What You Left Behind

by Jessica Verdi

  “I wish we could stay here forever,” I whispered against her mouth.

  “Me too,” she whispered back. “It’s perfect here.” But then she pulled away. “Wait, I still have to tell you something.”

  “Anything.”

  She sat up and pulled me with her. “I haven’t told you this yet because I didn’t want to freak you out, and things have been going so well with us and we’ve been having so much fun that I didn’t want to ruin it. But I went to the doctor today—”

  “Doctor?” I repeated. “What’s wrong, are you still sick?”

  She hesitated. “Yeah, I am. Um…” She peeked at me through her jet-black eyelashes. “I…well…I have cancer.”

  What?

  I didn’t know if I said the word out loud or not, but suddenly all the warm, happy, floaty feelings from the I love yous were gone, gone, gone.

  “It’s melanoma.” Meg picked at a pilly part of the blanket. “Or it started that way. There was this tiny mole on the back of my leg that I didn’t notice had changed. And I started feeling really bad all the time, so about four months ago, I finally went to get checked out, and it turned out that the melanoma had metastasized to my liver, gallbladder, and kidneys.”

  I was listening, soaking up every single word, trying to understand, but it all felt like a dream. Like I was watching some very special episode of a primetime drama during February sweeps, and the writers had thrown this curveball for one of the main characters, but don’t worry, you know she’ll be cancer free by the end of the season, because, after all, she’s the show’s star.

  “The treatments make things tricky. It makes me feel really gross, and it’s why my skin is so pale and why I couldn’t go to the dance—I have to stick to low-key activities.”

  Her skin. The skin I thought was so pretty was actually cancer skin.

  “I went in for a week of chemotherapy in April, so I was out of school for a couple of weeks. I don’t know if you noticed.” I shook my head, and she shrugged. “They do it in rounds, giving your body time to recover a bit before they go back and do it again, so I’m on break now. I still get sick from it sometimes though, as you’ve seen.”

  So that’s what that was. She didn’t have the flu. She was sick because of fucking chemotherapy.

  “But I have to go back in soon. So, um…I thought I should tell you.”

  I didn’t know what to say or do or feel. The best I could come up with—God, I’m such an idiot—was, “But you still have your hair.”

  That made her smile at least. “Yeah, I was lucky. I didn’t lose my hair in the first round. It got a little thinner, which is why I stopped blow-drying it. I figured I might as well be good to it, stop trying to wrangle it into something it’s not, and maybe I’d get to keep it longer. But my doctor told me yesterday that they’re upping the dose the next time around…so I’m probably going to lose it then.”

  “But…” I mumbled. “I love your hair.”

  Meg looked sad. “Me too.”

  I knew I needed to say something else, something better. So I forced my brain to clear itself and said, “Will you be okay?”

  “I think so. The doctor said the first round of chemo was somewhat successful, and the masses have started to show indications of shrinking. But there’s still a long way to go.” She looked me straight in the eye. “The survival rates for this kind of thing aren’t great. You should know that, but…I just have this feeling everything will be fine.”

  Everything will be fine. Yes! Good! Okay then! I grabbed her hands, suddenly needing to touch her, to remind myself that she was still here, that even though she had this disease, it didn’t mean she was going to die. “Promise?”

  “Promise.” She gave a little smile. “Do you want to take back what you said earlier?”

  I blinked. “That I love you?” I shook my head. “Why would you even think that?”

  “Okay, good. Because I have something else I need to tell you.”

  “Oh God, now what?” I asked before I could stop myself.

  Meg laughed. “Don’t worry, this one is better. At least, I hope you’ll think so.”

  I waited.

  “I want to have sex,” she said. Just like that, all direct and to the point.

  “What?”

  “I want to have sex,” she repeated. “With you. Today.”

  It wasn’t the sexiest proposition I’d ever gotten, but damn if I wasn’t immediately on board. “Are you sure? I mean, can you?”

  “I’m completely sure. And yes, of course I can. I’m not on my deathbed.” She paused. “Do you? Want to, I mean?” Her face was all red, embarrassed. As if she really thought I was going to say no.

  I leaned forward and kissed her with everything I had. Soon we were horizontal, me hovering over Meg, looking down into her excited, trusting face. I kissed her again, gently, wanting to show her how much I loved her. “Does that answer your question?”

  She giggled.

  But there was a problem. “Did you bring a condom? I don’t have one on me.” Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  “Don’t worry, I’m on the pill.”

  That surprised me. “Have you done this before?”

  “No, but I’ve been on the pill since last year. Helps with cramps.”

  “Oh.”

  “Have you done it before?”

  I cleared my throat a little. “Uh…well…yeah. Is that okay?”

  “Of course. I figured as much anyway.”

  I was still hovering over her, paused in suspended animation, waiting for her to press play. But there were still more things to say. “The pill only prevents pregnancy, not…you know, other stuff. Not that I have any of that stuff,” I amended quickly. “I don’t. I swear.”

  She smiled. “I may not have ever done this before, but I know how it works. Ryden, I have cancer. I’m in chemotherapy. My whole life is a guessing game. All I want is to do this, with you, before it’s too late. Please. If you say you’re fine, I believe you.”

  I gazed down at her beautiful, pink mouth. “I wish I had waited for you,” I whispered and brought my lips to hers.

  June 28…

  “Ryden,” Meg said.

  I almost didn’t hear her at first. I was tracing my fingers up her leg, slowly, up, up, up, almost at the bottom of her shorts. I definitely didn’t notice the shake in her voice until she said my name again, louder.

  My hand stopped where it was.

  “You okay?” I asked, starting to get scared. We’d already had one enormous, way-too-serious, life-changing conversation a couple of weeks ago. I really wasn’t ready for another one yet.

  “I…um…” She couldn’t get her words out, which was rare for her. And she wouldn’t look at me.

  “What is it?” I sat up and grabbed both her hands, relieved at the way she held on tight.

  She took a shallow, trembling breath. “I’m pregnant.”

  Moments like those don’t mean anything while they’re happening. I mean, they mean everything, but at the time, your brain is completely fucked. I know because I’ve experienced a lot of those mind-blowing moments recently. You can’t remember your own name, let alone make sense of whatever you’ve learned. That comes later.

  In the moment, nothing makes sense. So really, even though it’s probably the biggest moment of your life, it’s also a nonmoment. Instead of an exclamation point, there’s a gaping black hole.

  As Meg studied me, waiting for me to respond, time started ticking again. The only thing going through my head was fuuuuuuuuck. But I couldn’t very well say that, could I?

  So I went for the brilliant, “But you’re on the pill.”

  To which she answered, “Yeah.”

  “Guess it didn’t work.”

  “Guess not.”

  Neither of us was going to win an award
for Ability to Conduct Intelligent Conversations While Under Severe Emotional Stress.We got quiet again, and I squeezed her hands tighter, not wanting to let go, as the bigger picture started to form. Of course. She couldn’t keep it. Duh. There were other factors in play here. I started to breathe a little bit easier.

  “I’ll come up with the money,” I said. “I’ll go to the appointment with you and everything. We’ll get through this. Everything will be fine.”

  She shook her head. “It’s not that simple.”

  “What do you mean? You start back with chemo on Monday.” Shit—the chemo. That was probably why the pill didn’t work. Why hadn’t I thought of that two weeks ago?

  “I know. That’s how I found out I’m pregnant. I had to go in for pre-chemo blood work yesterday.”

  “So…? They’re not gonna let you go back to chemo if you’re pregnant, Meg.”

  “I know.” She kept her eyes down. I hated not being able to see them. “But…I need to figure out what’s more important to me.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. For a nerdy smart girl, she was being pretty goddamn stupid. She had to go back to chemo. It was the only way she’d get better.

  “Well,” I said, unable to stop the biting tone from creeping into my voice, “I know what’s important to me. There’s no choice here.”

  She looked up finally, and the second her dark eyes met mine, I knew she’d already made her decision.

  And that’s when the fighting started.

  Chapter 17

  On Friday after work, I finally give in and tell Mom what I’m looking for.

  She blinks a few times, like she’s thinking really hard. There’s a Sandra Bullock movie paused on the TV. It’s not The Lake House. “And the one you found has a checked box next to Mabel’s name?” she repeats.

  “Yeah. Why, you know something about it?”

  She shakes her head. “No. What did it say?”

  I tell her what the first journal revealed, and she says, “I’m not surprised.”

  “What do you mean? What are you not surprised about?”

  “That she wanted to have the baby even though she knew she might not make it.”

  “What?”

  “It makes sense, Ry. Think about it. She wanted to feel like she had done something important with her life. That’s how I felt when I was pregnant with you, even after I knew your father wasn’t going to be around to help me. Suddenly it was as if my life was so much bigger than just me. And I can only imagine how much stronger that feeling must be when you don’t think you have much time left.”

  I drop my head back against the couch and stare up at the ceiling. “But she didn’t tell anyone she didn’t think she had much time left! She kept saying how she would go back to treatment after the baby was born. She made me believe she thought everything would be fine! She lied, Mom.”

  Mom doesn’t say anything. She’s probably trying to figure out what she could possibly say that won’t make me more upset.

  I shake my head. “So you’re saying you haven’t seen any journals around anywhere.”

  Mom sighs. “No. I’m sorry.”

  • • •

  “Want to play a game?” Joni asks me at work on Saturday.

  “A game?”

  “A game. You know, for to have fun?” She crosses her eyes and sticks her tongue out at me.

  I laugh. “Um. Sure.”

  “Right this way, sir.”

  I walk beside her as she walks slowly up and down the aisles. She seems to be paying more attention to the people in the store than the items on the shelves, which is kind of the opposite of what we usually do at work.

  I lean forward and whisper in her ear. Her hair smells like Sour Patch Kids. Weird, but oddly appealing. “What are you doing?”

  “Just wait for it.” We see an old, white-haired man in a mechanical wheelchair. “Okay. See that guy?” she whispers to me as we pass him. “He’s ninety-four years old, and he has a twenty-three-year-old wife. Her name is Brenda, and she’s had not one but two breast enhancement procedures. She married him for his money, of course, but he doesn’t care. Today’s his birthday, and he has big plans for tonight, involving whipped cream and chocolate syrup.”

  Sure enough, the shopping basket on the old man’s lap contains whipped cream and chocolate syrup, as well as a container of cherries.

  I turn to face her. “How the hell did you know that?”

  She laughs. “I didn’t. I made it up. The guy’s probably making ice cream sundaes with his grandkids. But that’s not nearly as much fun as my version, is it?”

  I feel a smile spreading across my face. “This kinda reminds me of this game I play with my mom. She creates customized event invitations and shows me her materials, then I try to guess the kind of people who’ve ordered the invitations.”

  Joni raises her eyebrows. “I’ll have to meet this mom of yours. She sounds like my kind of chick.”

  I’m about to say, “Oh, sure, anytime,” but that wouldn’t work, would it? She’d find out about Meg and Hope in about a second and a half.

  I give a noncommittal shrug instead.

  “This game is a little different though,” she says. “The point is to come up with a ridiculous story, not try to guess the truth.”

  I nod.

  “Give it a try.”

  “I don’t think I’ll be very good at it.” Especially the way my brain’s been lately.

  “I’m not taking no for an answer, buddy.” A lady walks past pushing a cart filled with nothing but tofu. Joni nods at her. “Perfect. Go.”

  “Umm…she was just diagnosed with heart disease and her doctor told her she needs to eat healthier.”

  She shakes her head. “Nope. Try again.”

  “What do you mean, ‘nope’? There’s no correct answer—I thought the point was to make something up.”

  “The point is to use your imagination. Try again.”

  I study the woman. She’s got frizzy, gray-streaked hair and is wearing a lot of clunky metal jewelry that looks like it was made with a hammer. Actually, it’s a lot like the top of Joni’s stepbrother’s tree sculpture.

  Got it.

  “She’s an avant-garde artist,” I whisper, watching the woman push her cart toward the checkout. “She spent the ’70s and ’80s in New York City but had enough of that scene and moved to New Hampshire after Andy Warhol died. She’s semiretired now but has been commissioned to create a sculpture made solely out of tofu for a PETA fund-raiser.”

  I look back at Joni. She stares at me with a crooked smile. “Ladies and gentlemen, the student has become the teacher!” she shouts, skipping around the rest of the shoppers in the aisle.

  We keep the game up for over an hour, whispering stories about a guy who refuses to eat anything but foods that start with the letters C, R, or W, because those are his initials, the couple who’s planning to fill their swimming pool with rice pudding to celebrate their anniversary, and the frazzled woman who’s buying enough hot dogs and hamburgers to feed her husband’s entire extended family—who arrived, unannounced, from the Czech Republic earlier this morning.

  We get zero work done, but we move from aisle to aisle enough that no one notices.

  I don’t realize until later that it’s the first time in over a week my thoughts aren’t entirely consumed with journals.

  Chapter 18

  Monday morning, Mom gets up early to go with me to drop Hope at the day care downtown. It’s in a municipal-type building, and you have to go through security to get in. We have to take Hope out of her car seat so it can go through the X-ray machine. Mom carries her as she walks through the metal detector.

  Mom hasn’t said much about my decision to go with this place. It seemed like she’d been pulling for the nanny option, but ever since I made my choice, she’s
been all business about the downtown day care, like it was the plan all along. She’s probably just glad I made a decision at all.

  We walk down a few different cinder block corridors, following the handwritten signs for the child care room. Harried parents in badly fitting suits and various uniforms hurry past us.

  The day care is a large room with mismatched tiles and area rugs and crayon drawings on the walls. It seems clean enough, but the furniture is old and worn. Freestanding shelving units and cubby bins divide the room into sections. Signs hang from the ceiling over each area: 6 Weeks–1 Year. 1–3. 3–5.

  And it’s really, really loud. There are kids everywhere. Each section is more crowded than I imagined. Kids crying, screaming for their mommies, running around, squealing, fighting over blocks and books and markers. I have an instant headache.

  Mom and I head over to the front desk. The woman sitting there is holding a cup of coffee with both hands and guzzling it as if it’s Gatorade at halftime.

  “Excuse me,” Mom says, but the woman holds up a finger for us to wait while she takes one last gulp.

  “Mondays,” she says, shaking her head.

  Mom makes a kind of commiserating I totally hear ya chuckle that I have never heard her make before. She doesn’t work in an office. And she loves her job. She doesn’t care about Mondays. I raise an eyebrow at her, and she shrugs.

  “We’re here to drop off Hope Brooks,” Mom says to the woman. “Today’s her first day.”

  The woman punches some buttons on her computer’s keyboard with her way-too-long nails. “Right. Brooks. Full days, seven a.m. through three p.m., Monday through Friday, is that correct?”

  “Yes,” Mom says, and the woman pushes some forms across the counter at her.

  “Make sure all the contact information is correct, fill out the rest. Don’t leave anything blank. And sign.”

  Mom slides the papers to me and hands me a pen.

  I look at her. “Can’t you do it?”

  “You’re the parent, Ryden. I’m not her legal guardian.”

  I let out a little groan and complete the forms as quickly as possible. Name, address, emergency contact, allergy information, feeding information, insurance, blah, blah, blah. I hand them back.