Life and Other Near-Death Experiences

by Camille Pagán

  He leaned back, his skin slick with sweat. “I am a doctor. I am vacationing at this hotel,” he said in a clipped accent of undecipherable origin. “The staff called me when you fainted. Are you all right?”

  I was not all right, but alarmed, and very embarrassed. I sat up and brushed myself off, being careful not to meet the eyes of the waiter, who was hovering behind the doctor, undoubtedly concerned that I would die before I had a chance to pay for my ridiculously overpriced libations.

  “I’m fine,” I told the doctor. “It was a panic attack. Apparently I’m prone to them.”

  “If you’re losing consciousness, I’ll have to recommend you go to a hospital for evaluation as soon as possible. Is there someone I can call for you?”

  “I can manage,” I informed him, though this was roughly seven hundred miles south of the truth.

  “I’ll call you a taxi,” the waiter said.

  “No,” I said.

  “Really, it’s no trouble,” he insisted.

  I gritted my teeth. “Please don’t. Just bring me the check.”

  Ignoring the doctor’s questioning gaze, I paid my bill and hobbled down the beach back to the house.

  Pain is funny, isn’t it, the way it’s impossible to accurately recall once it’s gone? When my incision wasn’t hurting too much, it was easy to believe I would be able to withstand the agony all the way to the bitter end. But now it was as though I’d been ripped open anew, and I wasn’t sure I could take another second of it, let alone an hour or a day. I served myself a bowl of cereal, but the thought of eating made me queasy, so I left it on the counter and went to the bedroom mirror. An ashen, exhausted woman regarded me warily from the glass. As I turned away, a sharp pain radiated through my groin and down my leg, making me wonder whether the cancer was spreading. I needed to see a doctor.

  I limped over to Milagros’s. “Hello?” I called through her screen door. “Anyone home?”

  She swung the door open. “Ay!” she cried when she saw me.

  “Tell me about it,” I said. “I’m not feeling very good.”

  “You look like you swallowed a swordfish, mija.”

  “Funny, that’s what my stomach feels like right now. Do you know of a decent doctor?”

  “Do I know a doctor! Do I know a doctor!” she said, hopping around. “I know all three doctors on the island, and I’ll even take you to my favorite. You let me drive you.”

  “I can drive myself.”

  She wagged her finger at me. “That wasn’t a request. There are people I love living around here, and I’m not giving you the chance to run one of them over on your way.”

  What was the use in arguing? I got in her old Chevy pickup and let her take me to the clinic. She helped me up the stairs and checked me in, and it was all I could do not to take her with me into the examination room so she could hold my hand through it all.

  Instead, I went in alone. A woman with dark curls and an unlined face introduced herself as Dr. Hernandez.

  “I had a, uh, mass removed, and it hurts a lot,” I told her, lifting up my shirt. “I’m going to go back to my doctor at home”—a tiny fib, I reasoned—“but I was hoping you could give me something to ease the pain until I get there.”

  She inspected the incision, then pressed down on it with her fingers while I gritted my teeth and willed myself not to boot her in the head. “It hurts because it’s infected,” she said. “You should have had these stitches out at least a week ago.”

  “I thought they would dissolve.”

  “Wrong type of stitches. I’m going to use a local anesthetic to numb you up. It’s going to hurt while I do it, but you’ll feel better after.” She plunged an enormous syringe into my stomach, pushing it this way and that as she loaded my skin with a cold-feeling fluid.

  “It—still—hurts,” I gasped as she eased the needle out.

  She tossed it into a medical waste bin and smiled at me. “But now it doesn’t anymore, right?”

  I grimaced, though the pain was giving way to a tingling sensation. Maybe local anesthesia would be how I would get through the next few months. But I’d have to find a physician—someone other than Dr. Sanders—who would agree to take a palliative, rather than prescriptive, approach. Which could be complicated.

  Dr. Hernandez used tweezers to pull bloody-looking stitches from my skin, cleaned the wound out, and told me to apply ointment and new bandages for a week. Then she handed me a prescription for an antibiotic. “This should knock out the infection. You’ll feel better in a day or two, but don’t stop until you’ve taken every last pill. Your incision could get worse if you’re not careful. I’ve seen cases of septic shock when patients haven’t been compliant with their medicine.”

  I thanked her for this uplifting morsel of information and returned to the waiting room. “All set,” I told Milagros.

  She nodded, then looped her arm under mine. We left the clinic that way, with me leaning on an elderly woman for strength, and her holding me up as though I was a wisp of a girl. As she helped me into the Chevy, I began to cry. The soothing, the kindness, the subtle mothering: these acts comforted even as they reminded me of what I did not have. Because at that moment, what I longed for most was not my life before my husband came out, or even before I set foot in Dr. Sanders’s office. It wasn’t even Paul and my father, the two people in this world who loved me most. It was my mother.

  Milagros seemed to understand that I was not crying out of pain. “It’s okay, mija. Whatever it is, it’s going to be okay. You’re here. You’re alive.”

  “That’s the problem,” I said from behind my hands. “I’m not supposed to be.” I thought of the plane crash, and the truck on the hiking path. Cancer aside, weren’t these evidence I was fated for a short and unspectacular life?

  “And who told you that?” Milagros said, not unkindly. “You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be until it’s over and you aren’t anymore. Prince or pauper, that’s how it works for us all.”

  If this was true, then why was I meant to be driving down a dirt road in the middle of a tiny island in the Caribbean? Why was I meant to die in a rapid and devastating manner, just like my mother?

  I looked out the window for wild horses, but there were no hidden signs or answers. Only trees and bushes and vines, blurring into a seemingly endless line of green.

  TWENTY-THREE

  My mother was buried in a suburb just outside of Detroit, three hours from our home, in a cemetery where her own parents and many of her relatives lay.

  It might as well have been Uzbekistan.

  It wasn’t as though physical proximity to the cemetery would have allowed me to interact with her, but I was still furious. It was just one more way in which she had been kept from me.

  Perhaps because of this, in the months following my mother’s death—our death, really, as our family as we knew it had died there next to her—our father drove me and Paul to the cemetery as often as we requested. Then, after several exhausting months of weekend travel, he said no. “I’m tired, and we’re beginning to outstay our welcome with my cousins,” he told us, referring to the relatives we stayed with during visits. “We’ll go again soon. Just not right now, okay?”

  It wasn’t okay with me, but instead of saying this, I decided to relay my anger by taking a pair of craft scissors to my curls. Paul, sensing a catastrophe in progress, let himself into the bathroom while I was halfway through the hack job. He didn’t say anything, just held out his hand for the scissors, which I gave him.

  “You can’t tell Dad that this is about him not taking us to Mom,” he said as he did his best to make it look like I had not stuck my head in a fan.

  “Fine.”

  “Libby, please,” he said, still snipping away, “you can’t. He’s already upset. Pretend you had gum in your hair. Tell him you were tired of kids pulling on your curls. Ju
st, this is not about the cemetery, okay?”

  I didn’t respond, but when I saw my father later that evening, I smiled as wide as my face would allow, as though I were tickled to be the spitting image of a young Billy Crystal. And as he smiled back in response, I realized Paul had saved all three of us from yet another unnecessary maiming.

  That was Paul: fixer of situations, savior of me. I needed him, and maybe more important, I needed to make sure that the increasingly suspicious Tom was not the one to tip Paul off about the terrible thing I was concealing.

  So after Milagros brought me back to the beach house, and I had tossed back a handful of antibiotics and ibuprofen, I reluctantly called him. But when he picked up, I couldn’t make myself say it. Instead, I sat on the end of my bed and cried into the phone.

  “Let it out,” Paul cooed. “Honestly, it’s a relief to hear you cry. I know how horrible this has been for you. Keeping it all bottled up won’t help.”

  “Wahhhhh!” I howled, because even though Paul was referring to Tom, it was so good to hear him confirm that what I was going through was horrible. It was. As much as the gash in my stomach hurt, my heart felt worse. Like my tumor, the bit of hope left in me had been torn out, leaving a gaping hole and an unspeakable ache in its stead.

  Yet I couldn’t admit this out loud. Every time I went to tell Paul what had happened, my shame for not telling him immediately only deepened. So I curled up beneath the bedspread and cried while he listened to me carry on, interjecting an occasional soothing comment.

  “Are you still in Vieques?” Paul asked when the worst of the wailing subsided.

  “Yes.” I sniffed.

  “Good,” he said. “Are you leaving soon?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m such a wreck right now.”

  “Shhh, you’re not a wreck. It’s okay. Stay put and we’ll figure something out. We always do, don’t we?”

  “Thank you,” I whispered. Snot was collecting on my phone, and shame or no shame, it was evident that this would not be when I told him. “Can I call you later?”

  “Of course. Just please, promise you won’t pick up and fly to yet another country without telling me.”

  “Puerto Rico is part of the United States,” I said, feeling defensive of a place that was not my own.

  “So you say. By the way, I love you the absolute most.”

  “Yet I love you more,” I said, and it was the truth.

  The antibiotics began to work their magic. When I woke the next morning, I could actually manage breakfast; I even took a shower and got dressed without wincing. I walked along the beach for a while, then drove into town to have an early lunch at the café where I’d had my first solo meal. It was a sleepy weekday, and there were few people to people watch, so I pulled a novel out of my bag. I was able to lose myself in the misadventures of a pair of ill-fated lovers for a short while, but then said lovers began humping with a literary vigor typically reserved for straight-up erotica, and I became distracted by the thought of Shiloh. If only I’d met him under happier circumstances—in an alternate universe, perhaps, where I was neither married nor a ticking time bomb. But I knew that we would not have come together any other way.

  I reached into my bag, grabbed my phone, and called him. He sounded sleepy when he picked up. “Hey, how are you?”

  “Um. Okay,” I said.

  “Okay?”

  “Well . . . I kind of passed out yesterday and ended up going to the doctor. But I’m doing better now, so no need to worry.”

  Shiloh let out a low curse. “I knew it.”

  “You knew what?

  “It’s getting worse.”

  Yes, it’s getting worse, I thought. I’m dying. “Not true at all,” I said in what I hoped was a buoyant tone. “The doctor said my incision was infected.”

  “See? You need to go back to the mainland, Libby. It’s time to get this thing treated.”

  “I’ll do nothing of the sort. I have almost two weeks left in Vieques, and I plan to enjoy them. Heck, I might not even leave at all.” Though it hadn’t previously occurred to me, the idea made sense. Vieques was my Heaven’s Mouth; the longer I was here, the less I wanted to be anywhere else. It was the ideal place to end it all.

  “No,” Shiloh said firmly. “You’re leaving. Don’t make a bad decision just because you’re afraid of being afraid.”

  I pushed my toes deep into the sand. “What a ridiculous thing to say,” I said crossly. What did he even mean, anyway?

  “Is it? Ridiculous, I mean? You’re already dealing with pain, so it’s not that you’re trying to avoid.”

  I thought of the large bottle of horse pills in my fridge. “I was in pain, but I’m feeling much better. The antibiotics are practically a cure-all.”

  “I’m happy to hear that. But less pain doesn’t mean that the cancer is gone. I think you’re putting off treatment because you don’t want to feel vulnerable. It’s not chemo and radiation you’re afraid of—it’s letting yourself feel how scary it is to not know what’s next. Please don’t choose the worst-case scenario just to avoid that feeling. You have people to see you through this. I’m one of them.”

  Tears pricked my eyes. “Thank you so very much for that stunningly inaccurate analysis, Señor Freud.”

  “That’s not nice, Libby.”

  “Well, I’m not a very nice person.”

  “I don’t believe that for a second.”

  “Believe it, hombre.”

  “Libby,” Shiloh said slowly, “I’m going to go now before this conversation takes a wrong turn. Please just consider what I’ve said.”

  “Fine.”

  “Thank you. I’ll talk to you soon, okay? Take care.” He did not say he planned to return to Vieques to see me—which was what I wanted to hear—so I didn’t respond. But instead of filling the silence, he said good-bye softly and hung up.

  As silence filled the air, I stared at my phone. Seconds passed, then minutes, but instead of bursting into tears or throwing the phone into the sand, I just sat there. Numb.

  Love guts you, then saunters away as the vultures swoop down to steal what’s left. I knew that. It had been mere weeks since Tom had reminded me.

  But what had I done? I had run right back for another flaying—only to find myself surprised that once again, I was emptied and alone.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “Milagros? Hello?” I called through the screen door, but my voice was met with silence. It had been two long days since I’d spoken with Shiloh, and I was hoping a Spanish lesson would help take my mind off our chafing conversation. Plus, though I wouldn’t admit this to anyone else, I was a bit bored. I’d eaten at most of the restaurants on the island, sorted an inordinate amount of shells, and walked the beach until my legs would take me no farther—which was not particularly far, given the way I was feeling. Could I really keep doing some version of the same for an unspecified amount of time? Especially if it meant doing it alone? I’d gone to Vieques on a solitary mission, but then Shiloh had come along, and being there without him felt all wrong.

  Strangely, I missed work. Not the work itself, and not Jackie, obviously—but the structure to my day. The purpose. As I wandered from Milagros’s house back to my own, I wondered what my purpose was, now that I was unemployed and had a markedly shortened shelf life. Maybe I could finally learn to cook, or—

  A sharp pain shot through my stomach, as if to remind me of my only purpose: to survive.

  No, no, no, I argued with myself as the word survive resurfaced in my mind. That’s not right. It’s a biological urge at play, just like your urge to procreate with your nonfunctioning baby-making equipment. There is no surviving. There is only coming to terms with not surviving.

  Just thinking about it felt exhausting, and when I let myself into the house I immediately lay on my bed a
nd closed my eyes. I quickly fell into a deep slumber and emerged groggy and ravenous two hours later. I fixed myself a bowl of SpaghettiOs (in a moment of acute desperation, I’d purchased four cans at the mini-mart), then went to the sofa on the back porch, propped the bowl on my stomach, and sloppily spooned Os into my mouth. Through the glass doors, I watched a kiteboarder zigzag across the water. Something darted through my peripheral vision, and although it was probably nothing but a lizard or another kiteboarder, I glanced around for a large object with which to defend myself. But when I turned again to see what sinister criminal lurked beyond the glass, Paul was staring back at me.

  Lord help me, I fell right off the sofa. Paul yanked at the patio door, but it was locked. The bemused expression on his face as he waited for me to scrape myself off the floor told me at once that he had no idea about the big C.

  He still thought this was about Tom! Excellent: I could tell him on my own time. I pushed myself up, trying to pretend that doing so did not make me feel as though my lower abdomen had been impaled. Forcing my grimace into a smile, I unlocked the patio door.

  “Is it really you?” I said, touching his arm lightly, because I was still in too much pain to give him a proper hug. “You actually flew to Puerto Rico?” Paul did not fly—not when his big-shot clients invited him to Aspen, not when investors asked him to go to Europe or Hong Kong, not when Charlie had to be in Los Angeles for work. Half the reason our father had moved to New England was so he’d be within driving distance of Paul. Yet Paul had gotten on a plane for me. I wasn’t sure whether to be flattered or concerned. (Had I really sounded that awful? Probably, I conceded.) Mostly I was relieved. My brother was here to help me make sense of this catastrophe. It was unfortunate that he was not yet aware of said catastrophe.

  “Of course it’s me,” he said, throwing his arms around me, oblivious to how much his hug hurt me. “And yes, I set foot on a giant death trap just for you.” Paul’s smile faded as he examined my face. “Libs, are you bleeding?” he asked.