You Take It From Here (16 page)

Michelle answered the phone, which solidified my hunch that at one point I’d donated at least ten dollars to that fund-raiser.

She gave a jubilant “Hi, Danielle! It’s been a while!” but was then interrupted by a child yelling in the background. Something about a pillow.

“It sounds like you’re busy,” I said.

“No, just hold on.” After a moment I heard her calmly say, “Lily, Mommy needs to use the phone for a second because her friend has called her. Do you think you could let Mommy talk to her friend for a few minutes, and then we can set up your pillow for nap time? Would you mind?”

A voice answered, “Okay, Mommy. That sounds reasonable.”

Everybody else seemed to have a lock on this parenting thing.

“Okay, sorry, about that,” Michelle said. “Mini-meltdown with the mini-people.”

“I won’t keep you, I just . . . well, I have a friend who’s sick and she’s . . . sick like you were.”

“Oh.”

She only said that one word, that one syllable, but still her voice was packed with empathy, sympathy, and disappointment. She’d never even met Smidge, but she’d already expressed more emotions for her than I did for Michelle—and I used to do Warrior II beside her every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday.

“I was wondering if you had any advice. Treatment-wise.”

She sounded uncomfortable as she started with “I’m not her doctor, so . . .”

“Sorry, I don’t mean doctor stuff,” I said, losing my ability to describe anything that might approach oncology. “I’m looking for advice that isn’t necessarily medical. Anything that helped you. I mean, overall. I hesitate to use the word ‘spiritually.’”

“Oh, I got you,” she said, sounding pleased. “And yes. Move to California. That’s what I did.”

Michelle said she didn’t normally believe in homeopathic remedies, but when her husband insisted they take a place on the beach near the water, she wasn’t about to complain. The sun and laid-back attitude of the neighborhood eased her stress levels. She no longer dreaded waking up, because she knew that even if she couldn’t move an inch that day, if she never once got out of bed, she still had an amazing view. Watching the sunset with her family became their daily ritual, and has remained even now that she’s cancer-free.

“It makes you appreciate time,” she says. “The time you once had, the time you have right now, and the time you have left. And since I’m already sounding like some kind of hippie, which I am not, I will quickly add that I also went to a healer. Don’t make fun of me. I can’t believe I just admitted that.”

I tried to imagine Smidge in the same room as a healer. Would that be inside a yurt or a hut? How many seconds would she hold out before mocking that healer to tears?

“I don’t know if my friend would go for something like that.”

“Believe me, I thought I would be the last person to meditate, take supplements, or own a juicer. But when you’re sick enough, you’ll try anything. And I have to admit, some of those things made me feel better. I still start my days with a green smoothie. Maybe you could ease her into that.”

I heard Lily tell her mother that a reasonable amount of time had passed and maybe she could say good-bye to her friend on the phone now.

“I’ll let you go,” I said. “But thanks.”

“Is your friend in Los Angeles?”

“No.”

“Well, if you get her here, I’ll take her to my guy. He’s pretty amazing, just as a person. It’s worth it. It’s been forever since I’ve seen you. I heard what happened with you and James. I’m sorry.”

Lily promptly began a screaming fit.

“I’ll let you go,” I said again.

“Okay, well, you call me,” she said. “Let’s catch up, I mean it.”

I would think once you’ve survived cancer you no longer have to be nice to near strangers. You get a free pass to skip fake intimacy. No more forcing tenuous connections with the acquaintance characters in your life’s play. Smidge kept her social obligations, but I assumed it was because the more people she knew, the more she could control. But what did Michelle get out of making plans with me for when I got back to Los Angeles? She was busy. I was busy. We’d be getting together just to have gotten together, to go through the motions of people who know people. It was like putting your day in a costume and making it act like someone else’s life.
Today I lunched with my friend Michelle I know from hot yoga.

“Lily!” Michelle shouted, not to me. “That is not okay, and you are going to sit in the punishment chair right now. You go sit down.”

The screaming instantly stopped. “I’m sorry, Mommy.”

“I know,” Michelle said. Then to me: “I have to go, but hey, you’re a good friend for asking about my cancer.”

Neither of us had used that word yet. “I don’t know about that,” I said. “I feel pretty bad about it, actually.”

“I think you wouldn’t be calling me if you didn’t really care about her.”

“No, I meant you. I’m sorry I wasn’t around when you were sick.”

Michelle laughed. “You weren’t? It seems like everybody was. And no apology necessary. I wasn’t taking attendance.”

If I had cancer, even though I might tell people to stay away and not bring me anything, I would definitely be taking attendance.

As I hung up the phone I felt a shove from behind. I lost my footing and stumbled, but before I could fall I was encircled at the waist by a strong arm. Tucker’s low laugh buzzed in my ear. “Excuse me, ma’am, excuse me, excuse me.”

“You almost knocked me over!”

“Well, I didn’t. So calm down,” Tucker said, as he pretended to straighten me out, pulling at my shirt, brushing back my hair, like I was a mannequin he had toppled at a department store.

“You’re wearing sweatpants,” I informed him.

“You caught me in my escape clothes.” He pulled a pair of sunglasses from his waistband and lowered that ubiquitous ball cap over his eyebrows. I briefly worried about the state of Tucker’s scalp. “That’s what I call my running pants,” he explained. “I can’t go running unless I pretend I’m being chased by the good guys, so I just like to think of the whole endeavor as training for being on the lam.”

“I like how you think you’re the bad guy.”

“If the New Balance fits.”

“Is this coffee shop your supersecret lair? Is this where you keep all your evil cappuccinos?”

“It’s my reward. For each mile over three I get to go up a size.”

“And today?”

“Extra-extra-large, baby. Supersize latte, full-fat.”

As he reached past me to open the door, I caught a quick smell of him, of tired, sweaty man. The salty-sweet tang that lingered around the curve of a neck, the underside of an arm, all the places where your head might rest afterward.

Tucker waved his hand in front of me to fall into a bow. “M’lady.”

“Oh, no, I’m just leaving,” I said, even though for some reason I didn’t want to leave. Which is why I knew I needed to leave. Part of not being a shitty cancer friend is not hiding all day, semiflirting in the corner of the coffee shop. “I have to get back to Smidge.”

“She says jump, you ask how high.”

“It’s a little more complicated than that.”

“Right.”

“Good luck dodging the cops on your way home.”

“See, that’s your problem,” he said. “You think the good guys are cops.”

Once he was out of my sight I exhaled, feeling my shoulders drop.

He made my shoulders tense. Around him, my body seemed to put itself on hold, like it wanted to be ready for whatever was going to come next.

I chose to ignore that.

My head was tilted back to reach the final few drops of milk from my bowl of cereal when Smidge entered the kitchen with an announcement.

“We have a real problem,” she said. “Besides this bitch-beast of a headache I woke up with.”

From under the last of my breakfast, I asked,
“Mllh?”

She pressed her palms against her eyelids, causing her faded red sweatshirt to ride up enough to expose a small strip of her pale stomach. “My husband won’t stop humping me,” she said.

Jenny, sometimes I’ll have to pretend I’m talking to someone who isn’t you, because in order to get into the whole truth I’m going to share some things you might not like to hear about your parents. This is probably one of them, and I’m sorry. But this whole part was your fault for getting older. You reminded all of us that we were aging, and something about that made your father want to prove his virility and youth through bedtime frolicking.

I apologize for using the words
bedtime frolicking.
I went through about ten other phrases, but couldn’t find anything that didn’t sound like I was describing your parents having sex.

“It took forever to get him to admit this was about him having some kind of old-man crisis,” Smidge said. “He just kept rolling over on top of me, trying to act like he thought I was sexy, which I know isn’t true right now. Look at this.”

She hitched up the hem of her sweatshirt, accidentally flashing the bottom of her C-shaped scar. The surgery that robbed her of part of her lung left a mark that was knotty and gray-pink like a mouse tail. It snaked up and around her back, making her look like she survived a shark attack.

Which is exactly what she told the gawkers on the beach the summer we vacationed in Maui.

Smidge wanted to wear a bikini and get some sun on her “survivor scar.” A young newlywed couple couldn’t help but stare. It was massive, breathtaking. One wanted to assume it was fake because it looked so real. There was no mistaking that slow shake of a head, like witnessing a tragedy. You could tell what the couple was thinking.
Such a pretty girl, so ruined by whatever happened to her.

I thought Smidge was asleep behind her sunglasses, facedown on her towel, magazine tossed aside. But she was watching them watch her, because she pointed at her scar and told the couple, “Shark attack.”

“Oh, no!” That was from the girl, who immediately reached toward her husband’s hand until their wedding bands overlapped, as if somehow he could protect her from everything now that they were married.

Smidge got to her feet and posed, jutting her hip to reveal the entire length of the scar.

“Right there,” she said, pointing at the deep blue water just beyond, where the waves were rolling in, splashing boogie boarders and bobbing swimmers. “That’s where he got me. And why we came back here, right, Danny?”

From underneath my massive sunhat and layer of sunscreen that could technically be labeled SPF-Apartment, I immediately fell into my role, nodding solemnly, sagely, like I’d seen too much and learned too little too late. “Was a bad day,” I said, almost in a whisper.

“Okay, Quint, dial it back,” she muttered before returning to her audience.

“That’s where that shark tried to kill me,” she said. “And now I’m going back to kill him.”

She glanced around like she was searching for some kind of weapon. I handed her the only thing within my reach—a rolled-up
InStyle
magazine.

The quick, disappointed glare she threw told me she was going to give me hell for handing her a paper weapon for a water fight, but she couldn’t break character then. True to her nature, she acted like I’d just handed her a massive harpoon. “Thanks!” she practically cheered, and then ran right into the ocean.

I tried to figure out what would be the best thing to say that would get the couple to lose interest or go away so Smidge could come back. Those waves were strong. The longer she was stuck in the ocean, the angrier she was going to be when she returned with a soggy mound of glossy print in her left hand.

“She’ll be out there for a while,” I said. “You’ll probably hear about it on the news later.”

Luckily for me, the couple had already started packing their things and left, presumably for some newlywed sex.

Smidge came back with a new friend she’d made out in the waves, a pretty surf instructor named Kai who gave us a three-hour surfing lesson in exchange for a few mai tais and a generous tip.

But there in the kitchen, Smidge wasn’t trying to show me her shark scar. She was pointing out a dark bruise streaking across her stomach to her back, like she’d been kicked by a rodeo bull. This was a bruise better suited for a stuntwoman
or an action hero, not befitting a lady who took to standing on chairs when she saw a spider.

“Wow,” I said, fighting the urge to touch it. “What happened?”

“I hurt myself drinking
water
,” she said, her face suddenly flushing with outrage. She rotated her hip to get a better look at the dark patch just above her waistband. “I was having a sip when I started coughing and then fell against the sink.”

“Does it hurt?”

Her eyebrows relaxed toward her ears, her eyelids suddenly heavy from attempting to be so tolerant in the face of my stupid questions. She chose not to answer, saying instead, “The point is: I’m real sexy and I can’t have Henry rolling on top of me all the time. Not just because it hurts, but I don’t want him to see a bruise and start asking questions. He’s already suspicious because I’m all squirrelly when he wants to get busy. What we need to do is get a project.”

She winced as she jammed the edges of her sweatshirt into the waistband of her jeans. I reached out instinctively to help her, but there was nothing to do. I was standing there with my arms out, fingers spread, like someone watching her baby try to stand upright on its own.