Before I Go

by Colleen Oakley

  “Tonight?” I ask, looking down at the same pajamas I’ve been wearing since I woke up this morning. I had planned on changing before Jack got home, so I could pretend that I had been to class, but it’s only 5 P.M. and he never comes home before eight. I hope he doesn’t notice.

  “Yeah,” he says. “I just gotta change.” Benny at his heels, he walks back toward the bedroom, pulling his T-shirt off over his head as he goes.

  “I’m not really hungry,” I call after him, and snuggle tighter into the divot my butt has made on the couch. My cell buzzes on the coffee table and I know it’s my mom, because she’s texted me seven times in the past hour confirming her arrival Thursday morning to drive me to my stent procedure. It’s taken her seven texts because she just learned to text a month ago and she accidentally hits send too soon or she leaves out an apostrophe or she wants to make sure I’ve gotten the text and that it’s not floating in cyberspace somewhere or has erroneously (and miraculously) been zapped to someone else’s phone, even though I’ve explained to her that that doesn’t happen.

  I pick up my phone. This one says: Should I bring shedts? Or do you have? Can’t remember.

  I know she means sheets. And I know I’ll get another text message clarifying that when she realizes that she’s misspelled it.

  Minutes later, Jack reappears in a burgundy polo and looks at me expectantly.

  “C’mon, go change.”

  So he has noticed my pajamas.

  “What are you doing home so early?” I ask.

  “I told you,” he says slowly, as if I’m the crazy one. “I want to go to dinner.”

  I sit with this information. First it was the Waffle House and now this, and I couldn’t be more baffled than if Jack had told me he was quitting school to be a trapeze artist. Part of me knows I should be thrilled. Isn’t this what I always told Jack I wanted? To be caught off guard by a romantic dinner invite? Except when I told him that last year in a fit of restlessness because we’d only been married a year and I thought maybe we were lacking some of the spine-tingling excitement newlyweds are supposed to revel in, he said: “It’s just not me. I don’t think about stuff like that.” And though I was disappointed, I knew he was right.

  It’s not him.

  So instead of being elated, I feel something else, even though I can’t immediately put my finger on it. It’s like a sweater that used to hug my curves in all the right ways, but then shrunk in the dryer. This new Jack doesn’t fit right.

  “I don’t want to go,” I say, and I know that my voice is laced with irritation and I know that’s not fair, because Jack is doing a nice thing. A Romantic Thing. And I’m ruining it. But I’m orange. And I’m in my pajamas. And I haven’t felt right since throwing up in yoga, even though I didn’t mention that particular episode to Jack because I didn’t want him to look at me with any more concern than he already does.

  “Are you sure?” he asks.

  “Yeah,” I say, keeping my eyes trained on the television. I can hear him breathing behind me and I know he’s debating, calculating whether he should push or not. Try one more time. I try to tamp down my irritation. Now you want to be romantic? And then I’m jealous, because what if this really is the new Jack? What if this Lots of Cancer has flipped some switch in him and he’s become Romantic Jack and then I die and some other girl gets to bask in his swashbuckling, poetry-spouting romanticness?

  And then I try to look on the bright side, because his being more romantic is really just going to help when I do find his new wife, so at least it could make things easier.

  And then I’m exhausted from the vast range of conflicting emotions I’ve experienced in the past ten seconds and I wonder if maybe the orange-sized tumor in my brain is to blame.

  Remaining quiet, I hold my breath until I feel rather than hear him leave the room and I know he’s retreating to his office. I can’t help but feel a little relieved.

  I pick up the remote and flip to a show with bespectacled scientists hypothesizing the top-ten ways the Earth could meet its demise in the next century. A man looking a little too pleased at the prospect discusses the possibility of a colossal black hole swallowing our entire solar system into its gaping maw. And I know I should be horrified by the idea, but a tiny selfish part of me kind of hopes that this will happen.

  My cell buzzes again, and I sigh.

  Preferably before my mom gets here.

  ten

  ON THURSDAY MORNING, a picture of Charlene stares pleasantly at me from the computer screen as I read her short bio on the university’s veterinary medicine Web site. My eyes glaze over the first few titles of her published journal articles: “Digital Squamous Cell Carcinoma in Golden Retrievers,” “Incidence of Malignant Mammary Tumors in Female Canines.” I look back at her head shot and try to find some telltale sign of her sexual orientation. It’s a pointless exercise, not only because identifying gayness from a picture is ridiculous, but because Jack doesn’t appear to be remotely interested in her in any way. I click back to the directory of DVM candidates, and a sea of studious men and women in white lab coats look back at me. I start analyzing photos, and then laugh at myself. What can one possibly glean about someone from a single snapshot? And even if I could decipher that a woman would be a good fit for Jack, then what? Send her an email that says “Hey, Do you like my husband? Check yes or no.”

  I shut my laptop in frustration when I hear a knock at the back door.

  I head into the kitchen, where Benny is crouched on the floor, coiled like a spring, a growl reverberating from somewhere deep in his throat.

  I open the door for my mom, and then reach down for Benny’s collar, scooping him up in my arms. “You brought Mixxy?” I ask.

  Mom stands in the middle of the kitchen with the cat carrier in her right hand and her small rolling overnight bag in her left.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” she says, huffing from her walk up the back stairs. “Yes, I’m so sorry. I was hoping Jack could look at a cut on her paw. Poor little thing has been licking it all week. I texted you. You didn’t get it?”

  “You texted me the letter ‘ V.’ ” Benny struggles against me, so I walk with him toward the back door and fight with the stuck handle until it finally swings open and set him on the landing. “Go! Play!” I command him, letting the screen door thhwap shut between us. I turn back to my mother.

  She’s set both the carrier and the suitcase at her feet and is holding her flip phone at arm’s length, squinting at the screen.

  “I don’t have my glasses. Darn thing.” She makes a clicking sound with her tongue. “I don’t know why they have to make it so complicated.”

  “Mom, it’s fine,” I say, eyeing her keys that are splayed on the counter. Benny’s plaintive whimpers at the back door fill the air and I put my fingers to my temple. It’s the second time I’ve had a headache this week, and I make a mental note to drink more water. I bend down to get Mom’s belongings.

  “Leave that,” she clucks again. “I’ll get it. You’re in no condition—”

  “I’m fine.” Except I’ve already said fine twice and she hasn’t been here for longer than three minutes. I take a deep breath and exhale as I carry her suitcase and Mixxy down the hall to the office, where I’ve blown up a twin-size air mattress on the floor.

  I contemplate crawling onto it. I’m not really “fine.” I’ve been so tired the past few days, I’ve been asleep before Jack even gets home from work.

  “What time’s the procedure?” Mom’s voice from the doorway startles me and I straighten my shoulders.

  “Three.”

  She glances at her wristwatch, holding the tiny face of it between the fingers of her right hand and squinting. “Great! Anything you want to do for the next few hours?”

  Yes. Sleep. But I don’t want Mom to worry about me any more than she already is. She may be in fake-cheerleader mode, but I know underneath flows a river of anxiety.

  “We could take a walk?”

  She brighte
ns. “That’s a wonderful idea. Fresh air will do us both some good.”

  As I scoot past her, mumbling that I need to get my sneakers, Mom squeezes my still yellowish-orange-hued bicep. “You look great,” she says through a smile so wide I can see the gunmetal-capped molars in the back of her mouth. “You really do.”

  I glance into her eyes—red-rimmed and swollen—and I know it’s not me she’s lying to.

  THE GASTROENTEROLOGIST HAS a mole the size of a pencil eraser on her chin, with three long hairs sprouting from it. This is what I focus on as she repeats the same questions I was just asked moments before by the nurse.

  “Are you currently taking any prescription, over-the-counter medicines, herbs, or supplements?”

  “Just essence of yun zhi,” I say. The bottle of mushroom tablets arrived the day before in a yellow package with Chinese characters all over it. I’d already taken three.

  She narrows her eyes and pens something on my chart.

  “How’s your throat feel? Getting numb?”

  The nurse had sprayed a tangy anesthetic in my mouth and instructed me to swallow.

  I nod. It is definitely working.

  “Great,” she says. “Can you lie back on your right side? We’ll give that just a few more minutes to take effect and then we’ll slip this scope in”—she holds up a plastic tube—“and get started.”

  She clicks a button on the intercom next to my bed. It beeps. “Tonya, we’re ready to go when you are.”

  I assume Tonya’s the nurse. She hadn’t introduced herself before she started jabbing the IV needle into my wrist when she came into the room earlier. So much for bedside manner.

  Dr. Jafari turns back to me. “Who did you bring with you today?”

  “My mom,” I croak. My tongue is thick in my mouth and my throat feels papery. Parched.

  “Ahh. No one takes care of us like Mom can, right?” She’s shuffling through papers on the counter next to a box of latex gloves and a cross-section of a plastic intestine and stomach, and I know that her comment is practiced. A canned response that’s meant to relay a sense of comfort or camaraderie between doctor and patient. She’s not looking for a real answer, so I nod.

  There was a short time in my life when I thought that was true. That Mom took care of everything. After Dad died, she worked two jobs to stifle the endless flow of bills in our mailbox. I felt safest right by her side, so after school I would wait at home in our den, watching my taped cartoons until moonlight shone through the windows. Sometimes I’d wait up for her. Other nights, I would crawl into her tangle of sheets, and when I finally heard the car pull into the carport, I shut my eyes tight, pretending to be asleep so she wouldn’t make me get into my own cold bed. It worked most nights.

  It was life, and I thought it was normal until the day I realized it wasn’t. I was eight. And I was wearing my favorite Rainbow Brite shirt that had a real red ribbon sewn into the cotton fabric at the end of her long yellow braid. A girl in my class, Angela, was riding the bus for the first time that day—she usually stood in the car pickup line, but her mom had some kind of appointment and couldn’t make it. I knew that because she announced it loudly when she boarded the bus, as if it was imperative she let us know that just because she was riding with us that one time, she was still different, better in some intangible way. Her mother was standing on the sidewalk waiting to meet her. I got off first and ambled to my house, the front door key on a piece of purple yarn around my neck. I reached the front stoop and pulled the key up through the neck of my T-shirt. I was about to put it into the lock, anticipating the snack I would make for myself once inside—butter on saltine crackers—when a voice cut into my thoughts.

  “Sweetheart?”

  I turned to see Angela’s mother looking at me with concern. Her thick bangs stopped an inch above her eyebrows. I wondered if she cut her hair herself, like my mom did, and accidentally cut one lock too short, forcing her to make the rest of her bangs match. They were sharp. And judgey. And I didn’t like the looks of them. Angela stood at her side, peering at me, too, and I had a fierce, overwhelming feeling like I was being caught breaking some unwritten rule that no one had told me.

  I fingered the ribbon on my shirt and looked at her.

  “Darling, is your mother home?”

  Lying was wrong. This I knew with the righteous fervor possessed by every eight-year-old. But I also knew somehow that it was currently my only option.

  Still mute, I nodded.

  She took a step into our small yard that seemed to be perpetually brown, though the grass in the lawns that flanked our house was a vibrant green.

  “Can I speak with her, hon?”

  My mind raced and I opened my mouth to voice my first-ever real lie to an adult. “She’s asleep. She sleeps in the afternoons.”

  Angela’s mom was now standing on my front stoop with me, Angela tight against her leg as if she were attached to it. I felt cornered.

  “Maybe you could wake her up,” she said. “I’d like to talk with her.”

  I realized this woman wasn’t going to go away. There was no escape route and my young mind was struggling to come up with one on the fly. I slowly turned the key in the lock and opened the door.

  As I stepped into the hallway, Angela and her mom on my heels, I cringed, seeing our house for the first time through the eyes of a stranger. The hallway light was a single bulb. The glass fixture meant to encase it sat on the fake wood floor beneath it, covered in dust. It didn’t make sense to reattach it, my mom said, when you just had to take it off every time you needed to change the bulb. I stepped over it and glanced at the five uneven, teetering stacks of newspapers lining the wall leading into the den making the hallway feel even narrower. They were meant to be recycled, but there never seemed to be any time to take them to the dump.

  The den was worse. Old plates with crusts of stale bread and plastic cups a quarter full of leftover Crystal Light or Diet Coke sat scattered on our sticky end tables. Mold had started to grow in one of them, and I checked it every afternoon when I got home, curious to see what new spores—and colors—had developed while I was gone. In the corner of the room, the litter box for Frank, a cat that my mom had found in the parking lot of the drugstore she was working at one night, overflowed with black turds and urine-soaked lumps of gray grit. I thought of the cleaning chart mom put up on the fridge when school started. I was supposed to do my chores and check them off as soon as I got home. The first few weeks, she had been hawkish, making sure I was following the rules. But that had been months ago, and the cleaning chart had long since been covered up with magnets holding straight-A report cards and coupons for two-for-one pan pizzas at Little Caesars and yellowed Dave Barry columns.

  Angela’s mother’s wide eyes scanned the scene, her lip curled up in disgust. She put her hand on Angela’s bony shoulder, willing her not to move.

  “Um, stay here,” I said, turning away from her. “I’ll go get my mom.”

  I ran down the side hall that connected three boxy bedrooms and a bathroom, and entered the door that belonged to my mother’s room. Her bed was unmade, the white sheets grimy and yellowed from years of use and limited washings. My heart raced and I had no idea what I was going to do. Think, I commanded myself. I took a few deep breaths and that’s when an idea came to me. I left her room and ducked into the bathroom. I reached into the shower and turned on the water full blast.

  Then, I calmly walked down the hall to face Angela’s mother’s bangs.

  “She’s in the shower,” I announced as soon as I stepped foot in the den. “She says if you leave your number she’ll call you when she gets out.”

  Angela’s mother furrowed her brow and I knew she didn’t believe me. She glanced at her watch, and I was terrified she was going to say she’d wait. But she didn’t.

  She nodded, as if she had made a decision about something, grabbed Angela’s hand, and gingerly stepped her way back to the front door. Then she turned around. “You tell your m
other that I’ll be back,” she said, and narrowed her eyes at me. The thinly veiled threat hung in the air between us.

  When she shut the door behind her, the heat of shame blossomed up my face and I looked around at the den, seeing it with Angela’s mom’s eyes—unable to see it again through my own.

  I spent the entire afternoon scrubbing and vacuuming and washing dishes and dusting and bagging newspapers and laundering sheets. I even moved a chair into the hallway, and standing on my tiptoes on the seat of it, I was just barely able to screw the light fixture back into place.

  When my mother got home that night, long after the moon had made its appearance, she entered the house through the door between the carport and the kitchen. I heard her keys clatter on the now-glistening countertop.

  “Daisy-bear?”

  “Yeah,” I called from my perch on the couch. I beamed, waiting for her to shower me with gratitude and praise for our new, sparkling house.

  “Did you do your homework?” she called out.

  “Yes,” I said. Maybe she hadn’t looked up yet. Maybe she was still flipping through the mail that she carried in with her each night.

  She appeared in the doorway of the den and looked at me. The purple circles under her eyes were more pronounced in the evening. “Did you have a good day, sweetheart?”

  I nodded. I knew I should tell her about Angela’s mother. Ask her what I should do if she came back. But Mom looked so tired. And I couldn’t bear to burden her with one thing more.

  “I’m so glad,” she said, giving me a weak smile. Her eyes scanned the room, and I waited for them to brighten, for her to be overcome with the marked difference between now and when she left it that morning. “You picked up,” she said.

  I nodded again. If I were a dog, my tail would have been thumping the floor in rapid-fire succession. “You’re a good daughter.” There they were—the words I’d been waiting for, the reward for my hard work—but the emotion behind them was flat. And I couldn’t understand why, instead of brightening, her face appeared even more defeated. She walked behind the couch, leaned down, and kissed the crown of my head. “Go do your teeth. It’s bedtime.” She padded off down the hall and I stood up. But instead of following her, I walked the opposite direction into the kitchen. I got a hammer and a nail from the junk drawer, and with my tiny fingers, I gently tapped the nail into the wall beside the door. Then I picked up Mom’s keys from where they were splayed on the counter and hung them on the new metal peg.