Hope and Other Punch Lines

by Julie Buxbaum

  “She said she just wanted to be friends.” Like my shaking hands, it seems I can’t control the words coming out of my mouth. I ignore the pressure mounting behind my eyes.

  “Abbi said that?”

  “No. Your mother. Of course Abbi! I’m such a fuckup. My dad was a hero, and what do I do when faced with my first real life-and-death situation? I panic.” I lean against a wall and bend my body in half. Head to knee. A prayer that is not a prayer but an apology.

  “I don’t know. Sounds like you did everything right.”

  “I almost threw up in the ambulance. No one knows that. Don’t ever repeat that.”

  “Ambulances are nauseating. Lots of twists and turns. And sometimes you sit backward,” Jack says. “Did you sit backward?”

  “Thank God I didn’t puke.”

  “Dude, you got this hero thing all wrong. Who cares about whether you puke? It’s about getting in the ambulance anyway despite knowing that you might blow chunks on the girl you are secretly in love with,” he says. “That takes courage.”

  “Are you running right now?”

  “Yup. I can drop little wisdom bombs and run at the same time. I’m a hero too.”

  “Tell me she’s not going to die. She can’t die, right?” I ask.

  “She can’t. She won’t. Not going to happen,” Jack says.

  “How can you know that? People die all the time.”

  “Not Baby Hope.”

  “That’s a bullshit answer,” I say, and the mom of the kid with the Matchbox car gives me a dirty look. I mouth Sorry.

  “Okay, how about this. There’s no way that in less than twenty-four hours you could make out with a cool girl, find out your dad, who you thought was alive all these years, is definitely, a hundred percent dead and like this major hero, and then have your almost-first girlfriend die, who also happens to be, like, this national icon. That would be too ridiculous, even for you, Noah.”

  “That actually helps,” I say.

  “Good. I’m walking in now,” Jack says, and then before I can even say thank you, he envelops me in a tackle hug. I quietly start to cry.

  My first thought when I wake up, after I’m not dead, is I bled all over Noah. I’m not proud that this is where my brain goes first instead of the much more logical and empathetic My parents must be devastated. Maybe my grandma is right about my narcissism.

  I have a tube in my nose and an IV hooked up to my arm. I’m wearing a hospital gown, though I have no recollection of changing clothes. I do remember being rolled from room to room. X-rays, a CT scan. Not sure when I fell asleep. I assume they medicated me, that perhaps there are some good drugs dripping into my veins right at this moment.

  My mother stands next to my bed, staring at me intently, and I get the distinct impression she’s been in this position for a while. Possibly hours.

  “Abbi? Oh, honey.” My mother’s clenched face softens and releases. “How are you feeling?”

  “I don’t know. Embarrassed, I guess.” My mom laughs a snot-filled laugh because she’s also simultaneously crying.

  “I meant physically.”

  “Okay. Tired. I have a headache. Where’s Dad?” I ask mostly to get her to stop looking at me.

  “Daddy’s right here,” my father says, and the fact that he calls himself Daddy when he’s been Dad for a long time now breaks something on my insides.

  I turn my head toward him, slowly, since I’m afraid of disrupting all my attached machinery, and I notice that his eyes are as puffy as my mother’s. If I could, I’d jump out of bed and perform a tap dance, anything to make them both feel better. To prove that I’m going to be fine. But when I breathe, it feels like pressing a bruise. Standing would be impossible.

  “Guess what? You won Color War,” my mom says. She’s decided to play this cheery, despite her tear-soaked cheeks. I’m okay with that. I’m familiar with this script. It’s much better than the alternative. “Nice work.”

  “How do you know?” My voice sounds clear, if a little rough. Like I’m at the tail end of a cold. Not like I’m dying.

  “There were a bunch of camp people here. You should have seen the waiting room,” my mom says, and then starts counting on her fingers. “First of all, Julia and her boyfriend, I think? A mom and this cute little girl dropped off a bunch of pictures she drew for you. A boy who was quite dapper and kept apologizing. He also tried to get everyone to hold hands and send you positive energy, which was awkward.”

  My mom chatters and floats round the room as she talks, picks up random objects and then puts them back down. A clipboard. A vase. A remote control. “Let me see, what else? You have a ton of flowers.”

  “Noah and Jack are still out there,” my dad adds. “They’ve been here all day. They seem like nice boys. Kept offering to get us coffee. Kept calling me Mr. Goldstein. Then their friend with lots of tattoos showed up. He brought cookies!”

  Apparently, my dad is as nervous as my mom. All verbal diarrhea.

  I’m in a hospital bed. My parent’s look scared and tired and so unwaveringly sad.

  So this is it, I think.

  “Listen, I just want to say…I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.” The sobs start low, behind my defective lungs, and try to push their way out. “I should have told you. I wanted one last summer—”

  “Oh, baby, don’t cry. It’s going to be okay. You’ll be able to go home soon, I think. They need to do one more test.” My mom sits down next to me and links our hands. Her face is wet again. Still, she smiles. She looks deranged. “But you’re going to be fine. I know it. It’s—”

  “Wait. Should have told us what?” my dad asks, and I consider changing the subject, reversing back to my mother’s false promises. There’s no real need to confess. I’m here. The truth—the fact that I’m sick—is no longer a secret. What difference does it make that I knew this was coming?

  And yet, I realize I don’t want to be like Cat, who pushes her way into my mind even at this moment, though this time she brings with her an epiphany: I don’t want to get by on half-truths and twisted language, on the filtered picture rather than the real image.

  “It’s…it’s been going on for a while. The coughing. The blood. I didn’t want to worry you,” I say.

  “Worry us!” my mother yells, and my dad and I both jump. My mom never yells; we’ve moved from loving sympathy to rage in mere seconds. I feel dread climb its way up my spine vertebra by vertebra. “This is your health. Are you serious? You didn’t tell us?”

  “Mom,” I begin.

  “How long?”

  I shrug. “It wasn’t that big a deal. I mean, it was, but it wasn’t? I didn’t think I needed to say anything until…”

  “Until what, sweet—” my dad starts, but my mom interrupts him.

  “Tell us, damn it! The doctors will need to know. How long?” She’s on her feet again, pacing the room, her fingers balled into tight fists. I look over at my dad, but he has his dropped his head into his hands.

  “Don’t be mad,” I plead. I knew they’d be upset, but I figured they’d take the news in their usual calm, martyrlike way. Also, and it pains me to admit this, I thought seeing me sick would mean they couldn’t really get mad. You know, because of the whole limited-time-left thing.

  “Abbi, sweetheart, please tell us how long,” my dad says, and the tremor in his voice betrays his calm tone.

  “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. Not long. Maybe about six weeks–ish? But it wasn’t so bad. I was going to tell you in the fall. I needed the summer. I wasn’t ready. Don’t hate me.”

  “Of course we don’t hate you,” my dad says at the exact same time my mother says, “There’s a tumor.”

  I feel the floor of my insides give way.

  Turns out there’s a big difference between knowing and knowing.

  “I thought
we agreed we’d talk about the best way to approach—” my dad says, but my mom rolls right over him. There’s no containing her. Her anger bounces off the four walls; I can feel it, like a current.

  “Do you have any idea what this means? Tumors grow. The earlier you catch them…Oh my God, you should have told us.” My mom is no longer whirling around the room. Instead she stops abruptly, and folds over herself. She reminds me of Sheila Brashard talking about her husband, but about a thousand times more hysterical.

  “I’m sorry,” I say again. “It wasn’t…I didn’t think.” I sound like a little girl. Maybe this is what dying is like. Moving backward through time until you’re not there anymore. Until you disappear from a room.

  “We don’t know anything yet,” my dad says, and covers my mother with his body, folds himself directly over her, as if to bear her pain for her. “They need to biopsy. None of us should jump to any conclusions.”

  “Right. We shouldn’t jump to conclusions,” I say. I’m fully aware of my own hypocrisy. We all know where this came from. We all know how this story ends. This part is not a fairy tale. From the first moment I saw blood, I’ve never for a second thought things could be otherwise. You don’t get to be a survivor twice. You don’t.

  A tumor.

  My mom shakes off my father’s embrace. Looks at me in the bed. Slowly scans the length of my short body from the oxygen tank to the tube in my nose and down to my feet. Shakes her head.

  “I can’t do this again,” my mom says. “I’m sorry.”

  And then she walks out of the room.

  My mom calls me twenty-seven times. I send her to voice mail. Then she starts texting. Because of course she does.

  Mom: PICK UP YOUR PHONE. PLEASE. I’m worried. You haven’t been home since YESTERDAY!!!

  Mom: Noah! You can be mad at me and still give me the courtesy of telling me you’re not dead. I don’t ask for much.

  Mom: Please text back two letters: OK.

  Mom: I’m losing it. Seriously. Don’t do this to me.

  Mom: I saw the news. Is Abbi okay? Are you? What’s going on?

  Phil: You okay, bud? Your mom is really freaked out.

  Phil: Noah? Please let us know you are okay. I’m worried too.

  Phil: This isn’t funny. We’re your parents and we’re scared. Call. Text. Send a smoke signal. Anything.

  Me: …

  Phil: Those three dots mean you are there, right?

  Me: Did you make a joke?

  Phil: What?

  Me: The smoke signal thing. That was a joke

  Phil: Sort of. Not a very good one. Are you okay? Feel free to answer in Morse code.

  Me: Another joke

  Phil: I’m trying.

  Me: I’m at the hospital waiting to see Abbi

  Phil: Your mom is a wreck. Been worried sick all night.

  Me: Tell her I’m still angry

  Phil: She says she understands. You have every right to be.

  Phil: For what it’s worth, she didn’t tell me either.

  This unravels me. I think about my mom and Phil, how every night before bed, she slathers on her hand cream and he uses his Waterpik, and how, most mornings, she pours him his bowl of shredded wheat. I think how two lives can be braided together so tightly it doesn’t leave enough room for the truth.

  Did she think he couldn’t handle it either? Or did she realize that by telling him and not me, I’d feel doubly betrayed when I inevitably found out? My brain feels like it might spontaneously combust. This day has held too much. I still have Abbi’s blood on my shirt.

  Phil: Please come home tonight. You guys can talk this all out.

  Me: Ask her if it’s true that he liked pickle sandwiches or if that was a lie too

  Phil: She says yes. 100%. She also says to tell you that your dad once entered a pun competition. She says that’s a real thing. Competitive wordplay.

  Noah: What?

  Phil: Apparently it’s kind of like improv. She said your dad sucked at it and didn’t get past the first round but it was hilarious and terrible and you would have loved it. She said she has a million more things she wants to tell you about him and that you need to come home to hear at least the first three.

  Noah: I’ll be back later

  Phil: Good. He sounds like a cool guy. I’d like to know more too. Your mom needs to work on talking about him.

  Noah: Is this still Phil?

  Phil: Don’t sound so surprised. I’ve been in therapy for years. I’m very self-actualized.

  Noah: This day has been very confusing

  My dad and I are staring at a television screen mounted on the wall of my hospital room, not talking. We’re watching our second episode of Judge Judy.

  “I’m in love with your mother,” he says, suddenly, breaking our uncomfortable silence. His voice drips with misery. My mom left about an hour ago. We have no idea where she went or when she’ll be back.

  “What?” I ask to buy time as my brain catches up with this revelation, which, like the announcement about my tumor, isn’t so much a revelation, actually, now that I think about it, as a confirmation. I have no idea how I’m supposed to feel. Of course, kids of divorce often fantasize about their parents getting back together—I did it for years—even though everyone says that those reunions don’t happen and that hoping for them is like expecting someone to rise from the dead. And yet, here we find ourselves, one-half of the way there.

  “I’m in love with your mother. Again. Or still.” My father doesn’t look at me. Judge Judy screams at the defendant and jabs at her with a heavily ringed finger. I can see the spittle forming at the corner of her mouth, the peculiar benefit of watching her in HD. I wonder for the tenth time if Judge Judy is pretending to be angry, if her entire show is pure shtick, or if she truly cares that the lady with the teased hair did not pay the cost of ruining her cousin’s wedding dress with regurgitated merlot. I want to yell at the screen and tell them to stop fighting, that life is too short, and then I remember that I once read somewhere that the litigants get paid to be there.

  Like pretty much everything else, none of it is real.

  “Does Mom love you back? I mean, I know she loves you, but does she love you in like, you know, that way?” I ask. I have no idea why my father has chosen this moment, while I’m immobilized by an IV in a hospital bed and my mortality hangs in the balance, to discuss the intimate details of his and my mother’s relationship. Then it occurs to me that maybe it’s because he knows we’re running out of time and for him, unlike me, that realization has turned him honest. Maybe he subscribes to Noah’s blaze-of-glory theory, and this is how we’re going to go out—with big, life-changing declarations. Maybe he wants to have another wedding, and soon, so I can be well enough to attend. I could be maid of honor.

  Just after the divorce, there was nothing I wanted more—one house, one family, dinner on proper dishes that we put in the dishwasher afterward. And then, around twelve or thirteen, I stopped wasting birthday wishes on that sort of nonsense. I know people whose parents have had ugly, bitter divorces, whose parents can’t be in the same room together, who have to eat Thanksgiving dinner twice so no one is upset. I was grateful that my mom and dad seemed to still like each other. I’m relieved now by the idea that they’ll have each other to lean on after I’m gone.

  “I don’t know. Things have been…There’s been something new between us lately,” my dad says, and his voice breaks. “I shouldn’t be telling you this. I’m scared. I’m so unbelievably terrified about what’s happening, and I know your mom is too, and her running away, that wasn’t only about you. I mean, it was mostly about you, but not totally. Last night, I asked her if I could move back home. Great timing, right?”

  Again with the nervous talking and the oversharing.

  “What did Mom say?” I a
sk.

  “She said she’d think about it. That it was a lot of change at once, because of your grandmother. We didn’t know that twelve hours later you’d be hemorrhaging on the soccer field.” He makes a weird sniffle-laugh sound. Our lives have always been absurd.

  “I wasn’t hemorrhaging,” I say.

  “Do you prefer bleeding profusely?” he asks.

  “I do, actually.” This time, we both laugh, no anxious sniffling, and for a second, it feels like old times, or pre-today times, when my dad and I could sit comfortably and chat and would not have to pretend to be engrossed in Judge Judy to avoid having to face up to my impending death. Overall, things were pretty good pre-today.

  “When you have a kid, it’s like letting your heart walk around outside your body. You never get used to it.”

  “It’s going to be all right,” I say, which is truer than I’m going to be all right.

  “I know I should pretend I’m not scared, that that would be the right move parentally, but I can’t. Abbi, you being sick? You won’t know until you’re a parent, but holy crap, it’s our worst nightmare. Let me have your tumor. Please hand it right over. Forget the results. Even the biopsy scares me. That’s surgery.”

  My dad looks at me, and I’m afraid to look back. I don’t want to see his eyes. Instead, I turn again to find that Judge Judy has been replaced by Wheel of Fortune; the host and the letter-turning lady both have terrifyingly frozen faces. Talk about living forever.

  “I’ve been so naive thinking we paid our dues all those years ago. That we were so lucky. We got to do all our worrying at once. I’ve been the opposite of your mom. She’s been extra worried about you,” he confides.

  His voice breaks, and I pretend not to notice. I pretend we are not both drowning in our own fear. On the screen, the woman in the tight dress turns the letter Z.

  Sometimes, even though it’s perverse, I think about the jumpers on 9/11. About two hundred people plunged out the windows of the Towers toward certain death. With the exception of a single couple, who held hands as they fell, the rest went one by one, as if they’d been waiting in an unfathomable line.