You Take It From Here (28 page)

Smidge continued. “You’re all I’ve got. I hate that I need you, but I do. When you were gone over at Tucker’s, I was lost. I tried to do it alone, and I couldn’t. I was miserable and terrified, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell Henry. Don’t make me break my husband’s heart. You need to start acting like my best friend. Not a husband, mother, teacher, or doctor. Do you understand?”

I lifted my left hand to her torso, and gently pressed my palm against her rib cage, cradling where I knew she was the most broken.

“Damn, Smidge,” I said, tears streaking across my face until they dripped warm into my ears. “Why didn’t you just say that in the first place?”

TWENTY-FOUR

I
felt different after that. I don’t know how else to explain it, other than I had a purpose that was
with
Smidge, not because of her. I let our remaining time in Los Angeles play out as our last vacation together. We decided to cross off a few of Smidge’s wishes that had nothing to do with the business of her family.

Starting with skydiving.

She made me promise not to tell anybody, which is why this is probably the first you’ve heard of it. She somehow got it into her head that it was one thing she always wanted to do but had been too scared to try.

“What’s the worst that could happen, I die?” she asked. I was very concerned about her lungs at high altitudes, but her doctor told her by phone that the most dangerous thing was that she could panic. “I’ll be fine,” she insisted.

But I made the mistake of staying up the night before on the internet, reading about the risks. “Thirty-five people a year die doing this!” I told her as we headed toward what I hoped wasn’t going to be my final destination.

“Only thirty-five?” Smidge marveled. “I would’ve thought it’d be higher.”

I chickened out. It wasn’t my dream, and it wasn’t like we were going to hold hands as we went down. She’d be strapped to an expert, lost in her own tandem jump. I waited on the ground with a camera for what felt like forever.

Smidge wasn’t consistent in her fearlessness. The woman jumping out of that plane would leap just as high if she suddenly found herself standing next to a clown. Your mother never took you trick-or-treating because she was frightened by small children wearing masks. Henry did all the door-to-door stuff, shuffling you around on the early shift so he had time to get back home to deliver candy to the neighborhood ghosts and goblins knocking at the door. Smidge would hide in her bedroom, drinking, doing a horrible job of pretending she wasn’t terrified a child would break through the entryway and come running down the hallway, hell-bent on stealing her soul.

A girl with blond dreads, somehow looking shapely in a blue jumpsuit, pointed toward the sky. “There’s your friend,” she said.

At first it was just an orange dot. But that dot grew in size, twirling and swooping as it got closer to the ground. Eventually I could make out a parachute followed by the humans dangling underneath. The rest of it happened quite quickly. Smidge and her instructor swept one way, turned another, and then came to the ground with a thud.

“I did it!” she shouted at me, arms raised, struggling to move inside all that protective gear.

“Are you okay? Did it hurt?”

“A little, but I don’t care! This is so much better than acupuncture!”

Dinner that night was straight out of Smidge’s medical-marijuana-fueled fantasy: mac-’n’-cheese-’n’-In-N-Out—a double-meat cheeseburger stuffed with macaroni and cheese, slathered in heart attack. My friend might have been wasting away, but as we entertained her whims, I could feel myself growing larger.

“I just fell out of the sky!” Smidge said, cramming a handful of french fries into her mouth. “I couldn’t think of anything but that. No cancer up there. Just me falling to the ground, deciding to come back to the planet.”

She had repeated that story to me at least five times. With every retelling she’d remember another detail—how she wasn’t scared until the instructor asked if she was ready; how her brain initially disconnected from the experience as it looked like the earth was curved below her; how peaceful it was once the parachute took over, gently gliding them back to the ground. “I didn’t even think to be scared,” she always concluded. “Next time I bet I’ll be. This time I just did a lot of looking.”

She must have seen my face as I silently debated the probability of there being a next time. “I’m telling you, I feel great,” she said. “I feel so healthy. Maybe this is the secret,” she said. “Extremes will help keep me alive. Adrenaline and shock.”

“And heavy foods?”

“Yes. The heavier, the better! My body won’t have time to replicate mutated cells. It’ll be too busy keeping up with me. I love that I’m finally hungry again.”

I lifted my glass. “Cheers to that.”

She was halfway through getting a tattoo when I finally asked if there was a chance this was a version of a midlife crisis.

She stared down at the raised, red skin tight against her right hipbone. The thin, dark line would eventually form the name
Jenny
in cursive, discreetly hidden just below her waistband.

“Technically we can now confirm I had my midlife crisis at eighteen.” She winced, exhaling through a pucker.

She was trapped underneath the steady hand of a tattoo artist named Tiger, a white man with dark eyes and a thick, black bar driven through his septum. I decided to use her imprisonment to attempt to get some truth out of her.

“Henry said something the last night I was at your house,” I started, pausing to scratch my arm. “He said you still sometimes feel bad about James.”

“Bad? About your divorce?”

“Maybe. But I don’t know, he used the word ‘guilty.’ And then he wouldn’t tell me what he meant. You know what he meant, don’t you?”

She went still. “I suppose you’re a big girl now,” she said.

The back of my neck became sticky and hot as the blood left my toes. Smidge had something to confess. I could tell because she wasn’t relishing this moment. Her face was a complete blank.

“You’re already divorced, so it shouldn’t matter,” she said. “But your husband once made a pass at me. There. The end. Weight lifted.”

Time slowed to a crawl. “What kind of pass?”

I hated how she would make me fish for painful information, yanking the truth out of her crumb by crumb until we dug into what really mattered. I’d sometimes have to embark on an hour-long excavation in order to finally start hacking at the most important bits.

She pretended to be concerned with her tattoo. “Do you need a drink of water, Tiger? You’ve been working for so long.”

“He’s fine,” I said. “Answer the question.”

“He made the kind of pass that men shouldn’t make at their fiancée’s best friend.”

“
Fiancée?
When did this happen?”

“That’s such a specific question.”

“That’s the point.”

“I punched him in the balls. Don’t you want to hear that part?”

Tiger pulled back in his chair. “Do you ladies need a moment?”

“No,” Smidge said. “I might need a witness.”

I didn’t appreciate her trying to lighten the mood. “What happened?”

“You were fixing to get married and I didn’t want to ruin anything.”

“Ruin what? How ‘fixing’ were we?”

She didn’t answer.

“A month?” No answer. “A week?” Still no answer. “A day?”

“Yes. A day.
The
day. I mean, technically.”

“
The
day? My wedding day? It happened on my wedding day and you didn’t tell me?”

Was it okay to punch a woman with cancer? There had to be times when everybody would get behind it. What if she were kicking kittens, or sitting on a baby?

I left Smidge trapped in that chair so I could pace the parking lot.

No wonder she was so supportive of the divorce. She practically moved all my furniture into that empty apartment all by herself. The weight certainly had been lifted, not just now when she told me, but back when the final papers were signed, when she and James no longer held a secret bond.

That must be why she thought I could just
be
with Henry once she wouldn’t be there anymore. If she could have such intimate knowledge with
my
husband, if she could be a part of that marriage without me even having a clue, why wouldn’t she think of a husband and wife as an arrangement, an agreement, and not much more?

“Hey!” It was Tiger, half leaning out the glass door of the tattoo shop, his face pale and strained. “Hey, your friend needs help! I called 911!”

The ambulance came quickly, and as they worked on your mother, Tiger told me what had happened.

After I stormed out Smidge tried to make a few jokes with Tiger, but instead began to cry. I told Tiger he must be mistaken. Smidge never cries.

“That’s the thing,” he said. “I know she was crying because she tried to blame it on the tattoo, that I was hurting her,
but I wasn’t inking her at the time. I had just finished. Then she started crying harder, started choking or coughing. That’s when I first got worried.”

Tiger told me Smidge then stood suddenly, possibly to come find me. She lost her footing, wavered slightly, and passed out, slamming her head on a table as she fell. The paramedics revived her, applied ice, and administered fluids, but her blood oxygen level was low enough they felt she needed to be admitted for monitoring.

I waited for hours at the hospital before she had a room I could visit. When I finally saw her, spread thin under the sheets like a mottled paper doll, quietly gasping under an oxygen mask, I briefly lost my own breath. After all that life Smidge had been living the week she’d been in California, she looked frozen in a moment quite close to death.

There was a dark lump on her forehead, just below her hairline. Smidge lifted her puffy eyelids to look at me. She couldn’t speak because of that mask, and was too weak to move. She did nothing more than hold my gaze for a few moments before closing her eyes again. But I’d heard what she was telling me as clearly as if she’d just yelled it straight into my ear.

Shit, Danny. It’s starting.

I reached the foot of her bed and told her what I’d been thinking since we arrived at the hospital.

“I think you came to Los Angeles to die.” I said it loudly, so there could be no doubt it reached her ears over the beeping and wheezing of the machines, through the thick haze of selfish thoughts and self-protective acts she’d been using as insulation. “It was a hunch I had at first, but I’m sure that’s
what was going on. You thought you could come here and wear yourself out and then die on my couch so I’d have to go home and deal with your family.”

Smidge’s eyes met mine with a weary, guilty stare.

“Well, that’s not what’s going to happen, you coward,” I said. “And I can’t believe you thought I’d get tricked into that.”

I stood over her and readied myself, hoping I could handle what I was about to say.

“I’m in charge now,” I said. “I run your life. And first things first: we have to get you home, you stubborn bitch.”

From under that oxygen mask, even through the fog of condensation, I swear I saw your mother’s crooked smile.

TWENTY-FIVE