by Naomi Niles
“Is he ever coming back?” I couldn’t think of any other to ask what was really on my mind.
“We don’t know, honestly. The longer it goes on, the worse it looks. The doctors keep telling us it’ll be okay, that he’s a fighter, but it’s been a long time since I’ve had any hope for his recovery. They said the cancer was confined to his testicles and that they had isolated it, but I’ve seen it affecting his brain, changing his personality.”
“That could just be the radiation treatment,” I replied. “I had an aunt who underwent chemotherapy when she came down with breast cancer, and she became a completely different person. It doesn’t necessarily mean your dad is hopeless.”
Penny grimaced uncertainly. She had been despairing over her father’s condition for so long that it was hard to think of anything I could say that would help her.
“This is just making me realize I don’t know anything about death,” she said, her voice cracking slightly. “I believe that when he dies, he’ll go and be with Jesus, but will he still be able to see me? Can I just sit there and talk to him? I don’t know how it all works.”
“That I couldn’t tell you.” My parents had raised us religious, but I couldn’t make heads nor tails of the Bible. “I’m sure this won’t be the end of him.”
“I really hope that’s true. Wouldn’t that be terrible if he just died and that was the end? If he just ceased to exist? I keep trying to wrap my head around it. I realized I don’t really have any proof of life after death, other than what I’ve read in the Bible and stories my dad’s told me about the ghosts in our family. He says my mom appeared to him a few days after she died. He says it wasn’t a dream. She told him how she wanted him to raise me.”
“That might have just been his grief talking. I know a lot of people see ghosts right after a loved one dies, but that don’t prove nothing.”
Penny let out a sniff of contempt and glared at me. I hadn’t realized what an insensitive thing it was to say, given the present subject of discussion. “I’m sorry—that probably wasn’t what you needed to hear right now.”
“No, it’s okay,” said Penny, staring out over the grassy expanse. “You were just being honest about what you think. I hate it when friends try to give me false hope. I think that’s one reason I haven’t wanted to talk about it much. When I tell them he has cancer, the first thing they say is, ‘Oh, he’ll get better!’ I know they just want to encourage me, but they don’t know that.”
I wished I had been better prepared for this conversation; we were wading out into deep waters now. She had clearly spent a lot of time thinking about death and the afterlife. I had never given it much thought, apart from a sense that wherever we went after death, it was probably good and nothing to be stressed about.
“I wish I knew what to tell you,” I said with a shake of my head. The urge to reach out and take her hand was strong, but I resisted. “There’s not a lot of goodness or justice in this world, and sometimes our loved ones die before we’re ready. Nobody really knows where they go, and anyone who says they do is trying to sell you something. But that don’t mean we’ve gotta give up hope. I don’t think death is the end of every story. I don’t know where or how, but I’m sure you’ll see your dad again.”
I thought maybe I had said too much. I half-expected Penny to be offended and storm off. Instead, she leaned her head on my chest and lay there for a minute shuddering quietly and trying hard not to cry.
“I wish the world wasn’t such a mysterious place sometimes,” she moaned. “I wish we could know why certain people suffer, and I wish we could know whether or not it was going to get better. I always thought the world was a safe place, but the older I get, the more I feel my guarantees and securities being stripped away. And just—where will I go when I don’t have my dad to depend on? Who’s going to support me? I’m not ready to be an adult in this world, but lately, I’ve had to be, for both of us.”
While I was still formulating my response, she got up and walked over to the railing. For a long moment, she stood leaning over it, swaying precariously back and forth as the cool wind blew her hair back.
“Isn’t it strange?” she asked quietly. “I could just—jump off so easily. And then what would become of me?”
I began to feel a sense of unease, like maybe I should go over and stand next to her. “It’s a long drop,” I said, shielding my eyes from the sun. “You could fall and seriously hurt yourself. Even if you didn’t die, you might break a leg or a rib.”
“A few years ago, just before I dropped out of college, I visited New York City. I have the most vivid memory of standing on the subway platform and watching the trains roll in. I used to think how easy it would be just to nudge myself over the edge—how it would all be over in less than a second. It might not even hurt…”
With a feeling of extreme apprehension, I leaped up and ran over toward her. Right away, Penny turned and buried her head in my chest, clinging to me tightly.
“Oh, Darren,” she moaned. “I don’t want to die; I don’t! But sometimes the burden of living is too much. And I don’t want to have to sit here and watch my dad dying, knowing I can’t do anything about it, knowing the pain he’s in, knowing that might be me in another twenty years. It would be so much easier just to end it all right now.”
“You know how much I would miss you if you did?” I said low in her ear. “You’re the best thing that’s happened to me in ages.”
Penny glanced up at me in surprise. “Even better than the money?”
“God, so much better.” Bending low, I brushed my lips over her hair. “Even if I won another hundred thousand, that would still be true.”
For the first time since we had ascended the tower, Penny smiled. “Thank you for saying that,” she replied, wiping a tear from her eye. “I sometimes feel like the world would be better off without me. It’s hard to imagine Nic, or my dad, or really anyone missing me for more than a few days.”
“I can almost promise your death would be the worst thing that had ever happened to me.”
“Almost?” Penny repeated with a coy smile.
“One time in sixth grade I accidentally ate a whole thing of wasabi and had to be rushed to the emergency room. Nothing in my life will ever be quite that bad, but your death would be close.”
“I can accept that,” she said with a resigned shrug. “I guess we’d better get back down there before Nic starts wondering where I’m at.”
“You never did show me that muffler,” I said as we descended the ladder.
“Maybe you can come back and get it some other time. It would give you an excuse to come back, at least.”
“How about if I just took you out to dinner on Friday?”
Penny paused with her left foot on the bottom rung. “Would you really? I would love that.”
I’m not sure why, but for a moment I had worried that maybe she would say no. Relief flooded through me as I realized we would be going out again this weekend.
“Just an ordinary date this time?” she asked. “Nothing dramatic or death-defying?”
“Penny,” I said with a shake of my head, “as long as you’re there, nothing is ever gonna be ordinary.”
Chapter Twenty
Penny
Ever since our trip to Round Rock, Dad had been asking when I was going to let him read my book. Normally I had a strict policy of not letting anyone read my books until they were finished, and sometimes not even then. But Dad insisted on it. “If I wait until you’re done, I may never get a chance to read it.”
“Why wouldn’t you?!”
“Imagine you were directing a Star Wars movie and a ten-year-old girl with cancer came up to you and asked if she could see it as her dying wish. You’d have a hard time saying no.”
“Well, you’re not going to die,” I said in as calm a voice as I could manage. “But because I like you and I need another pair of eyes, I’ll send you the first five chapters. You have to promise me you’ll be honest about it
. I don’t want you lying and telling me you love the story if you think it’s awful.”
“Remember, I graded essays for twenty-five years,” Dad replied. “A lack of honesty was never failing.”
“Well, if you hand me the story back with a giant ‘F’ at the top, I’ll probably go to my room and cry, but I think I would prefer that over dishonest encouragement.”
When I left for work on Friday, Dad was sitting in the kitchen window reading the first chapter over a cup of tea. By the time I returned home that night, he had finished it.
“What did you think?” I asked him. In spite of my initial hesitation, I was genuinely curious. “Come and talk to me while I’m putting up my hair.”
Dad came and sat down at the end of the bed while I studied myself in the vanity. After agonizing over it for a couple hours with Nic, I had decided to wear a sleeveless black beaded top and a pair of high-waisted jeans.
“There’s a lot going on in this story,” he said, “a lot. I almost think there’s too much plot.”
“That’s not necessarily a bad thing, is it? I tried to keep the story moving along at a fast pace. I don’t want the reader getting bored, putting the book down to get a cup of coffee and then getting distracted and never coming back to finish it.”
“I sometimes think having too much plot can be as boring as too little. Like, it’s great that your characters are falling in love and flying around Berlin, but you haven’t given as much attention to their internal struggle.”
“Internal struggle?”
“See, the real story inside any story is how the protagonist grows and changes. Like, the thing that makes the original Star Wars so compelling is how Luke is transformed from a scruffy nerf-herder into a brave, confident young man.”
“Interesting…” I loved Dad’s insistence on using Star Wars analogies despite the fact that I had never much cared for Star Wars.
“Michael and Anna Beth need to have a goal that they’re working towards or else the story is just going be a bunch of random events. I want to know what motivates them, and I want to know the inner struggles that are keeping them from attaining happiness. Just as Luke Skywalker struggles with a lack of confidence in his own instincts, they ought to both have character flaws that are keeping them from being together.”
Inner struggles. Character flaws. I tried to think of it in terms of my own life. Was there anything keeping me and Darren from being really happy together? Sometimes I thought what we had was perfect. But then there were those moments, like on the tower on Wednesday, when I could tell I was making him nervous, when he seemed to be wondering what he had gotten himself into and whether there was a way out.
By now I was almost done getting ready, and I paused to examine myself in the mirror. I was wearing a blue beaded bracelet and a pair of long dangling peacock feather earrings. I was just applying an extra dab of body lotion to both wrists when the front doorbell rang.
“You want me to get that?” asked Dad, rising from the bed.
“No, I’ll get it.” I ran ahead of him, heart pounding with fear and excitement. Darren had never met my dad before in the capacity of being my dad, and I hoped their first meeting wasn’t horribly awkward.
He stood at the door wearing a red flannel shirt and a pair of dark jeans. I was so used to seeing him in his grease-stained blue uniform that for a moment I stared in surprise. “Are you going to invite me in?” he asked.
“Sure, come right in,” I said slowly. “I’d like you to meet my dad.”
Dad shambled slowly forward and extended his hand. “Darren Savery,” said Darren. “I’m kind of amazed we haven’t already met; Penny talks so much about you.”
“Only good things, I hope.”
“Yeah, she really loves you.” He had taken three steps into the house; now he stood in the doorway, silhouetted against the late afternoon sunlight and smelling strongly of cologne. Flashing me a warm smile, he added, “I find that Penny is a loyal and kind person in general.”
“Y’all are too nice to me,” I said, blushing. “I’m only loyal because I have people in my life who are worth being loyal to.”
“You’ve never given yourself enough credit,” Dad said with a shake of his head. It felt weird to be standing here talking with both him and Darren, two sides of my life that had never previously mingled. “You turned out so much better than I had any reason to expect.”
I had never much liked being the center of attention, especially when it was flattering. “Well,” I said, turning to Darren, “shall we get going?”
“Yeah, I guess we’d better. Your dad probably has things he wants to do tonight.”
“I think I’m gonna go lay down.” Dad turned and began shambling back in the direction of his room.
“Do you need me to come tuck you in?”
“Don’t worry about it. I just want you to be safe tonight. Darren, you look after her and make sure nobody hurts her.”
“I will protect her with my life,” Darren replied, and I didn’t doubt that he meant it.
Chapter Twenty-One
Darren
“So how’s your book going?” I asked Penny.
We were sitting in the back of Meso Maya, an upscale Mexican restaurant in downtown Dallas. I was eating a wood-fired marinated steak with charred salsa while Penny ate pollo con mole, a chicken breast served with white rice, a plate of chips, and queso fundido with oregano and grilled onions.
“It’s going well, actually.” She brushed her hair back behind her ears. “My dad just finished reading the first five chapters, and I can already tell I’m going to have to rewrite huge chunks of it.”
“Did he not like it?”
“I think he liked it okay. He knows a lot more about literature than I do, and I didn’t understand all of his criticisms. But I think what he was trying to say is that my characters need to be better developed. They’re so busy trying to save the world from fascism that they’re not paying much attention to their emotional lives.”
“I think that’s the risk you take when you fight fascism,” I said, taking a sip of my root beer. “I haven’t read the story, but I’m sure you’ll find your footing once you’re more than a few chapters in.”
“I hope so,” she said sadly. “This is why I never share my stories with anyone before I’ve finished them because if they criticize them, it discourages me from wanting to finish. I’m tempted to go back and scrap the chapters I’ve written so far and start over.”
She cast her eyes down on her plate; she’d been downbeat ever since we got into the car. Not wanting her dad’s criticism to dampen our whole dinner, I fumbled for encouragement. “I’m sure you’re a good writer. Sometimes it just takes two or three drafts before you figure out the story you want to tell.”
“I guess. I’ve just never been very good at accepting criticism.”
“Well, think about the first couple books you wrote and how much better of a writer you are now—and how much better you’ll be after you’ve got five or six books under your belt.”
Penny smiled a weak smile and reached for a chip. “This is my fourth novel, and so far probably my favorite. My first two were just utter trash. When I go back and reread them, I just want to set my computer on fire and hide in the woods.”
A smile played at the corner of my mouth. “You mind if I read them?”
“Ugh, no!” Penny recoiled in horror. “Maybe after I’m dead, and maybe not even then. They’re honestly so bad; you have no idea. Inconsistently written characters, factual errors, long awkward passages of dialogue that make me cringe when I read them…”
“It sounds great,” I said with a laugh. “One night, we’ll buy ourselves a bottle of wine, and we’ll go back to my place and drunk-read them.”
“No, we can’t!” cried Penny, practically in tears. “You would question why you ever went out with me. Commas in the wrong places, whole chapters that should probably be taken out—you’ll just have to accept that your girlfriend i
s not a very good writer.”
It was the first time she had ever referred to herself as my girlfriend, and she seemed to regret speaking the words as soon as they left her mouth. Her face turned slightly pink, and an uneasy silence fell over the table. I went on eating the last of my steak while she pulled out her phone and began typing.
“Who are you texting?” I asked after she had been doing this for some time.
“Nic,” she said, returning her phone to her purse with a guilty look. “She wanted to know how it was going.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I said it was going well. Hey, do you want to run by the store after we’re done eating? You never did pick up the exhaust system I ordered you.”
I paid for our meal, and we left. Outside, it was one of those warm spring evenings with a slight breeze carrying the scent of toffee and ice cream. I unlocked the car, and we got in, but I hesitated for a moment before starting it.
“Are you gonna go?” asked Penny, a little nervously.
“Yeah, I just had a question.” Leaning against the steering wheel, I turned to face her. “Before we go anywhere, I need to know: how do you see us as a couple? Are we dating?”
“I mean, we’re on a date.” She sounded offended by the question.
“I know, but that’s not what I mean. Are we in a relationship, or aren’t we? I assumed we were, but I realized we’ve never made it official.”
“Do you want to be?” asked Penny. “It’s whatever you want.”
I couldn’t understand why she was being so stubborn. “You’re a part of this relationship, too, and I want to know what you want. I think you already know what I want.”
“What do you want?” She was looking in my direction but couldn’t quite bring herself to face me.
“I’m pretty taken with you, if you don’t mind my saying. You’re not the sort of girl I would ever have expected to end up with, and I thought I would care, but I don’t. You’re one of the better things that’s happened to me, and I’d love it if we made it official.”