All You Could Ask For: A Novel (31 page)

I HADN’T CALLED HIM Phillip in almost twenty years.

That wasn’t an accident, and it wasn’t as though he hadn’t noticed. Back when he first hired me, when he was a managing director, eighteen months after graduating from HBS, he told me everyone called him “Phil,” but that I was welcome to still call him by his full name.

“That’s all right,” I told him that day, “you feel more like a Phil to me now.”

So when his full name came up through the intercom, I froze.

“Ms. Emerson,” the doorman said hesitantly, after a moment, “shall I send your visitor up?”

Well, wasn’t that an interesting question?

On the one hand, the last thing in the world I wanted was to see him, and on the other, there was nothing I wanted more. Which hand takes precedence in a moment such as this? I swear, they don’t prepare you in life to make the decisions that really matter. In school they teach you how to add and how to play nice with other kids, and there are books to help you with everything from meditation to how to dismantle a nuclear device, but no one ever tells you what to do if you’re staring your own mortality square in the face and the man who ruined your life shows up at your apartment with a conciliatory opening line.

“Of course,” I found myself saying, “send him on up.”

Then it was like I was on autopilot, drifting from the living room to the study and glancing into a mirror. Not so bad. He hadn’t seen me since I began my treatments, since I quit my job. Could that really have been just a few months ago? It felt like a different lifetime.

I went to the sofa and sat with my legs crossed beneath me, took a deep breath and held it, then slowly let it out. Then in again, and held it, and out. Again and again, as deeply as I could manage.

When the doorbell rang, I pressed the button to allow Phillip entry, keeping my eyes closed, continuing to breathe all the while. I heard the door open, then shut softly. Footsteps on hardwood floors, loud, as only expensive dress shoes on wood can be. Then the footsteps stopped and I could faintly hear his breathing over the sound of my own, but I did not open my eyes until he spoke.

“Hi, Kat,” he said, in his scratchy baritone. “You are a sight for sore eyes.”

I took one last deep breath, let it out, then I opened my eyes. The man before me was one I did not recognize. For the first time in all the years I’d known him, from the boy who was Phillip to the man who was Phil, from the most impressive student at the finest school in the country to the shrewdest chief executive on Wall Street, I couldn’t see any of it. It was as though his spirit had vacated his body, leaving only the limbs and flesh behind. He was pale and wan, and his lips were severely chapped. He also looked heavier than I had ever seen him.

“My lord, Phil, you look like shit,” I said. “I’m supposed to be the one who’s dying, what the hell is the matter with you?”

I stopped him dead in his tracks with that. People don’t talk like that to him, not even me, not back then or any time since.

To his everlasting credit, he started to laugh. Not just a giggle, but a hearty, chesty laugh, the sort I hadn’t heard much from him since Harvard. Wall Street is not an especially funny place. It was good to see him laugh, he looked healthier, but he sounded awful. I could hear it in his chest, in the deep breaths he took between chuckles, in the wheeze of his inhale.

“You’re smoking again, aren’t you?” I said.

He threw up his hands. “Guilty as charged.”

I sighed and patted the sofa beside me. “Come sit down,” I said. “You look like you need to talk.”

And talk he did, though he didn’t sit down. The first thing he did was pull a cigarette from the breast pocket of his sport coat and fiddle it about nervously between his fingers. I watched silently until he fished a silver lighter out of his pants.

“In case you hadn’t noticed,” I said, “I’m having a few minor health problems.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and stubbed the cigarette out with the heel of his shoe, despite the fact he hadn’t lit it. “I guess that’s sort of just like me.” He paused. “I’m sort of an asshole, aren’t I, Kat?”

I didn’t say anything. He waited, maybe because he wanted me to excuse him, maybe because he wanted me to yell, but I wasn’t going to make this easier for him. Whatever he had come to say he was going to have to say it without any help from me.

“When I heard you were sick it made me feel very bad, for a lot of reasons, and I wanted to do something to make it right. Maybe I’m just a scumbag, I don’t know, but I feel like if I do right by you then maybe I’ll sleep a little better at night.”

I stayed quiet. I had waited a really long time to hear whatever this was; I owed it to myself to listen to it all before I threw him out.

“So,” he continued, “the first thing I want to tell you is that I never accepted your resignation. I kept it a secret from the board, at first because I thought I would give you some time to change your mind, and then when I heard you were sick I went to the board and told them the rumors they had heard about your departure were untrue, that you were still one hundred percent a part of us and that we would support you in any way possible. That was unanimously approved, of course. So, I bring the warmest wishes of the board. Everyone is concerned about you, and if there is anything they can do they will act immediately.”

“That’s nice,” I said, but I knew the wishes of the board weren’t the important part.

“Of course, as a senior executive, all of your medical expenses will be handled, not a cent will come from your pocket, no matter how long it takes or how expensive it becomes. You have my word on that and full agreement of the board.”

“That’s very nice,” I said, though that still wasn’t the important part.

“And, because I did not accept your resignation, your profit participation remains intact, which means full compensation at your current levels indefinitely. And you and I both know that’s just a small piece of the puzzle.”

Now I got it, and I teared up even before he said it.

“With the unanimous approval of the board I have accelerated the maturation of all of your corporate options and bonuses. Effective the first day of next month, every penny you ever had coming to you will be fully vested at current market levels and will be transferred to your personal accounts with no conditions attached.”

All the money I walked away from. All of it. I left tens of millions of dollars in options on the table when I quit and didn’t care. But now I had it all back. Phillip gave it to me.

“You didn’t have to do that,” I said.

“I know,” he said, and now he sat down beside me. “But it seemed like the right thing.”

“Well,” I said, and patted him on the thigh, “that’s very nice.”

“It sort of feels like the least I could do. Like I said, maybe I’ll sleep better tonight.”

We sat beside each other in a comfortable silence, the distant sound of ticking from my antique grandfather clock clearly audible, echoing through the apartment. After all these years, I realized it was this I had missed most. The comfortable silence. I hadn’t thought of it in twenty years, perhaps because I never found it again. But being able to sit like this, two of us on a couch, my hand on his thigh, his hand over mine, listening to a clock ticking, not saying a word. It’s very nice.

Then, of course, he ruined it. “Kat,” he said, “I have the overwhelming desire to kiss you.”

I didn’t mean to laugh in his face.

I really didn’t. I’m sure it wounded his ego more than I meant to; in fact, I didn’t mean to wound him at all. The days when I wanted to see him beaten were gone. When I laughed in his face it was a natural reaction to his clumsy advance, nothing more, nothing less.

“Well, I didn’t expect this,” he said, the hurt evident in his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just didn’t see that coming.”

He started to stand, but I grabbed his hand.

“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t go. Just sit with me. Don’t kiss me or anything, just sit here with me.”

He took a deep breath and sat back, crossed his legs, standoffish. He was such a child. An angry little boy not getting what he wants.

“I know what you’re thinking,” I said, and he perked up a bit and faced me. “You’re thinking: If I give a girl fifty million bucks the least I expect is to get in her pants.”

That got him.

Suddenly he was laughing harder than I was, and wheezing that smoker’s wheeze, and turning a bit red, but it was funny and it was genuine and we were very comfortable sitting together. We laughed for a while, and then I took his hand and put it in my lap and held it with both hands, and we stayed that way quietly until he broke the silence by telling me the second thing he had come to say.

And this one, I really hadn’t seen coming.

BROOKE

I WISH I WERE the sort of person who underlined things in books. You know how people do that? They underline, or they dog-ear pages, or the really organized ones have computer files with quotes and paragraphs that touched them, moved them. I have encountered so many of those passages, all my life, but I never write them down. What a mistake that is. I so envy people who can quote great leaders and writers at the drop of a hat. It happens all the time. At a dinner party someone will say, “You know, it was General Patton who said blah blah blah . . .” I wish I could quote General Patton; that would be so great. Instead, I’m always the one saying: “I can’t remember where I read this, but blah blah blah . . .” Let me tell you, the blah blah blahs are always
much
more interesting when they have a name attached to them.

Like right now, for instance, I am thinking about how no two flakes of snow are identical. Isn’t that written in a poem somewhere? Didn’t someone attach some deeper meaning to it? If they didn’t they should have, because it is the most telling and important little fact about science I have ever heard.

No two things are exactly the same. No two people are, either. My twins are a perfect example. They are fraternal, not identical, but if they were identical they would have the same blood, the same DNA, the same fingerprints, but they still wouldn’t be the same. My children are different from each other in ways that go well beyond their genetic material, because no two people, no matter how identical, are exactly the same. Just like snowflakes.

That’s the part I think Samantha doesn’t understand.

She views her life in one way, I view mine in another. She has her values, her concerns, her beliefs, and I respect those. For whatever reason, she cannot seem to do the same for me. She behaves as though I am committing suicide, when I am doing nothing of the kind. As of this moment, I am cancer-free. And I am no fool, nor am I nearly as out of touch with reality as she has made up her mind I am. I talked at great length,
enormous
length, with my doctor about my decision and arrived at a conclusion I am comfortable with. And, not that it matters, but he tells me I am by no means the only patient he has known to make this decision. I could go through all the treatment options available to me, put everything and everyone I know and love on hold, and for what? In the best case, it would alter my chances of the cancer recurring by 10 percent. My chances of recurrence now are what they are. If I sacrifice my entire lifestyle, plus my husband’s, plus my children’s, they become 10 percent more favorable. Some people will do anything for that 10 percent. I will not.

When I was a girl, I had a friend named Amanda. She got caught up with the wrong crowd as we got a bit older and one night she got in a car with some older boys and there was drinking involved and then they ran into a large truck on the highway at two in the morning. The rumor that went around school was that Amanda was decapitated in the accident. I have always hoped that wasn’t the case, but either way she was dead before she turned sixteen. The lesson is that you don’t know what happens tomorrow. Would she have chosen differently if she’d known? Of course. But she didn’t. We choose based on what we know and we live with the consequences. If you told me undergoing treatments would guarantee that the cancer will never come back but not undergoing them will guarantee that it will, then of course I would do it. But my doctor couldn’t tell me that. In fact, he told me he couldn’t say with any certainty what would happen in either case. The numbers fluctuate based upon the science, and the genetics, and the advancements in research, and sometimes even socioeconomic status. And a lot of other things I don’t fully understand.

So I choose to live for today.

All I have is right now. I have all that I want, and no one can promise me I’ll have it forever no matter what I do, so I’m going to live it, love it, treasure it, for every second I can, and whatever comes next I’m prepared for it.

Samantha doesn’t understand. “Brooke, if they told me I increased my chance of survival by
one
percent I would go through anything,” she says to me every time we talk.

“I know that,” I always say, “but you are not me.”