The Me You See Read online

  “She looked so happy,” she said finally.

  “Who?”

  “Stefia.”

  “What?”

  “On stage. She looked so happy.”

  I didn’t know if we’d started a new conversation or if Stefia on stage somehow tied into wasted time so I listened before commenting because words are so precious when you know time is running out.

  “She’s doing what she loves,” she continued. “She hasn’t wasted time.”

  A frenzy of ice sloshed through my veins. Had we reached the part where my wife would come clean and admit she had hated everything about our life together? Would she walk to the closet and collect her things before she danced out to a life that didn’t feel wasted?

  She didn’t.

  “I want to see the show again,” Lindsey said. “I need to see it again.”

  The final performance of the show was the following night. It also happened to be completely sold out, but I mentioned something to the box office manager about “being family” and “six weeks to live.” I thanked him profusely when he said they would set up two additional chairs off an aisle and make room.

  “Can I ask one other favor?” I said.

  “Anything,” he responded.

  “Don’t tell Stefia about this, okay?”

  I could almost hear his wink over the phone, like he was happy to keep our little secret.

  When you see a play more than once, you pick out things you didn’t get the first time. So when we saw it again, I paid much closer attention. Our seats had been added to the end of the third row and we were so close I could see the spray of spit from lines delivered, the bubbles of sweat collecting as the spotlight warmed Stefia’s skin. Sitting so close to the stage sucked me further into Stefia’s world of make-believe, further and further until the boundaries between actor and audience blurred and I felt as though I’d been pulled from chair and wrapped around her feet.

  What my wife had said was true—Stefia really was the brightest star on that stage.

  When the performance was over, the cast members bounced their post-show adrenalized selves into the lobby. They set themselves against the wall like a receiving line at a wedding, shaking hands and accepting accolades from their adoring fans.

  So glad you enjoyed the performance!

  Thanks for coming!

  You’re too kind, really. I just enjoy being on stage.

  I thought we were going to blast past the niceties of the actor line, like we had the first time we’d seen the show, but Lindsey grabbed me by the arm.

  “I need to say something to her. I just need to say…”

  “Say what?”

  “Something.”

  It was so not like my wife to have to say anything. She was a master at letting things lie. But things are different when time is finite and suddenly you find that your mouth has filled up with all the things you never got to say.

  We waited in line through all the congratulations, well dones, and good jobs, shaking hands with the fifteen actors who had poured themselves out on stage for the last two hours. Since Stefia was one of the leads, she was towards the end of the line. So my wife waited. And waited.

  “Are you getting tired?” I asked after a few minutes. “Do you want to sit?”

  “No,” she said and shook her head. “I just need to say something to her.”

  And just like that, it happened. The line shuffled ahead and they were standing right in front of each other.

  It’s funny how the elephant never really goes away, you know? Four years of discomfort passed between the two of them in a glance that took less than a second. It was all there in that look, the mixture of surprise and disbelief and oh my god what do I say?

  Stefia refocused with a swallow and squared her shoulders.

  “Aunt Lindsey,” she said, with emotion that wasn’t easily named. “How nice of you to come to the show.”

  “I just need to say something,” Lindsey continued. “Hear me out.”

  Lindsey grabbed Stefia’s hands and stared into her eyes with a severity I was noticing more often as her time on earth ticked away.

  “Okay…” Stefia said, oddly uncomfortable with the attention.

  “Stefia, you are talented. You are so talented, baby girl. You are like…a hidden pocket of glitter.”

  “Oh, Lindsey…”

  “No, please let me finish. You shine up there on stage like those lights at the softball field. The ones that let you see for miles around? That’s you, Stefia. You are showing people their way. Don’t ever stop doing this. You’re amazing.”

  Stefia was starting to blush, which I didn’t understand because Lindsey wasn’t telling her anything different than what the hundred people before her in line had said. But she squeezed at Lindsey’s hands and politely said, “Thank you, Lindsey. Thank you for coming.”

  “There’s one more thing I need to tell you,” Lindsey said, cutting her off.

  I saw my wife look down at floor, then sigh and close her eyes. After a moment, she opened them back up and looked straight into Stefia’s eyes for the second time.

  “You, sweet Stefia,” she said, “you are nothing like your mother. And don’t ever let anyone tell you differently.”

  For a second, a seriousness pulsed between them; a connection that tied them up in something I couldn’t see. Then Stefia’s lips warmed into a smile that spread slowly across her face as she pulled Lindsey in for a hug.

  “Thank you, Lindsey,” she whispered into my wife’s ear. “Thank you for coming.”

  And it somehow seemed to me that the second time Stefia said it, she meant something entirely different than the first.

  **

  Immediately after seeing the second show, my wife completely fixated on Stefia. Not really Stefia the person, because we didn’t ever see her again. It was more the idea of Stefia that my wife was hyper-focused on. It was as if because Stefia did what she wanted and took things the direction she chose to go, it inspired my wife to do even more in her last days. And as we passed that six weeks to live mark and headed into eight weeks, ten weeks, three months, five months, I found myself thankful that we had sat in the audience watching Stefia paint her magical pictures that my wife interpreted as everyone can be happy if they just follow their dreams.

  Stefia was the inspiration. She aroused the need for my wife to continue. She sparked an interest in daily life and made my wife look at everything from the simple to the infinitely complex to everything in between and figure out what she loved. My wife grew to believe more each day that doing what she loved was important not because she was dying, but because she was still alive.

  My wife told me she wanted to drive a car with the top down to someplace she’d never been before. She wanted to take an old rusted out baby blue farm truck, find a deserted intersection where two gravel roads come together, and make love right there. She wanted to visit a city so big we had to take a taxi to get around and then she wanted to tip the driver with a hundred dollar bill. Just because she could. Because she wanted to. Because it was something she loved.

  She bought a croton house plant and transplanted it into a piece of pottery she fashioned with her own sweet hands. She stopped drinking coffee and started drinking chai tea. She painted her nails a different color every single day. She volunteered at a women’s shelter. She shopped for Christmas three months early. She celebrated Hanukah. She wrote poems. She baked rye bread. She used china and gold plated silverware to eat peanut butter and jelly.

  And I watched her in wonder. I watched as she spun around in a mad frenzy, doing all the things she had always wanted to do, wondering why had she waited? Why had she wasted so much time before?

  And then I wondered the same thing of myself.

  Was I waiting?

  Had I wasted time?

  Was I doing what I loved?

  I wondered.

  Things look different when you are contemplating the end. And I spent a lot of time wondering if
it was easier to be at the end knowing you had time to think on it, or if it was harder to deal with if it snuck up on you suddenly.

  One night we sat in the warmth of conversation and a fireplace, celebrating what would have seemed to most people to be the very least of things. We’d had a bottle of wine between the two of us—mostly me, because she couldn’t handle it well—and she told me to stop being so whiny about life.

  “I’m doing the things I’ve always wanted to do,” she said. “I’m crossing everything off my bucket list.” Then she took another sip of her wine. She was gorgeous and tipsy and I loved her more than anything and everything in the world.

  “What will I do when I run out of things to do?” she said with just a hint of a happy slur. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. When I run out of things on my bucket list, I’ll kick the bucket!”

  She held her wine glass up and toasted to the winter sky outside our bay window, tossing back what was left in the glass.

  “When I die,” she said, setting the wine glass next to her, “don’t write an obituary for me.”

  “What?”

  “Obituaries are all the same. They’re like a written participation ribbon for having shown up and breathed. It’s all the same phrases. She loved her family or she was a light to those around her. Nice, neat phrases. Like…a brassy ribbon tied around an existence that might or might not have been worth the space and air it took up.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” I said.

  “Like what?” she said. The wine had filled her with cynicism by the bucketful and she had grown weary of hiding anything that should have stayed hidden. “Let’s not pretend. It doesn’t help anything.”

  She’d lost so much weight and yet her face was puffy from all the medication she was on.

  “I’m not pretending,” I said. “But it doesn’t help anything to keep pointing it out either.”

  “You know, Shawn,” she said, “you could be worse off than me.”

  “What?”

  “Here I’m trying to get through this bucket list before I kick it because I know the end is coming. You…you could die in a car crash tomorrow. You could die suddenly without even knowing what your bucket list is.”

  There was something eerie about her words, something strange about her even bringing it up. And I didn’t like thinking about it because she was telling the god’s honest truth.

  “I am doing everything right now that would be on my bucket list if I had one,” I said.

  “Like what? Watching your dying wife get drunk?”

  “No. Just spending time with the person I love more than anything in the whole world.”

  I would have stayed there watching her for forever. I just couldn’t suck in enough of her. I felt like I spent every day wildly running after her with a cup, trying to catch the overflow of who she was before there was no more of her to catch.

  “Things look different when days are numbered,” I finally said.

  “They shouldn’t.”

  I knew she was right. I knew we weren’t supposed to save things for looking different or mattering for when the reality of finite days punched through our skull. But it seemed to be one of the more stupid human tricks we were all guilty of performing.

  “I love you,” I said. The wine and the soft crackle of the cedar log in the fireplace made everything about me warm and tingly, even my eyeballs and the tips of my fingers. “I have always loved you.”

  She looked so small and insignificant in her rocking chair, the quilt around her seeming to swallow her whole. But she beamed and sparkled with a glittery light on her upturned lips as her eyelids grew heavy and she inched closer to sleep.

  “I have always known that,” she said. “Always.”

  **

  I dreamed last night of heaven. I woke up in a brilliant fog and tried to sketch what I had seen: a silver blue sky with cedar trees the color of warmth lining a gravel path that rounded into a gentle bend. Just enough that you couldn’t see around the corner. But you knew what was coming: pure brilliant beauty.

  In the dream, my wife was standing on the path. I couldn’t see her as a solid thing and yet I knew she was there. In my wakened state, I furiously tried to sketch a figure that wasn’t really a figure. I tried to sketch the liquid fluid notes of her voice that had come out as ribbons of shimmering silk when she spoke. I tried to sketch it all, everything I had seen. Because in the dream, it was beautiful. In the dream, it was peaceful.

  I tried to sketch it all.

  Because it was beautiful.

  But today is different. Today is not beautiful. Today I’m going to a funeral.

  My wife sits on the edge of the bed, hardly able to put weight on her legs or keep balance, not just because she’s gotten weaker in the last month, but also because she can’t process what happened.

  Like any of us could.

  “I don’t get it,” she says, as I help get her dressed. Her arms are flaccid and she doesn’t want to move. “I don’t get what happened. It doesn’t make sense. She was doing what she loved.”

  I can’t even respond because it feels like I’ve swallowed a handful of cotton balls and if I open my mouth to speak I’ll gag. I can’t agree or disagree. I just don’t know.

  “She was doing what she loved,” my wife says again.

  I nod.

  I slip my wife’s arm into the sleeve of her coat and think about her niece. How she was doing what she loved because it was what she loved and not because she thought it made a difference to anyone or anything. It was just what she loved. If I could have picked Stefia up off that stage and shook her alive I would have told her that what she did mattered. It had always mattered. She had affected people she didn’t even realize she had affected. She had been the topics of people’s conversation when they were at the end of their rope and needed something to hang on to.

  And maybe, just maybe, she had even helped to keep them alive.

  “She was just doing what she loved,” my wife repeats again like a mantra that can’t be forgotten, her face sick with confusion and pale with incredulity. “Just what she loved.”

  I nod again.

  “I’ve been doing what I loved,” she says.

  And I nod, but this time more slowly and every bob of my head feels like a weight pulling my chin closer to the ground. Because I know what thoughts my wife has connected. And I get what she’s saying.

  And I have to accept it.

  I have to.

  We don’t say anything else. My wife leans on me to stand up and I help her with slow footsteps to an exit that neither of us knows how to handle.

  -Heidi-

  Lullaby, and good night…

  A lullaby plays over the loudspeaker system whenever a baby is born here. I love to hear that sound. Another life successfully brought into the world. A potential bright spot on the pockmarked face of our country’s population.

  I work as a labor and delivery nurse and I love my job. I love meeting the people. I love how different they all are. I love their stories. But mostly I love their vision. Their carefully laid out plans for how they’re going to raise the baby they’ve just birthed to be the Person Who Changes The World. They’re not going to make the same mistakes their parents made. They’re going to do things differently. Because they are different.

  They say it’s all in how you’re raised, you know? It’s all about what your parents did or didn’t do or how many siblings you had or what kind of neighborhood you grew up in or if you sold Girl Scout cookies or let the JWs into your house. What kind of food you ate for dinner. If you sat at the dinner table as a family or ate in front of the television. How early you ate eggs or peanuts and how much candy your parents allowed you to have.

  Let me tell you what I think: it’s all a big joke. And I’ve only found one person who ever agreed with me.

  Stefia.

  I’ve worked on this floor for almost 20 years. It never fails to amaze me how much the birthing and parenting recommendation
s change year to year. What new theories they come up with. What practices aren’t okay today that were okay yesterday. What beliefs are going to mess your baby up for good, and what things don’t make a difference at all.

  “Heidi?” my co-worker, Amanda, asks. She is fresh out of nursing school and makes me crazy. Her squeaky voice is the solitary reason I eat too much chocolate when my shift is done.

  “Yeah?”

  “The patient in room 310 is asking for more ice chips.”

  “So give her more ice chips.”

  “Do you think that’s okay, though? She’s had, like, twenty-four cups or something of ice since she got here.”

  “It’s just ice, Amanda. Frozen water. It’s not going to kill anyone.”

  That is, unless there was some new study about laboring mothers and ice that I missed the memo on.

  Amanda turns around and leaves quickly with the twenty-fifth cup of ice, looking like a puppy that has been yelled at. I think about apologizing for about half a second but decide against it. That girl drives me crazy just by breathing.

  Maryanne, the charge nurse, shoots me a look that I can’t quite read. I can’t tell if she thinks I should follow Amanda to apologize, or if she thinks Amanda is annoying, too. Maybe she just knows that I’m on edge because Stefia is being buried today and I’m stuck here with Miss Ice Chip. And honestly, that’s just about enough to make me want to drink about a quart of whatever they shoot in your spine for an epidural.

  Numb me up and make me stupid so I can totally forget this day even happened.

  I shuffle papers on the desk at the nurse’s station, making a mental note of what rooms are full and who is closest to delivering. Room 310 is closest but wants to go au natural and refuses to let her labor be augmented unless there is a medical emergency. Room 307 is a good four hours from delivery and would literally do anything to speed it up. Room 303 has a whole list of things she wants after the baby arrives.

  The mothers are all so needy. And so worried. And it makes me wonder when it was that things got so complicated. Birth is just birth. It’s the same process as it was a thousand years ago. Babies are still just babies and they need to eat and sleep. Why do we complicate things?