“We really fucked up.”
“We really, colossally fucked everything up,” said Owen. And then he reached out for her hand.
Lucy found herself circling back again and again to something Ben had said to her on one of those very first nights she was on her own, right after Owen had asked her to leave the house. She was sleeping in a motel room two towns over, talking to Ben on the phone for hours every night, and driving home each morning in time to get Wyatt out of bed and off to school.
“I feel like I should tell you something,” Ben had said to her.
“What?”
“Keep in mind, this is not a hidden message. This has nothing to do with you and me or our future together or anything like that. Do you understand?”
“I do,” Lucy said. “At least, I think I do.”
“I look at Eliza and Peggy when they’re asleep sometimes, when it’s one of my nights with them.”
“Yeah?”
“And I can’t shake it, the same thought just goes running through my head.”
“What?” asked Lucy.
“It’s, well…” Ben paused for a second, like he wasn’t sure he should say this, but he forged ahead. “It’s What was I thinking? It’s What in the world was I thinking?”
Lucy heard the back door open. Owen and Wyatt were making a bit of a commotion, and the door kept opening and closing and then opening again. Lucy stood at the top of the stairs for a minute and listened to the two of them talking. They were hauling in firewood, and Wyatt wanted to carry each log one by one instead of using the canvas log carrier. Owen was telling him why the log carrier was better. “It’s more efficient,” Owen explained. “That means it’s easier and faster and better.”
“Okay,” said Wyatt.
“We’ll do it together,” said Owen. “We’ll each hold one handle. And then we’ll make a great big fire for Mama.”
Lucy slipped on her sweater and headed downstairs to her family.
“You want some wine?” she called.
“Yes, please,” said Owen.
Lucy poured two glasses of wine and went into the living room. She sat in the big red chair and looked on as Owen and Wyatt set about building the fire.
“No fire starters!” said Wyatt.
“No fire starters,” agreed Owen.
“And only one match,” said Wyatt.
“Are you sure?” said Owen.
“Yes,” said Wyatt. “We’ll pretend we’re in the woods and we’ve lost all our stuff and we only have one match left.”
Owen turned to Lucy and said, “I’ve got something for you to read, if you want to read it.”
“What is it?”
“A letter.”
“Do I want to read it?” asked Lucy.
Owen thought about it for a moment and then said, “I think you do.”
Dear Owen,
I’m writing to you from sunny Scottsdale, Arizona, where it’s eighty-five degrees and the sky is blue and today, for some reason, there are about eighty hot-air balloons floating up in the sky. I’m still alive, just so you know. This isn’t one of those letters people write when they’re dying and then have someone mail for them after they’ve bit it. Well, let’s just say it’s March Madness and I was alive when I put this in the mailbox. Real stationery too.
I’m sorry I disappeared on you. I left Beekman to go die at my sister Mona’s house. I know, I know, I never said I had a sister. Mona and I both spent most of our adult lives trying to forget about each other and it turns out we did it more successfully than either of us ever imagined. When I called her to tell her I had cancer she laid out all of the reasons why I should stay in Beekman, but I got on a plane and showed up on her doorstep anyway. She didn’t want me there. She really, really didn’t want me there. I kept saying to her, “If the shoe were on the other foot”—but if the cancer shoe had been on her foot, I can’t say I’d do for her what she did for me and offer to let me die on a rented hospital bed in her dining room because I was quickly going to be too weak to walk up the stairs.
I decided I would binge-watch The Sopranos as I lay dying, while the docs from the Phoenix Mayo Clinic did some experimental last-ditch efforts on my failing form. The doctor stuff was a condition imposed by Mona if I wanted to go gentle into that good night shitting blood in her dining room while hiding my chardonnay in her breakfront. It’s possible she thought it was experimental enough it just might speed the whole process along (okay, that’s not fair—but I’m not crossing it out, just so you see that cancer didn’t really soften me all that much).
Where was I? Oh, The Sopranos. Let me tell you, that show holds up. And I realized I missed about a third of the episodes on the original run so every few days I’d have this flicker of a good feeling, that hey-I-never-saw-this-one feeling, and when you’re convinced you’re dying it’s nice to have a reliable source of good feelings.
Christopher came to visit me, back when things were at their direst. Mona tracked him down and told him I was with her. I made him promise to keep it to himself, which it seems he did, unless you are really over me (joking!). It was nice. Making peace with your ex-husband on your deathbed is not the worst thing to do. He stayed at the Comfort Inn for a few days, played a little golf, and sat and talked with me when I was lucid. It’s amazing how a slow and painful death looming over you makes all the other things shrink down to their proper size. So he put his dick into other women; so what? It really wasn’t worth the amount of rage I carried around with me for all those years because of it. I mean it: it really wasn’t worth it. And I don’t like that Louise L. Hay stuff about rage causing cancer, it feels a little too blame-the-victim for me, but if rage DID cause cancer, then, well—I’m not going to finish that thought. Anyhow, talking to Christopher, I realized how nice it was to be friends again, and I remembered how he always could make me laugh. We were, in our own way, important to each other.
And I was completely ready to go down with this ship, I did not survive because of some inner strength or will to live or prayer or even a shred of New Age hope. There’s only one reason I’m still alive: Because they caught it in the nick of time. The doctors said even three months the other way would have meant I’d be dead now for sure.
So what I’m saying is, basically you saved my life. Not even basically. YOU SAVED MY LIFE.
So, thank you. As Sunny Bang said to me after she figured out about the two of us, there’s a pretty small overlap between the kind of men I sleep with and the kind of man who would force me to go to the gynecologist. I’m lucky it was you.