Lieutenant Dan got up from his spot by my feet and put his big head in my lap. He always knew when my anxiety was high.
Lieutenant Dan was a three-legged two-year-old Bernese mountain dog. He was also one of the many reasons why I wasn’t interested in a chief position at Royaume Northwestern. When Amy and I shared him, he was never home alone for more than a few hours, even if I was working my eighty-hour week. But now he just had me. I wasn’t interested in never being home anymore. I liked being home. These days, home was the only place I felt true peace.
Especially now that everyone at work hated me.
I sat back in my chair in my plant room and stared wearily into the succulents. I hoped the cupcakes helped. I didn’t see how they could. The situation felt well beyond baked goods to me.
I looked back down at my journal. Journaling centered me, made me feel calmer. It was one of the skills I’d learned in therapy, and it helped me work through the events of the day and subsequent emotions when I transferred them onto paper. But in the end I didn’t journal.
I wrote a letter to Briana Ortiz.
Chapter 7
Briana
You move in with me or I call in Mom.”
It was seven p.m. and I was driving a discharged Benny home from the hospital after my shift.
He looked at me, horrified, from the passenger seat. “Why are you punishing me? Isn’t my life shitty enough?”
“I’m not doing this to punish you,” I said. “You need help right now, and I can’t be over at your place cleaning for you and making sure you’re taking your medications. You’re not paying your rent and you just put yourself in the hospital. You’re skipping dialysis. You’re not even showering.”
He leaned his forehead on the car window. He looked so frail and exhausted. So different from the healthy, fit, virile man he was just eighteen months ago, before this nightmare started for both of us.
You know what? Maybe Mom did need to tap in. I didn’t know if I had the mental and emotional fortitude to take care of him and me. But then I wasn’t sure I had the mental and emotional fortitude to deal with her either. Calling her was definitely the nuclear option, and I did not take it lightly.
When the lid blew off the Nick thing last year, Mom had flown in from Arizona, where she’d retired with her husband, Gil, and mothered me to within an inch of my life. I’d had to call Gil to physically retrieve her when she wasn’t showing any signs of leaving when the one-month mark hit. She never stopped cooking. Not for a second. She filled my entire freezer, then bought a deep freezer for the garage and filled that too. The day she left, she cooked hot dogs, put them in buns, and wrapped them in foil in the fridge like I couldn’t figure out how to assemble them once she was gone. I was still eating the leftovers a year later. It would be full-chaotic Mom energy if I summoned her home.
I turned onto the freeway. “It’s Mom or my place,” I said.
“I don’t want to give up my apartment,” Benny said tiredly.
“I know,” I said, merging into the left lane. “But your apartment looks like shit. You’re barely taking care of the cat. Just move in with me. It’s only for a little while. You can have your old room. You can have my old room, it’s bigger,” I said, trying to sell it.
He paused before replying like it was wearing him out just to conjure sentences. “I don’t want to mess up your dating thing,” he mumbled.
“There’s nothing to mess up. I’m like the most single person you’ve ever met. You seriously wouldn’t be cramping any of my style moving in. I have nothing going on right now.”
He didn’t reply and I glanced at him. “This is only temporary, Benny. You’ll get a transplant and you’ll get your life back.”
He stayed silent for a long moment. “I’m going to be dealing with this for the rest of my life,” he said quietly.
“It won’t always be this bad. Once you get a kidney—”
“I won’t. You know I won’t. You just don’t want to admit it.”
Now I went quiet. I didn’t know what was better. Trying to keep his hopes up or managing his expectations.
“Okay,” I said. “So let’s say you don’t get one and this is just your life now—it can still be a good life. It can be a great life. Why don’t we get you a home dialysis machine? You can do it at night while you watch TV. You only need to do it for two hours if you do it every day.”
There was no reply again, so I had to look over at him.
“I can do it from home?” he asked tentatively.
“Yeah, totally. You have a doctor for a sister. You can’t do it when you’re living alone, but if you move in with me, I’ll be there to sterilize the equipment, monitor your vitals.”
He looked slightly if not hesitantly optimistic.
“And if you do daily dialysis instead of three times a week, you can have restricted foods since the fluid won’t build up.”
He sat up. “I can have ice cream?”
I nodded. “Yup. We might even be able to get you off some of the meds with the more frequent dialysis. You’ll feel better, you’ll have more energy…”
I think this was the first time I saw him smile in months. Well, he sort of smiled. It was more of a neutral frown on the cusp of a smile—but still, it was progress.
“Benny, you can do this. You just need to get adjusted. I can help you.”
Please let me help you.
The silence hovered between us.
“Okay,” he said finally.
“Okay? You’ll move in?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
I let out a breath. I felt simultaneously relieved and sad. Relieved that I’d be able to take care of him, that I wouldn’t get any more surprise ER visits, that him being with me would give him a better quality of life. And sad that a certain chapter was ending—for both of us. Because both of our lives had officially come to an abrupt stop. We were adults, regressing.
It was like the clock had just wound back twenty years. Suddenly I wasn’t grown-up, thirty-five-year-old married Briana anymore. He wasn’t bright, driven Benjamin working in IT, training for a 5K. I was the older sister again, in charge of watching a brace-faced Benny while Mom took night classes and worked a double. And I was going to have to watch him. Because I didn’t trust him with himself.
I got him home to his apartment and made him dinner. He barely touched it and went straight to bed. I drove home after starting a load of dishes and watering his wilting plants that still looked twice as alive as my brother did.
I was so mentally drained by the time I got back to the house I just plopped on the sofa wrapped in a blanket and passed out there until the cat unceremoniously walked across my body at two a.m. Then I dragged myself to my room and stared at the ceiling in the dark, unable to go back to sleep.
I was getting further and further away from the me I’d planned. Of the life I had planned.
In two weeks, I’d no longer be married. I would, from this day forward, be alone.