Kill Me

by Stephen White

  I considered myself a young man. But because I’d spent most of my adult life living under the illusion that I had become a father late, I had always imagined I’d be a much older man before I had the responsibility and joy of helping a child of mine choose a college. When Adam and I headed out to visit schools, I found the time with him on the college-campus road show to be a rich terrarium of discovery. We both learned about colleges. We sat through mind-numbing admission presentations at schools from Pomona to Penn; we took unbelievably unrevealing campus tours in college towns from Palo Alto to Princeton.

  We learned how Swarthmore was different from Williams, and why Duke was no Washington University, and vice versa.

  We also, I think, learned about each other.

  We didn’t grow closer during that time. Adam made it clear that wasn’t an option. I was left to accept the role of financier and observer of my son’s life and to his process. But what seemed initially to me like a cursory, shallow, impatient—read: adolescent in all its pejorative connotations—process was actually a winnowing procedure for my son that was as personal and thoughtful and as idiosyncratic to him as would be picking out the right hat. The day we said good-bye after the last of the college visits was over, he was still treating me like I was a father he hadn’t met until he was fourteen, a father who had spent a chunk of a lifetime not knowing that his son existed.

  Adam didn’t do things my way at any stage of the journey, but I was able to recognize, and even momentarily accept, that he was doing things the way he needed to do them.

  The following August, and the actual beginning of college, arrived quickly.

  Adam had been accepted to six of the seven schools to which he had applied. He’d only been turned down by what anxious parents like me called his “safety” school, his backup. The one he was almost certain to get into. Adam considered the rejection a badge of honor. He decided to attend Brown—if you had asked me to rank his favorites, I wouldn’t have put it in the top three—and was scheduled to start classes just up Interstate 95 from New Haven in Providence. Adam had asked Thea and me not to go to Rhode Island to drop him off, so Bella had driven him to Providence from Cincinnati a few days before school began and had helped him settle into his dorm. His new roommate was a lacrosse star from Virginia whose father had been a lacrosse player at Brown.

  When I told Thea about Adam’s first Ivy roomie, I bet her that the first thing Adam would learn at college was which end of a lacrosse stick to hold. He confirmed my suspicion in an e-mail he sent that evening marveling that there was actually a sport played with a “jock strap at the end of a stick.”

  Despite the fact that I was aching to talk with him, I didn’t call him right away. The long interlude of relative stability I’d been enjoying with my aneurysm was over. I’d begun experiencing serious fatigue on a daily basis, and the headaches and nausea were growing more and more persistent. I wasn’t confident I could keep the fact of my illness out of my voice, and I remained determined that Adam not learn about my condition.

  The neurosurgeon in Denver I was seeing—I’d chosen him because he was the one who creeped me out less than the others—had my head re-scanned, and told me matter-of-factly that the bulge was bigger. “It’s not stable,” he said. “We’d like it to be stable.”

  Yes, we would, I thought.

  “Bigger?” I asked. I had an image of a water balloon in my head.

  “Not much. Fractions of millimeters.” He paused. “But you have to know it could rupture at any time. You could have a bleed on your way home tonight. Or tomorrow.”

  I didn’t like the fact that I was a patient for whom “bleed” had been transformed from a verb into a noun. The thin-walled excuse for an artery in my brain wasn’t holding up its end of the bargain I’d made with my denial.

  To make a complicated medical situation simple, an unstable aneurysm wasn’t a good sign.

  After my appointment, I reiterated to Thea that I didn’t want Adam to know about the aneurysm.

  Thea was, as always, a step ahead of me. “He can’t blame you for this. This isn’t reckless.”

  I feared she was wrong. Adam could blame me for this. And it was a little reckless. But she didn’t know about the reckless part. The Death Angels part.

  “You have to reconsider surgery, babe,” Thea said.

  “Yes,” I said. The neurosurgeons were saying the same thing. I’d consider it and reconsider it until rocket ships were making daily flights to Mars. But I knew it wasn’t going to happen.

  My circumstances—and my Death Angels—made that choice impossible.

  The next day I got a call on my Ob-la-di phone as I was sitting in my Denver office pondering my fate.

  No greeting. The voice in my ear was female and familiar.

  Tender, too.

  “You’re right on the line now. With any more new symptoms, the threshold will be crossed,” she said.

  I thought, God, you people are good . “Lizzie,” I whispered.

  “I bet they’re pushing surgery harder, aren’t they? Your docs?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, consider this, Yossarian: It’s a classic catch-22,” she said. “If you choose not to have surgery, the aneurysm will soon bulge a little more, and you’ll get increasingly symptomatic. And if that happens we will, of course, kill you.

  “Or the aneurysm will rupture. Sooner rather than later. Given its location in your brain, you’ll likely die if that happens. If you don’t die, you’ll be severely impaired. And if that happens we will, of course, kill you.”

  She paused to let the weight of that scenario sink in, or to steel herself for what she would say next. “If you do choose to have surgery, assuming it goes well, you will undoubtedly suffer some deficits from the procedure. And those deficits will almost certainly exceed the parameters you’ve set to trigger your insurance to kick in. And if that happens we will, of course, kill you.”

  “Lizzie,” I said again.

  “If you have some business to take care of, I suggest you take care of it.”

  She hung up.

  I thought she’d sounded sad.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  True to my word, I did finally disclose to Dr. Gregory the ways that Adam had hurt me.

  After I decided I would go there with him it took me a while to cover the necessary ground. First I had to tell him about Adam’s relationship with his uncle, then about me getting diagnosed, and about Connie’s death. Only then could I tell him about what had started all the hurt. I filled in that blank with a session-long tale about Adam’s momentous second visit to our home, and the revelation that he’d shared with me about his stepfather’s death.

  I concluded with an admission to my therapist that he had been exactly right, that Adam had made me vulnerable.

  I shared stories with him about the joy I felt during the college trips with Adam, and about the remarkable process of getting to know my son over that time period. I acknowledged the heartache of being forced to stay out of his reach.

  My therapist listened patiently, but I could tell that he recognized that I was dealing with prelude, and he was waiting for the crucial part of my story. The part when Adam twisted the knife.

  So here goes with that part.

  Brown University in Rhode Island is as close to the academic environment a brilliant, homeschooled, self-directed, eclectically minded kid is accustomed to as any new college student is likely to find. Brown’s undergraduate college is without curricular requirements, a place that actually encourages its students to taste freely from the academic bounty the university makes available. Brown allows a student to choose from a menu of majors, or to cobble one together on his or her own from bits and pieces of academic passion. My son had chosen his college well. If Adam was going to thrive in any organized academic setting, I’d come to concur with his decision that it would be the one provided at Brown.

  Given his idiosyncratic and prodigious intellectual gifts and his unorthodox approa
ch to learning, however, I wasn’t certain that Adam was really going to thrive in any organized academic setting. Thea, Bella, and I each had our fingers crossed that the experiment in formal higher education would work out.

  Adam, too, had his doubts. His final words to Bella before she drove away from his dorm?

  “Don’t be disappointed if this doesn’t go too well.”

  She promised she wouldn’t be.

  Five minutes later, when Bella told us about it on her cell phone, Thea and I promised we wouldn’t be disappointed, either.

  We were all lying.

  The first month of school seemed to fly by. Thea and I had taken advantage of Berkeley’s late birthday and decided to postpone the onset of her kindergarten adventure for another year, so we—Thea, Cal, Haven, and I—were all together as that autumn began. A long Indian summer interlude dominated Colorado’s weather as we split our time between Denver and Ridgway.

  Although my contact with my son continued to be more sporadic than I would have liked during those weeks, I communicated with him just enough—mostly by e-mail—to satisfy myself that his adjustment to being in college fell someplace on the scale between “okay” and “fine.”

  But all hell broke loose sometime in October.

  When exactly? That was hard to pinpoint because Bella had kept the early signs of the developing crisis to herself. The first time Thea and I heard that something might be up was after Adam had been absent from his scheduled classes for four days. And by that time, his roommate was also reporting that Adam hadn’t slept in his dorm room for six nights.

  The roommate actually thought it was six, but since he’d been gone on a road trip with the lacrosse team for some off-season something at the front end of the time period in question, he admitted that it could actually have been as long as seven or eight nights that Adam had been AWOL from Brown.

  Shit.

  “He’s on one of his adventures,” Bella explained on the phone during her we-may-have-a-situation-but-I’m-not-really-that-worried-but-I-thought-you-should-know call. “He’s always done this. Always.”

  It was clear that Bella, bless her heart, was far from exasperated about the situation, and hadn’t actually crossed the line that distinguished “concerned” from “worried.” She labeled her state of mind as “puzzled.”

  “He’s already away from home, Bella. Why does he have to run at all?” I asked her.

  “He’s not running—he didn’t run. Adam’s exploring. Something out there caught his eye, maybe something he was studying at school. He decided to take a closer look at it himself. It’s what he does; it’s how he learns. When he was thirteen he was reading about how salmon spawn, so he took off for a river in Washington State to see it for himself. That’s who our son is. He’s an experiential learner.”

  The kid had been out of contact with anyone for more than a week. “Experiential learner” wasn’t enough of an explanation for me.

  God help us.

  But Bella had also said “our son,” and hearing those words made it hard for me to recover any traction for my frustration with her.

  Thea was oddly quiet about the whole affair as it developed. At first I applauded the prudence reflected by her silence, and I admired her ability to keep some distance from the battle that I feared was about to be joined between Bella and me over what to do next about Adam’s absence.

  Then I had an epiphany about what was really going on with Thea. I thought about my conclusion for most of a day, trying to reject it, trying to convince myself I was wrong. But the more I thought about it the more right it felt.

  It also felt terrible.

  I’d taken Haven from Thea’s breast, changed her, and returned her to her crib before I’d read Cal her nighttime stories and tucked her into bed. After the girls were settled, I sat down next to my wife on the love seat beneath the window in our Denver bedroom. Thea was stretched out reading a book, and had to make room for me. Her accommodation was reluctant.

  “Hey,” I said.

  She put her finger on a spot near the bottom of the left page, turned to me, and smiled. The smile was halfhearted at best. It said “I love you” but it also said “This had better be good. I’m enjoying the silence, and my book.”

  I smiled back. I wanted the smile to shout “I love you, too.” In a calm tone, a conversational, nonconfrontational tone, I said, “You told Bella, didn’t you?”

  She made the mistake of responding too quickly.

  “Told her what? What on earth do you mean?” she said, turning her attention back to the book as though she couldn’t bear to be parted any longer from the story she was reading.

  My wife was a terrible liar. When she tried to prevaricate she almost always ended up forcing false assurance into her words like a woman who hadn’t seen single-digit sizing for a while squeezing herself into a size eight.

  “About the aneurysm.”

  I never called it “my aneurysm,” always “the aneurysm.” As part of the campaign to maintain my own optimistic charade, I needed to treat the damn weakness as an interloper, not a resident.

  As parasite, not partner. I had to regard it as nothing integral to me. If it were integral, it couldn’t be vanquished. I wouldn’t allow it to become integral.

  Thea made a dismissive face that was almost comical. From her expression it appeared that she thought that I’d begun speaking in tongues and she wanted to make it clear to me that it wasn’t her fault that she couldn’t decipher my babble.

  I pretended not to notice her feigned disbelief. It was easier that way. “When?” I asked. “When did you tell her?”

  She closed her book and placed it on her lap. She’d lost her place. She took a quick look at me—I think she wanted to judge whether or not I was angry—then she turned away from me and nodded two or three times into the darkness beyond the western windows. “End of September, maybe. She was in Ohio. I was up in Ridgway. It was a pretty day. We were talking on the phone. And we were both cooking. She was making bread. I was making cupcakes for Berk and her friends.”

  “Damn it,” I said, without any passion, and without any real anger. I already knew in my heart that Thea had talked with Bella about the aneurysm, and long before I confronted her I’d already spilled all the passion I could muster about it. The “damn it” was a simple recognition on my part about how complicated things were going to be with my son from that moment forward.

  Thea said my name then. She said it as a plea.

  I sighed. “Bella told Adam,” I said. “That’s why he split.” It all seemed so obvious to me.

  “Why would she tell him?” Thea asked.

  Thea wasn’t being curious; she was being defensive. It was obvious to her, too, how these dominos had tumbled.

  “Because Bella is Bella,” I said.

  “Maybe not,” Thea said. It wasn’t an argument; it was another layer of defense. She knew it and I knew it. “Maybe you’re … wrong about her. You’ve always been hard on Bella. She said she wouldn’t tell him. She promised me that she wouldn’t.”

  “Thea? We’re talking Bella. She can’t keep things from Adam. She can’t tolerate any boundaries between them. We both know that. Come on.”

  Thea didn’t want it to be true. “Why would she tell him?”

  “It’s her way of being a good parent. It always has been. She uses license as a substitute for responsibility, and she uses honesty as a substitute for judgment. That’s Bella. It’s who she is.”

  Thea thought about my words for a while before she decided not to argue with my conclusion. Instead, she decided to throw herself on the mercy of the court. It was a wise decision; the court was feeling merciful.

  “No,” Thea said protectively. “It’s me. I screwed up. Bella’s so nice. She is. After we got the news about the aneurysm bulging more, I needed to talk. It’s been so hard to keep everything quiet. She’s so far away … I thought it would be safe to …”

  So it’s my fault? I almost said. This all
happened because I wanted to keep my illness a secret? I didn’t, but I came close. Instead I said, “Where Adam is concerned Bella is like the mother without borders. Her judgment sucks. That’s why we weren’t going to tell her, remember? We talked about Bella specifically.”

  I realized at that moment that the entire I-don’t-have-an-aneurysm ruse had been concocted to protect Adam. Or, more to the point, had been concocted to protect me from Adam’s feelings.

  “I screwed up. I’m sorry,” Thea said.

  I kissed her. “It’s not your fault. I shouldn’t have put you in this position.”

  She touched me on the face. I was grateful for the caress.

  “Adam thinks I’m going to die. That I’m going to leave him. It’s his greatest fear about me. The aneurysm will be a huge thing between us. A mountain range. An ocean. I don’t know how to mitigate this, the fact that he knows about it. I don’t know how to erase it. I need to try to figure out what to do next.”

  “Why would he run, though?”

  “To sort things out? I don’t know. I don’t know my own son well enough to answer that question.”

  That admission took the breath away from her. From me, too.

  “Well, he’s wrong about you. You won’t die. We’ll just have to find him and tell him that,” Thea said when she recovered, endeavoring to sound defiant. “We’ll show him the numbers, the odds, explain all that you’re doing to maximize your chances, let him talk to the doctors—whatever he wants. He’s smart; he’ll see.”

  “It’s growing, baby. It could blow. We both know that.”