Hope and Other Punch Lines(58)

“What?” I ask to buy time as my brain catches up with this revelation, which, like the announcement about my tumor, isn’t so much a revelation, actually, now that I think about it, as a confirmation. I have no idea how I’m supposed to feel. Of course, kids of divorce often fantasize about their parents getting back together—I did it for years—even though everyone says that those reunions don’t happen and that hoping for them is like expecting someone to rise from the dead. And yet, here we find ourselves, one-half of the way there.

“I’m in love with your mother. Again. Or still.” My father doesn’t look at me. Judge Judy screams at the defendant and jabs at her with a heavily ringed finger. I can see the spittle forming at the corner of her mouth, the peculiar benefit of watching her in HD. I wonder for the tenth time if Judge Judy is pretending to be angry, if her entire show is pure shtick, or if she truly cares that the lady with the teased hair did not pay the cost of ruining her cousin’s wedding dress with regurgitated merlot. I want to yell at the screen and tell them to stop fighting, that life is too short, and then I remember that I once read somewhere that the litigants get paid to be there.

Like pretty much everything else, none of it is real.

“Does Mom love you back? I mean, I know she loves you, but does she love you in like, you know, that way?” I ask. I have no idea why my father has chosen this moment, while I’m immobilized by an IV in a hospital bed and my mortality hangs in the balance, to discuss the intimate details of his and my mother’s relationship. Then it occurs to me that maybe it’s because he knows we’re running out of time and for him, unlike me, that realization has turned him honest. Maybe he subscribes to Noah’s blaze-of-glory theory, and this is how we’re going to go out—with big, life-changing declarations. Maybe he wants to have another wedding, and soon, so I can be well enough to attend. I could be maid of honor.

Just after the divorce, there was nothing I wanted more—one house, one family, dinner on proper dishes that we put in the dishwasher afterward. And then, around twelve or thirteen, I stopped wasting birthday wishes on that sort of nonsense. I know people whose parents have had ugly, bitter divorces, whose parents can’t be in the same room together, who have to eat Thanksgiving dinner twice so no one is upset. I was grateful that my mom and dad seemed to still like each other. I’m relieved now by the idea that they’ll have each other to lean on after I’m gone.

“I don’t know. Things have been…There’s been something new between us lately,” my dad says, and his voice breaks. “I shouldn’t be telling you this. I’m scared. I’m so unbelievably terrified about what’s happening, and I know your mom is too, and her running away, that wasn’t only about you. I mean, it was mostly about you, but not totally. Last night, I asked her if I could move back home. Great timing, right?”

Again with the nervous talking and the oversharing.

“What did Mom say?” I ask.

“She said she’d think about it. That it was a lot of change at once, because of your grandmother. We didn’t know that twelve hours later you’d be hemorrhaging on the soccer field.” He makes a weird sniffle-laugh sound. Our lives have always been absurd.

“I wasn’t hemorrhaging,” I say.

“Do you prefer bleeding profusely?” he asks.

“I do, actually.” This time, we both laugh, no anxious sniffling, and for a second, it feels like old times, or pre-today times, when my dad and I could sit comfortably and chat and would not have to pretend to be engrossed in Judge Judy to avoid having to face up to my impending death. Overall, things were pretty good pre-today.

“When you have a kid, it’s like letting your heart walk around outside your body. You never get used to it.”

“It’s going to be all right,” I say, which is truer than I’m going to be all right.

“I know I should pretend I’m not scared, that that would be the right move parentally, but I can’t. Abbi, you being sick? You won’t know until you’re a parent, but holy crap, it’s our worst nightmare. Let me have your tumor. Please hand it right over. Forget the results. Even the biopsy scares me. That’s surgery.”

My dad looks at me, and I’m afraid to look back. I don’t want to see his eyes. Instead, I turn again to find that Judge Judy has been replaced by Wheel of Fortune; the host and the letter-turning lady both have terrifyingly frozen faces. Talk about living forever.

“I’ve been so naive thinking we paid our dues all those years ago. That we were so lucky. We got to do all our worrying at once. I’ve been the opposite of your mom. She’s been extra worried about you,” he confides.

His voice breaks, and I pretend not to notice. I pretend we are not both drowning in our own fear. On the screen, the woman in the tight dress turns the letter Z.

Sometimes, even though it’s perverse, I think about the jumpers on 9/11. About two hundred people plunged out the windows of the Towers toward certain death. With the exception of a single couple, who held hands as they fell, the rest went one by one, as if they’d been waiting in an unfathomable line.

It’s entirely possible that there was a line. That there’s decency in the darkness.

The jumpers have mostly been erased from history. It’s an unspoken rule that you don’t talk about them, but I’ve never been able to understand the stigma. When I think about those two hundred men and women, I think only of bravery, of taking one last leap of faith, of reclaiming their last bit of power the only way they could find it.