You Just Make Me So Happy

She loved him best in the wintertime, on those mornings when it was so cold that crystalline spores of frost could be seen in their glinting conquest over every smooth surface. Winter was the only time of year when the world might properly stop, and morning in its stillness could morph into an equally silent afternoon, and the only sign of change might be the fingers of ice racing by centimeters from the gutters to the ground.

On these mornings it was easiest to forget he was dying, or easiest—at least—to reformulate the idea altogether: Weren’t we all dying? He was just living at a faster rate. Small doses of self-delusion were acceptable, almost necessary at this point: three months into the diagnosis.

Three months ago, their relationship was heaving and exhausted—like a dying animal. Her career was stranded, she wanted another degree, she wanted a new city and a new jolt to her life. He was lazy and foul-tempered, eternally complacent with his piece-of-shit job—though he promised every six months he was going to quit. He was sardonic and self-pitying and far too antagonistic toward his parents.

And then he passed out one morning, in the middle of another nasty fight over Pepper, and for a bright, glossy moment, she’d envisioned leaving him right there—absconding freely to a new life. But reality reset itself, the guilt landed with a heavy pang, and the sudden panic of seeing him splayed across their floor collapsed her fantasy into two dimensions.

The diagnosis was grim, followed by a grimmer statistic: Six months. And when he’d heard this, his eyes had globed in the vulnerable, panicky way that she remembered from a long time ago—when their whole thing was still new and thrilling and certain. He’d collapsed onto her shoulder and sobbed.

“Your best path, in my opinion, is to make these next few months enjoyable for him,” the doctor said in the hospital hallway, outside his door.

Her head gave a gyroscopic half-wobble, the doctor frowned.

“Are you the best person to take care of him?”

She stared at the glazed wooden door to his room, on which a Rorschachian grain splotched and waved before her. Already her hesitation felt like something damning, like a pronouncement of her fickleness. It was proof she was a bad person.

Morality was a matter of thought experiments, after all. Would a Good Person do this kind of thing? Would a Good Person abandon her boyfriend of several years after his cancer diagnosis? No. A Good Person would not. And she was hardly someone who could openly accept such a thing—committing herself to a bad behavior.

So she nodded. And in the following months, she tried to re-angle her love, to magnify it in the necessary spaces, to find new things about him that could thrill her—his harmless wittiness, the sleek straightness of his jaw, the loose flesh where his muscles used to be.

But her strongest feelings were still borne from pity—that the smart, handsome, endlessly talented boy whom she’d known from all the way back then was going to die soon, and the swell of emotion, the bitter soap opera drama of it, filled her with a wobbly, spillover kind of sadness that she was able to redirect into love too.

 

They’d met on a tennis court. He was hitting big serves at a wall opposite the net and she was mustering up the courage to talk to him. She remembered noticing how tall he was, even from a distance, and how each ball he sent screaming across the net landed with a great hollow thump that shook the entire space up to its rafters.

She asked him if he wanted to hit for a while and he agreed. She could tell that he was showing off—hitting trick shots between his legs, gently returning the ball within easy reach for her, switching between one-and-two-handed backhands.

When he casually shifted his racket to his left hand, she laughed and said, “Am I that bad?”

“No, no, not at all.”

They spoke from across the net, natural breaks in conversation punctuated by little oofs with each return. He was on a tennis scholarship, though he’d likely stop playing after college. His parents had pushed him too hard when he was younger. At one point, he remembered being taken to a trainer and injected weekly with something that made his arm incredibly sore, and then growing six inches over the next year.

“Hey—I hope you don’t mind—can I?—” as he stepped over the net and positioned himself behind her. “You can hit a way more powerful forehand if you just, go like—this—” And she’d rolled her eyes at how cheesy a move this was, like the introduction to a porno, and laughed a little, because the sweat on his shirt smelled dark and slightly sweet, and the way he was able to envelop her felt complete and blanketlike.

And if you let yourself cling to certain golden recollections, using them frequently enough as ballasts and counterweights, then you were liable to remake the entire story of your past, to distort its edges or turn it into an outright lie. Which was probably why it took two pregnancy scares, interminable arguments, and that one unforgivable incident with Pepper, for her to realize that fortuitous chance meetings weren’t enough to justify a thing that was never there, that grabbing a sweaty dinner afterward and heading back to his place, that coming twice and gazing post-orgasmically at a night sky that seemed painted in streaky black, was hardly a guarantee of a long and healthy relationship.

 

On a windy afternoon in the middle of autumn, he drove them to the nearby Berkshires, through narrow roads that dipped and wound up the side of the mountains, as the trees below jostled in waves of blazing red and orange.

“I hope you’re getting some good pictures of this,” he said, at a scenic pull-out.

She nodded happily. “This is so gorgeous. I’ve never seen anything like it from this high up.”

“It’s kind of funny, isn’t it? How anything can look beautiful from far enough away.”

A bluster of wind tumbled past them; she put her head on his shoulder. The leaves in the canyon below them dipped and waved, reflecting the sunset and rustling in the wind and giving the illusion of such nearness that she was tempted to brush her hand over their surface like she would a pool of water, watching them flutter and fly away.

“These kinds of views never used to do anything for me when I went with my parents,” he said. “I used to be convinced that you could just smoke a joint and go on YouTube and have just as good a time. But I think I understand now—you have to be with someone you really love. You need to have that love inside you in order to be really dazzled by beautiful things. Otherwise, you’re just fooling yourself.”

She’d felt a warm shiver through her entire body, starting from her toes, that rose and wrapped itself in a blanket around her heart.

How distant that memory felt, now, as she knelt beside him, rubbing his slack-skinned back as he vomited oceans into the toilet, staring into the feverish redness of eyes that she’d fallen in love with—in love, though? She wondered how long it had taken for a word like love to appear in language, whether it had swerved and split into parallel lanes and planted roughly similar versions of itself in related but less concrete words—like, admire, lust. Or was it vice versa? Did those weaker synonyms gradually converge into the trunk of something more complete?

“I’m so lucky I have you,” he said, and she smiled encouragingly at him.

“I’ll always be here for you.”

By month four, the complications from his cancer led to several extended stays at the hospital, where he grumbled about having to share his room, and where she was forced to spend many uncomfortable hours, scolding herself for feeling all those ugly, unspeakable feelings.

“Please don’t go until I fall asleep,” he liked to say. Except that this would often take hours, and she still had to work the next morning, and Pepper was at home and needed to be fed, and oh God he was dying—dying—so could she at least have a heart?

The hospital was bile and death colored; it smelled of muffled disinfectant. She was surrounded by lifeless fluorescent light bulbs whose buzzing evoked the slow gathering of flies. Generic, painted-by-number ocean scenes hung above all the beds.

“He’s very lucky to have someone like you,” the attending nurse said. Rose tried to smile back. Instead, a sob shook its way out of her, as the nurse nodded understandingly. There was perhaps no one in this entire hospital whose grief was tapered with such self-disgust and self-hatred.

“Please don’t leave yet,” he mumbled again, through a half-snore.

She sighed and touched his cheek. One more bad thought before the night ended—that she should have broken up with him months ago. She should have left right after he did that thing to Pepper. That would have saved her from all this.

“Hey—hey—”

The room was split in two by a thin curtain connected to a ceiling rail by rattling metal hooks.

“Rose!” The voice said.

He must have overheard one of their conversations. She tapped Rich’s cheek, didn’t get a response, and turned around, whispering, “What?”

“Do you mind pulling the curtain?” the voice asked.

So she did, revealing a youngish man, around her age, lying in the same supine way as her Rich. He had what she thought were shadows of handsomeness—a square jaw that would have once been strong but now seemed incongruous, propped by a skinny neck. He had prickly, overgrown facial hair that would have looked nice as a scruffy trim and a smile that seemed to have long ago ceased to act as anything but a mask.

“I’m dying,” he said.

“I’m Rose,” because she didn’t know what else to say.

“I’m sorry about him,” the man said, motioning to Rich.

“Thanks,” because, again, she had no clue what to say.

“So are you—you and him—?” he waggled his index finger between her and Rich’s bed.

“He’s my boyfriend.”

“Ah,” the man sagged visibly. “Ah, right, well, to be expected, I guess.”

“Are you all right? Do you need me to call the nurse for something?”

He shook his head. “Just trying to understand why some people get all the luck.”

“I wouldn’t say having cancer is particularly lucky.”

“Sure,” he nodded, “but having someone like you to fall asleep and wake up to puts it just over the edge of bearable.”

“That’s nice of you,” she said, listening for a break in Rich’s deep, rhythmic breathing.

There were evenings when decades passed in the space between his snores, when the exhale would carry her through a jet stream into other kinds of lives, until a choppy wheeze shook her back into the one they shared.

“Can I ask a favor?” The man said.

She nodded warily.

“Will you be my girlfriend too?”

From behind her, Rich took a thunderous inhale.

“I’m sorry?”

“Not, you know, in a real-life committed way. Just as a little sending-away present for me. Like a fantasy I can indulge in.”

“I don’t know you,” she said.

“Right right, I know that,” and as he shook his hand as if to wave away her concerns, she saw the various tubes and intravenous drips connected to his wrists—how he resembled some kind of macabre puppet.

“I don’t get many visitors,” he said, in an expertly nonchalant way. “After a while a thing like this—you think you’ve won over it and it comes back, and you and everyone around you are too exhausted to jump back into it.”

“Well, I feel for you,” she said, terrified of being overheard, “but I can’t just do that—whatever you’re asking. Don’t you have—aren’t there services that can offer those kinds of things?”

The man shrugged and sighed and sank into his pillows, which were yellow with sweat stains.

“I could just really use someone, is all. It doesn’t have to be anything real. It can be all made up. And it can be when your friend is asleep. That would be enough for me—to just imagine having that kind of relationship.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, reaching for the curtains.

“Wait—wait—who’s Pepper?”

“Pepper? He’s our dog. How long have you been eavesdropping?”

“That’s a cute name.”

She was still listening intently for the rattle and start of Rich’s breathing.

“I had a dog growing up. Rudy. I named him after the guy in the football movie. My mom got him for me before she left.”

“She left?” Rose asked, out of courtesy, because it seemed fairly heartless to hear about an absentee mother and not follow up with something.

“Found another guy. Don’t really blame her; my dad was a real piece of shit. I didn’t know it at the time, because I was so little. I think that’s why Mom didn’t take me with her. She knew I’d squeal to him or something.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Did you go to school in this area?” he asked.

“No.” She glanced once more behind her shoulder before taking the seat at his bedside. The snores were steady and deep. Just one night.

“No. I’m from the Midwest. Nothing but farmland and farm animals.”

He closed his eyes and smiled, nodding. “That sounds nice. That would really be something else—to have that much open space. Before I moved here I’d never been outside New York City.”

“I’ve always wanted to move to New York,” she said.

“What’s stopped you? Rich?”

She ignored the queasiness in her stomach.

“The timing has never been right. And Springfield can be pretty exciting.”

He snorted. “This city’s problem is that it can’t decide what it wants to be. It doesn’t have the pull or the infrastructure to be a real commercial center. All it has going for it is the Basketball Hall of Fame. There are too many other great cities out there.”

“So why did you end up here?”

He shifted atop his pillow. She offered to bring him a new one, but he shook his head.

“A city is like—the closer you get to it, the less real it becomes,” the man said. “I guess that applies to a lot of other things too. There’s a perfect distance you have to stay from most things. You back out too far and they become arbitrary, or they disappear altogether. Zoom in too close and the imperfections become their own landmarks.”

They spoke for another hour. She told him how her dad was a small-town lawyer, how her mom worked part time at the library, how her older sister had been knocked up and ditched by an army guy, and her younger brother was in college, a stowaway to the East like her. She told him how she’d managed to pay for college through a tennis scholarship, how her favorite player on the Women’s Tour was Serena Williams and her favorite player on the Men’s was Juan Del Potro, and how Rich looked down his nose at women’s sports, in general, and liked to brag that he could beat any woman ranked in the top 100.

She liked how safe and commitment-free it felt to talk to him.

 

“Do you remember—do you remember that time we snuck little bags of vodka in the boobcups of your bikini? And we got so drunk at the beach that the lifeguard had to come over and check on us and then you flashed him and tried to run away?”

She shrugged. “Sure, I guess.” Rich was snoring again behind her.

“And remember the first time I came to one of your tennis games? I was completely clueless—”

“—Matches, they’re called tennis matches.”

“Right, exactly. See? I’m still clueless. I mean, why is the scoring so confusing?”

“It’s French.”

“I made it to a few more afterward, though. Remember, we even saw Serena play at the US Open.”

She sighed and smiled. That would have been nice.

“I remember our first fight too. You were mad that I’d started laughing at the end of the Titanic—remember that? Even though everyone knows what’s going to happen. I mean, it’s a historical event.”

“Why was I mad?”

“Well, you were angry that I wasn’t taking it seriously enough when Jack was sinking into the water. You were convinced that he could have shared the door!”

“I’ve heard that theory,” she nodded.

“Well, actually, it wasn’t a space issue, it was a buoyancy thing. Trust me, I was trained as an engineer—that part is true.”

“What did you do before you got sick?”

“I worked at Boeing. Systems analyst, which is just a fancy way of saying that I pushed a lot of paper around.”

“Wow, so you’re a smartie.”

“Sorry, I don’t have some million-dollar nest egg tucked away that I’ve been waiting to give to the right woman.”

Behind her, Rich made a sound that resembled the starting of a lawnmower. She nearly leapt from her seat, as the dying man smiled.

“You need to relax. I’ve been on the meds they’re giving to him. He doesn’t stand a chance of waking up—at least not in the next few hours.”

So she steadied her breathing, and she questioned her anxiety—why was she so nervous? What was she doing wrong? Or was this all a reaction to the kind of conditioning that Rich had specialized in?

She blinked and smiled and told the dying man how she’d been fast-tracked into management at the big, regional insurance company, and was basically guaranteed a VP gig after four or five years so long as she earned her MBA, which the firm would pay for anyway.

He nodded. “Career woman.”

“Yeah, but the hope is that I could jump ship after my MBA, then head to New York and work for a consulting firm. I’d go in and, you know, identify weaknesses, bottlenecks, pain points, trim off fat, that kind of thing.”

She found herself smiling as she described it—smiling and feeling as if this life were no longer a remote impossibility.

“I like being a fixer,” she said. “People mess things up. I like having answers.”

“I remember,” the dying man said. “You never gave up on anything you started. Not even that time you tried to fix that radiator in our apartment. I’m pretty sure you almost got the Super fired.”

She’d never lived in an apartment, but the thought of one, cozy and insulated against the night, sounded lovely. All those little capsule lives inside yellow-lit rooms, an enormous building’s many beating hearts. And hundreds of buildings as big or bigger, stacked in neat rows up and down the island. There was a collective soul that you inhaled and exhaled with that kind of life.

“Babe?” She spun around. “Babe? Who’re you talking to?”

“Oh, no one.”

“Can you get me some water?”

She nodded and left the room.

 

“Rich, don’t you think that your parents would want to know about this? Don’t you think they’d want to be here?”

He shook his head so hard that his bed rattled. “Fuck them.”

“Come on. There’s no reason to be that angry at them, still.”

“I’m not angry, I just don’t care. I don’t need them in my life.”

“OK, well, if you’re purely neutral on this one, then I’m going to invite them.

“What? Is this because you don’t want to take care of me anymore? You’re tired of being with a dying guy?”

She was pulsing with anger. She hated how the man sharing the room could hear them. She hated herself for wishing she were speaking to him instead.

But there were things that she could not possibly question, like trauma—especially the trauma of a person as impossibly different as Rich was to her. He’d repeated it over and over again: That his parents had traumatized him, they’d abused him with their immigrant desire to see him as some captain of industry or at least a fucking doctor.

A Good Person didn’t undermine that kind of suffering, especially when it emerged from a long tunnel of realization—when it came with a big enough personal breakthrough to compel him to eliminate the sources of toxicity from his life.

But he was dying. She called them anyway.

“Why you didn’t tell us earlier?” His mother rushed in on a hot afternoon, immediately convulsing into tears, as Rich’s face bloomed with disgust.

“I know you no want to hurt us, but now this much worse. We could helped earlier.”

His father shook Rose’s hand. “Good to see you again,” he said, his mouth a long thin line that puckered downward at the ends. His chin was shivering.

“Why you didn’t call us earlier?” Rich’s mom turned toward her, eyes blazing.

“She’s been here for me since I was diagnosed,” Rich said (Rose felt a hard, clapping guilt), “so don’t bully her.”

“Who am I bullying? Who? I be unreasonable by asking that my son tell me when he has cancer?”

“The important thing is that we’re here now, and we can help. I’m sure Rose has been exhausted. She has work to focus on too.” His father had a soft, trembling voice. He stood with a slight stoop, hands held behind his back.

“Please,” Rich said. “Please, I don’t need you two here.”

“We. Your. PARENTS!” His mother wailed, as a nurse walked in.

“Is everything OK? Are these all your guests?”

The room of heads swiveled toward him. He nodded. “Everything’s fine.”

 

 

To hear Rich speak of his upbringing was to be obsessively pummeled with the same stories of stifling failure, the same sense of boiling resentment, again and again until it had bored its way into your own life, until it was part of the founding myth of your relationship, like your anniversary or the site of your first kiss.

The stories began after the first month of dating: How they’d forced him up at 4 a.m. every morning to practice hitting, how his father—a former semi-pro player himself—would thwack forehands at his face when he mishit the ball. And how his mother insisted that he spend his exhausted, non-tennis-playing hours studying until his eyes dried out. How their goal for him had been some kind of Harvard-doctor-professional-tennis-playing-uber-prodigy. How selfish it was of them to push him so hard when they had no concrete idea of who they wanted him to become, either.

And she’d considered it endearingly sad at first—for him to be so damaged and so angry. It dented the sheen of his confidence; it made him more human.

And then she began to blame his parents for his outbursts and his bullying. Of course, he would wind up like this. His entire childhood was a nightmare.

And then she grew tired of it, because the arguments were growing longer and more vicious, and the reconciliations more perfunctory, and because being someone’s child did not preclude you from also being a full-grown adult.

And by the time she realized, in a pinhead instant, how impossibly fastened he was to his narrative, how contingent was his existence upon being resentful and broken and depressed, she’d already spent the better part of two years explaining and excusing and wishing away his petulance. She’d spent two years tumbling and now, finally coming to a halt, found herself in a room with no doors, with the sense that all her life had bloomed and unfurled before her.

After Rich had calmed down and been wheeled off to chemo, followed by his simpering parents, Rose checked behind the separating curtain to apologize.

The bed was occupied by someone else. There was a note left on the small bedside dresser.

Moved down to floor 3. Xo, M

“Why did they move you?” She said when she found him.

“No idea. Not enough space, I guess.”

“Doesn’t seem very fair.”

“Fairness doesn’t really come into play when you’re dying.”

His hands were pale and shaking. She wrapped her fingers around one of them, shocked at how cold they were.

“I don’t know if anyone has ever realized—there’s no better place to rewrite your own story than in a hospital. Even if you’re just in for a sprain, you get reminded of your own body. You wake up,” the dying man said. “You get reminded of how much choice you have.”

Rose felt a swell of sadness for him that she’d yet to experience for Rich.

“People talk all sorts of clichés when other folks they know are dying, but it’s a whole other thing when it’s happening to you. You find out that it’s possible, actually, to fit more life into smaller periods of time. That’s the only way you can get over the heartbreak of it.”

“Is that what this is all about? All these stories you’re making up about us?”

“Well, that’s the thing—it’s not like you’re building something on shifting rock, where the longer it’s there and the higher it gets, the more unstable it is. You can build years and lifetimes on top of shaky memories, and the less you investigate them and the more you take them for granted, the more solid and certain they feel.”

 

Why do you always have to give me shit for drinking? Everyone drinks. People have been drinking since way back.

Because when you drink too much you become an asshole, Rich. And the number of historical assholes there have been doesn’t make you any less of one.

As she pushed him around the hospital’s memorial garden, she told the dying man how Rich would swivel his head if he noticed an attractive girl walking by, how his mouth would visibly gape and his eyes would narrow in that same hungry look she saw in him when they were having sex.

I’m a guy. That’s just what guys do. Like, it’s a part of our biology. As long as I don’t act on it, then I’m doing nothing wrong. So stop guilting me.

And how he applied this same physiological argument to force her away from interactions with other boys, to bind her closer to him.

You’re a chick. Chicks are different. Chicks don’t have that constant sex drive, so when I see you flirting with someone, it really hurts. It means you really mean it.

How he was a master of deflection, how he could destabilize blame and remove himself from beneath it, placing it with incredible precision upon some other mitigating factor of his life.

I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I just—my parents—every time I achieved something, they just pushed me to keep going, without ever telling me I was doing a good job. My self-confidence is wrecked. So I’m sorry if I seem insecure and paranoid; I’m just always so afraid you’ll realize how you’re too good for me and you’ll leave me.

Or the corollary manipulation:

I don’t really understand why you’re so upset when I get jealous. It means I love you. Love can be selfish and irrational. You can’t just take the good without the bad.

“We’ve had arguments too, you know,” the dying man said.

“Have we?”

“Oh yeah, remember that time I got angry at you because you messed up the wine? I tried to remind you at the store that we needed a corkscrew but you insisted that we already had one at home. It was eighty-dollar wine for our anniversary! And we got home and, lo and behold, we didn’t have one, and you were so furious at being proven wrong that you tried to pick the cork out with a knife and the whole thing fell into the wine.” He laughed. “Eighty-dollar wine! For our anniversary!”

And she smiled and willed herself to remember this too.

The north side of the intensive-care unit was visible through soaring panels of glass that sent microbursts of light glinting down at them. The garden was a shattered prism of flowers—thin, budded stalks of lavender and fleshy petals of iris and wide-open bundles of marigolds.

“Remember that time you saw the pictures on my phone?” he said.

“No—” she frowned and almost stopped pushing him.

“I have regrets, and that’s a huge one. I’m so sorry.”

“What pictures were on your phone?”

“Don’t you remember?”

She shook her head and felt surprise at the jangling nervousness, the grayish lump of dread that settled in her stomach.

“They were fairly innocent, I mean—nothing explicit. They were just from one of the people at work. Underwear shots, just teasing stuff. You and I weren’t officially together at the time.”

She nodded with pursed lips. She took deep breaths and blinked rapidly and tried to calm herself—this sadness, this sense of betrayal, they were completely manufactured. They weren’t real.

“Sometimes it feels as if my skin were wrapped around the wrong set of bones,” he was saying. “And sometimes I wish I were being held outside the window of a speeding car, and when the wind caught just the right way, I’d get huge—like a balloon—and I could take up three or four times as many lives. I could be so many more versions of me.”

He sighed. As they made another pass around the garden, one of the wheels of his chair caught a jutting stone that made him wince.

“It’s funny, isn’t it? How we’re just playing out this trope. The dying boy entreating the healthy girl in increasingly unsubtle ways to live the most out of her life. As if I even knew what that meant.”

“What would you do?” she half-whispered. “What would you do if you weren’t sick?”

He paused. “I’d be very, very selfish.”

A finch was flitting and darting between the low branches of a nearby tree. An elderly couple was asleep on one of the benches. “I’d want you all to myself. That’s why we love in the first place, right? We’re selfish with each other. We’re not comfortable sharing our affections unless they’re completely reciprocated.”

“Makes sense,” she said.

The tree with the finch on it was dotted at the tips of its branches with wild purple and white flowers. They were aggressively beautiful—with spread agape calyxes exposed to the world like open secrets, that seemed to quiver slightly when a buzzing insect came near, and threatened to enclose and smother it when it landed on a petal. When she looked back down at him, his head was thrown back, and he was staring up at her, smiling.

Rose glanced tepidly up at the ICU’s window panels; shattered needles of sunlight jounced back at her. And then she stopped pushing, leaned over the dying man’s head, and kissed him.

 

 

“Who’s that guy you were helping to push around?” Rich asked one morning. She felt a sudden blitzing of fear. He’d grown so thin and gaunt.

“Just a friend I met while you were asleep once.”

“Was he the guy in the next bed?” Rich asked.

“No,” she lied, holding her breath. Trembling.

“I feel like shit,” he said, eyes closed.

She put her hand on his forehead, then cupped it against his cheek. “Do you want me to call the nurse?”

“Lower,” he mumbled.

“What?”

He grabbed her wrist and moved it lightly to his chest. “Just bring it lower.” A thin smile painting itself on his lips.

She shook her head. “No, Rich. Not here.”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“I’m not going to do that here.” His grip was feeble; she pulled her hand away.

“Well, if I had a choice, I’d probably want to do it on our bed, in our home, but it’s not really working out like that, is it?”

“You’re not going to guilt me into doing that for you here. What if someone walks in?”

“I’m DYING!” he roared, sitting upright, and even his fury had lost its whiteness. It was the indignation of a domesticated animal. There was no real threat behind it.

“I don’t care, OK? I don’t give a shit!”

He fell back.

“I guess you can push around that cripple boy. You can run to him and fuck him once I’m gone. Is that the deal? Are you already making future plans?”

“Oh, fuck you,” she said, walking toward the door.

“Is that it, though? Am I right?”

“That I’m cheating on you with another patient? No. You’re wrong. And insane. I was just helping him out.”

“You’ll help him but you won’t help me?”

“What have I been doing these past few months, if not helping you out?”

“Just waiting for me to go. You’ve been doing the absolute bare minimum to convince yourself that you’re still a good person, but I saw it in you—the moment you heard my diagnosis, you were looking for an exit plan.”

And as she stood by the door, growing hot despite the tin thump of sterile air tunneling through the HVAC, she felt so thoroughly stuck, so inconsolably trapped within the muddled interior of her own story—a common one too—that she considered exiting it entirely. She’d take the dying man on a vacation; they’d make up a new story as they went; and all the bristles and gnarled stumps of her old life would coalesce and simplify into something graspable—like a gully in the mountains, whose changing leaves resembled a vast, blood-red wave.

 

They’d adopted Pepper on a cloudy, cold day. The shelter was poorly maintained and rang with the metallic cries of hungry dogs and cats. The passageway through which the lone haggard employee led them smelled like sour fur and shit, and all around, stacked in boxes that reached the ceiling, were scraggly animals with gaunt faces and palpable sadness. Pitiful, helpless, unloved, death-row animals.

Rich was gripping her hand so hard it hurt, and when she looked up she was surprised to find that his lips were trembling and his eyes red and glassy. The shelter employee told them in an almost obscene monotone how the newest arrivals were given the cages at the very top and gradually moved down, reaching eye-level by day eight or nine, after which they were, they were…

She noticed, in spite of the heat generated by dozens of furry bodies, how very cold it still was in the sterile holding room, how her teeth chattered and her breath came out in flumes of steam, and how—through the mewling and hoarse bellows—there came the sound of something quickly scraping; a husky palpitation in the air.

“Do you hear that?” she asked, nudging him. He didn’t seem to notice. “One of them is sneezing.”

He was a schnauzer, no more than a month old, with mangy gray fur and rust-colored stains around his mouth. And he was in the middle of a sneeze attack, pawing at his nose, blinking, panting slightly. The sign below his cage had his name listed as “Buddy.”

“I don’t like that name, though,” Rich said.

She agreed.

The evening of the fight two weeks later was deathly humid. Everything was weighed down by water. Everything was heavy and stagnant and dead.

The argument had begun over a misplaced peeler, as Rich thundered and cursed and paced in exasperation, as he spat insults at her—feminazi, nag, bitch—and threw up his hands in an ecstasy of drama, as he got dangerously close to her, making her flinch, “What? What? What are you gonna do? Are you gonna call the police on me? It’s not against the law to yell! It’s not against the law to be fucking pissed!” And all the while, she noticed, Pepper was standing beside her chair leg, whining and jumping and shivering.

The kick came at the peak of his fury, after his third or fourth false ending, after he’d gone to the sink to get some water and collect himself, before rushing back to her—“And another thing!—” which set off another rant, because his anger was fissive and self-sustaining.

Pepper had smacked against the sliding glass door and skittered limpingly to his bed.

What is wrong with you? What the FUCK is wrong with you?

Relax, he’ll be fine. He’s just a dog. Breathing heavy, coming back down.

You’re a psychopath. You need to see someone.

He’ll be fine! I didn’t even do it on purpose.

And as terrified as she was with him hovering over her, a tower of fury, she was filled, too, with a perverse sense of eagerness. If only he could do something—something tangible and stolid enough for her to properly justify putting this whole relationship behind her.

 

 

In the weeks leading up to his final surgery he grew calmer and more peaceful. He asked her to read to him in the mornings—excerpts from The New Yorker or Tennis magazine.

His mother moved into the living room of their home and busied herself with the day-to-day making of his meals and administering of his comfort, all the while shooting her dark and vaguely accusatory looks.

For the first time since they’d begun dating, Rose understood the kind of stymied guilt that Rich must have felt through most of his life—the implications of deficiency, the vast accumulation of unremittable debt.

“Where you go?” Rich’s mother asked, when she returned home one afternoon.

“I’m sorry?”

“Where you go? When you not with him. You go for hour, two hour, when he sleeping. Where you go?”

“I just go do some things for work,” she said, flustered.

“No work for you,” his mother said. “You have two months off. No work.”

How had she found this out?

“I still have to check in.”

“Two hour every day?”

She nodded and pushed her way past Rich’s mother, to the spare room where she now slept, and collapsed upon the inflatable mattress and pushed her face into the cottony, mothballed pillow.

Another knock. Rich’s mother framed against the doorway.

“He love you, a lot. He buy you ring.”

She shook her head. No, no no.

“We always think he should move to New York or Boston, get a good job, but he say he want to stay with you.”

Rose was only half-listening.

“Every time we tell him to go do something or be more ambitious, he say you the one who tell him to relax and be lazy. And now he buy ring. And you say yes, OK?”

Rose shook her head. “No.”

“He dying! You no want give him happiness before he die?”

She gulped down a deep breath. “I did as much as I could.”

“You do nothing. You no even notice he has cancer until too late!”

And then Rose’s nails were digging in her pillow. What the fuck did this woman know about her? Sending her adrift with these mangled accusations. She was screaming back:

“He said you tortured him! He said you pushed him too hard and it made him crazy! And he said that you gave him growth hormones!”

“You never talk that way to me!” His mother’s eyes were red with sudden sobs and her shoulders were hunched and then she was crumpled on the ground. “We just want him to have best life, best education,” she shuddered.

“The doctor said that growth hormones can sometimes increase the risk for cancer.”

She shook her head vigorously. “When the government in China put his grandparents in prison, we run. We spend all our money on papers, we can’t even take plane. We go in boats—” She held up her fingers—“Two months.”

“I’m sorry,” Rose said, because she had nothing else to say.

“It all for him.”

“Well, maybe you should have focused more on what actually makes him happy, not what you think would have.”

The woman shook her head and grunted dismissively. “You never understand. Too selfish.”

“I’ve done everything I can,” Rose sighed. “I’ve taken care of him, kept him company, made sure he’s comfortable—I mean, what else do you want? What else does he need?”

“But you no love him.”

She nodded. “Yes, I do.”

“No. Everyone see. You just waiting. You can’t even pretend if he give you ring.”

Rose shut her eyes and nodded. Shudders were pulsing up her throat. She tried taking deep, deep breaths. She found small pockets of liquidity in her heart that she’d unwittingly saved for emergencies, and she withdrew them. She stacked them together and ignored the hollow, ovaloid pits that they left behind, and when she opened her eyes, she was ready.

“OK,” she said. “OK, I’ll do it. To make him happy.”

 

“I’m going to marry him,” she told the dying man.

“You are.”

She nodded. “I owe it to him.”

“You owe it to him.”

“Yes. I just thought you should know.”

“Well, now I do.”

“I just, I haven’t been a good person, so it’s something I just need to do now.”

“Fine.”

 

 

It was freezing back in Rich’s room. “I’m guessing my mom told you about my whole plan,” he said.

Rose shook her head and opened her mouth—

“—No, I know it was a stupid idea. I’m sorry she put you up to it.”

“I’m willing—no—I’m happy to do it. I want to do it.”

“I’m really sorry.”

“Rich?”

“I’m really, really sorry.”

“There’s really nothing to be sorry about.”

He smiled gently at her. “Don’t be condescending.”

She crossed her arms.

“I’m sorry for all the time I wasted. I’m sorry for holding you back.”

“I forgive you, OK?”

“And I’m sorry for being so jealous and insecure. Whatever’s happening between you and that guy—if anything is happening—I guess I don’t really deserve to know, but whatever it is, I’m OK with it. You don’t need my forgiveness but I’m giving it to you anyway.”

A high-pressure system moved up through her sinuses. Moisture was pooling at the edges of her eyes. “Are you scared?”

“A little.”

“You’ll be OK.”

“I think I will too.”

She took a deep, steadying breath. “Don’t forget how you also punted our dog.”

“Oh, yeah.” A tiny smile crept upon his face.

“That was really, really shitty.”

“I know.”

“But I love you.”

He nodded, eyes closed, still smiling.

 

What was she doing? What had gotten into her? She was flying across the hallway, frantically clicking the “down” button on the elevator, choosing the stairwell instead, descending the eight floors, taking two steps each, bursting into the Dying Boy’s room to find a nurse clearing out the bed, staring at a chart.

“Where’s the patient who was here?”

“You’ll have to be more specific, honey,” the nurse said.

“There was a guy here. Max. He had some kind of terminal disease. He said he was dying.”

The nurse shrugged. “No one was dying in this room.”

“Well, someone was very, very ill. He was so weak he had to be pushed around. You guys kept moving him to different parts of the hospital.”

“Oh—” The nurse nodded in understanding. “I know the guy you’re talking about. Thin, right? Brown hair, brown eyes?”

“Yes! Yes!” Rose said.

“We discharged him. Nothing wrong with him.”

“What?”

“That fella’s a hypochondriac. Comes to the hospital at least two or three times a week—sometimes more. Always convinced he has one thing or another. Probably has Munchausen, actually.”

Her buoyant, rollicking heart. Shot out of the air. Leaden and stiff, it tumbled down her throat.

“Are you sure you have the right person?”

The nurse nodded.

“He didn’t seduce you or anything did he? Sometimes he tries to seduce the other patients. Ain’t ever seen him seduce a guest, though.”

A metallic voice suddenly crackled over the paging system.

Paging Rose Stoddard. Rose Stoddard. If there is a guest named Rose Stoddard, in urgent care, please come to room 401B.

Rich’s room.