Five Days Left (8 page)

Mara

Mara left the sliding glass doors and took her seat at the kitchen table, opening her laptop. The computer’s clock read twofifteen in the morning, over two hours since she’d crept out of Tom’s bed and into Laks’s. She shook her head, amazed at how upended her sleep cycle had become since her diagnosis. Constantly worried about what she might face the next month, or week, she hadn’t slept a full night in over a year. Nights like this were common now, the rest of the house sound asleep while Mara sat in the dark kitchen, reliving. Worrying. Planning.

She lifted her laptop and peeled off the sticky note she’d hidden on its underside earlier: her list of people to say goodbye to, things to accomplish in the next five days. With a pen, she struck through the names of two McGill friends she had called after lunch, using the pretense of updating her contacts list. She also crossed out the name of one of her closest mom friends from Laks’s school, whom she had e-mailed before Laks arrived home. The e-mail began with a fabricated question about the school’s upcoming Field Day before moving into the thank-you-for-your-friendship paragraph Mara had rewritten four times until she was satisfied it didn’t sound suspicious. Not bad progress, she told herself. She’d chickened out on the forum, but she still had time. She stuck the note back onto the bottom of her laptop, opened her Internet browser and clicked the forum
open, scanning the entries that had been posted since the last time she had been on. She smiled to see MotorCity’s post about considering her like a sister, and smiled wider when she saw how many people had chimed in to offer their support during his final days with his little man. She wasn’t religious, but she closed her eyes and made a fervent wish into the atmosphere that her friend would be okay after the boy moved home. Thank goodness he had his own new baby to look forward to. While she was at it, she added a plea that Dr. Thiry’s staff would call tomorrow and practically laugh at her notion that one incidence of incontinence meant anything.

Her wish on its way into the atmosphere, she opened the HD research website she had bookmarked four years ago and reached for a legal pad and a pen to make notes. In the first few months after her diagnosis, she had scoured the site every day, thrilled to read about the various research teams around the world who were making “substantial progress” or receiving “significant new funding” to support their quest to discover the cause and cure of the disorder.

Several times, she’d caught Tom doing the same, though he always denied it, claiming to be looking up something about a patient and never adequately explaining why he felt the need to snap his laptop closed before she could see the screen. She hadn’t caught him in some time, and she herself had given it up. The “positive starts” and “exciting possibilities” never led to anything conclusive, and after a while, it felt like searching for money under her pillow in a house that didn’t believe in the tooth fairy. It had been ages since she’d opened the site.

Now, buoyed by the news she hoped to hear on the phone the next day, she held her pen over the pad and clicked it a few times, a NASCAR note-taker revving up her engine, ready to record details about the latest breakthroughs so she could tell Tom all about them in the morning, make a different plan for how to spend her birthday. She read through the headlines on the home page, clicking through to scour the details of each animal model study that had recently been wrapped up or was currently in progress, each patient trial offering hope.

After twenty minutes, she gave her pen a final anemic click before letting it fall to the table.

There was nothing.

There had been plenty of effort since her last visit—pages’ and pages’ worth—but nothing to show for it. A drug company had discontinued its long-standing research study after “disappointing results” were found in animal models. A lab had delayed the kickoff of its work to examine how neurons die in HD patients, with the first phase now scheduled for completion in eighteen months, not six. The end product of the project was, the team hoped, development of a drug that could slow the progression. Not a cure, then, just a governor. And not for three phases, each six to eighteen months long. There would be no elixir at Mara’s pharmacy anytime soon.

She should have known. The answers to the disease, the secret to how it worked, how it could be stopped, were as elusive as ever. She had been lured once again into checking under the pillow. All she’d found was her rotten, bloody tooth, no shiny coins in its place.

Mara looked from her laptop to the phone on the counter and wished she hadn’t left the message for Dr. Thiry’s clinic. They wouldn’t dare confirm her grocery store incident was the beginning of the end. No way would they predict impending doom based on one event.

But neither would they be able to promise her the incident wasn’t the start of her slide down the slippery slope toward her ultimate demise. That it wasn’t the signal of more humiliation to come, of greater decline. That she still had plenty of time before she lost enough physical control that she would no longer be able to command her own exit. That she could wait another year, or even another month. The only thing talking to them would accomplish for certain was having more people know about her embarrassing public spectacle.

When the clinic returned her call the next day, she’d let the phone ring.

Wednesday, April 6

FOUR DAYS
LEFT

Scott

Scott woke late, having spent much of the night staring at the ceiling. He was surprised to smell coffee as he made his way downstairs, since lately the smell made Laurie nauseous. He had started buying a cup at a drive-through place on the way to work.

She was dressed for work and sitting in the kitchen, finishing a piece of toast. He pointed to the coffeemaker as he walked toward it. “You drinking coffee?”

She made a face. “I’m not sure I ever will again. It’s the ultimate rip-off of pregnancy, you know. You hear all the time about all these cravings pregnant women have. They don’t tell you about all the sudden aversions to things you used to love. I made it for you. I wasn’t sure you’d make it to the coffee shop this morning. Did you sleep at all?”

“A little.”

“Can I take a wild guess at what was keeping you awake?”

He eyed her carefully as he debated whether he should make something up—staff cuts at school, maybe.

She stood, set her plate in the sink and put a hand on his chest. “You know, I was awake myself for a while. And I was thinking, if you’re this devoted to a boy who’s not even ours, then this baby is going to have the most devoted father on the planet.” She moved her hand from his chest
to his cheek. “I feel like maybe I haven’t been as sympathetic about it as I should be. I forget sometimes that as close as he and I are, you two are a hundred times closer. As hard as it’s going to be for me to see him go, as much as I’m going to miss him, it’s going to be so much worse for you. I’m sorry if I haven’t acknowledged that enough.”

The understanding in her voice, in her eyes, was so unexpected he couldn’t speak. He closed his eyes and pressed his cheek into her hand.

“You need me to get him from school today?” she asked.

“No. I only have a few more chances to drive him home. I’m not letting anything get in the way of that. I could kick myself for letting it happen last night. You were right—I turned practice over to Pete this week so I could spend more time with him, and then I let that woman—”

“Good for you,” she said. Her voice was soothing. He waited for a mild reproach about always putting the school first and decided he wouldn’t argue when it came.

It didn’t, and grateful, he turned his head to kiss her palm, then her cheek. “Thanks for the coffee.”

When she left for work, he was fifteen minutes behind in an already packed schedule. Curtis would have to hightail it, but there was a prize in it for him if he was in the mood to cooperate, and it was one of his favorites: pick the radio station on the way to school.

Scott grabbed their lunch bags from the fridge and tossed them onto the counter, setting a banana and a granola bar on top of one—a “to go” breakfast for his passenger. He set his cup in the sink, peeled a banana for himself and downed it in four bites as he took the stairs three at a time. “Little Man! We’ve got to be in the car in six minutes! Let’s go!”

Curtis was out of bed like a shot and easily earned his prize. “I’m not gonna bother with sports talk today,” he told Scott as he climbed into the backseat. “All they talk about is
baseball
now and I don’t care about it so much.” Quickly he added, “But I love the
Tigers
. Tigers
allll
the way!”

“Tigers allll the way,” Scott agreed. “So what’ll it be, then? Rock? Jazz? Blues? A little Motown?”

“My mom
loves
Motown.”

“A little Motown, to celebrate seeing her again on Monday? Moving home?”

He bit his lip the instant the words left him. Sending the boy to school with a weight on his mind was never wise. Scott kicked himself and composed an e-mail in his mind to Miss Keller:
Sorry if Curtis is a pain today—all my fault. . . .

But true to his young age, Curtis was as excited about the news today as he had been upset about it the night before.

“Yeah! Motown to celebrate moving home with my
mom
!”

“Motown it is.”

He found the station and backed out of the driveway, joining Smokey in the off-key voice Laurie always begged him not to reveal in public.

“So take a good look at my face

You’ll see my smile looks out of place.”

Curtis folded forward, hands over his ears in a show of being deafened. “Aaaaaah! Please! Make it stop!”

“C’mon, you expect this Detroit boy to hear Smokey and not sing along? And what’s your excuse? Sitting there complaining when you should be belting it out. Let’s hear it.”

“I only know the ‘good look at my face’ part. I don’t know the rest.”

“Well, mister, you’d better learn it if you intend to keep living in this town.”

They drove the rest of the way in companionable silence. Despite Curtis’s impossibly high energy level the rest of the day, he wasn’t a morning person. Scott reached behind and patted the knee of the quiet child now gazing blankly out the window at the buildings and trees whipping past him. Their morning drives often played out this way, sports talk or music on the radio, the two of them content to be together but lost in their own thoughts.

Scott was happy to dial up the excitement when the boy was in the mood, but he was also happy to spend the commute quietly, thinking about what new plays to try at practice, what new novel to introduce to his eighth graders. Today, he let his mind go blank as he watched the tony sections of Royal Oak give way to the blighted streets of Detroit.

After ten years of working at Franklin Middle, Scott had seen it all a million times. But there were small changes from time to time, and he watched for them when he could. Usually, the changes were depressing—another boarded-up house, another smear of graffiti on a building whose owner had cleaned the last paint off a week earlier. Another square paper nailed to another front door, its size and color announcing it was an eviction notice even if the words weren’t readable from the car.

From time to time, though, there were encouraging signs. Lights on again in a small machine shop that hadn’t operated for years, a few cars in the employee parking lot. A “Now Open—New Management” sign in the window of a produce store that had gone out of business a year ago. Laundry hanging in the yard of a house that had been abandoned but now showed new curtains in the windows, children’s toys on the peeling, slanted front porch.

It was these changes that kept Scott hopeful. Things could get better here. Families could reclaim houses and apartment buildings. Honest businessmen could reopen stores and small factories. A kid like Brayden Jackson could get a college scholarship. A degree. A real job. A life away from here.

Franklin, where Scott spent his days, was a microcosm of Detroit, at once depressing and beautiful, a has-been and a might-be. It must have been majestic once, Scott imagined, when it was new. Three stories of red brick with tall windows and huge double front doors. The front lawn would have been lush green, the outdoor basketball court flat and black under solid white court lines, the fence around it straight and proud. The marble hallway floors shone then, he bet, the wooden classroom doors smooth and clean.

He wondered how many people who had attended Franklin in its first days had studied it lately, and how they felt when they did. The brick was faded now, gray in some places and black in others, the discoloration a remnant of the now closed row of factories down the street. Several windows lacked a complete pane of glass, and the different solutions teachers had come up with to fill the gaps—duct tape in varying colors, squares of cardboard—had turned the façade from impressive to clownish.

The front “lawn” was no more than a brown patch of dirt now, with sparse clumps of weeds and grass struggling to lift themselves. The lines no longer showed on the basketball court, and much of its surface had heaved into cracked waves by the force of decades of Michigan winters. The fence had been cut or torn in multiple locations; no longer straight and proud, now it was bent and twisted into a drooping, sad thing.

And inside. The hallway floors were dull, scuffed. The walls were a putrid pale green that might once have been a cheerful shade but now reminded Scott of the sixties-era psych wards he had seen in movies. The classroom doors were barely recognizable as wood, covered now with kids’ initials and curse words, some scrawled in ink, some etched by knives.

They arrived at Logan Elementary, Curtis’s school, located a few blocks from Franklin, and Scott pulled into the parking lot. Logan hadn’t started out looking as majestic as Franklin. It was one story of pale yellow brick and green metal doors. But it also didn’t appear to have fallen as far as Franklin. The brick was blackened in fewer spots and not as dark. The windows were still in one piece. There was no graffiti. The classroom doors, Scott had pointed out to Laurie on parent-teacher conference night, bore no curse-word tattoos.

Scott put the car in park. “Your stop, Little Man.”

The boy jumped out, hoisted his backpack onto his shoulder, grabbed his lunch bag and walked around the car to Scott’s open window.

“Fist,” Scott said, holding his own out.

Curtis bumped his fist to Scott’s.

“Cheek,” Scott said.

Curtis feigned embarrassment, but smiled as he leaned his cheek closer for Scott to kiss.

“Promise,” Scott said.

“Promise.”

“Nope, not good enough. I want to hear the whole thing.”

Curtis sighed. “I
promise
to do what Miss Keller
tells
me.”

“For how long?”

“For the
whole entire day
.”

“Nice. Go get ’em, Albert Einstein.”

Scott reached his classroom with ten minutes to spare before his first-hour class. Enough time for a quick forum check. As he opened his laptop, he thought how odd someone might find it that during a week when he was trying to cram in as many experiences with Curtis as possible, he was thinking about the forum at all, let alone making time to post there. And it might seem equally odd, if not more so, that at a time of such devastation, most of his shoring up was coming not from his best friend, Pete, or even his wife, but instead from a group of people he wouldn’t recognize if they stepped into his classroom this second. Not that Pete and Laurie weren’t comforting—or at least, they tried to be. But, as oxymoronic as it sounded, when it came to revealing his most intimate feelings, nothing beat the total anonymity of the Internet. Unlike the people who knew him in “real life,” LaksMom, flightpath, 2boys and the others had no context in which to put his posts, no history—good or bad—against which to measure the things he said. To Laurie, the phrase “It’s going to kill me to live without him” was hurtful, offensive, because of all the implied meaning she heard along with it: “Curtis is more important than the baby. Curtis is more important than you.”

Pete didn’t read the same hurtfulness into it, but he couldn’t escape the big picture any more than Laurie could: “But, dude, you’ll see him again, when he’s a student at Franklin. Three solid years with the kid. And in the meantime, you’ll have your own baby to focus on, not to
mention the twenty kids on the team and the three hundred others you walk past in the halls every day.” It was an attempt to be helpful, Scott knew. But it didn’t help.

Scott’s friends on the forum didn’t know his big picture. They read a phrase like “It’s going to kill me to live without him” for its precise meaning, and nothing else. They didn’t read more than those nine words into the message. They didn’t take offense, didn’t try to talk him out of it. Didn’t resent it for its presumed relativity.

“Of course it is,” they said. And it was the same way they’d responded to every other thing he’d told them about himself: his thoughts on parenting, on marriage and sex, on education and race. They read what he wrote, and only what he wrote, and they responded. Not always in agreement—he’d had plenty of heated discussions over the past year on this issue or that. But he didn’t need yes-men any more than he needed someone to read twenty-one extra words into the nine he’d written.

As for this week, he didn’t need Laurie to make him feel guilty on top of feeling heartbroken. He didn’t need Pete to try to cheer him up, to make him see things in a shinier light. He had only four days left with Curtis: there was no cheer to be found, no silver lining. He didn’t need anyone to fix the problem—there was no fixing it. He needed someone to acknowledge his feelings. Accept his pain. Agree that his heart was broken, and that it should be. And that it might stay broken for a long, long time.

And that’s precisely what he got when he talked to his nameless, faceless friends on the forum: pure, unadulterated acknowledgment. That’s why he was making time for the forum today. And that’s why he would keep making time for it, when he had three days left, then two, then one, and after the boy was gone.

When he found the prior day’s conversation, he was touched to see how many people had commented about his situation. There were more than thirty new posts. These weren’t mere strangers at unknown IP addresses. They were friends, and they cared about him as much as he cared
about them. He couldn’t help smiling as one member after another came forward to wish him good luck in the next few days.

There was a reminder from SoNotWicked that it’s okay for men to cry, and he laughed. He had tiptoed into Curtis’s room the last few nights after Laurie drifted off, eased himself into the rocking chair and let the tears pool in the corners of his eyes, one or two slipping down his cheeks and neck, under the collar of his T-shirt, as he watched the flickering eyelids and twitching lips of the boy who was no doubt sassing and complaining to some dreamworld creature.

Scanning further, Scott stopped at a post he was hoping to see, by a now-and-then poster who called herself FosterFranny and had, along with her husband, fostered almost a dozen children over the past decade or so.

Tuesday, April 5 @ 8:41 p.m.

I’m afraid I’m of less help than you might expect. The best advice my husband and I were given before we started fostering was this: don’t let yourself get too attached. We have followed that advice from the start, and while the children we have cared for have made a real imprint on our hearts, we have always used caution to maintain substantial emotional distance.