Alex Foster

At This Moment in a Different Year

Originally published in AGNI 97

By Alex Foster

We were watching one of those summer blockbusters where the fun is in seeing your own city destroyed, when you squeezed my knee above the tan line and said you were ready.

“Right now?”

You laughed. “I mean, when we get back to my house.”    

“Let’s go then.” I tugged your hand, horny as hell. No time to lose. Your parents would be home by midnight.

“Wait.” The screen lit up the teenage glitter on your eyelids. You wanted to see how the movie would end! I assured you Will Smith would be okay.

He’s still okay twenty-five years later. Last month I took the boys to see his new one while you were getting more X-rays. He plays every character and goes back in time to kill himself, or something, I was distracted, but the movie did its job of keeping the kids occupied. Caleb didn’t even want to leave when it was over. He begged us to sneak across the Cinemark hall for another showing, but we’d promised to have dinner ready when you returned from the hospital so we dragged him out of there. We picked up Hawaiian pizza (his choice), and peace was won, until Kerry said, “Hawaiian pizza sucks,” and Caleb said, “Mom sucks” (he didn’t mean it) and Kerry told him to grow up and Caleb invited his big brother to choke to death on pineapple. That’s where we were at, emotionally, a month ago.

Last night, Kerry caught me on the porch smoking one of your joints. I told him the prescription covers husbands. It ought to.

He didn’t care about that. He asked if we’d made a decision about continuing chemo. (Do you think he’s smoked? We did in tenth grade, but knowing his friends, I’m doubtful.) I held the line: told him we were waiting for the doctors’ advice. He didn’t buy it.

“I hope ‘the doctors’ advise her to live,” he said, as if we were both in on some bitter joke.

I said, “Mom might spend her last months in the hospital and still not live longer.”

“She’d get better food there than the dinners you and Caleb have been serving.”

I didn’t humor him, and he looked down, and then I felt bad. I walked him to his room and actually tucked him in, the way I used to, kissing his hair, curly like yours. It was sort of in jest, but he didn’t stop me.

Then, in the pulsing dark, I came to our room and crawled into bed. I assumed you were asleep. Your baby breath danced over my nape, and when I rolled over, I was surprised to see you staring back. You asked if I remembered our first time. You meant the time we rushed out of that movie, our first almost-time since I was so feverish, sixteen, that when we reached your house I couldn’t get it up. Your parents returned home to find us in the kitchen playing Scrabble.

“We dealt them in,” you said.

“I miss them.” They were the sort of emotionally resolved couple one could picture lying in bed chatting over old recollections until nearly morning. I often wondered what it was like for you to grow up an only child. Playing lacrosse against the garage door of that house on Linden Street. I said, “I wish the boys wouldn’t fight.”

“Four years won’t be such a big gap when they’re our age,” you said.

I thought about the years till then, and all my scared, stoned muscles heaved. I wanted to talk more about our decision, even if there was nothing more to say but to retread the same intractable numbers. Five percent chance with chemo of surviving five years; or hope for one year untreated. Either way, I’d dwell on those numbers for a lifetime.

I tried to think of a thousandth fresh way to conceptualize five percent. You wrapped your arms around me. Your eyes closed. I let you sleep.

~

This morning I woke to the phone ringing. For a delusional moment, part of me thought it might be my little brother. I must have been dreaming about him again. I’ve started to get bad dreams from smoking before bed, or perhaps it’s from sobering up in my sleep, and I wake disoriented, forgetting where or how old I am. In any case, I rushed to get the phone before it disturbed you. It was just your aunt’s friend Gail.

I said I’d add her to my email list but asked her not to call as it was too tiring to repeat the same medical updates to everyone. Plus I liked to be able to share the email replies with you, when appropriate. The conversation ended with my confirming what she’d heard, that you’d been doing overnights at Northwestern Memorial and they’d found it now in the other lung.

Awake before my time and in a sudden fuck-all mood, I brewed four quarts of coffee. Today would be the Sunday I’d drink coffee and play guitar on the porch. Self-care. You and the boys could sit and listen, or not, no matter. I’d be doing it for me. I ran upstairs to tell this to the boys, but they weren’t in the Xbox room and they weren’t in their bedrooms either. They weren’t in the basement. They were gone.

I tried Kerry’s cell. No answer.

Autumn’s cold had softened my bike tires, but I didn’t bother with that pump that only you know how to use. I pedaled out, sans helmet, hoping to find them before I hit Sheridan. Dead leaves rustled in the wind. The smell of October reminds me of our wedding, and how my little brother wasn’t there. How my dad said he was surely “smiling down on us,” which I resented: it seemed so dishonest it was like we were killing him again. Not that he never smiled, but already by that time all memories of my brother smiling had been obliterated by the image of him on that dry Monday morning, winter of my senior year, when I entered our shared bathroom expecting to brush my teeth. That was, I sensed, the real Jonathan, whether we ever admitted it, in life or beyond.

A thing about me is that I didn’t cry over my brother’s suicide. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t overcome thinking it was too late for tears to do any good. Instead I became a worrier. Someone who photographs the stove before going out of town for proof the burner’s off. When Kerry’s not home by curfew, it takes everything for me not to alert the police. And in all the years since Jonathan, I’ve been liable to end perfect nights holding your smallness and fearing that one day one of us will die. So when we received your diagnosis last spring, the arrow fit perfectly into the wound that my heart had propped open. Other than that, all my worrying changed nothing.

I found Kerry and Caleb at Redhill School, playing basketball. They claimed to have left a note. I laid my bike beside their sweatshirts.

“Who’s winning?”

“Kerry,” Caleb said, breathless.

“We’re not keeping score,” said Kerry. He gave his little brother a free layup, which struck the bottom of the rim. No one else was in the playground, and the swing sets creaked each time the wind came through.

“Wanna play, Dad? Us two against you?”

We all like that arrangement because that way they both win. “You’re on,” I said. They let me start with the ball. I drove harder than my knees would’ve liked and took an early lead.

I used to win in basketball against Jonathan when we were kids. I had two years on him and at least forty pounds by the end. I’d make him play me, then call him gay. This was the early nineties. A lot might have happened between then and now. All he liked to do was sit in his room, strumming George Michael’s “You Have Been Loved,” so you can understand why I took it on myself to give him some exercise. I didn’t know how to play guitar back then. Some nights when I think about that now, I get depressed. Other nights, I get angry at him for not giving me time to change.

Kerry dished the ball to Caleb, who made a surprising bank shot from practically the three-point line with no arc whatsoever. I was down 4–9. They taunted and laughed. We never said what we were playing to. The wet smell of peat blew in from the empty soccer field, and our shouts and dribbles echoed across the schoolyard. I couldn’t hold back crazy thoughts like, If I sink this, you’re the one in twenty, and I wondered if the boys were thinking about you too or simply playing.

By 10–35 my knees were ground down bone-to-bone, so when I got the ball, I called “next point wins.” I lost. We walked (I limped) off the court to our jackets and phones. Kerry and I each had two missed calls, from you.

“The boys left a note,” I said when I called you back.

“Where?”

You have no idea how good it felt to hear your voice. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Come home. I made pancake batter. And someone’s gotta help me drink all this coffee.” I’d forgotten about that. “Also, you and I should prep how we’re going to explain our decision to Kerry and Cal.”

“If we’re doing that tonight,” I said.

“Aren’t we?”

“We don’t need to.”

“I thought you wanted to.”

It’s funny, we’ve never been very good at planning. Whenever one of us is raring to go, it seems like the other pumps the brakes.

Maybe we are good. Maybe we’re perfect.

We were sixteen when we started dating. I didn’t think we’d spend the rest of our lives together. I just thought you were the funniest, cutest, most confident girl I’d ever meet and there was a chance you liked me. I had never asked anyone out before, but I hoped if I wore a polo shirt and combed every hair on my head in the perfect direction and then showed up after your lacrosse practice without too many hairs getting messed up on the way, I’d have a chance. That day lacrosse practice ran late. I stood by the bleachers, shielding my head against the wind, listening to Coach Orin (Mrs. Orin, A.P. Biology) shout at you girls that you were all doing a really great job. Made me want to have daughters. When finally she blew the whistle to end practice, you walked to the bleachers with goggle rings around your eyes and asked me out.

~

You’ve no sense of economy when you make pancake batter. You show the part of yourself that always really wanted a family of ten or twenty—dozens of kids running around the kitchen, a perpetual armrest on your belly, to make up for the solitude of your own childhood. Kerry, Caleb, and I do our best, on basketball appetites, to eat for at least four.

“What’d you do to your knee?” you asked as you served us a stack of six pancakes, each, to start. You were wearing your blue headscarf, which in the kitchen almost looked normal, as if you had hair to catch.

“It’s just a bit clicky,” I said.

“You need to take care of yourself.” You watched us eat.

Kerry told you about his upcoming placement test. He’s in Algebra II, and if he scores in the top five percent, he’ll bump up to Algebra II Honors (with trig), which is where his friends are. He’s sixteen, the same age we were. It’s hard to believe.

“Senior year I’d get to take AP Calculus,” he said.

I noticed the strain in your smile when he mentioned his senior year, and it occurred to me that maybe he was doing it on purpose. He did something like that earlier in the week too, didn’t he? Mentioned what kind of wedding he’d like to have, out of nowhere. I told him to close the fridge.

“Speaking of that, I meet my college counselor on Tuesday,” he said.

You nodded and looked ahead on your calendar.

I glanced over your shoulder. Under today’s date, there was a short, blue, vertical line. The deadline we’d given ourselves to make a decision about treatments and communicate it to the kids.

~

Lately I’ve been thinking about our senior year, twelve months after we began dating, when our relationship faltered. We both remember that rough patch. I became shifty and more caviling—picking fights in the car, at the mall, outside homecoming. Somehow we made it through. We hardly talk about it now. In a healthy marriage, bygone tumult is allowed to die, like nightmares buried under forward-looking breakfast chatter. You’ve never learned the full extent of what went on during that period behind your back.

I only cheated with one girl. Whether my conduct was the cause of our strife or its symptom, I don’t know. I’m inclined to say both. An act of estrangement that compounded on itself, the way distance weakens gravitational attraction. The first time, in the bathroom at Joe Dell’s pool party, did not predate our first big fight, but neither did it clarify anything.

The fifth or sixth time, you almost caught me. It was a Friday after school. I thought you had lacrosse practice, and since my parents were out of town (their anniversary), I invited Grace over. You probably don’t remember Grace Boyzinsk. Maybe you didn’t even know her then. I barely did. She dated some short-distance runner, one of those weird aggressive-potheads you find in high schools. I don’t think they stayed together past graduation, but one of the few things I remember about her is that when she and I hooked up—which happened a dozen or so times in four months, before I called off the liaison and never cheated again—she always called me by his name. I was self-sabotaging. That’s the only way to explain it—the simplest explanation and nevertheless the most complex. I had an instinct, when something hurt, to press it. That is to say, I was waiting the whole time for you to catch me.

Of course, when you turned up on that Friday afternoon, I freaked out. You rang the bell. I held my breath. Then I heard someone answer the door. It was Jonathan. I didn’t know he was home. He must have been moping in his room next to mine, I thought, rereading Time’s Power or whatever, and now he was about to fuck me over.

He didn’t though. He told you I was out.

I thanked him the next day.

“For what?” he said.

We didn’t discuss it again. And for the time being, I kept seeing Grace.

Eventually, though, people change. That’s what I’ve been thinking about lately. And while my usual feeling on that matter is thank God we do, it wasn’t gratitude I felt this morning when I looked over your shoulder at your calendar. I caught a glimpse of today before you flipped the page, and I thought about how much everyone could change. How much I could change still, from what I am now, to something different, without you.

~

Touching my forehead to the wall, I heard our whole house humming.

“Could you focus, Babe?”

“Sorry.”

You stood behind me. I felt like crying, but I knew I wouldn’t. The boys were cleaning up breakfast, and you and I spoke quietly in the living room so they wouldn’t hear.

“It’ll be okay,” you said. “They’re expecting this talk. They might even be relieved to know our choice.”

“They’re not gonna be relieved.” I sat down. Our couch is green with corduroy cushions. “They expect you to continue chemo. They’ll ask why we’re giving up.”

Giving up pained you, and I regretted saying it. You had enough pain. You sat beside me in your enormous sweatshirt with the chipping WCRX logo and said, “The way I want to phrase it is, ‘I’m choosing to spend my remaining time at home with you guys instead of in the hospital.’”

“How much time?” I said. “That’s what they’ll ask.” I stared at the floor. Our rug is red with arabesque palmettes and the tightest knot density of all the rugs we looked at in three different stores. I thought about our time together. We had maybe twelve months left, maybe fewer, and I had an urge to spend them all of them pissed off.

“If they ask that, we’ll give the honest answer.”

“Which is?”

“We don’t know.”

We always keep our house cold. I wrapped my arms around you. The sweatshirt hid how thin you’d gotten. Your neck smelled like Eucerin.

I said I wasn’t ready to make this decision.

“It’s not fair to sit on it. It’s not fair to them. It’s not fair to us.”

I agreed, but. “What if we could still beat it and we don’t try?” I said. “I’m going to be stuck thinking about that forever.”

“I know that scares you.” We were still hugging. “But it’s not worth me spending these last months on chemo and in operating rooms.”

I said, “It’s your decision.” I said it in an even tone, hoping you’d protest.

But you said, “Letting go is natural.”

Did you want me to protest?

I agreed “remaining time” seemed tactful, and if they asked other questions, ones we weren’t prepared for, we could ask to talk about it more later. For better or worse, they probably wouldn’t question much. The important thing was to communicate our decision.

“We’ll do the talking together,” you said.

~

You used to wear that white jumpsuit, the one you got on our trip to Santa Fe. You wore it all the time. We’d come home after a night out, I’d dismiss the babysitter, and you’d pull the straps off your shoulders and let the top hang from your waist as you sampled leftovers from the fridge. I don’t know what happened to that jumpsuit. Maybe I’ll find it in a box in your closet.

I’m thinking about this while waiting alone for our pizzas, which still aren’t ready for pickup ten minutes after the appointed time. Frank, the pizzeria owner, whom I’ve come to know these past months, keeps winking at me from the kitchen. His pizzas are what you call “extremely average,” but he tries. When they’re ready, I’m going to bring them home, and we’re going to have our talk.

But I keep thinking, We don’t need to. We could sleep on it.

My phone rings. It’s Kerry. He wants to know where my guitar is.

“What’s wrong with yours?”

“I need another. I want to teach Cal a song.”

I don’t know where my guitar is. It might be by our bed. It might be on my chair next to your desk where I play Talking Heads songs while you’re trying to work.

“Dad, you okay?”

The smell of pizza follows me outside. “Wait,” I say into the phone. “I’m coming.” My bike drops over the curb, bungee cables dangling. I’m prepared to beg you not to give up.

~

I hit snooze three times the morning my brother died. The sun hadn’t risen, snow tingled on my windowsill, and my bed was warm. I could hear the shower running. On my clock radio, they talked about the Patriots’ 28–3 win over Pittsburgh. I was planning to see Grace that night. But I wouldn’t. Not ever again. That night I’d sleep sixteen hours, and by the weekend I would commit myself to you, never to look back, believing that if I became the man you deserved, we could spend the rest of our lives together. I rolled out of bed, needing to pee, tucking my boner in my waistband, and entered the hall to find steam seeping out from under the bathroom door.

~

You’re all standing in the kitchen when I burst inside. Lester Holt is on the news. Caleb is leaning against the island counter, trying to get his arms around Kerry’s guitar.

“Where’s the pizza?” you ask.

“It wasn’t ready,” I say.

“Oh,” you say. “Okay then.”

“Can we talk?”

We go in the living room and shut the door.

“I’m having second thoughts,” I say.

“Me too,” you say. We sit on the couch. “But I think we’re making the right choice. And we can’t keep burdening the kids with uncertainty.”

Uncertainty? I want to say. You think our decision avoids uncertainty? The news in the kitchen goes off, and I sense the boys standing just outside the door.

“Let’s wait,” I say.

You close your eyes and shake your head.

The door opens. Kerry stands on the threshold. His little brother, holding the guitar, tries to see around him.

“What are you guys talking about?” Kerry asks.

You and I look at each other.

“Come sit down,” I say. They sit on the short end of the L-sectional with the guitar between them.

Kerry frowns, the way he does when he’s trying to phrase something earnestly. He learned that face from you. He says, “Did you reach a decision about treatments?”

I glance at you. You’re watching me. It seems like you want to speak, but no words come. Your parents’ pendulum clock ticks on the wall.

“No,” I say. “We haven’t decided.”

Then no one speaks. I know you’re still looking at me. I imagine your parents watching us from wherever they are, as I avoid your eyes.

Kerry says, “Cal and I really, really want you to take every treatment possible. We can do better around the house to help. I can even drive you to the hospital once I get my license.”

I can’t believe he’s sixteen. I never will.

“I’ll help too,” says Caleb. “I promise, Mom. I won’t whine. I’m going to work on being constructive.”

You place your hand on my knee, and I think maybe you feel it too. That there’s hope. There has to be. You and I have a life we need to live together. Past the window, moths appear and disappear, like appalling angels trying to get in, some so large I can hear them fluttering against the pane. My eyes brim with tears. To miss you feels like little pieces of my body drifting away. Your hand on my knee forever can’t be so much to ask. But when finally I face you, my crazy reasoning ends, shattered by the look on your face. It’s the look I know I deserve, because it’s the one I’ve always feared. That withdrawn look that says that I’m betraying you.

Kerry’s shoulders—his skinny shoulders that bounce, even under the weight of his massive bookbag, when something makes him laugh—sink forward. “Mom doesn’t want to continue treatments, does she?”

The clock ticks. I don’t know how you and I got here. How we were so lucky. And so unlucky. So unlucky. So lucky . . .

“No,” I say, even though I’m too confused to speak. “She and I don’t think more aggressive treatment is a good option.” You take my hand. I squeeze.

Caleb plucks a guitar string and mumbles, “I knew it.”

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” you say.

You position yourself for Caleb to hug you, but he stays put.

In a voice that’s bullyish and heartbreakingly false, he asks, “How long?”

You smile at him and lift your shoulders in reply. Some part of me wants to moan. Wants to go, “Oooo,” until someone comes to get me. I show that part of me to the crowded hallway of my heart, fearing it will be there moaning in carpools and graduation dinners and strange beds for the rest of my life.

“Whatever happens—” you say. We’re all watching you. Your eyes, fixed on me, are imprinted with deep, red, goggle-like rings. “Whatever happens, it will be okay.”

And Caleb gives you that hug. And I nod and place my hand on your knee. But every part of me knows the truth, that some okays are so much better than others.