Ill Will (25 page)

“I guess I hadn’t thought about the day-to-day of her working ninety miles away.”

“I’m not sure Joanne has either.”

“You mean Joanne is being an insensitive brute,” I said as I started to clean the shrimp.

“Not at all.” Cordelia gave my hip a bump with hers for me to make room at the sink. “I’ll peel, you devein.” She picked up a big shrimp and started peeling. “What I mean is that we’re all still struggling, with everything from a longer drive to the grocery store, a constantly changing city, to having to deal with people coming back and realizing they can’t stay. Alex has had to train two new assistants in the last few months, you’ve had more work than you can handle and have often had to job in help or work with Chanse or Scotty.”

“And I hate having to depend on other people’s schedules.”

“That’s my point. Most of what we deal with isn’t so big anymore, but the small things add up, they take an hour or two hours out of our days, sap energy. You and I, Joanne and Alex, we all have to keep adjusting to change, like driving at twilight.”

“And who we are as we drive into the dark.”

“Exactly. I think Alex is struggling because she’s trying to deal with both what she went through and just day after day of having time sucked out of her life. That commute to Baton Rouge is killing her.”

“It’s certainly killing her relationship with Joanne,” I said.

“Alex is thinking about getting a place up there,” Cordelia said as she handed me a pile of shrimp.

“Joanne is not going to like that. She’ll see Alex even less.”

“Alex doesn’t have any good choices. She needs a job. Her choice is between Baton Rouge or flipping burgers here. If she spends three hours a day in the car, she has no time for Joanne or herself.”

I looked at her. “So you think they’re going to break up.”

“I think Alex needs to take care of herself or she can’t be any good to anyone. She said herself that every hour she spends in traffic she falls apart a little more.”

I rinsed my hands, getting the shrimp goop off as they were getting too sticky, then continued deveining. “And we’re going to get together with them this weekend so we can watch them as they break up?”

“No, we’re getting together with them because they’re both good people, they’re close friends of ours, and we want the best for them. And maybe some other solution will come up.”

“Oh, yeah, that miracle tree. I keep meaning to visit it.”

“There are worse things than breaking up, even a long-term relationship.”

“Yeah, your partner could get cancer and die on you,” I said bitterly.

Cordelia looked at me. “Oh, damn, I didn’t mean…I was just…I don’t even know.”

“I know,” I said. She was being general, but all I could see was my life. “I’m sorry. I’m not good at playing normal.”

“Don’t play at anything. If we can’t be so-called normal, then we just can’t. Please, Micky, I’m so sorry, I never wanted to put you through this.”

“I think you’re the one with cancer. The one who might…” But I couldn’t say the word.

“Might die,” she finished for me. “I’m going to try very hard not to. At least not for a long, long time, okay?”

“I know.” I started to cry. I couldn’t wipe my tears away because my hands were covered in shrimp slime. “Oh, fuck normal.”

We both had to wash and dry our hands before we could embrace. I hated that I was falling apart, crying first and forcing Cordelia to comfort me.

“This isn’t right,” I said as she threw the towel she had dried her hands with onto the kitchen table and put her arms around me. “I should be taking care of you.”

“Shh. Of course it’s right. Let me take care of you while I can. The chemo is going to be messy. When I’m throwing up, you can take care of me. And fuck right or wrong. No one is judging.”

So I fell apart. “What the hell am I going to do? If you’re gone? I can’t make it.”

“Yes, you can,” she said matter-of-factly. “Grief is hard and painful and I would certainly hope that you desperately miss me for a while. A year, maybe. But I want time to heal you, for you to go on, find someone else and love again.”

“Yeah, right,” I sobbed into her shoulder. It is hard to be sarcastic when you’re crying. “Easy for you to say.”

“If I die—I’m not planning to—and you don’t start dating in two years, I’ll come back and haunt you. I’ll hide your coffee and your car keys.”

“Damn it, you’re not supposed to make jokes about this. Wait, hiding my coffee is not funny.”

“If Alex and Joanne break up, that would at least mean there would be two eligible people to date.”

“They’re not breaking up; you’re not dying. And you smell like shrimp.”

And then we were both laughing.

I cooked the shrimp and cheese grits, made a big salad. We even opened a decent bottle of wine.

After a few more hand washings, the shrimp smell did fade.

The next day was a slap into reality. We were both up early. Cordelia was due for more tests and I insisted on going with her. She made a token protest, saying that I didn’t need to, that if she didn’t feel okay after, she could easily get someone else to drive her home, but I was adamant.

When we got to the clinic, the brave face she’d put on over the weekend was gone. She was pale and subdued. The light green walls, people in white coats, being the one to wait to be seen—the patient, not the doctor—made it real.

Then her name was called and all I could do was wait.

Hours passed, a book, a magazine; I flitted between the pile of reading material I’d brought. I tried not to wonder where she was and what was happening to her. The harder I tried, the less I succeeded. She’d explained what they were doing, taking some marrow from her hip to run more tests on it, going into medical detail that would have required me to ask her to explain every other word if I really wanted to understand. She needed to talk, to use information as a shield against what was happening to her. I knew enough—she would undergo a painful procedure so they could have more information about which type of lymphoma she had and therefore how to treat it.

How had our world changed so much? A few weeks ago life was normal; we didn’t need to pretend otherwise. I had to cling to what she’d claimed—it would be hard, but it would be okay. She was young, relatively speaking; she had access to good medical care. We would get through this. It seemed a cruel irony that we were finally getting beyond what had happened in the past, finding a new level of trust and connection, only to slam into the hard wall of disease, illness, mortality.

She was moving slowly when she finally came back to the waiting area, but flashed me a wan smile. She seemed relieved to have it over. I joined her as she finished with paperwork and making the next appointment.

“I’m not used to this,” she admitted to me as we left the building. “I usually just ask one of my coworkers, to see if my throat is red, or diagnose myself and get them to write me a prescription when we meet at the coffeepot.”

“And now you’re just a lowly patient like the rest of us,” I said.

She gave me her small smile again. “But with a great girlfriend to take care of me.”

And that was what I did. I drove her home, insisted that she plop in the comfortable chair, found something suitably mindless and entertaining on TV, fixed a lunch of soup and sandwiches. Left her in front of the small screen while I cleaned up after lunch.

After a while she was tired. I insisted she go ahead and take a nap, something she rarely does. But she fell asleep quickly, which told me how wearing the day had been.

I considering running by my office for an hour or two, just to catch up and make sure no fires were burning, but I didn’t want her to wake and not find me here. The little things had become important now because all I could control were those little things. I did some cleaning although after my last frenzy, there was little that needed more than a quick dust. I played with the cats so they wouldn’t go in and bother Cordelia. I turned to my standard fail-safe, cooking, making dough for a pizza, chopping several onions and caramelizing them. This was one of Cordelia’s favorites, a white one with a layer of the onions topped with sun-dried tomatoes and artichoke hearts. I cried while I made the dough, I cried while she slept.

I wanted to be cried out by the time she woke.

The evening was slow, we ate, we talked. I listened as she told me about what she went through, my tears used up, so I heard it all calmly, holding her hand when she needed it. Sticking a needle in and extracting bone marrow is a painful procedure. She downplayed it, but she moved slowly and I knew it had to be hurting her.

The next day she went to work and insisted that I go, too.

It’s how we get through the days
, I thought as I drove to my office.
We pad them with the mundane, the activities that don’t touch our hearts, so we can rest before the next break.

But I did little, save what was required. I knew the test results would take days, maybe even a week to come back. Time felt too small to allow for anything more than waiting to hear from her, to hear her fate.

The mundane did indeed await me. Or maybe it just seemed mundane compared to my worry about Cordelia.

Prejean had left another message, again asking me to call off the cops. I deleted it.

Danny also left a message. It was a brief update—basically Dudley was still out of it although his doctors predicted that he’d be awake in a day or two and able to talk.

Mr. Charles Williams called asking for a favor. Maybe I could talk to his nephew. He might listen to me. He suspected it might be a long time before his nephew ever talked to him again. “Guess I can kind of come on strong,” he admitted.
This isn’t your heartbreak, it’s someone else’s
, I reminded myself. I couldn’t help Mr. Williams. I suspected it might be forever before he’d talk to his nephew again.

The Grannies had done more digging for me. They’d even done some field work. Not surprising, it looked like Prejean was involved with insurance fraud. As I had noticed, his burned house didn’t seem heavily damaged. According to his insurance claim, it had been almost destroyed. It wasn’t just that house. He also had two more houses under different names, one had been vandalized and the third one also burned.

All through the same insurance agent.

With all the destruction that had taken place here, insurance companies were overwhelmed just as much as everyone else. They didn’t always have time to investigate each claim as thoroughly as they might have otherwise. The claims were still rolling in, with destroyed houses now stripped of copper or new appliances stolen. Prejean had clearly found a crooked insurance agent and was taking advantage of him having little oversight. The Grannies had taken a ride and snapped pictures of each of his supposedly damaged properties. As I suspected, there wasn’t much damage visible to the naked eye. As they noted, being an old lady was the perfect disguise. They could cruise with impunity.

I’d turn this over to Danny. This might be the pressure that would get Prejean to admit he’d hired Dudley and turn on him.

The randomness of life took me on a detour—two calls, several e-mails, mundane cases to work on—as mundane as finding a person gone missing can be, and tracing the tangled web of ownership for a property that was owned by the heirs of the heirs—every single second cousin had to be found and persuaded to sell. It was mostly tedious culling through dusty records, but I had to pay enough attention to make the hours—and the days—pass. The missing person was for another PI; he needed extra eyes and the money wasn’t bad.

The hours added into days, the heirs located, the missing person traced to Atlanta and a drug habit that made him unwilling or unable to contact his parents. That it wasn’t my case meant that I wasn’t the one to deliver the news to the family. A final phone call to tie up the details of the case and then I was left staring at the neat piles on my desk. Everything had been sorted and filed, there was nothing to readily claim my time.

The hours became empty. I didn’t know what to do next. I started to pick up the phone and ask Cordelia to meet for lunch, but I couldn’t cling to her. It felt like Katrina again, Cordelia was trapped inside Charity and I was far away in a safe land and couldn’t help her.

I had long ago given up believing in “God and His mysterious ways” as some catch-all explanation for bad things. Like God wanting to punish gay men with AIDS and mysteriously orphaning ten million children in Africa to get less than a million gay men in America and Europe.

Cordelia had cancer. I didn’t. It was a small tragedy, one that happened every day to millions of people. Cancer or HIV or car wreck or any of the hundreds of ways life takes a sudden and jarring turn. It hit both those affected and those standing next to them.

Time changed. Would I hold her hand in the next springtime? Or visit a grave? I looked at a year that felt impossibly fleeting and as if it would take forever.

“She’ll be okay,” I said.

I was the one who had lived on the edge—alcohol, even cocaine and a few other things when I was young and could pretend nothing bad ever really happened. I’d stumbled over a few cases that had been dangerous, bullets instead of the usually moldy records.