A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life (15 page)

“Happy birthday,” I say as I give him a squeeze. “Let’s go to your party.”

He links his arm through mine, and we go downstairs and out of the house and into my still-warm car and head off to Il Bacio.

The party is great. They gave us a private room with a painted mural on the ceiling, and we sit at one long table with a red and white checked tablecloth and candles burning in old Chianti bottles. James sits in a chair that looks like a throne. I watch Jake and Sam all through dinner, and he’s so considerate and polite, making sure she has everything she needs and involving her in all his conversations. Sam may be two years older than Jake, but she’s shy and quiet and seems a little unsure of herself. She wears the striped wool hat with the earflaps that Rivka knit for Jake, and his arm is draped over the back of her chair. Even though I’m sure Jake would hate for me to describe them this way, they just look so
cute
together.

And then right before the waiter brings out the birthday cake—a carrot cake, per James’s request, which seems like a complete waste of cake to me—something extraordinary happens. A true birthday miracle. Let’s just say that I would have been dead wrong if I had said to James that he was dreaming, that it was never going to happen, that he was wasting his time just thinking about it.

That’s right. Patrick walks through the door.

I’ve never met Patrick, but I know the minute I see James’s face that the blond guy standing in the doorway with the black-framed glasses and green leather jacket is the boy for whom James has been pining since the summer. James jumps up and they hold each other for a really long time, and everyone else continues on with their conversations, trying to create the illusion that James and Patrick are having a private moment. Then James asks the waiter for an extra chair, another place is set at the table—the sixteenth place, which I was hoping would be for Zack—and James introduces Patrick proudly to all of his friends.

Somehow, even though I’ve been moping around all afternoon and evening and even though tonight James was supposed to be my date, my partner in isolation, the surprise of Patrick showing up and the sight of James sitting with him snap me out of my mood. I can’t wipe the smile from my face. My heart is singing. Even the carrot cake is delicious. And then James gets a ride home with Patrick, and I leave the party happy and alone.

EIGHTEEN

Rivka has an appointment at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston and calls to see if I want to meet her in the city for dinner. That doesn’t sound good, does it? Driving all the way from the Cape for an appointment at the hospital can’t be a sign that things are going well. I ask her how she’s feeling, which is the closest I’ve come to actually acknowledging that she’s sick, and she says okay, but she says okay in the way that really means
I feel like crap.
So we make plans to meet at Pho Pasteur, which is probably my favorite restaurant in Boston, and Mom and Dad don’t seem to mind that I’m taking the car into the city alone and won’t be home until hours after it gets dark.

When I get there Rivka is waiting, drinking an avocado milk shake. I laugh because I’m the only person I know who likes the Pho Pasteur avocado milk shake—everyone always makes a face when I order it, which is something I do without fail every time I eat at Pho Pasteur. It’s a perfect night for pho, the specialty of the house, a big steaming bowl of Vietnamese noodle soup. It’s sleeting outside. It isn’t quite cold enough for snow, but it’s too cold for rain. And yet, even in this weather, Mom and Dad let me take the car into the city.

I slide into the booth across from her. She smiles at me. I look at her face and recognize that this is not a real smile. This is a smile like her okay was an okay. Her eyes look worried and sad.

“Tell me,” I say, “how did it go today?”

“Honestly?”

“Sure.”

“Not so hot.”

I feel a tightening in my stomach, a shortness of breath, a wave of heat on this icy evening. Panic. Rivka is here to tell me that she’s dying. No, wait. I already knew that. She already told me that she’s dying, but I guess I haven’t accepted that this is really going to happen. That this isn’t just something to talk about and then wait for it to go away. That this isn’t just a brief chapter in my impossible life.

Something is terribly wrong with Rivka, and I can’t keep pretending that she’s fine.

I take a sip of my milk shake. The avocado tastes a little off.

“I had to come in for some testing to follow up on something I had done last week, and honestly, I am tired of testing and follow-ups to follow-up testing because I’m not testing so well these days.”

“What do the doctors say?”

“They say I should eat. Let’s order dinner.”

I’ve lost my appetite, but I order a bowl of pho anyway. My dad always talks about the restorative properties of pho. If you feel the first hints of a cold, eat a bowl of pho and you’ll avoid the flu. If you feel achy, eat a bowl of pho and the fever that was creeping up on you will beat a quick retreat. But tonight I don’t think this pho can cure what’s ailing me. And we know that Rivka needs something much, much stronger than a bowl of noodle soup with secret spices.

Rivka orders the lemongrass tofu, and when it arrives she seems to spend more time moving the tofu around on her plate with her chopsticks than she does moving the food into her mouth.

“I’m sorry to be such a downer tonight, Simone. I didn’t ask you here to burden you with all of this.” She puts her chopsticks down and picks up a fork and uses the fork to move her tofu around the plate. “I asked you here because right now I enjoy your company more than the company of anyone else in the whole world. So tell me something. Tell me a couple of things. Tell me some stories to remember on my long drive home tonight. Tell me the best thing that happened to you this week. And then tell me the crappiest thing.”

“Well,” I say, “it looks like the ACLU has won its town seal case.” I go on to explain the case and how after a pretrial hearing the town just caved because they decided that it wasn’t worth the time or the money to fight a case they probably couldn’t win.

And then to my total shock Rivka tells me, “I’m glad it never made it to trial. I think a case like that is a complete waste of the ACLU’s time.”

“That’s like slapping me in the face!” I say. “I fought hard for this. I spent a precious Saturday gathering signatures. I rallied at the town hall. I squared off against a villain more frightening than you could possibly imagine.” I tell her all about the Evil Bitch and her Towering Kingdom of Self-Righteousness. Rivka laughs.

“And you of all people,” I say. “I just can’t understand how you don’t see a cross on a town seal as a worthy cause.”

“I just think there are far more important causes to fight for. There are people who live in fear. In abject poverty. There are people who need lawyers as a matter of life and death. There are liberties and freedoms that are getting trampled and kicked and pummeled for sport in the world today, and we need every ounce of fight the ACLU has left in it. A cross on a town seal is symbolic. It’s cosmetic. It doesn’t have any truly debilitating effect on anyone.”

“I respect your point of view, but I totally disagree. I think you have to keep a sharp eye on the little things before they become the big things.”

Rivka smiles at me. “Your mother must be so proud of you. And you must be so proud of her.”

“Yeah, I guess I am. But she’s entirely useless in the field of the crappiest thing that happened to me this week.”

“What field is that?”

“Boys. I can’t even talk to her about that stuff because all she ever says is something about how great I am and how anyone would be lucky to date me and blah blah blah.”

“So what happened?”

“I asked Zack out and he said, ‘No way, not in a million years, you repel me.’”

“He said ‘No way, not in a million years, you repel me’?”

“He said something like ‘That sounds great, I wish I could, but I can’t,’ which to me is the same as ‘No way, not in a million years, you repel me.’”

The waiter is hovering around our table, not sure if he can clear two meals that haven’t been eaten. Rivka has perked up a bit. Some color has returned to her face, and although she has barely touched her tofu, she’s on her second milk shake. I wonder what all this bad testing means. What comes next? What do they do when your tests are bad? Get you a tutor? No. They do drastic things that make you sick and weak and make you lose your hair. So Rivka may wind up in a wig after all, which is how I imagined her before she walked through my door on Thanksgiving afternoon—in a wig and not nearly as beautiful.

“Are you going to have to get chemo?”

“I’ve already had chemo. It obviously didn’t work, although I guess that isn’t the right way to look at it. It did work for a while. But now I’m beyond it. The doctors say I could try it again, but it isn’t likely to do much other than make me feel terrible.”

I feel tears coming on, but I also know that this isn’t what Rivka needs right now.

“This is just so unfair.”

Rivka laughs.

“What’s so funny?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Nothing, really. It’s just that I used to get hung up on thinking about fairness and why and why me and why now. And it just doesn’t get you anywhere. It’s like those questions you used to pester your parents with. Why? Why? Why? Finally they get fed up and say, ‘Just because.’ And that’s the only real answer here. Just because.”

I’m having a thought. An idea. It’s gnawing away at me, and even though I have a sense that this isn’t something I should say out loud, somehow with Rivka I feel like I can say anything at all.

“Do you ever think God is punishing you? Do you ever think that maybe if you hadn’t turned your back on your faith this wouldn’t be happening?”

Rivka takes a deep breath, and for a minute I think I’ve offended her, but then I see that she’s just carefully considering her answer.

“Simone. First of all, I didn’t turn my back on my faith. It’s important to me that you understand this. I left the Hasidic community that raised me to find my own way and to discover my own relationship to Judaism, a relationship that I believe is every bit as valid. And here’s what I think about God. I think God exists in moments of grace and beauty and good fortune. I think things like this, like my sickness, are just bad, bad luck. Things like this happen just because.”

This strikes me as a pretty generous interpretation of God. How can she let Him off the hook so easily? Why does He only get credit for the good stuff? I want to argue this out with her, but I don’t think tonight’s the night.

“Do
they
know?” I ask.

“My family?”

“Yes.”

“No. They don’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I want them to see me for who I am, to accept my choices and my life because this is what’s right for me, not because they’re worried that they’ll feel guilty for not accepting me when it’s too late. I don’t want acceptance or forgiveness or whatever it is I need from them to come out of pity or out of a sense that this is their last chance.”

“Huh.”

“What?”

“I guess I just don’t see what’s wrong with letting people know that it’s their last chance to make something right.”

She stares at me for a long time without saying a word.

“How old are you again?”

“Officially, sixteen.”

Rivka shakes her head. She reaches across the table and squeezes my hand. I squeeze hers back.

“How’s Cleo doing?”

“Same. Obsessing about her boyfriend, who I still suspect is an imposter, a villain masquerading as Prince Charming.”

“Rule number one: always beware a Prince Charming.” She makes a loud slurping noise as she reaches the bottom of her second milk shake. For a brief moment she looks like a little girl.

“Is there anything I can do?” I ask.

“You’re already doing it,” she says.

Rivka walks me to my car. We’re both carrying to-go bags heavy with our uneaten dinners. We walk through the streets of a student neighborhood. Considering Boston has 250,000 students living here, to a certain extent every neighborhood is a student neighborhood, but the students are packed with particular density in this part of town, the location of the Pho Pasteur we ate in without eating in tonight. It has warmed up a little, the skies have cleared, and the sidewalks are wet but not icy. There’s a long line outside what must be some kind of nightclub. Huddles of students stand in heavy coats and wool hats, smoking cigarettes, talking and laughing too loudly. Life just looks so easy for these college kids. I realize that all of this is waiting for me not too far down the road. I’m staring at my future (minus the cigarettes). And seeing this all before me, I feel strangely guilty.

When I get back home my parents are sitting on the couch, Mom looking through some files and Dad reading the newspaper. Either they’re getting good at pretending they don’t worry about me out on the road by myself at night or else they’re getting used to the idea. I ask about Jake, and Dad gives me a look that means
Do you even have to ask?
and this is how I know that Jake is in his room on the phone with Sam. I sit down in the armchair facing them and pull off my boots. My big toe is sticking out of a hole in my sock, and I stare at it. “She’s really sick,” I say.

“Yes, honey, we know.” Mom looks at me and then at Dad.

I start to cry, and they just let me. They don’t rush over to hold me or stroke my hair or wipe the tears from my face or tell me that it’s going to be okay, and I appreciate this tremendously.

“It just makes me so sad to think of her all alone. No one should live life like that. No one should live alone and no one should have to die alone.”

“Oh, I don’t think she’s alone. She has friends. Lots of friends who are like family to her. And now she has you,” says Mom.

“It’s just so ironic.” I wipe my running nose on my sleeve.

Dad looks at me. “What’s ironic?”

“Well, she gave me up because she was afraid that her family and community would reject her if she had a baby. Then she ended up leaving them all anyway. So in the end she could have kept me and then at least she would have had a daughter. And she wouldn’t be alone right now.”

“True,” says Mom. “But then
you
would have been left alone, and I think that would have been unbearable for her. It would have made this even harder on her than it is already.”

I press my fingers into my eyes until I become dizzy with the bright colors and shapes swirling in front of me.

“This is too much. It makes my head hurt. I think I just need to get some sleep.”

I say good night and go over to the stairs.

“Oh, wait. Simone?” Mom calls from the living room.

I come back in. “Yeah?”

“You have a message,” she says, and hands me a scrap of paper on which she has written in her annoyingly perfect penmanship:
Zack called. He said he wants to talk about the next time
.