by Nina Lane
And for the first time ever, I know to my bones there is something I can’t do. I can’t live without Liv.
I can’t.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
DEAN
WHEN I WALK IN THE FRONT door, the house has an unnatural stillness. I put my briefcase on the foyer table, take off my suit jacket, and go into the kitchen. A few unpacked shopping bags sit on the central island alongside Liv’s purse and keys.
“Liv?”
No answer. Faintly alarmed, I check the living room and sunroom. I loosen my necktie and try to think. It’s Thursday, which means it’s Claire’s day off, and Liv usually picks up Bella at lunchtime so they can spend a few hours together before going to get Nicholas from school.
“Liv?” I hurry upstairs.
Bella’s room is empty. I go into our bedroom, my alarm intensifying. The door to the master bathroom is open a crack, a light shining through. I rush to push it open, suddenly imagining my wife unconscious on the floor or…
My breath escapes in a rush. Liv is sitting on the closed toilet, her elbows on her knees and her head bowed, her features hidden behind the curtain of hair falling across the side of her face. She jerks upright at the sound of the door opening. Her eyes are bloodshot, her skin pale.
“Liv.” Relief weakens me. I sink to my knees in front of her. “Are you all right? What happened?”
She swipes at her damp cheeks and shakes her head.
“Sorry,” she whispers.
“No.” I put my hands on her thighs, my chest tightening. “What happened? Where’s Bella?”
“I asked Claire to pick her up. I wanted to…” She shakes her head again and gives a hoarse, humorless laugh. “It’s just silly.”
“Liv, what?”
Then I see it—the opened box on the counter alongside a pair of scissors and a brush.
I get to my feet slowly. A knot sticks in my throat as I look at the box and the packaging in the trash. It’s a “professional” hair clipper that promises to deliver as close a shave as you can get without a razor.
“I bought it an hour ago.” Liv straightens, looking from the box to me. “I wanted to… I don’t know. When I saw I was starting to lose my hair, I thought maybe it would be empowering or something to shave it off myself before it had a chance to fall out completely. You know, like taking control? But when it came down to actually doing it, I totally caved.”
She takes the clipper from the counter and pulls off the plastic wrapping. Her hands are shaking.
“It’s so stupid,” she whispers, staring down at the shiny blades. “I mean, it’s just hair, right? But I think I’m more scared of this than I was of starting chemo. It doesn’t make any sense at all.”
I reach out to brush a lock of her thick, dark hair away from her forehead. I’d wanted to touch her hair the minute I first saw her at the university registrar’s office all those years ago.
“It makes perfect sense,” I tell her gently.
She wipes away another tear and takes a shuddering breath as if she’s trying to gather her courage. I go into the bedroom and grab the chair from the dressing table, then return and set it in front of the bathroom sink and mirror.
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll go first.”
Liv looks up. “What?”
“You shave my head first. For practice.”
She blinks in surprise. “You… you want me to shave your head?”
“Yeah.” I drag a hand through my hair. “I need a cut anyway. And why should you get to be the only cool, bald person in this household?”
She smiles at that, and I feel like I won the lottery. I grab a towel and drape it around my shoulders before sitting down.
“Go ahead,” I say. “It’ll be easier if you get the hang of it first.”
Liv hesitates, but finally pushes to her feet and unwinds the cord of the clippers. She plugs it into the wall, sets it on the counter, and moves behind me. Our gazes meet in the reflection of the mirror as she puts her hands in my hair.
“I love your hair, Dean,” she says. “When I saw you that day at the university, I first noticed you, then I noticed what gorgeous, dark hair you had and how shiny it looked, even under the fluorescent lights.”
She strokes my hair away from my forehead, then down the sides. She rubs her fingers over the outer edges of my ears.
“Remember when I used to give you ear massages?” she asks.
“Mmm. Turned me to putty in your hands.”
“You used to especially like it when I did this.” She gently trails the tips of her forefingers around the crevices of my ears.
“I still love that,” I remark, as warmth trails down my spine. “But you’d better be careful, lady. Only you could turn head shaving into foreplay.”
Liv laughs. A real laugh this time, one that makes me smile in return. She takes her hands away from my ears and reaches for the clippers. When she turns them on, an unpleasant buzz fills the air.
“Are you ready?” she asks.
“Yeah. Give me a Mohawk before you shave it all off.”
Liv bites down on her lower lip as she positions the clippers at my hairline and draws them back. My hair falls to either side, leaving a path of smooth scalp. She concentrates on shaving the sides of my head. Tufts of hair rain down onto the towel and floor.
After she’s finished shaving both sides, we both look at the sheer weirdness of me with a stripe of hair running right down the middle of my scalp.
“Maybe you should leave it like that,” Liv suggests, her eyes lighting with amusement. “Shock your students and the other professors. Can you imagine?”
I turn my head from side to side to examine the effect. “They’d never take me seriously. Go on, get rid of it.”
Liv places one hand on my forehead and moves the clippers over my head again, shearing away the last of my hair. The reflection staring back at me looks alien with his shorn head and ears that stick out too far, but whoever that guy is, I think he’s doing the right thing.
After Liv finishes shaving off any remaining patches of hair, she puts the clippers on the counter and studies her handiwork.
“You have a very nicely shaped skull, professor,” she remarks. “I never would have known that.”
I rub a hand over my bald head. “We’re going to save a fortune on shampoo.”
I take the towel from around my neck and shake the hair clippings into the trash. “I’ll vacuum later.”
Liv drapes the towel around her shoulders before sitting down. She takes a deep breath and reaches for the clippers.
“Okay?” I ask.
“Okay.”
She turns the clippers back on. This time, the buzz sounds like a chainsaw. A bolt of rage fires through me so fast that I have to step behind Liv and away from the mirror so she won’t notice. My fists clench as anger and grief claw up my throat.
Keep it together, West.
I shut my eyes and force the helpless rage back down. The sound of Liv’s voice over the noise of the clippers dilutes some of the pain. I open my eyes and step toward her. She’s holding the clippers out to me.
“What?” I say.
“Will you do it?” she asks.
Oh, God in heaven, don’t make me do this. Don’t make me shave off my wife’s beautiful hair.
I take the clippers from her. My hand is shaking. I clench my teeth and move behind her, unable to bring myself to meet her gaze in the mirror. I can’t even ask her if she’s ready because if she hesitates for an instant, I’ll never be able to do this.
It’s just hair. She’s the same. She’s always yours. Always will be.
I put the clippers back on the counter and pick up the brush. I don’t know if this will torture me or comfort me, but I do it anyway. I brush Liv’s hair, gently tugging out the tangles, watching the bristles mo
ve through the thick strands like water. Ignoring the excess of strands that cling to the brush. When her hair is a shiny curtain against her neck, I pick up the clippers again.
I take a breath and put my hand on the side of her neck, feeling the warmth of her skin. Liv is very still, her gaze on the mirror.
“I could just do a buzz cut,” I tell her. “Short but not gone.”
“No. It will all come out soon. I need to get used to it.”
I look at the blades of the clippers and focus my concentration.
This is a job. I know how to get a job done. I do it all the time.
But something shrivels inside me when the blades saw through the first strands of Liv’s hair. I pull the clippers back over her head, not looking anywhere except at the pale stripe of skin that appears as her hair falls away. One swathe. Another.
My wife’s scalp, which I love because it protects her—because it’s part of her. Her skin, her blood, her bones. I drag the clippers back again. More hair rains to the floor. A few freckles appear in the place where Liv parts her hair. I pull a few strands stuck to the blades and keep going.
Her pretty ears, each with a tiny, hurtful hole piercing the lobe. The oval birthmark right at the top of her nape. The arch of her hairline. The slope of her collarbone. The ridge where her neck meets her spine.
Mine. My wife. Always my perfect, beautiful Liv.
The last strands of her hair fall to the floor. I run the clippers over her scalp again. Not a trace of hair remains.
I know how to get a job done.
I brush my hand over her head, finding some solace in the warm, smooth feeling of her scalp. Then I dig for courage and look at her in the mirror.
She’s gazing at her reflection, dry-eyed and somber. Without the softening tumble of hair, her features are sharper, more enhanced. Her lips look fuller, her cheekbones more prominent, her brown eyes bigger. She’s like an exotic forest creature, an elf or a fairy. Ethereal. Transcendent.
She turns toward me, finally lifting her eyes to meet mine. I rub my hand over her head again and swallow hard.
“Hey, beauty,” I whisper.
Liv manages to smile before she presses her face against my torso and cries.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
DEAN
NICHOLAS AND I SIT AT A window table with our chocolate ice-cream cones. He swings his legs back and forth, working industriously at the ice cream and looking outside at the frozen lake.
“So it’s just gone,” he says.
“For now.” I’m wearing a baseball cap, though of course Nicholas noticed that something was off about me as soon as he saw me waiting for him outside the school.
At Liv’s suggestion, I’d agreed to pick him up and tell him about both Liv’s and my hair before Bella gets home. Maybe if Nicholas deals with it well, she will too.
Nicholas glances at me. There’s a ring of chocolate around his mouth.
“You’re not sick too, are you?” he asks.
“No. I did it so your mother wouldn’t have to be the only one.”
“Will hers grow back too?”
“One day, yes. But it might take a while.”
“What about yours?”
“Mine will grow back faster, but I’m going to keep it shaved off until your mother is better again.”
“So she won’t be the only one?”
“Yeah.”
Nicholas processes this as he licks a ring around his cone. “Does she look funny?”
“She looks like Mom. Just without hair. It’ll take us all a little time to get used to it, but it doesn’t change anything about her. She’s exactly the same.”
He shrugs. “Okay. Can I see your head?”
“Sure.” I lean forward so he can take off my baseball cap.
He does, then studies my head for a minute. “You look weird.”
“I know. But do I still look like your dad?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s all the matters, then.”
He seems to accept that. We finish our cones in silence and toss the napkins into a nearby trash can. I put the cap back on.
“I’m counting on you to help Bella be okay with this,” I tell Nicholas as we walk back out to the car. “She doesn’t really understand about Mom being sick, so it could upset her to see both Mom and me without any hair.”
“Is Mom wearing a hat?”
“She’ll wear a scarf most of the time, I think, but not always.”
“What about you? Will you always wear the hat?”
“No. I just wore it so I could tell you first. It’s a little easier for men not to have hair because a lot of men lose their hair as they get older. But it’s harder for women.”
“Is Mom crying?”
My chest constricts. I have to think about the best way to respond.
“She did cry when we first cut it off,” I finally admit. “But she’s not anymore.”
Nicholas nods. I get him buckled into his seat and we return home. Liv is waiting for us in the kitchen. She’s dressed in a polka-dot blue skirt and a white blouse, with a pale blue scarf tied around her head. She’s wearing makeup, little silver earrings, and her Fortune Favors the Brave necklace. Though Liv always looks good, I can tell she’s taken extra care with her appearance.
“Hi, Nick-Nack.” Liv holds out her arms. “How was school?”
“Good.” Nicholas approaches her somewhat cautiously, but as soon as her arms close around him, he hugs her with his usual after-school enthusiasm. “We had rehearsal for the music concert, and Dad took me out for ice cream.”
“So I see.” Liv indicates the ice-cream ring around Nicholas’s mouth.
He studies her for a second, and I wonder if he’s going to ask her if he can take off her scarf. Instead he says, “You look like a pirate.”
“Really?” Liv smiles, as if he couldn’t have given her a better compliment. “Thanks. We both know how cool pirates are. Now come sit down and show me your schoolwork.”
She takes Nicholas’s backpack, and they sit down at the kitchen table so he can show her the worksheets and drawings he did that day. Within seconds, he seems to have forgotten about her hair, though I know it’ll be tough for him to see her without the scarf.
As they talk, I start getting dinner organized. Half an hour later, the front door opens. Liv and I exchange glances. I grab my baseball cap and put it on, hurrying to get to the foyer before Bella and Claire come into the kitchen. Claire is helping Bella off with her coat.
“Hi, Daddy,” Bella says.
I crouch and hold out my arms, letting my daughter dash into them. After a hug, I ease back to look at her.
“Do you remember when we told you Mommy would lose her hair?” I ask. “Because of the medicine?”
Bella nods, her gaze going to my baseball cap and the obvious lack of hair beneath. A worried look crosses her face.
“Well, Mommy did lose her hair,” I explain. “And I cut mine off so she wouldn’t be the only one without any hair.”
Bella frowns. She grabs the brim of my cap and pulls it off. She stares at my head, then gives a little whine and pulls away from me to run back to Claire.
“It’s okay, Bella.” Claire takes Bella’s hand. “Let’s go see your mom.”
She marches past me into the kitchen, leading a reluctant Bella. Alarm flickers through me. I follow, trying to get in front of my daughter as if I can protect her from the shock.
Nicholas and Liv are still sitting at the table. Liv rises from her chair with a smile.
“Hi, sweetie.” She approaches Bella and holds her arms out, but Bella doesn’t move, her eyes narrowing suspiciously at the scarf on Liv’s head.
“So let’s see it,” Claire says brightly, giving Bella a nudge forward. “We know Dean still looks great without any hair,
but what about you, Liv?”
“Hey, we’ll take it from here.” I step forward to stop Claire from interfering further.
“Bella, Mom just shaved her head,” Nicholas says. “It’ll grow back, like Dad’s.”
“I don’t like it,” Bella whines.
“At least losing your hair is better than losing your boobs, right?” Claire says with a laugh.
What the actual fuck?
Liv looks stricken, two spots of color appearing on her cheeks. Claire opens and closes her mouth, faint horror appearing in her eyes.
“I’m s-sorry,” she stammers. “Liv, I didn’t mean—”
“Enough.” I grab her arm. For the benefit of the kids, I keep my voice calm as I say, “Kids, say goodbye to Claire. She has to go now.”
“Bye, Claire,” Nicholas calls.
Bella looks like she’s about to cry. I guide Claire gently but firmly to the door.
“That was completely unacceptable,” I say, low and angry.
“Oh God, Dean, I’m so sorry.” Claire groans and presses her hands to her cheeks. “I totally did not know what to say or do. I meant to research how to talk to kids about chemo and hair loss, but I forgot and the whole thing caught me off guard. I didn’t realize Liv would lose her hair so soon. I’m so sorry. Please don’t fire me.”
“I’m not going to fire you.” I sigh, suddenly tired. “But we’ll handle how we talk to the kids about Liv.”
She still looks upset as she pulls on her coat. There’s a knock on the door, and I answer it to find Archer standing on the porch.
“Hey.” He holds up a kit of power tools. “Just returning this. I was going to leave it in the garage, but the door is locked.”
“Thanks.” I take the kit and set it on the floor, then hold the door open for Claire.
