After the End(6)

“It’s an etiquette thing,” Pip had said, as our kitchen table wobbled beneath the weight of more carefully wrapped boxes. “People feel rude not giving us something.”

“Surely it’s ruder to ignore a request from the happy couple not to bring presents.”

“Maybe it’s all for my benefit,” Pip said, with a sideways glance and a mischievous glint in her eye. “They think a nice crystal vase might make up for the fact I married this horrible American, who tries to stop people giving me presents and wouldn’t let me wear a nice pair of fluffy wings at my hen party—”

I’d grabbed her and tickled her till tickling had become kissing and kissing had become something we had to push the boxes to one side for.

The flight attendant is smiling at the photo of Dylan. “How old is he?”

“He turns three in May. That was taken last summer.”

“They change so fast, right?” she says. “I bet he’s completely different now.”

I manage a tight smile and the attendant goes to fetch my meal. She leaves a trace of something floral in the air. Pip would know what it was. She knows perfume the way some people know cars, or music.

“Jo Malone, Pomegranate Noir?” she’ll say to someone in the elevator. And they say Americans are direct.

I liked her straightaway. I was flying home to Chicago after a trip to a client in London—pretty much the reverse of what I do now. She had the longest eyelashes I’d ever seen in my life, and I was so busy wondering how women got eyelashes to grow like that, that it was several seconds before I took the hot towel she was patiently holding out.

Afterward—when we found ourselves in the same bar in River North and were three cocktails down—I complimented her on them.

She laughed. “I have them stuck on.”

It was like being sixteen again, and realizing girls padded their bras and tanned their skin, except I wasn’t sixteen, I was twenty-eight and hardly inexperienced. I knew what false eyelashes were, I just didn’t know they looked so . . . The truth of it, of course, is that I’d been blown away by how gorgeous she was.

Pip put both her hands on her head. “And then of course, there’s my wig.” She moved her hands and her scalp shifted forward and back, and I’ll admit that for a second . . .

“Your face!” Another burst of laughter. When Pip laughs, her whole face lights up. Her cheeks dimple, and her nose screws up, and it’s impossible not to laugh too.

“I wouldn’t care,” I said recklessly.

“You wouldn’t care if I was bald?”

I’d kissed her, then, right there in the middle of the bar, and she’d kissed me back.

I wasn’t even supposed to be on that flight. I’d booked with American, then the flight got canceled, and the office switched me to British Airways.

“Imagine,” I said to Pip once, after we got engaged. “If my flight hadn’t been canceled, we never would have met.”

“We’d have met,” she said, right away. “If something’s meant to be, it’s meant to be. No matter what.”

We saw each other again, the next time she flew into Chicago, and again when I found myself in London with a few hours before my flight, and she had just finished work. I started to miss her, and she said she missed me.

“Couldn’t you get a transfer?” she said.

“Move to England?” I said, in a tone that was only half joking. But I was already in love with her, and I figured I could just as easily work from the UK office as the Chicago one, and the rest, as they say, is history.

I tap the keypad and move the images forward, one by one. Dylan with a football, Dylan with his balance bike, Dylan with the goldfish we won at the fair. Each photo is different, each one freezing a moment in time we’ll never get back.

The daily photos stopped in October. Pip continued, for a while, after Dylan got sick. The photos show him losing weight, losing his hair, making a double thumbs-up by the door of the oncology ward. They show him helping out on hospital radio, and playing with his buddies in the room at the end of the hall. But then he got pneumonitis, and they transferred him to PICU, and as one day bled into the next, the photos weren’t marking change, but instead reminding us all how little progress he’d made.

I look instead at the WhatsApp message Pip sent last night. Our boy’s a fighter!

My message history is a cross-section of our lives, in texts and images. Flight times, airport photos, tired selfies, and silly gifs. Photos, too. Ones that the grandparents don’t see. Photos that speak for us, when we can’t find the words. A glass of wine; an empty pillow; the car radio playing “our” song. Dylan’s blood test results, his feeding tube, the labels from new drugs. When I can’t sleep I hit up Google and look up the drugs, search for success rates.

At dinner, homesick and jet-lagged in some forgettable hotel bar, I’ll scroll back through our conversations until I get dizzy; until I hit last summer, before we knew Dylan was sick. I read our messages, and it’s like listening to a conversation between two people you once knew, but have long since lost touch with.


Back by 8. Take-out, bottle of wine, and some sexy time once D’s asleep?


Dude, not if you call it sexy time.



I smile, carry on scrolling. That bloody dog has been barking for an hour!