Before I Go

by Colleen Oakley

  “ALMOST DONE.” A voice jerks me out of my past.

  I open my eyes and focus my gaze on the long tube protruding from my mouth. I know it’s jammed all the way down my throat and—even though I can’t feel it—I fight the urge to gag.

  A hand rests on my shoulder. “It’s OK,” the nurse says. “Relax.” Her tone is warm, soothing, and I feel bad for thinking poorly of her before. She sounds nice.

  I notice a slight pressure to the right above my abdomen and then nothing.

  “There,” she says, patting me again. “All done.”

  I try to raise my eyes to look at her, but my lids feel heavy and I have the absurd thought to prop them open with my fingers. I resist the impulse.

  “Tired?” the nurse asks. “We gave you a light sedative. It should wear off shortly.”

  As she threads the plastic tubing backward out of my throat, Dr. Jafari’s voice cuts in from beside me. “You did great. Tonya here will wheel you to the recovery room, go over a few postop details with your mom, and then you’ll be on your way home in no time.”

  I want to say OK or thank you or something to acknowledge that she has spoken, but I can’t make my voice work in conjunction with the opening of my mouth, so I shut it and don’t say anything.

  In the recovery room, Tonya rattles off instructions from a clipboard. “You may notice some discomfort where we placed the stent over the next few days, but if your stomach gets hard or swollen or you start vomiting, call us immediately. Ditto if you have a fever, chills, or any severe pain.”

  I nod like an obedient child but I’m not really listening to her. She has nice hair. Big soda-can-size curls that she obviously spent some time perfecting in a mirror before she left her house that morning. And she’s a nurse, which means she’s good at looking after people and disinfecting things. I wonder if Jack would find her attractive—her hips are wide and round.

  Childbearing hips.

  The phrase enters my mind, unbidden. I need to add to my list—a woman who wants children. And doesn’t mind ant farms.

  Just as I’ve decided that yes, Jack would like her, Tonya hands over the postop checklist and the diamond-studded gold band on her left ring finger neutralizes my thoughts. Great. So far my contenders for Jack’s wife are a maybe-lesbian, a few smiling head shots of Jack’s colleagues whom I’ve never met, and a woman who’s already married.

  On the way home, Mom reaches over and pats my leg. “How are you feeling?”

  “I’m fine,” I say, inching away from her and closer to the door.

  “But do you—”

  “Mom! I said I’m fine.”

  She nods and we ride in silence for a few minutes until she begins to fill the empty air with tales of Mixxy and the latest Giada recipe she re-created (“It was too tomatoey. And I don’t think I like capers.”) and the ending of the Mary Higgins Clark book she just read. Then she tells me that she’s recently joined the Atlanta Audubon Society and she’s going to attend her first bird-watching field trip this weekend. “I really only leave the house for work,” she says. “I need to get out more.”

  I murmur a reply, but sit up a little straighter. That’s it.

  If I’m going to find Jack a wife, I need to get out more. I need to widen my net. I’m not going to meet anyone by staring at strangers on campus or going to the same yoga class I’ve been going to for years or getting procedures done at the doctor’s office. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before, but then it occurs to me that I’ve never had to date before. Not really. I met Jack when I was twenty. A baby. And he was the first real adult relationship I’d had—unless I count Adam, my “friend with benefits” who lived in the dorm beside mine my freshman year. My roommate assured me that this was what everyone did in college. But after a few short weeks, when I realized I knew how Adam curled his lip and whinnied like a horse when he came, but had no idea what he ate for breakfast, I ended it.

  I need to get out. But it’s more than that. I need to know where to go. And whom to look for. And what to do.

  I need to learn how to date.

  And I know, as much as I hate to admit it, that there’s only one person who can help me.

  I need Kayleigh.

  eleven

  TURNS OUT MIXXY’S cut is infected. Jack says he needs to run her up to his clinic to bandage her paw (“She has to stop licking it if it’s going to heal,” I overheard him instruct Mom in the living room) and pick up a round of antibiotics.

  “You’ll be OK?” he asks, sitting beside me on our bed. He rubs the back of my hand with his thumb.

  I shrug him off. I’m only lying in bed because Mom won’t let me get up, not even to do a load of laundry. I tell Jack this, adding a smirky: “Doctor’s orders.” I sigh. “I’m so glad she’s leaving in the morning.”

  It’s a sentiment I would have never voiced in elementary school, when I swallowed envy as other moms sewed costumes for school plays and made pineapple upside-down cakes for bake sales and were chaperones for field trips to pick-your-own berry farms and art museums. I nearly shook like a timid puppy with my own desire to have her reassuring hand smooth my hair or to put my head in her lap on the rickety seat-belt-less bus that we traveled in to our destinations. But I never told her that. There wasn’t enough room in our tiny house to hold all of our sadness, so I did everything I could to alleviate hers and basked in the attention I received for my efforts. “I don’t know where she came from,” I overheard Mom whisper to Aunt Joey on one of their ritual Sunday-night long-distance phone calls, her voice cracking. “She’s just so . . . responsible.”

  By high school, we had evolved into something resembling roommates more than mother and daughter. While my peers were fighting for later curfews and driving privileges, I was essentially running a house—ironing Mom’s pleated pants, trying new recipes for dinner from her Weight Watchers cookbook, admiring the parallel vacuum lines that I etched into the carpet every second Saturday that I spent deep-cleaning, and reminding her every three thousand miles to get her oil changed.

  “You worry too much, Daisy-bear,” she’d say to me, but the unorthodox role reversal worked for us—until she met George. He was a car mechanic with a handlebar mustache, skinny arms, and a round belly. And the first time I saw him make Mom smile was like seeing the sun after living underground for ten years. George moved in with us when I was in the tenth grade and encouraged Mom to go back to school for her two-year degree—which is exactly how long their relationship lasted. “Not everyone’s meant to be together forever,” she said when I asked her why he was leaving. I was worried she’d revert back to her old self, but she never did. He had changed her. Or she had changed herself. And that changed us.

  It was like some dormant momness had been jolted awake inside her, and like a peacock, she felt the overwhelming urge to display it all at once. On the Richter scale of parenting, she was suddenly a ten, insisting on driving me up to UGA for my first semester of school and decorating my dorm room with Target pillows and lamps and picture frames, then calling every day to make sure I was studying and not partying too hard or sleeping with inappropriate boys. I didn’t resent it as much as I just didn’t know how to respond to it. It was like we had been doing the fox-trot our entire life and Mom suddenly switched to the tango. I didn’t know the steps. So I ignored most of her phone calls and her advice, while continuing to navigate my life the only way I’d ever known how—alone.

  And then I got cancer. And I had no choice but to finally let her be the mother she had so desperately been trying to be, because for once I couldn’t completely take care of myself and I didn’t think it was fair to depend entirely on Jack and Kayleigh. So I let her come drive me to a few appointments and slather my dry skin with lotion, but I drew the line at spoon-feeding me broth and holding my hair when I threw up.

  And now, here we are again—with her trying to squeeze in as much mothering as I’ll allow, leaving me to believe it’s no coincidence that only one letter changes the
word to “smothering.”

  “She is leaving?” Relief floods Jack’s face. “She was just saying something about staying the weekend.”

  I sigh again. “I already told her that wasn’t necessary.”

  “I can see how she would think it might be,” Jacks snaps. “She probably thinks I’m the worst husband ever. You should have let me take you today.” Since I didn’t let him come down to Emory for my trial workup, he had been single-minded in his determination to accompany me to the stent procedure. But I was just as determined not to let him miss any more clinic and jeopardize his chances of graduating on time.

  I shake my head. “School comes—”

  “—first,” he finishes. “Yeah.”

  He stares at me and I feel like a glass slide in his lab, beneath his microscope lens. The sensation that I could break at any second under his gaze is constant and exhausting. At least he’s given up trying to be romantic. After my rebuff of his uncharacteristic dinner invite, Jack’s been working his usual hours—maybe even more than usual, and I wonder if it’s because he wants a break from playing the concerned husband as much as I want a break from being the pitiable, dying wife. I’m relieved when Mom pops her head into view, declaring that I have a visitor.

  Kayleigh steps into the room, her neon-pink shirt as loud as her voice. “What the hell? I have to get announced around here? It’s like getting an audience with the queen.” She curtsies at the foot of my bed.

  “Hey, Kayleigh,” Jack says, acknowledging her presence without really looking at her. When I first started dating Jack, I had a naive wish that he’d love Kayleigh as much as I did and the three of us would seamlessly become best friends, taking cross-country road trips and finishing each other’s sentences like some kind of NBC sitcom. But it didn’t exactly work out like that. “Does he ever, like, actually speak?” Kayleigh asked after first meeting him. I tried to explain about his social anxiety and that he warmed up after you got to know him. “She’s a little, uh . . . in your face,” was Jack’s assessment, destroying the last vestiges of my perfect-friend-triangle fantasy.

  Since then, they’ve learned to tolerate each other, even though Jack still sometimes questions our friendship after spending extended amounts of time with her. “You guys are just so . . . different.” I’ve given up trying to explain that what we have in common is our whole lives.

  Now he stands up, his right knee—the one that he had to have ACL surgery on in high school, not because of sports, but because he tripped up a set of cement stairs—popping, at the same time that Kayleigh crawls up onto the bed and sits cross-legged on Jack’s side, facing me.

  “I’ll be back soon,” Jack says. “Yell if you need anything.”

  Mom follows him out of the room. “No more than thirty minutes, Kayleigh,” she calls over her shoulder. “Our patient needs her rest!”

  I roll my eyes and lean into the stack of pillows supporting my back.

  Kayleigh and I stare at each other, and the anger that I lit on in the yoga studio comes rushing back.

  “Where have you been?”

  “You just texted like ten minutes ago. I came right over.”

  “Not today,” I say, annoyed. “For the past three weeks.”

  “What do you mean? I’ve asked if you want me to come over and you keep saying you’re busy.”

  Technically, that’s true. But she always texted right when I was elbows deep in my wife research or in the late evening when I’ve been too tired to respond. And besides, that’s not the point.

  “So? You’ve never asked before.”

  “Excuse me for trying to be polite,” she says.

  “That’s the thing!” I sit straight up to allow the irritation to rise up from my belly and out of my mouth. “You’re not polite! You’ve never been polite!”

  “Daisy, calm down,” she says, glancing at the door as if we’re eleven and she doesn’t want her mom to catch us watching soap operas when we’re not supposed to have the TV on. “Look, I was just trying to give you and Jack some space.”

  I nod. My body’s suddenly weak from my small outburst. I lean back into the stack of pillows and take a deep breath. “I don’t want space. And I don’t want to go to the Waffle House.”

  At this, she scrunches her nose and tilts her head at me. “The Waf—”

  I wave my hand to metaphorically erase what I just said. “Forget it. I just want everyone to stop acting so weird.”

  “OK,” she says.

  “OK,” I say. But the air around us feels stretched thin, like a chewing gum bubble that’s getting ready to pop. I know it’s bad when I start wishing my mom would come in to check on me, just to break the silence.

  But she doesn’t, and finally Kayleigh speaks.

  “You really were not kidding about your skin,” she says. “You look like George Hamilton. I thought the stitch was supposed to fix that.”

  Relief washes over me. She’s back.

  “Stent,” I correct her. “It will. Doctor says it may take a few days.”

  She nods. “How do you feel? Did it hurt?”

  “No. It was nothing. I don’t know why Mom’s acting like I just had brain surgery.”

  “She just cares about you,” Kayleigh says, waving her hand. “You’re all she’s got.”

  The words fall on my chest like a wrecking ball, and it takes effort to push them away. I’m not all she’s got. She’s got Mixxy. And Aunt Joey in Seattle. Or Portland. Somewhere near where those vampire movies were filmed. I can’t ever remember. Oh, and her bird club. She’s getting out more.

  I smooth my hair over my shoulder, eager to change the subject. “How’s work?”

  Our eyes meet and I realize she’s just as relieved as I am to discuss something normal. Neutral. Unrelated to Dying and Cancer. She launches into a rant about her annoying co-teacher, Pamela, and the upcoming kindergarten open house. “She’s overhauling our entire classroom as if Bill Gates himself is coming to judge her teaching skills. And Pinterest. Oh holy God, the things she’s finding on Pinterest. I don’t have time to make sandpaper letter cards or any of the forty-seven stupid crafts she thinks will”—Kayleigh makes air quotes with her fingers—“enrich the learning environment.”

  We ease into the rhythm of our years-long friendship, bantering back and forth like two lumberjacks gliding a saw through a felled tree trunk. I take the lead, guiding the conversation toward the reason I invited her over.

  “Are you still seeing the nineteen-year-old?”

  “Harrison?”

  “Is there more than one nineteen-year-old?”

  “No!”

  “OK, then.”

  She chews her thumbnail and mumbles. “I may have been at his house when you called.”

  “Kayleigh!”

  “What?”

  “It has to stop. We need to get you back out there.”

  “I know! I know.”

  I nod, pleased that I’ve steered our chat in the exact direction I wanted it to go. Pleased that I’ll be able to get the information I want from her without revealing why I want it. I thought about telling her the truth, but every time I practiced saying it out loud, it sounded crazy. Even to me. “OK. Where do you go to meet guys?”

  She shrugs. “I don’t go anywhere. I just meet them when I’m out.”

  I lean forward a bit. “Out where? Where was the last place you met one?” Then I add, to clarify: “A man. Not a man-child.”

  She pauses, thinking, and spits a piece of her nail out of her mouth. “The dog park.”

  It’s my turn to pause. “You don’t own a dog.”

  “I know. I took Benny. That weekend you were in the mountains.”

  Oh, right. I brighten. The dog park. Why hadn’t I thought of that? Not only will there be a lot of women there, but they will love dogs, which means they’ll have something in common with Jack.

  “Great. Let’s go back. This weekend?”

  “You’re going to help me find a man? This should b
e good. You find something wrong with every single guy I date.”

  “Not true!” Although it is kind of true. But only because Kayleigh has the worst possible taste in men (and men-children) ever. She always has, dating back to middle school when she was obsessed with Chris Poland, a skater boy who spent more days in in-school suspension than out of it and sent her a love note with her name spelled incorrectly. And though my plan hadn’t really been to help Kayleigh find a guy, I might as well help her at the same time I’m helping Jack.

  God knows she could use it.

  That night when Jack gets home and crawls into bed and rolls his socks one at a time off his feet and adds them to the pile on the floor, I watch him. I’ve spent the time since Kayleigh left in awe of the effort it takes to meet potential partners. With Jack it was so easy. I think about the day we met—when I didn’t know he was my husband, when he was just a fellow student waiting for the university bus. I flinched when I saw a hand come at me from my peripheral vision.

  “Sorry,” a voice said. “There was a bee.”

  I had heard the buzzing, even seen the furry insect, but I hadn’t been concerned about it.

  “I thought those big ones were friendly,” I said. “They don’t have stingers, right?”

  “Common misconception.” He smiled, and I swear his face competed with the sun above us. My eyes lit on his crooked tooth. My stomach dropped to my toes. “They can actually sting more than once because they don’t have barbs like honeybees.”

  I marveled as if this was the most interesting thing I had ever heard. Maybe it was.

  In bed, Jack pulls me to his naked chest and I burrow my head into it, his wiry curls scraping my cheek, and I gather more memories into my growing pile. Jack memories. The terrible poem he wrote me one Valentine’s Day, using the word “zaftig” to describe me. “It means curvy! You’re curvy! Beautiful.” I laughed. “Next time just use beautiful.” Or driving to my mom’s for Thanksgiving and the wreck he nearly caused on I-85, screeching to a halt and jumping out of the car to save a box turtle that was attempting to cross all six lanes of the highway. Or when he first kissed me, my lips trembling with nerves, and he pulled his oversized sweatshirt over his head and swallowed my small frame with it, allowing me to keep up the pretension that it was the air causing me to shiver.