Five Days Left

by Julie Lawson Timmer

  He squinted, letting her know he was on to her. It might only be one room, but he had seen her to-do list for the nursery and it was as long as the one she had made for their attack on the entire first floor. She laughed and punched his shoulder. “Stop,” she said. “You’re going to love decorating as much as I am.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said. “I’ll go get the kid.”

  The front door flew open before he reached it and Curtis fired himself through at a run. At the last second, Scott opened his arms to catch him, Curtis laughing at the impact. Reluctantly, Scott pulled himself away and put a hand on the boy’s shoulder, steering him toward the kitchen. “Wash your hands, LeBron. It’s dinnertime.”

  4.

  Mara

  After the bus left, Mara stood at the kitchen counter and ran a hand over the cool granite. This was her favorite room in the house. She had always found it so seductive, with its sleek, gunmetal granite counters run through with a thin line of limestone green, its tall, rich-warm cherry cabinets, its sexy slate floor, lighter gray than the granite but with a delicate vein of the same limestone green.

  These days, the room posed a few challenges for her, but she still loved it. The oven door felt heavier every day and it took a practiced combination of arm, leg and hip movements for her to open and close it. The countertop had to be given a wide berth; she had plenty of hip-level bruises to remind her how painful the granite could be on impact. And the beautiful slate floor would not be trifled with; when she lost her grip on a glass or plate, she knew not to waste time hoping it survived and instead walked to the pantry for the broom and dustpan.

  Tom was always urging her to spend more time on the soft couches and carpeted floors of the living room and family room, rather than the hard wooden chairs or bar stools in the kitchen. But Mara loved the way the sun streamed through the sliding glass doors that led from the kitchen to the backyard. The suncatcher hanging in the doorway harnessed the light and shot it in concentrated rays into the kitchen, a million laser beams of color that always infused her with energy, even on days that followed sleepless nights or unsettling appointments with Dr. Thiry at the Huntington’s disease clinic in downtown Dallas.

  Mara, Tom and Laks ate their lunches at the kitchen counter and their dinners in the dining room, leaving the kitchen table to serve as Mara’s workstation. Her laptop lived there, along with several legal pads, a cup filled with pens, and at least ten packages of sticky notes. A stack of legal files used to reside there, too. Now Mara used that space for the magazines and novels she turned to when she was still wakeful in the middle of the night and had run out of things to look at online.

  Until recently, she had gone straight to the table after her early-morning date with the elliptical machine and dumbbells they kept in the guest room, squeezing in an hour or more of work before the rest of the house woke up. She would return there later, after Laks was in bed, until Tom finally goaded her into calling it quits for the night and joining him on the couch in the family room, or in winter, in front of the fire in the living room.

  Mara headed to the table now, and sitting, she peeled a large-sized sticky note from the top of a package, chose a pen and considered everything she needed to accomplish in the next five days. She had to plan every detail of Sunday morning. Arrange for Laks to be out of the house on Saturday night. She had goodbyes to say.

  Task number one—finalizing all the details—was largely complete. There was a full bottle of vodka in the liquor cabinet. She had been stockpiling sleeping pills for a few months and thought she had enough, but she would count them out later, to be sure. If she felt she needed more, a quick call to Dr. Thiry’s office would solve that problem. Three simple words, “I’m not sleeping,” and thirty more little white pills would be hers.

  Task number two—arranging for Laks to be out of the house—was a minute’s easy work. Mara picked up the phone and dialed her parents.

  “Morning, daughter.” Pori loved his caller ID.

  “Hi, Dad. Mom around?”

  “She is, but so am I.”

  “Great. Want to talk about plans for Saturday night?”

  “I’ll get your mother.”

  Mara laughed as something rustled on the other end of the phone. “Marabeti,” Neerja said. “How are you feeling? How did you sleep?”

  “Never better,” Mara lied. “Mom, could I ask a favor? Could Laks sleep at your place this Saturday?”

  “Of course. Your father and I would love to have her. Is everything . . . ?”

  “It’s all great. Tom and I want to . . . We have . . . There’s something we need . . .”

  Her mother laughed. “You don’t have to be shy around your mother. Lakshmi is welcome here, and you and Tom can enjoy your . . . something.” She chuckled softly.

  “Mother. Please.”

  “I’m only teasing, Beti. We should all be so lucky. What are you up to today? Resting, I hope?” When Mara didn’t answer, Neerja added, “Well, don’t do too much.”

  “Thanks for Saturday. Laks’ll be thrilled.”

  “Rest, Mara.”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  Task number three—saying goodbye without raising suspicion—would take more time. Mara drew three columns on the sticky note.

  People she would talk to in person: Tom, Laks, her parents. “Those Ladies”—Laks’s name for Steph and Gina, Mara’s two best friends, who appeared so often as a unit that everyone understood why Laks would lump them together with one name. In truth, when Laks had first come up with it, she called them “Dose Yadies.” Now that she could pronounce the words properly, she didn’t like to be reminded of a time when she couldn’t.

  Perfect timing: Those Ladies were taking Mara to lunch on Saturday to celebrate her birthday. Another benefit of having chosen April 10 for her deadline. She would ask Tom to take her to their favorite place for dinner on Saturday night, she decided, and she made a note of it beside his name, so she wouldn’t forget.

  People she would call: her closest McGill friends in Montreal, her best law school friends after Steph. Tom’s mother and sister in New York, who would be expecting Mara’s semiannual update call about now anyway, so wouldn’t think twice. It had always been enough for them to hear in her twice-yearly phone calls, and her annual holiday card, how their son/brother was, how much the granddaughter/niece they’d only ever seen in pictures had grown since the last update. So different from the constantly hovering Pori and Neerja, who knew before Mara did when Laks lost a tooth or outgrew her shoes. “This is the risk you run,” Tom had said with resignation, not bitterness, “when you confront family members about alcoholism and they choose shooting the messenger over hearing the message.”

  People she would e-mail: a handful of people at the firm where she and Steph had worked since their graduation from SMU Law School, a few mom friends from Laks’s school. And, of course, Mara’s dear friends from the Not Your Father’s Family forum, an “online community of adoptive, step, foster, gay and other nontraditional families.” She had found the forum a week after she and Tom arrived home from India with new baby Lakshmi, plucked out of the same Hyderabad orphanage from which Neerja and Pori had rescued Mara thirty-seven years earlier.

  For the past five years, Mara had chatted a few minutes almost daily with her fellow forum members, about nontraditional parenting arrangements and so much more. Work, cooking, exercise, finances, marriage, sex—no topic was off-limits. Plenty of people had come and gone from the forum once their specific question was answered, but a core group of regulars remained, Mara among them. The reason each of them had joined the forum had long been supplanted by the reason they remained: friendship.

  With a few members, she had ventured beyond group discussions and into the private world of personal messaging. It wasn’t uncommon for a discussion to begin on the broader forum, only to have one poster ask another to “PM” to continue to tal
k about it. The PM accounts were set up through the forum—a double click on a member’s username allowed you to send a private message to that member—so PMs didn’t reveal the members’ identities any more than the main message board itself.

  SoNotWicked, the founder of the forum, requested that members remain anonymous to protect the foster parents among them, most of whom were under confidentiality agreements with their states in connection with the children they were taking care of. But all the members agreed the anonymity factor was one of the main benefits of the forum; not sharing names made it easier to share details they would never reveal to people they actually knew. Mara had mused to Tom many times over the years how odd it was that she was so private “in real life,” yet so comfortable sharing profoundly personal details with people she knew only as PhoenixMom, MotorCity, flightpath, SoNotWicked, 2boys.

  Mara wrote MotorCity’s name on her sticky note and drew a circle around it. For a year, he and his wife had been guardians of a boy who was scheduled to return home next Monday, to live with a mother who had paid the boy less attention in his entire eight years than MotorCity had in the past twelve months. It was easy to see MotorCity loved his “little man” like his own, and while he had professed many times that it was best for his temporary charge to be reunited with his mother, everyone could tell it was killing him that Sunday would be his last day with the boy.

  MotorCity would need a friend on Monday.

  Mara would be dead on Sunday.

  Her chest tightened with guilt and she turned from her sticky note to her open laptop, clicked open the forum and her voice-recognition software and dictated a quick post.

  Tuesday, April 5 @ 8:32 a.m.

  @MotorCity—I’ve been thinking about you all morning. Five days left with your LMan (not that you need a reminder). Sending positive thoughts your way, friend. I’ll check in later to see how the day’s going at your end.

  She clicked the “post field” button at the bottom of the screen and waited to see her message pop up as a new comment. When it did, she read what she had posted and frowned. A line or two about “positive thoughts” was so inadequate.

  She scrolled to the top of the page to see what SoNotWicked had posted for the day’s topic of discussion. It was about MotorCity’s situation: How have other forum members managed to keep it together when returning their foster children to their families? What advice could any of them give to MotorCity to make his coming days less sad?

  The forum would light up today, Mara knew, and the thought made her chest relax. The members were for the most part a busy group, with little spare time, but the “regulars” made it a priority to spend the minute or two it took to check the day’s topic and fire off a post before returning to their children or work. Even at Mara’s busiest, she had made time to offer a line or two of encouragement whenever a fellow member needed it.

  Mara had never told her online friends about her illness, and months ago, a daily, raging debate had begun in her mind over whether she was sparing them or depriving them. It seemed disloyal to have kept it from them for so long. And now, the thought of simply disappearing without explanation, especially when MotorCity needed every friend he had, felt unforgivable. Mara leaned forward toward the laptop’s tiny microphone and spoke.

  Tuesday, April 5 @ 8:34 a.m.

  While we’re on the topic of five-day countdowns, there’s something I should have told all of you a while ago:

  She read what she had dictated so far and considered how to continue. It would help MotorCity, she thought, to know she had more than bland compassion for what he was going through, a thousand miles away. She, too, was preparing to say goodbye to her child.

  She understood the suffocation he must feel when he thought about letting his little man go. The vise grip of panic that must squeeze his chest each time he pictured his life without the boy. How he must choke away tears every time he tucked him in at night, knowing tonight’s goodnight kiss was one of the last. She felt those same things, she could tell him now. He would appreciate knowing a friend was going through the agony with him, wouldn’t he?

  Or would he be horrified, knowing she had a choice in the matter and was choosing only another five days with her daughter instead of another . . . however long she might have? Would they all be horrified? Was it better to slip quietly from MotorCity’s life, from all their lives, and not burden them with the reason why?

  There was a time, a few months before, when Mara’s fine motor control had begun to mutiny. More disturbing than the issue of coffee grounds all over the counter and floor, her posts to the forum suddenly read as though written by a barely literate second grader. When 2boys finally asked about it in his characteristically abrasive way (“wtf, laksmom—you been knocking a few back already this morning?”), Mara lied and told them she had broken her arm and was using only one hand to type. She spent the following hour downloading voice-recognition software onto her laptop and phone.

  If she confessed everything to them now, would they blame themselves for not having noticed the too-quick restoration of her typing ability, the too-quick recovery of her allegedly broken bone? Would telling them now benefit them, or only her? She would die without the guilt of having disappeared from the forum without explanation or goodbye, but they would live on with the knowledge that their friend had been suffering all this time and they hadn’t done anything to help. They would never forgive themselves for not being there for her, and the fact that she hadn’t given them the chance wouldn’t make them feel better.

  At first, it wasn’t a conscious decision, keeping her illness from them. She was in denial in the beginning, as loath to admit to herself that something was wrong as she was to admit it to them. But then, after her diagnosis, everyone around her became so overly concerned, so insufferably attentive that she started to regret anyone knew. As much as it was a relief to have a diagnosis in hand, it was infuriating to watch herself deteriorate in the eyes of the people around her. Use the word “disease” and suddenly everyone will instantly treat you like you’re ill, Mara learned, even on days you feel fine.

  The forum had become the last vestige of normalcy in her life. The one place where people weren’t constantly urging her to slow down, take it easy, conserve her energy. There, she wasn’t treated like Mara the patient, Mara the sick, Mara the pitiful soul who wouldn’t even outlive her own parents. On the forum, she was simply LaksMom: adoptive mother, full-time lawyer, wife to her college sweetheart, helpful friend. For that reason, the forum had been her lifeline, many days. The rope, however frayed it sometimes felt, that tethered her to sanity.

  Mara read again the beginning of the post she’d dictated. If ever she needed an aid to maintaining sanity, it was this week. This was not the time to let them in on her secret. She positioned her cursor at the bottom of the screen and clicked “delete field.”

  5.

  Mara

  Mara lay beside Tom in bed, running her hand over his shoulder and chest as he slept the contented slumber of a man who had just been made love to. To her, it had been a desperate, clinging kind of lovemaking. Part apology for what she was about to put him through, part gratitude for everything he had done for her and would do for their daughter. Part goodbye. To him, it had been hot.

  Now, a half hour after, he didn’t stir as she moved her hand over him. She ran her index finger gently down the long bridge of his nose, over the stubble along his square jawline. He wasn’t the least bit vain but he was troubled lately by the salt and pepper of his sideburns and the way his beard grew in half gray, not that he ever let it grow for more than a long weekend. Mara loved it, though. It was as if the gray hairs were little spotlights, drawing attention to the contrasting blue of his eyes.

  Neerja once told Mara that “they” say the combination of dark hair and blue eyes, rarely occurring, tends to result in exceptional beauty. Certainly Mara’s study subject of one, sleeping beside her, prov
ed that theory. He was constantly being hit on, by both men and women. How many invitations, propositions, had he turned down in the past twenty-two years? she wondered.

  How long would it take him, after she was gone, to accept?

  She drew her hand away.

  Disentangling her limbs from his, she crept out of their room and into Laks’s, a short detour before she made her way to the kitchen table and her waiting laptop. It was an instinctive nightly habit—a few seconds to pull up the covers, thin out the herd of stuffed animals the girl had wedged in beside her, kiss her forehead and whisper “I love you,” before she settled at the table to work or read or surf the Internet.

  Only tonight, Mara was frozen by the sight of the slender little shoulder above the covers, and she stood watching it rise and fall, rise and fall, until her legs felt weak. She sat on the edge of the bed then, and when she realized her weight on the mattress hadn’t made the girl stir, she stretched carefully on the bed, inching herself closer to the sleeping body.

  She put an arm around Laks and slowly pulled her closer until they were spoons, the child’s tiny bottom pressed against Mara’s stomach. She buried her nose in her daughter’s thick hair, inhaling deeply. Laks had talked her way out of a bath earlier that evening, and her hair smelled faintly of the prior night’s shampoo and . . . honey? From lunch, Mara supposed: five days a week of butter and honey on whole wheat, no crust. Six baby carrots. A bottle of water. And the blasted cookie, of course. God help the person who forgot to include the cookie.

  Mara moved her nose to the girl’s neck and felt something sticky. Grinning, she pictured Laks in the lunchroom, waving her sandwich in the air as she chatted away to her friend Susan and others, suddenly feeling an itch on her neck and reaching with the same hand to scratch it. The fact that she had smeared honey on herself wouldn’t have fazed her. She would have shrugged—regretfully maybe, or maybe not—and just gone on talking. “Miss Messykins,” Tom called her.