routine, having seen her father through six years of chronic illness.

  “Don’t fight the hospital,” Melissa said. “Claim it as a second home. Own it.”

  She showed Becky the best and most often available parking spaces, and divulged the hours she could leave for lunch and still return to find a place. She introduced Becky to the volunteers at the information desk, and soon Becky knew not only their names but also the names of their grandchildren. Melissa took her on tours of the cafeteria, pointing out which foods to ingest and which avoid, and revealed a booth in the corner where one could go to have a private cry. Together they decorated Mike’s hospital room with relics from home and made alliances with the nurses. One invited Becky to her wedding.

  Four months later, the disease was taking a visible toll on Mike. It was frightening to see that big, strong man lose weight, lay so small on his side, curled up on the hospital bed, more of a question mark than a person. She stood in the hospital room, watching him as he slept, her arms folded. This wouldn’t end badly. She wouldn’t allow it. Strength and fierceness poured through her and she was sure she could wrestle a Herculean beast into submission, if only one would be so gracious as to terrorize the hospital.

  Mike’s cure wasn’t progressing. The doctor laid out new plans. They involved lots and lots of money.

  Becky had barely mentioned it before Felix arranged to pay for a cutting-edge treatment that their insurance wouldn’t cover, and Becky didn’t argue with him about the money. The plans were failing one by one, the fight was getting nebulous, her hands were feeling weak. It was starting to get difficult to think clearly. She felt haunted. This thing, this infected phantasm, was clinging to the family, whispering in their ears, making the whole house feel drafty and prone to collapse, their lives thin and chilly. With each sliding moment she realized more fully—she was living in a horror movie.

  Don’t go down those stairs, Becky! Don’t open that door!

  If only she knew which door was the one that would unleash the killer, she’d board it up for good. Instead every moment seemed to inch by as if a creepy soundtrack played in the background, the eerie kind of music that is designed to speed up your pulse, make your skin hurt in anticipation of attack.

  She took deep breaths. She fitted herself with more armor. She would not succumb. You hear that, foul cancer beast? I won’t give up my husband! You won’t take any of us!

  She kissed Mike a lot. She kissed the kids a lot. She made buckets of snickerdoodles.

  The night before they found out the results of the new treatment, their bishop (not Andy the car lot manager—a new one) and a neighbor came over in suit and tie to give Mike a blessing of healing. They anointed his head with olive oil, placed their hands on his head, and began the prayer. Mike had had several blessings so far, and Becky fully expected it to go like the others, full of lines like “We bless you that your body will heal and you will experience a complete recovery.”

  But as the bishop was speaking the prayer, he paused. He started to speak again then hesitated again, finally saying, “We bless you, Brother Jack, to feel your Savior close by you, preparing you to return home. We bless you that your pain will decrease, your mind will remain lucid, and you will be able to fully enjoy the time you have left with your family in this life.”

  Becky’s eyes opened. Take it back, she wanted to say. But she couldn’t get her mouth to work.

  The bishop’s eyes were wet. Mike was crying quietly, as was the neighbor. Becky didn’t cry. She felt dried-up, a fallen winter leaf ready to crack underfoot. After they finished the blessing, everyone was silent, motionless. Finally the bishop spoke.

  “I’m sorry. I wanted to bless you with remission, but I felt impressed to speak the words that I did. I think the Lord has other plans for you, Mike.”

  Mike nodded. He didn’t dare speak, Becky knew, for fear that he might sob. The kids were all there, staring, eyes wide, Polly’s chin trembling. Becky cursed herself. She should have hidden them away, plugged their ears, spared them from this tragedy. From all tragedy. Or maybe not? Maybe they needed to hear it all to be prepared, hear the “I’ve got some bad news” parts before the bad news really struck?

  It was going to strike. Becky felt that now, prowling on the edges of her forced calm.

  After the bishop and neighbor left, the six Jacks sat in the family room. Even Sam, the youngest at age eight, seemed fully aware of what had just happened. A stunned, icy silence vibrated around them, as if the air were frozen solid and shaking under the blows of a hammer. The kids kept glancing at their mother, waiting for her to speak the comforting words, make it all better. Where was she going to get those words? She took a deep breath, hoping that they rested deep within her, that if she just started to speak, somehow the tiny grains of hope still left inside would multiple into loaves of brilliant comfort that would feed the entire family.

  Mike spoke first. “It’s all right. It doesn’t matter. Whether I’m going to experience a miracle and be completely healed, whether I’ll get sicker before I get better, or whether I’ll die—it’s out of our hands. We don’t have to worry about it. What ever happens will happen, and it won’t change the fact that we’ve got the best family in the world, and we’ll be a family forever. So what that it stinks? We’ve been through stinky times before. Remember that summer Hyrum had the foot fungus?”

  Sam and Hyrum chuckled.

  “Talk about a stinkfest,” Fiona said.

  “I used to wipe my feet all over your pillow,” Hyrum said, between maniacal giggles.

  “You did? That’s gross! Mom, did you hear that?”

  The next day at the doctor’s, they heard the news—the cancer had spread to his liver, his lungs. There was no more treating the disease at this point, only the symptoms.

  “Time,” Becky said. “I want to know how much time.”

  The doctor sucked in his breath. He was considerably less spunky than usual. The potted plant behind him was drooping. The whole world felt sluggish, malaised.

  “It’s hard to say . . .”

  “Say,” Becky insisted. She’d supplied him with a steady stream of snickerdoodles over the past months—that should buy her one sentence of truth.

  The doctor pressed his lips together. “Weeks. If you would take my advice, Mike, live them. Live each one.”

  “What do you want most of all?” Becky asked that night, curled up beside him in bed.

  Mike’s face was tired, but his jaw didn’t clench. There was some peace to be had in knowing that he didn’t have to fight anymore. “Just the family. Let’s get away, the six of us, somewhere quiet and beautiful, somewhere we can be alone together.”

  Mike’s parents’ cabin was too far away. Thinking was becoming hard for Becky. Since the unhappy blessing, she couldn’t arrange a bouquet of flowers let alone a family vacation. In all her life, she’d never met a challenge that had stripped her of all confidence and left her feeling so small and useless. It was time to crack and ask for help.

  She had her parents and Mike’s parents, her siblings, Mike’s siblings, a combined total extended family of 126 people, besides friends, neighbors, ward members, all begging for ways to help, all waiting for her call.

  She called Felix.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “Mike doesn’t have long. I need—”

  “Anything.”

  “I need to take the family away. Where we can be alone. People are constantly calling and coming by and the kids can’t relax and just be with their father. We need to get out of this house, but we can’t be more than an hour from the hospital. I can’t think, I can’t—”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  “I don’t want to bother you, but Mike, all he wants is to be with the family someplace quiet and . . . and beautiful . . .” Her voice broke.

  “Did you hear me? I said I’ll take care of it. If you waste your time worrying about it for another seco
nd, I’ll fly out there just to paddle your bum.”

  She sighed in relief. Felix would take care of it.

  Four days later the family took possession of a house on a mountain lake twenty minutes from the hospital. They found the fridge and pantry fully stocked, fresh sheets on the beds, flowers on every table, stacks of board games in the living room, a six-person boat waiting on their private dock. Nothing cumbersome or unnecessary, like televisions or computers or neighbors. A nurse checked in on Mike every afternoon, but otherwise they were alone. It was quiet and beautiful, and afterward Becky supposed it was among the most blissful weeks of their lives.

  They boated. They ate. They played games and laughed. Mike couldn’t sit on the sofa without at least one child snuggling up next to him. And at night, he held Becky in bed, held on to her as if she were a buoy in a tossing lake. His most casual touch was hot with significance. Each word he said, each expression, she fought to keep with her as if remembering them meant saving the world.

  “You’re memorizing what I’m saying,” he accused her one night.

  “I am not.”

  “Every word I say. You get that look of concentration, then later when you think I’m asleep, you go scritch scratch in your journal.”

  “I do not! I mean, I’m just recording thoughts, I don’t remember every—”

  “Poo.”

  “What?”

  “Poo. I’m saying poo. Poop. Poopy poop. Poo everywhere. Poo on your head, poo between your toes, poopy poopy poo.”

  She started to laugh, and that laugh broke into another laugh, and she stuffed her face into her pillow to keep laughing without waking the kids, and soon he was laughing, quietly, in that tight way he did to keep from being in pain. She put her arms around his neck.

  “You’re right. And I’m going to remember every word.”

  “Mmhmm, that was the plan.” He kissed her forehead.

  “What’s the difference between poo and poop anyway?”

  “Poo is what goes in the toilet; poop is what you find on your front lawn.”

  “So is poo determined purely by its maker, or does it refer to its semiaquatic state?”

  “Uh . . . all I got is poo. You’ll have to ask Felix about the details.”

  “He is the poomeister.”

  “Is he?”

  “Naw, I just liked the way it sounded.”

  They lay there, foreheads touching, staring at each other’s eyes. It was enchanting to see what the dark and the closeness revealed about Mike’s eyes, how the familiar became strange, alien even. And beautiful too. So complex. Rings and marks and colors, roundness and flatness and intricacy. Eyes were the most amazing things in all creation, she thought. Mike’s eyes especially.

  “Bec,” he whispered after a time, breaking her transcendent contemplations about eyes, “when I’m gone, it’s okay for you to fall in love—”

  “Don’t—”

  “I want you to hear this now and remember every word and go scritch scratch in your journal. You’re forty-four years old—that’s only half your life. If you have the chance to fall in love again, I want you to take it. If you find someone who could be a good surrogate father to the kids, don’t turn that down. I’m giving you permission.”

  “I don’t want—”

  “Well, I’m giving it anyway.”

  He stroked her hair. She let him. She wasn’t going to argue. If he needed to believe that she could move on, so be it. But she knew her own heart. And there was no possible chance.

  She’d met her Unattainable Crush (Felix) and had the opportunity to fall romantically in love with him. How many people get that chance? Their number-one choice, their sigh-and-dream fantasy man, their tiptop unreachable ideal? He’d asked to kiss her, and she’d laughed. It had been unthinkable, unintelligible, unimaginable that she would ever choose Felix over Mike. So if her fantasy man fell so far short when compared with her husband, how could there be anyone else even remotely adequate?

  No, Mike was all she’d ever want. The memory of him would be enough to sustain her in a desert. She had bonded with him, merged into one, half of her contained within him. That couldn’t happen twice in a life. And besides, he was still very real, very warm and near, and she breathed in his smell and pulled him in tighter.

  They’d been lying like that, foreheads pressed together, his hand on her hair, her arms around his neck, for minutes or hours. Maybe they’d both fallen asleep for a time and woken again. Even after that long space of silence, their conversation still hung about them, like spiderwebs dangling from the trees, tickling her face, reminding her that there were creeping things about.

  “I love you,” she said, meaning, only you, only ever you.

  He said, “You want to argue with me still. I can tell. What are you holding back?”

  She grumbled.

  “What?”

  “You said I was forty-four. I’m forty-three.”

  That made him want to kiss her. And he did, until they both fell asleep.

  Becky didn’t argue with him about the future. And he didn’t need to bring it up again—just as he suspected, she did remember every word. There was no need to squabble. They just tried to live each moment perfectly.

  The paradise in limbo lasted exactly three weeks. Then overnight, Mike worsened. They sped away from the cabin on the quiet lake and back into the valley, back into the white hospital room with constant watching and things that beeped. Two days later he died in the night while she slept beside him, holding his hand.

  Untitled

  The family had been prepared. Not that it mattered. There’s never enough preparation. There’s always the last-minute miracle, after all—God’s unexpected hand, an experimental cure, Superman zooming to catch the meteor and hurl it back into space. Becky considered that the difference between sudden and anticipated death was more time to hope for the miracle that wouldn’t come.

  “I miss Daddy,” Sam said, as he curled up tight in his bed, his forehead to his knees. Becky’s insides were sliced by those words. She lay beside him as he fell asleep, her belly against his back, her arm over him, tucking his hands into hers.

  She couldn’t talk to her kids without touching them, holding their hands, petting their hair, rubbing their backs. She had an instinctive need to feel them, hold them, almost afraid that if she wasn’t tangibly aware of their presence, they would cease to exist. Sam needed the touch, Hyrum tolerated it, Polly melted into it, and Fiona gave it in return.

  Of all the kids, Becky worried most about Hyrum because of his silence. The others talked to her and to each other, could say words like “I miss” or “I’m sad” or “Why?” and “What now?” But Hyrum rolled up and shut off .

  “Hey, sweetie.”

  “Hi.”

  “We’re going to Uncle Greg’s for dinner. They got a new Play-Station and Aunt Carolyn is making that chicken casserole with the potato chips on top.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Honey, we’re—”

  “No thanks.”

  There was no time for Becky to grieve. She was grieving for her kids, she was praying and working for the kids, her heart beating for Hyrum. And for the first week, she was a rock. Family was everywhere; she never had a chance to be alone and think.

  Melissa made herself present, doing a fine impression of a bulldog whenever she thought people were bugging Becky too much. Neighbors came by to deliver meals and flowers, but if they lingered, Melissa was on her feet and walking them to the door.

  “They need to learn—they’re here to give, not to get,” Melissa said as she locked the door.

  Diana drugged her sister at night to make her sleep, alternating various sleep medications so that “you won’t get addicted.” And in the daytime there was the funeral to arrange and Mike’s life insurance and pension and the bills and the kids. The kids, the kids. And writing countless thank-you cards for all the dinners and flowers. It hardly seems fair that she should be expected to fulfill that ta
sk at such a time, does it? But she did. She never even considered letting it slide.

  Felix was there for the funeral. When he came through the front door, she toddled to him, and he swept her up and held her for a long time. She didn’t cry. She just let herself be held. It was the most relaxed she’d been all week. Usually she was the one holding others. Melissa was right in a way—when the neighbors and friends came to offer condolences and hugs, they really wanted something from her. They needed to feel that they were helping somehow, making her feel better, and so asking for their own comfort. She was constantly giving her energy over until it was peeled away layer from layer. Sometimes, she felt like raw bone.

  Except with Felix. He just held her.

  But soon she was pulled back into family and food and planning, and he was swept into the corner. She barely spoke to him, and he didn’t insist himself on her. Sometimes he sat on the couch and sang with Polly or read books with Sam. Once she looked out the kitchen window and saw him kicking a ball around with Hyrum. That sight gave her heart a happy spark.

  She wasn’t sure when Felix left Utah, but a few days after the funeral, a landscaping service showed up to weed and mow the lawn, saying they’d been paid in advance for the next two years. They also planted perennials in ecstatic colors. Nice mute fall colors would’ve been appropriate for September, but her yard was roiling with bright pink, yellow, and orange. The landscaper left a card that read, “In lieu of flowers. Call for ANY reason. FC.”

  Postfuneral, things were calming down, visitors slowing, the house emptying, the scores of bouquets on every table or countertop in the house wilting at once as if on cue, the air thick with a sticky sweet miasma of decay. Polly, who had seemed okay for a couple of days, splintered suddenly and wept through dinner over her bowl of minestrone soup.

  “Can you put it into words?” Becky asked. “Are you angry, are you in pain? Confused or heartbroken, exhausted or sick to your stomach? It helps to stick words on it.”

  “There’s a pain here,” she pointed to her chest, “like I’m on my back and a boulder is pinning me down.”