I couldn’t imagine devoting my last energies to anything beyond relaxing, but I didn’t tell her that. Because maybe I was wrong. Maybe I wouldn’t feel that relaxed if I learned I had three to six months to live. Maybe I was more selfish than she was, and maybe I only understood cancer from movies. All of which meant that I knew nothing.
So I didn’t ask: Don’t you want to spend this time doing your favorite things with the people who love you? First because it sounded trite, and second because when I really thought about that, I wasn’t sure who loved Ana. Everyone loved her, of course, but they loved her from afar. I was her closest friend. Wasn’t I? Yes, she told me that all the time. I was her soul sister. I was the other half of the necklace. I was her somebody to lean on, and now she needed to lean on me, which meant I had to support her.
“Don’t you trust me, Nan?”
“I want to trust you, Ana,” I said, which wasn’t a lie.
?
When we got back in her house, I said, “I really think we should sit in the Jacuzzi for a little while. Just to take pause, you know?”
“You’re right, Nan,” she said. “A pause is the answer. I’ve taught you well.”
I hadn’t brought a suit, so Ana let me borrow her red one. I thought it might be too big in the bust area, but it fit perfectly.
“That looks great on you,” she said when I emerged into the living room, wearing just the suit with no towel around my waist to cover me up because who cared about anything now? She was dying.
The living room was a little messier than usual—the afghans weren’t folded like they usually were, but strewn haphazardly instead, and one was on the floor. Ana was lying on the low couch in her black silk kimono, threading Portico through her fingers and studying me. “You can have that suit when I’m gone,” she said in a businesslike way.
I looked at her sadly. “Thank you.”
She held Portico’s tiny face in front of her nose. Portico’s two-pronged black tongue glided in and out of her tiny mouth, and Ana kissed her.
“Do you want me to put those flowers in water?” I asked. The flowers and the carrot cake were still near the door.
Ana gazed in the direction of the door, her eyes coming unfocused. “If you want to.”
I did want to. I wanted to be useful. I took the flowers and the cake into the kitchen. The counter was piled with the fruit from the fruit stand. The mangoes looked good. I opened the drawers, looking for scissors to cut the flowers. I couldn’t find any. “Do you have scissors?”
“No, you can use a knife though,” she said.
There were only two knives. A small paring knife and a huge butcher’s knife. I chose the butcher’s knife. The hacking sent stems onto the floor. Using this tool was a little more violent than I would have liked. I put the flowers in the clear plastic vase I found on top of the fridge, and then I tied the orange bow from the carrot cake around it.
Ana was humming. At first I thought it was “Lean on Me,” but it wasn’t. It was a song I didn’t know. She stared straight out the window at the ocean, her arms splayed on the cushions. Beside her on the couch, Portico was as still as a hose. Before, I thought, before the diagnosis, Ana would have been stretching right now. Or doing something more lively. Maybe she would have been eating some of this cake.
“Do you want some cake?”
“Possibly,” she answered.
“Good,” I said, “because I want you to eat.”
I chose her prettiest plate. A maybe homemade ceramic oval in a happy yellow color. I cut the cake into cute little squares, and then I added some of the fruit, because if it was here, we should eat it. Banana and papaya and mango, sliced delicately with the paring knife. I took two forks out of the drawer and poured two cups of ice water and ripped two paper towels off the roll.
I brought her one of the waters, looking for Portico, who wasn’t on the couch anymore. “Let’s go outside,” I said in my most uplifting voice.
She took the water and sipped and said, “Okay, Nan,” and I followed her out with the pretty yellow plate of food, which reminded me of something. The way I had lovingly set the food on the plate—this was what I did for the boys when they were sick.
Ana sat on the edge of the Jacuzzi with her feet in the water. The breeze pushed her kimono into her body so every contour was visible. Her firm, perfectly round breasts and the small mound of flesh low on her stomach. She stabbed a banana slice first, chewed it like chewing was a hard thing to do. But then I knew the food started to taste good to her because she kept eating. “This cake is good, Nan,” she said.
“Oh, I’m so glad,” I said, stabbing a mango slice for myself.
Ana seemed calmer now. Maybe the anger was passing. After a while she said, “I’m full,” and put her fork down. She stretched her neck and fingered her half of our necklace, looking out at the horizon. The water was calm today. No waves sprayed us.
I felt the sudden urge to say it. Say it now, just in case. “Ana,” I said, “I just want you to know that I’m going to be here for you through all of this. And I want you to know that I love you.”
She blinked. She looked straight at me. Her eyes were wide open and blank. “I don’t know what love is.”
“What do you mean?”
“I might know what love isn’t, but I don’t know what it is.”
I touched my heart. This was heartbreaking. I didn’t know what to say.
In a distant voice, not looking at me, she said, “Tell me more about your childhood.”
“What do you want to know?” I brought one foot out of the water. Still the purple sparkly polish Ana had painted on.
“Tell me more about your mother.”
I laughed. “My mother?”
“It makes you uncomfortable.”
“No.” I stopped laughing. “It’s fine.”
“Tell me how she killed herself.”
I sighed the requisite sigh. “Pills. She overdosed.”
A pause. “Who found her?”
I said it quietly. “I did.” I looked away from her. She was staring too hard. I looked at the ocean, and it was so vast and so clean and this was comforting.
“You did,” she said. I knew she wanted more, so I gave it to her.
“I found her in her smelly chair. The one she sat in all the time. Toward the end, she never moved from that chair except to go to the bathroom and to refill her drinks. By the very end, she’d switched to boxed wine, the kind that comes with a tap so she didn’t have to move to get a refill. Next to her, she always had a drink, a bottle of pills, and the remote. On the day she died, she was drinking white wine. I remember that because she didn’t finish her glass. It was still almost full.” My neck burned. My shoulders clenched. “Anyway, I thought she was sleeping. I didn’t realize she was dead until I tried to wake her up later.”
I had said the last part too fast and I was out of breath. My ears prickled, waiting for her response. I could feel her staring at me. I didn’t look up.
“I’m sorry,” she said finally.