Fix You

by Beck Anderson

  Cover

  Title Page

  Fix You

  ...

  Beck Anderson

  ...

  Omnific Publishing

  Los Angeles

  Copyright Information

  Fix You, Copyright © 2013 by Beck Anderson

  All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the publisher.

  ...

  Omnific Publishing

  1901 Avenue of the Stars, 2nd Floor

  Los Angeles, California 90067

  www.omnificpublishing.com

  ...

  First Omnific eBook edition, September 2013

  First Omnific trade paperback edition, September 2013

  ...

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

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  Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  ...

  Anderson, Beck.

  Fix You / Beck Anderson – 1st ed

  ISBN: 978-1-623420-48-2

  1. Contemporary Romance — Fiction. 2. Hollywood — Fiction. 3. Widow — Fiction. 4. Idaho — Fiction. I. Title

  ...

  Cover Design by Micha Stone and Amy Brokaw

  Interior Book Design by Coreen Montagna

  Dedication

  To the Anderson men:

  Thank you for putting up with my writer-ly insanity.

  I love you.

  Prologue: The Long Way Around

  IT’S A BLUEBIRD DAY. Warm spring skiing, clear skies, soft snow. On Upper Nugget, the turns come to me easily, and I feel for a brief moment like an expert skier, someone terribly suave and possibly European.

  I watch Peter. He makes long, lazy turns, and they seem to rise from the bottom of his skis, as if suggested not by him but by the corduroy powder beneath him. Turn here, the mountain whispers, and so he does.

  I try not to be exasperated. The boys are between us. Hunter looks more and more like his dad. At nine now, he has begun to stand tall in his boots. His brown-blond hair riffles in the wind.

  Beau races to catch up. He looks very small on skis, a compact bundle of energy. At six, he still is a little boy, though heaven help the person who dares say that to his face. He tucks determinedly, in a constant effort to keep up with his brother and, more distantly, his father.

  The wide, sunny slope begins to narrow. Now is when skiers like me start to tense up. The run begins a steady banking that will end in a slender trough called Second Chance. What had been an ego-boosting run for me quickly turns surly.

  As I brace myself for the transition, I notice that Peter has pulled up at the top of the shot. I stop, grateful for the chance to gather myself and assess the risk-to-benefit ratio before me.

  “Why’d you stop?” I ask him. He usually never stops, not even to let the kids catch up. The boys have shot on down the run, making tighter and more frequent turns as it narrows like a funnel. I can see the chairlift at the bottom and can almost make out the liftie with the shovel, smoothing out the ramp.

  Peter holds up a gloved hand, not answering for a second. When he does, he is uncharacteristically winded. “Give me a minute.”

  “Is there something wrong?”

  He smiles, shakes his head no, still leaning on his poles. “I’m pretty sure it’s your fault. You keep me up at night.”

  I elbow him. If it wasn’t so cold, I might blush. I shuffle my skis, trying to stay warm and ready for the next burst of skiing.

  “You doing this?” Peter nods down the tight stretch of snowy hill.

  I assess. The right side of the run, the side I like because the angle is more consistent, has been scraped off. I can see icy streaks of hard pack where the powder is gone.

  The left side of the run is moguls. The powder has been bulldozed over to that part by the morning’s skiers and boarders. The piles of snow are menacingly uneven. The cat track leading into the trees at the edge of the run—the gentle, safe way down—calls to me.

  “I’m going around.” I can see too many opportunities for disaster today.

  “Okay, Miss Cat Track Fever. See you at the bottom.” Peter readies his poles for a split second and shoots down the run before I’ve even fully settled into my decision to follow the easier path.

  As usual, the boys have all left me by myself, contemplating, while they take action.

  I sigh, adjust a mitten, and push off to cruise my way down.

  “Don’t mind me!” I say this to the pines and the crunch of snow as I leave the run for another day.

  Peter sleeps, but mostly the Fentanyl has taken effect, willing the pain to leave and the body to rest. I suppose he made the right choice a few days ago. After a long five months, he’s insisted on having himself moved to the hospice center. I had no idea, standing on the slopes with him in April, that we’d be here now, making decisions like this.

  His thought is that the boys do not need their home turned into a hospital wing.

  I guess I could agree with him, but I can’t help the strong urge to surround him with known people, items, rooms, anything. It feels like we need to batten down the hatches and ride out the storm, and here he is insisting on taking a trip in a rowboat.

  He’s warned me for weeks. About the trip part. And he’s not talking metaphorically anymore. He is planning on departing.

  Again, I can’t blame him. The doctors have tried increasingly creative and desperate ways to manage his pain. They have been increasingly unsuccessful. And lately, there’ve been very few discussions about beating back the illness. It seems to have won in its effort to camp out with us. When words like metastasized and terminal began to be tossed around, we stopped fighting on that front. Now we’re in a different theater of war. I guess we could call it the Managing the End campaign.

  We could call it that, but I can’t give voice to it. I hang on by a very, very tenuous grasp to full consciousness. But I haven’t let the waves of hysteria win, at least not yet. A few times I’ve found myself locked in a stall in the hospice women’s restroom, but I manage to rally enough to make it back to the room and Peter’s bed each time.

  Right now I sit next to him. I’m kind of cheating about the sitting. I’ve pulled my lounger up to the side of his bed, and my head and upper torso rest forward on it. This pose looks suspiciously like the kids in their school desks when they play Heads Up Seven Up.

  I listen to him breathe shallowly in and out for a while. My mind drifts, and I think about the message I need to craft to the boys’ teachers, one that explains they will start the school year late, owing to the fact that they have a gravely ill father.

  I don’t know when it is exactly, but that train of thought gives way to the weight of exhaustion, and I am out. I don’t think sleep is the word, because this is the absence of anything. Total deprivation leads to blank unconsciousness.

  And just as suddenly, I am upright in the chair, and I know Peter has taken the opportunity of my sleep to leave. His body, though it’s been still for weeks now, is a different kind of still. Before I’m even awake for a second, I know he is no longer breathing.

  I stand and begin to call for someone in a loud wail of a voice. Thankfully the boys are away. I can pretend later for them that Peter’s passing was peaceful. Actually, his part of it was, relatively, but my reaction is proving not to be.

  His eyes are closed, and in the relaxed state of death, his mouth looks strangely smaller, drawn. His hands are at his sides.

  Nurse Ann comes in, alerted by my wet cries for hel
p. She checks his vital signs or lack of them, makes a note of the time on his chart, and gives my hand a squeeze. She whispers a soft “I’m so sorry, hon” before she exits the room. Then she leaves me with myself and my grief and my gone husband.

  The thing I am most acutely aware of, before I lose myself to the sobbing, is how spacious the room feels with one less soul in it.

  1: The Spaces in Between

  I DON’T KNOW HOW to describe the time that passes next. Yes, there are stages of grief. Yes, there are plenty of abysses that seem to suck any attempt at normalcy into them.

  But routine often saves me. When I feel things getting bad, I notice that the house has gotten overly bad too. Toilets need to be scrubbed, and dishes have multiplied while soaking in the sink. If I throw myself a life preserver of chores and errands and rides for the boys, not only does the house start to look better, but I’m able to hang on through the riptides of depression that want to pull me out to sea.

  This routine cannot, however, help me overlook the necessities prompted by Peter’s death. It is not routine, nor is it a standard household chore, to meet with an attorney to discuss putting things in my name that were in his. There is nothing fathomable or predictable about the way it feels to summarily strip his name off of the title to the car, for instance, or the mortgage to the house. Or to discuss the life insurance policy—the one I tried to talk him out of because we were both so young. I don’t like the way the lawyer says that policy will take care of me and the boys for a good long while. Suddenly we’re comfortable, and it’s because I’ve lost my husband. That’s the worst kind of fortune. It isn’t routine, all of this. What it is, is treason, as far as I’m concerned. It’s an admission that, yes, I believe he really is gone for good and, no, I’m not waiting for him to come back.

  The least I could do for the person who waited for me while I fumbled around for my keys for the nine millionth time in the grocery store parking lot is wait for him. It’s the loyal thing to do. Either that or follow him in a prompt manner.

  Yet I have no choice but to stay. The other people in the world who rely on me for their basic survival force me to cope with what has happened. That’s actually one comfort: I don’t have any options. I can’t think about doing anything but sticking around, because there are two people who need me to be here, now more than ever.

  This doesn’t make it any easier, though. Gray days stretch into one another.

  Months slip through the house surreptitiously, like uninvited spirits.

  Eventually, I wake up one day to both my boys standing by my bedside. Their eyes are wide with concern.

  “What’s up, boys?” I sit up, rub the sleepers out of my eyes, and try to shake off the weight of the anvil sitting on my chest, my familiar companion since Peter died.

  Beau elbows Hunter. He’s been appointed spokesperson.

  “Mom, we called Gran, and she said to get your butt up out of bed and go see Joe. We told her you slept most all of the weekend.”

  This is what they’re wide-eyed about. They tattled on me to Gran, and they’re afraid of the consequences. The thought makes me want to cry.

  “Oh, guys, come here.” I pull both of them to me for a long hug. “Listen. I’ll hop in the shower, and I’ll call Joe for an appointment right after, okay?”

  Joe is our family doctor. He is also my best friend’s husband. And he used to ski with Peter. He’s patched up every one of the Reynolds clan at one point or another. I guess it’s time he patched me up. This is not something I look forward to, but the way the boys look at me is reason enough to suck it up and call.

  Sure enough, when I talk to the receptionist at Joe’s office, my mom has called ahead. Great. She’s staged an intervention long-distance. Since I went to college, we’ve never lived in the same town, but now that I’m alone in Boise with the boys, she keeps tabs on us more closely. Mom and Dad live in LA, and we visit them there and at their condo in Indio a lot. And if I asked them to move in with us in Boise, they just might do it. I’m pretty certain that would be a disaster, which is why the subject has never been discussed, but they do take good care of us.

  The appointment is for ten. I drop the boys at the sitter and drive through town in the pouring rain. When I get there, the receptionist hustles me into a room. I check to see if I’m bleeding anywhere; I don’t think I’ve ever gotten such prompt service at the doctor’s.

  I sit on a chair next to the exam table. After a few minutes, Joe sits across from me.

  “What’s going on, Kelly?” He’s a fit, glossy-haired Asian man, who looks trim and put-together in his white lab coat. I showered, but that’s about the only thing I have going for me currently.

  “I feel rotten. I think you may have heard why.”

  He takes a deep breath, lets it out. “Are you taking care of yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “Exercising?”

  “No.”

  “Sleeping?”

  “No. Unless it’s the random times when I can, and then all I do is sleep.”

  “Reading? Taking the dog on walks? Entertaining the thought of seeing your friends? Learning how to cook? Thinking about going back to teaching?”

  “I get the point. What’s your point?”

  “I prescribe activity. You need to get out of the house. If you don’t make an effort at this, to exercise, or call Tessa up to have coffee, or to get a part-time job, I’ll prescribe something stronger. Antidepressants stronger. You catch my drift?”

  I surrender. “Yes. I promise I’ll do something.” I start to tear up.

  “Oh, Kelly, listen, we all love you, and we’re worried sick about you. But it’s been seven months. It’s time to ease back into it.”

  I nod.

  He scribbles on a prescription pad. “Try running again. It’s good for you. Gets the endorphins going.” He hands me the slip of paper. “That’s the address of the store I like for running shoes.”

  When I leave the office, the sun has come out. I squint and stop for a minute before I get in the car. The smell of the rain on the warming pavement is clean. I remember that I like that smell. I decide to give re-entry into normalcy more of an effort.

  I go get new running shoes on the way home. I call Tessa, Joe’s wife, to have coffee. The pain is still there, hanging on under the surface, but I try to live through it, kind of like running through an injury. It feels awkward.

  Finally, I’m able to put two days together where I function almost normally. Then I’m able to go three days with only brief crying episodes when I wake and when I fall asleep. And yes, after a long while, there’s the day I make it through without a tear shed. The day after that is spent in bed, inconsolable, but still, the tear-free day is on record.

  There’s always an ache under my collarbones, but every day that I brush my teeth and put on pants instead of pajamas, I call a good day. I wait for there to be more of those than the not-so-good days.

  2: Departure

  A FEW MONTHS AFTER my visit with Joe I’m able to stitch a few “together” days together. After six months, I make it a few weeks. And now, with the time that’s passed, apart from the recurrent ache under my collarbones and the voids Peter has left all over my life, I’m pretty sure I at least appear to be a functioning human being.

  Today, for instance, the boys and I are taking a very functional trip to visit my parents. This is something regular people do. No problem. Tessa takes us all to the airport. I love her dearly. She and Joe take good care of us. In a town without family, they are our family. With Mom and Dad two states away, I’ve leaned on Tessa and Joe a lot in the last two years.

  She looks over at me. Her sleek dark bob bounces as she twists her hands on the steering wheel, the conspicuous diamond ring on her left hand glittering with all the movement.

  “Are we going to park anytime soon?” I try hard to keep the exasperation out of my voice. Tessa gets worked up when we leave. It’s sweet, but her worry about details and departure times and
whatnot does nothing to relax me.

  She finally pulls her oversized SUV into the spot at the curb. The boys hop out, shoving each other to get to the tailgate first to unload.

  “Boys! Just get your stuff. Get it and go wait by the kiosk. This is not a race. We’re all getting on the same plane.”

  “Mind your mother, boys.” Tessa pulls a suitcase from the back of the car. Hunter and Beau finally have all of their stuff and drag their luggage into the terminal, leaving me with my best friend at the curb.

  “I want to kill them already, and we aren’t even on the plane yet.”

  She pulls one last bag from the back of her car. It’s a shiny tote with the Eiffel Tower on it. “Here’s the remedy. This is my flight bag. Delve into these goodies and ignore the wombats until you touch down in Cali.”

  She reveals the contents: a stack of gossip magazines. From the looks of it, most of them are “Sexiest Man” or “Hottest Hunks” editions.

  “Quality journalism. I feel smarter already.”

  She shows me one in particular, reads from the cover. “Look at this gorgeous creature. And inside, ‘Twenty-Five Things You Didn’t Know About Andy Pettigrew!’”

  I look at the tall, lean, handsome man on the cover. “I know nothing about him.”

  Tessa strokes the cover guy’s tuxedoed body with a manicured nail. “Except that he’s smoking hot.”

  “Thank you, Tessa. I’ll take good care of these. I better go herd the boys on to the plane before they get detained by the TSA.” I give her a big hug, and I probably squeeze a little too tightly for the light conversation we just had.

  She pulls back and looks in my eyes. “Take care of yourself. That’s what this trip is for. Run lots, sleep lots, rest lots.”

  “I promise.” I sling the bag over my shoulder and head into the terminal.

  3: One Morning Run

  I WAKE UP TO A DIM ROOM. Soft, blue light comes from a monitor. I sit in a chair in the corner.