A Little Hope

by Ethan Joella

  “I would call it a bone marrow defect,” his doctor said that first day.

  “Bad bone marrow,” Greg tsked, mock-slapping his thigh.

  “It would do you well to not minimize this,” the doctor said.

  “Will it make my bone marrow less defective?” Greg shrugged after he said this—yes, yes, he knew he was cracking, and he could feel Freddie’s tearful eyes glaring at him. The oncologist with his white hair and starched gingham shirt reminded him of a doctor in a Hallmark Channel movie. If he stops for a moment, he can list the titles on the doctor’s bookshelf. He can describe the exact turpentine-and-lemon furniture polish smell that the office had. But he hasn’t stopped, and he doesn’t plan to. A rolling stone and all that. But he felt something that day about Freddie, some confession in her crying that she loved him and needed him so much. He always knew this, but it was validated in that moment. He remembers leaving the doctor’s office and thinking I am loved before anything else.

  Now it’s Alex, his boss, in Greg’s office doorway, leaning to the side. Alex, with his face tanned from golfing, thinning hair, thick gold wedding band, an air of expensive cologne, shining cuff links. He hates these new eyes Alex has for him, and the way he never suggests the club anymore, or a long lunch at Martin’s Steakhouse—the way he tries not to dump too much on Greg’s plate. Some days he wears suspenders or a bow tie. When Alex bought Greg a Mercedes when he promoted him to VP, he said, “Once in a lifetime, kid. Don’t get too used to me buying you stuff.” Alex who can’t do half the push-ups Greg can, but he will probably live to be ninety.

  “Mr. President,” Greg says. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “Just checking on you.” Alex clears his throat. He steps in slowly and crosses his arms. He pretends to be looking at the black-and-white photo on Greg’s wall of Addie and Freddie—Addie riding the carousel a year ago at Woodsen Park, the ballet dress she insisted on wearing that day, her soft bangs, eyes squinting from the sunlight. Freddie standing beside her grinning, long blond hair looking so beachy then, gold hoop earrings, her expression carefree. When was the last time his wife grinned? When have her eyes sparkled like this? Not for two months, at least. Greg thinks of how he just wants to tell her to relax, let me worry about this. He used to be able to make her happy so effortlessly (tickling her sides when she was making a salad, or coming out of the bathroom in his silky black robe), but now with all this, he has to worry about her constant fear.

  He is weary already, and he hasn’t even started fighting this thing. And now Alex is worried, too? Greg feels like some tragic man in a Greek myth who saddens everyone he meets.

  “Checking on me? What am I, a soufflé?” He selects compose on his email. “I’m just in the middle of writing Edie at Home Walls.”

  “Greg, what does Freddie say?”

  Greg stiffens. He looks up from his computer screen. The empty email window beams at him. “About what?”

  “Are you going to keep doing this?”

  “Doing what?”

  “Doing what,” Alex says. “Avoiding your illness.”

  “Illness.”

  “Yes, your illness.”

  “You make me sound like Emily Dickinson in a white nightgown.” For some reason, he always pictured the poet in bed in a nightgown, scribbling on parchment.

  “Oh stop.”

  “You stop.” Et tu, Alex, he wants to say. Don’t you know me better than this? Nothing has happened yet. He’s still trying to figure things out. Until then, can’t Freddie and Alex call the dogs off and let him be? He feels betrayed. Haven’t I proven myself to be more than a quivering sick man? Didn’t I oversee a huge merger less than a year ago? Didn’t I save clients who were all but signed off on leaving? Haven’t I kept Freddie and Addie wanting nothing? Just over a year ago, he ran two marathons in one summer. Can’t Greg be the one to tell them when to worry? Don’t they know he will wrestle and clobber this thing? That is who he is.

  Alex goes to the door. “Pamela, Mr. Tyler and I are going to have a quick meeting.”

  “Sure, Mr. Lionel. Anything you need?” she says outside.

  “We’re fine,” Alex says, and closes the door softly.

  “Thanks for not broadcasting my illness.” Greg pushes back his desk chair and looks out the window. The leaves are that fully awake color that will only last a day or two. A woman below pushes one of those horrible double-jogging strollers, and he wonders if he will lose the ability to move something like that, to lift the dog into the car, to carry fence posts on his shoulder.

  “I want to know what the doctor says, and what we’re going to do. The doctor doesn’t say to do nothing, I assume.”

  “Yes, he says I should make jokes about it and keep showing up at work.”

  “Then you need a new doctor.” Alex takes off his glasses. His eyes look strange without them. He rubs his cheek and sits in the leather chair in front of Greg’s desk. “What are we talking here—chemo, radiation? Stem cell transplant?”

  “All of the above, my friend. You should see the binders I get to read, and all the appointment cards we have on the fridge. It’s just a parade of great stuff waiting for Greggy.”

  “I’m sick with worry about you.”

  Greg’s stomach flips. “Stop.”

  “Stop?”

  “Yeah, stop.” He pauses. Looks down at the computer. He pushes his keyboard hard, hard enough to make it skate across the desk, and puts his arms behind his head. “I’m not worried, so you shouldn’t be.”

  Alex does a half laugh, half sigh. “You’re not worried?”

  “No, do I look worried?” He tries to flex his chest, his arms, as though he is standing at attention for some type of military inspection.

  “Yes, I think you do.”

  “I shouldn’t have even mentioned this to you.” He shakes his head. “You’re treating me like that egg experiment I did in high school.”

  “I want to help. I’ll get you in to any specialist. I’ll hire a consultant who can explain every medical term at your appointments. Shoot, if I have to fly you to Switzerland, I will. I think of you as a son. You know that.” His voice wavers with emotion when he says this.

  Greg shakes his head. He sees fear in Alex’s eyes, he sees uncertainty. And after what happened to Alex’s son all those years ago, Greg realizes saying that word is a big deal. Son. He feels honored. This makes his eyes burn, and he swallows hard. “Then you should know me better.”

  Alex gets up. “Should I call Freddie? Should I talk to her instead?”

  “No.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “What you should do is stop looking at me like I’m a fucking porcelain doll. It’s insulting.”

  “Insulting?” Alex sighs. “I don’t think many others would be insulted.”

  “Isn’t that why I got to this point in the company? Because I’m me. I work my ass off, sick or not.” He touches his chest. “I’ve got to keep moving.” He inhales. “I can’t stand this.”

  “This is beyond work, Greg. You can’t even see that, can you?”

  “No, what I see is that my travel has been cut down to almost nothing, that you’re giving all the good stuff to Franklin and Jean. What the hell do either of them know?”

  “Greg.”

  “I hate Franklin. He doesn’t win anyone over. Smug little wimp.”

  “Greg, this is your life.”

  “Is it?” He thinks of the double-M name for his disease. He thinks of his bad plasma cells, his defective bone marrow. He lets Alex’s word life roll around in his head. Life. What is a life? Is this really his life? Has he used up most of the good times already? The effortless way he and Freddie would hold hands walking around downtown after dinner, Addie skipping in front of them. A Sunday where the three of them would climb into bed in the afternoon and watch a movie. A spring day where he’d soap up the Mercedes in the driveway and spray it off. All that traveling for work—the excitement of wheeling his bag behind hi
m in the airport, the old clients who remembered him, the new ones he had to impress. He loved crashing at some hotel later those nights, ordering room service and spreading out in the middle of the bed, calling Freddie and Addie and saying I love you, I love you. God, this whole thing has been love: with Freddie. With Addie. And life, too. He loves his life.

  He hates himself for not being better at this. He always figured if, God forbid, he got some disease, he’d be valiant and humble. Not this prickly thing who spits in the face of a wonderful wife, a caring boss, an excellent doctor. “Well, I want a life where I’m not sick.”

  He feels his limbs go weak, feels light-headed. He was never dainty like this. He forces himself to stand, and he walks to the window, keeping his back to Alex. “I can’t be sick,” he says. “Alex, I can’t be sick.”

  His throat aches, and a familiar feeling comes over him from when he was a boy, a sadness so deep he feels like it will never go away—the sadness when his grandmother died, the pain when he fell out of a tree and broke his collarbone. He feels like a little kid again. Scared. He starts to weep. He doesn’t want to leave Freddie, Addie. He imagines Freddie will let Addie sleep in their bed at night, rubbing her back while she cries.

  He doesn’t want them to cry for him.

  He doesn’t want them to eat their dinners alone at the small kitchen table. He wants to be with them every part of the way—he wants to see Freddie get a book published, he wants to see Addie go to school dances. He wants to help her with an economics paper when she’s in college someday, even if she calls him at two in the morning. He wants her to get married to a guy he can teach to play golf; he wants them to have children whom he and Freddie can invite over for sleepovers and cook waffles the next day. He has thought about all of this. He wants to be in this office until he’s seventy. He wants to keep seeing the next season. He squeezes his eyes shut, but the tears come anyway.

  He feels Alex’s hand on his shoulder, and his head slumps forward like a resting marionette. There are pigeons on the roof of the building below them, and the guys are on their suspended platform squeegeeing the windows across the street. He sees a plane creep by in the empty blue sky, and he lifts his head and wipes his eyes with the side of his hand.

  “People get better all the time. Every day, someone in a hospital is fixing something. Thousands of people go in sick and come out cured. Every day that’s happening,” Alex says. His voice is a low whisper, and Greg loves this man for saying this. He wishes Freddie would say this—that she wouldn’t look so uncertain. He wishes the doctor would say, “We’re going for a cure. Nothing less.”

  “But I don’t feel lucky. I’ve won too much already.” He thinks of Freddie, beautiful and perfect with the winks she gives him, the way he can look into her eyes and know exactly what she wants to say. He knows the patterns of her breathing, how she’ll inhale sharply before she says something important, how she’ll barely breathe at all if she’s waiting for him to say something. He thinks of the Mercedes he feels so proud of, even years later, how he grins when he gets into it every morning, the familiar sag of the leather seat, the confident way it starts up. He thinks of this job in its old, classic, gray building. Their peaceful house with the light blue door. He thinks of Addie. How she looks into his eyes while she talks to him about planet names she invents. How she leaves misspelled notes on his bedside table (Dady I mis you). He shakes his head and sighs.

  “You’re always a winner. Why should this be any different, huh?”

  Greg listens for false cheer in Alex’s words, but hears only sincerity.

  “Yeah,” he says. “Maybe.” He remembers pressing the elevator button in this same building all those years ago and shaking Alex’s hand the first time. He remembers what he said when Alex asked his plans: to keep developing his skills and have his responsibilities grow. He was only twenty-two. He remembers how Alex trusted him with clients right from the start.

  He remembers, too, how Addie saw his framed MBA degree from Yale (he did the executive program while he worked full-time), and she wanted to know what Yale was. A school, he told her. Not far from here. “Maybe I’ll go to college there, too,” she said, “and you and Mommy can drive over to see me whenever you want.” He remembers showing her pictures of the campus on the computer, how he promised he’d take her on a tour there. Why hasn’t he done it yet? How many promises has he made her that he hasn’t made good on? Skiing in Vermont, visiting Disney World, Hawaii. He thought there would be so much time.

  Will she even remember his voice? Will she tell people about him?

  “Let me help you,” Alex says. “Let us help you. Kay loves you guys. We can make dinners, watch Addie, walk the dog. I know you don’t want charity and that you don’t need help. It would just give us an excuse to be with our favorite family more.”

  “Thanks,” Greg says. “Freddie tried to get me to stay home a couple of weeks ago.”

  “Listen to her then.” Alex claps his shoulder the way he used to do after a round of golf, and Greg aches for that old feeling when nothing else was going on.

  Nothing else.

  Now there is nothing else besides this, he thinks.

  He could call his life perfect if he weren’t dying.

  They stay in silence watching the cars on the street. He sees the fountain below, and in his head hears the splashing sound it must be making as the water cycles through one layer to the next. He sees the old St. Vincent’s Church steeple and tries to make a wish on it. “Alex,” he finally says.

  “Yeah?”

  “Thanks.”

  They walk toward the door together. Maybe after this, he’ll go see Freddie. Maybe they can drive to Yale when Addie gets home from school. Yes, he will take her to Yale. He will make time. He will carry her if she gets tired of walking.

  Addie and Yale. How many kids her age care about college? Does she already have some notion of what she wants in life? He did. He always did. She is a little force of nature. She seldom blinks. She is so precise when it comes to her drawings, her clothes, the way she situates her stuffed animals on the bed.

  Could she feel like she’s inevitable, too, the way he always did? For a second, he is proud. But then he doesn’t want her to feel inevitable. Maybe he jinxed himself that way.

  When he applied for the job, he was the best applicant. He felt it in his blood, in every cell. He had the firmest handshake, the best answers to the questions. He was so damn alive and on fire. He made sure his shoes gleamed when he walked into this building.

  He doesn’t want Addie to care about any of that. She should just be free. He wants to blurt that out like an epiphany. He wants her to keep skipping. He wants her to hold two halves of a peach in her hand the way she always does and keep staring at the fruit with wonder—as if it contains a secret. He wants her to jump rope, to keep giving a voice to the dog and cat. Hell, he wants the dog and cat to live forever, too. He wants her to know that he did all he did, that he tried so hard in everything—in school, in work, in being a husband and dad. He wants her to think that what he did—all this stuff—was enough. To know that she and Freddie were the most of all of that. The most he could ever ask for.

  He grabs his bag and nods at Alex. His throat hurts so bad that he has to whisper. “I’ll keep you posted,” he says quietly.

  “Yes,” Alex says. Greg holds his car keys and walks past the picture of Freddie and Addie, past the round table where he usually sits for meetings, and he can feel something has changed—maybe the sun outside has gone behind clouds, maybe the music in the hallway has gotten quieter. He can feel his boss watching him—as if he’s the applicant again and just had an interview—and he opens the door now and slips away.

  3. Care Is Costly

  Darcy Crowley will scold them later. She will get on the phone when she is back behind her desk, the invoices stacked on the filing shelf, the door closed so the seamstress won’t hear, so customers who come in won’t hear, and she will tear them down the strip, as
her husband, Von, used to say.

  She will let them have it. This afternoon. After coffee, after the stuffed tomato she’ll get for lunch. She will blot her face, she will take a breath, and they’ll be sorry.

  But for now she stands outside the row of garages. Somewhere she hears the unmistakable chirp of a cardinal. The Open sign for Mercury Storage blinks on and off. There are about twenty parking bays in the lot, and she sees where the window to hers has been broken. The hole is large enough to hoist a slim person through. Why hers, out of all the garages?

  She stands in the empty lot, and it’s so clean she could almost count the pebbles. It’s that time of year, she thinks. That perfect sun of October, the sky that feels as if nothing can happen. Down the street, she sees a woman come out of Dairy Land with two chocolate vanilla twist cones, and cars come by and then disappear around the sharp turn.

  She shakes her head. Why didn’t someone tell them that windows were silly on garage doors? Glass is so fragile. They were asking for this.

  This is a business, she will say, and you have a responsibility not to let things like this happen. Don’t people use cameras now? That’s how burglars are caught. That’s how her neighbors, the Ellersons, showed her a picture of a bear that visited in August. A damn bear, Von would have said. Right across their front grass like he owned the place.

  She cannot not think of Von.

  Ten years now. Ten years and that laugh—she can still hear its bounce, its echo.

  His wavy hair, almost all gray, but with that trace of blond from when he was young—the hair they made him cut when he was in the service. His sloped back, his watch always ticking with its gold stretchy band. During that first year, how often she reached into the drawer to pull out his watch and wind it. How often she slid it around her small wrist (feeling selfish for not burying it with him). It would hang there and she would stare at the space between the watchband and her arm.

  She can close her eyes and hear him talk. She often thinks of what he would have said. Is this a garage or a playground for criminals?