So life is changing, and I know it won’t be changing back. That’s the bastard of IPF—every time I lose a little lung function to the scars and fibers, it’s permanent. It sucks, but I don’t have time to waste feeling bitter. God! That’s the last thing I want to feel. Whenever I get scared, I just look at Josh, or think about how lucky I am that we found each other. Sappy, isn’t it? And you know what he thinks, Dad? He thinks he’s the lucky one. He really does. He adores me. He loves, honors and cherishes me, just like he promised on our wedding day.
Well, I should go. I love you, Dad. Watch over me, okay? I’m glad you’re there. It’s not that I didn’t love Gangy and Pop-Pop and Grammy and Gramps (please tell them hello from me). It’s just that you’re my dad, and I know you’ll be there for me when the time comes.
Love,
Lauren
Pebbles had learned to fetch the remote, the genius. If Lauren was on the couch, Pebbles was there, too, a ball of silken brown-and-white fur curled up right on Lauren’s perpetually cold feet. “What did we do before we had this dog?” Lauren asked Josh.
“You mean back when I was the love of your life,” he said, grinning as he cooked.
“Were you, though? Or was I just waiting for Pebbles?” she said, and he laughed. Getting him to laugh was akin to medaling in the Olympics, Lauren thought as she stroked Pebbles’s head. His kind of intellect didn’t have a lot of room for humor, so his laughter . . . the occasional joke, it meant the world. “Right, Pebbles?” she whispered. “You’ll need to brush up on your wisecracking, missy.”
“Before we eat,” he said, turning off the stove, “I got you a present.”
“Hooray! Is it a horse?”
“Um . . . no. But it’s really fun, and actually, you can ride it.”
She waited as he went into his study. A second later, he came out, pushing a . . .
A mobility scooter.
Her throat immediately clamped shut. Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry, she told herself, but her fists were clenched. She wasn’t supposed to need that! She wasn’t even thirty! He should’ve gotten her a damn horse. Or a motorcycle.
He was smiling, but she could see the echo of sadness in his dark eyes. He knew it was an awful present.
And he knew she needed it.
It was fine. It was smart. They could do more because of it.
So she flashed Josh a big smile, and after a second, it became genuine. “That is one damn sexy scooter,” she said.
“Please tell me you’ll wear leather when you use it.”
“Of course! Red leather, I think.” She got off the couch and walked around it. Unsurprisingly, it was top of the line and, for a mobility scooter, as sleek as it could be, looking almost like a motorcycle from the front. Which Josh would know would help with the indignity aspect. A surge of love for her husband brought tears to her eyes—and these tears, she would allow. She kissed Josh’s neck, then hugged him. “I love it. I’m calling it Godzilla. Every bike needs a name. Come on, let’s break it in.”
She climbed on it, hit the forward button, then laughed as it lurched. Pebbles leaped and barked, and Lauren turned in a tight circle. “Whee! This is fun, honey! Come on, you try it.”
He did. He went down the hall, tried to do a K-turn, got stuck, and the two of them laughed till it hurt.
From then on, it was a little easier to take walks and be outside. The reality of needing a scooter was outweighed by the ease of getting around. Sarah came over one night and bedazzled the back of the seat with hearts and gave her an air horn to scare the bejesus out of inconsiderate pedestrians.
Lauren and Josh combed through Providence for places with good paths—Blackstone Boulevard’s gravel paths, the Botanical Center at Roger Williams Park, India Point Park, or Providence College’s pretty campus. Being outside made Lauren feel less like an invalid, even if she was sucking oxygen and riding a scooter. She’d always loved the cold air (which was also easier to breathe). Godzilla let her spend more time outside, so it was a win. She loved going as fast as possible, then circling back to herd Josh or Jen and the kids, telling them to hurry up. Sebastian loved riding on her lap, and really, why had Lauren ever thought a scooter was an admission of defeat? Godzilla let her be even cooler in the eyes of her nephew, and that was everything.
One evening, with Lauren bundled in a pink wool coat, scarf, hat and mittens, they walked/rolled down Blackstone Boulevard, admiring the gorgeous houses and Christmas decorations. A familiar figure came running at them, blond ponytail swinging. “Sarah!” Lauren cried. “Hey, you!”
“Hey!” Sarah stopped. “How’s it going?”
“Great! You look very fit!” Sarah looked like Catwoman, dressed in tight all-black running clothes.
Sarah smiled. “How’s Godzilla?”
“Awesome. Want a turn?”
“Yes!”
Lauren climbed off and took her portable oxygen out of Godzilla’s basket. “Go for it. I’d love to walk for a little while.”
“See you later, losers!” Sarah said, and she waved and went full speed ahead. “This is awesome!” she yelled over her shoulder.
“Now we can walk like normal people,” Lauren said, taking Josh’s hand.
“Normal people are overrated,” he said. “But this is great.”
It had been a while since they’d held hands and meandered for no reason. The loveliness of the fall evening settled around them, the smell of wood smoke and crisp leaves, a hint of cold in the air.
“I love this house,” Josh said, stopping in front of a sprawling Victorian. The lights were on inside, and the yard was tastefully decorated for the holidays, strands of white fairy lights meticulously twined around a few trees. It looked like a Christmas card, so cozy and posh and welcoming. Lauren suspected her husband had stopped to give her a rest, and she was grateful. Slow and easy, slow and easy, fill those lungs as much as you can.
“What kind of house should we get?” she asked.
“Something like this would be nice.”
“In the city, though?”
“Wherever you want, honey.”
The thought that she wouldn’t live long enough to pick out a house flitted through her mind, as fast as a hummingbird, here and gone. “I do like this one,” she said. “Or the brick one up here. Very impressive, as my genius husband deserves.”
“That’s big, all right. We could have ten kids in that house.”
“Ten, huh? Spoken like a man. We might have to adopt a few.”
“That’s fine by me.” He kissed her then, and she hugged him close, his mouth so perfect against hers.
“Break it up, lovebirds,” came Sarah’s voice. “Are you trying to make me jealous?”
“Why don’t we have dinner together?” Lauren said. “Us three. And get off Godzilla. He misses me, and if you break him, I’ll kill you.” The fatigue was heavy tonight, but she didn’t want to go home just yet.
They switched places and headed for Declan’s, an Irish bar on Hope Street. As they walked ahead of her in the deepening dark, Lauren had a thought. That someday, maybe, Sarah would be holding Josh’s hand. That she would be his wife. It would be good to know that Josh had a lovely, caring, smart woman as his second wife . . . someone who had known her and would understand that he would always love Lauren just a teeny bit more.
She rolled her eyes at herself and bumped Godzilla up a little faster. Not today, Satan. Not today.
5
Joshua
Three (or four?) weeks after Lauren’s funeral
March
FOR A STREAM of unmarked days after his wife’s funeral, Joshua Park, BFA in industrial engineering (summa cum laude), MS in biomedical design (ditto), and PhD in mechanical engineering, watched TV. Not his usual shows—The Great British Bake Off and Star Trek, the original series—but cooking shows that involved frantic
dashes to the grocery store and making a dish out of rattlesnake and watermelon. Those docudramas about ancient battles. Alaskans looking for gold. People who cleaned hoarders’ homes.
He was fine. It was fine. The shows all put him to sleep, which was the point. Numbness settled in around him, and he welcomed it.
He ate. Or he didn’t eat. It was one extreme or the other—an entire pizza in one sitting, resulting in his feeling sick for the next twelve hours, or blurry days without food, marked by his phone; he’d set an alarm to feed Pebbles so she wouldn’t starve to death. His own intake seemed irrelevant. Back before he’d dated Lauren, and when they were first dating, he’d been like this—unstructured, eating to survive, not to enjoy. It had driven Lauren crazy. By their third date, she was organizing his life.
Let her do it again. Let her come back and get right to work.
He looked around the apartment and was horrified at the mess. Lauren would hate it. She was—had been—a very tidy person, and she would hate seeing their place like this. He was forty-five minutes into cleaning before he realized he was cleaning up for her. In case she came home.
When people called, he said he was doing okay. Getting through it. Hanging in there. But he kept looking at the door, same as Pebbles did. The poor dog did not understand that her owner wasn’t coming back. Pebbles used to sleep with them, but Josh couldn’t bear the thought of sleeping in the bed he’d shared with his wife. Pebbles and he now slept in the guest room at the end of the hallway.
He didn’t want to work. He didn’t care what was happening in the world or nation. He powered off his computers and set an automatic response for emails, saying he was taking some time off after a death in the family.
Jen, Darius and the kids had come over the day after the funeral to return Pebbles. Little Sebastian had run around the apartment, opening doors, looking under the couch, in the cabinets. “Where’s Auntie?” he demanded. “Is she hiding? She’s not dead! She’s not! She’s hiding!” A screaming tantrum had followed. Josh knew exactly how he felt. Darius had left with both kids, apologizing.
Grieving together, Josh found, was worse than grieving alone. His own searing pain was shocking—physically agonizing, causing him to bend in two, his hands over his head as if warding off a blow.
But seeing Jen sobbing into a towel in the bathroom, or sniffing the sweater Lauren had worn so often, ripped his heart out and ground it up with shards of broken glass. The sight of Donna, his mother-in-law, stroking a picture of Lauren, her mouth trembling, suddenly looking twenty years older, gutted him. His own mom, her face swollen from crying, trying to hide her tears by scrubbing his counters. Ben, squeezing his shoulder, wordless, his eyes wet as he looked away from a photo of Lauren on her wedding day. Ben had served as best man that day.
Yeah. Solo was definitely the way to go. Without his family, or hers, it didn’t feel so real. Sitting alone on the couch with the dog in the evening, all the lights off, he and Pebbles could both pretend Lauren was just about to walk in the door.
It was exhausting. It was like swimming in hot black tar. He worried about Donna and Jen, already having suffered the loss of Dave, Lauren’s beloved father. He worried about his mother, who had worried that Josh would never find someone and had been so glad when he did, and now had a thirty-year-old son who was a widower. He worried that Pebbles would die of a broken heart. He worried that he would die, and there would be nothing, no Great Beyond, no afterlife, no reunion, and then he wondered if that would be a chance worth taking.
In a nutshell, life was ruined.
He’d jerk awake at night to check her, reaching for her side of the bed, worried about her breathing, then realize, nope, she was dead. He got up in the morning and put the kettle on for her tea. One night, he called down the hall for her before remembering. Sometimes he woke up and wondered if he’d dreamed their entire marriage.
Dead. The word sounded exactly like what it was. Hard. Flat. Ugly and cold.
Since her diagnosis, taking care of her had been his job. Oh, he’d finished one medical device design and sold it to Johnson & Johnson, but mostly, he’d been trying to save her. He’d read every scholarly article about IPF he could find. He spoke to doctors, foundations, patients and pharmaceutical researchers, and the desperate search for a better outcome had eaten up hours of his day.
Then there was her actual care. Cooking for her, doing the regular household chores, getting her prescriptions filled, taking her to the myriad doctor’s appointments, arguing with the insurance company. Taking walks with her, doing her respiratory therapy, monitoring her O2 sats. Getting her to the bathroom when the medication gave her such bad diarrhea, he had to hold her on the toilet because she’d been too weak to stay there on her own. The past six months, he’d helped her shower almost every day. He’d had to make sure she took her meds at the appointed times. Make sure she had enough oxygen. Make sure she was eating enough. Make sure she was sleeping enough, happy enough, entertained enough, loved enough.
He missed every second of it. He’d cut off his arm to go back to that time.
He was lost. Utterly and completely lost. The Josh who was Lauren’s husband no longer existed, and all that was left was . . . this.
Pebbles was the only reason he left the apartment. Sometimes, he was too tired to face the outside world, so he took her up to the roof and let her shit up there. He wasn’t too proud of that, watching his dog crap where he and Lauren had had so many nice evenings—her sitting near the edge, him solidly in the center, since he didn’t like heights—but he couldn’t guilt himself into doing more. The seagull who had watched him burn his funeral clothes seemed to hang out there, judging him. Too bad. It was winter and cold as hell. Or maybe it was spring. He didn’t know. It didn’t matter.
Her “living urn” came—the soil, the supplements, the seedling. He couldn’t remember ordering them, but he must have. She’d bookmarked the page on his laptop. Joshua stood there at the counter, looking at the kit, his wife’s ashes, and got to work.
Lauren had loved plants. She’d grown herbs and flowers in pots on the rooftop and had bought hanging baskets for their rented house on the Cape. Their apartment was filled with plants, which reminded him they probably needed watering. He glanced around. Nope. Too late. They all looked dead.
As he followed the instructions, mixing his wife with the additive and soil provided by the living urn company, he was almost cheerful. He could picture her coming in. “What are you doing, hon?”
“I’m planting your tree.”
“Oh! Cool! Make sure those roots aren’t too squished.”
“You got it, babe,” he said aloud. Pebbles lifted her head to look at him.
This plant would not die. If it did, he’d kill himself. In a sudden panic, he booted up his laptop and ordered a gauge that monitored the soil’s moisture, pH, sun exposure, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. He read about what kind of exposure dogwood trees favored. The best room in their apartment would be their bedroom.
He’d have to go in there, then.
He did, spending not a second more than he had to, then fell asleep on the couch, hoping to dream of her.
Since her death, he’d dreamed of her often. In one, he came home, and she was tidying up the kitchen. “I came back just for a little while,” she said. “God, what a mess!” Or she was in her mother’s house, and he came in just as she was about to go into the attic. “Lauren!” he said, and she ran into his arms and hugged him, laughing.
The worst dream was almost an exact replica of her final hours in the hospital, a memory that Josh, when awake, had forbidden himself to think about. In the dream, though, she sat up at the end and said, “I feel better! How are you?”
The cruelty of waking from that made Josh feel like he’d been hit in the chest with a baseball bat. Why would God give him that dream? Josh was raised as a Christian—Lutheran—though it didn’t re
ally take. But these days, it was hard not to blame someone. To want to kick God in the nuts. Thanks for nothing. I knew you didn’t exist.
Jen texted every day. She was the only one Josh could tolerate, and only because Lauren had loved her so much. Darius checked in every fourth day, asking if he wanted company or to get out of the apartment. Donna would call, leaving tearful messages on his voice mail, and he’d call her back dutifully. Jen finally told her to give him some space, which Donna took very personally, and Josh just didn’t have the energy to care.
One day, when his hair felt sticky, he took a shower, standing under the spray, unable to tell if it was too hot or too cold. Why was he in here again? Oh, yes, hygiene. Lauren’s shampoo and shower gel were still on the shelf. He took the cap off, inhaled, then found himself lying on the shower floor, racked with the pain of losing her, the sounds coming from his mouth terrifying and unstoppable. He eventually fell asleep there, exhausted and wrung out, and woke up only when the water had turned frigid. Lauren would’ve been horrified to find him passed out like that. Let her be. Let her come in and say, “Jesus, Josh, what are you doing? Don’t be such a loser, hon!” She loved saying that to him, her voice always playful and full of love.
He found himself studying the framed pictures of them that Lauren had put throughout the apartment. Their wedding day. Hawaii. New Year’s Eve, when they’d hosted an actual party here, Josh’s first time ever doing so. Lauren giving Sebastian a piggyback ride. With his mother on her birthday. With her family at the wedding. The two of them in Paris. The two of them in the Caribbean. The day they got Pebbles. Holding Octavia in the hospital.
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