Life and Other Near-Death Experiences (12 page)

In all my recollecting, what I had not much considered was my mother’s actual request. Unflappable and
über
capable, Paul had been the one to take care of everything and everyone, including me, so I had failed my mother in this regard. But it would not be a final failure, I assured myself as I curled up against Shiloh. I would spare Paul the sight of skin spread like rice paper over bones and blood, a body battered beyond recognition by the same chemicals intended to salvage what a lab test had already confirmed was unsalvageable.

By avoiding a grueling repeat of our mother’s death, I would take care of Paul in the most meaningful and lasting way I was able.

Or so I told myself as I drifted into a deep and dreamless sleep.

TWENTY-TWO

“I need to go into the office this afternoon,” Shiloh said the next morning. We’d had coffee and croissants at his apartment, and had just returned from a quick walk on the beach, during which neither of us brought up our life-and-death chat. “You okay to take the ferry?”

“Of course,” I said, though in truth, I wished he’d mentioned it earlier. Still, if I could dine alone, certainly I could take the S.S.
Regurgitator
back to Vieques by myself. Besides, I was acutely anxious about becoming too attached to a man I would be leaving behind in a few weeks. Milagros could squawk about love until she was blue. The main thing was that I didn’t
want
to fall in love. Except I was getting confused, with thinking about the future and enjoying sex as more than a stand-alone act. It was the cancer; I was sure of it. Not only had it warped my brain, it had created an instabond between me and Shiloh that would not, and could not, last.

So when Shiloh dropped me off at the boat that would take me from Puerto Rico proper back to Vieques, I kissed him with abandon, then ran for the dock before I could ask when I would see him again. One day soon I would no longer be a part of his life, nor he mine. It was best if we both began adjusting immediately.

As the ferry approached the shore, I felt the sense of relief one feels when coming home. At the beach house I took a nap, and when I woke it was dark out. It was a waste of a day, but I was wiped out and a bit feverish, and needed to rest. I made myself a bowl of cereal, read for a while, and returned to bed.

Shiloh didn’t call the following morning, and in spite of my feelings about healthy separation, it was impossible not to wonder if this had something to do with my refusal to give into his attempts to save me from myself.

No matter—it was impossible to dwell on anything other than the rusty knife slowly sawing through my gut. I’d soaked through my shirt, and when I put my hand to my forehead, I realized I was burning up. I took three Advil and cursed myself for not having rum on hand to chase them down.

Until that point, I hadn’t really felt like I was dying, per se, but now death was all too real. As I bent at the waist and resisted the urge to dry heave, I imagined my life force seeping out of me, like heat from the windows of an old home. And to think that I was still months out from the worst of it! My mother had refused morphine until the month before her death. She kept smiling as tumors bombed their way through her ovaries, into her intestines and bladder. And how? How did she have the energy to parent two children and be a wife and see her friends, while I was struggling to get off the sofa?

If she could keep going, then I would have to as well. Gritting my teeth, I tugged on my bathing suit, slipped on a cover-up and a sun hat, and took off down the beach. I wasn’t really in the mood to sunbathe, but Milagros told me that half a mile from our stretch of sand, there was a new hotel that made killer cocktails, which sounded apropos, even at eleven in the morning.

The hotel was a mirage of sparkling limestone at the edge of the sand. “Will you be dining with us?” a waiter asked as I approached the bar.

“Just drinks,” I said. I pointed to the canvas lounge chairs lined up on the beach. “Can I sit in one of those and still be served?”

“Are you a guest of the hotel?”

“No, but I’m dying of cancer.”

The waiter regarded me as though he didn’t believe a word I was saying, but I was gripping my side in a manner that suggested I was in the middle of birthing a live cactus, and he decided it was better for me to be far from the dozen or so patrons brunching on the patio. “I’ll be right over with a menu,” he said, indicating that I was to choose a chair.

The piña colada I ordered seemed to dull the pain, so I ordered another before finishing the first. It was fast approaching noon, and some of the people around me had begun sipping fruity cocktails, so I didn’t feel too bad when the waiter asked if he could bring a bill and I said yes—as soon as he was done fetching me a third drink. “Medical marijuana doesn’t work for me,” I explained when he lifted an eyebrow at my request. “This is the next-best thing.”

In fact, I had not yet tried nor considered weed, and it struck me, through my hooch haze, that it might not be the worst idea. Perhaps Paul would be able to help on that front, too.

Seagulls were circling overhead, and it was hard to tell if they were after the cocktail peanuts the waiter had served, or my flesh tartare. The persistent boom of the surf mostly drowned out the gulls’ high-pitched clamoring, but between the two, I nearly missed my phone ringing.

It was Tom. I answered, which I will attribute to the piña coladas.

“Libby?” As per usual, he sounded upset. “Why are you in Puerto Rico?”

I almost asked how he knew I was there, but then I remembered that I had booked tickets on one of the credit cards I shared with him and that in my haste, I had removed him from the account but failed to change the password. That would need to be fixed soon. In the meantime, I told him to leave me alone.

“Your doctor’s office called me,” he insisted.

My stomach lurched. “You know sharing a person’s medical information without their permission is illegal, right?”

“They didn’t
share
anything. They just asked if I knew how to get ahold of you.”

“Good,” I said, watching a spindly brown bug approach my chair. As it crept closer, I lifted my foot, then changed my mind as I was about to crush it. I nudged it away with the edge of my sandal and watched it scamper in the opposite direction.

“Are you going to call them back, Libby?” he asked, sounding too kind and concerned for someone who was no longer supposed to be a part of my life. “Is everything all right?”

“Of course, it is,” I said, and it was almost believable. After all, what did
sick
mean? And what was
well
, anyway? I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, then opened them, fixing my eyes on a vein in my forearm that was pulsing like a river. To the left of the vein was a blackened freckle, and to the right, a small white pigment-free blotch—both remnants of the summers I spent slathered in baby oil beneath a baking sun. My eyes trailed down, past the festering flesh hidden beneath my cover-up, to the subtle curve of my calf muscles and my slender ankles. My imperfect body, deemed terminally unwell, was the best it would ever be. Soon it simply would not be at all. It was almost impossible to wrap my mind around.

“If the doctor calls you again, tell them we’re no longer married and give them my number,” I told Tom.

He hesitated. “Okay,” he said after a moment. “I know you’re upset with me, but I want you to know that I’m here for you if you need anything.”

Upset. Upset! Like the only reason I’d chosen to put two thousand miles between us was because he’d eaten the toaster waffle that I’d been saving for breakfast.

“I am fine, Tom,” I said sharply. “Now please, stop calling me.”

“Li—”

I ended the call before he could continue, not only because I didn’t want to speak with him. I was having the same feeling I’d had after the plane crash.

“Ma’am? Ma’am, are you okay?” the waiter asked, regarding me as I gasped and clutched at my throat.

I turned my head in his direction and croaked, “I am not.” And then, I am sorry to say, I passed out.

When I came to, an older man wearing a very small banana hammock was crouched over me. I yelped as I realized my face was mere centimeters from his rug of chest hair.

He leaned back, his skin slick with sweat. “I am a doctor. I am vacationing at this hotel,” he said in a clipped accent of undecipherable origin. “The staff called me when you fainted. Are you all right?”

I was not all right, but alarmed, and very embarrassed. I sat up and brushed myself off, being careful not to meet the eyes of the waiter, who was hovering behind the doctor, undoubtedly concerned that I would die before I had a chance to pay for my ridiculously overpriced libations.

“I’m fine,” I told the doctor. “It was a panic attack. Apparently I’m prone to them.”

“If you’re losing consciousness, I’ll have to recommend you go to a hospital for evaluation as soon as possible. Is there someone I can call for you?”

“I can manage,” I informed him, though this was roughly seven hundred miles south of the truth.

“I’ll call you a taxi,” the waiter said.

“No,” I said.

“Really, it’s no trouble,” he insisted.

I gritted my teeth. “Please don’t. Just bring me the check.”

Ignoring the doctor’s questioning gaze, I paid my bill and hobbled down the beach back to the house.

Pain is funny, isn’t it, the way it’s impossible to accurately recall once it’s gone? When my incision wasn’t hurting too much, it was easy to believe I would be able to withstand the agony all the way to the bitter end. But now it was as though I’d been ripped open anew, and I wasn’t sure I could take another second of it, let alone an hour or a day. I served myself a bowl of cereal, but the thought of eating made me queasy, so I left it on the counter and went to the bedroom mirror. An ashen, exhausted woman regarded me warily from the glass. As I turned away, a sharp pain radiated through my groin and down my leg, making me wonder whether the cancer was spreading. I needed to see a doctor.

I limped over to Milagros’s. “Hello?” I called through her screen door. “Anyone home?”

She swung the door open. “Ay!” she cried when she saw me.

“Tell me about it,” I said. “I’m not feeling very good.”

“You look like you swallowed a swordfish,
mija
.”

“Funny, that’s what my stomach feels like right now. Do you know of a decent doctor?”

“Do I know a doctor! Do I know a doctor!” she said, hopping around. “I know all three doctors on the island, and I’ll even take you to my favorite. You let me drive you.”

“I can drive myself.”

She wagged her finger at me. “That wasn’t a request. There are people I love living around here, and I’m not giving you the chance to run one of them over on your way.”

What was the use in arguing? I got in her old Chevy pickup and let her take me to the clinic. She helped me up the stairs and checked me in, and it was all I could do not to take her with me into the examination room so she could hold my hand through it all.

Instead, I went in alone. A woman with dark curls and an unlined face introduced herself as Dr. Hernandez.

“I had a, uh, mass removed, and it hurts a lot,” I told her, lifting up my shirt. “I’m going to go back to my doctor at home”—a tiny fib, I reasoned—“but I was hoping you could give me something to ease the pain until I get there.”

She inspected the incision, then pressed down on it with her fingers while I gritted my teeth and willed myself not to boot her in the head. “It hurts because it’s infected,” she said. “You should have had these stitches out at least a week ago.”

“I thought they would dissolve.”

“Wrong type of stitches. I’m going to use a local anesthetic to numb you up. It’s going to hurt while I do it, but you’ll feel better after.” She plunged an enormous syringe into my stomach, pushing it this way and that as she loaded my skin with a cold-feeling fluid.

“It—still—hurts,” I gasped as she eased the needle out.

She tossed it into a medical waste bin and smiled at me. “But now it doesn’t anymore, right?”

I grimaced, though the pain was giving way to a tingling sensation. Maybe local anesthesia would be how I would get through the next few months. But I’d have to find a physician—someone other than Dr. Sanders—who would agree to take a palliative, rather than prescriptive, approach. Which could be complicated.

Dr. Hernandez used tweezers to pull bloody-looking stitches from my skin, cleaned the wound out, and told me to apply ointment and new bandages for a week. Then she handed me a prescription for an antibiotic. “This should knock out the infection. You’ll feel better in a day or two, but don’t stop until you’ve taken every last pill. Your incision could get worse if you’re not careful. I’ve seen cases of septic shock when patients haven’t been compliant with their medicine.”

I thanked her for this uplifting morsel of information and returned to the waiting room. “All set,” I told Milagros.

She nodded, then looped her arm under mine. We left the clinic that way, with me leaning on an elderly woman for strength, and her holding me up as though I was a wisp of a girl. As she helped me into the Chevy, I began to cry. The soothing, the kindness, the subtle mothering: these acts comforted even as they reminded me of what I did not have. Because at that moment, what I longed for most was not my life before my husband came out, or even before I set foot in Dr. Sanders’s office. It wasn’t even Paul and my father, the two people in this world who loved me most. It was my mother.

Milagros seemed to understand that I was not crying out of pain. “It’s okay,
mija
. Whatever it is, it’s going to be okay. You’re here. You’re alive.”

“That’s the problem,” I said from behind my hands. “I’m not supposed to be.” I thought of the plane crash, and the truck on the hiking path. Cancer aside, weren’t these evidence I was fated for a short and unspectacular life?

“And who told you that?” Milagros said, not unkindly. “You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be until it’s over and you aren’t anymore. Prince or pauper, that’s how it works for us all.”

If this was true, then why was I meant to be driving down a dirt road in the middle of a tiny island in the Caribbean? Why was I meant to die in a rapid and devastating manner, just like my mother?

I looked out the window for wild horses, but there were no hidden signs or answers. Only trees and bushes and vines, blurring into a seemingly endless line of green.