“Well, I’m trying,” he says, and he reaches around to unfasten my bra, and I attempt to be serious, which makes me start laughing all over again. “Could you?” he says. “Stop?”
He walks me, backward, over to his bed, and we fall down on the mattress, with him on top of me, and he says, “I can’t believe how long I’ve waited for this,” and I say, “Me, too,” as you do. It’s just the slightest bit awkward, but I’m wondering if life would have been altogether different if we had done this long, long ago—that day way back when he didn’t buy condoms. If I could go back in time, I’d insist we try another drugstore.
This is what I’m thinking, lying there underneath him and looking into his eyes—and then, all of a sudden, I’m not thinking anymore at all. Sex has a way of taking over, all the body parts waking right up and taking their stations.
Afterward, I think how nice it is, lying there in his arms, as though no time at all has gone by. Press a button, and—bingo, you’re back to safety.
When I go home that evening, I realize that I, too, am sleeping in my girlhood room with the same posters and sheets. We’re not so different after all, he and I. The walking wounded, coming home to heal.
FIFTEEN
BLIX
So I don’t die.
I don’t die that night, and I don’t die the next week or the next after that. In fact, I have never had a larger appetite, or more of a piercing sense of what it means to be alive. All this feels like bonus time, like the days that get tacked on to a vacation trip because the airline cancels your flight.
There’s a kind of holiness to these days, this time, painful as it is.
Maybe I am meant to simply cruise along. Maybe there’s still something I am supposed to accomplish.
Or maybe when death came for me, Houndy jumped out in front and took his turn first. He’s a scoundrel, that one.
Ah, well, but if you believe, as I do, that there are no mistakes, then clearly I am supposed to be here.
Summer ends, and Brooklyn ushers in September. I am tired. The mad current of life goes on around me. A bright ribbon of humanity exists outside, coming back to life now that the summer’s heat has dissipated some; there is laughter and there are doors slamming, and sirens and cars backfiring, and conversations and arguments in the street and out the windows. Houndy’s chrysanthemums bloom in his rooftop pots, as though he’s saying hi. The nights grow chilly, and Sammy goes back to school and doesn’t come home now until after six o’clock every day because he’s in an after-school program. Patrick is still writing about diseases, but he comes up to see me sometimes when he knows no one else will be here.
In this bonus time I’ve been given, I trundle down the steps, bringing him cakes and pickles and delicate mushrooms, and once a Prosecco that I need him to taste—but no matter how often I throw open his curtains and rub his head, no matter how many times I hug him and bask in his presence, I’m not sure anything I’ve said has yet convinced Patrick that he deserves love.
Sometimes the universe has its own ideas, and I have to accept the fact that I may run out of time here on the planet, and I have to hope I can watch people from the unseen realm. I wonder if that’s true, if I’ll see them and hear them. If I’ll be able to communicate from beyond.
I take a deep, deep breath—breathing in the city around me, all its sounds and voices, and the car horns and the laughter and uncertainty of life on planet Earth. And then a voice says to me, There is nothing more important than this.
One morning I make my way out to the stoop. I have sciatica, I have a pain in my chest area, an arm that feels on fire, and my eyes are burning. I haven’t been able to sleep since four o’clock, that blackest of hours, so at first light I go outside where I can watch street life happening in front of me, and perhaps be healed by the jangle of personalities and car horns. I want to stop thinking of pain as a problem I have to solve.
I’m sitting there on my blue flowered pillow thinking about endings when I notice a man loping down the sidewalk. He is swinging a backpack behind him, and I watch him come toward me because it is more effort to turn away, frankly, and because I have a little tingly sense that something is about to happen. He looks elegant and disheveled at the same time, animal-like in the way he moves, his arms swinging and his long legs in their khaki shorts striding down the street, looking around him the way a tourist would. He comes closer and closer, until I finally have to put my hand over my mouth, seeing who it is.
“Noah?” I say, and I cannot even stand up, cannot hold on even another hour, because I am suddenly so tired, and here is Noah to catch me when I fall. Maybe he is the miracle I’ve been waiting for, the savior coming to console me, to pay his respects, to say good-bye. Wouldn’t it be amazing if, after all our family history, the universe has sent him, and he turns out to be the one who helps me?
He comes closer, peering at me from under a fringe of long hair, and I don’t see very well, but I feel his shock at the look of me. All that terror. “Aunt Blix, what happened to you?” he says. “Look at you! What—? Oh, are you ill?”
“Yes,” I say. “I’m actually about to drop dead. That’s why you’re here.”
“That’s why I’m here?” he says. He doesn’t hug me. He runs his hands through his mop of hair and looks around. “You’re dying?” he says. He licks his lips nervously. “Shouldn’t you be in the hospital? Who’s taking care of you?” He looks up and down the street, like he’s hoping a team of doctors and medical professionals with their stethoscopes will step out from behind the shrubbery and tell him everything is under control. I almost want to laugh.
“No, honey. There’s no need for hospitals. I’m dying,” I say. “Perfectly normal thing to do at the end of life. Come and sit with me. I’m so glad to see you.”
“Aunt Blix, I think we need to get you to a doctor.”
“The hell. No doctors, darling.”
“But doctors could help you!”
“I’ve been dying for some time now, and I have no intention of seeing doctors now. Sit here, please. Hold my hand.”
He looks so sad, so frightened. Like if he could, he’d rewind the tape, spool himself walking backward down the street, back down the subway steps, back into the subway car, perhaps all the way back to the airport and maybe even back to Africa, the plane flying in reverse. But he sits, perched on the steps, and I take his hand in mine, and he lets me hold it there. I flow an abundance of love and energy to him.
Ah, my grandnephew. How we loved each other when he was a little kid, but as can so easily happen with distance and time, things went bad between us later. I remember that he came to visit Houndy and me when he was about nineteen and full of himself. I was shocked at the change in him. He was so much his mother’s son at that point—arrogant and judgmental, challenging me about all my beliefs, laughing at us for being old hippies, as he called us.
Even worse, I felt the first inklings of a brittle vanity in him, as though appearances were all that mattered, in the same way Wendy was renovating our old mansion without curiosity for the past or any attention to the details that made the old house beautiful. Just pave over what you don’t appreciate. That’s what my family seems to say.
And mock in others whatever you yourself don’t understand.
But now maybe we have another chance. Clearly that’s what his presence here means.
“Well, then—what?” he says. “What can I do?”
“You can ease me over to the other side,” I say. “That’s what I’m hoping you’ll do.”
“Wait. Does my mom know how sick you are?”
“No. Nobody in the family knows. That’s the way I wanted it. But now you’re going to be here, and I hope you’re going to stay with me while it happens. And it’s going to be the kindest thing you could ever do for me.”