by Laura Lanni
“Hey, what is it?” I was neutral and guarded when I picked up.
“Eddie. I need a ride.” She tried to sound like it was no big deal for her to need a ride home from her run. No big deal for her to call me and actually ask for my help.
It was early October, a whole month away from her deathday, so I knew she wasn’t in real danger yet. “Are you hurt?”
“No.” I heard her sniffle. “I’m lost.”
“How can I find you? What do you remember?”
“I’m on one of those back roads where I run, all trees and hills, but I can’t remember which one.” Silence for a moment and then she said, “I zoned out.”
I grabbed the car keys.
“Let me get Joey, and we’ll come find you. Okay?”
“Yeah. Call me back.” She hung up.
We found her half an hour later sitting on a fallen tree trunk on the side of the road, about three miles and two wrong turns off her regular running route. She wiped her eyes dry and said she wasn’t paying attention while she ran. I’m a distance runner, too, so I could relate, but I’d never lost track of where I was like that.
She sat beside me in my truck, weeping, and I didn’t comfort her. I couldn’t. Instead, in my blind fear, I admonished her for running so far out, as though she got lost on purpose.
“Anna, you have got to be careful!” I yelled at her and banged the dashboard. Joey sat between us, eyes wide.
“Careful, Ed? Careful? I was running.”
“But you could get hurt!”
“No, I could not! And what do you care, anyway?”
“Anna, listen.” I lowered my voice. “There’s a gap, a hole. It can pull you in, take you away. Stay away from it. Stay still. Stay home,” I pleaded.
She sniffled, and I knew I’d made her cry again. She wasn’t listening to me. Or maybe she couldn’t hear these words.
“Anna?”
“Don’t be mean, Eddie.
“I just want you to be safe.”
“What?” she barked at me. “Am I supposed to thank you for rescuing me?”
“I just don’t want you to get hurt,” I said. Lame. Weak. Helpless.
“You’re like a broken record, Ed. You already said that. Just shut up, will you?” And she resumed her weeping, head turned away.
I shut up. My warnings couldn’t get through. Damn the universe.
In my frustration, I treated Anna like an ignorant child instead of my brilliant wife. I hurt her because I was hurting. Weeks from her deathday, she was disintegrating before my eyes. I couldn’t even hug her because I could not function. I could not breathe. I could not talk. I staggered through the days as they whipped past me, out of my grasp. It felt like my wife was already dead. I knew I couldn’t live without her, and yet I had no way to protect her. I was paralyzed by the dreadful idea of life without Anna and by my growing certainty that she’d choose to leave me and not come back.
Taken all together—her cooking, her vaporous memory, and losing her way—it was apparent that Anna was coming unglued. Her matter and antimatter were separating.
It was only a matter of time, a finite and definite amount of time, until she left me.
38
Anna’s Deathday
A week before Anna died, I came home from work at the end of a long day at the hospital. I’d lost a favorite patient that day. They were all my favorites, I’ll admit, but watching sweet Selma die was tough on the entire staff.
I walked into our house, disheveled, and badly needing a hug and a few minutes alone with my wife, but certain I couldn’t have either. Joey came running to greet me. “Daddy!” he yelled. I squatted and he launched himself into my arms. I took the available hug. So healthy and strong, he smelled like grass and chocolate. I couldn’t lift him; he was too big for that, so I sat with him on the floor in my wrinkled scrubs while my boy chatted about his day.
“I kicked a homerun in kickball today, Daddy. And I learned to count to ten in Spanish. Wanna hear?” He didn’t wait for a response. He just launched into, “Uno, dos, tres, quatro, cinco, seis ...” and got stuck.
I prompted, “Siete?” and he jumped back in and finished.
“Know what else I know? Your shirt is rojo, and Mommy’s skirt is negro! How’s that?”
I kissed his forehead and said, “Amazing, champ!” The house was quiet. “Where’s your madre?”
“On the swing. She wanted some peace. She was talking to Bethany on the phone, but now she’s grading papers.” He pointed out the back window, and I saw Anna outside. She looked peaceful when she didn’t know I was nearby.
“What do you want for dinner?” I asked.
“Mac and cheese!” he yelled. No surprise there.
“Coming up,” I announced. I pulled some hotdogs from the fridge to complement the cheesy noodles.
Twenty minutes later, I sent Joey outside to announce dinner to his mom. “Tell tu madre that dinero es ready.” That’s how Anna and I communicated—through our Spanish-speaking son.
“Dad,” he said with two accusing syllables, “dinero is money, not food.” He giggled and ran out the back door to his mom.
I saw Anna look up when she heard the door slam. Irrational jealousy stabbed at my heart when she gave Joey her smile. I wished I could hear her voice but couldn’t through the closed windows. She shook her head. Joey turned to run back inside, but she caught his hand and said something to him. He tiptoed to her. She bent down so he could kiss her cheek. This made my wife smile again, but made me cry.
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Later that night, I walked in on Anna, quite innocently, as she changed into her pajamas. Her clothes were strewn all over the floor in our walk-in closet. She didn’t hear me come in. The sight of her bare back, so familiar and beckoning, stopped me cold. I hadn’t seen her skin in months.
“Anna ...” I sighed, forgetting everything and just seeing my best friend, my other half.
She froze. She didn’t turn around. In March, she would have removed the rest of her clothes and greeted me with a hug. That night she said, “No, Ed. Just get out.”
I was not permitted to touch her unless I was nice to her. It was an agreed upon stipulation from early in our marriage when we were learning to live together. Since I couldn’t meet her eye without looking like a fox with bird feathers in my teeth, she didn’t trust me. I didn’t blame her. But I was dying right beside her.
I had no logical defense for my behavior. Nothing I could say that she would understand, and so I remained silent. She cried alone in the bathroom with the door locked every night before she came to bed. We slept side by side but separated by a gaping chasm. Bad days followed bad nights. She hit rock bottom and proclaimed that her mother was right about me. How could I hurt her so much, and why couldn’t I stop?
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My relief at finding Anna still alive on November twelfth every preceding year for almost a decade was like coming up for oxygen after months of drowning. This year, I couldn’t see beyond her deathday. I couldn’t imagine that we would survive this time as we had so many years before.
November twelfth had become my favorite day of the year, a personal holiday of sorts. Last year, when I woke up beside Anna on the morning of the twelfth, she was already awake. I could tell by her breathing. She lay on her side, facing away from me, curled up into a ball on the very edge of the bed. I rolled to her and lay an inch away without touching her, marveling that she wasn’t gone. She stiffened at my closeness, unaccustomed to it.
“I’m sorry,” I said to the back of her head. “I’ve been an ass.”
“Yes. You have.”
“It’s over, I think.”
“Well. Good for you.” She wasn’t giving an inch.
“Can I fix it?” I asked.
She didn’t answer, so I said, “I really miss you.”
“Then why did you leave again?” She turned around and faced me, tears running down her cheek into her ear.
“Because I’m an idiot.�
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“I know that better than anyone.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
“You’ve been an ass.”
“Anna,” I breathed out her name and cautiously stroked her cheek, wiping away the tears. I remembered catching a single tear on her face on our wedding day. A surprising memory since I didn’t remember our wedding day under normal circumstances. “No more crying.” That made her cry even more. She’d missed me, too, and could no longer resist our mutual gravity. It was easier now because her deathday had released her. She crumpled into my arms.
Although she never understood my strange behavior, why I pulled away, Anna always welcomed me back. Our lives carried on.
Most people live their lives as though they have forever, an infinite supply of minutes and hours, weeks and years. They never imagine that they could die tomorrow, or even today. Knowing that my deathday is April second gives me a superhuman feeling the other three hundred and sixty-four days of the year. I know I won’t die any other day. With my knowledge of the significance of November eleventh, I could function for about ten months each year after Anna’s deathday passed. But as the planet’s orbit approached the end of summer, every year my dread knocked me down and pinned me there to watch and wait.
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Each fall, in the midst of our annual cold war, I longed for the simplicity of our early days. Despite my awkwardness, even our first date had shown such promise. At the end of that night, I managed to get Anna to take a walk through campus with me. It was cool, and she put on that sweater I suggested she bring. We talked about everything: family, hopes and dreams, God, population explosion, politics, our fears, and just everything. She was my perfect match, and I knew it well before she had any idea that I was in crazy love with her and would propose as soon as I reasonably could without scaring her away.
We were walking through the rose path, her hand small and warm in mine. I suggested we sit down for a while on a bench. My intentions were completely dishonorable. I wanted a kiss, had a peculiar feeling I would get one, and yet I was petrified.
Anna sat down and said, “Do you bring all your first dates here?”
“No,” I gulped. Could I tell her that I rarely had time or interest in dating, or would that just reveal me as a loser nerd?
“Just the ones with awful hair so you don’t have to be seen in public?” she asked.
I hoped she was joking. I hoped she would someday forgive my comment about her hair. “Actually, it has nothing to do with their hair.”
“Oh?” she asked. “Then what prompts you to bring a girl in the dark to a bench on the rose path?”
I decided to risk my life and said, “I just bring the ones I want to kiss.”
“Really?” she asked warily. “How many times have you been here?”
Still out on a limb, torn between impressing her with my lady-killer skills and risking my self-esteem with the truth, I said, “Never before tonight.”
Silence. We sat side by side in silence and the minutes danced around us. I could hear Anna breathing. I know it was her because I was holding my breath, every muscle tensed. I wished I could hear what she was thinking. What thoughts swirled in her head and why was she looking at me like that? Then she took my hand and brought it to her face. She spread open my hand on her cheek and turned her head to press her soft lips to the center of my palm.
The incredible pounding of my heart blocked the silence of the night.
Still in control of my hand, she placed it on her heart and said, “Not the best first kiss, but look what it did to my heart.”
Her skin was warm and soft. Her heart was beating wildly and she was breathing as though she’d just sprinted a mile. I felt the stirrings of something that resembled hope. Maybe I had a shot with this girl because it seemed she might like me back.
My mind was a blur, so my body took control. With one awkward arm around her shoulders, I pulled her to me. And she let me. I lowered my face to hers until we were sharing the same molecules of air. I touched her curly hair and said, “I love your hair.”
She said, “Baloney.”
“I do,” I insisted.
“I’ll grow it out for you.”
“Good,” I said. I think I sighed too loudly.
She laughed and said, “Just kiss me already.” She was smiling when I finally did.
39
Mood Swings
I called home from the hospital on November ninth to tell Anna I would be stuck there late and would miss dinner. She answered the phone in a huff. Her “hello!” was like a command.
It didn’t sound like my Anna. Even when she was in a mood, she would fake it on the phone and do that singsong, three-syllable “hello-oh” that always sounded like her mom. When we were dating and I called her at her parents’ house, Anna’s mom would answer the phone all sweet like that—until she found out it was me, and then she’d turn into the drill sergeant.
I said to my wife, “Mrs. Wixim?”
“Who’s calling?”
Amused that she didn’t recognize my voice, I lost my mind and turned a little into my dad, dropped my voice an octave, and said, “Mrs. Wixim, you are the lucky winner of a free in-home pest inspection.” Anna loved to torment telemarketers. Her goal was to harass them until either they lost it laughing or hung up on her.
When she didn’t reply, I rushed on, hoping in my disguise that I could make her laugh. “Our highly trained bug engineers will come to your home and look for black and brown and green insects. How about that?”
She sighed and said, “Can you hold on a sec? There’s a three foot cockroach crawling up my skirt, and I have to whomp it.” She whomped something. With the phone. Then there was a thud.
“Mrs. Wixim?” I tried to get her back. “Hello? Are you there?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m still here. But the sucker isn’t dead yet. Can you send your guys over right now? I need backup.” Then she let out a blood-curdling scream that ended in a cackle, and with a final grunt, she hung up.
When I got home that night, she was in a fine mood and didn’t even complain that I hadn’t called to tell her I’d be late. I went out on a limb and risked it. I told her it was me on the phone.
“Hey, Anna, did you know it was me? I’m the bug guy!” I offered an attempt at a laugh. She’d found it funny when she thought she was dealing with a stranger, a telemarketer. I missed her and us, terribly. Maybe we could have a little reunion over this one.
“What?” Her crumpled face told me I was repulsive. “Now you’re calling me and taunting me and making fun of me?” She smashed the laundry basket down on the counter and, instead of walking away, this time she turned on me. “I told you not to be mean to me. I wasn’t kidding, Eddie.”
Utter failure. The wall between us was too high. I should have kept my mouth shut and just let her enjoy her little joke. Then I could have held it for myself, too.
She took two steps toward me and repeated, “Didn’t I tell you not to be mean?”
“You did. Many times,” I said in retreat. “I’m sorry.”
Together, we had no humor. I’d killed it.
Less than two revolutions of the Earth separated us from Anna’s deathday, and every bridge between us was shattered. I had absolutely no hope. I opened the back door and stepped into the rainy night to get away.
40
November 11
When Anna first began teaching high school, she was in charge of a tough bunch of students for the first few years. Apparently that’s what they do to new teachers. They stick them with the “bad” kids until they learn the ropes and gain some seniority. For the last few years, Anna mostly taught the higher-level classes and didn’t have to directly deal with the discipline issues abundant in lower-level ones. She dealt with delinquents in the halls between classes each day. But her time in the well, as they called it, taught her to alter her kindhearted, everybody-is-nice ways and handle the rougher kids harshly. That’s what they responded to. Don�
��t back down, hold your ground, believe you are right and tell them what to do. My little Anna would stand up to anyone. She had no fear.
I carried a truckload of fear for her. As November eleventh approached this year, my mind ran through all the dangers she’d face that day. It would be a school day, so there was the added possibility of an attack on campus. Could I possibly convince her that her horoscope said she should be nice that day? Doubtful.
I decided my best hope was to keep Anna home all day.
On the morning of Friday, November eleventh, I awoke with a start. Anna wasn’t awake yet. She was lying close to me in our bed. I leaned over, quiet as a mouse, held my breath, and brought my ear dangerously close to her face to check if she was breathing.
She rolled over just then and cracked me on the nose with her elbow. Ow.
Definitely breathing. But she remained asleep, I thought.
I carefully got out of bed and walked around to her side. I was pretty sure I couldn’t talk her into staying home, so I decided to turn off her alarm clock so she would oversleep.
“Eddie, what are you doing?” her groggy voice asked.
Busted. “Just checking the time?” I offered.
“What time is it? Did you make the coffee yet?”
I left the room to make coffee, and I heard the shower turn on. Joey was up early, too, and greeted me in the kitchen.
“Hi, Daddy. Is Mom up?”
“In the shower. Hungry?” I asked.
Joey’s sleepy eyes lit up. “Can I have breakfast right now, right away?”
“Sure,” I said. “Whatcha want?”
“Oreos, please.”
I looked up from the coffee grounds and caught the grin on his face. If this was indeed his last morning with his mom, I didn’t want them to have their traditional breakfast fight. I wanted him fed before Anna came out of the shower. But Oreos would ensure that, although Joey would be happy, Anna would crucify me on what might be our last morning together. I thought about it and decided to take my chances.