The Half-Life of Everything

by Deborah Carol Gang

  “I’m glad you found someone good. I liked David. How he stepped back and trusted you. No macho stuff.” Charlie swallowed hard a few times, and then took a sip of water. He set the glass down too hard and some spilled. “But I’m still going to be an idiot and say that if you wanted, if it would be better, if there’s some part of what you have that isn’t what you need…we could, we could get to know each other again.”

  Jane leaned back sharply and her back hit the wood of the booth. If she hadn’t met Kate, if her life hadn’t taken the turn it did, then this would be the most surprised she had ever been.

  PART IV

  AFTER

  Jane went to the fridge and brought out two key lime pies. “Every last lime was squeezed by me,” she said. “And since I missed Dylan’s birthday, we have to consider one pie to be his.

  “One of the best gifts on record,” Jack declared, and Dylan said, “Better late pie than no pie.”

  Kate had cobbled together unused remnants of decades of birthday candles from their tiny boxes in the back of various drawers until the mismatched assortment totaled Dylan’s age. “I think you’d better hurry,” she said, as she and David finished lighting them.

  “You all know what I’m wishing for,” Dylan said, “but I think it will still come true.” If his birthday were six months ago, he would have wished for Jane to disappear, but he no longer wanted a vote on their lives, except to wish that his mom stay healthy. He and his mother exchanged a look, and she blew him a kiss across the table.

  He acquitted himself well, but as the candles shortened, he motioned for his brother to help.

  “Thanks, dude, but you spit on my pie,” said Dylan.

  “Hey,” Jack said, “I didn’t have time to prepare myself.”

  Then no one spoke except for occasional inadvertent sounds of pleasure. The cats slept coiled and overlapping in the copy-paper box that had held the pies. They woke periodically to take in the lingering smell of fish tacos until Fred, resigned, left.

  “Watch him go,” Jane said, “looking for all the world as if he has somewhere to be.”

  With his mouth still full, Jack asked about her visit with her mother. “If it rained all the time, what did you end up doing?”

  “Her new boyfriend came over so I could meet him,” Jane said. “She’s been doing online-dating for like twenty years, and she’s finally met someone good. It’s really promising.” She smiled. “She wants me to try it too—I’ve never gotten around to telling her about this lot.” She had picked up a few of Ian’s lines. “She wrote up a profile for me. I’m quite a bit younger than I realized—and a triathlete.”

  “Well, she only wants the best for you.” It was Dylan’s joke, at which Jane loudly laughed, which caused him to blush.

  Everyone reached for seconds of the pie and they were quiet again until they rose as a group to clear the dishes. David sorted out the chaos by making three people sit down. The dishes were left to soak, and they moved to the front porch to play Jack and Dylan’s choice, “Trivial Pursuit.”

  “Dylan, you have to let us each skip one category,” Kate wheedled. “Dad and I never get past sports. Once, we never even got a second turn.” David spoke up to agree with her. He liked sports but found himself unable to memorize anything—like history was for some people.

  “I don’t know, Mom,” Jack answered for Dylan. “What about geography? Don’t you need to sit that one out also?”

  “Okay, there’s that, too.”

  Dylan quickly appraised everyone and paired his dad with Lily, Jane with Jack, and himself with his mom. “There,” he told Kate. “We’ll have everything covered. You do literature and culture of the baby boom and I’ll do everything else.”

  Jane said, “Do I detect a little over-confidence? Pride goeth…”

  David studied his family in the slant of the evening light. When the rays moved lower, they would need to lean and bend to protect their eyes but, for now, everyone was still as they watched Dylan set up the game. We look like a tableau, David realized, and then he told them this, though he had to explain it to the boys—one more odd thing that people did before electricity.

  “That’s a good book topic,” Jack suggested. “Weird stuff people did before TV. Like singing for each other after dinner. Is it possible that men started wars out of boredom?” Jack had been thinking about Erica and how she would fit right in here. He could picture her on the remaining small wicker chair, the rickety one, and how she would insist it was fine even though everyone would see it wobble as she spoke.

  They began to play, forgetting at first who their teammate was or sometimes remembering but impulsively volunteering a clue to the others. “Jeez,” Dylan said, after David gave an answer to another team. “We know you’re all evolved, wonderful people, but it’s a game. Compete. Try to win. You don’t have to share everything.”

  Kate picked up the small spray bottle they used to keep the cats off the table and Dylan pretended to flinch. They played a few more evenly matched rounds, though David had apologized to Lily in advance for all the answers he wouldn’t know. He was distracted by a powerful sense of contentment—a contentment tinged with fear around the borders as if the tableau contained their abundance, but just beyond it lay distant worries: a small lapse of memory, an icy road, cells gone out of control. If he looked too hard, the future seemed frightening. If he just lived and waited, it was merely unknowable. He knew they weren’t through with the press, and that if the good results continued, they’d be in and out of hiding. The press are like mosquitoes. Sometimes you just have to stay inside.

  “It’s your turn, Dad,” Jack said. “Lily can’t possibly know this one—and she must be tired of carrying your…” he paused and ended with, “hapless—your more-than-usual hapless game.”

  “Oh!” David said. “Was I driving?” The Sanders exploded in laughter. Jane and Lily looked mystified and the other four began to tell the joke, competing to give their version of two elderly ladies riding together, one unaware that she was the driver.

  “Stop,” Kate said. “If we’re rolling out a dementia joke, I think I should be the one to tell it,” and they laughed more and then quieted enough to let her.

  One of the boys had left the living room TV on after checking a score. The sound of the promo for the eleven o’clock news traveled out to the porch, though reduced to a murmur, and none of them was close enough to hear: “My husband came back from Alzheimer’s. The biggest wonder drug trial yet.”

  Oblivious, and free again to sit on the front porch, they sipped their beer, except Kate, who stopped at less than one, and Lily, who was pregnant with the baby she hadn’t announced yet, even to Dylan, and who only pretended to drink. She knew he would remember the recent middle-of-the-night moment when they woke to find themselves having sex. Even when they woke more fully, neither pulled away. When Dylan asked if she was okay with what happened, she said she thought she was. Good, he said, as he pulled her on top of him. I’m tired. You do the work this time.

  Lily was afraid. Not so much of the lottery of a healthy baby, and not so much of the juggling or finding the right daycare, or even of the nights to come worrying about a teenager driving stupidly, or drugs or binge drinking, things even she and Dylan, comparatively sensible as teenagers go, still had done too much of. She was afraid of her child having a middle-age illness in middle age or, like Kate, an old-age illness in middle age, or that by then maybe everyone would have some kind of cancer, having poisoned themselves and the planet with exhaust and plastic bits, like in a Margaret Atwood novel. She was afraid of an apocalypse, and that order would break down and their child would never know safety. And if not their child, she was afraid for their grandchildren, who will live in a foreign and unimproved version of an already brutal world. She was afraid of things she couldn’t imagine, along with everything she could.

  And yet she was extravagantly happy, as if she had waited her entire life for this child—even though she’d scarcely given
children a conscious thought, and when she did, it was always not yet, not convenient, as if a child was a nuisance, a dentist appointment arrived too soon. She needed these last hours before she told Dylan because she knew he would be afraid too, and she wanted him to name his fears if he wanted to, and she would be calm and agree with him that everything he feared was possible. Her neutral acceptance of his disaster list would perversely disarm him, as agreement does, and they would set catastrophe aside. Then she could give in to the abundance of her delight, as if they had done something remarkable, as if they had invented something.

  Lily looked up to see Kate watching her and she saw that Kate had guessed her secret. She was looking at Lily and at the prop of a beer bottle her hand, and they made eye contact. Kate smiled broadly. Lily smiled too, her finger to her lips. The two of them kept looking at each other, trying not to giggle.

  David turned to Kate. “What are you so happy about?” he said. “You do realize you’re not winning?”

  Kate ignored him and mouthed the words “I love you” to Lily, and David turned again and said, “You love who?” and she said, “I love it all. I love the whole damn mess.” She touched Jane’s forearm. “I’m really glad you’re here. We’re going to have so much fun. There will be more birthdays. And then weddings and babies. Or babies and weddings.”

  She might not be there, but these things will take place. For the first time, Kate found herself counting on the idea that Jane could be there for the boys. Never before had she delegated to Jane—even mentally—any aspect of being their mother, but tonight the thought was a comfort, an odd insurance policy. And David. David would be sad again, but less alone. Anxiety was missing tonight, and her mind felt clear and deceptively young. It was as if she herself was savoring an unannounced pregnancy.

  Dylan observed his mother and Lily communicating in some archetypal, female code. He tensed at first, but it didn’t seem to be about him, so he returned his gaze to the game board, stopping first to watch his father, made whole by a change of fortune and somehow tolerating the perils of happiness.

  “And dogs,” Jane said. “Don’t forget dogs.” She didn’t know if it was the celebration or the lighting or the perfection of the air—the ideal mixture of balm and warmth, with a breeze so slight it felt like breath—but she knew she’d never forget this evening. Perhaps she hadn’t needed as much as she thought she did—or she needed something different than she had believed. The exposure by the press had resulted in a gift for her—the chance to know Charlie again and to hear him say what he was and what he had done. She believed everything he said, and she thought his good intentions were real. But she was loved by someone who didn’t have to work hard to be good, and so after she and Charlie talked for three hours, she kissed him on both cheeks and left the restaurant that she had never liked.

  David smiled at Jane. He had come to accept that he would soon be walking one or more dogs in the rain, though he did plan to propose that Jane and Kate consider sharing one animal. Or maybe not. Maybe he would learn what kind they wanted and buy each whatever she desired. No, they would want to choose for themselves. But he’d go along and he’d be enthusiastic. He didn’t really mind walking in the rain. He was pretty sure he had a firm hold on gratitude, and he wasn’t going to fuss about dogs. David didn’t know what had happened to Jane after Charlie tracked her down. She was out of his life for a few long days and then she was back. One afternoon, he looked up and she was standing at the threshold of his office. “There’s nothing to tell,” she said.

  Lily also watched the slant of the light on the porch. She wanted to look at Dylan and Jack and imagine them as boys. She wanted to listen to David and Jane and Kate try to sneak hints to help their competition, as if everyone could win. She had the thought—and it was a new one—that time goes by just slowly enough to trick you into thinking life is long. She wasn’t quite ready to tell anyone about the future. She needed to watch them all a while longer. With love and amazement, she needed to study her strange new family before she stepped onto center stage.

  In the deepening angle of the sun, the young looked radiant. The same light was kind even to the three aging faces. Though realistically there might not be many more easy years, the three of them looked forward, trained as they all were to think not of death but of love and work.

  The young, still young enough to imagine their parents always with them (even Dylan and Jack had resumed this fantasy), looked up from the colored plastic wedges and the messy pile of spent trivia and saw the game abandoned for the beauty of the night. They smiled too as they looked all around and waited for the rest of it.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  With thanks to:

  Bruce Bortz and Bancroft Press,

  for loving this book and taking a chance

  Stanford Creative Writing Workshops,

  where the first chapter was finally written

  Sandy Linabury, a first reader, and

  Ann Speltz, a final reader

  Elizabeth King for kindness

  My parents, who let me read anything,

  at any age, from their jammed bookshelves

  My sons, who taught me what smart and

  funny young men might think and say

  My husband, who said, “I think

  we can get along on only my income”

  Andy, who seemed to think I could do this–-

  before it even occurred to me to try

  Every scientist working to cure the loss of memory

  and every family that has lost someone

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Deborah Carol Gang’s beautifully written and ultimately uplifting debut novel will remind readers of Anne Tyler’s lyrical and slightly off-kilter novels. And Tyler, who steadfastly continues an anti-blurb campaign she began in 1986, wrote the author to “tell you directly how much I enjoyed The Half-Life of Everything.”

  Gang’s short fiction has been published in Literarymama, Bluestem Journal and The Driftless Review. Her poetry has appeared in JJournal/CUNY, New Verse News, The Michigan Poet, Arsenic Lobster, and The Liberal Media Made Me Do It. Her research as a clinical psychologist has been published in Education and Treatment of Children.

  Originally from Washington, D.C., she moved to St. Paul, Minnesota to attend Macalester College and then attended graduate school in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she remained for her work as a psychotherapist and because of her love of Lake Michigan. She now writes full-time.