“Daisy, lay back down. You’re in no condition—”
“I’m going,” I say, standing up and ignoring the fact that the room is slightly off-kilter. “If you won’t take me, I’ll drive myself.”
“OK! OK,” she says. “I’ll get my keys. But stay right there. I’m helping you to the car.”
DURING THE NINETY-MINUTE drive to Athens, I practice what I’m going to say to Jack. How I’m going to convince him to forgive me, come back to me, be mine. But it’s hard to concentrate with the pitching of the car and the intense throbbing in my head. I’m lying with the seat fully reclined and my mom keeps shooting me worried sidelong glances that she thinks I can’t see.
“Stop looking at me like that,” I say through clenched teeth. “I’m fine.”
By the time we pull up in front of my house, I consider just living in my mom’s car for the rest of my days, as I’m not sure I even have the strength to open the door. But I somehow manage to slowly raise myself up in the seat and look out the windshield. The first thing I see is an unfamiliar car in our driveway. Not a car, but a truck. A gray pick-up truck. And something clicks.
I saw that truck on Facebook. On Pamela’s home page.
And suddenly I find a store of energy that I didn’t know I had. I throw open my mom’s car door and stomp across the yard to the front steps and then I’m at the front door, swinging it open and looking for Pamela like a lion stalks a gazelle.
I’m barely registering the disarray my house is in—where the hell is my couch?—when I see Pamela standing in the hall, staring at me, her perfect mouth locked in an O.
“Daisy,” she says.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I growl, surprised at my own venom, like I’m a mama bear and she’s an evil hunter who’s just shot one of my cubs. But it’s kind of an apt analogy, because really, what kind of woman dates someone’s husband? Even if his wife is dying.
Before she can answer, Jack appears behind her.
“Daisy,” he echoes, his feet glued to where he stands. “What are you doing here?” His eyes are already big, shocked at the sight of me, but then they widen more as he takes me in, and it’s only then that I realize what I must look like—my head wrapped in gauze, my sallow-just-had-surgery complexion, a pair of my mom’s gray sweatpants that have ridden up on my calves during the ride here. And I’m sure I look especially dreary compared to perfect Pamela, who still looks put together in a white T-shirt and a pair of ripped-up jeans. What the hell is she wearing?
“Daisy?” My mom appears at my side and her eyes dart from me to Jack to Pamela, trying—like everyone else in the room—to decipher what, exactly, is happening.
“Can’t you wait in the car, Mom?” I say through clenched teeth, crossing my arms in front of me. “I’ll be right out.”
“Honey, I really think—”
“Mom.” I cut my eyes at her, but she hesitates, looking at Jack, Pamela, and then me once more. Then she nods and turns to go.
When she’s gone, I point at Pamela, but my energy is considerably sapped. “What is she doing here?” I ask again, in a weak voice.
He hesitates, and a look passes between him and Pamela before he looks to me. A secret look that two people who have a secret share. A flash of jealousy and anger stings my belly. He takes a deep breath, and when he exhales, he says: “You should sit down.”
He walks toward me and gently places his hands on my shoulders. And even though I came with the explicit intention of grabbing on to him and never letting him go, I want to shrug him off, because I suddenly can’t stand the thought of him touching me. Or where else his hands have been. But my head feels light and the room is spinning a little and I know he’s right. I need to sit. He steers me through the living room and into the kitchen, because it appears to be the only room that has any furniture at all right now.
“Jack?” I say, as I collapse into a chair, worried that the surgery was unsuccessful, that the screenings were wrong, that my brain is malfunctioning.
He studies me. “Are you OK?”
“No,” I say. “What is going on?”
“I didn’t want you to find out,” he says quietly. And I stare at him with a mix of horror and anger. That he’s so readily admitting to it. I mean, I guess he doesn’t have much of a choice, since Pamela’s here, but I realize now I was still holding on to a sliver of hope that I had been wrong.
“Well, I know all about it,” I say as angrily as I can muster, which isn’t very, considering the short walk from the car to the house—and the confirmation of Jack and Pamela’s relationship—has left me shattered.
“You do?” He furrows his brow.
“Yeah,” I spit, wondering how he can be so calm. How he can sit there looking at me with his deep dimples and his mock expression of concern.
He shrugs. “I guess I’ve never been a great liar.”
At this, I find one more inexplicable store of energy and explode. “You’ve never been a liar at all, Jack! I don’t even know who you are anymore. How you could do this.”
It feels good to yell at him—to blame him—even though I know it’s not entirely his fault.
We sit in silence staring at each other and he looks so sad that I fight the urge to reach out for him, to hug him. And it makes me hate him as much as I love him.
But then, in an instant, his countenance changes, and instead of sadness, his eyes burn with something else. Something that looks like fury. “What else was I supposed to do?” he shouts. “Tell me! You wouldn’t let me come to doctor appointments, I couldn’t postpone school. God forbid I try to be with you.”
I know he’s right. That this is my fault. But his words burn. So I latch on to the last thing he said, and lash out with it. “Seriously, Jack? This is all because I wouldn’t have sex with you?”
“What? No!” he says. “What is wrong with you?” He looks at me with his forehead crinkled, and then it relaxes, as if he’s thinking Oh right, you’ve had brain surgery. And it inflames me even more, because he’s the one who’s cheating, but somehow I’m the one who’s crazy. When he speaks again, his voice is quieter, more level. “I just . . . I thought it would make you happy.”
It’s my turn to furrow my brow, confused. Did he somehow find out my plan to set him up with Pamela? How could he have? Kayleigh’s the only one who knew and I know she wouldn’t have told him. She’s never betrayed me, and she wouldn’t start now.
I narrow my eyes at him. “What exactly did you think would make me happy?”
“You know, not having to worry about it anymore. I know it’s a big stressor and I just wanted to help. I had to do something to help.”
Wait, it? Doesn’t he mean him? Not having to worry about him?
“Jack,” I say, putting my hands on the table in front of me, as if that will stop the room from revolving and bring some clarity to my muddled mind. “What are you talking about?”
He tilts his head and gestures back to the living room. “Uh . . . the house?” he says, dragging out both words, as if he’s talking to a child.
I just stare at him, waiting.
“You know, how I got Pamela to work on it?”
I think of the bare living room and Pamela’s unkempt clothes, and pieces of a puzzle begin to slowly connect to one another in my pulsing head. All the things I know about Pamela race through my mind—the sky-diving, Grey’s Anatomy, her ability to make jam—but suddenly one tiny fact emerges above the rest. Something that Jack told me: Pamela and her dad built most of the farm themselves.
“What is she doing to it?”
“All the stuff that I wasn’t able to do,” he says. “She just finished the beams in the basement. Today she’s starting on the floors.”
I try to wrap my head around this new information. Pamela is not only my husband’s girlfriend, but she is, apparently, our new contractor.
“How much is this going to cost us?” I ask, my head swimming with numbers—prices that we can’t afford.
“Nothing,” he says. “Well, I mean, materials. And we had to rent a sander. But the labor is free.”
I take this in, trying to slow down the flood of information, to sort out what I’ve learned so far, to understand it. But a question still leaps to my lips: “Why?” I regret it as soon as it’s out of my mouth. I know I don’t really want to hear the answer. I know it’s because she loves Jack. That this is the kind of thing you do for someone you love.
“I did save her horse’s life,” he says, as if this is the only explanation needed. But it’s not. I need more. So I wait.
He fills the silence. “She wanted to do something in return. She overheard me telling Ling about the other stuff I was working on, the landscaping, the caulking, and asked if she could help out. We’ve been talking about it, planning it, for weeks, but I wasn’t sure when we’d be able to get it done. Then you wouldn’t let me come to the surgery and—”
He shrugs.
He’s trying to spare my feelings. To not rub his relationship with her in my face. But I need the truth.
“And you’re”—I take a deep breath, not wanting to finish the sentence, but I don’t have a choice—“with her?”
“What do you mean with?” he says, and then his eyes grow wild, as it dawns on him exactly what I mean. “Wait. With with? With Pamela? Why on earth would you think that?”
I shake my head, trying to organize my thoughts, and then remember his all-nighter and, of course, the phone call. “Sunday night, when you didn’t come home. And then when I talked to you the other morning, I heard her voice in the background. She was here.”
He nods. “Yeah. I couldn’t tell if you heard. She came over early to get started on the beams. I didn’t want to ruin the surprise, so I didn’t say anything in case maybe you didn’t hear her.”
I nod, absorbing this.
“And the other night,” Jack says. “I didn’t come home because I didn’t think you wanted me here.” He pauses, as if he’s wondering how much to tell me, how honest to be. Then he shrugs. “And I was furious.” He glances into my eyes. “At you.”
The raw honesty of his emotion takes me aback because it’s so unlike Jack. But then, he does have every right to be mad.
“So where’d you go?” I ask.
“The clinic. Pamela did meet me there,” he says, and I prickle. “She was worried about Copper’s surgery the next morning, but she left around eleven and I stayed up late working and then slept on the couch in Ling’s office.”
I nod again. “So all those times you left the room to talk to her, or said it wasn’t her calling, even when I knew it was, it was because of this? You were talking about our house?”
“Yeah,” he says, and then as if the full weight of my accusation has dawned on him, he sputters, “You really thought . . . ? Oh, God, Daisy—no. I could never . . . I would never.” He reaches out to put his hand on my face and the warmth of his palm is everything.
I want to revel in his touch, but my head is still thudding. I close my eyes, trying to absorb this completely unexpected turn, when something else he said jumps out at me. All the stuff he wasn’t able to do. “Wait—the front garden.” I open my eyes. “Was that Pamela?
The right side of his mouth turns up, as he slowly shakes his head no.
“It was you?”
His crooked tooth peeks out at me.
“And you did the caulk?”
“Yep.”
“Jack, I thought I was going crazy.”
He pauses, as if he’s considering this. “Well, you kind of were.”
I smack him on the arm and he grabs my hand.
“But why?” I ask again. “The house has always been my thing.”
He squeezes my fingers. “I told you. You wouldn’t let me do anything else.”
I think back to every time the past few months that I shut Jack down, pushed him away, and I know that most men would have given up—that I thought Jack had given up. But he hadn’t. I sit back and let the enormity of his gestures sink in. He didn’t just plant some flowers or fix a couple of windows—he found a way to love me when I was doing everything I could to not let him.
I nod, a smile creeping across my face. “I guess I have been a little hard to live with.”
“Hard?” He scoffs, and a flash of anger lights his eyes again. “Try impossible. You’re so goddamned stubborn and independent.” He shakes his head, and I think he’s done, but then more words tumble out. “You stopped telling me things—not just big stuff, like how you were feeling, but little things, like what you ate for lunch or how you bought a new laundry detergent because it was on sale.” He lowers his head. “I thought—I don’t know what I thought. That you were facing your mortality and taking stock of your life, and I don’t know—regretted spending it with me or something.”
My heart, which has already been through so much, nearly cracks at this information. “What? Oh Jack, no. No, no, no,” I say. “You are the thing—maybe the only thing—that I’ve ever gotten right.”
And for the first time in months, I see Jack’s shoulders visibly relax as he takes this in.
But then he furrows his brow, as if he still can’t figure something out. “So what are you doing here? You really need to be in bed.”
I close my eyes and rub my temples. “Well, I really did think . . . I mean, you and Pamela . . . And, you know.” I search, but I can’t find the right words, so I just end with: “I didn’t want you to be.”
But it’s not enough, because I still can’t shake the feeling that maybe there’s more to their relationship than friendship, that maybe Jack does harbor some attraction to her—how could he not?—even if he hasn’t done anything about it, so I say, “You don’t . . . I mean, you’re not . . . Do you have any feelings for her?”
Before Jack can respond, I hear laughter from behind me. “Oh my God,” she says. “Me and Jack? We would kill each other.”
I turn around to see Pamela standing in the doorway. I had forgotten she was here.
She smiles. “I mean, have you seen his office?”
I put my hand over my face to try to hide the flames of color that are spreading up my cheeks. “Oh, Jesus, did you hear all that?”
She nods, ducking her eyes. “Daisy, I—”
“No, stop. You must think I’m completely crazy.”
“No,” she says, but I know she’s just being nice, because that’s what she is—no matter what Kayleigh says about her.
JACK WALKS ME out to Mom’s car, where she’s sitting in the driver’s seat, her lips a thin line of concern.
“You need to go home and get some rest. You shouldn’t even be out of bed right now.”
“I know,” I say. “I just . . . I had to see you. I was so afraid that I messed everything up.”
“Daisy, c’mon. We can talk tonight,” he says, moving to open the door.
“No!” Since my surgery, I’m now all too aware that anything can happen, that I might not ever get this chance again. That I need to tell him how I feel and keep telling him and never let a day go by without him knowing it. That I can’t waste any more time. Not a second of it. And then, for some reason something Patrick said pops into my mind. “I could get hit by a bus when I leave here.”
“What? I don’t think there’s a good chance of that happening.”
I hide a smile, confident that Jack would have hated Patrick as much as I did. “I know. I just want you to know that I’m sorry. I haven’t felt like I’ve done anything right since all this started, especially when it comes to us.”
He nods. “I haven’t either. There’s so much I wish I could go back and do differently. Like not take no for an answer when you wouldn’t let me come to your doctor appointments.”
“I guess there’s not exactly a handbook for this kind of thing, huh?”
He stares at me. “You’re kidding, right? You bought me the handbook.”
I stare back at him, confused, until I remember the self-help book I picked up fo
r him at Barnes & Noble.
“You read that?”
“Isn’t that why you got it for me?”
“Well, yeah, but—I didn’t think you actually read it.”
He laughs, and then throws back his head and laughs some more, and the sound warms me from the inside out like a cup of hot cocoa.
“God, Daisy,” he says, shaking his head. “Only you.”
may
twenty-five
“IT’S NOT SUPPOSED to be this hot in May,” Kayleigh says, fanning her face with a paper program.
We’re sitting in Sanford Stadium, and I’m leaning forward, straining to find Jack’s lanky body in the sea of doctoral candidates wearing white square caps.
I finally spot him, and a flood of warm fuzzies fills my body. Jack is finally done with school, the checklist on our house is complete thanks to Pamela, and we have days, maybe weeks, maybe months to spend together, rubbing noses in the sunshine of my favorite season. Maybe even more—who knows? At my last clinical trial checkup, Dr. Rankoff said that my tumors hadn’t made any progress—they were the same size they’d been a full month earlier. She said perhaps I was finally responding to the medicine, or that removing the brain tumor somehow shocked the other ones to behave, at least for now. And I’ve never been so happy to hear that some part of me was underachieving, not living up to its full potential. But I know they will, one day.
When the students in Jack’s section stand up and move their tassels from one side of their caps to the other, my mom hoots and Kayleigh leans over to me.
“You husband is officially a doctor. Twice over.”
I laugh. “And he still has no idea how to make canned soup.”
“He’s hopeless.”
“Nah,” I say, thinking of the door handle and the windows and the garden that he fixed. I know that Jack can take care of himself, even if he may not pick up his socks as much as I want him to, or know how to make anything other than cereal for dinner.
But there is one thing that still gnaws at my heart in the middle of the night. And there’s only one thing I can think of to fix it.
Before I Go Page 27