Chapter 32
chapter
thirty-two
You thought this was a happy story, didn’t you?
Where the good little cancer patient sits in her chemo chair, takes her medicine, eats her vegetables, and survives.
Beats it. Well, cancer doesn’t work that way.
It takes who it wants, when it wants. Death knocks on your door the second you get the diagnosis.
Death is on everyone’s doorstep, of course, but you don’t become aware of it until something like this happens.
And then it’s all you think about. The possibility of not being here anymore, of not accomplishing everything you want to accomplish, not going all the places you’re meant to go.
Every moment you live becomes a reminder that it could all be taken away in the blink of an eye.
At a certain point, cancer claims some of us.
Becomes resistant to treatment. Spreads.
Or something else gets to you first. Malnutrition, infection.
A story about cancer is a story about mortality.
So, welcome to the party.
The world is gray. Color has been sucked out of it. Everything is slow and difficult, like moving through peanut butter. I have to remind myself to do the things that should come naturally. Putting one foot in front of the other. Breathing.
Louise is gone.
Louise is gone.
Gone.
One word—one syllable, even—and everything is different.
One day I won’t be here anymore, and that’s the way it is. I can still hear her scratchy voice. Gem? Good name. A paisley kaftan with a trailing cloud of Chanel No. 5 and ten times more chutzpah than I could ever hope to have. The memories make my legs tremble.
I can’t feel my own steps back up to the bridal suite. Josh is still downstairs with Tori, so I’m alone, hovering a few inches above the ground like a wraith.
Time glitches and suddenly, I’m standing in front of Penelope, her makeup artist brushing on eyeshadow.
“Yes?” she asks sharply.
“Louise is…” I trail off, my throat closing. “She, um.” Tears are trying to press their way out of my eyes, wet and heavy. “Passed away. This morning.” I hold my cheeks. “I’ll call the vendors—”
“What?” Calliope croaks from my right.
“Why would you do that?” Penelope’s face is disturbingly calm.
“Because…” I can’t force out the words. Because someone really special just died and how are we supposed to go on living our lives normally?
Penelope groans. “This will not ruin my wedding day!”
The world stops, like shifting to park at fifty miles an hour. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me. I’m sorry she’s gone, but that isn’t going to stop anything today. It’s not what Louise would have wanted.”
I have to laugh. “Not what Louise would have wanted? You don’t know the first thing about what she wanted.”
Penelope’s voice turns to ice. “This is my special day.”
In the light of a sun Louise can no longer see, I realize that I don’t know this person.
This isn’t the girl I became friends with.
The person I sipped sangria with over our laptops, giggled with in the corners of clubs while we picked out boys to talk to, cheered on through two book deals.
That person doesn’t exist. At least not anymore.
I’ve been bending over backward, pinching myself again and again into a shape that would fit with someone who couldn’t even visit me during treatment without taking photographic evidence.
It’s a slippery slope, losing yourself. Like free-falling above the atmosphere, where there’s no air to tell you which way is Earth and which way is vast, empty space.
Penelope barrels on, oblivious to the fact that the earth is no longer stable beneath us. “This whole time she’s been blackmailing me into spending time with her, and now when I finally get what I deserve out of it, she goes right ahead and finds a way—”
“Shut up,” I seethe.
Penelope’s eyes narrow to diamond-tipped points. “What did you say to me?”
“I said to shut up. You didn’t spend a single second of time with her. You pawned off any obligation you had to do that to me.”
The truth tastes like loss. Like letting go of a seven-year-long friendship.
Losing the piece of myself that was still embedded in it.
The twenty-two-year-old, hungry for friends, desperate to publish at all costs.
But the truth also tastes like relief. Because I’ve been fighting to hold onto a friendship that has become nothing more than a glorified business transcation.
“She was—” I gasp. “She was dying, and I had no idea. I wasted the last months of her life planning your deranged wedding.” The thing about the truth is, it can’t be stopped once you start.
It’s like the sun. A burning bright light cast on everything, in all directions.
“Those days were all she had, and we wasted them.” I’m careening, a train car that’s skated off its rails and over a cliff. Those days were all she had.
May you never lose sight of all the days before tomorrow.
I understand now what Louise was trying to tell me.
This is my life—my one and only. I’m in the middle of it.
It’s the thing that’s actively passing me by, every minute I spend waiting for tomorrow.
All we have is now, and that’s eternal, in its own way.
“How dare you!” Penelope swats away her makeup artist and stands up from the folding chair. “I’ve been an amazing friend to you, and this is how you repay me?”
I laugh. I am a madwoman. I am unleashed. “Amazing friend? Are you serious?” A year and a half of trial and triumph and life comes out in my voice. “Where were you when I needed you? When I wasn’t a photogenic trophy you could show off? When I had to shave my head? When I couldn’t get out of bed?”
Penelope gasps, an affronted, kicked-puppy sound. “You are so out of line right now, it’s insane. I did you a favor making you a bridesmaid after Izumi got knocked up.”
It’s a surprise, and it isn’t, this final blow. If anything, it makes me feel at peace. Because I’m finally seeing everything clearly. Penelope and I are not friends anymore.
I rip the hydrangeas out of my braids, taking several bobby pins with them. “Hydrangeas are a ridiculous wedding flower.” I hold the wilted flowers up. “This looks like a fucking charity luncheon.” I throw them at her for emphasis.
When the flowers hit her chest, she shrieks. Pen is a supernova, alright. A dying star collapsing in on itself. She reaches for a club sandwich from the room service cart and lobs it at me. Lucky for me, her aim is shit.
“Fuck this wedding. Fuck you.” The bouquets of hydrangeas are sitting on the table. I want nothing more than to see them meet the back end of a garbage truck. The entire bridal suite watches me snatch up the bouquets and burst out of the hotel room, arms full of sickly sweet flowers.
“What are you doing!” Penelope shouts after me.
I find the trash chute easily. It smells like rotten fruit and must. I fling the bouquets down it. The entire wedding party has followed me into the hallway, everyone watching the scene in disbelief.
“You psycho!” Pen’s perfectly tan face is the color of a ripe tomato.
I suddenly notice that Calliope, crying but smiling, has a phone pointed at us.
“I can’t believe I was going to introduce you to my agent,” Pen seethes. “I’m going to get you blacklisted at every single agency.”
“Penelope?” Josh’s voice peeps up from the crowd that’s gathered around us. I guess he and Tori finally came back upstairs. “What are you talking about?”
No time like the present! “Your lovely bride offered to introduce me to her agent,” I tell him, “in exchange for becoming her unpaid wedding planner for the summer.”
Josh’s face screws up. “That’s not—” He turns to Penelope. “You wouldn’t do that, would you?”
“Of course not, baby, she’s lying,” Pen assures him.
“Oh, and Penelope never finished her conversion requirements.” I smile at her. “Do you want to tell the rabbi, or should I?”
“You bitch—” Penelope snarls, but her groom holds her back.
“I’m leaving,” I announce, feeling lighter than I have in years.
“MOM, LOOK WHAT SHE DID!” Penelope screams.
Tori lets out a withering sigh. “I need a scotch.”
“Someone do something!” Pen shouts as I walk to the elevator. “Arrest her!”
“Goodbye, Penelope,” I say cordially.
Outside, the sun is shining and the trees are varying shades of burnt, like the entire world is on fire. My dress drags through muddy piles of leaves as I check the map and realize, with glee, I’m only a fifteen minute walk from The Sunny Island.
There’s only one thing I want right now: a Chicago-style dog, extra relish, with two pickles.
While I walk, I get ahold of Alma to find out what happened.
“She was hospitalized Friday,” Alma says, sadness leaking through her voice. “It happened so quickly. Her temperature was elevated, and then we found out she was septic when we got there. She was gone within twenty-four hours.”
We’re quiet for a minute, sitting with Louise’s memory.
My mind loops through all the signs I missed.
The changes in mobility, the phone call she took from the hospital.
It’s clear now that she wasn’t visiting a friend.
She was trying to downplay the progression of the disease.
I think death is maybe the last human milestone I have on the horizon.
I hope that, even though I was an idiot for not realizing sooner, she was glad that I didn’t treat her any differently, knowing that she was in her final days.
“I’m getting a hot dog,” I tell Alma.
They laugh, throaty. “Can you believe that she would leave the country club between bridge rounds to go to that hot dog hut? Instead of eating in their restaurant that has, like, a Michelin-starred chef?”
I can believe that. There’s something special about the hot dog hut. Like a secret.
The Sunny Island is just as I remember it: shabby, with a sign that’s probably existed since the eighties, and buzzing fluorescents that beckon me inside.
When the hot dog arrives on checked paper in a red basket, I hold it up in the air, toasting. “To Louise,” I say quietly.
The first bite of overflowing relish, eye-watering mustard, and rubbery veggie dog is nothing short of a revelation. Exactly what I need. Maybe Louise is even here right now, eating one with me.
In the aftermath of the first food I’ve had all day, I imagine what’s going on in the bridal suite. Maybe they’ve finished sewing my voodoo doll, or perhaps started burning an effigy.
Anger at Penelope hits me again. Anger that she couldn’t appreciate having someone like Louise in her life.
That she twisted our friendship into a knot incapable of being untangled.
I’m not complaining, Louise said. I like you much better.
Maybe I found something better, too. I think about eating a hot dog right here with Alma, and drinking bubble tea with Calliope.
Being twirled by Eitan around a medical-office-building-DJ-studio.
Eitan.
The same thought that I had when he first opened that bathroom door hits me again: soul contact.
Do you believe in me? Eitan asked. It’s such a fickle thing, belief. Made of iron and feathers.
I dig my knuckle into my armpit. The lump is still there. I see myself losing my hair again, getting more surgery, fighting for a life that keeps trying to kill me. It’s a storm I might not survive. Louise didn’t.
I’m being cleaved. Smashed together and torn apart at the same time. Wanting to be with someone and knowing you may not get enough time with them. Once you start telling the truth, it’s hard to stop. It’s bright light, in all directions.
The Dark Place is laid bare. A wasteland surrounded by cliffs.
Years I may lose, parts of my body I’ll never see again, safety I’ve lost. The life I thought I would live is projected on all sides, an insidious reflection.
An eightieth birthday party. A body that’s whole.
A mind that’s careless and peaceful. A life that can be danced through.
What is there to believe in when life deals you these cards?
Louise’s words flow all around and through me, like water. When you close yourself off to the world like that, you let the fear take over.
What would I believe in, if I let go of my fear? Answers pelt me from all sides. Laughter at the dinner table. Drinking coffee together in the morning. Holding hands during a thunderstorm. Never losing sight of all the days before tomorrow.
There’s this heavy weight that I’ve been dragging around, that I’ve chained myself to.
A fear of dying, a threat of darkness, a resignation to be cursed.
It will sink me if I let it. But there are gifts, too.
Lightning in a summer storm. Lake Michigan sparkling under the sun.
A room full of people, listening to your words, understanding you.
I stand up abruptly, my stool scraping The Sunny Island’s tiled floor. I don’t know what I’ll say, but there’s someone I need to talk to.
At the same time, the door chimes with another Sunny Island customer. I am quite a sight. A runaway bridesmaid with a full face of makeup, minus some mascara tear tracks. I stay angled away from the door, hoping to avoid eye contact with whoever just walked in.
Which is tough, because I’ve learned the hard way over the last four months that soul contact isn’t easily broken.
“Ruby?” a husky voice breathes from the door.
It’s Eitan, bow tie undone, hair a mess, chest heaving.