by Jj Rossum
“We were so foolish,” I said. “But, we were in love.”
She smiled. “You’ll need time to move on, Luke. Time to get past this. But I need you to promise me you will. I need you to promise me that you’ll find someone new to love. You have so much love to give, and it would be a shame if it went to waste.”
The last thing in the world I wanted to be thinking about was moving on, loving another person. Love was special, but love took a lot of work. We had married right out of high school, and we had struggled. We were immature, we didn’t have much money, and we argued more than I had ever argued with anyone else before. But, we made it work. She was my best friend and we made it work. I loved her, and I didn’t want to think about anything else. Fucking cancer.
She wasn’t done. Apparently, she had planned this speech for a little while.
“I’m jealous that someone will get to spend the time with you that was supposed to be mine. But then again, it obviously wasn’t supposed to be mine. Or this wouldn’t have happened.” She held her arms up when she said this, as if they signified that her entire being was now cancer. That probably wasn’t far from the truth.
The words were taking her energy away; I could feel her slowing down. But she wasn’t going to stop, not until she was done.
“I want you to have kids. I want you to have grandkids. I want you snuggled up on a couch with someone when you’re old and gray. I just wish it could have been me.”
“I don’t want it to be anyone else,” I stammered, the tears in my throat, controlling my voice. “I hate this. I don’t want to lose you.”
We sat there the rest of the night and cried together until we fell asleep in the recliner. The next two days we would wake up early, enjoy the sunrise, listen to the river and the wind in the trees. Her parents would spend time with us until the sun went down. They would leave, and Carrie and I would return to the recliner and talk and cry and laugh some more. The third morning I woke up to one of the most majestic sunrises that I had ever seen. I shook Carrie gently to wake her up, but she wouldn’t wake up.
I made it to the morning meeting in time, and I was able to share with the rest of the faculty what had happened overnight with Robin. Everyone joined together to pray for her and Walt, but everyone was encouraged that the doctors had been able to successfully perform the surgery. Most considered it miraculous that Walt had been able to get her to the hospital in time. I was inclined to agree.
I spent the majority of the morning balancing my thoughts of Robin and the ones I was having about April. I hadn’t seen her that morning yet, and I found it preoccupying wondering what color her dress was, or how she had fixed her hair that day.
I went down to the lunchroom and sat with my coworkers, but there wasn’t any sign of April. I assumed she had been next door—no student had complained that the classroom was teacher-less. She couldn’t have been having lunch with her husband, who was of course in Boston. I ate hurriedly and excused myself from the table, pretending like I had to get back and prepare for my next period.
I walked down the hallway toward our classrooms, and her light was still on. I got close to the door and peered through the glass. She was sitting at Robin’s desk, her head buried in her arms. At first I thought she might have been sleeping, but I could see her hands moving through her hair.
Don’t go in there, I told myself. She obviously wanted to be alone.
I ignored my better judgment and walked in.
Her head lifted slowly from her arms, and she smiled forcefully as I slowly walked toward her desk. It didn’t look like she had been crying, but her eyes looked twenty years older than the rest of her. It was startling.
“Hey,” I said. “I just wanted to check on you, make sure everything was okay.”
“Oh, I am fine,” she said, and I knew she was lying to me. “Just had a long night. Thought maybe I could get a quick nap in.”
I didn’t buy what she was trying to sell me, but I played along.
“Well, I’ve heard turning the light off usually helps. People seem to sleep better in the dark.”
She smiled, less forced this time.
“Plus, if the lights had been out, it would have kept an idiot English teacher from barging in and disrupting your peace.”
I was mad at myself for walking in like this, but instead of making it better and leaving, all I could apparently seem to do was keep talking.
She sat up and leaned back, involuntarily stretching her upper body. She was wearing a scarlet red blouse, and when she leaned back, her small breasts pushed up against the fabric of her shirt. I tried not to look, and thankfully she hadn’t noticed me fail at my attempt.
“It’s okay, really,” she said. “Lunch is almost over anyway, and there is no way I would have passed out on this desk.”
“For future reference, you can always go lay down on the couch in my classroom. Just make sure I am not in the middle of teaching something if you are a snorer. Oh, and make sure you take a whistle.”
“A whistle?”
“In case you sink in, and need someone to come save you from the quicksand couch of death.”
“Ohhhh, right,” she said, without laughing or smiling, just looking tired.
In third grade, my teacher had given me a Mr. Cool award at the end of the school year. It had a cartoon surfer guy riding a big wave and wearing giant black sunglasses. I half expected my teacher to walk into the classroom right now and ask for the award back.
“Well, I won’t bother you anymore,” I said. “Resume your slumber if you can.”
“I’m fine, Luke, really. You aren’t bothering me. I just hope I can sleep tonight.”
“Rough night at home last night?”
“Yeah, you could say that. Some nights the kids decide they don’t want to sleep and decide to make my life miserable.”
“Yikes,” I said.
Seriously, Luke, yikes? What am I, a Scooby Doo character all of a sudden?
“It must be tough with Marco being away.”
“Yeah,” she nodded, “I don’t know if it’s something I will ever get used to. You basically are a single parent for most of the year, and then when he shows up the kids have a hard time adjusting to having him around full-time.”
“Well, he gets to be home when the team is playing here at least.”
“Not really, with practices and meetings and warm-ups and games, the kids are lucky to even catch a glimpse of him during the morning in passing. And once the games are over, he doesn’t usually get home till around midnight.”
“Wow, that doesn’t sound pleasant at all,” I said, being entirely sincere. “I always wanted to become a professional baseball player, but now I am thankful I chose this line of work.”
“Did you play?”
The bell signaling the end of lunch rang, but it would still be a few minutes before the kids got anywhere close to the classroom.
“Yeah,” I replied. “I played in high school and through most of college.”
She just nodded and didn’t ask any further questions about it. She probably thought I must have not been very good.
April asked about Robin, and since she hadn’t been present for the morning meeting, I quickly filled her in on what happened during the evening.
“Wow,” she said. “And here I was complaining about not getting any sleep.”
“I am assuming the surgery will take a little bit of time to heal from, so you might be asked to hang out here with us a little longer. That is, if you haven’t gotten tired of us yet.”
“I think I could probably handle a few more days here,” she said, and it looked like her face was beginning to return to normal. Maybe talking to me injected a little life into her.
“You’ll have to get more sleep, though,” I said, speaking in a mock scolding voice. “These kids don’t like grumpy teachers.”
“I don’t know where you get your energy after sleeping so little,” she said, shaking her head.
The
students for her next class began to enter the room, so I took that as my cue to head out.
I called Walt on my way home at the end of the day. He told me Robin was still a little tired and run down, but seemed to be doing better. She apparently had a pretty bad flu bug before the situation with the aneurysm arose, so it was expected for her to still be run down for a little while. He told me that the doctors expected her to be in the hospital for at least another five to seven days before they released her to go home. I promised to visit sometime over the weekend and we wished each other a good night.
Holly was sitting at the kitchen table, fully clothed, typing away on my laptop when I got home. She had texted me during the day, asking about Robin, but I had mostly ignored her, telling her I would fill her in when I got home. So, I explained the situation to her, and told her Robin seemed to be doing a lot better.
“Thank God,” she said. “I know how much she means to you.”
She then explained to me that her boyfriend Kyle had called during the day, and had begged her forgiveness for his assholery. He said she deserved for him to treat her better than he had ever treated anyone else in his life, and he was prepared to do it. She told me this with relative nonchalance, which indicated she wasn’t all that moved by his spiel.
“You didn’t bother telling him you shacked up here for a few days, did you?” I asked, winking for the second time that week.
What the fuck is going on?
“Yeahhhhh, not so much. I am fairly certain he would have cried.”
I am not sure why I thought this was funny, but I did, and laughed loudly, and probably for too long. Then I leaned over her and slipped my hand down the front of her shirt, wiping the wicked smile off her face. You can tell a lot from a woman’s eyes. The look she gives you when she really wants you. Her eyes glaze over and there is a raw passion in that glaze. You know exactly what she wants you to do to her from that look. So you do it. Doing it to Holly’s body was my favorite pastime.
That night, we went to dinner at a hopping little tapas place, and then decided to walk to the nearby theater to check out the latest Reese Witherspoon offering. The movie was pretty lousy, but I didn’t care. I needed a night out to take my mind off of everything. April, Robin, hospitals, Carrie. That asshole Marco.
He’s probably the nicest guy in the world, I told myself. You’ll meet him and feel like a complete asshole for flirting with his wife.
We drove home in relative silence, and when we got back to my place, we kissed long and slowly at the door. The bed was our next stop, and after we removed all the necessary clothing, we fell into each other on top of the covers. It was one of our more intense sexual experiences together. Everything felt different that night. It didn’t feel like FWB fucking, but it definitely wasn’t “making love” either. It was somewhere in between, like we were too good of friends and too close to simply be fucking, but we didn’t quite have the romance and love for each other to actually be making love. Whatever it was, it was good. And it made me think that this round of Luke-Holly was likely coming to a close. It always did when things got too intimate.
I returned to my classroom early during lunch the next day with the intention of setting out a pop quiz on all the desks to welcome my next group of students to class. They hated when I did that, but they also knew that when I did, it would mean no homework for them over the weekend, so I knew they’d be okay with it.
April had joined the other teachers for lunch that day, and everyone had spent the lunch period talking about their favorite places to visit. She seemed much more relaxed, and when I asked her how she slept, she smiled and said that she had one of the best night’s sleep in a long time. And, she mentioned how it was nice of me to ask. She seemed comfortable with the teachers, so I left her with them to get back to setting up my quiz.
The bell hadn’t rung yet, so when the classroom door opened, I hoped it would be April. But, again it was Principal West.
His eyes quickly informed me that something was wrong before his mouth did. I stood up straight, knowing that whatever was going to come out of his mouth wasn’t going to be good. At first I thought maybe someone had seen me have a mojito at the tapas place and had reported it back to him, but his face promised something much worse.
“Luke,” he said, with pain in his voice. He was choking up, and my thoughts went a million different directions. “I was down at the hospital visiting Robin. She had a massive heart attack, Luke.”
An invisible sledgehammer pounded me in the chest.
“What are you talking about? I just talked to Walt last night. Everything was fine.”
“I stopped to talk to someone at the nurses’ station. Then people started yelling for help and running back into her room.”
He was shaking his head while he spoke, as if he was in disbelief too. His eyes had tears in them.
“Well, is she okay?” I asked, much louder than I had intended. It sounded like I had yelled at him.
“Luke, she died.” His voice trailed off and he collapsed into one of the desks.
I fell back into the chair at my desk, my head swimming.
“What, what do you mean? What do you mean she’s dead?”
I asked it out loud, but I kept asking it in my head too. West just sat there at the desk, tears in his eyes, staring off into space.
How could she be dead? I just saw her. She was fine. This has to be a misunderstanding. She’s too young for a heart attack.
“This is bullshit,” I said without thinking. Normally, that kind of language could get me fired, or severely reprimanded, but he didn’t even seem to hear it, or it didn’t register.
I stood up and pushed the stack of papers that were on my desk onto the floor. I didn’t want to believe it. I refused to believe it. This wasn’t happening. Not to Robin. Not to Walt. And sure as hell not to me, not again.
There were tears in my eyes as I ran down the hallway. I was going to go to the hospital. No thought went to my upcoming classes, to the quiz I had been preparing to administer. I didn’t care about any of it. I was going to see her. She was going to be fine. I went down the elevator and sprinted to my car. As I was about to open the driver’s side door, I felt my phone vibrate. I looked at the screen, and the name “Walt” flashed across it. In tears he told me the same thing West had said. He sounded a million miles away. I hung up and got into my car. I pounded on my steering wheel, hitting it as hard as I could with both hands. Tears poured down my face. The inside of my car was burning up, but I paid no attention to it. I felt like screaming at the top of my lungs, but somehow I refrained. I threw my phone down onto the floor in front of the passenger’s seat and cried some more. I sat there until one of the groundskeepers spotted me and alerted the office. The superintendent, Carl Wilson, came out, and told me that I should probably go home for the rest of the day, and that my classes would be covered.
I drove back to my house with tears streaming down my face. I was still pounding the steering wheel. I couldn’t remember having felt that angry in a long time.
Holly wasn’t at the house when I got there. I wasn’t sure where she was, but I hoped she would be awhile. As soon as I walked into the house I collapsed on the floor and began bawling. They were the same tears I had cried when I found out Carrie had cancer, the same tears I cried when we found out she had two weeks left, the same tears I cried for months after she died. They were angry tears. And they hurt, deeply.
My mind took me back to the waiting room, praying with Walt. I knew I had no business praying for her. Everything I pray for falls to pieces. If there was a God, which I wasn’t so sure about anymore, He had taken great lengths to avoid listening to me.
I had one Bible in the house. It was in the bookshelf by my television. I pulled it from the shelf for the first time in years and launched it across the room. It knocked something over in the kitchen, but I didn’t know what. I guess I figured if God didn’t know I was mad at Him, He would now.
“Why? Why
her?” I yell. “Of all the people...of all the people...OF ALL THE PEOPLE! How could You do this? How could You let this happen?”
I buried my head in my hands, and cried harder than I think I have ever cried before. And the only words coming out of my mouth were “Why?”
Six Years Earlier
Carrie’s funeral was beautiful. It was held at Lakefront Community Church, the church through which the school was affiliated. The pastor of Lakefront, Paul Mitchell (no, not the salon guy—this Paul was bald) spoke, as well as a few other people, including Linda. I had been asked if I was going to want to speak, but that absolutely was not going to happen.
There was a good-sized turnout. Everywhere Carrie went, she had an impact on someone. The whole floor of nurses who had taken care of her at the hospital had shown up, along with most of the students in my classes. Friends from college and high school paid their respects, family of hers from around the country. Someone had mentioned to me that there was even a newspaper writer there, who had heard Carrie’s story and wanted to write a piece about her. I never saw the writer, or saw any story later.
People spoke, and I fought back tears the whole time. It’s strange how you can be prepared for something so completely, have so much warning ahead of time, and then be completely shocked and unprepared when it actually did happen. I had experienced death before, a few times, but this one hurt the most. I knew it would hurt for a long time.
I heard a lot of “Everything happens for a reason,” and “God has a plan,” and “All things work together for good.” The more I heard it, and the more death and pain and heartache I experienced in my life, the less and less I found myself believing that to be true. Nothing seemed to happen for a reason, unless the reason was to have our hearts trampled and done away with. And I refused to believe that that was the meaning and purpose of life.
But, everyone who spoke remembered Carrie at her best and brightest, and hearing them speak reminded me of what had drawn me to her in the first place back in high school. Pictures appeared on the screens throughout the service, showing my happy, vibrant Carrie. There was even a rather embarrassing photo of us that had been taken at the Junior Prom that made an appearance. It garnered chuckles from people throughout the sanctuary.
