You Take It From Here

by Pamela Ribon

  “Can’t break them down now,” she said, shaking her head, her voice not much louder than a mutter. “I’m not going to be selfish, rob their time with my moaning. I’m dying either way, so why prolong their sad parts?”

  “Smeh, they want to be here for you.”

  “No. Think of what the Lizard did. She broke our family, and then she had the nerve to be crying about it, trying to be the focus when the entire town knew she had skanked around with the mayor.”

  “This isn’t the same, and you know it.”

  “Isn’t it? She made us have to deal with her pain, her suffering, her, her, her all the time. No matter how much we loved her and wanted her to stay, guess what? She left anyway. She wasn’t strong enough. She made a mess and then disappeared forever. I ain’t going out like that, Danny. No, ma’am.”

  I wanted to tell her that, while we can get through this together, that maybe I will do whatever she wanted, she didn’t have to make us do this alone. We needed to tell her husband. I could use Henry’s calm, level head for just a second.

  I had a brief flashback to the day I was about to sign my first set of divorce papers; I was terrified and lonely. I needed Smidge to tell me it was all going to be okay. Despite two phone calls and six consecutive texts, she did not reply. Instead, Henry called.

  “Smidge left her phone on the edge of the bathtub, it seems,” he said. Henry could sometimes sound like he was trying to solve a puzzle, often ending sentences with “it seems,” or beginning them with “turns out.” He talked through his thoughts, trying the internal words out loud to make sure he’d processed everything he was thinking. “She’s at the movies with Jenny,” he told me. “Otherwise I’m sure she’d be looking for it. Maybe she is looking for it, but it’s here. She would have Jenny call it, if she knew it was missing. So I’m guessing she doesn’t know it’s gone yet.” Then he asked, “Are you okay?”

  I told him how I was staring down a stack of papers that said there was nothing I could do to save my marriage, documenting my intent to have the state of California come in and sever it, to rip it apart in front of everyone, to put in public record that I was finished being married to James and he was finished being my husband and that was it. We were done. Signed and stamped, gavel-dropped, done.

  “I put my pen to the first place where I’m supposed to sign,” I told him. “But then I couldn’t stop shaking. Then I couldn’t breathe and I lost all feeling in my legs. Either I’m having a panic attack or I’m dying, so I called Smidge.”

  “You know she probably would have just made you more upset,” he said.

  “That’s true.”

  Henry sniffed as I heard him shift the phone in his hands. I pictured him sitting on the lid of the toilet seat, staring at the cabinets filled with zit creams and moisturizers, the mason jars stuffed with cotton balls and Q-tips, the boxes of open eye-shadow samples and shreds of perfume-scented magazine pages. The sink would be snaked with a stringy collection of twelve-inch auburn hairs. The shower curtain would be jerked to the side, possibly still damp from when Smidge ended her call and apparently took off running.

  I could just imagine Henry looking over the state of this bathroom and asking himself, “How did I end up having to deal with so many damn women?”

  “Thanks for calling, Henry,” I said. “That was nice of you. You don’t have to stay on the phone. Tell Smidge to call me when she gets home.”

  “Let me ask you something,” he said. “Do you have a life insurance policy? Some kind of money that goes somewhere after you die? Your next of kin?”

  “Yeah, I do. Why?”

  “Well, just in case you are dying right now, you might want to sign those papers quick so James can’t get a penny of it. Especially since he’s the one who killed you.”

  My signature is shaky on my divorce papers, but it’s from laughter.

  Smidge had folded her fitted sheet into a tight rectangle. She presented it to me like an award. “Ta-da!”

  “I want to tell Henry,” I said again.

  “No,” she said. “I can’t do that to him. And if you go behind my back on this one, Danny, I will mess you up. Do you understand?”

  She tossed the folded linen at my head.

  “Now you do it,” she said as she left the room. “Call me when you get it right.”

  “I thought you were trying to teach me!” I shouted toward the hall. “How am I supposed to figure out what you did?”

  “Google it!”

  The tension in her response hit the little hairs along my earlobes. Before I could say another word, she slammed her bedroom door.

  It is no small confession to say I have regrets about how things went down with your mother, Jenny. This moment here I’ll remember, because I should’ve done more. I should’ve forced her to talk. I think it’s when she really needed me, and I was still too scared of her to step up to the plate. All I could hear in my head was this frantic, urgent voice, incredulous with judgment.

  This is her last request.

  That’s what I kept thinking, mostly because it seemed impossible. How could someone like Smidge ever have one final request? There would always be more. This is Smidge. Smidge wants things. Random things, big things. Your things. How could this be the last thing she’d ever need?

  We make our loved ones’ final wishes sacred. We find the exact lake to scatter their ashes, erect park benches under their favorite trees. We name buildings and avenues, libraries and highways after the deceased. We create scholarships and gardens and sometimes even laws. We need enormous monuments to fill the space they left behind. Maybe sometimes it can’t just be a statue. Sometimes you need the real deal. Another life. A living memorial.

  At the most, Smidge was asking me to give up five years. Five years she couldn’t have. This is the kind of thing siblings do for each other all the time. It wasn’t Smidge’s fault she didn’t have a sister to step in to help. Of course I was the next logical choice. Who else could do it? It wasn’t like the Lizard was going to be asked back after all this time.

  Unless . . .

  Unless I could find the Lizard. Had Terms of Endearment taught me nothing? No matter how estranged a mother and daughter could get, this was how they’d patch things up. Maybe I wouldn’t even have to tell her about the cancer to get her here. Mother’s intuition could kick in and save me from spilling a secret. If the last person Smidge would ever expect to be there for her could show up and stick around, maybe she would see it was okay to tell everybody else.

  Smidge told me to get on Google. I was just searching for something a little bigger and more elusive than housekeeping tutorials.

  It didn’t take long to find her. She had her own website; she was running what looked like both a pageant class and a photography studio. Lots of pink and sparkly graphics, the word princess used several times. I clicked Contact and wrote what I hoped came across as a breezy yet intriguing e-mail, asking her to write back when she got a chance. Yes, it had been a while. Still, could she possibly contact me. We could use some catching up.

  It wasn’t until I hit Send that I realized I’d been holding my breath. I knew I was doing the right thing, but it still felt like playing with fire.

  THIRTEEN

  As someone who’s been an actual shitty cancer friend, I can tell you with absolute certainty that if you’re going to know someone going through cancer, it’s best to do it with a tertiary friend. There’s just a lot less pressure.

  Michelle Stevens was a girl I knew from that hot-yoga class I stopped attending once it gave me a worrisome skin rash. Not long after that, she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

  I mostly heard about it from friends of her friends. Talk of Michelle’s cancer spread through acquaintances via Facebook updates and the occasional fund-raiser tweet. I’m pretty sure I gave money toward something.

  I hadn’t thought about Michelle in a while, but I do know that she survived and for some reason her number was in my cell phone, so the next morning
I walked the half mile from Smidge’s house to the coffee shop to try to get some advice without the threat of Smidge overhearing.

  Michelle answered the phone, which solidified my hunch that at one point I’d donated at least ten dollars to that fund-raiser.

  She gave a jubilant “Hi, Danielle! It’s been a while!” but was then interrupted by a child yelling in the background. Something about a pillow.

  “It sounds like you’re busy,” I said.

  “No, just hold on.” After a moment I heard her calmly say, “Lily, Mommy needs to use the phone for a second because her friend has called her. Do you think you could let Mommy talk to her friend for a few minutes, and then we can set up your pillow for nap time? Would you mind?”

  A voice answered, “Okay, Mommy. That sounds reasonable.”

  Everybody else seemed to have a lock on this parenting thing.

  “Okay, sorry, about that,” Michelle said. “Mini-meltdown with the mini-people.”

  “I won’t keep you, I just . . . well, I have a friend who’s sick and she’s . . . sick like you were.”

  “Oh.”

  She only said that one word, that one syllable, but still her voice was packed with empathy, sympathy, and disappointment. She’d never even met Smidge, but she’d already expressed more emotions for her than I did for Michelle—and I used to do Warrior II beside her every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday.

  “I was wondering if you had any advice. Treatment-wise.”

  She sounded uncomfortable as she started with “I’m not her doctor, so . . .”

  “Sorry, I don’t mean doctor stuff,” I said, losing my ability to describe anything that might approach oncology. “I’m looking for advice that isn’t necessarily medical. Anything that helped you. I mean, overall. I hesitate to use the word ‘spiritually.’”

  “Oh, I got you,” she said, sounding pleased. “And yes. Move to California. That’s what I did.”

  Michelle said she didn’t normally believe in homeopathic remedies, but when her husband insisted they take a place on the beach near the water, she wasn’t about to complain. The sun and laid-back attitude of the neighborhood eased her stress levels. She no longer dreaded waking up, because she knew that even if she couldn’t move an inch that day, if she never once got out of bed, she still had an amazing view. Watching the sunset with her family became their daily ritual, and has remained even now that she’s cancer-free.

  “It makes you appreciate time,” she says. “The time you once had, the time you have right now, and the time you have left. And since I’m already sounding like some kind of hippie, which I am not, I will quickly add that I also went to a healer. Don’t make fun of me. I can’t believe I just admitted that.”

  I tried to imagine Smidge in the same room as a healer. Would that be inside a yurt or a hut? How many seconds would she hold out before mocking that healer to tears?

  “I don’t know if my friend would go for something like that.”

  “Believe me, I thought I would be the last person to meditate, take supplements, or own a juicer. But when you’re sick enough, you’ll try anything. And I have to admit, some of those things made me feel better. I still start my days with a green smoothie. Maybe you could ease her into that.”

  I heard Lily tell her mother that a reasonable amount of time had passed and maybe she could say good-bye to her friend on the phone now.

  “I’ll let you go,” I said. “But thanks.”

  “Is your friend in Los Angeles?”

  “No.”

  “Well, if you get her here, I’ll take her to my guy. He’s pretty amazing, just as a person. It’s worth it. It’s been forever since I’ve seen you. I heard what happened with you and James. I’m sorry.”

  Lily promptly began a screaming fit.

  “I’ll let you go,” I said again.

  “Okay, well, you call me,” she said. “Let’s catch up, I mean it.”

  I would think once you’ve survived cancer you no longer have to be nice to near strangers. You get a free pass to skip fake intimacy. No more forcing tenuous connections with the acquaintance characters in your life’s play. Smidge kept her social obligations, but I assumed it was because the more people she knew, the more she could control. But what did Michelle get out of making plans with me for when I got back to Los Angeles? She was busy. I was busy. We’d be getting together just to have gotten together, to go through the motions of people who know people. It was like putting your day in a costume and making it act like someone else’s life. Today I lunched with my friend Michelle I know from hot yoga.

  “Lily!” Michelle shouted, not to me. “That is not okay, and you are going to sit in the punishment chair right now. You go sit down.”

  The screaming instantly stopped. “I’m sorry, Mommy.”

  “I know,” Michelle said. Then to me: “I have to go, but hey, you’re a good friend for asking about my cancer.”

  Neither of us had used that word yet. “I don’t know about that,” I said. “I feel pretty bad about it, actually.”

  “I think you wouldn’t be calling me if you didn’t really care about her.”

  “No, I meant you. I’m sorry I wasn’t around when you were sick.”

  Michelle laughed. “You weren’t? It seems like everybody was. And no apology necessary. I wasn’t taking attendance.”

  If I had cancer, even though I might tell people to stay away and not bring me anything, I would definitely be taking attendance.

  As I hung up the phone I felt a shove from behind. I lost my footing and stumbled, but before I could fall I was encircled at the waist by a strong arm. Tucker’s low laugh buzzed in my ear. “Excuse me, ma’am, excuse me, excuse me.”

  “You almost knocked me over!”

  “Well, I didn’t. So calm down,” Tucker said, as he pretended to straighten me out, pulling at my shirt, brushing back my hair, like I was a mannequin he had toppled at a department store.

  “You’re wearing sweatpants,” I informed him.

  “You caught me in my escape clothes.” He pulled a pair of sunglasses from his waistband and lowered that ubiquitous ball cap over his eyebrows. I briefly worried about the state of Tucker’s scalp. “That’s what I call my running pants,” he explained. “I can’t go running unless I pretend I’m being chased by the good guys, so I just like to think of the whole endeavor as training for being on the lam.”

  “I like how you think you’re the bad guy.”

  “If the New Balance fits.”

  “Is this coffee shop your supersecret lair? Is this where you keep all your evil cappuccinos?”

  “It’s my reward. For each mile over three I get to go up a size.”

  “And today?”

  “Extra-extra-large, baby. Supersize latte, full-fat.”

  As he reached past me to open the door, I caught a quick smell of him, of tired, sweaty man. The salty-sweet tang that lingered around the curve of a neck, the underside of an arm, all the places where your head might rest afterward.

  Tucker waved his hand in front of me to fall into a bow. “M’lady.”

  “Oh, no, I’m just leaving,” I said, even though for some reason I didn’t want to leave. Which is why I knew I needed to leave. Part of not being a shitty cancer friend is not hiding all day, semiflirting in the corner of the coffee shop. “I have to get back to Smidge.”

  “She says jump, you ask how high.”

  “It’s a little more complicated than that.”

  “Right.”

  “Good luck dodging the cops on your way home.”

  “See, that’s your problem,” he said. “You think the good guys are cops.”

  Once he was out of my sight I exhaled, feeling my shoulders drop.

  He made my shoulders tense. Around him, my body seemed to put itself on hold, like it wanted to be ready for whatever was going to come next.

  I chose to ignore that.

  My head was tilted back to reach the final few drops of milk from my bowl o
f cereal when Smidge entered the kitchen with an announcement.

  “We have a real problem,” she said. “Besides this bitch-beast of a headache I woke up with.”

  From under the last of my breakfast, I asked, “Mllh?”

  She pressed her palms against her eyelids, causing her faded red sweatshirt to ride up enough to expose a small strip of her pale stomach. “My husband won’t stop humping me,” she said.

  Jenny, sometimes I’ll have to pretend I’m talking to someone who isn’t you, because in order to get into the whole truth I’m going to share some things you might not like to hear about your parents. This is probably one of them, and I’m sorry. But this whole part was your fault for getting older. You reminded all of us that we were aging, and something about that made your father want to prove his virility and youth through bedtime frolicking.

  I apologize for using the words bedtime frolicking. I went through about ten other phrases, but couldn’t find anything that didn’t sound like I was describing your parents having sex.

  “It took forever to get him to admit this was about him having some kind of old-man crisis,” Smidge said. “He just kept rolling over on top of me, trying to act like he thought I was sexy, which I know isn’t true right now. Look at this.”

  She hitched up the hem of her sweatshirt, accidentally flashing the bottom of her C-shaped scar. The surgery that robbed her of part of her lung left a mark that was knotty and gray-pink like a mouse tail. It snaked up and around her back, making her look like she survived a shark attack.

  Which is exactly what she told the gawkers on the beach the summer we vacationed in Maui.

  Smidge wanted to wear a bikini and get some sun on her “survivor scar.” A young newlywed couple couldn’t help but stare. It was massive, breathtaking. One wanted to assume it was fake because it looked so real. There was no mistaking that slow shake of a head, like witnessing a tragedy. You could tell what the couple was thinking. Such a pretty girl, so ruined by whatever happened to her.

  I thought Smidge was asleep behind her sunglasses, facedown on her towel, magazine tossed aside. But she was watching them watch her, because she pointed at her scar and told the couple, “Shark attack.”