Expiration Dates: A Novel (17 page)

Three things happen in rapid succession. The first is that my cell phone rings. The second is that Hugo releases his hold on my shoulders, freeing me to wobble, lose my balance, grab for my phone, and then drop Murphy's leash. The third is that Murphy, now untethered, takes off after the rabbit. I've never seen him run this fast before. He's running like he's just discovered he has legs and wants to test exactly how fast and far they can take him.

“Murphy!”

Before I can even get the word out, Hugo takes off after him. He's a runner, still does six miles every Saturday, but I see him struggle to keep up. Who knew that tiny guy had it in him to be a dog.

I watch them zoom around the reservoir, now blurs in the distance, and I feel an overwhelming sense of helplessness. Because I can't do anything. I am powerless. Murphy could escape, and I can't do anything to stop him.

I walk quickly in their direction, frustrated by my speed—this forced pace. I want to leap. I want to chase after them, screaming at them both.
How could you?

I wrote Jake's note.

How could that possibly be true? The unthinkable reality of Hugo's interference. What that would make true about my life, my future, this relationship. I focus on Murphy.

When I got back from San Francisco—after my failed relationship with Josh and my failed job—I was devastated. I felt rejected—by Josh, by the professional collapse, by the city itself. For six brief months I had felt connected, engaged—even better than that,
normal.
After, it was like the universe had reminded me—not so fast, Daphne. You're not like the others.

I started apartment hunting in earnest, determined to live on my own even if it meant living in a hovel. I was lucky when I found Gardner Street. The landlord just wanted the right tenant and decided that was me. The first thing I ever brought back to the apartment was Murphy.

“Murphy!”

I'd gone to Petfinder and found a dog at Bark n' Bitches I thought would be mine. I was certain I wanted a Muppet-y dog—curly and happy and bouncy. But when I got there, the dog I was supposed to see was a total dud. They'd named her Daisy, and you could just tell she had no personality. She sat up against the side of her cage and gave me a blank stare—we weren't a match. I started to go, and the woman who ran the place asked if I wanted to see Murphy.

“Murphy!!”

I'd had an imaginary friend when I was younger, exclusively
during my fifth year of life. It was a brief and torrid chapter, but the gentleman who joined my parents and me at dinners and the beach and—much to their chagrin—required his own ticket at the movie theater, was named Murphy. It felt like fate.

Murphy the dog was such a good boy. He didn't bark; he didn't even sniff. They let me foster him for the week, but by the end of the first night I knew he was mine.

“Murphy!!!”

Murphy hates the water but loves to dig at the beach. It's the only place he ever digs. When you give him a haircut he's suddenly so soft it feels like a secret. Like he's been holding all that velvet sweetness right there, right under the surface. He loves sunbeams and gazing out the window. About once a year I cry about the fact that I'll never know what he looked like as a puppy.

The obvious: he's the longest relationship I've ever been in.

“Murphy!” I hear Hugo in the distance.

I keep echoing his calls.

But I can tell it's useless. Murphy is light-years ahead of us now.

I've never even seen him run before. He was the perfect dog for me. He always kept my pace.

Hugo jogs back toward me, his arms at his sides, his palms hanging open, empty.

“I don't know where he went,” he says, breathing heavily, his words spaced out and empty. “We should call—”

I keep screaming for him. I clap my hands. “Murphy! Murphy!”

“I'm sorry,” he says. “Fuck, Daph, I'm so sorry.”

“Murphy!”

“Daphne, listen to me.”

“Murphy!”

“I wanted you to know. I—”

I can't lose him. I can't have him disappear from my life. This was my promise, the one living creature I've been able to show up for. I swore I'd keep him safe, I swore I'd never desert him, that I'd tend to him and look after him and in return that he could trust me, that he'd be wise to. He's the only thing that's ever really needed me. The only thing I've ever really done right.

“MURPHY!”

And that's when I see his little body in the distance—just a tiny twirl of white and beige.

“Murphy!”

He runs back at a clip. I see him race into view, coming back to me fast, and I begin to cry. Big tears of relief and love and fury.

He trots up to me. As he gets closer I see that his leash is in his mouth. The first thing I've ever seen him carry there. When he reaches me, he looks up at me, his eyes big and open and wide. And then he drops the leash at my feet.

I'm back. I'm yours.

I bend down and gather him into my arms. I press my face into his fur. I smell the sweet softness of his coat, feel the pulse and rhythm of the blood through his body—this tiny creature. This life. This deep responsibility. “Murphy,” I whisper.

I pick up his leash. I wind it around my wrist. I'm still snuggling him close when I look up at Hugo, and on his face I see it—all the anguish I feel. Every impossible question.

“Why?” I ask him.

Hugo's face is red. I don't think I've ever seen him cry before.
Not when I told him I was sick or when we broke up—and not any time since. But his eyes are betraying him now.

“Because,” he says. His voice falters. “I wanted you to know what it felt like.”

“To what?”

Hugo shakes his head. “To not have a limit.”

I stand. I hold Murphy close on the leash. “And you thought it was up to you to decide that? That you should give yourself that kind of power? Hugo, do you have any idea what you've done? I'm marrying him.”

“Yeah, and he's perfect for you. And you wouldn't be if you had found that piece of paper.”

I stop in my tracks. I feel my blood run cold. Because I hadn't considered that part, hadn't thought about it until right now, right this very instant. “Wait. Was there another note?”

Hugo inhales. I feel his eyes trace my face. “I was in your neighborhood, and I dropped by. I saw it tucked under your door.” He pauses, he squints up at the sky. “It said three weeks.”

Three weeks. Less than a month. Less than Hugo.

“Jesus, Hugo. Three weeks? He could have been a serial killer!”

“But he wasn't! I knew Kendra was introducing you. And you're not an idiot. You wouldn't have fallen for a serial killer. You wouldn't have committed to him.” He blows out an exhale. “Maybe I just wanted you to feel what it felt like to choose.”

“Yeah, well, mission accomplished. Feels great right now. Why don't we go try on some wedding dresses!”

I can feel the rage spark through my hands and up through my veins and into my chest. I start walking. Murphy trots beside me, his head forward, as if to say,
I will now behave perfectly in order
to make whole my bad behavior.
In other words:
I know what I've done.

“Where are you going?” Hugo asks.

“Away from here. Right now.”

“Daph, please, stop. It doesn't mean anything. You fell in love.”

I whirl around. I face him. “Did I?”

I see Hugo's chest rise and not fall. I feel my own breath hover, too.

The moment stretches, then: “No one hates to say this more than me,” he says. “But, yeah. You did. And now if you want to be with him it's your decision. Not fate's. Not some piece of paper's. Yours. No one stood a chance, Daph. Not if you couldn't really choose. And now someone does.”

I can feel the water rising in my throat. I can feel it sting my eyes. I shut them tight. When I open them, my vision is blurred around the edges.

“I wanted it to be you,” I say. Softly, so softly I hope that maybe he cannot even hear me. “I wanted more time.”

Hugo's face doesn't change. He keeps his eyes locked on me. “But you got it,” he says. He smiles. I see the lines of water down his face like the trails of fingertips. “I'm still here.”

When I get home I have no idea what to do. I feel wild, enraged, on fire. I do not know in which direction to burn.

Three weeks.

I think about my third date with Jake, about our first kiss in his apartment, in this apartment, when he cooked me dinner and we gazed out at Los Angeles. Was there an exit point then? Did I just not see one because I wasn't looking? It all felt like open freeway. What would have been our end, otherwise? And then: What would I have made our end?

I sit down on his tan couch. Jake has been wonderful about trying to make this place mine. He's asked me which of my things I might want to take out of storage, if there's any furniture I hate that I'd rather him give away. But I've just said it's fine, I have enough here, which I can tell bothers him a little. I understand it. If this place isn't mine, if I don't make it mine, then it's still only his. Then I don't really live here.

Murphy wanders over to his daybed by the glass doors and plops down into the sunshine. Saber thumps his tail on the couch but stays put. I go into the kitchen and fill a glass with tap water.

Three weeks.

For as long as I can remember I've had an all-or-nothing narrative around love. The movies pitch marriage as some magical undertaking, where you meet a person who is physically molded for you. The feeling of certainty is impenetrable. Everyone is so damn definitive. They know instantly; they say yes without hesitation. But I'd have something better. It wouldn't be a feeling, it would be evidentiary proof.

Even with the air-conditioning the sun is beating through the glass doors. I strip off my T-shirt and leave it tossed down on the counter.

I'm messy
, I think. And I hide that from him. Not because I think Jake wouldn't love me but because he deserves better. He deserves better than a woman who leaves her T-shirt on the counter. He deserves someone with baskets and drawers and labels, too. Someone who can adult and understand order. Someone who can provide it.

I peel off my yoga pants next and head into the bathroom. There are mirrors lining the entire wall above the sink, and I catch my reflection. I look brazen, sweaty, wild.

I want to turn away. I normally would. I want to peel off my bra and underwear and get into the shower, let the steam dissolve the mirror, any possible reflection. Fill up this bathroom with liquid smoke.

But instead I stay put, and I stare.

There is a scar down my sternum and two jagged cuts above my left breast. There are bruises there, too, old ones, ones that never heal. They itch; sometimes they burn. These are not dormant things. I lift my fingers to touch my chest, and I coil back. Before my skin can even make contact with its own body, I startle. I've never noticed it before, I've never called it out, but of course it's true. I cannot touch myself where I'm hurt. I cannot lay my own fingers on my skin.

I'm not ready
, I think. I am not ready to put my hands on the most vulnerable place, to feel with my own fingers the damage that has been done to me.

So don't touch
, I think.
Just look.

I force myself to meet my own eyes in the mirror. I force myself to see the person across from me. She is wrecked and wretched and distorted. She has been pulled apart. I think about all the times I got dressed hastily, all the times I've worn a turtleneck in the dead of summer, all the times I refused to meet my own body. Every time I turned it over to someone who did not care.

I couldn't look at it because I thought seeing it would mean I'd have to acknowledge the truth: that I was damaged, that I'd never again be organized, tidy—fuck it,
feminine
. But I was wrong. Standing here now I see it. All the glorious reality that makes me who I am. A whole person. A discombobulated whole, a whole that has been stitched and sutured and stapled, but a whole nonetheless.

We have to be cracked open sometimes. We have to be cracked open sometimes to let anything good in. What I see now, emerging in the mirror, is this one, simple truth: learning to be broken is learning to be whole.

I float my hands over my heart. I hover them there. Hummingbirds at the fountain.

“I'm not going anywhere,” I say. Out loud. It's a small space and I say it quietly, but I say it. “No matter what, I'm never leaving you.”

When I lived with my parents all those years of my extended adolescence, my father and I would have coffee together every morning. He likes to wake up early, just before sunrise, and since I was a light sleeper then, his kitchen rhythms would soon have me out of bed and sitting next to him at the table. We never talked much, just allowed each other to slowly come awake.

“I used to dread the morning because it meant I had to rush out of the house. Then I realized even if I can't make the day longer, I can make the morning earlier,” he said.

I never became a morning person. I was only ever awake to see the sunrise during those few hazy years. But now I think maybe I've been missing out. Maybe he's onto something.

I show up at my parents' house the next morning at seven and knock softly at the door. I hear my father's padded footsteps and then there he is—bleary-eyed, his hair standing up every which way, an early-morning Einstein.

“Daphne,” he says. “What's wrong?”

A common refrain. But I don't answer. I just start crying. I feel myself exhale and exhale and exhale—everything, all of it. The past five months, the past five years, this decade of being strong and stoic, of never letting myself think or feel the reality of my situation. I exhale the holding back. Of my health, of my heart, of all these paper threads.

“Sweetheart,” he says. He puts his arms around me. He holds me close to him. I smell his toothpaste and coffee and yesterday's skin. “Come on in.”

I am seated at the counter in my parents' kitchen. My father takes a mug down from the cabinet over the sink and fills it. He dumps in a little creamer—Coffee mate, Irish Crème—and gives it a stir with a spoon. He hands it to me.

“You're sad,” he says.

I take a sip. It's hot and sweet. “Captain Obvious.” I smile over the rim of my cup. “I don't know,” I say. I swallow. Out it comes. “I'm not sure I want to get married.”

It's the first time I've said it out loud like this. Maybe it's even the first time I've let myself think it: all the words, right in a row.

My father reacts. I see the surprise on his face, and then the mitigated efforts at resolution. “OK,” he says. “What's going on?”

“I'm not sure,” I say.

“Oh,” he tells me. “I think you are. No one says something like that without a little thought grunt work first. Take me through it.”

I put my hands around my mug. I click my nails against the blue ceramic. My parents bought these mugs on a trip to Seattle.
I know because in the past ten years, it's the only vacation they ever took.

You're not the only one who has sacrificed
, I think.

“You know, when I got sick it made sense to me, in a strange way. It's like there was always something different about me, like I behaved different, my life was different. I thought I deserved it. But now—I don't want to punish myself anymore.”

My father nods. It's cool in the kitchen, and he still wears his robe over his pajamas. It's a blue paisley terry cloth. My mother ordered a striped one from a catalog and they sent this floral one instead. “Why can't I wear it?” I remember my father asking. “I like flowers, too.”

“What changed?”

“Time?” I say, although I think maybe it's more than that. Maybe it's something else, some other unseeable force.

“Jake is a nice guy,” my father says. “We'd be happy to have him as a part of our family.”

I feel my stomach clench, and I brace myself. I know, after all, how my father surely wants someone to be here to take care of me when he isn't. Who could blame him? Hell, I should get married for that reason alone.

“I know,” I say. “He's kind and considerate, and he always leaves the toilet seat down. He's honestly perfect.”

My father takes a sip of coffee and then looks back up at me. “He is,” he says. “But that doesn't matter much if he isn't perfect for you.”

I think about Jake proposing at Moonshadows, all the hope in his heart—all the hope he
presented
to me. I took it. I wanted to. But this hope feels heavy, too heavy to hold. I want lightness.

“He's willing to sign up for all of this,” I say. “And it's not fair.”

My father's voice is gentle. “What, exactly?”

I feel my throat constrict. I don't like to talk about my heart with my father. Not because it's painful for me but because it is for him. I don't like to remind him what isn't fair to him, either. But I put that aside now. Because I need to say it. “That I'll leave him. That I'm forcing him to sign up for this at all. That I can't promise him another day.”

I see the gravity of this settle on my father. He sets his mug down. He comes around the counter and puts his hands on my shoulders. I look into his warm, brown, caring eyes. I see so much there—the wrinkles around his forehead, the gray hair at his temples. All the signs of someone growing old, the way the thickness of life recedes and recedes until it's translucent.

“Chicken,” he says. The lines around his mouth wobble. I can see how much effort it is taking to say what he does next. “I think about you all the time. Most of the moments of my day, in fact. Even when I'm doing something, at the market or on a run, I'm thinking about you. I'm thinking about how much I want you to be well. I'd give anything to fix it so that you could be. I pray for it every night. I have for thirteen years. If you knew the bargains I have tried to make with the universe—” His voice breaks and his eyes fill up. He shakes his head. “There isn't a day that goes by that I do not wish it was me. Hell, they made a mistake, Daphne. It should have been.”

“Dad—”

“That's what we do for our children. We wish it were us.”

I feel the warmth of his strong and steady palms.

“But the thing is, Daphne. No one's time is promised. Not
yours. Not Mom's. Not mine. Not Jake's. It's just the way it is. We are all dying. Every day. And at some point it becomes a choice. Which one are you going to do today? Are you living or are you dying?”

My father looks right at me. His face is soft. He looks at me in a way I can only describe as open. I think, perhaps, this is the first time I have ever, in more than thirteen years, invited him to show me his grief.

“And, honey,” he says. “All I wish for you, for any of us, is to do the living one. To do it to the fullest. For as long as it lasts.”

Tears spill down his face. I've only ever witnessed my dad cry once, all those years ago, in a quiet corner of a hospital room.

My mother was asleep in a chair. They were running so many tests in those early days, and I was exhausted all the time. It felt like I was in a perpetual haze.

I awoke, but my eyes were still closed, and I heard my father next to me. No, I felt him. I felt his hand in mine, sitting right next to my hospital bed, and then his lips on my fingers and then the wet of his tears. I kept my eyes closed as he wept into my palm.

“Please,” I remember him whispering. Just the one word.
Please.

“My child, my baby girl.”

I could feel the well of his grief, and I remember thinking I never wanted to see this much vulnerability from anyone ever again. I remember thinking:
This is terrifying.

Looking at my father before me now, I realize how much I've been denying the people who love me. I didn't want them to know I was in pain or short of breath. I didn't want them to know the new drugs made me feel tired or heavy or anxious. I didn't want
them to know I thought about it—how much time I have left. I didn't want my sickness reflected on their faces. But more than that, I didn't want to see their own weakness. I didn't want to feel their tender and heartbroken humanity. Because then it would confirm it all, everything I feared. That it was just as serious as I suspected. That I was in that much trouble.

It's not bad
, I think, as I watch my father cry now.
It hurts and it's painful, but it's not bad.
Pain and bad are not the same thing.

I thought if I had all the answers, if I was always one step ahead, if I knew my hand, then I'd never lose. But being surprised by life isn't losing, it's living. It's messy and uncomfortable and complicated and beautiful. It's life, all of it. The only way to get it wrong is to refuse to play.

I look at my father, and I see the man I saw in the hospital room all those years ago—broken and open. But where there was once helplessness there is now something else. These are not the tears of desperation but rather acknowledgment—of all we have accepted. Of everything we still do not know.

“He wants to protect me,” I say. “Jake does. But he can't.”

My father laughs. It is a gentle laugh. A skip of a laugh. A little hop over sorrow. “Your mother started saying something to me right after my father died, and she kept telling me in those years after your diagnosis, too, when, damn, I needed to hear it.” He exhales. “Love is a net.”

He looks right at me. His eyes are gentle. I see in them the enormity of his grief, the enormity of his love.

“She would tell me all the time that the love we had mattered, that it could catch you, that it
was
catching you.” He shakes his head. I see his mouth move, uneven, overcome. “So, no, he cannot
give you forty more years, but, baby, love is the most powerful force we've got. If you think protection isn't in its jurisdiction, you're wrong.”

I sit back. I suck in a breath.

“I don't know what to do,” I tell him.

“Sweetheart,” he says. He squeezes my hand. His grip is strong, assured. “Sure you do.” He smiles at me. There is a glint in his eye. “You just do what's in your heart.”