Before I Go

by Colleen Oakley

  “You know they broke up,” I say.

  “Oh,” she says, stepping back as if this news is an extra weight that I’ve handed to her. “I didn’t know that.”

  And then I feel bad because it’s not her fault that Max died or that her boyfriend is alive or that one of Hollywood’s oldest power couples couldn’t make it after all or that I have cancer all over my body.

  I take a step back, too, cradling my books as if they’re a peaceful baby with blond feather wisps of hair, and say with as much heart as I can muster: “I’m really sorry about your cat.”

  WHEN JACK GETS home from work just after nine thirty, I’m already in bed, half reading the Nora Roberts and realizing that it wouldn’t be quite so sad to die without having finished one. That perhaps I should concentrate on going through the classics that I always meant to read someday. Like Lady Chatterley’s Lover or something by Proust. I dog-ear the corner of the page that I’ve reread three times and close the book, sliding it onto my night table. Jack shrugs off his jacket and slings it over the back of the blue velvet wing chair in the corner. His shoulders are curved over his long frame and when he looks up at me his eyes are bloodshot.

  “Rough day at the office?” I say, offering him a smile.

  He groans. “Yeah, if you consider three back-to-back surgeries and then staring at a computer screen for eight-plus hours trying to compile as much research as I could find about equine prosthetics for Ling a rough day. I don’t even think I scraped the tip of the iceberg.”

  He peels off his T-shirt. “How was class?”

  “Fine,” I say, swallowing down the guilt at my little white lie. I do still go to class sometimes, but not nearly as often as Jack thinks I’m going.

  “What else did you do?”

  I shrug. “Not much. Bookstore. I ordered you a few button-ups online. Called and got some quotes for the beams in the basement.”

  He raises his eyebrows in question.

  I shake my head. “You don’t want to know. Let’s see . . . what else? Took Benny for a walk. I should’ve started caulking instead but it was too pretty outside.”

  Jack doesn’t respond and suddenly I’m self-conscious about my lack of interesting activities or news to share about my day. I used to have intelligent things to say about my classes or stories that I couldn’t wait to share with him when I got home. I search the crevices of my brain for something noteworthy or fascinating that happened that I can comment on, engage my husband in some way.

  Oh, and I consoled a crying woman at Barnes & Noble who I thought you could marry because she had just lost her husband, but it was her cat. She was totally crying over her cat.

  It’s one of those awkward social moments that Jack would have found entertaining, but I can’t exactly explain why I was talking to her and I’m afraid the mention of death will just make Jack’s shoulders tense even more, so I stay silent.

  Naked, except for the tube socks that hug his calves, Jack walks over to his side of the bed. I hold my breath as he glances down at the self-help book I left on his nightstand. What will he say? Will he be irritated? Intrigued? Will the words leap out at him off the cover and shake him out of his denial? Will he throw himself into my arms sobbing “I can’t lose you” while I knowingly brush his hair off his forehead and whisper “Shh” and “Everything will be OK”? I quickly dismiss this option, knowing it’s just a scene that I saw in a movie once. Jack has no penchant for drama.

  I watch Jack’s eyes graze the cover and wait for his reaction. But there isn’t one.

  His expression doesn’t change as he lifts the comforter and sits down on the mattress, stuffing his legs under the blankets. He removes his socks, drops them on the floor, sets his glasses on the nightstand—on top of the new book—and reaches for the lamp.

  “G’night,” he says, leaning over and kissing my shoulder. “Love you.”

  He rolls over and within sixty seconds, his breathing deepens and I know he’s asleep.

  “Night,” I whisper to his back as I let out the breath I was holding.

  I pick up my Nora Roberts from the nightstand, blink a few times, shake my head, and resume trying to get lost in a world of ripped bodices and sweaty cowboys.

  thirteen

  NOW THAT I’M dying, the sky seems larger. Or maybe it’s that I feel smaller. Or maybe it’s just that dying or not, when you really stop to look at the expanse of blue hanging above us, you can’t help but feel inconsequential. Overwhelmed at how meaningless your tiny life is in the grand scale of things.

  I tip my face to the sun and let it warm my skin, closing my eyes and leaning into the bench Kayleigh and I are sharing. The dog park is full, people shaking off their winter inertia and embracing the first weekend of temperate weather.

  “She’s pretty, in an urban hipster kind of way.”

  I open my eyes and look in the direction Kayleigh is staring. A paisley scarf engulfs the neck of a diminutive woman in a white tank and skinny jeans, her head topped with a fedora. A large mutt—some type of pit bull mix—trots beside her on a leash.

  “Too trendy,” I say. “And she looks young.”

  “I think she just has one of those faces. I say twenty-five, maybe twenty-six.”

  I close my eyes again. Inhale the grass-scented, earthy air. The smell used to make me tingle with anticipation—a presage reminding me that the long, alluring days of summer were near. Now that feeling is mixed with something else. A sense of time tumbling out of control. Wasn’t it just winter? How did spring unfold so quickly? The urgency with which I used to live life suddenly seems gratuitous. Always yearning for something—for Jack to graduate, summer to get here, Fridays. Now I long for Mondays that last all week and sun rays that refuse to surrender to moonlight.

  “So,” Kayleigh starts, then pauses as if trying to find the right words. “What are you going to do when you actually find someone?”

  “What do you mean?” I reach down and scratch Benny behind the ears. He strains at the leash, whimpering for freedom to sniff other dogs, tree squirrels, find a dead bird and roll ecstatically in its decaying carcass.

  “I mean, what’s your plan? Your opening line?”

  I avoid her gaze and continue stroking Benny. I’m embarrassed to tell her I haven’t gotten that far. I had been spending so much time on my list, choosing the specific qualities that Jack’s perfect wife should have and not much time on what I would actually do when I find her. If I find her. As evidenced by my encounter with the woman in the bookstore, finding someone is proving to be more difficult than I anticipated. And apparently I’ve become terrible at making conversation with strangers.

  “You don’t know.”

  “I don’t know yet,” I say, not ready to admit to the multiple holes in my plan. While I’m more convinced than ever that I need to find Jack a wife—particularly as I try to quell the rising anxiety that with each passing day, I get a day closer to leaving Jack completely and utterly alone—I’ve realized that knowing it and doing it are two completely different things. I know exactly what I’m looking for—my list is solid. But what if I don’t find her? Or what if I do? Then what? How do I introduce them? And what if Jack doesn’t like her? Or she doesn’t like Jack?

  “You should practice. Go talk to that woman.”

  “The fedora girl?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No. That’s stupid. I’m not going to waste time talking to someone that’s not even his type.”

  We’re interrupted by a strain of Lionel Richie singing “Hello . . .” then four slow chords on an eighties synthesizer . . . “is it me you’re looking for?”

  Kayleigh digs into her pocket for her cell phone and silences it.

  “Harrison?” I raise my eyebrows.

  “No,” she shoots back.

  “Who was it?”

  She mumbles something.

  “What?”

  “Bradley Cooper,” she enunciates.

  “You’re kidding.” Benny starts yippin
g furiously. I tug the leash to rein him in. “The guy from the coffee shop? I thought you were done with nineteen-year-olds.”

  “He’s twenty-one,” she sniffs. Then shrugs. “And he’s hot.”

  “You. Are hopeless,” I say, though I’m happy to have a respite from thinking about my problems.

  “Whatever. Oh, before I forget, I need you and Jack to come to open house and pretend to be prospective parents.”

  “Um—no.”

  “No, seriously. You have to. I’m supposed to bring five parents and I don’t even have one. Pamela’s already got eight.” She rolls her eyes, but I notice she’s only half involved in our conversation. Her thumbs are furiously typing a text. I try to ignore it.

  “So claim some of hers.”

  “I can’t. It doesn’t work like that. Will you please come?” She hits send and slides her cell back into her jeans. Then looks at me. “Pretty please? I don’t want to look like I totally don’t care.”

  “You don’t.”

  “I know. But I don’t want my principal to know that.”

  I sigh. “I’ll think about it.”

  “Great,” she says, smiling and sitting back into the bench, because we both know that I’ll go. That I can’t ever say no to Kayleigh.

  I lean back again and look up at the sky. An airplane that looks like a small sparrow, it’s so far away, streaks across the blue, leaving a trail of white smoke in its wake. A sudden urgency grips me. I want to be on that plane. I think back to the question Kayleigh asked me in the coffee shop about my biggest wish. Why didn’t I travel more when I had the chance? Study abroad or backpack around Europe. Or go see that bicycle in Seattle. How hard is it to get to Seattle? And I know it’s because of Jack. He never had the time to take off and I didn’t want to go without him.

  But he promised we’d go on vacation to celebrate his graduation. We’d been talking about it forever, tossing out ideas of where we could go. Realistic destinations: Seaside, Savannah, Miami, mixed in with unrealistic ones: Capri, Mykonos, Bora Bora. Where we ended up didn’t really matter to either one of us. We were just in awe of the idea that we’d get to spend seven full days together. Jack’s school finally behind us. Our entire lives ahead of us.

  Now I realize that since my diagnosis, neither one of us has mentioned the trip. No tickets have been booked. No new bathing suits have been bought. And I realize that maybe that’s because I won’t be around to take it.

  I shake off the thought and turn to Kayleigh: “You should be a flight attendant,” I say. “Or a pilot.”

  “Ah, no,” she says, digging the toe of her boot into the dirt at our feet. “Flying terrifies me.”

  “Really?” I say. It’s hard to picture Kayleigh being terrified of anything. “Well, have you thought about—”

  “Daisy,” she cuts me off and shoots me a warning with her eyes.

  “Sorry,” I mumble. It’s not the first time I’ve made career suggestions to her and I know it irritates her. And I know she has to figure it all out on her own timetable—that something, someday will inspire her, or point her in the right direction—but I can’t help but try to encourage her to pick up the pace sometimes.

  “Oh, did I tell you Karmen got a promotion?” she asks, and I know she doesn’t mean it in a I’m-so-happy-for-my-sister way, so I don’t say anything in response.

  We stare in the direction of the fedora girl, who’s now engaged in light banter with a skinny guy in Ray-Bans and a vintage concert T-shirt.

  “You snooze, you lose. Dude beat you to it,” Kayleigh says.

  “She wasn’t Jack’s type!” I say, annoyed. “Look at that guy. Now he’s totally her type.”

  “Yeah, they probably met at Goodwill buying vests.”

  “Or at the tailor making their skinny jeans even skinnier.”

  “Or on, like, Fuck-the-Mainstream-Match-Dot-Com.”

  I laugh. And then I stop laughing. Because that’s it. And I don’t know why I haven’t thought of it until now. The one place where there are more single women looking for partners than anywhere else on earth—the Internet.

  KAYLEIGH’S APARTMENT STILL smells like fresh paint even though she moved in two months ago. Once inside, I immediately walk over to her windows and begin opening them.

  “What are you doing?”

  “You don’t smell that?”

  “What? Did I forget to take out the garbage?”

  “No, the paint,” I tell her, explaining that it’s full of VOCs, a major cause of cancer. “I know the management didn’t spring for the ecofriendly kind. It’s like fifteen dollars extra a can.”

  Kayleigh just stares at me, the same expression I get from Jack when I turn my nose up at conventional fruit or nonfiltered water. I know they think I’m crazy, but now that I know all of this stuff, I can’t not know it.

  “I’ll go get my laptop,” she says.

  For the next forty-five minutes, Kayleigh briefs me on the merits and pitfalls of the seven different dating Web sites she has personally used.

  “Seven? How are you possibly still single?”

  “I’m picky,” she retorts.

  I scoff, but she shoots me a look, so I refrain from bringing up the slew of college boys she is decidedly not being picky about.

  We narrow it down to Checkmates.com, where potential daters must pass a background check before being allowed to join the site, and Loveforlife.com, which guarantees you’ll find someone in six months or your money back. I ask Kayleigh if she actually asked for a reimbursement, since it obviously didn’t work for her. She explains she had to cancel her subscription after a month because a guy she met started stalking her.

  “Crazy Mike?” I ask.

  She shakes her head. “Weird Cal.”

  “You met Weird Cal online?” It catches me off guard because I’ve known Kayleigh so long it feels like there’s nothing I don’t know about her, and it’s unlike her to be secretive. “I had no idea.”

  “I wasn’t hiding it. I just don’t think I dated him long enough to share all the sordid details.”

  In the end we go with Checkmates, because I think Jack’s future wife is going to be cautious about meeting strangers online. I know I would be.

  “OK, we’re in,” Kayleigh says, handing me back my credit card.

  “Great. First question?”

  Kayleigh stares at the screen. I wait. Her computer must be running slow.

  Thirty seconds pass.

  “Kayleigh?”

  “Um . . .” She turns the computer to me.

  What’s your relationship status?

  Single

  Divorced

  Separated

  Widow/er

  The word “widower” jumps off the screen and slugs me in the gut.

  Widowers are supposed to be hunched, with unruly eyebrows and nose hairs. They wear Mr. Rogers cardigans and shoes with thick rubber soles and smell like boiled chicken. Widowers do not have thick brown hair and firm abs beneath a cotton T-shirt and smell like summer grass just after it’s rained.

  I look up at Kayleigh and notice the water rimming her lashes. “I’m sorry,” she says, putting her hand up to her mouth. “It just . . . it hit me.”

  “That’s OK,” I say, careful not to touch her, knowing that any contact will shatter us both. “It hits me all the time.”

  I grab the edge of the computer screen and slide it closer to me. Then I run my index finger over the mouse pad, click “Widower,” and move on.

  AROUND SIX , I pull the car into our driveway. But instead of tapping the gas to accelerate to the end of the slab of concrete, my right foot slams the brake pedal, jerking my upper body forward. I barely notice. I gape at the front of my house, my mouth poised to catch flies. My flower bed. It actually has flowers in it. Hydrangeas and . . . I squint. Is that a stone edging? It is. A beautiful, natural river-stone edging. I put my car in park and leave it where I stopped—not bothering to ease it the last ten yards where I usually park by the b
ack door—and get out. I walk toward the freshly mulched, beautifully manicured garden that now borders my front porch. Small blooms of purple verbena sprout from between the larger hydrangea bushes. I’m dumbfounded. Struck speechless, which hardly matters since there’s no one around to talk to. It’s as if garden gnomes sprang to life while I was gone and created this masterpiece. It’s exactly how I pictured it, exactly how I had explained it to . . . Sammy. I tip my head back and laugh. Sammy. Of course she would take it upon herself to dig up my unsightly weeds, even after I told her not to.

  And even though I didn’t think I wanted the charity, I can’t help but be touched by her thoughtfulness, the obvious hard work she put into this flower bed that I probably never would have gotten around to doing, if I was being honest with myself. I lean over, inspecting it closer, staring at foliage that I don’t recognize. Hosta? The name comes to me from nowhere. I hadn’t planned on hosta, but it does make for perfect ground cover between the two flower shrubs. I smile, wondering if the man at the Home Depot had recommended it to her. And then I wonder, though the chances are small, if it was the same man who helped me pick out the caulk. He had nice eyes.

  I stand rooted in my front yard, soaking in the last warm rays of the day—and the unexpected feeling that there are people in this world who still have the ability to surprise me.

  fourteen

  I’M NOT SURE how people who date online have time for anything else. For the past five days it’s like I’ve been sucked into a black hole—one that’s wallpapered with hopeful women’s head shots and swimming with statistics: height, weight, eye color, religion.

  From the moment I get up in the morning until the time I crawl into bed at night, I’ve been wading through pages and pages of profiles. I feel like a headhunter searching for the perfect job candidates, which I guess in a way I am. I’m fascinated by what people will share about themselves, and I wonder how much of it is true. Are the majority of women really “spontaneous and fun,” or do they think that’s what men are attracted to? Wouldn’t most women prefer at least a few days’ notice before being whisked away on a romantic beach trip so they could stop eating carbs, shave their bikini areas, and pick up new underwear?