Life and Other Near-Death Experiences(41)

Best to play dumb, I thought. “After dinner? Maybe we can call it an early night.”

He chuckled. “Sure. But I mean after Puerto Rico.”

He’d seen me stark naked, with all my divots and dimples highlighted in the bright light of day. He’d witnessed my postsurvival meltdown on the beach and my sobbing like a sad sack on the porch. But sharing how I planned to spend my final months felt insanely revealing, and I fought the urge to duck under the nearest table.

“I’m going to see my brother in New York,” I said noncommittally. “Hey, would you mind if we went back to the table? I’m kind of thirsty.”

“Of course,” he said, guiding me across the room. We sat down, and I downed an entire glass of water before looking up. When I did, he smiled and said, “So, New York, huh? I hear they have some pretty good hospitals there.”

“That’s what I hear,” I said, dabbing at my mouth with a corner of a cloth napkin.

“That’s what I hear, too,” he said, and reached for his wineglass.

The waiter delivered our paella, and Shiloh and I feigned an unusual amount of interest in consuming it, pausing between bites to discuss meaningful topics such as whether I liked mussels, and if the rice had been cooked long enough.

But.

After we returned to his apartment, stripped down, and took to each other like coyotes on carrion, we were lying there panting. And he looked over at me and said, “Has it occurred to you that maybe it isn’t your time?”

I squinted at him, still kind of light-headed from the sex we’d just had. “Given what you’ve told me about your feelings on fate and fatality, I’m going to assume you don’t really believe that.”

“No,” he confessed. “I believe we have absolutely no way of knowing. But I think it doesn’t hurt to assume we’re going to live until we’re absolutely ready to die. You’re not ready. You can’t convince me you are, Libby.”

I pulled the sheet up around my bare flesh and said nothing.

In the low light of the bedroom, his eyes looked nearly black. “Damn it, Libby, fight for your life,” he said in a low tone. “At the very least, get a second opinion.”

Fists wedged into my armpits, I gripped the thin cotton sheet tightly. “That’s not what this is about. This is about dignity. I’m fighting for my right to let nature run its course instead of letting chemo destroy what little time I have left.”

“You’re talking to the wrong guy about that one. Trust me, I know how much treatment sucks. Chemo and radiation almost cost me both balls—and that was after my marriage ended. Any time I have a cramp, I think, It’s back. I have to work every single day not to let this thing that happened sixteen years ago define the rest of my life. But you know what? It was worth it. I’m alive, and I’d do it again tomorrow if I had to.”

“I’m sorry that happened to you,” I said, sniffing as I attempted to maintain my composure. “But this is different. You’re not going to change my mind, and if that’s what you’re trying to do, maybe we shouldn’t see each other anymore.”

His sighed deeply, then put his arms around me and pulled me down so his stomach was pressed against my back. “Don’t say that, Libby,” he whispered as I let myself ease into him. “Aren’t we having fun?”

Fun? I couldn’t argue with him there. After we made love again, and Shiloh had fallen asleep beside me, I stared up at the mosquito netting, listening to him snoring lightly. In spite of our argument, I felt weirdly content. While I wasn’t fond of the inciting incident that had put me there, I liked this parallel universe I found myself in. It was a place in which I was able to ignore trivial matters such as work, bills, and my gay husband, and instead sun myself with abandon, eat and sleep at will, and catch up on the carnal pleasures I’d missed during the first thirty-four years of my life.

If only my resolve about the end of my life was not eroding like the shoreline at high tide. What would I do? Was my decision to forgo treatment not brave at all—but rather impulsive and perhaps even selfish, as Shiloh had implied?

As I began to drift off, I heard my mother’s voice, or at least her voice as I imagined it. My father had neither the foresight nor the spare cash to invest in a video camera before her death, and so Paul and I had only a two-minute clip taken by a distant relative at another relative’s party to help us re-create the light, steady timbre of our mother’s speech.

“I’m not worried about you, Libby,” she said, placing her hand in mine. She was at the hospice, tethered to the bed by thin plastic tubes that ran between her legs and into her limbs. It was a week, maybe, before the end, and she had asked to be alone with me. “You’ll be just fine; I know it in my soul. But take care of Paul, please, love? I need you to do that for me.”

“Of course, Mama,” I told her as I sat paralyzed, unable to shed a tear or squeeze her fingers for fear I would make her pain even more severe.

“You’re the joy of my life, Libby Lou.” Her words were slow and strained, as though it took everything in her to push them through her throat and off her tongue. “I love you.”

“I love you more, Mama,” I assured her, holding her gaze until she finally let her eyes close.

This was not the memory I would have preferred to recall, but nonetheless it surfaced regularly. Because it was the moment when I finally acknowledged—if only for a few brief minutes—that she was going to die. My pastor, my father, Paul: they all tried to warn me. I was always a pleasant child, or so I’ve been told. But the day my mother and father sat us down and explained that she had cancer, a switch in me flipped. Forget looking on the bright side. My subconscious decided that if I didn’t acknowledge that there was a dark side, I somehow thought life’s negatives would cease to exist. So when people tried to explain that my mother didn’t have long to live, I nodded and mentally filed this probability somewhere between alien probings and a prehistoric mammal breaststroking through Loch Ness.