“Well, fucking stop!”
I turn and head to my car.
“I’m sorry I pretended to be Sarah!” Elsa says, continuing to follow. We’ve known each other a few hours and she’s already resurrecting skeletons from our past. “I’m even sorrier about your mom’s cancer.”
Which sets me off. “How do you know that?” I ask as I turn and step toward her with barely-controlled fury. Fury at her for being here. At Ryan for telling her anything. “Did you call her after I left?!”
Elsa looks down.
“What is wrong with you?!”
“I didn’t tell her I wasn’t Sarah.”
“Oh, my fucking god!” I shout, and turn away from her. I hurry to my rental car with balled fists.
“And what’s wrong with me?” she shouts.
Not far off, car tires whine as they grip the parking structure’s gray-painted floor.
“You’re so incredibly self-absorbed,” Elsa says behind me. “You’re not even asking how she is!” I lengthen my strides. Behind me Elsa says, “Thomas? Thomas?!”
I turn to tell her, “Quit saying my name.”
As I open the door to my car, she says, “Please talk to me.”
I do not like her here. Pressing me on my mother. Acting like Sarah’s all-the-way gone. Making me feel exposed.
My phone rings, and I pull it out. Blocked ID.
“It’s Sarah,” I say, holding up my phone, defiant.
“I don’t think it is,” Elsa says.
I dip hard into my car and slam the door closed before I answer. “Hello?”
“Don’t hang up,” Sarah says.
I take a sharp, quick breath. “I won’t.”
“I just want to know how you’re doing.”
“You saw.”
“I what? This connection is terrible,” she says, and pauses. I check my phone, which goes from two bars to one, then put it back to my ear. Her voice echoes. The connection teeters.
“Just tell me where you are,” I say.
“Sorry, what?” she says.
“Tell me, and I’ll come.”
“You’re cutting out.”
Then the beep-beep-beep of the call ending.
As I wait for her to call back, I grip the wheel hard as I watch Elsa recede toward, then into, the elevator. By the time I exit the garage I have four missed calls:
Blocked ID.
Blocked ID.
Blocked ID.
Mom.
•••
I’m two blocks away when the signal’s strong enough for me to dial in to check the single voicemail. A message that’s only two words. My mother’s weakened voice saying, simply, “Please, Thomas.”
Fourteen
Once I’m inside my hotel room, I call Ryan.
“What is happening?” I ask him, angry.
“I want to ask you the same thing.”
“You sent Elsa to EO Games! I mean, what the fuck?”
“She asked where you were, and I told her,” he says. “She was concerned. I’m concerned.”
“Thanks, but if we could keep ambushes to a minimum, I’d be grateful.”
“Well, it’s not my fault that you’re not being straight with me!” he says, voice strained.
“You told her about Sarah,” I say, exasperated, disappointed.
“Well…yeah.”
“It’s not okay,” I say. “I don’t know her.”
“She said Sarah called while you were in the parking garage—why would you say that?”
Which is when my call waiting bleeps, a 646 area code.
“One sec,” I tell him, relieved by the interruption. “Other line.”
“Dude,” he says.
I click over and after a hello I hear, “Hey, it’s Carly from EO Games—you free tonight?”
“Tonight?” I say, surprised by the invite.
“Can you do Thirsty Crow on Sunset? At eight?”
“I can do eight.”
“Cool,” she says. “See ya.” And hangs up.
I click back over, and distract Ryan by telling him, “That was Carly from EveryOther. She wants to meet up later.”
“I don’t care about that right now.”
“Well, they said they’d be calling Peter.”
“I need to know about your mom,” Ryan says. I close my eyes slowly. After too long a silence, he says, “I’m your best friend. Tell me what’s going on.”
I lean against the desk and kick off my shoes. I can’t figure quite how to start. With my phone pressed hot against my ear, I track back to when I lied to Ryan, via email. If he knew the truth, he’d demand I go home. And if I went home, then I’d have to confront the limitless sadness of my mother gone.
I swallow deep, ready to speak but then there’s the hiss-hiss-hiss of cat scratches at my door.
“Fuck, dude,” I say. “You told her where I was staying?”
“Who?”
“Elsa.”
“What?” he says. “No.”
Annoyed, I head to the door. “Unbelievable,” I say.
As I pull the phone away from my face, I hear Ryan say, “I swear I didn’t…”
When I answer the door, I see he’s telling the truth. It’s not Elsa. I clap my phone closed without another word and my mouth goes immediately dry. Because, like an angel, Sarah’s gliding past me, into the room.
Fifteen
I’m standing, pressed against the window, while Sarah sits on the bed’s edge. Her dress is navy flowers on white.
“You came back,” I say.
Sarah nods.
“After so long.”
On her left arm, in dry-erase marker, she draws four parallel lines, then a diagonal slash through them. Then again. When she starts on the third set of parallel lines, I guess that she’s counting the time since she stood on the ledge of my Brooklyn rooftop.
“Fifteen months,” I say. “I get it.”
Sarah wipes her arm clean and takes a lazy look around the room. Her gaze lands on a halo of fading sunlight on the wall. The room is filled with remedial shapes.
“How are you here?”
Sarah looks at me, annoyed. She erases her arm then writes, Don’t ask dumb questions.
“At least talk to me?” I ask.
She erases her arm except for the words dumb questions. She writes, I just said. Then underlines just and circles
dumb questions.
Fearing she’ll leave too soon, I push myself forward, take a step toward her and reach out with my hand. Sarah evades by sliding soundlessly off the bed and backing away in the direction of the door.
“I’ll take you to dinner,” I say weakly.
Angry, she wipes her arm clean then jabs at her arm with the pen, scrawling out, Your mother.
“If I don’t go home, she can get better.”
She leans back, exasperated. Without erasing, she writes, NO.
Now she backs farther away, her gray eyes on me.
“If I go home, she dies.”
Coward, she writes. With her back to the door.
“Please don’t go,” I say.
She slashes at her left forearm with her right to do a quick-erase, then writes in thick dry-erase ink: Close your eyes.
“No,” I plead.
She underlines each word with three harsh stabs. Close. Your. Eyes.
“If I do, you’ll go,” I say.
She stares at me, exhales a soundless sigh.
“Fine,” I say. I stand up straight, put my feet wide, then close my eyes.
When I open them back up, I’m right: Sarah’s gone.
•••
It’s ten minutes later when I’m on the edge of my bed, trying to calm myself, and my phone rings loud in my
pocket. A call from Ryan.
“Seriously, no more bullshit,” he says, clearly frustrated. “Can you tell me what’s going on with your mom? Or not? Just one or the other, and I’ll stop asking.”
I consider the tangled logic, the embarrassing effort of explaining that if he’d known, he would have joined Sarah’s chorus, demanding I go home. And now, I expect he’ll do the same. “Not,” I say.
Ryan let’s out a sound of disgust. “I’m your best friend.” His voice is gauzy with disappointment.
“It’s complicated.”
“Your dead mother is alive and now dying?” he says. “What’s complicated about that?”
I go quiet.
It’s maybe thirty seconds of silence before Ryan, defeated, says to me, “I’m sorry, but this whole thing? I don’t get it. And I keep thinking back to when I moved, and how clear it was that you were struggling. But I used a strategy I picked up in London: ignore it until it goes away. But it’s not letting up, and now all this with your mom.”
“I need to go,” I say.
“Fuck, man, seriously?” Ryan says.
“I think I better call home.”
“Oh,” Ryan says. “Okay. Well, I’m here.”
Off the phone with Ryan, I dial my parents’ landline. After three rings, my father answers.
“It’s me,” I say.
“It’s dire times over here, Thomas.”
I try to tell him I can’t face it, but my throat’s seized up. No words come out.
“I’ll put your mother on.”
I hear the exchange. Dad whispers my name to Mom. Mom whispers, “Oh, thank heavens.”
“Thomas?” she says to me.
“Mom,” I say, a gasp that ekes out of my closing throat.
“It’s okay,” she says.
I lean my head back to keep from losing it.
“It’s okay,” she says again, her weak voice cracking.
But it’s not okay. If I stay away, maybe. But if I go home, it won’t ever be, again.
“It’s okay,” she says. “It’s okay.”
Then Dad gets back on the line.
“Son?” he says.
“Yeah?” I whisper.
“All I’m saying is hurry.”
Sixteen
Twenty-two months ago, I was home alone in Brooklyn when my mom called and said, “Thomas?”
“Hey, Mom.”
“Are you sitting?”
With an opening like that, I knew sitting wouldn’t do any good. I clenched my stomach, hoping the news would be bad but not awful.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“There’s a spot on my lung,” she said. “It’s the size of a stone that was the size of a pinpoint. Doctors say it will grow to the size of my lung. I want you to come home.”
I was under contract for the rest of the week, but I called and told them my mother was ill. Then I flew home to St. Louis.
•••
My parents picked me up from the airport, and we went straight to my mother’s doctor.
The doctor said to my mom, “As yours is an advanced case, we hope to see the metastatic deposits in your liver and in your bones shrink significantly, or totally melt away.”
“Her liver?” I interrupted. “Her bones?”
Her lung was just the starting point. The place in her body where they first discovered it.
The doctor went on, “It’s important to understand that intensive chemotherapy—even a bone marrow transplant—won’t kill off every cancer cell in your body. Plus, there’s your age to consider. There’s no case of absolute success, it’s just remission we’re talking about here. Let’s stray from the word ‘cured.’”
The doctor didn’t have charts. He didn’t have X-rays. He was just a tie, rolled sleeves, and a beard. He said, “Best case scenario: the cancer becomes merely parasitic. We quell it with therapy, hope it stays down for months and if we’re fortunate, a year or maybe even several years.”
“And worst case?” my dad asked.
The doctor looked at my mother apologetically. “The cancer resists everything we’ve got, even the experimental stuff, while the treatment weakens you considerably and your quality of life dips drastically.”
I found myself in a state of absolute awareness. I watched my mother, my safety net who protected me my whole life, to see if she’d shrink to nothing under the buzzing office lights.
The doctor’s sleeved elbows were on his knees, his hands woven together, thick black hair on the back of each of his fingers. How many times had he told people they would die? The light in the room made it so there weren’t any shadows.
I waited for Mom’s reaction. But so far there wasn’t one.
“Is she going to die?” I blurted, her only child, afraid my family would soon be halved.
“Statistics don’t tell you what is going to happen to any one person, just groups,” the doctor said.
The statistics: more than 70 percent of people with my mother’s condition die within two years.
“‘More than seventy percent’?” I said. “How many more?”
“Thomas,” my father said.
And the doctor said, “Blah, blah, blah.” Abstractions and ambiguities, all.
My mother reached over to hold my hand.
“Are you okay?” I asked her. “I want you to be okay.”
“I love you so much,” she said, and kissed my hand. “I need you to be strong for what happens next.”
I felt weightless.
•••
In the car on the way home from the hospital, my mother, confident and composed, told my father and I, “I’d like for you two to assist my suicide.”
My stomach sucked in, my throat seized.
“Oh, honey,” my father said to my mother, his voice so gentle. He reached over and placed his right hand on the back of her neck.
A wave of heat rocketed through me.
“Mom,” I said. “What about chemo?”
We both watched my mother.
“You heard the doctor,” she said. “And at my age.”
“You’re only sixty-one!” I said.
Mom looked straight ahead at the street and sidewalk and trees that hurried past us.
“Mom,” I insisted.
“It could go away with treatment,” Dad said.
“It won’t,” she said.
“But it could!” I cried. “You don’t know.”
“I know.”
“You don’t,” I pleaded. “Don’t be selfish!”
“Thomas,” my father said, so I’d stand down.
“No,” she said. “No chemotherapy.”
I began to throw up in the back seat. There was so much of it, my father had to pull the car over.
When I stopped, I saw my mother was doubled over in the front seat. Her hands over her face.
“Mom,” I said. “Please.” Wet hung from my lips. Neither of us could stop crying.
“Enough,” my father turned and said to me. I could count on one hand the times I saw my father angry, but he was angry now. “Goddammit!” he shouted at the windshield, his voice tense with pent-up hurt. I didn’t look at him. I just looked at the floorboard, the impossible amount of sick that had forced its way out of me, then closed my eyes. I choked back a sob, which turned into a loud, gulping swallow. Then I pushed a quick breath out of my nose, eliciting twin rockets of vomit and snot. I wiped my mouth and nose with my sleeve, and sat up.
After another minute, calm prevailed—or at least quiet. At some point, my father drove on. When we hit the speed limit, I let go and sat back. The nasty film of hydrochloric acid was on my tongue, and an empty, nowhere feeling pulsed all through me.
“Son,” my father said. “If your mother wants to die, we n
eed to let her die.”
Mom took Dad’s hand and kissed it.
To keep her alive, I knew I had to leave and not come back. But I didn’t say a word. No one did. We drove with the windows down to help dilute the smell. After a while, my mother, without looking back, reached between the seats and rested her left hand on my knee.
Seventeen
I’m twenty minutes early to meet Carly at the Thirsty Crow. After I locate it in a squashed clump of unremarkable shop fronts, I pull into a parking spot two blocks clear. I sit for a minute, then force myself to call Ryan.
“You called your mom?”
I watch the bright, recurring blot of headlights arrive, then vanish in snapshot clicks, followed by the wheeze of taillights in gentler red.
“I did.”
“And you’re going home?” he asks. I shake my head, though no one can see it. “Because now you have to.”
“This is why I didn’t tell you,” I say. The glands in my neck tingle, a signal that floodgates inside me are trying to break open. If I stay away, there’s a chance she’s okay. If I go, though… So I shut it all down. “Right now,” I tell Ryan, with finality, “I just can’t face it.”
I wait for him to speak, but all I can hear is the light scratch of cell phone connection. The weight of Ryan’s silence pushes down on me, makes my shoulders ache. Then it pushes into me and it settles hard and hot and heavy in my belly. So I hang up.
•••
The Thirsty Crow is a cramped, boisterous hotspot with a speakeasy feel. I find a pair of stools along the bend of the horseshoe-shaped bar under a light bulb so dim I double take when I realize it isn’t candlelight. After a few minutes of decompressing, one of the bartenders—a black guy with a beard, suspenders, sleeves rolled up—asks, “What can I get you?”
I point blindly at a battered, paper cocktail menu, all the drinks described in ten-point font. “I’ll try this.”
“The Mezcaline Smash?”
“That’s the one,” I say with an assured nod.
Once he turns to make it, I squint at the menu to see that I’ve ordered a drink designed by Rahad Coulter-Stevenson that mixes El Silencio mezcal, green chartreuse, lemon, mint, agave, and Peychaud’s. Some ingredients I’ve heard of, most I have no idea what they’ll taste like. All of which I’m grateful for, so everything can just slow down.
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