When I'm Gone: A Novel (7 page)

No small talk, he had to dive right in.

“I had a nice chat with Ms. Mason today.” Luke sat down on the edge of the bed next to Will and started to put an arm around his shoulders. At his father’s touch, Will pulled away, leaning back against the wall, with his knees drawn up to his chest. When Will didn’t speak, Luke continued.

“I’m sure you are aware of what she called me about. Correct?” He made his voice stern, fatherly.

“Uh, yeah.”

Luke thought for sure he could hear remorse in Will’s voice. The hint of regret was almost enough to make Luke willing to drop the whole thing. Almost.

“Will.” Luke had to pause to take a breath, frustration stacking up inside him like blocks in a tower. “What possessed you to tell her you are adopted?” Will didn’t respond; instead, he shrugged and picked at his thumbnail. “No.” Luke slapped the unmade bed. “I know I’ve let you get away with a lot of things lately, but I’m not letting this one go. You answer me. Now.”

“Fine.” Will hit his crumpled bedding and threw his head back against the old-school Metallica poster on his wall before pushing himself off the bed and on the floor. Digging around under the bed he finally slid a medium-size cardboard box out from under the overhang of his covers. It had the word “Memories” written across the side in Natalie’s handwriting.

Luke knew this box. She brought it with her when they got married. At least once a year he’d find her curled up in a corner examining its entrails. Sometimes she shared a scrap of paper or a memento, but most of the time she kept its contents private. He’d never been tempted to look inside, understanding the desire to keep some memories to herself. Natalie had always respected his boundaries, so he’d always tried to return the favor. Knowing Will had broken that trust made Luke angry and jealous at the same time.

“That’s your mom’s box. You shouldn’t be rummaging through it.”

Will already had half his arm buried inside the box, shifting objects around, searching.

“She’s dead, Dad. Nothing belongs to her anymore, remember? You taught me that a long time ago.” He whipped out a business-size envelope with black lines of writing on the back. “Here. This is what got me thinking.
You
tell
me
what this means.” He shoved the hair out of his eyes, settling back on his knees.

Luke took the envelope reluctantly. On the one hand, he hated the idea of breaking Natalie’s confidence in him by snooping. On the other hand, he was eager to know what Will had found that made him so suspicious. Curiosity and a desire to figure out what his son was going through won out over loyalty.

The back of the envelope was filled with names and phone numbers. Some were first names only, others the names of companies or hospitals in several different colors of ink. Some were crossed out and others underlined. There was no way to know when the names and numbers were written or what they were for. This random list couldn’t possibly be the catalyst for Will’s lie.

“I don’t get it. Is this supposed to explain something?”

“You’re holding it wrong.” Will took the envelope and flipped it over. The front was addressed to “Mrs. Natalie Richardson,” and up in the corner a return address emblem read: “Maranatha Adoptions, Chicago, Illinois.” Postmarked the month Will was born. Luke peeked inside the roughly opened envelope, but it was empty.

“What did the letter say?”

“It was empty when I found it,” Will mumbled.

“So let me get this right,” Luke said, trying to keep his voice steady and his blood pressure from skyrocketing. The large vein in his neck pounded against his collar. “You decided to make up some extravagant story about how your whole life’s been a lie off an empty envelope with random names written on the back?” Luke was almost yelling. He took a breath before continuing, remembering how distinctly he and Jessie had heard Clayton through the ceiling during her first visit. “You’ve seen all the pictures of Mom pregnant with you, of you lying in her arms at the hospital, the videos of you coming home. You really think we staged all those?”

Will went back to picking at his thumb. Luke couldn’t see his eyes, but when his son started sniffing, he knew Will was crying. He put the envelope in his shirt pocket behind the folded list of grief counselors. Once his hands were free, he slid an arm around Will’s shoulders and touched his forehead to his son’s.

They hadn’t cried in front of each other since the day Natalie died. Sometimes Luke thought he could hear Will crying in his room as he walked by, but he’d always assumed Will needed his privacy. Now that Will was in his arms, Luke knew he’d been wrong. What he needed was for his dad to tell him everything was going to be okay.

“No,” Will sobbed, “I guess I knew it wasn’t possible.”

“Why did you say all those things to Ms. Mason?” Luke asked calmly, kissing the top of his son’s head like he used to do when he was little.

“Because I wanted it to be true,” Will choked out.

The admission stabbed Luke in the heart. Will wished he didn’t belong to their family.

“You don’t feel like you fit in?”

Will sat up and pulled away from Luke’s arms. Thick trails of tears traced down his cheeks.

“No, it’s not that.” Will shook his head. “When I saw the adoption agency and the date, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. You weren’t there when I was born.” He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, catching his breath. “You guys always talked about how you were in China for most of Mom’s pregnancy and how hard it was to get pregnant. How I came a month early and you weren’t back yet. I thought, maybe, there was a chance.”

Luke put a firm hand on Will’s shoulder. “But Grandma was here, and I got home the day you came home. Your mom was tired and sore. The nurses had taken those Polaroid pictures for me right after you were born. Plus, no adoption agency would give a baby to someone without the father being there.”

Will nodded repeatedly. “I guess I know that, but the more I thought about it, the more I wanted it to be true. I kept thinking: if I was adopted, if that letter was about me, my mom’s not dead. She’s out there somewhere, waiting for me.” When Will choked on the last words, Luke knew why people wanted to believe in heaven so badly. If only he could pretend he believed. He’d say: “Don’t worry. Your mom
is
waiting for you. You will see her again.” Now he didn’t know what to say.

“You still have a mom; she’s real, she existed, and you have all your memories of her.”

“Lucky me.” Will placed the box back under the bed and yanked up his sagging jeans.

Luke ran a hand through his hair, scratching his scalp in thought. “Um, about the adoption, if you are still worried, I can look into that Maranatha place. Maybe find out why they were writing to your mom.” Luke told himself it was to placate Will, but he couldn’t deny the embers of curiosity stirring in his mind. Will was his child, he didn’t doubt that, even with all of Will’s convoluted points. But an adoption agency and a list of hospitals—what did it all mean?

“Really?” Will looked at him suspiciously. “You’d do that? Even though you’re so sure?”

“Hey, if you tell Ms. Mason that story one more time, she’s going to lose it. If this will put your mind at rest, I’m happy to.”

Will seemed to consider the idea carefully, like he was trying to balance two sides of a scale. “Yeah, I think that’d help.”

“Okay. I’ll do some research and make some phone calls. In the meantime, Ms. Mason said we need to take you to a therapist.”

“No way.” Will rolled his eyes and leaned away from Luke. “I do not want to talk to some stranger about Mom.”

Luke wasn’t ready for another fight so he settled for a few firm pats on Will’s back.

“I know, but when you start making up stories about your life, there are consequences. You go to this doctor for six weeks, you start turning in all your homework, and if your grades are okay and you want to stop, you can. Deal?”

Will grunted but couldn’t seem to figure out a rebuttal. Instead, he said, “Deal.” They shared a quick hug.

“Oh, and all these dishes need to make their way downstairs and into the dishwasher. No more eating in your room. Meals with us every night. Homework turned in. Got it?”

“Fine. I got it. I got it.” Will rolled his eyes and grabbed a plate coated in some kind of dried-on film.

Luke left Will’s room feeling like a qualified parent for the first time in a while. He glanced at his watch. He was already half an hour late relieving Jessie. Picking up the pace, he took the stairs two at a time. Jumping off the last step, something fell out of his pocket. He half expected to see one of Natalie’s letters, but they were still in his coat pocket. No, this was the mystery envelope from Will’s room.

He examined it one more time. Nothing new on the front—adoption agency, Chicago, postmarked near Will’s birthday. Knowing Natalie, she was trying to help a friend or a student, right? After a little research and a few phone calls, he’d have a simple explanation to bring to his son and settle the anxious thoughts that kept creeping to the fore.

Luke shook his head. Will was too young to understand—Luke and Natalie were best friends. Over their life together, they’d always told each other everything. Natalie knew his secrets and he knew hers. All of them. Well, except for whatever was in the box . . . and the letters and . . .

He turned the paper over to look at the list of hospitals and names. Something caught his eye. One name in particular stood out to him. He’d seen it before: Dr. Neal. He’d seen that name before on the contact list on Natalie’s phone. At the time he’d assumed it was one of Natalie’s doctors. Now he wasn’t so sure. He ran his finger over the name again.

“Dr. Neal,” Luke whispered. “Who are you?”

MARCH

CHAPTER 7

Luke closed the door to Clayton’s bedroom with a cautious click. Over the past two months it had become a habit to check on the kids before turning in for the night. A new part of his routine was prying Natalie’s iPhone from Clayton’s grubby little fingers to charge it.

Every night since Luke had found Natalie’s phone tangled in the bedding from her abandoned hospital bed, Clayton had fallen asleep listening to his mom reading one of the six picture books she’d recorded on the phone. She’d also recorded a few songs and favorite memories from when they were little. Luke tried to avoid those videos. Natalie made them when she was in the front room, having hospice visit her, making plans for her funeral. She was a shell of the woman who’d walked into the oncologist’s office a year earlier. But the kids didn’t seem to mind. Especially Clayton.

Some nights Luke left the phone in Clayton’s bed, knowing when he woke in the middle of the night he could tap a button and hear his mother’s voice. But tonight, Luke needed the phone more than his son did. Luke tiptoed into the master bedroom, closed the door carefully, and tossed the phone on his rumpled bed.

Right after his discovery of the phone, it was too painful to look through the device. Avoidance had always been Luke’s greatest defense against pain. From his brief look through the phone, he found tons of pictures and videos, e-mails with friends and family, and casually noted Dr. Neal’s name in her contact list along with about fifty others. That’s when he handed the phone over to Clayton’s perpetually sticky care.

Then, her two-month death-anniversary came, and along with it, a new letter. Day 60. It was so different than the rest of the notes, less lighthearted, more narrative. There was a man in the letter—the elusive Dr. Neal, the stranger whose name continued to show up. First, as a random contact on her phone, next on the mysterious envelope, and now a real live person in one of her letters. To make matters worse, there was something about the way she talked about him that made Luke bristle.

DAY 60

Dear Luke,

Today was a horrible day. I know it seems like every day of a cancer patient’s life during treatment could be described as less than stellar, but that’s not entirely true. At least not for me. Most days I only think about cancer for maybe 10 percent of my day. Honestly. Between the kids and you and school and Annie and everything else, I’m usually on an even keel. But not today.

It happened on campus. I like getting to school early to study; we’re already paying for childcare so I might as well get some non-kid-interrupted study time in. There’s this group of girls, and when I say girls, I mean young female children, who “hang out” in the stairwell by the vestibule where I sit till class starts. They’re generally annoying, laughing and swearing like your Uncle Stan. But the other day I smelled something, uh, strange coming from their general direction. Luke, they were smoking pot, right on campus, in the building. I couldn’t believe it.

Of course, being a teacher and a bit of a natural-born tattletale, I wanted to report them to someone. But I didn’t. They’d be kicked out of school, maybe arrested, and I didn’t want to be responsible for all that. Instead, I packed up and poked my head in the smoky stairwell. There were three of them: two average-looking brunettes and one tiny blonde. The short blonde one seemed to be the ringleader. She wore this insanely small pair of shorts over hot pink tights. They were pretty much underwear. It’s February. How desperate for attention do you have to be to wear underwear shorts outside in the snow?

I’m getting distracted. So the underwear-shorts girl didn’t even try to hide the joint. She gaped at me like I’d walked into her living room after breaking down the front door. She looked me over, eyes lingering on my headscarf. I can’t remember exactly what they said, but it went something like this:

The underwear-shorts girl demanded to know what I wanted, the hand holding the joint frozen midpuff.

I gave her the nicest smile I could muster and closed the swinging door behind me.

I got my teacher voice on and said something like, “Uh, ladies, I can smell your pot all the way out in the main hall. You might want to put it out and get to class or wherever you need to be.”

The blonde rolled her eyes, took a long drag on the joint, and blew it out in my direction. I’ll edit her profanities out because she was proficient in her use of spicy language. “So f-ing what? You might be somebody’s mom, but you’re not mine.”

A door at the top of the stairs opened and closed, and a single set of footsteps echoed through the well. The taller brunette with bleached gold tips shifted uncomfortably and tried to convince “Tiff” to go.

I pulled the door open and stepped aside. “Yeah, Tiff, you should go.”

The Tiff girl glared at me as she snuffed out the weed and put it in the pocket of her underwear shorts. But before they made a move to leave, my methods professor, Dr. Neal, came up from behind. He’s a tallish guy, and on the stairs he stood at least two heads above the crew.

You have to imagine a deep, very authoritative voice here. It echoed in the hallway and almost scared me as much as the girls.

“What’s going on here?” He put his hands in the pockets of his tweed sport coat; it even had patches on the sleeves like a perfect professor stereotype. “Do I need to remind you ladies this is a nonsmoking campus, with a zero tolerance policy for illegal drug use?”

One of the blonde’s groupies poked her in the back, nearly shoving her toward the door. She hitched her thumb at me. “Look at the scarf; bet she’s got cancer. I heard they get pot for free.”

I was appalled they tried to use my cancer as cover for their pot smoking. I wanted to tell them off or at least call their mothers and tell them what lovely “flowers” they’d raised, but instead I tried to lighten the mood by flipping the tail of my scarf over my shoulder. And saying, “Shows what you know. Baldness and scarves are hot this spring.”

Tiff did not catch on. She rolled her eyes and said something like, “God, lady, the chemo’s gone to your brain. That outfit is the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Dr. Neal shook his head, and I knew Tiff had just said the wrong thing. He asked me to head to class and let them know he’d be a few minutes late. As I backed out the door, I thought I could hear Dr. Neal ask for the girls’ IDs.

I hurried to the chair I’d been studying in. My shoulder bag was still there, untouched. It had probably been a dumb idea to leave it out in the open. I took a quick inventory, and everything seemed to be intact. I had pulled the strap onto my shoulder when a hard shove came from behind, knocking me against the back of the armchair. No need for my overactive imagination here. I remember this next part word-for-word.

“Thanks a lot, bitch. I f-ing hope you die.” Tiff stood behind me. She wrapped her hand around the loose end of my black-and-gray scarf and yanked. It came off easily, sliding against my smooth scalp and falling to the floor in a pool of satin. For a moment I couldn’t breathe. Everyone in the hall stopped and stared. I could feel their stares rubbing over my bald head, hear them whisper, “She must have cancer.”

Even Tiff seemed shocked for a moment at the reality of my illness. She backed away into the crowd gathering around us when Dr. Neal broke through. He took in the scene in front of him—the scarf on the ground, the tears on my face. He grabbed the scarf and my bag, then put his arm around me, leading me through the crowd and to the nearest empty classroom.

By the time we got into the dingy old room, I was sobbing. He put my bag down and held out the scarf and asked if I was okay.

I didn’t know what to say. Physically, I was fine. Everyone is always worried about my body, but at that minute, my soul hurt. I knew the scarf wasn’t fooling anyone—they all knew why I wore it, but without it I felt naked. I couldn’t hide from what was happening inside my body.

I lied and told him I was fine. I wiped my face with the slippery material, hoping my glued-on eyelashes were waterproof.

“Don’t worry about that girl. I got her name. I promise, she will face discipline.” His face was hard, looking less like a professor and more like a vigilante. He wanted me to press charges, get the girl kicked out of school. He was furious. I told him I didn’t want to be involved. For a moment I thought he was going to fight me on it. Then he took a step back, checking the clock above the whiteboard. We were both late for class. He told me I didn’t have to go, that he’d e-mail me the notes.

I wiped my nose on my sleeve with a loud sniff and shook my head. If I went home, Tiff would win. I told him that I wanted to stay but that I needed a few minutes to try and get my scarf back on. I tried to smile as I threw the scarf over my shoulder.

Then to my surprise, Dr. Neal yanked the fabric off my shoulder and untwisted the large knot on its side. “My wife used to wear one of these . . .” He trailed off without finishing the sentence and then offered to help.

I hesitated for a moment, but not long. He wanted to help, but didn’t look at me like those other people did, like a sick person. He looked at me like a real person who happened to have cancer. I nodded, and he took two steps toward me until we were nearly nose-to-nose. Hands on my shoulders, he whispered, “Turn around.”

I spun slowly on one foot, facing the whiteboard at the front of the classroom. When he first touched my shoulders I jumped, still jittery from the confrontation with Tiff. He gave them a kind squeeze, and I let out a sigh I think I’d been holding for a long time. It was nice to be with someone who’d been there before, who had wrapped bare heads and cried useless tears that changed absolutely nothing. He wound the silken fabric around my scalp and tied a simple knot under my right ear. I pulled the tail of the scarf over my shoulder like I used to when I had a ponytail.

I carefully inspected the scarf, dancing fingers over the knot and checking to be sure it fully covered my baldness. It was perfect. I thanked him and he left. A few minutes later I went back to class, and life went on like any other day.

Now I’m home. I can’t bring myself to tell you this story. First, I know I’d cry, and you already have to deal with so many of my tears, I don’t want to burden you with more. But really it’s because I know you. You’ll want to “fix” this for me. You’ll want to call Brian so we can press charges, or drive to campus, hunt those girls down, and force them to apologize. So instead, I wrote the story down for you to read later. Let’s face it: if I’m dead, then there’s nothing to fix. One thing you can do for me though. If you ever meet Dr. Neal, tell him thank you for me.

Hope you and the kids had a better day than I did. Kiss them for me. I love you all!

Love,

Natalie

The first time he’d read the letter a week ago, Luke wanted to jump in his car and hunt down underwear-pants girl and shove a picture of his dead wife in her face.

He’d gotten as far as the highway before realizing Clayton was sitting in the backseat, stuffed into his puffy blue winter coat, ready to be dropped off at Annie’s house. Luke made a tight U-turn right before the on-ramp and sped back to Annie’s, only a few minutes late.

He reread the letter obsessively for three days, unsure if he was more disturbed by the cruelty of Tiff or the gentleness of Dr. Neal. Dr. Neal. That name—it couldn’t be a coincidence. Natalie’s grad school professor showing up in three areas of her life made no sense. At least not any kind of sense he liked considering.

He’d already looked up his contact information on the phone, briefly, after seeing Dr. Neal’s name on the Maranatha envelope. But upon further investigation, the phone numbers didn’t match. Luke took it as a sign he was jumping to conclusions. Now he wasn’t so sure.

He stared at the sleeping phone, its screen black and covered in smudges. Avoidance had been the right choice. While the phone was dark, it was as if he could keep a little part of Natalie in suspended animation, like some Disney princess May was always watching on TV. He wanted nothing more than to leave the sleeping princess in peace, but his list of questions was getting longer than his list of excuses.

Luke entered her password. Apps sprawled across her touch screen, never organized in any way he could easily understand. Maybe that’s what had kept him from getting a smartphone for so long; they had so many useless applications on them, so many things that consumed time like it was endless. Well, it wasn’t endless.

He tapped the green messages button, feeling a little uncomfortable searching through his wife’s phone—like a jealous lover. Top and center in black letters was the name Dr. Neal. If his name was on top, Dr. Neal was the last person on earth to send his wife a message. His finger hovered over the name, and he touched it cautiously, as if it could bite him.

The message screen opened instantly, one blue message glowing on the screen. It said: “I’m glad we found each other.” Then . . . nothing. Luke tried to scroll down, searching for more messages, for some explanation as to why this guy’s moniker was all over his wife’s life. But the blue text bubble bounced back into place. “I’m glad we found each other.”

What the hell? That was
not
a normal message to get from your college professor no matter how many times he helped you out of a difficult situation. And no way he’d sent her only one text on the day she died. An unnerving thought came to him. If there were no previous texts from Dr. Neal, Natalie must’ve been deleting them.

Luke switched over to the recent calls. The first four names made him let out the breath he’d been holding, fogging up the screen. This was more normal. Natalie talked to her mom, Annie, Luke, and the hospice nurse Tammy. But he couldn’t help swiping his finger up one more time. The fifth name on the recent-calls list was Dr. Neal. They talked for twenty minutes the week before she died. Damn it.

Luke dropped the phone as if it was on fire. He rubbed his eyes with closed fists, and the tears he’d successfully held back for three months burned angrily against his eyelids. No, he wouldn’t let an old envelope, Natalie’s letters, one text, and a few phone calls make him question the sixteen years they’d had together. Right?