You Take It From Here (26 page)

We were quiet after that. She had stunned me out of feeling anything other than helpless grief.

Smidge slept for almost the remainder of the flight; a deep sleep that kept her out during beverage service, a meal, another snack, and a pretty rough patch of turbulence over west Texas. I did my best to keep her covered with a blanket, but it repeatedly slid to the floor. I tried to answer e-mails or write myself a to-do list, but I found I just kept staring at my sleeping friend, wishing I knew what to do, wondering if she felt that mass in her lung with every breath.

Would she fight for me the way I wanted to fight for her? I know she’d be forcing me to get treatment, marching me straight into chemotherapy, holding me down while they injected the chemicals. She wouldn’t let me bow out. She wouldn’t give me the chance to die.

“Fix this!”
she’d yell at every oncologist, at anyone within earshot. “Fix my friend, she can’t be sick, I need her!”

When the flight attendant began to serve small bowls of ice cream, I made sure Smidge was awake. She’d be furious if I let her miss that.

“Vanilla is just better than all the other ice creams,” she said around a mouthful of iced sweetness.

I poked at my strawberry scoop with regret. “I think you’re right.”

“I
am
right. Death brings you clarity,” she said. “Why does strawberry act like it’s so special? Just because it’s pink? No. Vanilla is perfect. Clean and white and pure and all you need. And don’t ruin it by dropping nuts on it.”

Our peals of immature laughter woke everybody else in first class.

TWENTY-TWO

“L
os Angeles is brighter than other cities,” Smidge said, shielding her eyes as she watched me struggle with our luggage up the flight of concrete stairs to my apartment.

“Everybody always says that when they first get here,” I told her. “I think it’s the pollution.”

Smidge joined me on the second floor, just as out of breath as I was. “I like how you make up science but present it like you read that somewhere.”

I opened the door.

“Oh, this place,” she said as she walked in. “What did you do to it? It used to be
so nice
.”

“Might I remind you I’ve been unexpectedly out of town.”

She wandered, hands pressed to her hips, like she couldn’t figure out which piece of furniture to toss first. Was it the coffee table, where the half-filled coffee mug I was drinking from the morning I left still rested, looking rather moldy? Perhaps it was the disheveled couch, which had been doubling as the house sitter’s mail receptacle. I felt bad for being embarrassed
by my lumpy green corduroy sofa, especially since it had been there for me through many lonely nights.

If I’d known Smidge was coming, I’d have at least cleared the clutter off my dining room table, which was also my desk, which was really more of a recycling bin. It looked trashed. Papers, magazines, and half-read paperbacks scattered across the tabletop, spilling over until they were stacked on the chairs. No fewer than eight pairs of shoes were in sight, pushed aside like a dance contest had been in full riot before everybody disappeared. A lonely fork rested on the table next to a dead plant. A sock had fainted next to the sink. I couldn’t imagine what it would look like inside my refrigerator. My place resembled a crime scene, frozen, waiting. Like if you pushed on into my bedroom you’d find my stone-cold corpse. It did make me wonder why more people hadn’t been asking where I’d been. I made a mental note to make more local friends.

Smidge slept most of that first day away, which gave me a chance to focus on the things that had fallen behind. It was unsettling to be suddenly back at my desk, a mug of coffee next to my laptop in the place where I liked to keep it. My toes were dug into my familiar carpeting, the grooves in my chair welcomed my body, and before long I found myself back to my familiar procrastination clicks and searches, checking on websites and social networks I hadn’t thought much about since I’d left my apartment. I was finally where I’d been wishing to be, but it all felt different than I’d remembered.

There was a surreal disconnect. I was above my life, looking into it, flipping through bills I needed to pay, reading e-mails I hadn’t answered from friends who would understand
my absence later, but at the time would worry that we were in some kind of fight they didn’t remember. There were parties I’d missed, baby showers, a wedding invitation. Life had been moving forward while I was gone, this life I’d been living for a while without noticing how much of it I did by rote. Time used to be an inconvenience, something I needed to maneuver, schedule, carve out. Time got in my way. I had to wait to see someone, sit still long enough for a client to get back to me, stall as I waited for a paycheck, a package, an answer. Time never used to seem finite. It was still my enemy, but now because I couldn’t let things wait.

Rainey had definitely noticed I’d dropped off on my website, and sent a rather terse e-mail that I was making her look bad, that I was risking losing sponsors if I didn’t start updating more, if I didn’t take on new clients. She’d heard I’d passed on the San Francisco gig, and the consultant she went with instead was now in talks to have her own hour on a cable network.

I tried not to let it stress me out, especially considering I’d never wanted my own cable network show, but I still felt like opportunities were passing me by, that I was making myself irrelevant, obsolete.

I was struggling to determine what was important. Was it the life I had in Los Angeles, or the one that was pulling at me back in Ogden, the one that might be waiting for me in not too many days?

When Tucker called I let it go to voice mail.

“By now you probably know she called when you were here, and that I deleted any proof of that. For what it’s worth, I was trying to protect you. Let you be sick in peace. You were a mess,
Danielle, and she would’ve only made you feel guilty and—you know, forget it. I’m sorry I messed with your personal property, but I’m not sorry about what I did. The way you tore out of my place the other morning because of her only shows I did the right thing. I know she’s there with you, probably saying worse stuff about me, so I won’t wait for you to call back.”

On the drive to a coffee shop the next day, Smidge listed the things she wanted to do during her week in Los Angeles, including eating cheeseburgers and putting her feet in the ocean. Suddenly she squirmed away from me, rolling down her window in horror. “You stink!” she shouted.

Michelle, the acquaintance who’d survived cancer, the one with the polite daughter, had Facebook-messaged me with a few suggestions on how to make Smidge feel better without having to involve doctors.

I know it seems hokey,
she’d written.
But aromatherapy really helped on days when I hurt. Good smells, like lemon and eucalyptus, make the brain feel better. They have healing properties. Maybe we just like lemons, and eucalyptus smells like a spa, I don’t know. Regardless, it did help. And acupuncture was nothing short of an atheist’s miracle for me. Please don’t make me explain unblocking energy flow.

“You don’t like it?” I asked Smidge. “It’s lemon and eucalyptus oil.” I showed her the small tinctures of essential oils and hydrosols I’d brought along in my purse. “They’re for you. They’re supposed to help make you feel better.”

“No, thank you,” she said, waving at her nose. “You smell like an old lady’s crotch.”

“Well, take the lavender water, at the very least. It’s supposed to be soothing.”

“Meaning it’ll shut me up?”

“No, Smidge. Only a bullet could do that.”

She kissed the back of my hand for that one. But getting her to try acupuncture was a complete disaster.

“I’ve scheduled a sort-of massage for you.”

She spotted my verbal gymnastics immediately. “Define ‘sort of.’”

“It’s a California thing, Smidge. Just give it a try. Lots of people out here like it.”

She gave a quick clap. “Is it tiny ladies walking on my back? Because you know how much I love that. Can you get me one of those massages again?”

“Wouldn’t that hurt your tumor?”

She looked disappointed. “Maybe. You take the fun out of everything.”

I couldn’t pretend everything was normal and fun; that we were just hanging out in my city like a couple of pals. It seemed like too big of a lie.

“It’s acupuncture. People say that can help.”

“Nice try,” she said, lowering her sunglasses. “I told you I was done with needles. Even the weird ones. No more poking!”

But I had to do something. Smidge was starting to require much more sleep each day. I was so used to her constant whirlwind that to see her, head cocked back, mouth open, almost drooling on one of my throw pillows, felt like my Smidge had been secretly switched at the airport. They gave me one that was low on batteries.

At moments when she did seem more like herself, she’d be chattering full force, sticking her fingers in every pair of
cement hands in front of Mann’s Chinese Theatre, when she’d suddenly deflate, a wave of exhaustion leaving her crumbled. “But I wanted my picture taken with the fake Johnny Depp pirate,” she said wearily, pouting as I helped her back to my car, referring to the handful of celebrity impersonators who gathered in front of the cemented tributes. Jack Sparrow had flirted with Smidge as she’d passed him earlier, something about her “booty.”

“We’ll come back tomorrow,” I promised.

But the next day she’d moved on to a new desire, one she told me over her morning five-shot espresso. “I want you to score me some pot.”

Your mother and I weren’t really all that into drugs. I know that sounds like something parents say when they’re trying to cover up huge swaths of stoner years, but this is the truth. We’d both tried pot in college, and your mom did acid once at a Lollapalooza concert. Although I’m pretty sure she was sold a fake and was acting to save face, as everybody else I knew who bought tabs off that guy said they were bogus. (Why is it we only use words like
bogus
when talking about people who sold drugs back in college?)

Because we were in California, one could acquire it legally, but the problem was,
I
couldn’t. I didn’t have a prescription. Luckily, almost every other person I knew did.

I picked my friend Mia because while she got high all the time, I can’t recall ever seeing her stoned. I chose a pot person like I was choosing a wine connoisseur—someone who knew what she was talking about, but was discreet.

Mia was also one of the few people I knew who wouldn’t want us to smoke it with her after she bought it. I learned
that inconvenient rule the last time I thought about buying marijuana. Smidge would never agree to such a stoner tax; she would balk at the idea of hanging out in a stranger’s living room for hours. Not that I have any desire to get high and then wait out having to go home. I’d never stop being paranoid.

The one time I did get high before going to a movie, I was convinced everybody in the theater—and even the people
in the film itself
—knew I was high. I was sure the police were on their way to arrest me. I fled to a Pinkberry, ordered “all the toppings without the fake yogurt crap,” and ate candy, fruit, and nuts until I no longer felt like I was being persecuted by the fuzz. After that experience, I try to put myself under house arrest if I’m going to smoke.

Mia’s wrists were loaded with bangles. Leather bracelets twisted halfway up her arms. She jingled and clanked as she drove her Prius down Sunset Boulevard. She wore purple sunglasses that hid half of her face. Her dark, glossy hair was tied in a knot above her right shoulder. One spaghetti strap of her tank dangled in a lazy, sexy way, highlighting the white line that cut across her deep, soft tan. Her lips were pink and glossy, the only hint of a cosmetic. She was all summer on top but winter below; a battered pair of Uggs adorned her feet. This was standard outfit for a girl in Los Angeles running errands in late autumn weather. You can determine the season only by thickness of her scarf. Mia’s was thin, made of T-shirt material.

She pulled into a strip-mall parking lot. Surrounding us were a 7-Eleven, a nail salon, a dry cleaner, a Thai delivery place, and a nondescript storefront I knew was the dispensary
because of the seemingly ubiquitous sign of a green cross on a white background.

“Okay, you two,” she said after she’d parked. “I need to know what you want.”

“Duh!” shouted Smidge, clapping her hands together like someone had just brought out a birthday cake for a two-year-old. “We want pot. The weed. Drugs, please.”

Mia nodded, unfazed. “I meant how much.”

“Oh, I should give you money,” I stammered, digging into my purse. This whole thing, as legal as it was, still felt shady. I guess because what
we
were doing wasn’t legal. We were in a parking lot handing over cash so that someone would buy us drugs. I was already getting paranoid, antsy to get this over with.