Minus Me

by Mameve Medwed

  She finds him in the kitchen, reading the paper. And just like that—divine intervention?—he offers her the cue. “I see old Mrs. Bouchard died,” he reports, turning the paper inside out to exhibit a dated photo of the deceased, who even in her youth scared local kids enough that hardly any trick-or treater, Annie included, would venture up those rickety stairs on Halloween.

  She takes the chair beside him rather than her usual one across the table. He leans over and kisses her. She smells coffee mixed with onions and pickles.

  “Even the obit writer,” he continues, “seems to be having a hard time conveying anything good about her, except that she was devoted to her cat.” He chuckles. “Well, I hope Agnes inherits a bundle. She deserves every cent, tending to that miserable women all those years.”

  “I stopped in the drugstore, and Mr. Miller told me. He also told me she died intestate and that heirs are coming out of the woodwork.”

  “Poor Agnes.” Sam sighs.

  “Speaking of which …” Annie begins.

  Sam sneezes. “I think I may be getting a cold,” he says. “My throat’s a little raw. Maybe I caught your cough.”

  “At this point, I doubt it’s contagious.”

  “Let’s hope. You know how I hate being sick.” He puts down the paper. “How was your day?”

  “Okay,” she says. She pinches her wrist. Why is she such a wimp? Such a coward? Why can’t she answer, as intended, very much not okay and explain why?

  “Did you pick up my stuff from the cleaners?” he asks. “The jacket and pants I spilled hot chocolate all over? Not my fault. Megan bumped into me,” he adds.

  “They’ll be ready tomorrow.” How long must they string out these banalities, this preamble, until she can detonate the bomb that will explode their world? She studies Mrs. Bouchard’s photo now sneering up at her from the Passamaquoddy Daily Telegram. “As I was about to say,” she begins.

  “Do we have any lozenges left in the medicine cabinet?”

  “Sam!” she exclaims. “I’m trying to talk to you.”

  “Sorry,” he says. “Go on.”

  She goes on. “I think we should make up our wills.”

  Sam frowns. “Whatever for?” he asks.

  She points to the photo of old Mrs. Bouchard. “Because …”

  He interrupts. “Don’t be ridiculous. We’re not going to die tomorrow.”

  “We need to do this.”

  “Look, even without a will, everything will go to you or me. After we’re both dead, who cares? Why bring up such an unsettling topic now?”

  “Because …” she repeats.

  He cuts in again. “We have no children. No one’s going to fight over our—ha!—fortune. Besides, we’ll outlive my mother and father. And I can’t imagine anything felling Ursula.”

  “We can’t be sure.”

  “It’s in the natural order of things for children to survive their parents. We’ve already disrupted that order once, we’ve already had a loss …”

  “Which doesn’t mean there couldn’t be more losses.”

  “Statistically”—he considers, his voice pedagogical—“not probable. If you look at insurance tables for life expectancy …”

  “Statistics are irrelevant when … Sam, I could be sick, very sick—”

  “As could I. This cold might turn into pneumonia. Or even worse. I’d end up bedridden. Tied to an oxygen canister. Sent to a TB sanatorium. Do they still exist? Crack all my ribs from coughing. Have to move to Arizona for the air, give up Bunyans to subsist solely on applesauce and Cream of Wheat, then be forced to take medicines with all those terrible side effects they warn you about on TV ads.” He laughs.

  “Not funny.”

  “It is, sort of,” he counters.

  “I hate to break into your litany of disasters, imagined disasters, Sam, especially when you’re on such a roll, but I’ve got something I’m trying to tell you,” she persists.

  “Okay. I know it’s prudent to make a will. I acknowledge you’re the practical one in the family, and that, as usual, you’re right. We could be hit by the proverbial bus or choke on a chunk of cheese. Still, what’s the rush? We’ll get to that in due course. At the moment, however”—he sneezes, blows his nose on a napkin—“the very thought of making a will, of imagining one of us dying …”

  “I understand your reluctance. Nevertheless,” she ventures, “what if … one of us … me …?”

  He shakes his head. He puts his hands over his ears.

  She leans closer. She notes the stubborn set of his jaw, his toddler’s hear-no-evil posture. She assumes he can read her as well as she can read him. Does he already sense the train heading toward them, the impossibility of derailing it, the hopelessness of rescuing the damsel in distress now tied to the tracks?

  “I refuse to listen any more to these silly suppositions. Annie, I could never live without you. You know that. If something happened to you, well, I’d just …” He stabs his thumb against his heart. “There’s no way I could go on without you.” He rubs his chest. “I plan to grow old with you.”

  “There’s no guarantee, Sam.”

  “For me, there is. It’s what I count on. Otherwise …” He lowers his chin to his hands.

  She studies him. Tears have started to form in the corners of his eyes. He squeezes her shoulder, pulls his chair back from the table. He points at the newspaper. “Even dead, Mrs. Bouchard still casts her evil spell, provoking this totally unpleasant conversation. Right now, all I want is to swallow two aspirins, get in bed, and take a nap. End of discussion. I love you, Annie. That’s all we need to say to each other.”

  He heads upstairs. As soon as she hears the medicine cabinet squeak open, she walks to the front hall. She picks her pocketbook off the table. She digs underneath the tangle of receipts, Chap Stick, comb, rubber bands, pens, and the matchbook from Gus’s Gas for the number to Dr. Buckley’s office.

  Is there a wobble in the receptionist’s voice when Annie identifies herself? “I’ll put you right through,” says Carolyn Connelly, sparing her the usual Wassup and How’s your mom?

  “So glad you called,” says Dr. Buckley. “I’ve got a patient here. Hang on while I step into the other room.”

  Annie registers the clank of a metal file drawer, the thud of footsteps, the closing of a door. “How can I help you?” Dr. Buckley asks.

  “It’s about Sam.”

  “Would you like to make an appointment for me to talk to him?”

  “Absolutely not,” Annie says, more harshly than she intended. “I don’t want him to know.”

  “Know …?”

  “I mean my lungs …”

  The clock ticks on. The radiator still hisses. Dr. Buckley is silent for so long that Annie wonders if they’ve been cut off. But then he says, in a measured tone, “He will have to be told.”

  “I tried. Unsuccessfully. He shut me down.”

  “Then try again. And tell your mother, too.”

  “Eventually,” says Annie. “But not now.”

  “This is folly, young lady.”

  “This is what I want.”

  More forcefully, he urges, “Something I strongly advise against. For your family’s sake. For your own sake.” Then his voice turns softer, gentler. “You’ll need help in processing all of this. I can refer you to a counselor. And by the end of the day, I should receive the name of a top-notch oncologist.”

  “No!” Annie nearly shouts. As soon as she hears his intake of breath, she stops. “Okay,” she concedes. “Maybe. Though I need to think this through first. I can’t make this big a decision so fast. But I can promise you this: the minute I feel sick, the minute I develop symptoms I can’t excuse, I’ll do everything. Tell Sam, see a specialist, have surgery, sign up for a shrink, undergo chemo, radiation, acupuncture. I’ll meditate, write a blog, guzzle carrot juice—whatever. But for right now, for the time being …”

  “Annie …”

  “I have to sleep on it.”

&
nbsp; “Annie …” he repeats.

  She cuts him off. “If you have a problem with that, let me remind you of HIPAA rules. Of doctor-patient confidentiality.”

  Chapter Four

  Annie drops onto the sofa. She scoops up the newspaper crumpled underneath the coffee table. In the lower corner, a headline catches her eye: Ninety-Year-Old Couple Die Within the Same Hour. She reads about a husband and wife, inseparable since meeting as teenagers, who “held hands at breakfast every morning even after seventy years of marriage.” Tears spill over as Annie pictures the pair’s gnarled, nonagenarian fingers clasped over their Shredded Wheat. She studies her own hands, not yet and never to be liver-spotted with age, sporting only a scattering of scars chalked up to workplace injuries.

  She considers opening a bottle of wine. Too early. And what good would it do? Dull senses that are already numbed? Depress reactions that are already slowed?

  Tell Sam, Dr. Buckley said. There are a million reasons not to tell Sam, ones she should have presented to Dr. Buckley. No wonder she dropped out of debate club. She could never summon an argument on the spot, only after the fact. What the French call l’esprit d’escalier. She tried, but he wouldn’t listen. Clearly she can’t do it. At least not now, when she doesn’t have a real diagnosis, when she has no facts. She must protect him, has always protected him. More so since all lioness instincts have been deflected from her nonexistent cubs and onto her spouse. Sam will support you, Dr. Buckley promised. What kind of support can Sam offer her in this case? There are no buttresses for dying, only the prospect of knocking the scaffolding out from under both of them.

  Sam is incompetent, Ursula complained. That’s Ursula’s adjective. Annie herself would choose a tad bungling, a bit clueless. She sighs, a drawn-out sigh that ends in a cough. What is the word for holding two opposing thoughts in your head? she wonders. Paradox? Cognitive dissonance? Doublethink? Once she knew the precise term, but her formal education is now too far in the past and too blunted by daily life. Yes, Sam gives her support. (How can she live without him?) Yes, Sam is, well, bungling. (How can he live without her?)

  Another paradox: as exasperating as Sam’s foibles are, they’re also endearing. Especially when his apologies make you want to apologize for causing the need for him to apologize in the first place. Annie can always forgive Sam’s absent-minded-professor quality because it’s impossible to stay mad at him.

  Not that she doesn’t get annoyed. She scrolls through examples that might forever infuriate a less tolerant, less grudge-bearing spouse. For instance: his hypochondria, his fear that every splinter requires a tetanus shot, his tendency, despite repeated disasters, despite an inability to learn from his mistakes, to leave items on the roof of the car while he’s loading the trunk. How many times has he fetched cartons of freshly laundered shirts from the cleaners only to arrive home without them? Retracing his route, he’ll either discover the box untouched at the side of the road or flattened by a semi, the shirts inside embossed with the tread of big-rig tires; or worse, he’ll find nothing, all missing contents most likely recycled into the wardrobe of a stranger whose neck measures fifteen and a half and whose arms are a perfect thirty-four.

  “Maybe whoever swiped them needs those shirts more than me,” Sam will note, turning an act of neglect into an act of charity. How can you not love somebody who, except for his own health catastrophizing, sees the glass not just half full but brimming? Yet even the most unrepentant Pollyanna must acknowledge that there are certain things that cannot be changed by a positive attitude.

  Annie recalls the coffee mugs plunked on the roof of the car, thus requiring a constant backup of thermal replacements. She remembers the ring of house keys, shop keys, and car keys flying off a bridge and into the river underneath, resulting in a comfortless night at the Comfort Inn because it was too late to get a new key made or contact the neighbors who kept their extras.

  And what about the novel Rachel lent her for the trip to a convention of food purveyors in Portland? Stopped at a red light in Monument Square after a three-hour drive on the Turnpike, they were startled by a man pounding on their windshield.

  “Ignore him,” she warned, “he’s probably a squeegee scammer.”

  Sam rolled down the window.

  The man held up the novel. Intact except for a dusting of gravel. “This fell off your roof back there on Exchange Street,” he said.

  Did Sam feel sheepish? Embarrassed? Ashamed?

  No. “Imagine,” he marveled, “that book made the whole trip at sixty-five miles an hour along Ninety-Five and only toppled a block away. A feat worthy of the Ripley’s Believe It or Not.”

  She turns her attention to what happened after the baby—the one time when Sam could not weave straw into gold. A nurse had ordered her into a wheelchair, even though she’d been pacing the corridor relentlessly for the three days she was incarcerated in the maternity ward, tortured by the cries of healthy newborns and the chatter of excited mothers debating breastfeeding techniques and diapering skills.

  Discharged, she was rolled to the hospital lobby as Sam hurried to get the car. She and the nurse waited and waited. When the nurse checked her watch for the seventh time, Annie suggested she return to her other duties. “Go,” Annie ordered. “I’ll be fine.”

  The nurse seemed dubious. “You sure?”

  People came and went. Solicitous husbands and attentive family members helped the newly released to their still-running, double-parked cars outside the entrance. Some patients cuddled babies; others clutched overnight bags, pink plastic sick bins, balloons and flowers, and folders of post-surgery instructions. “You still here?” asked a man she’d seen earlier carrying a beribboned fruit basket and now wrapped in his overcoat.

  After what seemed like an eternity, Sam appeared, face furious. “You won’t believe this,” he said.

  “Try me.”

  “They lost our keys.”

  “Let’s call a taxi. I can’t bear to stay one more minute in this place.”

  “Of course not, Annie.” He stroked her hand. “How could they …”

  A man wearing a blue uniform with Hospital Parking embroidered on the pocket came up to them. “I’ll drive you. We are so sorry. They have never mixed up the keys in the twenty years I’ve been parking-garage manager. For some strange reason, the key we found left with your Volvo is marked Toyota. I can’t imagine how …”

  “Toyota,” Annie said.

  “Toyota,” Sam repeated.

  “Check your pocket,” Annie demanded.

  Sure enough, Sam fished out his key chain, the Volvo key attached. “Oh, hell!” Sam struck his forehead with the palm of his hand. “My fault,” he said to the manager. “I gave you the wrong one after I parked the car. And didn’t think to check. I’ve had it in my pocket all this time while my poor wife … I feel so stupid. Do let me treat you to a meal, a week of meals, at our sandwich shop. Please convey my apologies to the attendants. I’m such a …”

  “Sam,” Annie said. “Shut up and take me home.”

  All the how could you especially at this times dried up as Sam struggled to hold back sobs. All recriminations vanished as Sam led Annie upstairs to the bedroom, fresh sheets on the bed, flowers on the bureau, a jar of malted milk balls set out on a brand-new wicker breakfast tray with a stack of page-turning mysteries piled next to it. “I was so worried, such a wreck over, well, everything, I must have been out of my mind,” he confessed.

  And a week later, he ended up in the hospital. “Clinical depression,” the doctor diagnosed. “Emotionally fragile,” he warned.

  Now Annie sticks the newspaper back under the coffee table and thinks about Sam, about how their loss has pulled them closer, not caused the kind of rift other tragedy-plagued marriages suffer. She and Sam resemble puzzle pieces. Apart, their edges are so jagged and jutting, so awkwardly notched, it’s hard to get a sense of them—until, fit together, they form a complete and continuous whole.

  Like the couple in the
newspaper, they’ve been close from the start. Well, almost, she corrects, depending on how you define start. She pictures the redheaded young man whose brass-buttoned blue blazer topped pressed white trousers. Whose side-parted hair gleamed like glass. He was holding a martini in the bar where everybody else was chugging beer and wearing jeans. Charles. Hardly a Chuck or a Charlie, though the other college kids she hung out with that summer addressed him that way. “Are you the last virgin in New York?” he said to her in his tidy bed in his shiny downtown loft.

  “I’m from Maine,” she said.

  “That explains it,” he said, pulling her to him with practiced ease.

  It was her fish-out-of-water interlude, a time when she and Sam had decided to take a break for the summer. She’d secured an internship in New York between freshman and sophomore year, sharing a hellish Hell’s Kitchen one-bedroom, one-bath walk-up with Rachel and the two NYU juniors who answered their need-roommates ad. Untethered to home, family, Sam, she’d discovered an alternate universe that eclipsed her normal world and turned her into a second self she barely recognized.

  She’d worked at a now-defunct women’s magazine. Hidden from the valuable front-of-the-house real estate just off the elevator, she sorted unsolicited submissions into graveyard file cabinets and sent hope-dashing form rejection slips to the writers of the unread articles. Though it wasn’t the glamorous job she had anticipated, its recompense was the glamorous Charles.

  “A summer fling,” Rachel pronounced. “A rite of passage.”

  The rite ended in August along with her lease on big-city life. Charles had moved on to a sophomore at Columbia. Besides, she’d had her fill of martinis; she grew to loathe Charles’s bay rum aftershave. Right after Labor Day, she was back home and with Sam.