After I Do

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

  “Someone in particular,” she says. Her voice is rough and scratchy. Her eyes are still closed. Her face barely moves when she talks.

  “Grandma? Are you OK? Can I get you anything? Should I get Mom?”

  She ignores me. “You have that someone. That’s all I’ve been trying to say. Don’t give up on him just because he bores you. Or doesn’t pick up his socks.”

  “Yeah,” I say. She seems too weak to keep talking, so I don’t want to ask her questions. And yet there is so much I want to learn from her. Her eccentricities, the things that felt so silly and laughable before, now seem profound and insightful. Why do we do this? Why do we undervalue things when we have them? Why is it only on the verge of losing something that we see how much we need it?

  “I wasn’t actually positive that I had cancer,” she says. “I hadn’t been to the doctor in ages. I kept telling your mother and your uncle that I was going.” She laughs. “But I never went. I figured if I did have it, I didn’t want anyone trying to cure it. A few times, I walked out the door, telling Fletcher I was going to see my oncologist. I didn’t even have an oncologist. I was playing bridge with Betty Lewis and the Friedmans.” She laughs again, and then she fades out for a moment and perks back up. “The doctors say this type is fast-moving. Most likely, I just developed it. You guys weren’t wrong to make fun of me all those years I kept saying I had it,” she says, smiling at me, letting me know she knew what we were saying the whole time. “I was ready to die, and I think that was the only way I could admit it.”

  “How can you be ready to die?”

  “Because my husband is gone, Lauren,” she says. “I love you all so much. But you don’t need me anymore. Look at all of you. Your mom is doing so well. Fletcher is fine. You three kids are doing great.”

  “Well . . .”

  “No, you are,” she says, patting my hand. “But I miss my mom,” she says. “I miss my dad. I miss my big sister. I miss my best friend. And I miss my husband. I’ve lived too long without him now.”

  “But you were doing OK,” I say. “You were getting out of bed. You were making a life without him.”

  My grandmother gently shakes her head. “Just because you can live without someone doesn’t mean you want to,” she says.

  The words bang around in my brain, knocking into one another, bouncing off the edges of my mind, but they keep rearranging themselves in the same order.

  I don’t say anything back. I look at her and squeeze her hand. I often think of my grandmother as the old lady at the dinner table. But she’s seen generations. She was a child once. She was a teenager. A newlywed. A mother. A widow.

  “I’m sorry this has been so hard,” I say. “I never thought of how difficult it must have been for you without Grandpa. It’s a hard life.”

  “No, sweetheart, it’s not a hard life. I’m just done living.”

  When she says it, she’s also done talking. She falls back asleep, holding my hand. I rest my chin on her arm and watch her. Eventually, Natalie comes back in, needing to sit down.

  “It’s hard to stay on my feet so long,” she says. “It’s also hard to sit still for a long time. Or lie down for too long. Or eat. Or not eat. Or breathe.”

  I laugh. “Is this such a good idea?” I ask her. “I mean, you’re due in, like, days, right?”

  “I’m due Thursday,” she says. Five days away. “But it was never a question. We had to come. This is where we need to be. I’d be uncomfortable sitting at home, you know? This way . . . this is better.”

  “Can I get you anything?” I ask her. “Ice chips?”

  “You know I’m not actually in labor, right?” Natalie laughs at me, and I laugh back.

  “Fair enough!” I say. It wasn’t when she said she needed to be here for Grandma that she became a sister to me. It was when she made fun of me for offering ice chips. Big gestures are easy. Making fun of someone who’s just trying to help you, that’s family.

  Charlie joins us. Uncle Fletcher comes in with a bag of Doritos. I don’t even know if he went to get a nurse. Mom and Rachel come in. Rachel has clearly been crying. I look at her and see the red in her eyes. I give her a hug.

  We stand around. We sit. We wait. I’m not exactly sure what we can do to make any of this better. Sometimes we are talking. Sometimes we are quiet. There are too many of us in this small room, and so we take turns walking out into the hall, walking down to the vending machines, getting a glass of water. Nurses come in and out. They change fluids. The doctor comes in and answers our questions. But really, there aren’t many questions to ask. Questions are for when you think there is a way to save someone.

  I feel a knot start to form in my throat. It gathers strength as it moves up to the surface. I excuse myself. I go out into the hall.

  I put my back against the wall. I slide down to the floor. I imagine Ryan sitting next to me. I imagine him rubbing my back, the way he did when my grandfather died. I imagine him saying, She’s going to better place. She’s OK. I imagine the way my grandfather might have done this for my grandmother when she lost her own mom or her own grandmother. I imagine my grandmother sitting where I am now, my grandfather kneeling beside her, telling her all the things I want to be told. Holding her the way that only someone in particular can hold you. When I’m her age, when I’m lying in a hospital bed, ready to die, whom will I be thinking of ?

  It’s Ryan. It’s always been Ryan. Just because I can live without him doesn’t mean I want to.

  And I don’t. I don’t want to.

  I want to hear his voice. The way it is rough but sometimes smooth and almost soulful. I want to see his face, with his stubble from never shaving down to the skin. I want to smell him again. I want to hold the roughness of his hands. I want to feel the way they envelop mine, dwarfing them, making me feel small.

  I need my husband.

  I’m going to call him. I don’t care about the pact we made. I don’t care about the messiness of it. I just need to hear his voice. I need to know that he’s OK. I stand up and pull my phone out of my pocket. I don’t have any service. So I walk around the floor, trying to get a bar or two. Nothing.

  “Excuse me?” I ask at the nurses’ station. “Where can I get cell service?”

  “You’ll have to go outside,” she says. “Once you get out the front doors, you should be OK.”

  “Thanks,” I say, and I walk to the elevators. I hit the button. It lights up, but the elevator doesn’t come. I hit it again and again. I’ve waited this long to call Ryan, and now, suddenly, I must talk to him this second. The urge has overtaken me. I need to ask him to move back home. I need to tell him I love him. He has to know right now.

  Finally, the elevator dings. I get in. I press the ground floor. The elevator drops quickly. It’s so quick that my stomach doesn’t fall at the same pace as my feet. I’m relieved when I touch ground. The doors open. I walk through the lobby. I walk through the front glass doors and step outside. It’s a hot, balmy day. It seems so cloudy in the hospital that I’ve forgotten that it’s actually very sunny and bright. I look at my phone. Full service.

  It’s loud out here in the front of the hospital. Cars are zooming by. Ambulances are pulling in and out. It occurs to me that I am not the only one losing someone right now. Natalie isn’t the only one about to have a baby, either. Charlie’s not the only man about to become a father. My mother isn’t the only one about to lose her last parent. We are a family of people going through all the things people go through every day. We are not special. This hospital doesn’t exist for us. I’m not the only woman about to call her husband and ask him to come home. I don’t know why it feels good to know that. But it does. I’m not alone. There are millions of me.

  A cab pulls up to the sidewalk, and a man gets out. He has a backpack. He shuts the cab door and turns to face me.

  It’s Ryan.

  Ryan.
<
br />   My Ryan.

  He looks exactly the same as when I left him at our house ten months ago. His hair is the same length. His body looks the same. It’s so familiar. Everything about him is familiar. The way he walks. The way he shuffles the backpack onto his shoulders.

  I stand still, staring right at him. I can barely move. I’m not sure when it happened, but I have dropped my phone.

  He walks toward the sliding doors and then stops once he sees me. His eyes go wide. I know him so well that I know what he’s thinking. I know what he’s going to do next.

  He runs toward me and picks me up, grabbing me, clutching me.

  “I love you,” he says. He has started to cry. “I love you, Lauren, I love you so much. I’ve missed you. God, I’ve missed you.”

  My face hasn’t changed. I’m still stunned. My arms are wrapped around him. My legs are wrapped around him. He puts me down and kisses me. When his lips touch mine, my heart burns. It’s like someone lit a match in my chest.

  How did he know I needed him? How did he know to find me?

  He wipes my tears away. Tears I didn’t even know were on my face. He’s so gentle about it, so loving, that I wonder how I was able to wipe away my own tears all these past months. In an instant, I have forgotten how to live without him, now that he is here.

  “How did you know?” I say. “How did you know?”

  He looks me in the eye, preparing me. “Don’t be mad,” he says. His tone is playful, but the underlying message is serious.

  “OK,” I say. “I won’t.” I mean it. Whatever brought him here is a blessing. Whatever brought him here was right to do it.

  “I’ve been reading your e-mail drafts.”

  I drop to the ground.

  I laugh so hard that I lose control of myself. I laugh past the point where my abdomen aches and my back hurts. And because I’m laughing, Ryan starts laughing. And now we’re both on the sidewalk laughing. His laugh makes mine seem funnier. And now I’m laughing simply because I’m laughing. I can’t stop. And I don’t want to stop. And then I see my phone, busted up and broken, from when I dropped it. And that seems hilarious. It’s all so perfectly, wonderfully, amazingly, beautifully hilarious, isn’t it? When did life get so fucking funny?

  “Why are we laughing?” Ryan says, in between breaths.

  So it turns out this is how I confess. This is how I tell him what I’ve done. “Because I’ve been reading yours, too,” I say.

  He cackles wildly. He’s laughing at me and with me and for me. People are walking by and looking at us, and for the first time in my life, I really don’t care what they think. This moment is too intoxicating. It has such a strong hold on me that nothing can bring me back to earth until I’m ready.

  When we finally do get control of ourselves, our eyes are wet, our heads are light. I start to sigh loudly, the way people do when they are recovering from fits of laughter. I try to get control of myself, like a pilot landing a plane, slow and steady, readying to hit solid ground. Except instead of feeling the world under my feet, I take off again at the last minute. My sighs turn into tears. Laughing and crying are so intrinsically tied together, spun of the same material, that it’s hard to tell one from the other sometimes. And it’s easier than you think to go from being so happy you could cry to so devastated you could laugh.

  The weeping becomes sobbing, and Ryan puts his arms around me. He holds me tight, right here on the sidewalk. He rubs my back, and when I start to wail, he says, “It’s OK. It’s OK.”

  I look at his left hand as it holds mine. He has his wedding ring on.

  Ryan and I get up off the sidewalk slowly. He grabs his bag. He picks up the pieces of my dropped cell phone and puts it back together.

  “We might need to get you a new phone,” he says. “This one appears to have taken a beating.”

  He grabs my hand as we walk into the hospital. We join the group of people waiting at the bank of elevators. When an elevator finally arrives, all of us cram into it, pushing against one another, spreading out against the three walls. Ryan never lets go of my hand. He squeezes it tight. He holds on for dear life. Both of our hands are sweating into each other. But he never lets go.

  When we get to the eighth floor, I lead us off the elevator, and standing in front of us, ostensibly waiting for a down elevator, is Rachel.

  “Where have you been?” Rachel asks. “I’ve been looking all over for you. I called you four times.”

  I start to answer, but Ryan answers for me. “Her phone is broken,” he says, showing Rachel the pieces.

  Rachel stares at him, her eyes fixated on him, trying to piece together why seeing him in front of her feels as if it makes perfect sense and yet doesn’t make any sense at all. “Um . . .” she says. “Hi, Ryan.”

  He moves toward her and hugs her. “Hey, Rach. I’ve missed you. I came as soon as I heard.”

  Ryan’s back is facing me, as Rachel’s face is in my direct eye line. She mouths, Is this OK? half pointing to Ryan’s back. I give her a thumbs-up. That’s all she needs. She just needs a thumbs-up. If I’m thumbs-up, she’s thumbs-up. “I’m so glad to see you!” she says. She turns on the charm as if it has a switch, but it’s real. She’s being entirely genuine.

  “Me, too,” he says. “Me, too.”

  “We’ve missed you around these parts,” Rachel says, giving him a sisterly light punch to the arm.

  “You don’t even know the half of it,” he says. “What can I do? How can I help now that I’m here?”

  “Well,” Rachel says, looking at me now, “we’ve had a slight hiccup.”

  “Hiccup?” I say.

  “Natalie and Charlie ran down to prenatal.”

  “Oh,” I say.

  “When is she due?” Ryan says. “It’s soon, right?”

  “Thursday,” I say.

  “Right,” Rachel says. “Well, she thinks she has something called Braxton-Hicks.”

  “What is Braxton-Hicks?” Ryan and I both say at the same time. It’s muscle memory, the way we can function as one unit so easily. It’s such second nature to be two halves of a whole that after months of not speaking, we are now speaking as one.

  “I don’t know. Mom explained it. It’s something where it seems like you’re in labor but you’re probably not.”

  “Probably not?” I ask.

  “No,” Rachel says. “I mean, she’s not. But they thought it was best to address it. Apparently, the contractions feel just like real contractions.”

  “So it’s painful?” Ryan says.

  Rachel nods and tries not to laugh.

  “What?” I ask.

  “It’s not funny,” Rachel says. “It’s totally not.”

  “But?”

  “But when the first one came, Natalie grabbed her stomach and said, ‘Jesus, fuck me.’ Even Mom was laughing.”

  I start laughing along with Rachel. Multiple elevators have come and gone at this point, and we just continue to stand here.

  “You guys are mean,” Ryan says.

  I start to defend myself, but Rachel intervenes. “No, it’s just funny because Natalie is the nicest person I’ve ever met. Truly. When she said it, Mom laughed so hard she blew a huge snot bubble.”

  I start laughing again; Ryan does, too. My mother has appeared right behind Rachel.

  “Rachel Evelyn Spencer!”

  Rachel looks at me and rolls her eyes. “Mom heard me, huh?”

  I nod.

  “Sorry, Mom,” she says, turning around.

  “Never mind that,” my mom says, her face growing serious. “We have a slight hiccup.”

  “Yeah, Rachel told us,” I say.

  My mom’s line of sight focuses in on Ryan and then my hand, which is still holding his after all this time. “Good Lord, this is all just too much,” she says. She sits down in one of the
chairs along the hall and puts her head in her hands. “It’s not Braxton-Hicks,” she says. “Natalie is in labor.”

  “Please tell me you’re joking,” Rachel says.

  “No, Rachel, I’m not joking. And this is a good thing, remember? We want this baby born.”

  “No, I know,” she says, reprimanded. “I just mean it’s a lot at once.”

  “Can I do anything?” Ryan asks.

  My mom looks at him and stands up. She hugs him tight. She hugs him the way only a mother can hug. It’s not a mutual hug, like Rachel and Ryan had. My mother is hugging. Ryan is being hugged. “I’m just so glad to see your face, sweetheart,” she says. “So glad to see your face.”

  Ryan looks at her for a moment, and I think he might lose it. He might actually start crying. But he changes course. “I missed you, Leslie.”

  “Oh, honey, we all missed you.”

  “How is Grandma Lois doing?” he asks. “Can I see her?”

  “She’s sleeping at the moment,” my mom says. “I think we should split up. Some people need to go be with Natalie and Charlie, and the rest of us need to be with Grandma.”

  It’s an impossible choice, isn’t it? Do you want to be there for the last moments of one life or the first moments of another? Do you honor the past or ring in the future?

  “I can’t do this,” my mom says. “I can’t choose. My grandbaby or my mother?”

  “You don’t have to choose,” I say. “Between me, Ryan, Rachel, and Fletcher, we’ve got everything. You can go back and forth.”