“I have a favor to ask of you.”
“Anything,” I said.
She squeezed the banana and threw it into the sink but didn’t reach for another this time. Instead she walked around the counter and spread her arms out wide.
“Oh, Ana.” I hugged her. I breathed in her coconut smell. Or maybe it was my coconut smell, I didn’t know. Portico writhed against my stomach.
Ana pulled back and held my arms and sighed. “Eunice called. She officially listed the house.” A beat. “Can I move in with you?”
“Of course,” I told her. I was elated, and then I was already imagining the conversation with Chuck—she’s dying, Chuck—and telling myself why this would be good for the boys. To meet someone who was dying—it would make them understand how fortunate they were.
“Oh, Nan,” Ana said, her bald head catching the light. Her eyes looked like they’d already sunk deeper into her head. “You are my truest bluest friend.”
“It’s no problem. We’d be happy to have you.”
“Thank you,” she mouthed. She looked at the fruit. “I guess I can stop squishing these bananas now.” She chuckled, but barely, and put a tired hand on her forehead. “Sorry, sometimes I just get so angry.”
I was soothing. “It’s okay. Squishing bananas is probably a healthy way to express anger.”
We both chuckled at that, and then Ana hugged me again. It felt good to hold her. It felt good to be needed. In a sick way, a secret part of me might have been glad for the weight of her catastrophe. Her imminent death and all the details surrounding it made my problems seem stupid, which was a relief. Instead of feeling sad about Chuck, my mind filled up with her logistics. Would she need movers? Was this furniture hers? Where would we put Portico’s tank? Portico would have to stay inside the tank; we would have to have that conversation. And when? When was this happening?
“When would you like to move in?” I asked her.
Ana inhaled and exhaled deeply. “Eunice gave me two weeks,” she said. “But honestly, I don’t want to be here anymore.”
“Let’s leave now,” I said.
My spontaneity surprised her. “Now?”
“Now.”
“Now.”
“Now!” I yelled, and then I don’t know why—to make her feel better, probably—I picked a mango off the counter and hurled it at the sink. “And we can be angry if we want to!”
“Angry and vengeful!” Ana yelled, like this was now a therapeutic exercise we were doing. She picked up a mango and hurled it the other way.
If there had been enough time to form a sentence in this moment, I would have said, I hope that sliding glass door is open.
But it happened so fast.
The mango whipped across the living room.
After the initial whop, it sounded like ice cubes crackling in a drink as the fracture spread fast throughout the pane. The sliding glass door was now in pieces but the pieces were still in the frame. They were holding on to nothing but each other’s shapes. I waited for them to fall. I waited longer. They didn’t fall. The new prisms cast light in all directions, and it was kind of beautiful.
?
It only took us thirty minutes to pack Ana’s stuff. She put on her relaxing yoga music and turned it up so loud that it became energizing rather than relaxing.
“There is a difference between needs and wants!” she boomed, tossing another Buddha figurine into her camo duffel. “I want everything, but I need almost nothing!”
I didn’t tell her this, but I thought that Ana’s needs and wants were kind of reversed. The things she needed were the things I would have left behind. She chose the pretty things over the essentials. In the bedroom, she held up a pair of black lace panties and said, “You know what? I’m not going to wear underwear anymore,” and let them fall to the floor. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes were spinning in the light.
I put the bananas in the trash while Ana finished packing. There was nothing to do about the broken door. After the ice cube sound had stopped, Ana had said, “Shit, Eunice is going to charge me for that.”
Adrenaline rushed through me like a drug. The loud chanting in another language reverberated throughout the house, and I kept thinking the blast of gongs would make the glass fall, but it kept not falling, and I kept putting the bananas in the trash, and what would Chuck say and how would the boys react, and would I get a divorce? But none of this mattered because right now my hands were just moving to the beat of the music that had no rhythm, and the snake was free and writhing on the floor, and in the middle of this chaos I watched my focused hands wipe banana meat from the sink, and I was impressed they were doing that because I could barely feel them.
Ana marched to the stereo and jabbed the power button. The silence was alarming.
“Let’s go,” she said, her voice echoing in my head like the gongs that were no longer there. She was out of breath and sweaty and her face was the color of a wild strawberry, and I knew for sure that this was the most alive she’d been since the diagnosis.
She grabbed Portico off the floor and put her in the tank and picked up the tank with surprising force. “I’ll carry this,” she said. “You carry the duffels.”
The duffels were in the doorway of the bathroom. They weren’t very big. “Are you sure this is it?” I asked her.
“Oh yeah,” she said, bouncing the tank up to get a better grip. “I’ll meet you at the car.” She started to walk away, and then she turned around. “Oh, and I left Eunice a present in the toilet.” She raised her eyebrows. “Don’t flush it.” As she walked away again she called, “Nan, do not flush it! I will know if you did!”
I lifted the toilet seat for the same reason I drove slower past a car accident: just to see how bad it was. And then I stopped breathing because it was bad.
I picked up the duffels. They were heavy. I had to get to the car. And then—I don’t know—my hand was reaching for the flusher.
“Naaa-aaaan,” Ana called, and before I knew it, my hand had retreated.
“Coming!” I said, and hauled the duffels across the living room.
At the front door, I paused. Good-bye, house. Good-bye, Jacuzzi. Good-bye, couch. Good-bye, rainbow afghans and all the crap in life we acquire but don’t really need. I felt particularly enlightened about this last one, as if I’d reached a new understanding about the art of letting go, even though it wasn’t actually my stuff we were letting go of. Good-bye, baggage, I added with attitude, even as my body buckled under the weight of her duffels.
Before I left I took one last look at the site of the crash. The fractured glass was still hanging on. I shut the door quietly so I wouldn’t disturb it.
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