by Pamela Ribon
A space opened up to the right. I pulled in and drove alongside the Lexus that was previously in front of me so I could put a face to the personalized license plate. I glanced at the driver, who was an older, Hispanic female. She was shaking her head while talking on her Bluetooth headset, fingers outstretched on her steering wheel.
I’m gonna go with Superstar 8.
“I hatechoo,” Smidge said.
“Why? Because I don’t support you on your little death wish?”
“Because you think things can be simple and then you judge me for not doing what you want me to do. You think I’m weak when I don’t do what you think I should do.”
“I cannot believe you just said that.” I felt my neck wrench as I turned to face her. “How is that any different than the way you think of me?”
“It is completely different.”
“In what way, Smidge?”
“I can’t believe you live twelve miles from the beach and it takes an hour to get there. This city is fucking stupid.”
It took another fifteen minutes to get to the water, which was the same length as the heavy sigh that came out of me.
Smidge jammed both of her feet into the sand and took as deep an inhale as she could muster. “This is good,” she said. “Can you bottle up this smell? This feels like it could help.”
I was still too upset to pretend everything was fine. I kept my fists in my pockets as I stared out at the horizon, shaking my head.
“Okay, that’s it,” Smidge said as she pushed me backward onto my butt, plopping directly into the damp sand. I was unprepared for her strength.
She straddled my stomach, sitting over me like an older brother about to spit in my face.
I didn’t struggle. “Get off me.”
Sand stuck to her cheek. She ran the back of her hand across her forehead as she sneered.
“This is officially the last time I talk to you about this,” she said. “This is it. I cannot get better. It sucks and it ain’t fair, and it’s embarrassing enough without you trying to make it sound like I am doing some kind of high-horse bullshit, which I assure you, I am not.”
She lifted her head to gasp a few breaths, trying to calm down. The tide was coming up around our feet, chilling the backs of my legs. My toes were numb from exposure.
Smidge continued. “You’re all I’ve got. I hate that I need you, but I do. When you were gone over at Tucker’s, I was lost. I tried to do it alone, and I couldn’t. I was miserable and terrified, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell Henry. Don’t make me break my husband’s heart. You need to start acting like my best friend. Not a husband, mother, teacher, or doctor. Do you understand?”
I lifted my left hand to her torso, and gently pressed my palm against her rib cage, cradling where I knew she was the most broken.
“Damn, Smidge,” I said, tears streaking across my face until they dripped warm into my ears. “Why didn’t you just say that in the first place?”
TWENTY-FOUR
I felt different after that. I don’t know how else to explain it, other than I had a purpose that was with Smidge, not because of her. I let our remaining time in Los Angeles play out as our last vacation together. We decided to cross off a few of Smidge’s wishes that had nothing to do with the business of her family.
Starting with skydiving.
She made me promise not to tell anybody, which is why this is probably the first you’ve heard of it. She somehow got it into her head that it was one thing she always wanted to do but had been too scared to try.
“What’s the worst that could happen, I die?” she asked. I was very concerned about her lungs at high altitudes, but her doctor told her by phone that the most dangerous thing was that she could panic. “I’ll be fine,” she insisted.
But I made the mistake of staying up the night before on the internet, reading about the risks. “Thirty-five people a year die doing this!” I told her as we headed toward what I hoped wasn’t going to be my final destination.
“Only thirty-five?” Smidge marveled. “I would’ve thought it’d be higher.”
I chickened out. It wasn’t my dream, and it wasn’t like we were going to hold hands as we went down. She’d be strapped to an expert, lost in her own tandem jump. I waited on the ground with a camera for what felt like forever.
Smidge wasn’t consistent in her fearlessness. The woman jumping out of that plane would leap just as high if she suddenly found herself standing next to a clown. Your mother never took you trick-or-treating because she was frightened by small children wearing masks. Henry did all the door-to-door stuff, shuffling you around on the early shift so he had time to get back home to deliver candy to the neighborhood ghosts and goblins knocking at the door. Smidge would hide in her bedroom, drinking, doing a horrible job of pretending she wasn’t terrified a child would break through the entryway and come running down the hallway, hell-bent on stealing her soul.
A girl with blond dreads, somehow looking shapely in a blue jumpsuit, pointed toward the sky. “There’s your friend,” she said.
At first it was just an orange dot. But that dot grew in size, twirling and swooping as it got closer to the ground. Eventually I could make out a parachute followed by the humans dangling underneath. The rest of it happened quite quickly. Smidge and her instructor swept one way, turned another, and then came to the ground with a thud.
“I did it!” she shouted at me, arms raised, struggling to move inside all that protective gear.
“Are you okay? Did it hurt?”
“A little, but I don’t care! This is so much better than acupuncture!”
Dinner that night was straight out of Smidge’s medical-marijuana-fueled fantasy: mac-’n’-cheese-’n’-In-N-Out—a double-meat cheeseburger stuffed with macaroni and cheese, slathered in heart attack. My friend might have been wasting away, but as we entertained her whims, I could feel myself growing larger.
“I just fell out of the sky!” Smidge said, cramming a handful of french fries into her mouth. “I couldn’t think of anything but that. No cancer up there. Just me falling to the ground, deciding to come back to the planet.”
She had repeated that story to me at least five times. With every retelling she’d remember another detail—how she wasn’t scared until the instructor asked if she was ready; how her brain initially disconnected from the experience as it looked like the earth was curved below her; how peaceful it was once the parachute took over, gently gliding them back to the ground. “I didn’t even think to be scared,” she always concluded. “Next time I bet I’ll be. This time I just did a lot of looking.”
She must have seen my face as I silently debated the probability of there being a next time. “I’m telling you, I feel great,” she said. “I feel so healthy. Maybe this is the secret,” she said. “Extremes will help keep me alive. Adrenaline and shock.”
“And heavy foods?”
“Yes. The heavier, the better! My body won’t have time to replicate mutated cells. It’ll be too busy keeping up with me. I love that I’m finally hungry again.”
I lifted my glass. “Cheers to that.”
She was halfway through getting a tattoo when I finally asked if there was a chance this was a version of a midlife crisis.
She stared down at the raised, red skin tight against her right hipbone. The thin, dark line would eventually form the name Jenny in cursive, discreetly hidden just below her waistband.
“Technically we can now confirm I had my midlife crisis at eighteen.” She winced, exhaling through a pucker.
She was trapped underneath the steady hand of a tattoo artist named Tiger, a white man with dark eyes and a thick, black bar driven through his septum. I decided to use her imprisonment to attempt to get some truth out of her.
“Henry said something the last night I was at your house,” I started, pausing to scratch my arm. “He said you still sometimes feel bad about James.”
“Bad? About your divorce?”
“Maybe. But I
don’t know, he used the word ‘guilty.’ And then he wouldn’t tell me what he meant. You know what he meant, don’t you?”
She went still. “I suppose you’re a big girl now,” she said.
The back of my neck became sticky and hot as the blood left my toes. Smidge had something to confess. I could tell because she wasn’t relishing this moment. Her face was a complete blank.
“You’re already divorced, so it shouldn’t matter,” she said. “But your husband once made a pass at me. There. The end. Weight lifted.”
Time slowed to a crawl. “What kind of pass?”
I hated how she would make me fish for painful information, yanking the truth out of her crumb by crumb until we dug into what really mattered. I’d sometimes have to embark on an hour-long excavation in order to finally start hacking at the most important bits.
She pretended to be concerned with her tattoo. “Do you need a drink of water, Tiger? You’ve been working for so long.”
“He’s fine,” I said. “Answer the question.”
“He made the kind of pass that men shouldn’t make at their fiancée’s best friend.”
“Fiancée? When did this happen?”
“That’s such a specific question.”
“That’s the point.”
“I punched him in the balls. Don’t you want to hear that part?”
Tiger pulled back in his chair. “Do you ladies need a moment?”
“No,” Smidge said. “I might need a witness.”
I didn’t appreciate her trying to lighten the mood. “What happened?”
“You were fixing to get married and I didn’t want to ruin anything.”
“Ruin what? How ‘fixing’ were we?”
She didn’t answer.
“A month?” No answer. “A week?” Still no answer. “A day?”
“Yes. A day. The day. I mean, technically.”
“The day? My wedding day? It happened on my wedding day and you didn’t tell me?”
Was it okay to punch a woman with cancer? There had to be times when everybody would get behind it. What if she were kicking kittens, or sitting on a baby?
I left Smidge trapped in that chair so I could pace the parking lot.
No wonder she was so supportive of the divorce. She practically moved all my furniture into that empty apartment all by herself. The weight certainly had been lifted, not just now when she told me, but back when the final papers were signed, when she and James no longer held a secret bond.
That must be why she thought I could just be with Henry once she wouldn’t be there anymore. If she could have such intimate knowledge with my husband, if she could be a part of that marriage without me even having a clue, why wouldn’t she think of a husband and wife as an arrangement, an agreement, and not much more?
“Hey!” It was Tiger, half leaning out the glass door of the tattoo shop, his face pale and strained. “Hey, your friend needs help! I called 911!”
The ambulance came quickly, and as they worked on your mother, Tiger told me what had happened.
After I stormed out Smidge tried to make a few jokes with Tiger, but instead began to cry. I told Tiger he must be mistaken. Smidge never cries.
“That’s the thing,” he said. “I know she was crying because she tried to blame it on the tattoo, that I was hurting her, but I wasn’t inking her at the time. I had just finished. Then she started crying harder, started choking or coughing. That’s when I first got worried.”
Tiger told me Smidge then stood suddenly, possibly to come find me. She lost her footing, wavered slightly, and passed out, slamming her head on a table as she fell. The paramedics revived her, applied ice, and administered fluids, but her blood oxygen level was low enough they felt she needed to be admitted for monitoring.
I waited for hours at the hospital before she had a room I could visit. When I finally saw her, spread thin under the sheets like a mottled paper doll, quietly gasping under an oxygen mask, I briefly lost my own breath. After all that life Smidge had been living the week she’d been in California, she looked frozen in a moment quite close to death.
There was a dark lump on her forehead, just below her hairline. Smidge lifted her puffy eyelids to look at me. She couldn’t speak because of that mask, and was too weak to move. She did nothing more than hold my gaze for a few moments before closing her eyes again. But I’d heard what she was telling me as clearly as if she’d just yelled it straight into my ear.
Shit, Danny. It’s starting.
I reached the foot of her bed and told her what I’d been thinking since we arrived at the hospital.
“I think you came to Los Angeles to die.” I said it loudly, so there could be no doubt it reached her ears over the beeping and wheezing of the machines, through the thick haze of selfish thoughts and self-protective acts she’d been using as insulation. “It was a hunch I had at first, but I’m sure that’s what was going on. You thought you could come here and wear yourself out and then die on my couch so I’d have to go home and deal with your family.”
Smidge’s eyes met mine with a weary, guilty stare.
“Well, that’s not what’s going to happen, you coward,” I said. “And I can’t believe you thought I’d get tricked into that.”
I stood over her and readied myself, hoping I could handle what I was about to say.
“I’m in charge now,” I said. “I run your life. And first things first: we have to get you home, you stubborn bitch.”
From under that oxygen mask, even through the fog of condensation, I swear I saw your mother’s crooked smile.
TWENTY-FIVE
I must’ve woken Smidge close to fifteen times to make her walk around the airplane during those flights home. The doctor told me of her elevated risk of blood clots, and I wasn’t taking any chances. I could just hear the gossip in Ogden if something happened.
Smidge was fine until she went to California. Then Danny brought her body back dead with a tattoo.
Smidge engaged in a gentle form of calisthenics at the front of the plane, chatting up the flight attendants until she came back with a plate of warm chocolate chip cookies.
“They’re real nice ladies,” Smidge said. “They’re also bringing over some champagne. I think they’re being all Make-A-Wish.”
“They kinda are.” I stared at the foundation-caked lump on her forehead and wondered for how much longer we were going to keep her secret.
Smidge told me about the weeks leading up to finding out about the cancer’s return. She’d been under a lot of stress, and almost ended up in the hospital with pneumonia, which settled into a cough she couldn’t shake. At the time she’d been hoping to run a marathon with a couple of her friends from down the street, but when she could no longer keep up with them after mile eight, she knew something was more serious. She went to her doctor, who confirmed her deepest fear. Her cancer was no longer in remission, and it had metastasized. Maybe a year, maybe less.
“I didn’t tell anyone for a while. When I went to see you that last time I already knew. I didn’t want to pile on to your divorce sadness, but I was also in a panic, Danny. I thought maybe if I never mentioned it to anybody, it would go away. I went crazy not telling Henry, since I saw him every day and he knows when something’s bothering me, but the hardest was keeping it from you. It felt like I’d started cheating on you, having an affair with my disease.”
I thought about telling her right then about Tucker, how I’d been doing the same kind of hiding. But I didn’t want to risk a new fight. I wrapped an arm around her and pulled her toward me. I kissed the top of her head, resting my face in her hair. “Hey, I’m sorry we never got on that cruise ship.”
She admitted, “I already did it with Jenny.”
I pulled back in surprise. “You did? When?”
“Right after the diagnosis. It was a tiny trip, just for a few days, right when she got out of school for the summer. I told her not to tell you.”
“She didn’t.”
&nb
sp; She laughed. “I told her you’d be mad.”
“I wouldn’t! But I would’ve known something was up.”
“Exactly.”
“How was it?”
“How do you think? Trapped on a boat with a bunch of strangers and only one real place to eat. It was awful. And, Jenny can’t drink, so she was pretty useless.” Then she added, “I don’t really mean that. I’m the worst mother.”
“What do we do now?” I asked. “I mean, I know I’m in charge, but say that I wasn’t. What’s next?”
She studied her fingertips like she was debating getting a manicure. “Well,” she said. “Palliative care. That’s what we’re doing now. It means make sure I’m constantly happy until I’m dead.”
“Then you’ve been in palliative care pretty much since you were nine.”
“My birthday is coming up. Can I have a party?”
“Are you asking me for permission to do something?”
The overhead light dinged. The flight attendant informed us that we were prepping for our initial descent. Smidge nodded.
“Okay. Then I grant you permission to have a birthday party.”
She smiled, and that’s when I had that familiar rising in my stomach, the one that meant I’d been tricked again. “And guess what will happen when the party is over?” she asked casually, staring down at her seat-back button.
“Tell me,” I said, my tongue heavy with dread.
She sat up, fidgeted with her T-shirt, fluffed out her hair. She popped her knuckles at the middle joints, one at a time. “You ever searched ‘dying of lung cancer’ on YouTube?”
“No.”
“Nothing but a bunch of withering, gasping zombies praying for death. There’s no way I’m putting Henry and Jenny through that. I can’t let that girl remember her mother that way. I’m going to die with a little dignity. Just as soon as everything’s in order, I’m going out like a rock star. And you’re going to help me.”
“You’re asking me to commit murder.”
