Читать книгу Banshee - Rachel Dewoskin - Страница 8

CHAPTER THREE

LEAH SAID SHE WAS GOING TO go spend the next day at the park, that I should join her. The park was a long strip that ran through our tiny university town like a green vein. She wanted to sit outside together and read, maybe eat something, a picnic? She asked the last word with one thin eyebrow arched, her big eyes sparkling with something devious. Tomorrow. Would we see each other tomorrow?

The thought of a picnic with her was a tourniquet around my heart, so I said I had errands to run, things to prepare. I left her place in the early evening, drove my car down the newly throbbing streets. Pulling into Charles’s and my driveway, I felt like I was driving over all the years underneath this one, every day I’d driven home, every conversation he and I had ever had, every other me I’d ever been.

Never having cheated before, I hadn’t realized what an instant accelerant sex is for disorientation and guilt.

Out of the car, I walked by plants I’d once cared about, up the stone walkway to our imposing, pretentious front door—what assholes lived here? —and turned my key in the lock. A metal taste spread to the back of my mouth, as if I’d licked a bloody knife. I set my purse on the in/out table, kicked my shoes off, and walked into my own kitchen. The young me watched the old me and thought—seriously, it’s come to this? Who are you?

“Sam?”

Charles was home. My name in his voice sounded familiar and just, brought back the delicious horror of hearing it in Leah’s voice.

“Yeah, it’s me,” I said, my fake words clanging around, the taste of Leah and impending lies on my lips.

He walked out into the foyer to find me, looking like a sleepy hunter, someone who has stayed awake all night in a blind, watching for deer. Except I was the deer, and he wanted to save me instead of killing me.

As he came close and hugged me, I said, “I feel very strange and tired.”

“Do you want to lie down?” he asked, but even though we’d known each other for what now felt like our entire epic lives, I couldn’t decode this. Was it a proposition, and if so, of what sort? Was he offering to lie down with me? Was it a romantic offer? An exhausted one?

“I want to watch a nature show,” I said.

He nodded, and I saw myself as if I were a character in a story in which Charles was the protagonist. He said, “How does The Blue Planet sound?”

“Good.”

“I have a call, so I can’t watch with you, but I’ll set it up. Do you want something to drink, Sam? Tea? Coffee? Water?”

I deserved to perish from my own thirst. If I was going to quench whatever the desire for Leah was, then maybe I should desiccate my body by ignoring its other more mundane drives. “No thanks,” I said. “Thank you, though. I’m fine.” Too many words, lined up unnaturally.

As we headed to the couch, Charles asked, uncharacteristically, “Were you at school?”

“Um”—I was now formally a person who said um—“yes.”

The lie bounced around the room between us, like one of those horrible Orbeez Alexi used to grow in bowls of water. They were hard beads until they absorbed the stagnant water and then they became juicy, bouncing little gelatinous balls that fell all over the house and rolled everywhere but also smashed into clumps of a kind of disturbing Jello when stepped on.

I sat on the couch and Charles used one of our seventeen remotes to turn on an endless menu. He scrolled and typed through to The Blue Planet and waves came on the TV. I felt nauseated, seasick.

“Can I have The Great British Baking Show instead, please?” I asked, and he scrolled again, and as soon as the hosts were bawdily joking about bread boxes, I felt instantly better. Cured, bright, happy.

“Thanks, honey.”

He sat for a minute more. “Sam?”

“Yeah?”

“Can we talk about what’s happening? Are you—”

Poor Charles. He wanted, I knew, to ask if I was insane, having a nervous breakdown, going to be okay. He wanted to send me somewhere to get whatever help I needed, but he knew better than to ask if I was crazy, in case I either was or wasn’t, and flipped into a mad rage at having been confronted.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Just anxious. I just need a little space.”

I knew immediately that this had come out wrong. He seemed to reel.

“Space—space from what, Sam?”

“You know, from this—from our—from, I don’t know. I need to think this surgery through before it happens.”

“Of course. Let’s think it through together. Are you saying you want space from our—” Here he paused, because he was incredulous. “—marriage?”

My face was on fire. Were we actually having this conversation? I tried to backpedal, but needed to go forward with it, too. Otherwise, how would I justify what was already underway?

“Not just that,” I said. “From everything. I need to float up above my life for a second to get through this.”

“Which means watching British Baking during the day? Which means not teaching? Which means what, Sam?”

Fucking my student.

It means fucking my student, and never being polite or apologizing again. It means shedding every rule like itchy lizard skin, suffocating all the people I love most, you included, and freeing myself. Then putting back on only the ideas and habits I believe deserve to be worn.

“It just means I need a minute to think through who I am, in case this is the end.”

He took my right foot in his hand and set it on his lap like a pet. “Oh, Sam. I’m sorry you’re suffering, honey. And I get how scary this is. It’s a nightmare. But there’s no reason to make it worse than it is. This is not ‘the end,’ no one dies on the table. It’s not a catastrophic diagnosis. The surgery and treatment are common and well-tolerated. Look at your mom—she’s doing fine, all these years later. You’ll be fine too. Please try not to exaggerate the danger. You’re torturing yourself.”

I took my foot back. I didn’t want to be told I’d be fine.

“I think I need to go for a walk, actually,” I said, and I turned off The Great British Baking Show, even as the meringues were being whipped in the glass bowls, even as the bakers were talking about the necessity of adding the sugar spoonful by spoonful.

Even as the blood sausage was being wrapped in fatty pastry.

“A walk is a good idea. Do you want company?”

“No thanks,” I said. “I’m just going to clear my mind.”

“Of course. Go easy on yourself, honey,” Charles said, and he let me go. I walked through the park until the sky darkened, knowing I would walk through it again in the light with Leah. Tomorrow.

THAT NIGHT I slept alone. When I went to bed, Charles was in his study, and then he never came to bed. I woke up alone, showered, dressed, and headed out our backdoor toward the park, dialing Leah’s number. She picked up, and her “hello” was low, maybe because she was asleep, or maybe because she didn’t know who was calling.

“It’s me,” I said in a very sexy voice, because I couldn’t sign up for either Sam or Professor Baxter. “I’m done at home. You still free for a picnic?”

“Oh, wow, okay,” she whispered. Her voice stayed low, so maybe that was just what she sounded like on the phone. “I’ll get ready now. We can meet at the bench next to the sundial.”

Something about the way she said that—without asking where I’d like to meet, without checking—made me feel like she was standing over me. With a whip.

The hills were scattered with a complicated mess of leaves. It was unusually warm, even in the morning—a sign of impending global disaster, but which meant I didn’t have to be cooped up either in Leah’s embarrassing apartment or in our house. Instead, I could skip across nature, an innocent, infatuated, middle-aged teenager.

As I walked toward the hill, I wondered about women who left their spouses. And then what, rented apartments? How boring and unbearable. An apartment seemed like the opposite of an affair. Not to mention, I couldn’t possibly leave Charles because 1) I loved him, and 2) then what, I would wheel myself from the hospital to a basket-case tank/bachelorette pad I had rented two days after being diagnosed with cancer?

That sounded mentally ill, even to me. The mere thought of looking for this grim potential apartment seemed a task so insurmountable and final, it required me to crawl into whatever bed was closest, likely Leah’s. Looking at apartments always made me feel not only mortal, but also deflated in the present tense—like, why even bother living if a drafty, dust-covered (or worse, object-filled) space is all it comes to? I’d fly around the room at the very thought and then land flat on the floor, a balloon weeks after the party.

Even without the sad bachelorette tank, if I moved out, I would have to tell Alexi what was happening, and that was obviously impossible. I wanted her to get through her finals first. No wonder men who had affairs kept them secret and tried to have it every possible way at once. How convenient it would be to stay married to Charles, live in our house, and recover or die from whatever illnesses ravage me, while also pretending I was twenty and loving whoever else I wanted to on the side, feeling reckless again as I careened into antiquity and death.

I suspected from Charles’s gentle, unfinished, “Are you—” that he was worried I was having a breakdown. That he didn’t know about Leah. He knew something was happening, but not precisely what or with whom. To his great credit, he didn’t ask that, even after I said I needed space. For Charles, the larger picture was always possible. He’s never been petty, but he wasn’t correct about the breakdown narrative. My mind was lucid. I didn’t blame him; all of our friends who’d been left had accused the deserters of being mentally ill. How else was it tolerable to be the victim of such a choice? Especially when you were as famously blameless as Charles?

It wasn’t him, it was me. I just wanted to leave him for a while, even though he was almost as perfect a person as he considered himself to be. This particular brand of certainty reminded me of what I experienced when I decided to marry him. I’d known I wanted it—but forever? For a while? For how long?

Maybe this would all turn out to have been an absolute bloodbath, but even that possibility—that there were reveals left that I couldn’t see, outcomes I couldn’t guess at, thrilled me. I remember when I was thirteen, I read “soap opera” and didn’t know what it meant, because I’d always thought the words—which I’d only heard up until then—were “soap bopper.” This had seemed, at the time, both terrible and exciting. I knew I’d had something deeply wrong, and understanding that indicated to me that there might still be other discoveries that awaited me. It’s not a great example, but I was reminded walking away from our house that getting something wrong often felt right.

If I had turned around, I would still have been able to see our house on Riverview Court. Charles, who studied engineering before becoming a lawyer, designed it and had it built: imposing, modern, made of light, blond wood that looked like his straight, straight hair. The house remained as chilly and unblemished as his family, no matter how many Midwestern seasons it endured. It was a beautiful palace, and when I first moved in, I felt like a Disney princess, promoted from my own ratty life to Charles’s lovely kingdom. He was very artsy in those days, hanging paintings and surprising me with throw pillows that complemented the red leather couch he’d chosen.

I found Leah at the sundial, leaning back on the stone bench, her eyes closed. The early sun looked like it might light her pale face on fire, and I wanted to warn her to hide her neck, lest some wild animal bite it. But I sat next to her and she opened her eyes slowly and calmly. “Hey,” she said. “Long time no see.”

She’d never been one for radical originality, but I laughed agreeably.

“Should we walk?” I asked, thinking that if we saw anyone—if anyone saw us—well, fine, we were having office hours, a student and her teacher on a stroll through the park. Right?

We headed along the park’s path, Leah chirping and chattering about a dream she’d had in which a squirrel leapt out of her tote bag and bit her. I tried to listen, watching young mothers pushing strollers, students in fleece staggering under the weight of their enormous book bags, two readers sitting on backpacks and sipping from thermoses of coffee. A child darted away from his mother and rolled through a pile of leaves and I remembered the story my fourth-grade teacher had told us in a ghoulish whisper, of kids in a pile of leaves being crushed by a car. The driver parked on the pile? Seriously? I guess her point was not to lie in the street even if there was a tempting leaf bed there, but the fact that every time I see toddlers playing in leaves even now, thirty-five years later, I think of that? It’s an instance of a teacher having a hideous and everlasting impact on her young student. I wonder why it was on my mind.

Leah spread a blanket, pink with leaves and needles remaining in its fibers from days she had already spent in the park, hopefully frolicking with people her own age. She sprawled upon it so earnestly that I wanted to either devour her or be her—if there was even a meaningful distinction between the two.

She rolled onto her stomach to take a book out of her bag and started reading. She was wearing textured tights and a very short cargo skirt, which now rode up her legs. She kicked her feet up and used one hand to hold the book, the other to shade her eyes. Sun filtered through the trees. It did not seem to occur to Leah to smooth her clothing down or cover herself. What was her mother like? I pushed the question from my mind.

The book was Janet Malcolm’s biography of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, which Leah was loving, maybe because Alice B. was its underdog heroine, a fun shock to the system for anyone who had grown up with the Gertrude-as-protagonist paradigm.

“Listen to this!” Leah said, beginning to read loudly enough that several other picnickers looked over at us. I neither apologized for nor shushed her. She wasn’t my child, after all.

Alexi was never like Leah, and neither was I. Leah showed up on the first day of Poetry and Performance wearing a black button-down lumberjack shirt with an olive tank top visible underneath, and the first three books on the syllabus already read. Read carefully. She always stayed three assignments ahead, and I didn’t know what exactly she was proving or to whom. Her adoration of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Audre Lorde was so undiluted as to be comical.

Leah’s eagerness would have been solely silly if it hadn’t been contained by a macho, unapologetic affect—her red hair a threat to the room, about to turn and burn us all down. Her shoulders, wings, arms slim and muscled, eyes absolutely frank. She was a living dare.

When she put anaphylaxis in a poem, I was surprised to learn it was hers, that she had allergies, but maybe she knew we’d feel doubt, because she showed us her EpiPen that day in class, tucked in her shirt pocket. Leah’s appeal was odd, linked to her way of thinking, and—patronizing though this was—to her way of trying. Leah tried very hard.

“She must have been furious,” she said now, meaning Alice Toklas.

“Probably,” I said, “but who knows whether more or less than any of the rest of us.”

“What does that mean?”

I shrugged, tipping my head back until the sun hurt my eyes. “Just that rage is part of the program,” I deflected.

“I’m not really enraged,” she said mildly.

Should I have said what I thought, which was “not yet?” I didn’t. Instead, I put a hand on her back, before remembering how wildly inappropriate this whole situation was and lifting it off like I’d burned myself.

“Keep your hand there,” she demanded, and I put it back.

“Move it down,” she said, louder, and I did so fast, wishing she’d say less, or at least speak quietly.

“How about Gertrude Stein not admitting she was Jewish?” I asked, changing the subject as I moved my hand off of her, hoping she wouldn’t notice or direct me to put it back.

“Well, I guess you can see why she felt she had to hide it, right?”

“It’s unsavory.”

“I don’t know,” she argued, “I think it’s forgivable. Can any of us really say we’d have been first in line to announce our Jewishness when it might have gotten us killed? Wanting to survive isn’t really selfish or unsavory, is it?”

“Depends on how far you’re willing to go, and at whose expense,” I said, like a bitter old man. It seemed funny to me that even though Leah’s idea was slightly more cynical and less idealistic than mine, her reason for believing it was forgiving and kind. Whereas my impulses were now jaded and rusty.

“I have to stretch,” Leah said, twitching on the blanket. She stood then and bent at the waist, and I had a moment of horrific expectation that she might do an entire yoga routine. She reached her arms up to the sky. “Join me,” she said, grinning. I wanted to do yoga with Leah in the park about as much as I’d wanted to eat the disastrous cheese sandwich, but I didn’t want to be cranky or immobile, so I stood and reached my arms up. I did everything she said, is the truth. Maybe she was the perp and I, the innocent victim.

“Sun salutation,” she said.

The only sports I liked were swimming and climbing the sheer faces of cliffs. There was something about the private, single-minded focus of those two activities that allowed me to engage without embarrassment, self-criticism, or pure loathing of the way they made my body feel. I hate teams. I hate sports that involve rules or balls or getting chased or hit or even interrupted in my own pursuits.

Alexi was always athletic, talented, even when she was a baby, kicking her chubby legs furiously. She never had to try hard, but maybe needing to make a bigger effort might have benefited her, given her some necessary experience.

Once, after a volleyball game in which Alexi leapt up to the net and slammed a ball down onto the other team’s side, whooping like a superhero, a high school boyfriend of hers said, “You know what you’re good at? At being good at things.”

Alexi reported this to me at the time, unsure why it made her unhappy. “He meant it as a compliment,” she said, “but I don’t like it.”

“Of course not,” I told her. “Because you work hard and he can’t see it.”

She surveyed me skeptically. “Yeah,” she said, “maybe.” I looked away, caught. Had Alexi ever had to work hard at anything? And if not, was it because she had enough talent to compensate? Maybe Leah was the daughter I’d never had, the pleaser. Oh my god—reroute your thinking, Sam! Stop imagining them in the same sentence, please.

Leah was embarrassingly planking on the blanket, her body an absolute two-by-four. I did what I always do when asked to plank, which was to collapse and lie on my stomach. I looked at the grass, the billions of blades, the leaves on top of it, and tried to see individual shapes and colors. A bug struggled through a tangle of damp leaves, finally triumphing and finding itself on top. Now what, bug? Sunbathing? What’s your goal?

“That’s not a plank, Professor Baxter,” Leah said. She rolled onto her back and shaded her eyes from the sun.

“I’m observing nature,” I told her, my face scalded by shame at my own fancy name and title, dripping as both were with desire and irony.

But now she sounded genuinely curious. “For a poem?”

Ugh. How dark did I want to go? Did I want to say what I was really thinking, that soon I’d be packed among the dirt, bugs storming my body, flesh blowing off my bones?

“Yes, maybe,” I said. “For a poem.” Then she touched the small of my back.

Once, when I was in seventh grade, I made a bug collection, and one of the beetles didn’t die properly even though I asphyxiated it with nail polish remover before pinning it to the foam board with all its dead colleagues. When I woke in the morning, the hearty beetle was turning slow circles on its pin, its stomach leaking, its eyes black with either life or impending death—I couldn’t tell. I put a nail polish remover pad over it so it would be drenched and certain to die, and then I cried all the way to school and all day at school, including during my presentation of the bug collection.

“I remember when I first read ‘Button,’” Leah said, her hand still on my back, possessively, I thought. At the mention of my work, nausea rolled me over and trapped me on my back. At least this meant I shed her hand. I imagined kicking my many insect legs while I closed my eyes and hoped Leah would say nothing else about that poem, which had gotten more attention than any of my other work (and which I could hardly stand to remember). Kill me! That pompous motherhood poem—why had I written it?

And why had everyone liked it more than any of the other awful or good poems I wrote? “Button” was a poem about my mother infusing me with everything she was, and my only realizing it once I had a baby and had, in the way we all do, become my own mother. While buttoning Alexi’s coat. I outlasted Leah by not saying anything, not even grunting in acknowledgment that she had mentioned the poem.

“It made me think someday I’ll be like my mother,” she said, shrugging and using the hand that had been traveling down my body only a minute ago to shade her eyes. “And that being like her, I mean, will be okay.”

“Oh, wow. Thanks,” I said.

I hadn’t yet told my mother. I was worried she’d die of seeing me in danger, of having to recalibrate her entire notion of me, the way she’d understood me her whole life, depending on my invincibility for the narrative of her two children to work.

“Sam?”

“Uh huh?”

“Do you have sisters or brothers?”

I so didn’t want to be having this conversation. Why was it impossible to avoid intimacy with someone with whom you’ve had sex? Already here we were, on a picnic, paddling down a river of talk that would likely lead from our siblings to our exes.

How could I redirect this deep talk into a series of meaningless one-night stands with her in a row? Probably not going on a romantic picnic to the park with her would have been a good start. Oh well. “I have a half-brother, from my mother’s first marriage.”

“Oh,” she said, gazing up at me. Was she batting her lashes? “Did you grow up together?”

“Only somewhat.” I looked away.

“Are you close?”

I took a long time responding, hoping that would signal my lack of interest in having this conversation. I was looking at the faint view of Leah’s underpants under her tights, visible between her legs, up her skirt. I put a hand on her leg again, imagined sliding it straight up her warm thighs in public, then thought better of it—but only by a slim margin. Were my half-brother and I close? Hank, from our mother’s first, brief marriage, frail and wounded his whole life, alternately in love with and furious at our mother, both poles informed by his desperate need of her. He married a woman ten years older than him, a curly-haired, outgoing beauty so much like our mother that it almost seemed like an intentional joke. I loved her. I was thirteen when Hank married Sarah, and she was like a second mom, made significantly better by the fact that she wasn’t actually my mom. And by the fact that she was the kindest, smartest, most beautiful woman I had ever known.

“Hello?” Leah asked. I was staring at the curve of her on the blanket, resting my hand on her hip.

“We’re only sort of close,” I said. I didn’t ask about her family, just gently squeezed her.

“Well, I’m a twin,” she said.

I was as surprised that this hadn’t come up in the workshop as I was distressed to know it. I felt I should know nothing about Leah except the way she felt against me, the taste and feel of her—nothing about her family. If I had learned she was a twin in the workshop—when we were discussing Keisha’s poem about her sister, for example—that would have felt less obscene. But I had my hand on her ass, my fingers pressing, worrying her clothes away, wishing they’d dissolve and that we were in her bed, on her floor, back in the bath. I wondered dirtily whether Leah and her twin were identical. Would I immediately desire her sister too, if I met her? How much of my wanting Leah was about her body and how much about herself, and again, that question: what was the difference?

“Are you two alike?” I asked.

“No. She’s better at everything,” Leah said, because she’s a child.

“That can’t be true,” I said.

“Well, it is.”

This was the sort of thing my half-brother Hank might say about me. I wondered if the cancer would change or punctuate that idea for him, the theory that I was a thieving, attention-stealing winner who took all. I hadn’t told Hank about the cancer, either—how would he be able to bear it if I was the one who was sick for a minute or two? And I couldn’t tell Sarah, because she’d suffer knowing I was sick, which I couldn’t bear. Sarah was the one I told when I decided I “needed” a bra. I was eleven, and she took me on the secret shopping trip and let me choose. She didn’t even embarrass me about my choice: a heavily padded, pink-and-black-leopard-print lace one.

“She’s a musical prodigy,” Leah was telling me about her twin, who was also, apparently, a straight-A student at Harvard Law, and had been an Olympic-level pole-vaulter during high school and undergrad. Did she make the cricket sound in the back of her throat when she came? Would she buck against me the way Leah did? Pin me down?

“It’s tough to compete with someone like that,” I said mildly. “Maybe don’t approach your sisterhood as a competition?”

Leah rolled her eyes. “Well, except we have to compete for our father’s love,” she said.

I laughed and she stared at me.

“What’s your father like?” she asked, as if we were teenagers falling in love.

“I have no father,” I reported truthfully, inexplicably still laughing. “I was conceived in a fit of fleeting passion my mother always described as her ‘feminist’ rebound after my half-brother’s father left them.”

Leah’s mouth was open. I wanted to put my burning fingers in it and cool them, or put them in the collar of her jacket, open her shirt, press my hands into her chest, her stomach. Instead, I stood up. I didn’t care about the thing with my father/no-father; someone else could parse that with Dr. Freud. I had present-tense fish frying here. I hoped she would suggest returning to her apartment, but she saw me stand and said, “I’m hungry,” so we walked back to University Street for vegetarian bibimbap—and then to Leah’s.

She peeled off her patterned tights in the hallway, taking my hand and placing it under her cargo skirt while looking straight at me. I was disoriented by her confidence, and we tumbled into the place unzipping and pushing and falling. Suddenly in her underpants, Leah looked like a rare creature I’d trapped in a jungle somewhere. She took my arm and tackled me onto her futon.

Ah, her futon. On the surface of that flat mattress she pinned and slid up and down me. Somehow, I thought of Connect Four, the little plastic coins sliding down into their proper places, lining up. She was so young and hard and smooth I couldn’t help but wonder for a moment what my body—not bad for a half-dead professor, but still—looked and felt like to her.

Did she see the danger of my age, the slight sag between my breasts and ribcage, the whisper of a C-section scar across my bikini line? What did she make of all the parts of me that made me irrevocably not hers and not available to her? Her tongue was on my stomach, in my belly button, tracing a delicate line down across the scar. Her eyes stayed open, looking up. Was she daring me? I closed my eyes.

When we lay flat across each other later, we were like attached disposable chopsticks. I could taste some outrageous mixture of the two of us and feel all the places she was wet.

“You can stay the night if you like.”

That’s how she put it, stay the night, and I whacked into reality so fast my head hurt as if I’d hit it against concrete.

“Oh, um, no thank you,” I said, and the formality and awkwardness prompted me to continue, so I added that I had to prepare to teach the following morning. As I spoke these words about my teaching, they popped and cracked with the sweet absurdity of candy.

Leah diminished the hilarity, though, when she rolled off me and into her own corner of the horrible futon and responded, “I know. I’m in your class, remember?”

“Of course, right. Well, yes, see you tomorrow.” I almost called her “dear,” but pulled myself together before that happened.

Oh, my silent house, the slip of light under the door of his study the only evidence that Charles was there. In our bathroom, I took my clothes off, stood in front of our giant mirror, and stared. My breasts were tragic in the flattering light, sagging only the tiniest bit, their general curve still round, skin taut, nipples as transparent pink as they’d been when I was a girl. I liked their slightly tired look, the line suggesting a dramatic contrast between breast and rib cage. Leah had touched them; maybe that was why they had a literary, golden sheen. They looked like characters in a novel. I then had the dissociating sense that I was looking at Leah rather than at myself, and found it comforting.

From now on, I would think only of her breasts, never my own, even when I looked at myself. I would think of her nipples, rising to meet my fingers when I made small circles over, across, and around them. Speaking of which, it didn’t matter to me that Leah was a woman, except insofar as she reminded me of something beautiful and important, and I needed to keep stripping naked with her in order not to lose whatever it was forever.

I put on pajama bottoms and a tank top, and climbed into bed with Mina Loy’s Lunar Baedeker, but my mind fell from the lines over and over, as if they were ropes strung too thin and precarious for me to balance on. I could think of nothing but Leah and illness. Well, and death. And Alexi.

None of this—not the affair, the lying to Alexi, or the being alive—was sustainable. Maybe Leah knew that too, but most likely only I knew for sure. Who knew what Leah knew?

Something. Part of what I missed most about being young was the way in which youth made it impossible to guess at the limited outcomes of love. Even if you’d been wild, or been burnt, you still had unbroken hope that the potential endings of each story were limitless. It’s like the difference between having a secret admirer and finding out who it is. When it’s still secret, it feels like everyone—and then when you know who it is, it’s just that one person. And that person who actually admires or loves you? The narrow eliminator of all the other possibilities, crusher of hopeful scope.

So, it wasn’t going to last, okay, that shouldn’t have kept me up, because it was something, at least—for now. And something and nothing were more clearly opposites than I’d ever known them to be, or stark choices anyway.

I heard feet on the stairs—Charles’s—and listened as if I were a detective, deduced he’d made it about halfway, and then the sound stopped. Was he standing mid-staircase, frozen? It would have been so unlike him, any gesture of indecision. All the mean bones in me hoped that my horrible behavior had introduced to him the human experience of not being totally certain all the time that you were right, a tiny dose of crazy. At the same time, I wished he would climb into bed and fall asleep with a book on his face. Or wrap an arm around my neck. Our routines shorted out, just like that, after nineteen years of enacting them until I thought we had calcified into their patterns. Were they gone now, those patterns?

Maybe my fear that the universe would rob me of what mattered most was making me destroy what mattered most in advance, a wildly childish breaking-up-with-my-own-life-before-it-could-break-up-with-me. I never did hear Charles make it up or down the rest of the stairs. Would he spend the night stranded mid-staircase?

I turned the light off and listened to the hum of the park outside our window, wind, the crisp leaves snapping finally and falling slowly onto piles of other leaves, a huge dead salad. I tried to put my breasts far outside myself. Some nights, they seemed small, manageable, a wisp that could (and now would) be swept away; other nights, like this one, they seemed to swallow the rest of me, to be a season, something abstract and around me, around us all, impossible to remove by way of surgery or any other means.

Dr. A’s words, “No problem, because the tissue is external,” joined the nighttime sounds, and I imagined my skin inside-out, the tissue internal to me becoming literally external. I imagined what tissue looked like and felt fear so intense it made me see lights, glittering and spinning in my vision. I closed my eyes, but the constellation remained.

I wanted to watch TV, longed for Amy Schumer, the girls from Broad City, Abby and Ilana, or for Samantha Bee. Someone sharp, hit-or-miss maybe, maybe only half-funny even, but always on the side of what was right, a risk-taker.

But now that I was taking risks, I had forfeited the right to entertainment, to watching TV at all. That belonged to Charles, and now if we watched TV together, I would have to confess what was happening. And then it would actually be happening. A throbbing, irrational fury of self-justification rose in my chest; I imagined it solid, knocking on the wall they’d soon scrape.

Men left their wives all the time and shacked up with graduate students—or, in the case of our former dean, other middle-aged men. This anger was replaced almost instantly by twin forces of guilt and freedom: I would be cast out by society forever, or would have to cast myself out.

I saw, in my mind’s now-vicious eye, the slides of my breast tissue, all that dark swirl and a single devastating spot of white. Dr. A’s words spritzing the light box.

The night came down on me, sheer, cold fear of a sort I hadn’t felt since childhood, gasping under the covers at the clear calamity of what forever meant. Feeling in it all I’d never see again: spit, light, leaves, a slide, my girl.

I sat up and called my mother.

“What’s wrong?” she asked before I’d even said hello.

This would have seemed eerily prescient if she hadn’t always answered the phone that way. The only counterpoint to my mother’s cheerful firecracker style was her own belief that catastrophe was right around the next bend. I think she believed—in some primal way, a feeling more than an articulated thought—that worrying would stave off actual danger if done diligently, constantly, relentlessly. Like if she could just prevent misery from sneaking up on her, she’d prevent it entirely.

“Well … the news from that MRI wasn’t excellent, and I—”

“Oh, Sam! What? Is it malignant? Oh my God. I’m coming over. I’m on my way.”

“No, Mom! Please don’t come. I’m in bed already, I taught all day, and I—”

“What are we going to do? What are they recommending?

“Surgery and then we’ll see.”

“What surgery? When? Have you scheduled it?”

I couldn’t say the word. “It’s on the 21st.”

“But that’s—

Was she going to point out that it would ruin Thanksgiving two days later, on the 23rd? I wanted to provide her an opportunity for further consideration before she did, so I interrupted, “Mom—”

“So soon. I was just going to say how soon that is—do they feel it’s an emergency?”

“Isn’t having cancer that could be spreading through your body always something you want to address sooner rather than later?”

“Oh, Sam. Do they know what stage it is?”

“No.”

“Is it in both breasts?”

“No, just the one.”

“But you’re going to have a bilateral mastectomy, right?”

I squeezed my feet and then released them, made fists and released those too. I tried to shrug my shoulders, which were riding up near my ears.

“Oh, Sam!” my mother said. “I wish this were me again, not you.”

My mother had what her doctors called an “insignificant” breast cancer twenty-four years ago. At the time, it felt significant to my mother and me. I was desperate for my mom not to die, so terrified when I let myself imagine losing her—which I almost never did—that I blacked out and whacked my head on the floor of our apartment.

And then she was fine. She had her surgeries and didn’t need any additional treatment, and slowly the doorway to that hellscape closed and eventually, it seemed like nothing bad could ever happen to us again. I no longer remembered what that fear felt like—until now.

I said, “Thank you, Mom.”

“You don’t believe me, but I really do.”

“I believe you. That’s how I’d feel if it were Alexi.”

“What can I do?”

“Um, this is fine. You can just talk to me about it.”

But then I said goodbye and we hung up. I felt like I’d run out of words. I went outside in my pajamas and stood on the deck, relieved and terrified at how big nighttime had stayed even though I was an adult. What does it mean for human beings to disappear? When our bodies quit their jobs, what happens to our minds? Dickinson was right that the only secret people keep is immortality. I think the reason we can’t babble about it and have to keep it secret is that we have no access, can’t say what we don’t and will never know.

No wonder I was this disoriented by the possibility of my own dying, of even just admitting, acknowledging that we’re all dying, sooner than I’d realized.