“Wes.” I sank down into the black leather chair by his desk. I spoke slowly, hoping to calm him, to help him realize he wasn’t making sense. “I know we have to move the wedding, but why are you going to England? What does one have to do with the other?”
Wesley just stared back at me, his expression strange and harsh.
“Look,” I continued into the silence, repeating myself, “I know the wedding plans have to change or whatever, but why are you going on a trip to England? How does that move anything forward?”
He rubbed his hands over his face as I began to shiver in the cold room. “It’s like I already said,” he finally answered, sounding less impassioned now. “I just need some time to deal with everything. I know in my head that this wasn’t your fault, that you and your family didn’t kill my parents, but every time I’m in the room with you, all I feel is rage and blame seeping out of me. I need to get away from you to get past it. I need you to let me go.” He stepped toward me, stroked my hair. “I’m going to leave as soon as shiva ends.”
He didn’t say how long he was planning to stay away, whether it would be two weeks or two months. All I knew was that everything I said seemed to be making him angrier, so I swallowed a sob and held back my words. I tried not to think of all the plans we had made—the glittering wedding, the honeymoon in Vermont, the twinkle lights and chiffon that were supposed to drape the ceiling of the event space, the sparkly life I had thought I was about to begin with this man who was suddenly a stranger. I stared at the striped comforter on Wesley’s old bed, finding no comfort at all. I heard him let out a deep sigh, and a moment later he turned and left the room.
FIVE DAYS LATER, he was gone. He called from the airport to say good-bye. He said he would be in touch in a few days, once he was settled at his uncle’s. I cried myself to sleep every night that first week, and the week after that.
On what was supposed to be our wedding day, I finally got an email from him. His uncle had a connection at some elite cooking school near Southampton. He was going to take some classes there. His uncle would pay. It was a genuine opportunity for him to study under this particular British chef. And it was better than coming home and seeing me, which was the same, he said, as staring his parents’ death in the face.
This isn’t what your parents would want, I wrote him back. Please come back. Let me help you heal. Please.
I wrote him every day after that. Pathetic, long, pleading emails. Some were heartfelt petitions for forgiveness, while others were simply journal-style recaps of what I had done that day. One feeble attempt after another, trying to remind him who I was, why he had loved me.
He never wrote back. I tried calling, but it seemed like his cell phone wasn’t working on the other side of the Atlantic. I knew I could probably look up his uncle, Marty Scheiner, maybe find a phone number, but it was clear Wesley didn’t want to speak to me. So what could I do? I gave him time.
After a month went by and I hadn’t heard from him again, I began to question whether he would ever come home. My mother visited me at my little studio apartment and tried to lull me out for meals that I couldn’t eat. When we reached the three-month mark after his departure, I finally slid my engagement ring off my finger and put it back into its green velvet box. Because of all the weight I had lost, it was constantly slipping off anyway. I gave it to my mother and asked her to hold on to it in case Wesley ever wanted it back, in case he ever returned and asked to put it back on my finger.
Three months turned into six. When six months stretched into a year, I finally realized that we were truly over, that he was never coming back, that maybe we were never meant to be.
Chapter Thirteen
February 2017
As Aaron and I emerge from the thick yellow lighting of the church kitchen and back into the crowd of people milling about on Broadway, I gulp in the crisp winter air as though I had been suffocating inside the building. He starts walking in the direction of the subway and I follow numbly, still trying to digest the information Wesley told me moments ago.
“Want to go wait in line at Barney Greengrass?” Aaron asks, mentioning my favorite bagel shop uptown. He looks at his watch and adds, “It’s so late, there’s probably not even a line anymore.”
He turns his head to look at me and abruptly stops walking. “What is it? What happened?”
I have the urge to sit down in the middle of the dusty sidewalk, to let the passersby just maneuver around me. I cannot handle the weight of what I have been told.
“Wesley’s dying.” And then I do begin to sink, but Aaron catches me and pulls me up.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” He has me in both of his hands. I can feel the confusion that must be etched on my face. He puts one arm around my shoulders, the other around my waist, and steers me over to a side street toward the steps of the closest brownstone.
“Sit.” He lowers himself beside me and takes my hand. He looks at me, waiting for me to speak, but all I can do is shake my head. I don’t want to start crying for Wesley in front of Aaron, but if I speak any words, I won’t be able to hold back the tears. I just shake my head a second time.
Aaron leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “Look, I know I said I didn’t want to know about your first fiancé, that we should keep the subject off-limits, but that was before he reappeared in your life. It was different when he was living in a foreign country. But it seems like you’re going to be seeing him at the soup kitchen, and wherever else now, and obviously something is upsetting you. What good am I if I can’t be here for you to unload on? Can you tell me what’s going on?” He knocks his knee lightly into mine, and I just want to rest my head in his lap, close out everything but his nearness.
“He has ALS.”
“Oh.” Silence. “Well, shit.”
“Yeah.” I look down at my black leather boots, noticing that one of them has a new gray scuff mark on the outer edge.
“How long has it been since he was diagnosed?”
“I don’t know.”
“How are his symptoms?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where is he being treated?”
“Jesus, Aaron, I don’t know!” I stand as I snap at him. “I didn’t think to give him the third degree, okay?”
“You’re right, you’re right,” he says, standing too. “I know it’s got to be a lot to process. I’m sorry.” He reaches out to put his arm around me and I shrug him off, now not wanting his touch, not wanting to feel anything at all.
He stares at me for a hard moment.
“We can go,” I say, pulling myself back together and stepping down from the concrete steps. “Let’s just go.”
TWO HOURS LATER, I’m alone in my apartment. I’m supposed to be packing boxes for the move to Aaron’s loft, but instead I’m frozen in front of Google, learning all sorts of information about ALS. Horrible information. Each sentence I read is more distressing than the last.
The life expectancy after diagnosis can often be as little as two years, or sometimes even a shorter span of time. The brain stops sending messages to the muscles. Progression of the disease varies and can move slowly in some, way too rapidly in others. Unused, the muscles began to twitch, to weaken and atrophy. Eventually, the brain loses the ability to control voluntary movement. Gradually, people lose their ability to speak, eat, move. Breathe.
In my mind’s eye, Wesley has always, always been a fireball, filled with more light and movement than anyone I’ve known. And now all of that energy and verve is going to seep out of him, muscle by muscle, twitch by twitch, day by day. It’s too hard to bear, thinking of him fading like that. Like someone dismantling the Eiffel Tower, pulling the iron apart spoke by spoke.
I remember how he said I dodged a bullet earlier today. I suppose. I get to marry Aaron, who is the picture of health, with his football player’s physique and many salutary habits, his penchant for kale smoothies and avocado toast. If Wesley and I had married as planned, if his parents had never di
ed, I’d be well on my way to widow-hood by now. I don’t feel like I dodged a bullet, though. I feel robbed of the opportunity to care for Wesley during this time, robbed of the chance to be with him during his last good years, or months. Or weeks.
I read and read everything I can find online, as if I’m somehow going to find a cure for Wesley, or a cure for the aching strain I feel in my heart.
Aaron sends me a text from the hospital, where he is working the night shift. He wants to know how I’m doing, how the packing is going. I stand and look at my apartment, where I haven’t packed a single box. I type out a quick response saying I’ve been procrastinating, but then quickly delete it. I don’t want to give him the impression that I’m not excited about moving in with him, because I am, even though at this very moment I feel excited about exactly nothing. Aaron’s not the type to get self-conscious from a flippant text. Still, given my reaction to Wesley’s illness earlier today, I feel I ought to tread lightly, so I respond:
Me: Moving slowly. Could have used that bagel earlier today, I think. Now carb-deprived and lethargic.
I put a little heart emoji at the end so he knows we’re all good, and then I head into the kitchen, where I start pulling plates from the cabinet and wrapping them one by one in the bone-colored packing paper the moving company delivered with the boxes yesterday. I fold and flip and fold again, hoping that my ministrations will be sufficient to protect the ceramic dishes as they travel downtown in the back of the moving truck. I find myself progressing too quickly through the recycled packing paper, using too many sheets per dish, and I berate myself for having declined the moving company’s packing service, where the professionals come in and pack up your kitchen or other areas. The additional charge would have been negligible compared with the cost of the move itself, but I figured I could wrap breakables just as easily as anyone else and that I might as well save the money. I place the wrapped plates into a brown cardboard box, one after another, thinking all the while that they will most likely end up shattered, useless shards of memory.
I’VE BEEN DISTRACTED at work all week. We finished clawing our way through a few final boxes of documents for the chewing tobacco case on Monday night, and since then, I’ve had almost three full days to work on Moe’s I-589 and supporting documentation. I think I’m just flying under the radar and none of the senior attorneys have realized I’m not currently busting my butt on some corporate, billable case. As I study up on Moe’s history and dig for additional historical or political details that will bolster his application, I am struck by the staggering amount of information I myself have learned from working on this case. As much as I was a diligent student throughout my schooling, I never learned anything about the tension between Buddhists and Muslims in Myanmar. In fact, I was never taught anything about Myanmar at all. I can still spout all sorts of trivia about the Magna Carta or King George III, but when it comes to actual current events in countries that do not have a clear impact on the United States, I am more ignorant than I care to admit.
Only from working on this case have I learned that Myanmar is also called Burma, that the countries those labels denote are one and the same, except that the different terms are politically loaded, so people had better choose carefully which one they use. I was also previously unaware that there is a place in the world where Buddhists behave violently. It’s antithetical to everything I thought I knew about Buddhism. The more I learn about Moe’s past, the better I understand the fear and torment he has suffered at the hands of his country’s military, though the militants would claim that Myanmar is not his country, that his ethnic status as a Rohingya deprives him of any of the rights of citizenship. Regardless of the citizenship question, the violence and destruction that have been foisted relentlessly upon his people take my breath away again and again. Coming to the United States was his last hope, and it’s on me to make sure he receives permission to stay here. No pressure or anything.
This morning, I spoke on the phone with a country conditions expert who will be emailing me a report that I can attach to the I-589 to support Moe’s story. I also have those articles that Aaron found for me, many of which I’m planning to photocopy and affix to the application as additional supporting material.
I hear a knock on the open door of my office and look up from my computer screen to see Ian standing in the doorway, coat in hand.
“Hey. I was just going to head down to Wolfgang’s for a steak lunch. Join?”
“Haven’t given up on Atkins yet, I see.” His brief but ardent enthusiasm for each new fad he adopts makes me smile. “My best friend is in town from LA, and I’m about to meet her at The Smith. Pretty sure they have steak there, too, if you want to come.”
“Nah.” He smirks as he shakes his head slightly and shrugs into his wool coat. “I know better than to intrude on a reunion with one of your college girls. As much as I might like to hear you reminisce about the trouble you caused on some wild spring breaks or whatever else you crazy coeds did, I’ll leave you to it.” He puts his hand out for a fist bump, which I return, before he goes on his way.
From the desk behind me, I hear Nicola scoff. “Is that serious?” she demands, and I turn to see an expression of utter outrage on her round face.
“What?” Nicola is always annoyed. I don’t have the patience to massage her indignation today.
“That was, like, total and complete sexual harassment, sexualizing the behavior of college girls like that. You could get him fired.”
“No, he’s just joking.” Sure, if a seventy-year-old partner said the same thing to me, it would be inappropriate, but Ian and I have a long-standing and comfortable friendship and we can rib each other without concern. I stand and start collecting my things so I can go meet Daphne.
“It’s completely unacceptable conduct,” Nicola continues to complain, her lip curling up so far that it becomes indistinguishable from her nose.
I don’t answer as I retrieve my phone and the backup battery that it’s been plugged into all morning.
“You should think really seriously about how you’re going to handle it,” Nicola drones on. There is a timbre to her voice that I don’t like, an undercurrent that sounds an awful lot like a threat. I have no idea whether her menace would be directed at me or at Ian, but I just want to get out of here, to see Daphne and finally have an honest conversation with someone.
“Okay, yeah,” I say over my shoulder as I head out. “I’ll do that.”
Man, I hate this place.
AS DAPHNE AND I sit at lunch, dipping handcrafted potato chips into Roquefort fondue, savoring the fat grams that we’ll both regret later, she fills me in on what’s been happening with her job search out in LA. She’s finishing up a PhD program in psychology at UCLA and trying to determine what she will do after she receives her degree in May. Hardly a week goes by that we don’t speak or text at least once or twice, but Daphne moves in her own orbit, and sometimes it’s a struggle to keep up. She’s also going through fertility treatments because she and her husband, Ethan, have been trying to make a baby for two years, with no luck.
“It sucks balls,” she says, popping another chip into her mouth, “getting shot up with this hormone that you know is going to fuck with your head, and then you have to go home and have sex on demand. My kid better be one cute motherfucker after all the shit we are going through to get her.”
“Or him,” I point out.
“Or him,” she repeats, her copper curls dancing around her face. “I hear baby boys pee all over the place, though. My friend Joni’s son pissed straight into her eye like five times in the first week of his life. Yeesh. Fingers crossed for a girl if that shit’s for real.”
I laugh then, my first happy laugh since I learned about Wesley’s diagnosis. I take solace in Daphne’s wide-open face, her nearly translucent alabaster skin. Daphne has always been able to dilute my moments of gloom, to drag me out from under whatever is assailing me. Ever since we were kids complaining about who knows what —o
ur parents, the mean girls in the grade above, my pushy older brother—she could always light me back up with her absurd behavior and her oversize emotions.
“Okay, now you.” She has pulled the straw out from her glass of mineral water and is pointing it at me. “What’s the latest with your hot hunk of doctor meat?”
“It’s been a weird week,” I say. My eyes scan the other tables at the restaurant. I’m not looking for anyone in particular among the sea of faces, the groups of twos and threes lunching at small, square tables, bodies settled into trendy bistro chairs. I’m just preparing myself, stalling for a few more seconds, because once I open the levee, I’m not sure what emotions will come surging out.
“Tell me,” she says, suddenly focused. My hesitation has betrayed me, alerted her that I’ve got something real, something bulky, on my mind. Our waiter appears and deftly pushes our platter of chips and fondue to the side before placing matching chopped salads on the table in front of us.
“I saw Wesley again, at the soup kitchen,” I confess as soon as the waiter turns away.
She flinches slightly. Blinks. “Wait, hold up. What?” She puts up a hand as if to push away what I’ve said, or at least to block herself from the fallout. She never forgave Wesley for the way he disappeared, or for how she had to nurse me through my broken heart. She almost moved back from California to take care of me at one point, and I know she’s still more than a little pissed off. She made that perfectly clear when I called her after I bumped into him at Thunder Chicken. She spent a good twenty minutes lecturing me about not letting Wesley’s presence in the States have any impact on my relationship with Aaron, on the new life that I’ve worked so hard to build.
I tell her all about the work training program that Wesley started at Community Kitchen, and she seems genuinely intrigued, as if the socially conscious nature of the program has allowed her to forget all about who’s behind its creation.
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