Stay with Me

by Sandra Rodriguez Barron

  “What memory? We don’t share mountains of memory because we don’t know anything about ourselves before age two and we didn’t grow up together. I return to my original point.”

  “You know what, Holly? I’ll see you later.” He spun on his heels and climbed over a row of seats. Holly called his name but he didn’t look back. In a few seconds, he had disappeared into the sea of beautiful women, which parted a little bit for him. She could actually see the ripples of his movement through the crowd. The next day, she found out from Taina that he had had backstage passes all along, and that they went unused. She had left him a nasty voice mail, something about him not being very brotherly anyway. She called back again and apologized but she wasn’t surprised when several weeks went by, then a month, and then two, and she still hadn’t heard from him. “Adrian’s so damn sensitive,” she complained. Her husband, Erick, had replied, “He has a level of integrity that’s out of place in his South Beach nightclub world. I like that about him.”

  Chapter 5

  David

  Amazingly, I felt fine after the biopsy. I was restless, bright eyed, and ravenously hungry. My parents’ house was filled with flowers and balloons and casseroles. I spent most of the day fielding calls from friends, coworkers, and relatives, but that got exhausting. I stopped taking calls after a while, and only made an exception for Adrian. The day after I came home from the hospital, I asked my mother for the family wedding ring, which had been her grandmother’s, a one-and-a-half-carat emerald-cut diamond on a platinum band. She had always told me that it was mine to pass on, since she and dad had skipped it and chose to buy their own rings. When I asked for it, she shook her head and said, “No way. You and Julia just broke up a few weeks ago.” She pointed a finger right into my chest. “You decided that your relationship didn’t have the engine to go the distance. You refused to get married when you didn’t have a brain tumor. You’re telling me that now that you have cancer you see the light?”

  “Yeah. With brilliant, blinding clarity,” I said, opening my eyes wide. “Where my life was once blurry, it now has these sharp, clean edges. I wish it had always been this way.”

  “It’s not fair, David. You can’t trap her into a life that lacks stability, peace of mind, a strong future. What about kids? Isn’t she thirty-four? She doesn’t have a moment to waste.”

  “You don’t believe I can beat this.”

  “Honey, of course you’re going to beat it. And when you reach that place of stability, then you ask her. Right now, you can’t offer her the ‘in health’ part of ‘in sickness and in health.’ You’ve got to focus on healing, David. Marriage is hard work, and you need to save your energy to fight cancer.”

  My hand went up to my biopsy cut, which was starting to itch. I couldn’t scratch, only wiggle around the bandage. I said, “Being married will help me get through this. You heard the doctor. He practically prescribed it.”

  “She’s a person, not a treatment.”

  “Julia loves me. She wants to marry me. It took a kick in the teeth to get me to appreciate what I have had all along. The fact remains that she’s mine; and I’m not going to let her go.”

  My mother kept her body rigid as she delicately rubbed my shoulder. “You’d be abusing that love, David.”

  I got up, stood by the window and looked east, aware that that was the direction of New Haven, where she belonged. Where I belonged. The two of us should be in our apartment, planning our future. And to think that, had it not been for the cancer, I wouldn’t have that as a goal. That’s what gave me hope: that the cancer was visiting me for a reason, a higher purpose, not to kill me but to fix me.

  I hugged my mother and gave her a kiss on the cheek. She would need time to adjust to the new me, and I understood, but I needed to get on with the business of surviving.

  The next disagreement with my parents was about my living arrangements. If they were going to be my chauffeurs, then I had to stay with them. Dad said that it wasn’t fair to make them drive to New Haven to pick me up for every little thing. They wanted to keep an eye on me. I argued that New Haven was right on the way to New York. “What about groceries, what about errands? What if you need help in the middle of the night? You can’t be alone, David.” Excellent point, but still, I refused.

  “I can’t live with my parents! I don’t want you knowing everything I do!” Since that didn’t work, I tried, “What if I want to have sex?” My mother flashed me a look and my dad grumbled and shuffled away. But they were right and so I was forced to move into my old bedroom, with the fake log-cabin wood paneling and the bed still covered with a Star Wars comforter. That night, I lay my head down on my Luke Skywalker pillowcase. On top of everything else, I was emasculated too.

  So I rebelled. One of my hiking buddies came to get me out of the house. He promised my mother that he was taking me on a gentle walk through the woods. We ended up blasting through wooded paths on quads, and I came home covered in mud to her disapproving glare. The next night, a coworker took me to the movies, and we ended up getting plastered on gin and tonics at a townie bar and coming home at two in the morning. My mother was outraged. What she didn’t know was that I came this close to getting into a fight. I left the bar with three friends, who turned back to talk to someone. I told them I’d wait outside because the smoke was getting to me. This little guido got all pissed off because I was leaning against his El Camino in the parking lot. He had three thugs with him and they circled me. I’m not the fighting type, so I apologized, hands up and all, but when my friends caught up to me, tempers flared, especially since I’d just had surgery. I managed to diffuse the situation and we left. But then the guys in the El Camino appeared again, driving down the street as we headed to the next bar. We ended up side-by-side at a red light. They had golf clubs and one guy got out and threatened us with it. Something in me snapped and I jumped out of the car, beat on the hood of the other car, and shouted, “Let’s go. Into the garage where the cops can’t see us.” I pointed to a dark, empty parking garage. I slammed my fist down again. “And you better bring your golf clubs!”

  The guys got back in the car, all of them cussing and flipping us off, but they drove away. I was disappointed, all of my energy draining out of me as I watched their taillights disappear. My friends were also disappointed, but relieved too, because no one wanted to see me take a punch to the head or have to answer to my parents. “We woulda killed them,” my friend assured me. “Buncha pussies.” By the time I lied down in my twin bed that night, I felt a lot better about myself.

  My parents and I had no choice but to endure being trapped together in the same house. Under the dinner table, I texted Adrian, “Dude, I hate the way they chew.” I think the friction is what prompted me to dream about finding my “real” parents. I dreamed I was wandering around a strange city, barefoot, unshaven, and unwashed. The city was poor and the buildings were dilapidated, and so I blended in with everyone else, following women around repeating the same question: Are you my mother? Are you my mother? In the dream, no one understood me because they spoke Spanish. There was an increasing wind whipping everything around. There were only women in this village, and they all pointed me to a dark, ruined building, telling me that I could find shelter inside. I went inside to investigate, but the building was nothing but charred wood and broken glass. Rats scurried about. In the center of the building was a half-rotten wood boat.

  I woke up to find my mom at my bedside with a damp cloth and a glass of water. Still half-asleep, I asked, “Are you my mother?”

  She cooed, “Of course, David. You’re my boy.” She stroked my head and stayed by my side until I fell asleep again.

  In the morning, over coffee, she asked me if I had had any interesting dreams the night before. “Not that I can remember,” I lied. “I slept like a baby.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “What kind of baby?”

  “A happy, safe, loved baby,” I conceded. A little smile rose in her lips.

  My dad sai
d, “I’ve been thinking. Those . . . eh, ‘visions’ you described, the ones you say are flashbacks but the doctor says are hallucinations?”

  “Yeah, Pop?”

  “You wanna do a little experiment to find out who’s right?” His eyes lit up.

  I shrugged. “It don’t see how it matters.”

  “I think it does. I think you’re going to want to know the difference between the crazy stuff,” he said pointing at his head, “and when you’ve gained unauthorized access to the classified stuff.” He raised an eyebrow, like a sleuth in a movie. My dad had worked for the National Archives for a short time when he was in his twenties. He had handled top-secret documents, thus the “classified” reference.

  “What’d you have in mind?” I asked.

  “Let’s test the locker combination,” he said.

  “What?” I said, making a face. “That’s impossible.”

  My mother put her coffee down and took my hands in hers. “Honey, I know that I’ve discouraged you to pursue knowledge of your biological roots. I always felt a bit nervous . . . eh, threatened. Perhaps . . .” She looked up at my father and they locked eyes.

  My dad took over. “We want you to know that we support you, if you feel that it’s time.”

  I put my hands out. “No, I never . . .”

  “Take it from me, son, one day the unanswered question will gnaw at you.”

  “Okay,” I said, “but what does this have to do with the locker? And who cares anyway? Like I don’t have more important things to worry about?”

  My mother stirred her coffee, shrugged a little. “Those . . . memories about being a baby that you had on the mountain . . .” she said. “I can’t stop thinking about them. I think they mean something. It’s like the past calling you. And how amazing that a woman spoke to you and said that you’ll ‘overcome.’ ”

  “Succeed.”

  “Succeed. Triumph . . . She said that you’re the strongest, healthiest one, David, she prophesized that you’d survive. It’s incredible. You didn’t even know you had cancer so it’s not like you made it up to make yourself feel better.”

  I had thought of all this already, of course. But because it was coming from my parents, it suddenly sounded silly.

  “Dad,” I said, folding my arms. “What makes you think we could test the locker combination, anyway? I’m sure they changed it the very next school year.”

  Dad was way ahead of me. He had already talked to the principal, and, as he explained in the car, this principal was a pack rat whose policies required the archiving of just about everything, including decades of locker combinations.

  A few minutes later, I was sitting in a plastic bucket seat of the main office of my old high school, being stared at by a row of teenagers with lip rings and multicolored hair. Apparently, the fresh-faced, flannel-shirted teens of my day were an endangered species. I remember when leaving your Timberland boots untied meant you were a real badass. These guys (or girls, I couldn’t even tell the difference) were pale and looked dressed for Halloween. Would I have kids like this someday? Yuck. And then I felt the weight of my situation pressing down on my shoulders again. I couldn’t assume that I would live long enough to raise teenagers, even ones as homely as these.

  Acid was building up in my stomach, an empty receptacle slowly filling with fear. I gripped the edges of the chair and let the wave of despair pass over me. Why was I even here? I had a useless recollection about a locker. Who cared? I wanted to go home and wait for Julia. Julia, who was on her way to my parents’ house from LaGuardia Airport.

  My dad came out and signaled me to follow. The principal’s secretary invited us into a long storage hall full of file cabinets and boxed archives. She whipped out a box-cutter and slashed the plastic band on one box, then rummaged through documents for a few minutes. “What year did you say you graduated?”

  I cleared my throat. “Nineteen-ninety-five. I believe I was assigned locker number eleven-forty.”

  She rummaged some more, and then held up a sheet of paper. She blew dust off the edges. “O’Farrell. Here it is.”

  My father held up a hand to her. “Don’t say it.” Then he looked at me. “Combination?”

  “Three clockwise, eleven counterclockwise, clockwise seventeen.”

  She nodded. “Yup. That’s correct.”

  My father whooped and punched the air the same way he did when I hit my first home run in Little League. “Steel trap!” he shouted. “You brain is a machine, David. It’s compensating.”

  “Oh yeah?” the woman opened her eyes wide. “You some kind of genius?”

  “Yeah. I’m a genius. I’m a kind of savant who counts cards in casinos and I can remember top-secret classified data,” I said, my voice buckling into laughter as I pointed to the dusty box full of obsolete locker combinations. My dad closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, and all at once he burst into laughter too. The secretary looked bewildered but gave us a kind smile and said, “If there’s anything else we can do for you, honey, you just let us know.”

  Out in the hallway my father said, “Tell me, David, did you have these numbers written down anywhere? Is there anything that you can think of that could trigger you to remember them, besides your tumor?” I shook my head. He put his arm around me as we walked to the car. “Then you know for sure, son, that what you’ve been having are certifiable memories. Not hallucinations, not dreams, not imagination, but actual recalled events. That’s somethin’.”

  “I guess,” I said. “Maybe next time I’ll remember something useful, like where I lost my Spider-Man umbrella in the third grade.”

  Dad grinned. “Or where you put my cordless drill? Get to work on that, okay? I want it back.” He put an arm around my shoulders. “We’ll fix it, son,” he said. “That steel trap of yours.”

  Julia. There she was, standing on the front porch of the house, talking to my mother. She had these new light streaks in her hair and she looked so tan and healthy it took my breath away. She held out her arms. We embraced for a long time, so long, that I heard my mother whisper, “C’mon, Paul,” followed by the shuffle of my parents’ footsteps as they went into the house. I looked straight into her eyes, seeking the permission I needed to kiss her on the lips. But she lowered her eyes and stepped back, a gesture I would see her repeat a hundred times more in the next few months, as my need for physical contact with her increased. She held on to one of my hands. “Turn your head,” she said, reaching for my chin. “Let me see your wound.”

  I took off my baseball cap and turned my head. “It’s still bandaged,” I said. She gasped anyway.

  “God, David. I’m so sorry this is happening.”

  “Julia, I made a mistake. Breaking up.” I shook my head, taking one of her hands and placing it over my heart. “I regret it.”

  Her eyes filled with tears and she blinked them away. “It is what it is,” she said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “We broke up. You got cancer. We go forward from here.” She tapped a foot on the floor. “We can’t go back.”

  I had backed her into a corner, literally. She dipped under my arm and headed for the front door. “I came to talk to your parents about the logistics of your surgery. I’m taking time off work to help out so I need to know what’s going on.”

  “That’s what a girlfriend does,” I said, following her into my parents’ living room. “So don’t pretend that you’re not my girlfriend.”

  Later, I tried to get her to come up to my room, to no avail. I was facing the scariest surgery of my life and to know that she was near was not enough. I needed to absorb her, as weird and needy as that sounds. I wanted to know that she was more than my beacon. I needed her to be the very bones that hold me up.

  Chapter 6

  Julia had begun the process of organizing David’s medical paperwork with her usual energetic efficiency. She registered him on websites that linked him to support groups and to stories of survivorship. She h
ad gone to an office supply store and bought a two-drawer steel file cabinet, color-coded file folders, labels, and three-hole punch. She bought printer paper and ink. She was ready to be his medical manager because she could already see that the O’Farrells couldn’t handle him. David was extremely stubborn and independent, and he wasn’t going to listen to his parents’ advice, even for his own good. Now that she had the upper hand in their relationship, she knew that she could use that power to help him help himself. David’s first appointment with the renowned neurosurgeon was just three days away and yet none of them had the energy or courage to prepare, probably because the news only got scarier and scarier. When a huge problem loomed before her, normally Julia would begin to break it down by focusing on small tasks in order to move forward. But the enterprise of cancer management was a mountain of intimidating and overwhelming proportions. There were huge stacks of brochures yet unread. It was vital that David and his parents research and familiarize themselves with glioblastoma multiforme, specifically, which had a very unique set of properties, treatment, and prognosis. But once Julia set up the infrastructure to managing David’s care, they found that they could do nothing but ignore the stacks of paper. They all needed, to their very core, to pretend that everything was completely normal, if only for few more days.

  Julia had promised to take time off from work around the time of David’s surgery and recovery (Dr. Levine estimated that David would be hospitalized anywhere from seven to fourteen days). Julia knew she had to pace herself, so she began a manageable routine: she drove to the O’Farrells’ twice a week after work and came by on Sunday afternoons. Marcia O’Farrell scheduled other visitors on the days that Julia wasn’t around, so David would have a continuous flow of people around, although he soon began to complain that it was too taxing. “I’ve always been a loner, why would I want people hanging around jabbering at me now? Listening to small talk hurts my head. I have a brain tumor, not breast cancer.” Julia and Marcia had just looked at each other and rolled their eyes. But it was true. The attention was jarring to him.