by Bec Linder
“Mom,” Ben said to the woman, “this is Sadie, my fiancée.”
“Your what?” his mother said, the pitch of her voice rising sharply, and I knew then that Ben hadn’t told her anything about me.
He tried to explain, later, when we were alone. “They’re really racist,” he said, “my entire family, and I just didn’t want to deal with it. I didn’t want any trouble.”
“Okay,” I said, still numb. Three years. We had been together for three years, engaged for one, and he never even mentioned me. They lived in New Jersey, and he’d never bothered to introduce us. And I, stupidly, had never questioned it, had assumed they were estranged, or lived too far away, or—well, whatever it was that I had thought.
“I didn’t think you would care,” he said. “I guess I should have.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, even though it did, it did matter, like a knife through my heart—that he had loved me, promised to spend the rest of his life with me, and never spoke one word to the people who raised him.
He didn’t want the trouble?
If I’d found out six months earlier, we would have had a raging fight. He would have yelled, I would have thrown dishes, we would have slept in different rooms—and then we would have made up, and put it behind us. But I couldn’t throw a wine glass at his head, as sick as he was. There was no room for anger anymore. No outlet for it. Any capacity for rage had left me, drained away and replaced by sorrow. I needed it, that anger, to lance the wound and drain out the poison. It festered instead.
I would have forgiven him, if he asked for my forgiveness, but he didn’t ask.
His mother hated me. It was obvious from our first meeting, and it only got worse as the weeks went by. She refused to make eye contact with me, and responded in monosyllables to all of my attempts to make conversation. I quickly gave up on being friendly and tried to avoid her, but she never called ahead, just showed up at the hospital whenever she felt like it, and it was hard to make excuses to leave that didn’t sound like obvious excuses to leave.
It sucked, but I could have handled it. So what if she hated me? I wasn’t going to cry about it. But what really chapped my ass was that she got herself listed as next of kin, and excluded me from every important decision about Ben’s care. It wasn’t so bad early on, when he was still able to make decisions for himself, but toward the end, when he was totally out of it, she was calling all of the shots.
There was nothing I could do. We weren’t married. We had been waiting, saving up for a nice honeymoon in the Bahamas, and I came to regret that decision so hard I thought I would never be able to put it behind me. The medical decisions were the big thing, the major regret, but there was also little stuff, things I never would have thought about in my former life, the one I inhabited before Ben got sick. For instance: Ben had insurance, but it was a bare-bones, high-deductible plan, and mine had every bell and whistle. For instance: I used up all of my vacation days and sick leave, and after that I had to go back to work, struggling through every miserable eight-hour day before I could make the trek to the hospital, because I didn’t qualify for FMLA. If we had been married, if I hadn’t insisted on the fancy trip, if, if—
Hindsight, and all that.
By the time he got sick, it was too late.
I tried to get him to marry me, just get a marriage license and have it done quick and dirty, but he wouldn’t agree to it. “I don’t want you to be stuck with my bills,” he said. “Let my mom pay off my student loans. She deserves it.”
“You aren’t going to die,” I said.
“Just in case,” he said, and that was that.
We originally expected Ben to be in the hospital for a month, for his first round of chemotherapy, and then to be discharged and spend a month at home before the second round. That didn’t happen. Dr. Mukherjee came to speak with us toward the beginning of the fourth week and said, “I’m afraid that your cancer isn’t responding the way we hoped.”
“What does that mean?” Ben croaked out, and I scooted closer to him on the bed, wanting to offer whatever comfort I could.
“We’ll have to take a more aggressive approach,” the doctor said. “I won’t be discharging you at the end of the week. It’s best if you stay here so that we can monitor your progress on a daily basis.”
“Do I need a bone marrow transplant?” Ben asked.
The doctor shrugged. “It may come to that,” he said. “But not yet. A few other things we can try, first.”
He said a few more platitudes and then left us alone to cope with the bombshell he had just dropped.
I started crying. I didn’t mean to. Ben had enough on his plate, without worrying about me having an emotional breakdown, but I just couldn’t cope with it anymore. He was my best friend, my partner in crime, my safe harbor, and I didn’t know how I would go on with my life if he died and left me.
“Sadie, what’s wrong?” he asked, sliding one arm around my shoulders and hugging me close.
“I don’t want you to die,” I sobbed, tears streaming down my face, my words almost incoherent.
“I’m not going to die,” he said firmly. “We have plans. We’re getting married. We’re going to have kids and grow old together. I’m not going to leave you alone.”
“Promise me,” I told him. “Promise me that you won’t die.”
“I won’t die,” he said, and I believed him, for that one moment.
The moment passed.
Dr. Mukherjee’s backup plan seemed to work at first: Ben’s white count improved, and he seemed to have more energy, to be more like the man I fell in love with and less like the hollow-eyed wraith he’d become. But then he regressed, and regressed further, and the nurses started frowning at his chart in a way that told me there wasn’t much hope to be had.
I broke down and called Regan, finally. She knew that Ben was in the hospital, but I hadn’t told her how bad it was, had kept reassuring her that he was fine, getting better, home any day now, nothing to worry about. Regan was a grown woman, but in some ways she was still a child, with a child’s innocent view of the world, and I wanted to protect her as long as I could. But it wasn’t fair to keep lying to her. She cared about Ben. She deserved to be able to say goodbye.
“Sadie, I haven’t heard from you in ages!” she said, when she picked up. “Is Ben okay? Are you okay?”
I leaned against the wall and slowly sunk to the floor, sandwiched between an empty laundry cart and a stray chair. A passing nurse gave me a sympathetic look. They were all accustomed, here, to relatives in various stages of grief. I rubbed my free hand over my face and said, “Ben’s dying.”
It was the first time I had admitted it to myself, but it was true: he was dying, and everyone knew it, the doctors, the nurses, him, me.
Regan was quiet for long moments, processing, and then she said, “What do you need? How can I help you?”
I wasn’t sure what I had expected her to say, but it wasn’t that. I closed my eyes, overcome with gratitude, and swallowed past the hard lump in my throat. “Come visit,” I said. “He’d like to see you. We could both use some cheering up.”
“I will be so cheerful,” she said. “Oh, Sadie. I’m so sorry. You don’t deserve this.”
“I don’t think it’s about deserving,” I said. “It’s just how the chips fell.”
I had to believe that: that it was random chance, that nothing I had done, or that Ben had done, had caused this. That we couldn’t have prevented it by drinking bottled water or eating more organic vegetables or whatever.
My parents were deeply religious, and I was too, as a kid, but somehow I fell out of the habit during college. God started seeming trite, or old-fashioned, or something. Uncool. I hung out with cynical, post-modern hipsters who liked to smoke weed and argue about nihilism. There wasn’t much room for belief there: only logic, and Nietzsche.
Anyway, I started praying again, after I talked to Regan that night. I didn’t think it would work, really, but it gave
me some comfort.
Three months after Ben was first admitted, Dr. Mukherjee told us there was nothing more he could do.
“Well,” Ben said, by then too sick to muster much enthusiasm for anything, even the news of his own impending death. “Thanks for trying.”
We fought about that, after the doctor left. I wanted Ben to rage against the proverbial dying of the light, and he just wanted it to be over: the suffering, the chemo, his life. “I hurt,” he told me. “Everywhere. All the time. It never gets better. I want it to end.”
“You can’t just give up and die,” I told him, so angry I was shaking. “You promised me.”
He sighed, weary, and closed his eyes, his head falling back against the pillow. “I know. I shouldn’t have done that.”
My anger vanished, like someone had cut the strings holding me up. I sank to the floor, kneeling there on the cold linoleum, and rested my forehead against the metal frame of his hospital bed. A maelstrom churned inside me: grief, self-pity, love.
He was everything to me. My entire world.
“Ben, you can’t leave me,” I said.
He didn’t respond. When I looked up, I saw that he had fallen asleep.
By the end, I slept in his hospital room every night after work, curled on the vinyl-covered recliner in the corner, going back to our apartment every so often to shower and pick up clean clothes. It took two grim, horrible weeks after the doctors said there was nothing else they could do. I wanted hospice; I wanted to take him home with me so that he could die in peace, in his own bed, but his mother refused. No hospice. She wasn’t going to give up on him, unlike some people, said with a dark glare in my direction.
What was I supposed to do?
We weren’t married. There was nothing I could do.
He slept, most of the time, but sometimes he woke and had brief moments of lucidity. I was there for one of them, a few days before he died: shoving greasy takeout in my face, trying to catch up on work, and he turned his head toward me and said, “Sadie.”
I went to his side, crouched down on the floor and stroked his face, gently, not wanting to cause him any further pain. “I’m here,” I said.
“I’ll miss you,” he said. “Do you think there’s an afterlife?”
“Yeah, baby,” I said, throat closing up. “I do.”
“I don’t want to go if you’re not there,” he said. He frowned at me. “Sadie, will you be happy?”
“I don’t know, baby,” I said. “I guess I’ll have to try.”
“Promise me,” he said. “Don’t mourn. I love you. Be happy.”
I would have wept, if I could, if I had any tears left in me. Instead I squeezed his hand and said, “Try to sleep.”
Those were the last words he spoke to me. He died while I was at work, on a Thursday afternoon, and I didn’t find out until I went to the hospital that evening and found his room already empty, his things waiting in a cardboard box.
I took the subway home that night and stayed awake until dawn, sitting on our sofa with one of his flannel shirts wrapped around my shoulders, gazing out the window and feeling a great emptiness opening inside me, my chest like a cage with no bird in it.
At dawn, I got in the shower and went to work.
His mother didn’t invite me to the funeral.
I only found out because I went by the hospital to tie up some loose ends and one of the nurses commented on the touching obituary. I looked it up when I went home: beloved son, brother, nephew, cousin, laid to rest, private ceremony—two days prior.
I cried, then, for the first time in weeks. Cried until my eyes hurt and my face felt swollen and bruised. He was gone from me, dug deep into the earth, and that was all. That was the end of it, the end of our story.
Life after love was a pallid country, seasonless. Weeks passed without my notice. I worked and went home to an empty apartment, fed myself, showered, slept alone, woke in the morning and did it all over again, mechanically, unthinking. Friends came by at first, with casseroles and wine, but they were uncomfortable with my grief. They didn’t know what to say, or how to comfort me.
Nothing could have comforted me, probably.
I hated him. I was so unbearably angry with him for dying, for leaving me, for lying about me to his mother, for breaking every promise he ever made, for giving up. And I hated myself for my anger. I thought about moving, during those first terrible months, when everything in the apartment served as a constant reminder of Ben’s absence: the pots and pans he’d used to cook so many meals, the furnishings we’d picked out when he moved in and we decided to get an actual grown-up coffee table that wasn’t stuffed with newspaper.
But as time went on, I came to treasure those reminders. Seeing a book he had loved, a mug he had shattered and glued back together, made me feel that he wasn’t fully gone from my life. If he was a ghost, I welcomed the haunting. It reminded me that I hadn’t always been alone.
A year passed.
ELEVEN
Sadie
I went out dancing with friends that weekend. Some of them I hadn’t seen in months; they gave up on me when I kept turning down invitations after Ben died. But when I sent out a group text asking if anyone wanted to hang out, my friend Edith immediately replied, SHE’S BACK!!!!
We went to a club in Williamsburg and I stayed on the dance floor until the lights came on and my feet were so blistered I could barely walk. Then we went to an all-night diner and crammed into a booth, eating cheese fries and laughing as the sun came up. I felt a little like my old self, the Sadie who drank and swore and stayed out all night and lived without limits.
I wasn’t that person anymore, of course. But it was nice to pretend.
I rolled into work on Monday feeling tired but happy. The little aloe plant I had bought for my desk hadn’t died over the weekend. Elliott had made a big pot of coffee and there was still enough in the carafe to get me going. I had some good ideas for the website. Things were looking up.
Elliott wandered over, holding his coffee mug. For all of his silent disapproval about my office upgrades, he sure was happy to use my coffee pot. I forced myself not to smirk at him. Smugness wasn’t attractive. “How was your weekend?” I asked.
“One Drop,” he said.
I frowned at him, but he just kept looking at me with that brand expression on his face. He was baiting me, I knew, but curiosity had killed me along with many cats. I bit. “Okay, I’ll bite,” I said. “Elucidate.”
He raised one eyebrow, an elegant arch. “I’m instituting a ten-dollar fine for every word over three syllables before 10:00.”
I made a show of counting on my fingers. “You owe me ten bucks, then, because instituting is definitely too long.”
“One Drop,” he said again, pretending he hadn’t heard me, “is the new name for the company. You mentioned last week that you thought Zawadi Ya Maji was too obscure and difficult to pronounce. I thought about it and decided you were right.”
Huh. I leaned back in my chair, considering. It was kind of boring, but also kind of perfect: accessible without being too obvious. “I like it,” I said.
“You do?” he asked.
I smiled at him. “I really do. I’ll make a new logo that’s a little—like, a little anthropomorphized raindrop, holding a tiny water filter—”
“That’s five syllables,” he said.
“I’m not give you ten dollars,” I said. “Sorry. But I’ll buy you lunch if you’re really that hard up for cash.”
He gave me a look like he was annoyed but also amused despite himself. “No smiling water droplets. Nothing with a face.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
Conversation over, but he kept standing there like he had something else he wanted to say. I waited. I’d learned that Elliott would spit it out when he was good and ready, and not a moment before. He took a sip of his coffee, scratched his forehead, and then said, “I’m going up to Boston later this week.”
“Work or fun?” I asked.
His mouth twitched. “Work. I’ve been corresponding with a grad student at MIT who’s doing some interesting work with ceramics. I’d like to talk to him about hiring him on as a product engineer once I’ve managed to acquire some funding. I’m also going to meet with a few potential investors.” He took another sip of his coffee. “I’d like you to come with me.”
Oh boy. That was a recipe for disaster. What if he expected us to share a hotel room? I would probably sleep-walk for the first time in my life and come to my senses buck-naked and straddling him in bed. Delightful, but mortifying. Just thinking about it made me want to stay in my house for the rest of time. “I don’t think that’s really necessary,” I said. “It’s not like investors want to meet the graphic designer.”
“No, I wouldn’t subject you to that,” he said. “But I’d like you to meet the MIT kid. If I hire him, it’s important that we’re all able to get along.”
Was it? Okay. Elliott had some pretty strange ideas about running a company. So what if the engineer was a weird mouth-breathing neck-bearded cave-dweller? He could just sit at his own desk in the corner and be as nerdy as he wanted. We could get a lot of work done without being best friends. “I’m sure we’ll be pals,” I said. “It’s not necessary. I’ll just stay here and work on the website.”
“I insist,” he said. “We’re getting close to the conference, and I don’t want to lose any work days.”
I shrugged. As long as the company was paying for it, I wasn’t going to complain about a free vacation. Boston was a neat city. I could keep it in my pants for a couple of days. Probably. “Okay, you win. When are we leaving?”
“Wednesday,” he said. He looked pleased that I had given in so easily. I was tempted to tell him not to get used to it. “Just an overnight trip. We’ll take the train up on Wednesday. I’ll meet with the investors that evening. We’ll go to MIT on Thursday morning, and come back to New York that afternoon.”
