You Take It From Here (9 page)

Smidge stopped here, her eyes filling up with what appeared to be real tears. Her face began to twitch as her words turned to mumbles, the corners of her mouth pulling down. She sucked in a deep breath to knock that emotion out before forcing herself to continue. “See that they get breakfast every day and look nice and . . . that Henry doesn’t get fat and . . . Jenny only dates nice boys and—Excuse me.”

Smidge jumped off her bar stool and quickly wove her way through the crowd to the bathroom.

I didn’t follow, mostly because she would’ve pushed me out the door and told me to leave her alone. But I wanted her to have a moment, so she could come back with a huge grin on her face, boasting that she’d just gotten me good. I was still holding out for a prank. I needed Smidge to take it all back.
“Even better than Big Count Road,”
she’d brag.

Maybe anger and resentment weren’t the first feelings most people would have if their best friend had just asked them to take over once they die of terminal cancer, but I had previous experience with Smidge stretching things out of reality, exaggerating the extent of the situation. Smidge could be rather dramatic. Maybe she’s saying “cancer,” but she really means a kidney stone. Instead of willing me her life, maybe she just needs me to babysit for a month.

And honestly, it wasn’t the first time she had tried to hand her daughter over to me without much of a warning.

You were about seven when your mother called me one morning, calmly informing me that you were on a plane
headed straight to my apartment, where I was to continue to raise you for the rest of your life.

You wanted to have all your clothes in your favorite color, but when Smidge refused to buy purple underwear, somehow you figured out how to use fabric dye and tossed your entire wardrobe into the washing machine with a box of purple. I still think it was rather clever for someone who was only in the second grade.

Smidge was icy calm as she informed me she had just shipped her offspring to California, so much so that I wasn’t absolutely sure you
weren’t
sitting on a plane somewhere in the sky, sobbing in the bulkhead. Tiny purple fingers wiping away tiny purple tears. I made your mother put you on the phone, just so I could ask, “Where are you right now? And has your mother packed any kind of suitcase? Do you see one, Jenny? Look carefully.”

One time Smidge called in the middle of the night so hysterical I was immediately terrified someone had died.

It was two in the morning West Coast time—meaning four her time—and she was shouting into the phone, “I don’t know where I am! I’m lost and sad and I need you to come and get me!”

I was fifteen hundred miles away. Which 911 do you call for that? Mine? Hers? If hers, how exactly do you dial some other city’s 911? Only because of Smidge have I had to ponder such questions. When normal people have an emergency, their first response isn’t to call the one person who at that moment is at the absolute farthest point.

“Smidge!” I shouted back as I wandered through my dark bedroom. I made a vain attempt to find something to pull
over myself, meaning some sleepy part of my brain knew there was a slim chance I might have to walk straight out of my apartment and drive to wherever she was. “Where are you?” I asked.

What Smidge lacked in tears she made up in volume. “I don’t
knoooooooow
!” she wailed. “Everybody’s mean here and they won’t let me
driiiiiiive hooooooome
!”

This is when I stopped looking for a pair of pants and started looking for a glass of wine.

“Who’s everybody?” I asked into the phone, my confusion making me sound like an old, lost lady. “Where are you? What is happening?” I tried to keep from sounding too judgmental as I asked, “Are you drunk?”

The missing answer in her answer told me all I needed to know. “This party is the worst!” she shouted. “Everybody here is an asshole and they’re all laughing at me right now.”

“Where is Henry?”

Then the
skritch-shluck!
of a phone sliding down someone’s shoulder filled my ear. Smidge returned even louder, sounding like a walkie-talkie wired straight to my brain. “Who cares?” she shouted. “I told him if he didn’t give me the keys, we were getting a divorce, and he didn’t give me the keys so I hate him and that’s it. The end.”

Most likely Henry was standing right there, listening to her diatribe, Smidge’s keys safely hidden in his left palm.

“Can you describe where you are right now?” I asked, like she was a little boy trapped in a cave or a well. Like I’m talking a trauma victim through a hypnotherapy session.

“Some guy’s house,” she said. “He can’t decorate for shit.
He’s got stuffed monkeys on his shelves. What kind of psychopath decorates with baby toys?”

“Well, I guess I can see why you’re so upset.”

“
Thank
you. Now come get me.”

“I can’t come get you, Smidge.”

She began her tearless wails again, her voice raising an octave as it warbled, “Then you aren’t a very good friend and I hate you.”

Hatechoo.
That’s how she says it. Like a vicious sneeze.

She wouldn’t remember it in the morning, but I would never forget it. As drunk as she was, and as little as she meant she hated me, what was real in her anger was how far away I was and how impossible it seemed to her that I couldn’t just come right over and take her away from all those people who—thankfully—wouldn’t let her drive home. I never forgot how useless it made me seem. What good was I in her life if I couldn’t be at her beck and call?

And then there was the swimsuit incident in Puerto Rico.

Smidge usually wore a one-piece to hide the scar on her chest from when they removed the tumor, but this time she’d just completed a six-week boot camp and wanted to show off her impressively toned body.

We were flat on our backs, poolside, when she pointed at a mole on her left flank.

“You see this?” she asked me.

I leaned in. “Yeah.” It was brown and shaped like a tulip, blurred edges and oblong.

“It’s cancer,” she said.

I sat up so quickly I spilled my drink.

“Damn, I should’ve known you’d get scared!” Smidge cackled, wiggling a hand like she was trying to erase what just happened. “I was kidding! I’m sorry. I’m sorry!”

I wiped chunks of boozy ice from my thigh as I scolded, “Now, why would that be funny?”

“I don’t know. The mojito made me say it, Danny. Don’t be sore.”

When it came to Smidge, sometimes she was definitely kidding, sometimes she was kidding but she wanted you to pretend she was serious, and sometimes she was seriously out of her mind. It made it hard to know exactly when it was time to take action, or if it was a better idea to wait a few minutes, long enough to accurately assess the situation.

I couldn’t summon the courage to ask Smidge just how bad the cancer was until an hour or so later, once we were back at the hotel room, safely away from the public. When she realized I had some doubt, her response was to hurl various items from her suitcase directly at my head. They were mostly clothes; soft, squishy things I could easily catch or watch pathetically float to the floor like exhausted streamers. Every once in a while she’d find something with better aerodynamics. Her toothpaste comes to mind as a particularly effective missile.

We squared off on either side of our hotel bed. Smidge wore her taco pajama pants and a yellow camisole. I was still fully dressed from the evening, what with all the defending my body from personal injury I’d been doing.

Smidge had weaponized every item from her suitcase save for a bottle of whiskey, which she then grabbed like a baseball bat. While it made me momentarily nervous, I knew it was for drinking, not battery.

One of our traditions on these trips was to pack the bottle of wine we’d bought on the last one. But in China we feared the bottles of so-called Chinese wine, and opted for what we saw others copiously drinking: Johnnie Walker Red.

Smidge sat at the edge of the bed, whiskey bottle tucked between her legs. Her hair had fallen out of its ponytail and strayed in wild bunches in front of her face. She quietly stared at her hands.

“I wasn’t thinking about how you’re just now finding out about this,” she finally said. “I should be nicer about giving you some catch-up time.”

The mattress creaked underneath me as I sat down beside her, causing the much-smaller Smidge to roll toward me, just slightly. “I’m really confused,” I admitted.

“You’re in shock,” she said. “I confess I was hoping to take advantage of that. Have you saying yes before you got a chance to wrap your big brain around it. But I need you to hurry up so we can get to the important stuff.”

I took a deep breath, and as I held it I imagined Smidge’s lungs, how maybe she couldn’t take that same breath without thinking of what was going on inside her. I don’t think I’ve taken a deep breath without thinking of her ever again.

Smidge twisted the top off the bottle before lifting it to her mouth for a swig. “I didn’t get much of that martini,” she said. “This feels good. This’ll be my new drink of choice. Danny, let’s start being whiskey drinkers.”

“Okay.” I sounded miserable, which seemed to spark Smidge in another direction.

“Sooooooooo!”
she sang. “What’s going to happen is that nobody’s going to find out what we’re doing. This is our secret.”

I snorted. “Yeah, right.”

She nudged my hand with the bottle, trying to force me to take it. “Drink on it. We’re not telling anybody about this.”

“About what?”

“Any of it. The plan, the cancer, the future. Only these walls will know what we’re doing, otherwise it won’t work.”

I pushed the bottle away. “No. That’s insane. We have to tell Henry, at least. Doesn’t he get a say in whether or not he wants me to be his wife?”

Smidge nodded, her jaw locked. “I need you to remind me of something. I don’t think you’ve ever been through cancer before. I think that might be true. Is that true?”

The carpeting in the hotel room was beige with navy squares. I focused on counting how many squares my bare toes were touching at that moment as Smidge continued.

“Well, since I’m thinking you might not know what having cancer is like, I’m going to tell you a little something. People think having cancer immediately makes you some kind of hero. ‘Oh, you’re so brave,’ they say. ‘Oh, bless your heart,’ they’re always wailing. From afar. Way afar. They’re not coming over to make food for your kid when the smell from a can of tomato sauce makes you vomit for half an hour. Nobody’s rushing over to help you wash your sheets after you find your scattered pubes in them one morning. No. Just words of encouragement, like I’m walking a tightrope and they would love to come up there and help, but
darnit
, I’m just so far away!”

I quickly count twenty-six squares touching my toes because I know there’s a chance Smidge is referring to me. “What about Millie Mains? Didn’t she wash your laundry every day?”

“Oh my God, are you really going to make me feel guilty about Millie Mains right now?”

“No, I’m just saying—”

Smidge shook her head. “You’re talking about the girl who was hoping I’d die so she’d get into my husband’s pants, but I’m the ungrateful bitch? I get it.”

“Is that true?”

“I need a glass.”

I knew it wasn’t true. Smidge just liked her story better if she had gotten through her cancer all by herself.

Finding a glass from the faux marble wet bar, she poured herself an inch, leaning against the counter with her free hand like a weary bartender. She was still shaking her head, lips pursed, like I was this
thing
she had to deal with, a fool in her face.

She talked into her drink, staring at the liquid like only it understood. “Surgery, chemo, radiation,” she said. “I wasn’t being ‘brave’ or ‘strong.’ That’s bullshit. I didn’t have a choice. I was too scared to do anything other than what the doctors said. It’s brave when you opt to do the hard part. So this time I’m opting hard.”

I could tell these words were rehearsed, but I didn’t know if this speech was prepared for me, or if this is what she’d been telling herself. She didn’t seem to notice me there anymore. She faced the window, the lights inside the room kept her from being able to see anything other than her own reflection. I watched her stare herself down.

“It’s stage four,” she said. “It’s spread already. In my ribs, other places. They didn’t want to tell me how long I have, but I pinched the doctor under her arm until I got her to admit
it’s probably less than a year. Do you know they stage cancer in Roman numerals?”

There were thirty squares along the left side of my foot, fifteen squares along the right side of my foot, and too many things I didn’t want to hear bouncing around in my head. Every time I thought it couldn’t get any worse, more words came out, hitting me like fists.

“What did the doctors say you should do?”

“Some bullshit I ain’t doing.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I’m not going through chemo again. No surgery. Nothing. This is it. I’m not going to lose my hair again. Last time I looked like one of those just-born kangaroo inchworms, all wet and pathetic, blind and helpless.”

“Smidge!” I grabbed the comforter in my hand and gripped it to keep me from shaking her. I was seconds from taking her by the shoulders, turning her upside down, and treating her like a human Etch A Sketch. I’d rattle her until all the cancer fell right out. Then we could stare at that pile of unwanted, parasitic, life-robbing mass and watch it lose all its power, writhing and suffocating on the floor between us.

“There’s nothing to do, Dans,” she said. “They told me I could try surgery that’ll remove a few ribs and hack out more of my lung. But it wouldn’t give me too much more time, and I’d be stuck in a hospital bed for six months. I’m not spending half my remaining life in a hospital bed. I’m spending it with you.”

These are the years when we’re supposed to be taking our bodies for granted, just starting to feel morning aches and
pains, not thinking of your parts as failing, as killing you. She’s still supposed to be invincible.