Five Days Left (10 page)

Plus, she reminded him, she had dreams, too, and one in particular:
to have a family of her own. They had spent the past three years trying to get pregnant—years that involved a considerable amount of heartbreak, frustration and tense moments between them, not to mention countless doctor’s appointments, fertility tests and IVF. The first IVF round hadn’t worked, and they had recently concluded they had the financial and emotional capacity to try only one more round, in the fall.

All of Laurie’s energy and attention was directed toward the baby of their own they were hoping for. She didn’t see how she could direct that attention toward someone else’s child.

Seizing on her singular obsession with starting their own family, Scott tried to sound casual as he suggested having Curtis there while they waited to start the second IVF round, and then waited to see if it had been successful, might be exactly what they needed. Busying themselves with a child would distract them from the crazy-making process of waiting, hoping, wondering, worrying. And a child with a few minor behavioral challenges? All the better to distract them, right?

And the timing was perfect, he pointed out. It would be a relief to spend the summer months entertaining a seven-year-old instead of fretting about their impending “last chance” at IVF. If they were lucky enough to get pregnant this time, they would still have an entire school year of pregnancy. By the time their little bundle was born, their temporary charge would have gone back to LaDania.

Laurie wasn’t entirely convinced that taking on a yearlong babysitting job was a good idea. She could think of any number of ways she’d rather spend their hopefully final child-free year. But it was true their journey to parenthood had been fraught with worry and tension, and more impatient waiting didn’t appeal to her. The distraction of having a child in the house had its allure. And she knew how important Bray was to her husband. So she reluctantly agreed.

Curtis could stay for the twelve months of LaDania’s sentence, she told Scott. He couldn’t stay longer—by that time the next year, Laurie
fully expected to be making preparations for a baby—but he could stay for twelve months.

The following morning, Scott, Laurie and Bray met with Janice, the social worker appointed to the Jackson family case. Ideally, Janice told Scott and Laurie, they would keep Curtis for one year and one week. That would allow LaDania a week after her release from the halfway house to apply for a job and to get herself and her apartment ready for her son’s return.

Scott looked pleadingly at his wife, who sighed, but agreed Janice’s plan made sense. That afternoon, with LaDania’s blessing, along with her signature on the limited-guardianship placement plan form, the four of them appeared before the judge to request the Coffmans be made Curtis’s limited guardians for twelve months and one week. A few statements by Janice, a half dozen questions from the judge to the Coffmans and Bray and one rap of the gavel later, Scott and Laurie were Curtis’s guardians.

LaDania had moved out of the halfway house and back to her own apartment the previous Sunday night. She was looking for jobs, Janice had reported to Scott and Laurie, and she was fixing up the apartment in preparation for having Curtis move back on Monday, after the court formally dissolved the Coffmans’ limited guardianship at the hearing set for Monday morning. And now, Scott only had until Sunday with the little man, four days left with the boy who had made him feel more like a father than a “limited guardian.”

The fact that LaDania hadn’t called Curtis more than a handful of times all year, or even responded to half the letters he’d sent her in jail, wouldn’t be relevant to the court. Nor would the fact that Scott and the boy were connected by so much more than a one-page legal form.

LaDania was Curtis’s mother, and Scott was merely a man who’d looked after him temporarily.

Scott

The joke was on Scott. Curtis had played his role of distractor as well as Scott had promised Laurie he would do. He had occupied so much of their mental energy, in fact, that Laurie credited the boy for her pregnancy. Her doctor had been telling her to try to stop obsessing about getting pregnant, to occupy her brain with other things so she could go into the next IVF round with a body that wasn’t taut from anxiety about conception.

Curtis arrived on the scene in April, and by September, Laurie was so embroiled in behavior charts and reward systems, so consumed with getting his reading level up and his visits to the principal’s office down, that she had little time during the day to perseverate about fertility, and no energy at night to do anything but fall soundly asleep. When they found out the IVF had worked, her first statement was, “This is because of Curtis.”

Her gratefulness for the boy’s distracting qualities didn’t translate into her wanting him around longer than the agreed-upon twelve months, though. Scott didn’t blame her for this at all. He was the one who had gone off script, letting himself get closer and closer to the little man with each passing month so that now, when it was time to say goodbye, he couldn’t bear the thought.

For the past several weeks, they had reversed roles, and Laurie had been the one trying to convince Scott to seek distraction elsewhere, starting with the child she was carrying.

“
Our
child,” she liked to emphasize, in a tone that made it clear she wasn’t happy to have to remind a father-to-be that he was, in fact, a father-to-be, and that such title was (in her mind) far more important than that of limited guardian to someone else’s boy. So far, Scott had managed to refrain from saying out loud, “How can I get excited about a child I haven’t even met yet, when I’m so upset about losing the child I already have?” But the looks his wife had given him over the past few weeks suggested his general mood had conveyed the same message.

Like his wife, Scott had dreamed of having a family, his mind swirling with images of father-son games of catch in the front yard, hockey and HORSE in the driveway, family cookouts in the back. He had been overjoyed about the pink lines on the white stick in October, and he’d felt his own heart might burst when he heard his baby’s heartbeat for the first time, saw her shadowy image on the ultrasound.

He was excited. Beyond excited. Who wouldn’t be? But feelings were relative, so he had learned, and the fact was, he hadn’t been able to maintain the same level of giddiness as his wife. He had tried; man, had he tried. And then he’d beaten himself up over the fact that something so easy should require such an effort—as had his wife.

But their baby girl was still over three months from arriving. And there was a boy here, now, who needed him. A boy who would be returning to a world of skipped meals and grimy clothes and a not-always-lucid mother. And while Scott had mostly come to terms with the concept that being with his mother was better for Curtis than being separated from her, it still tore him apart when he thought about the kind of life his little man was leaving, and the kind he’d be returning to. And it was just so goddamn hard to think about anything else.

Scott was startled out of his reverie by the clanging of the bell announcing first hour. Moments later, muffled voices in the hallway turned
into louder ones inside his classroom as a herd of eighth graders made their way to their seats for Mr. Coffman’s first-hour English class. Scott lowered the hand that had been clutching his stomach at the thought of the little man’s future after next Monday.

Next Monday. It was too soon.

Don’t think about it, he told himself. There’s plenty of space between now and then. Time to cram in plenty more memories. Spaghetti and cookies and cake and burgers and movie night.

And monster trucks—the crazy-looking vehicles made of regular-sized pickup truck bodies and oversized, heavy-duty tires that competed to see which one could drive over the biggest pile of dirt or jump the longest row of old car chassis while an arena full of rabid fans cheered on their favorite. Curtis had watched monster trucks on TV, he told Scott once, and he had dreamed of seeing them in person his “whole entire life long.” It was soon after he had moved in. They were, not surprisingly, playing Would You Rather, and Scott had asked if Curtis would rather be the first kid on the moon or the first seven-year-old president.

“Well, if we’re talking about best things in the world,” Curtis said, “then neither. I’d rather see monster trucks.”

“Monster trucks?” Scott laughed. “The best thing in the world is seeing monster trucks? Better than being in space or running the country or . . . what about playing for Michigan with Bray?”

“Nope. Monster trucks.”

“Playing in the NBA with Bray?” Scott tried. “Having a lifetime supply of bubble gum? Or ice cream? A lifetime pass on homework? Or—”

“Monster trucks,” Curtis said firmly. “Seeing monster trucks would be the best thing in the
entire world
, of all the things you can mention. You can go on
all day
. But there’s nothing I’d rather do than that.”

At dinnertime two months earlier, Scott had casually slid the tickets across the table and waited as Curtis whispered the words out loud as he read. “Mon. Ster. Truck. No, trucks. Mon. Ster. Trucks. Monster.
Monster!
Monster trucks!
Monster trucks!
” Raising the tickets above his head,
he jumped out of his chair, sending it crashing against the wall behind him, and ran laps around the first floor of the house, shrieking as he went. “I’m seeing monster trucks! I’m seeing monster trucks!”

Scott, laughing, had to retrieve the tickets so the boy didn’t crush them in his grip. He stuck them in the top corner of the bulletin board in the kitchen, afraid to leave them anywhere Curtis might be able to reach them. “Can’t have you drooling all over them, reducing them to a wet mass of unreadable paper.” The tickets were for this Sunday, for Scott and Curtis’s last day together.

It took Laurie one day to realize she needed to give Curtis a Monster Trucks Countdown Calendar so he wouldn’t drive her insane asking, “How much longer?” every half hour. Since then, the last thing he did each night was mark a big red X through that day’s date, and announce the number of days left until “the
very
best day I’ll
ever
have in my whole
entire
life no matter what else I ever do for the next
hundred
years.”

Half a dozen times since that night, Curtis had asked Scott to lift him up to touch the tickets pinned out of his reach. Each time, he ran a finger slowly over each word, sounding them aloud in the whisper Scott loved so much. A few nights ago, Curtis went through his whisper-reading routine twice. As Scott set him down, the boy put a small, cool hand on Scott’s cheek and, in the same quiet whisper, said, “This is the
very best thing
anyone will ever do for me.”

Scott swiped a knuckle across each eye as he walked to the front of the classroom and waited for the din to fade. There wasn’t a last-day-together extravaganza big enough to show the child how deeply Scott loved him, how terribly he would miss him, how much a part of his very fiber the boy had become. But Monster Trucks was pretty close.

Mara

Laks and Tom were standing at the front door, ready to walk out to the bus, when Mara dragged herself into the living room. “I can’t believe I almost missed you!” she said, making her way to them. “Sorry I slept so late.”

She kissed Laks and laid her hand against Tom’s cheek. “You should’ve woken me, darling. I could’ve handled the morning routine.”

“No problem. Breakfast with one of my two beautiful girls is never a chore.”

She could tell from the way he said it, from the way he was grinning at her, that he was pleased with himself. She could picture him standing over her sleeping form earlier, reaching first to brush a strand of hair off her face or touch her cheek, then to turn off the alarm she had set, smiling to himself as he did her this “favor” of letting her sleep in after she was up so late.

Mara did a poor job of returning his smile. She had so few mornings left with Laks, and it destroyed her that she had wasted one of them. She would have to remember to set a second alarm tomorrow, one he didn’t know about. She wondered if she still had her running watch. Had she given that to Goodwill with all her other gear, or was it around
somewhere, in a drawer she hadn’t looked in for a while? She hoped she would remember to look for it as soon as Tom left for work.

“Are you walking out with us?” Laks asked. She crinkled her nose as she assessed her mother, still in her nightgown, robe hanging open, one end of its belt dragging on the floor. Mara bent to look at her reflection in the glass of a picture frame that hung beside the front door. A clump of her short black hair stood straight up at the top of her head and deep lines crisscrossed one cheek. She tried to smooth down the disobedient hair with one hand while she rubbed her cheek with the other to erase the lines. It didn’t work.

Backing away from the picture, she made a funny face at her daughter, pretending not to care about how mortified Laks seemed. “Of course not! I’d never let anyone but you and Daddy see me this way! I’m a total mess!” She walked to the front window and stood behind the drapes, one hand holding them open an inch or so to allow her to peek outside without being seen. “Get going, you two. The bus’ll be here any minute. I’ll hide here, behind the curtains, and wave, invisible to everyone but you.”

The little girl smiled her relief and skipped out the door with her father, calling over her shoulder, “Bye, Mama! See you after school!”

“Bye, sweetie! I promise I’ll be presentable by then!”

Mara was at the kitchen counter, wrestling with the Wednesday compartment on her pill container, when Tom came in. “She didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.” He reached for the container but she pretended not to notice, continuing to fight with it until the lid finally flipped open. She popped her daily mood-leveling pill into her mouth frantically and reached for a glass of water to wash it down. If ever there was a day her emotions threatened to overcome her without pharmaceutical soothing, this was the one.

Tom waited for her to swallow the pill before running a finger over her cheek. “You’re beautiful, even right out of bed.”

She lifted her hand, batting his away, and covered her cheek to hide the lines. “Liar.”

“You. Are. Beautiful.” He moved her hand. “You didn’t need to hide behind the curtain. She was only being—”

“Honest,” she said. “She was only being honest.” She glanced down at her robe, which had fallen open again, and shook her head with disgust. She cinched the belt tight enough to hurt.

“I don’t want you to think—” Tom started, and she knew what he was going to say. That he didn’t want her to think she had done what she had so clearly just done: embarrassed her daughter.

“Well, of course I think that, Tom. And if she’s embarrassed now, when I’m still walking, talking, able to at least recognize when I need to hide behind the curtains, how will she feel in a few years, or sooner, when those things go, too?”

“Stop.” He took her chin in his hand and turned her face to his. “Stop.”

“Stop what? Stop it from happening? Because nobody can—”

“Stop assuming how she’ll feel at any point in this process,” he said, his voice stern. “You don’t know how—”

“I think this morning gave us a pretty good idea how she’ll feel, don’t you?”

He exhaled slowly and wrapped his arms around her, pressing his lips against the top of her head. They had had this debate before, Mara fretting there was no way Laks could emerge unscathed from this kind of childhood, Tom insisting their daughter was a lot stronger than Mara gave her credit for, a lot more willing to deal with even the ugliest aspects of Mara’s illness.

She let herself relax against his chest, let his arms keep her upright. He released her after a while and leaned down to kiss her. “New topic of conversation?”

She smiled at him gratefully. “Please.”

“Last night. What got into you? And how can we arrange more of it?”

She called up a casual expression and asked, “What? Can’t a woman express appreciation for her gorgeous husband and his beautiful body?”

“She most certainly can. As often as she wants.” An arm still around her, he reached across her to pour two cups of coffee. He filled hers only a quarter high and she nodded for him to keep pouring, then reached for the cup greedily when he was finished.

“You might want to reduce your caffeine intake a little,” he said as he handed it to her. “I get the feeling you’re having more trouble sleeping than usual these days.”

She shrugged.

“You need more rest, love,” he said. “You know that. Should Thiry up your Ativan dose, do you think? Or are you forgetting to take it some nights? Should I be reminding you?”

Her heart knocked into her rib cage as she pictured him standing in front of her, pills in one hand, a glass of water in the other, smiling sweetly as he watched her swallow. An unknowing prison guard standing between her and the escape tunnel she had painstakingly dug.

Or worse, accompanying her to the Huntington’s clinic to ask for a stronger dose and hearing she had made the same request a few months ago, unbeknownst to him. And that the new dose she had been prescribed was the strongest amount anyone would order for someone her size. There was no way it wasn’t working, Dr. Thiry would say. If she wasn’t sleeping, she must not be taking it.

“Oh, no,” she said, waving him off. “Not necessary. I’ve got a whole routine going, and thanks to all my sticky notes, I never miss a step. Brush, floss, take an Ativan, finish my water, climb into bed. Kiss my husband goodnight. Thankfully, no sticky note required for that last one yet.”

She stared into her cup, unable to look at him as she lied. When she had put the “Ativan!” sticky on their bathroom mirror months ago, it was to remind her to add to her secret stash regularly, to make sure it was still concealed at the back of the bathroom drawer, behind the hand towels. Tom didn’t look convinced, so she reached for his keys and pressed them
into his hand while she turned to the clock on the stove. “Look at the time!”

It worked. He disappeared to find his briefcase, his mind on the office now, on patients, not on his wife’s sleeping pills and why the dose he believed she was obediently taking wasn’t keeping her asleep.

He returned moments later, briefcase in hand, suit jacket over his shoulder, the taste of mint toothpaste in his kiss. For the first time that morning, Mara noticed how his eyes shone. Her closet-arranging strategy had worked; he was wearing a blue shirt. Her favorite, an Italian cut with a subtle herringbone pattern. Her eyes fell to the wedding band on his left hand and she imagined, not for the first time, how much excitement he would stir in the women who caught sight of him once he finally took the ring off.

And, not for the first time, she fought to keep the warm spread of jealousy from rising above her collarbone and reddening her cheeks. The thing about suicide, she reminded herself, is that the price, at least for the actor, must be paid in advance. There was no “later” over which she could parcel out her loss. The thought of Tom with another woman, the pain of everything she would miss in Laks’s life, would all pile up on her in these four days.

Stop feeling sorry for yourself, she thought. It’s four days for you. It’ll be a lifetime for them.

“Plans for today?” Tom asked, and she was grateful for him interrupting, halting her on the path of self-loathing she’d started down.

“A few errands later,” she told him. “I called a cab to come around two thirty.”

“Great,” he said. “Listen, I want you to leave the laundry. I’ll do it tonight, when I get home.”

“Tom Nichols,” she said sternly, “I am perfectly capable of doing laundry.”

“But a lot of it’s my running gear and it’s really rank—”

“Nice try,” she said. “But I know what you’re up to, and you can knock it off. I’ve washed your rank running clothes for over twenty years. It hasn’t killed me yet.”

“Fine,” he said, holding his hands up in surrender. “But at least let me pick up dinner on my way home, spare you from having to cook. You could take an afternoon nap instead.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh yes, please. How will I ever manage to make dinner and fit in a rest, all in a mere seven hours?” He flinched, and she instantly regretted her sarcasm. Smiling an apology, she touched a few fingers to his temple, grazed them over his sideburns. “You spoil me. I can make dinner.”

“Let me spoil you. Please. If I can’t bring dinner home, what about groceries? Need anything?”

They both turned at the same time to the half-dozen pink sticky notes on the fridge door. It was part of Gina’s master system, and she had come over herself to explain it to Mara and Tom: pink sticky notes listing the groceries they needed, yellow ones telling Mara what she planned to cook that night, green ones signaling she needed to take something out of the freezer, blue ones reminding her to make Laks’s lunch each night. Tom walked to the fridge to retrieve the pink squares. “I’ll get this stuff on the way home.” He held one hand in front of him, a sticky note on each finger, as he walked to the garage. “Love you,” he called over his shoulder. “Take a nap, please.”

“Yes, Dr. Nichols.”

The phone lit up as Mara set her coffee cup in the sink. A few months ago, loud noises had started to make her flinch, and Tom had immediately switched their regular kitchen phone for one with lights that flashed to announce a call. It wasn’t something she had read about in any of the lists of Huntington’s symptoms or side effects from her medications, but she had knocked more things off the counter, the table, her dresser, because of a ringing phone, a knock on the door, Laks or Tom calling her name.

It didn’t seem to make a difference if she knew the noises were coming. There was a certain game Laks had, one involving quacking ducks, that Mara had finally given up playing. Even when Laks warned her mother a duck was about to sound, the quack would make Mara fling her cards across the room, or knock the pieces off the board.

Mara leaned over the sink and read the caller ID screen: Thiry clinic. As the lights continued to flash, she thought about the results of her desperate Internet research the night before: there was no new medical discovery that might halt the slide she had started down with the grocery store incident on Monday. The clinic would have no promises for her, no assurance that she need not worry about the incident. No guarantee that she could let Sunday’s deadline pass and still retain control over her own ending.

At best, they would utter sympathetic clucks and tsks while they shook their heads on the other end of the line and thanked God they weren’t as pitiful as Mara Nichols. At worst, they’d alert Dr. Thiry that given the humiliation Mara had undergone, he had better alert her husband to be extra vigilant about her, lest she do something reckless in response.

Mara glared at the phone until its lights stopped flashing and the screen went dark.