What's Worth Keeping

by Kaya McLaren

  From the bathroom came nothing but silence, and he knew she had already gone to the place where he could not reach her. It had already happened—he had already lost her. She was already gone. He knew it when he saw it because he remembered when he had been the one who had gone to the place where she could no longer reach him.

  He looked across the room at their closet. Inside his side was a guitar he hadn’t played in years, but there had been a time when he used to play for her every day when she painted or when she took a bath. For just a moment, he entertained the idea of getting his guitar out of its case and playing for her now. But she was silent. She didn’t want connection. She wanted space. Slowly, he stood. He couldn’t quite bring himself to go to the living room and watch TV. That seemed like too much space. Instead, he crawled into bed and turned out the light. He was there if she needed him or wanted him. Or they could both pretend he was asleep—whatever she wanted.

  * * *

  On the way home, he passed the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum. For many years, he would drive far out of his way to avoid it. Now, though it still seemed wrong for there to be an empty space where the federal building had stood, it wasn’t as empty. The Field of Empty Chairs still evoked uneasiness in him, but at the same time he appreciated this memorial—particularly to those he knew and those he found. He liked the Reflecting Pool.

  Something about this park mirrored what was inside him. At least he had thought that at the time. At first, it felt as if he had been blown open and destroyed just like that building. And then for a long time, he felt only rubble inside. He didn’t know whether that had been demolished and removed in his heart—only that inside he felt as empty as that park. Not any emptier. In the way that the park had functional space, he had somehow figured out how to be functional as well. In the way that the park had soft grass and places for people to sit, he thought he was able to make people reasonably comfortable in his presence, even considering. But the memorial park would never be anything else. It was not a place for joy. It was not a place for fun. It wouldn’t be a place where people wanted to have weddings. It wouldn’t be a place for three-on-three basketball tournaments or music festivals. It was simply a big empty place to be solemn, a place to sit and think about how unfathomably horrible things can happen in an instant and how small and powerless we are, really, in the face of it all. Inside of himself, that was all he saw as well.

  Turning on his signal, he waited at the light and then drove away from his reflection, drove on home to the woman he had planned to leave on this very day before he had come to his senses, the woman who had given him everything good about his life, the woman he had no idea how to reach right now. He had thought getting through cancer together would bring them closer, but he couldn’t say it had. Still, it had counted. Surely it had counted.

  He drove on home to shower and shave before picking up the daughter who was slipping away as well. Some things could not be fixed. Some things could only be made into something peaceful and still.

  Carly

  After a solid half-hour discussion of what their names would sound like combined, Kiara had gone off to “talk” with Kai, leaving Carly sitting on the edge of the pool alone, her feet in, watching member after member of the class of 2012 fly out of the long curvy tube feetfirst and, if they were smart, legs crossed. She pondered the irony of such a childish celebration following the ceremony that was supposed to make them all official adults. The hands on the clock had moved interminably slow all night. Six thirty felt like an accomplishment in endurance. Just two more hours. It was almost over. There was no denying that the other graduates were having a great time. Their hearts were all so much lighter than hers. They were like lightning bugs radiantly flying through the air, while she felt more like a spider, stuck in one place, waiting for something. If she was especially cross, as she was now, it might be fair to say waiting for her next victim, someone to take a tiny bit of her anger out on.

  That turned out to be Billy O’Brien, Jr. This spring she had spent many class periods pondering what an unfortunate name that was the first time and trying to wrap her mind around why anyone would have thought it to be a name worth repeating.

  Billy sat down next to her and smiled as he looked at her with his wolflike, silver eyes. “Carly! Aren’t you having fun?”

  She shrugged. “Sure,” she said, because this was what people wanted to hear. As long as she said the words people wanted to hear, no one tried to fix her. God, she hated it when people tried to fix her. There were things that couldn’t be fixed. She was one.

  He either scratched his head or simply ran his fingers through his short, sandy hair, darker now that it was wet. She wasn’t sure. “Carly, since it’s graduation, I have a confession.”

  “Uh-oh,” she replied with a smile, somewhat dreading the awkwardness that undoubtedly would follow.

  “When we were in sixth grade, I had the biggest crush on you. I walked by your house every evening for a month just hoping to run into you so I could talk to you without all your friends or my friends watching.”

  “Only a month, huh? You call that persistence?” As she gave him a hard time, she noticed something change in his eyes, something that looked like excitement. This was the thing she had been surprised to learn this spring—the less she cared and the more she gave boys a hard time, the more they seemed to find her utterly irresistible. It wasn’t anything she did with the intention of achieving that. She truly didn’t care—not about anything—and it felt really good to be flippant with people who could take it and sometimes even with those who couldn’t. It released small amounts of pressure before all of her stress caused her to blow up. Not blow up in a fit of rage—she meant physically blow up into a million little pieces, popped like a balloon that did not have the capacity to hold all of the air that it was expected to hold.

  “You don’t think a month is persistent?” He was incredulous.

  She shrugged again. “All right, for a sixth-grade boy, a month is probably persistent. But why did you give up? Did you get distracted by another girl who grew bigger boobs?”

  He looked up to the corner of the room wistfully. “Megan Frampton … but no, that wasn’t why. I flunked a math test and when I looked across the aisle at your paper, I saw you had an A-plus and figured I wasn’t smart enough for you.”

  She paused for a moment, trying to figure out how to unpack that sad story. “First, Megan? Really? Goody-goody, nicey-nice little Megan?”

  “Yeah, she was stacked. She never paid any attention to any of us, but we all orbited around the gravitational pull of her.…” He directed his cupped hands toward his own chest rather than choose a distasteful word.

  “Boobs,” she said.

  “Boobs,” he repeated, now that he had permission to say that word.

  “Issue number two: If you weren’t smart enough to have a shot with me then, what changed? Did you get smarter?”

  Smiling self-consciously, he said, “I don’t think so. But a couple weeks ago, I saw that you flunked your math final and it gave me hope.”

  Burying her face in her hands, she laughed. Her life had come to this. And the worst part was that she actually preferred the attention of Billy O’Brien, Jr., to being holed up in her bedroom, stressed and alone, trying to be perfect and achieve everything.

  She caught him glancing down at her boobs, but she didn’t hold it against him. Her boobs looked undeniably great in her multicolor-striped bikini top. “Billy, I want to ask you something. If I had no boobs—I don’t mean flat boobs, but no boobs at all—would you still be sitting here talking to me?”

  He rubbed his jaw as he looked up at the ceiling and thought. “Well, I suppose that would depend on how good you were at blow jobs,” he finally said.

  She rolled her lips into her mouth and bit them just enough not to swear up a tropical storm, then nodded, took a deep breath, and exhaled slowly. “Well, Billy, I do appreciate your honesty.”

  “I promise I’
ll always be honest.”

  Those words seemed to suggest that Billy was proposing a long-term relationship, which Carly found both strange and presumptuous.

  Kiara and Kai came shooting out of the tube together just then, his arms around her belly, laughing as they flew through the air just before they plunged into the water.

  “Go down the slide with me like that,” said Billy.

  Surfacing, Kiara and Kai smiled at one another and then swam to the side of the pool, where Kiara put her hands on his shoulders and kissed him quickly. Then she turned, grasped the rails, and climbed up the ladder out of the water, leaving Kai to study her behind, a look of pure bliss cemented on his face.

  While Carly wasn’t capable of feeling as happy as Kai looked, she supposed she could make Billy that happy. That was something. While she wouldn’t have great memories of this night, he would at least have great memories of her. This was how she had revised the history of the end of her senior year as it was happening. It worked as long as she wrote in her journal as if she were someone else. Tonight’s entry would be written from the perspective of Billy. One day she would by and large forget this night, God willing, but should she ever choose to go back and read an old journal, she would read the story of a boy whose dreams came true six years after he had dreamed them because in a moment when he felt he had nothing to lose, he had risked it all.

  “Okay. But I’m not kissing you like that.”

  “Yeah…,” he said, unconvinced. “Maybe not the first or second time, but I suggest keeping an open mind.” Then he shot her his best smile.

  She laughed and walked toward the line at the bottom of the ladder.

  As he walked beside her, he said, “Also, since I promised you honesty, I must admit that I have every intention of copping a little feel on the way down the slide but having the good manners to pretend it was an accident.”

  “So, like, a boob graze with your arm instead of your hand,” she clarified.

  “Well, if you’re in front and my arms are around you, these things could happen.”

  “Eh, fair enough.” While she had boobs, she might as well let Billy O’Brien enjoy them, and she might as well enjoy the attention she got from having them. There was a good chance that one day, that would all change.

  Amy

  As she toweled her hair dry, she studied herself in the top half of the bathroom mirror, the half not covered by wrapping paper. In it, she saw her short, masculine hairdo, somewhere between blond and white instead of the red it had been, and her green eyes that still reminded her of broken glass.

  Any sense of control over her life that she had once had was long gone now. All the organic kale, beets, and blueberries she had eaten several times a week for most of her life, all the worthless natural deodorant and other natural products she had ever used, none of it had been enough to overcome her BRCA2 gene mutation and keep her cancer-free.

  And all the good deeds, the acts of love, the effort and care, and the little family they had created together had not been enough to make Paul truly love her and want to stay. There was so much she had no control over, as it turned out. There was no rhyme or reason to this crapshoot called life.

  She mused that no one had told her that even when breast cancer was technically over, it would leave her with unbearable intolerance for entire aspects of her life. It should have been listed in the side effects of her treatment plan.

  She had expected to feel nothing but jubilant when treatment was over and the outcome was good. After all, so many people did not get such a good outcome. But often, it seemed that when her life was saved, it was also wrecked, and that made it hard to care about anything. She could not imagine any roads leading to happiness anymore, so there was nothing to lose. At least that was how she felt today. She didn’t know whether she would feel that way in six months or in a year or in three years. She only knew that in this moment, she felt dangerously unattached to the few things that she hadn’t already lost.

  She watched as her face and scalp broke out in a menopausal sweat. Compared with the side effects of chemo, menopause was manageable, but it was one more thing that left her feeling irreversibly changed and so much older than she had been a year ago. What she missed most was sleeping well.

  After opening the door to let the cold air into the steamy bathroom, she dressed and then began pacing the house, nervously, occasionally tossing another object into her tote—matches, a road atlas, a flashlight.

  She paused in the doorway of Carly’s room, a space Carly had just outgrown. The artifacts it held were reminiscent of the in-between time when she wasn’t a girl and wasn’t a woman.

  To say her cancer had been hard on her daughter and their relationship would have been an understatement. It had hit bottom nearly two months ago, in early April just before her second surgery, when Carly had asked, “If you had breast cancer, why are you getting all your other lady parts taken out?”

  Amy had paused, still undecided about how to handle this. Out of time to make that decision now, she simply told the truth. “I have the BRCA 2 gene mutation. This means I had about a sixty to seventy percent chance of getting breast cancer in my lifetime, and it means I have a twenty percent chance of getting ovarian cancer, which is a really scary cancer. Often, by the time a woman knows there is a problem, it’s too late. I want to live, so I’m getting rid of all my high-risk body parts.”

  “Is that the thing Angelina Jolie has that made her run out and get her boobs chopped off?”

  Amy winced at Carly’s word choice—boobs chopped off. As if it were done by a lumberjack with a big ax or maybe an ax murderer who hadn’t finished the job. “She has the BRCA1 gene mutation. It’s similar, but not exactly the same. I think she had an eighty percent chance of getting breast cancer.”

  Carly paused and then said, “You said gene. As in genetic.”

  “Yes.…” Amy watched Carly’s face change as the implications hit her.

  “Do I have it, too?” Carly had Paul’s eyes, and Amy hoped like hell that Carly had inherited much more from Paul—namely, his ability to consistently repair both strands of his DNA instead of just one strand like her.

  Immense dread filled Amy as she struggled to answer. “I don’t know. There’s a fifty-fifty chance. When you turn eighteen in August, you can have the test if you want.”

  Suddenly, Carly seemed angry. “Why would I want to know? So I can run out and get my boobs chopped off? Or just know that there’s a gun pointed at my head? Why would I want to live like that?”

  “You don’t have to get the test now. But when you’re twenty-five, you should find out so that if you have this gene mutation, you can get annual MRIs on your breasts. That way, if…” Amy couldn’t even say it because it was too unthinkable. She choked up and then finished, “If you ever did get cancer, it would be caught … in time.”

  Carly froze in terror for a minute as she looked into her mother’s eyes and then said, “I am not going to be like you. I’m not anything like you. This is your problem—not mine.”

  Amy saw past the anger to the fear and wanted to reach out and hug Carly, but the wounds on her chest were still fresh and painful. If Carly resisted or fought … if she was anything but extremely gentle, she would hurt Amy. In that moment that Amy hesitated, Carly took off. With the exception of Carly’s one-word answers, it was the last time they had talked. Carly had been avoiding her ever since, staying out too late or even spending the night at friends’ houses without asking first, sometimes coming home drunk or smelling like marijuana, running wild and reckless as if she believed she was doomed so nothing mattered.

  Even Paul, a police officer for twenty-five years now, could not rein her in, although in moments where Amy had been independent enough to be left alone, he had tried. The best he could come up with was a plan to ambush her after graduation and take her to Amy’s aunt Rae in the mountains of northern New Mexico, where she would work in her aunt’s outfitting business and hopefully straighten up be
fore she self-destructed. When Amy and Paul had returned home from the ceremony last night, he had wordlessly packed a suitcase with things he thought Carly would need and put it in his trunk.

  This morning, he had slipped out and gone to the gym before Amy was able to wake up enough to get the words out. Now the pressure of the words inside of her left her pacing around the house. She looked at family pictures on the wall. Disneyland. A trip to the Gulf Coast. Harvesting a small vegetable garden with Carly when she was just a little bitty thing. Birthdays, Christmases, and Halloweens. Togetherness. Traditions. Family. She was about to blow them all up.

  With moments to spare, she walked out to drop bills into the mailbox, a detail she wanted to wrap up before she left. She waved to Jim, who was standing in his yard visiting with a neighbor who had just moved in on the other side of him, and he waved her over. The conversation started off normally enough. Jim put his arm around her and introduced her to Mark, the new neighbor. “Amy is a survivor,” he said. That word made her bristle for so many reasons. In this particular case, her experience with cancer wasn’t really what Amy would have chosen to lead with. Her struggle was personal, and this was a stranger. It was none of his business. The conversation got even weirder when Jim jokingly referred to her hysterectomy as being “field dressed.” He didn’t know her well enough to make a joke like that. And all of her suffering was no joke. She really had no sense of humor about it at all. Just when she didn’t think it could get worse, he said, “When Helen first found out, she was thinking about shaving her head in solidarity with you, but I told her if she did … bye, bye!”