The Girlfriend (The Boss)

by Abigail Barnette

  My heart lurched and I sat up, blinking my eyes in the dim light from the bedside lamp I hadn’t turned off. “Neil?”

  “Did I disturb you? I’m sorry. I couldn’t sleep.” His tone was weary; he’d been awake for some time.

  I sat up beside him and wrapped an arm around his waist. He was chilled, his skin wet with perspiration. He smelled different, metallic and medicine-tinged. He shivered uncontrollably as I held him.

  “Oh, baby,” I murmured. I felt guilty that I had been sleeping beside him while he’d been suffering. I pushed my hair back. “Is there anything I can do?”

  His forehead creased, as tried to focus. I thought back to all the side effects I’d memorized by heart. Clammy skin, cold sweats, trouble sleeping, confusion... none of it should have been unexpected. I guess I had been feebly hoping that he wouldn’t have to deal with any of it.

  “I don’t think there is?” He pressed the heel of his hand to his temple. “Maybe you should get the nurse? I feel terrible.”

  “I can do that, sure. What do you want me to tell him? What do you need?” I slipped from the bed and grabbed my robe.

  “I don’t know. I feel... something isn’t right.” He swung his legs over the side of the bed and leaned his elbows on his knees. “If I move, I get dizzy, I’m drowning in my sweat... I think something must be wrong.”

  “I’ll get him.”

  I grabbed the phone on the nightstand and rang Josh’s cell. He picked up on the second ring, despite the fact the alarm clock said it was three-thirty in the morning. “Mr. Elwood?”

  “Can you come to our room please?” I asked, the hysteria I held back crackling like electricity through my tight voice. “Neil is really not feeling well.”

  As I said it, he stood and lurched for the bathroom, slamming the door behind him.

  “I’ll be right down,” Josh said, instantly alert.

  I hung up and padded toward the bathroom door. I’d just laid my hand on the handle when Neil called, “Sophie, please don’t come in.”

  “Are you all right?” Now I was really worried. “Neil, are you okay?”

  “It’s nothing to be alarmed about. It’s just bloody embarrassing.”

  Oh no. Poor Neil. I felt awful for him, because I knew how controlled and composed he always tried to be. A run-of-the-mill toilet accident during chemo might be something other people had a sense of humor about, but not Neil.

  “Josh is on the way down right now. Do you want me to leave?”

  “Yes, I would. Perhaps you could... fetch me some tea?” he asked, his voice plaintive and wobbly.

  He didn’t even like tea. He just wanted me to leave.

  All I wanted to do was comfort him, but if the only way I could make him comfortable was by leaving, then I resolved I would do just that. “Okay. I’ll wait until Josh gets down here, and then I’ll go.”

  I paced the floor a moment, helpless, then went to Neil’s wardrobe and pulled out a clean pair of pajamas. I handed them to Josh the moment he came in the door.

  “He’s in the bathroom,” I explained in a low voice. “He’s had some trouble and he doesn’t want me around. I’ll be downstairs, ring the kitchen phone when he’s ready for me to come back up.”

  “Very good,” Josh said. His brown eyes were ringed with tired shadows.

  Downstairs, the kitchen was dark and dead silent. The staff all started arriving at five AM, so I had plenty of time without worrying about being caught in my bathrobe. I located a teacup, filled the kettle that sat on the back of the industrial stove, and lit the burner.

  The kitchen was super modern. A wide crescent skylight with white beams supporting the glass lit the room in the daytime, and shades sandwiched between the panes blocked them off during the night, so our next-door neighbors couldn’t see down and in. At night, inset lights illuminated the room with a bright, but indirect, glow.

  Even though I wasn’t hungry, I wandered to the refrigerator and opened it. Fully stocked with more fruits and veggies than I thought would be possible for a human to consume in the few short days before they went bad. But then, before chemo, Neil had been drinking shakes made out of huge bunches of kale and bushels of carrots. He’d really embraced the healthy diet Emma had pushed on him, and I was glad. It would not only help him stay as strong as possible through chemotherapy, but it gave him an illusion of control.

  Staring at all the produce— all of it scrubbed clean in anti-bacterial dishwashing soap as per Dr. Grant’s orders— an answer I hadn’t even been looking for came to me. The hardest part of Neil’s treatment wouldn’t be the side effects or the transplant or missing work, but his lack of control. He was the master of his own destiny, or he was a shambling mess. There was really no in-between.

  I was going to have to be very careful with his feelings. I guess I had known that all along. I’d just never seen it illustrated so literally.

  When I came back from the kitchen with his tea, Neil was already showered and dressed in clean pajamas. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, and he couldn’t meet my eyes.

  I placed the teacup and saucer on the bedside table. He wouldn’t drink it, but I could keep up the facade. “Feeling better?”

  “No. Not at all.” He didn’t look up.

  I sat down next to him. “So... you shit yourself. Big deal. I did that once when I was running cross-country in high school. In front of all my teammates.”

  He blanched. “Not at a meet, I hope.”

  “No, a practice, thank god. But it was still humiliating. For the rest of high school, I was sure everyone thought of me as ‘that girl who shit herself’.” I forced myself to laugh at the memory. “Look, this is going to happen. You’re sick. You’re really, really sick. Nobody’s going to hold it against you if you barf or poop or even just have a cranky day. You have to stop pretending like you’re fine to make other people feel better. You have to stop pretending like you can pretend you’re fine.”

  “I haven’t been fine since the hospital,” he admitted quietly. “I’ve been miserable.”

  “Then why didn’t you tell me?” I felt like I had been punched in the chest. Here, I’d been acting like everything was fine because I was following his cues. If there had been something else I could have done for him, some way I could have made him comfortable... “Neil, I’m here to help take care of you. You have every right to let me know how sick you’re feeling.”

  He grimaced. “I’m frightened, Sophie. And I don’t like it.”

  “I know you are. If you need control, boss me around. I’m used to it. You can give me one pointless task a day, and I’ll be all over it.”

  “Only one?”

  “Don’t push your luck.” I leaned my forehead against his shoulder. “Neil, I love you. I’m going to love you no matter what you do, as long as I don’t have to clean it up. And even if I do, I’ll still love you.”

  “I know.” He shook his head. “Ever since we came back from Paris, I’ve been thinking, is this really my life? Is this— I mean feasibly this could be how it all ends for me.”

  “It could be.” Somehow saying it felt better than reassuring him that he would be fine. I owed it to him to take his concern seriously. “But if it is, do you want to go out miserable, fighting for control over a situation you can’t change? Or do you want to accept the fact that the people who love you don’t love you because you’re a control freak, but in spite of that?”

  He laughed softly, then squinted his eyes shut tight. “Oh, I really don’t feel good. Maybe it would be a good idea if we slept with the waste bin close to the—”

  And then he threw up all over both of our laps.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Chemotherapy is hell on Earth.

  For the rest of the first week, I watched Neil go from “miserable, but kind of functioning,” to “miserable, nonfunctioning, and super crabby.” It was easy enough to put up with. He wasn’t just being a dick for no reason. I wouldn’t be a piece of cake to live with if I fe
lt hot all the time, sick to my stomach, and too weak to walk. However, around the end of that first week, my patience had begun to fray when he would argue that the sheets hadn’t been changed when they most certainly had, or that I was stealing all the blankets when he was wrapped up in them like King Tut.

  I knew he felt terrible. It showed in every line on his face, the dark hollows under his eyes. One day, after he’d nodded off in the arm chair in his study while trying to finish a sentence that hadn’t fully made sense as he’d been speaking it, I was startled to find myself thinking that he didn’t look like a man who was forty-eight. He looked like a man who was sixty-eight and dying.

  “It’s the chemo,” Josh reassured me when I tearfully confronted him in the hallway. “It looks really bad, but that just means the drugs are working.”

  Thank god for Josh. Tall and lanky, with sandy brown hair and a nose that was way too big for his face, Josh was the most patient nurse I had ever met in my entire life. If Neil blamed him for the sun setting at an odd angle, poor Josh would apologize for it without complaint.

  By day six, Neil was sleeping almost full time, and I started to have the strangest feeling of loneliness. I stood in the kitchen one night making a cup of tea that Neil had asked for, but I knew he wouldn’t end up drinking. And I thought, “This is what it will be like when he’s dead.” Not “if he dies,” but “when he’s dead.” I’d cried all the way back upstairs.

  Some of my emotional response had to do with my cycle finally getting back to normal. After the baby scare, I was charting, taking my temperature every morning and peeing on ovulation predictors. If my period was an hour late, I would know about it. I’d also managed to find a doctor in London who would give me a birth control shot when I finally did get my period again.

  Not that Neil and I were going to be having tons of sex or anything. I just wanted it for my own peace of mind.

  But the whole “don’t get pregnant” plan had an unexpected benefit for Neil’s care. The doctor predicted Neil might need several rounds of chemotherapy to get the cancer into remission. If I kept track of his symptoms, we would know what to expect when round two floated by.

  I started taking copious notes, like how often the sheets needed changing because of his night sweats, to what food made him sick to his stomach. I did all of this surreptitiously, because any little thing seemed poised to set him off, emotionally. I imagined confronting him with what I was doing, and I could almost hear him snapping, “Don’t you start reducing me to numbers on a damn chart, too!” and decided to keep it to myself.

  About ten days after the first dose of drugs, Neil started to get less prickly. He was so relieved that his hair hadn’t fallen out by the end of week two that his mood improved vastly. Week three was like paradise. He was almost himself again, albeit a more nauseated version of himself, but the anti-emetic drug Dr. Grant had prescribed took the edge off of that, somewhat. Neil ate, he got dressed, he even went for daily swims, since his usual workouts made him too tired.

  His week of rest became my week of exhaustion, because when his sex drive returned, it was with a vengeance. I was the first to know when he was feeling better; he shook me awake in the night.

  “Are you okay?” I asked him, rubbing my eyes. “What’s wrong?”

  I leaned up to turn on the light, but he tugged me down, covering my body with his. “I need you. Right now.”

  It took me a minute to process this request. What did he need? A glass of water? Another blanket? Then he rolled me beneath him, and I felt the hard ridge of his erection against my belly.

  “Oh,” I said, and “okay,” and he was inside me, all of him, my unready body stretching around him painfully. I moaned, utterly grateful; I’d missed this intimacy more than I would ever admit to him.

  As much as it pained me, I had to stop him with a hand to his shoulder. “Condom. You have to put on a condom.”

  It wasn’t a chance he would normally take, but he wasn’t thinking straight. He growled in frustration and annoyance as he withdrew. “Where are the damn things?”

  “Here.” I opened the drawer of my nightstand and fished one out. He impatiently sheathed himself and pushed me down again, shoving himself between my legs with one hand to guide him. I spread my thighs around him and gripped his waist with my knees as he pounded into me.

  “Oh fuck, oh yes!” I shouted, slapping my palm against his back to urge him on. This was exactly what we’d needed, I thought as my legs squeezed around him. The headboard banged against the wall, and his breath puffed from his chest like he was at the end of a run. Then, everything went south. He pulled out and flopped onto his back, squinting his eyes shut tight.

  “I may have...” he swallowed and half choked, and I sat up, jarred out of my momentary spike of desire to turn on the light. He was pale and sweaty, gasping for air. “Overdone it.”

  “Neil!” I jumped from the bed, pushing down my nightgown. I had the phone in my hand, and he waved impatiently at me.

  “For Christ’s sake, I’m not dying, I just...” he closed his eyes. “I just tired out very quickly.”

  “Oh.” I set the cordless phone back in its cradle and cautiously pulled the blankets back to climb in beside him. “Sorry.”

  “Everyone is treating me like I’m going to just snuff out at any time.” He pulled off the condom and tossed it into the trash bin, and jerked his pajama bottoms up with some difficulty.

  “Sorry, you just didn’t look well.” I didn’t know how to respond to this kind of anger, especially since I had caused it. But what did he expect me to do, when he seemed to be in genuine distress?

  “This is ridiculous.” He wiped his hand down his forehead and covered his eyes. “I can’t even fuck my girlfriend. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, I’m tired all the time and too fatigued to even watch television. And in three more days, I have to start this bloody process all over again.”

  “That sucks.” It was all I could think of that wouldn’t be interpreted as patronizing.

  “Yes,” he agreed grimly. “It does suck. I feel like my life is wasting away a day at a time. It’s a wonder more people don’t commit suicide going through this.”

  The s-word set off a powerful alarm. “Neil... have you been considering—”

  “No!” He sat up and pushed back the blankets as though he would storm off in anger, but he was too tired. He sat on the edge of the bed, his head in his hands. “I don’t want to die. I want to be dead. There’s a difference.”

  “Not much of one.”

  “Look, I’m doing what I’m supposed to do, aren’t I?” he snapped. “I’m doing the fucking chemotherapy. I’m being a brave little soldier ‘fighting’ against cancer.” He made quotes in the air around the word. “Isn’t that enough?”

  I didn’t answer him right away. In his mood, nothing I could say would help. But he wanted a response. I put myself in the role of the counselor I’d seen briefly in high school, and turned it around on him. “Is it enough for you?”

  The anger went out of him then. That was almost worse than seeing him angry. “No. What would be enough would be having the strength to give up. To be able to look at you and tell you that I was quitting this stupid treatment. I want to be selfish enough to look my daughter in the face and tell her that I won’t be at her wedding, because I’m going to die instead.”

  I walked around the bed, feeling like I had been slapped, forcing myself to act like we were talking about the water bill and not his mortality. He resented me for keeping him tethered to his life. That was a bitter pill to swallow. At least he was confessing all of this to me, and not Emma. I didn’t want her to have to hear it.

  For a while, I just sat beside him, not saying anything, while he stared down at his feet.

  I was out of my depth. “I want you to see someone. A counselor or a psychiatrist. Some kind of mental health professional.”

  He made a bitter noise.

  “No.” I was going to stand firm on this. “You�
�re hurting, Neil. More than I can help you with, and more than you need to hurt. I love you. I can take the resentment, the crabbiness, I really can. But I can’t stand watching you suffer and isolate yourself.”

  “And if I don’t?” He looked up, testing me.

  “If you don’t, I’ll tell Dr. Grant what you just told me.” I knew that Dr. Grant would likely tell Neil exactly what I’d advised: to seek mental health help. But in his despondent state, maybe Neil didn’t know that. Maybe he would take it as the threat I meant it as; that if he didn’t seek help on his own, I would try to have him hospitalized for it.

  He paled further, though I wouldn’t have thought it possible. When he spoke, he was wounded. “Sophie... I’m in a real crisis here.”

  “I know you are.” I tried to sound sympathetic and firm at the same time. “That’s why I want you to get help.”

  He broke down then. I was getting strangely used to his tears. But there was a divide between us that seemed to grow wider with every passing day. So, when I held onto him, I wasn’t just comforting him. I was trying to keep him with me, against the internal tide that would inevitably pull him away.

  * * * *

  It only took one threat, and Neil called his therapist.

  “You have a therapist?” I asked him, surprised. Neil always seemed so pulled together, I couldn’t imagine him needing therapy.

  Scratch that: I couldn’t imagine him thinking he needed therapy.

  “You go through a divorce and see if you don’t need someone to keep you sane,” he cracked mildly. We were in the kitchen, making protein shakes while prep went on in anticipation of dinner. We’d found that giving Neil protein a couple hours before a meal kept him from getting queasy at dinner time, and he could hold down more food.

  “I would really rather not,” I replied, smiling sweetly at him over the top of the blender. I had to raise my voice to be heard, so I waited until the blades stop to say, “I like you too much to kick you to the curb.”

  “Even when I’m being a self-pitying jackass?” He was embarrassed about his meltdown the night before.