by Lisa Sorbe
What’s that old saying? If only I could go back, knowing what I know now…
Or something like that.
If only I could.
But I can’t. I can’t bend time, no matter how much I may want to. What’s done is done.
“Ben and I had a…fight.” I say this instead, because it’s not a lie, but it’s not the whole truth. There was no fighting, not really. Just me yelling, me leaving.
“So make up.” Mimi says this so casually, so cluelessly, so childlike in her damn naiveté that I feel a prickle of annoyance at her words.
“It’s not that easy.”
“Well, it’s never easy. But it’s almost always easier than most people think it’s going to be.”
“Sounds like fortune cookie advice.”
Mimi shrugs. “There’s a lot of wisdom to be found in fortune cookies.”
“Well,” I say, “not in this case. The circumstances are…extenuating.”
“Be that as it may, but too many repairable relationships fall through the cracks because people refuse to talk out their problems. Or,” she says, peeling a chunk of doughy crust away from her slice, “they talk but don’t listen, which is way more important in my opinion.” She offers the crust to Bear, who snags it with his tongue and swallows the piece in one bite.
I change the subject. “Hey, by the way, how’s Jerry?”
The question does what I hoped it would and gets Mimi focused in a whole new direction. I listen with more envy than jealousy as she tells me about the house they recently rented together and the two cats, Stache and Murray, that they adopted from Ben’s shelter.
I nudge her knee with my foot. “I’m happy for you, Meems. I really am. And…” I sigh. “I’m so sorry I left without saying goodbye. I was just in a shitty place. Not that that’s an excuse.”
“It is totally an excuse. And you’re one hundred percent forgiven.”
I look at her for a moment; sometimes the pure way she moves through life still throws me. “I didn’t know people like you actually existed. To be honest, you kind of freaked me out when we first met.”
Mimi squints, suspicious. “Um, okay? Is that supposed to be a compliment?”
I laugh, and feeling that tickle against my ribs after far too long feels so damn good. “Yes, it absolutely is.”
Mimi’s features relax, and I drain the rest of my wine and watch her feed another piece of pizza crust to Bear. The buzz from the drink and Mimi’s visit has cracked my heart wide open, and I bite my lip, considering the question waiting on the tip of my tongue. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.” She slides her finger along the screen of her phone, ending Holiday and starting Live to Tell. The music dips, slows, and it’s as if the very beat is resounding in my blood, pushing the question from my lips.
“Your dad,” I begin, not sure how to work the question. “He passed away last year?”
Mimi nods; her expression doesn’t reflect the grief I was worried the question might trigger. Still, I tread carefully.
“Ben told me it was cancer.”
She nods again. And while her eyes remain dry, her sigh is heavy, as if it’s filled with the remorse not yet etched on her face. “Yeah. Lung that eventually spread to his brain. Or maybe it was the other way around. I never really understood it. It happened so fast. It was,” she sighs again, “awful.”
“I’m so sorry.” I frown. “I shouldn’t have brought it up…”
But Mimi holds up a hand. “Stop. It’s fine. Talking about it is good. It…it helps.” When I cock a brow a her, she responds with a raised one of her own. “Really.”
I don’t know how to form the next question, because it’s kind of morbid. Hell, screw kind of. It’s incredibly morbid. “How, I mean, when did you know there was no hope? For a recovery? Or did you?”
Mimi is quiet for a moment, and I don’t push, just turn my attention to Bear and smooth my hand over his head while I wait.
“About three weeks before he passed, he started talking…weird. Like, on the way home from his second round of chemo, he said he was glad he wouldn’t have to go through another one. At the time, I thought he was just being forgetful, which was understandable, of course. Because he had one more round to go before finishing the…series, I guess you could call it? But then he started talking to a dog that passed away when Chevy and I were kids.”
“So he was hallucinating?”
Mimi nods and then shakes her head, her lips set in a grim line. “That’s what the doctor said. Chevy bought it, but not me. My dad was foggy throughout the last two months of his life. Which was so unlike him; besides Chevy, he was the smartest person I knew. But when he was talking to Barkley, he was completely alert. Lucid, Chevy called it. In those moments, he wasn’t sick. He was suddenly Dad again, bright-eyed and awake and just, you know, chatting it up with a dog who’d been dead for fifteen years. I got so I looked forward to the times when Barkley came around. She was the only thing that took his pain away. Nothing else worked. Whether it was a delusion or the real thing, I didn’t care. It brought him peace. A peace I, for one, couldn’t give him.”
Mimi’s eyes glass over, and for the first time since we began talking about her father, she looks like she might break. But then she sniffs and clears her throat, lifts her chin. “But the weirdest thing of all happened a few days before died. Chevy and I were trying to get him to eat. Chevy had made this green juice-smoothie concoction, but Dad refused to drink it. And when we tried to persuade him, telling him how important it was that his body get the nutrients, he just said it didn’t matter because he wasn’t going to be here much longer. That he was leaving and he loved us, but we needed to let him go.” She presses a finger to the corner of her eye, sniffs again. “He fell into a coma the next day. And the day after that, he was gone.” She takes a deep breath, blows it out with a little chuckle and fans her face. “Damn. Sorry.”
“Meems—”
“No, it’s all right. I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m okay. Seriously. But yeah, to answer your question, I think I knew. I think we all did. After that last round of chemo, we knew. Though none of us wanted to admit it. Eventually, though, watching him suffer the way he did…” She shakes her head. “That was the hardest part. He was in so much pain. All the time, you know? And it was like nothing helped. Accept ghost dog, of course.”
I’ve been reading a lot about the subject over the last few months. I took Lenora’s books with me, the ones she gave to Ben, and after cramming so much philosophy and science and spirituality laced with metaphysics into my brain, I’m irritated to find I have even more questions than when I started.
“If you, say, knew the inevitable outcome—that there was no hope for recovery—would you have…I mean…if he’d asked and wanted to, you know…” I’m struggling to find the right word, because this is a tender subject, for some a taboo subject, and by the time I realize that there’s probably no way at all to broach it ethically, Mimi jumps in.
“You mean, if there was a way to end his life peacefully, do I think he would have wanted that? Yes,” she says in answer to my nod. “Without a doubt.”
“Some say it’s wrong to end a life, any life, before its time. That to suffer is to grow, and by, um, leaving too soon, you cut off your soul’s opportunity to evolve. Then, of course, there’s the whole going straight to Hell theory.”
Mimi snorts. “I get the theory. I do. But most people suffer enough in life. After seeing what my dad went through, though? I’m sorry, but I just can’t get on board with that way of thinking. And as for the Hell part? The last two months of his life were Hell on Earth. So he already lived it.”
“So you would have wanted him to have a choice, in a sense? A way to go peacefully, on his own terms, regardless of the…stigma? You would’ve been okay with that?”
Mimi doesn’t hesitate. “Absolutely.”
The place feels empty after Mimi leaves, despite Destiny’s hoard of minions spilling through every vei
n of the house. It’s a night of drunken frolic—as it is most nights when my roommate is in town—and I’m doing my best to ignore it: the thumping music, the murmur of voices that every once in a while rise to a shriek, the whisper of footsteps treading up and down the hall, either looking for a bathroom or a room to screw in.
I made Destiny install a lock on my door after Hobo Joe’s midnight visit, so I’m not worried about any of those wanderers accidentally slipping into my room. Still, I feel restless, unable to settle when I hear the approaching feet, waiting for a knock on the door or the knob to rattle.
I attended one of Destiny’s shindigs right after I moved in. I told myself it was the polite thing to do, that it would be rude to refuse my new roommate’s invitation to come out and mingle with her friends. Plus, I was lonely, shattered from what I learned about Ben and Lenora, and wanted to do anything I could to move past it. So I donned my hottest, most uncomfortable L.A. outfit, drank champagne laced with sugar cubes and bitters, and clicked through the house on heels that squeezed my toes and cut into my ankles. I fit right in, just another pretty face among dozens of pretty faces, so beautiful we were plain, each woman drowning in a sea of devastating normality.
The guests that night eventually began to blur together, and with each person I met, I found it harder and harder to tell one from the other. Even the men, casual in their designer attire and artfully tousled hair, blended so fully that not one stood out from the rest. Any tell-tale imperfection distinguishing their uniqueness had been removed, cut or sanded away, leaving a smooth exterior that matched everyone else’s.
The conversations were lacking, stiff, superficial. The chattered buzz was of surface things, reality television and gossip about other people at the party. Few had jobs, real jobs, and the two writers I met were really just slackers, drinking and smoking as much as they could under a false guise of literary dedication.
I left the party early that night, even more downtrodden than when I arrived, realizing that in my attempt to scrub the past six months from my mind, I tried to run back to a life that no longer fit.
Not that it ever did.
I just hadn’t realized it at the time.
Even now, as the party reaches a new crescendo a few steps from my room, the separation I feel from something that I used to be a part of—whether here or back in L.A.—is disheartening.
And I can’t go back. Once you climb the ladder of your consciousness and reach a new level of understanding of the world around you, there’s no going back down again. No retreating to the life you once knew. You’re a changed person, inside if not out, and the things that once brought you pleasure no longer fill you with the same glow.
Looking back, I think fitting in was my pleasure. My way of proving myself, over and over again, to Cliff, my mother, even my sisters. I sacrificed integrity for value and ended up with a life without substance: friends who didn’t know the true meaning of the word, a boyfriend who saw my need for acceptance as acquiescence and used my pliability to mold me into his ideal partner, a job where society’s hierarchy was thrown constantly in my face.
It was a lifestyle that didn’t fit, but instead of moving on and trying out a new one, I forced myself in to it, day after day, the decision to conform cutting off my circulation and shortening my breath like a pair of jeans that are a size too small.
A pair of feet shuffle past my door. Following that, a click-clacking of heels in what sounds like hot pursuit. I hear heady laughter and the deep murmur of voices, and then then they’re gone, moving farther down the hall and out of earshot.
I return my attention to the mail Mimi delivered, sorting through bills and junk, credit card offers and post card advertisements. I changed my address with the post office two months after I left Lost Bay, after deciding that Minneapolis was where I planned to stay put for the time being. So none of what Mimi brought down is important, considering how old it is. In fact, I’m flipping through everything so fast that when I come to a small manila envelope, I almost discard it as junk. But when I turn it over and see my name scrawled above Lenora’s address in familiar handwriting, my breath catches and my heart stops and time flashes to a standstill.
There’s a roar in my head, one that trumps the chaos of the party. It fills me up, makes my hands tremble with excitement or fear, I’m not sure which. This isn’t just an envelope, it’s a doorway. A hand reaching through space and time, with a message I may or may not want to hear.
The postmark is three months ago.
I sit with the envelope for hours or seconds, feeling its weight in my hands as well as on my heart, a pull on both my body and my soul.
Because this is Ben’s handwriting. I’d know it anywhere. I spent hours at the clinic deciphering his clipped scrawl, translating his pen to keyboard as I worked to transfer paper files into digital ones.
My chest is swelling, expanding, threatening to split me in half, and I’m smiling and crying and warning myself not to open the damn thing while, at the same time, I’m already slicing into the envelope so fast the paper cuts my finger. But the bloody smear left along the edge of the torn flap is a symbol of my triumph, because despite the glass-half-empty part of me that warned of devastation, I gave in to the side that touted hope.
A side that stays buoyant as I pull out another envelope, this one slightly crumpled and worn. But my momentum slows, grinds to a halt when I realize what it is, and I don’t even need Ben’s attached sticky note to remind me of what I’d so thoroughly forgotten.
And when I rip that letter open, sans blood this time, my entire world flips…again.
I try to focus on the radio as I drive. But at the pace I’m flying up the interstate towards Duluth, towards Lost Bay, towards Ben, it crinkles with static so often that I eventually shut the damn thing off.
I’m foggy from too little sleep and twitchy from too much coffee, which probably isn’t the best state to be in while traversing Minnesota’s slick roads in the pale light of early dawn. The sky domes overhead, an obscure monochrome ceiling that gives way to Heaven’s celestial floor, and the clouds stretching between Here and There are so dark and dense that they can barely contain winter’s wrath. Some of it spills over, sifting soft flakes through the air, lazy flurries that dot my windshield and make me nervous. But I continue on anyway, despite the impending storm, stoked into action by the words in Lenora’s letter.
As it’s a Saturday and not yet eight o’clock in the morning, the roads are nearly deserted, and the few vehicles that are out and about this early happen to be on my stretch of interstate, heading north and pulling flatbeds crammed with snowmobiles along behind them. Their presence doesn’t hinder my progress, though the same can’t be said for my bladder. The pot of coffee I chugged on the first hour of the trip is now hitting home, and like the snow, it becomes a further detriment to my trip. Eventually I give in, shouting a chorus of expletives in my head as I do, and pull over at a rest area just outside of Duluth. Impatience rushes me through the task, and within minutes, I’m jogging back to my Rover, my mind racing ahead of my body as I flip my keys and click the lock release.
But just as I’m stepping inside, something across the way, on the other side of the interstate, catches my eye. A blue and white pickup, the boxy shape emphasizing its age, and there, just stepping out of it, a figure I’d recognize anywhere.
Like his penmanship, his form is burned into my mind, my heart, the very structure of my cells, and I don’t think I’d be able the shake the familiarity even if I tried.
They say that once two particles are connected, they’re always connected. That even when they’re split and taken to opposite ends of the globe, they’re still joined by an unseen force. They still act as if they’re connected even though, visibly at least, they’re not. As a result, it’s possible to trigger a reaction in one by stimulating the other. There was even a study done on it, though I can’t remember by who or when or where. And maybe none of this is neither here nor there, but it’s the
first thing that springs to my mind when, from two hundred yards away, that figure turns and looks directly at me. As if he can sense my stare, the pull of our connection, across a distance that spans not just feet, but all of time and space.
Ben.
He’s a sight for sore eyes, and I feast on him like he’s a ship at sea and I’m a castaway stranded on a deserted island. Again, as I did with Mimi’s surprise visit, I feel that swoony sensation of being both lost and found at the same time, though it’s greater now, more overwhelming than it was before. I watch him grip the door of his truck, take a step forward, and it’s like I’ve finally been cracked open, the entirety of everything I am spilling over, out in to the air, up through the spongy layer of clouds and the earth’s monochromatic dome, spinning, turning, twisting until I can’t catch my breath. It’s coming hard and fast through my mouth; I’m gulping icy air so rapidly my lungs burn, feel as if they’re about to burst.
Only then do I realize I’m running.
Right across the flipping interstate.
Maybe this is what we do for those we love—we meet them in the middle.
Ben is yelling something at me, though I can’t make it out over the roar of the wind. I pump my legs and work on closing the distance between us while, from his side of the road, he’s doing the same. When I get to the snow-packed median separating the north side from the south, I immediately start to clamor into the pile until Ben, his voice now discernable due to our close proximity, hollers at me to continue on a few paces down. I do as he says and, after about twenty feet, hit a smooth patch of concrete, kept mostly clear of the season’s snowfall for U-turns and emergency vehicles.
“What the hell, Lenny?”
