Life and Other Near-Death Experiences(9)

After a while, I returned to the kitchen, ate a few brownies, then remembered the ticking of the cosmic time clock I was now observing and the fact that although I didn’t have concrete plans, let alone a job to occupy my day, there was plenty left to accomplish. I sat down at the computer and began.





FIVE


Even with Tom out of the apartment, I still felt tethered to him. Unlacing some of our financial ties seemed to be the next best step toward securing my independence, even if said independence would be, quite literally, short-lived.

The legality of emptying most of our joint savings into a new online account registered to yours truly was questionable, but I decided I had the ethical right of way: I had been the one to stash cash all those years. After transferring the funds, I logged onto my retirement and life insurance accounts and made Toby and Max the new beneficiaries. Though it was tempting, I ultimately opted against canceling Tom’s school-loan payment, which was drawn directly from our checking account. After all, he would end up paying it himself when I ran out of money, after I died, or when we divorced, whatever came first.

There was the sticky matter of the mortgage, which was in both our names. I didn’t know how I would convince Tom to sell, but somehow, some way, I would. The apartment had been our haven for eight years, and like the tar-stained drywall of a smoker’s home, it reeked of Tom and Libby—a couple who no longer existed. If I couldn’t burn it to the ground, it would have to be sold. A quick e-mail exchange with a friend who was a Chicago real estate shark confirmed that the condo would be an easy sell.

I was on my way.

The only problem was, cutting Tom off financially had released some of my anger, and that opened up a space for the loss that had been hovering in the background. As soon as I shut my computer, I found myself hunched over, sobbing so violently that I was worried I might vomit. Eighteen years: it was nearly half my life, and thanks to Dr. Sanders’s medical briefing, I was hyperaware that I would never have the opportunity to spend more time without Tom than with him. Now all of it—my epic high school crush, our long-distance college relationship, the wedding, moving to Chicago together, our anniversary celebrations, the many holidays spent with Tom’s insufferable family, and yes, obviously, the sex—felt like an incredible farce, particularly in light of my new expiration date. It was as though I’d just watched a priceless piece of jewelry wash away in the swell of the ocean’s tide. There was nothing I could do to change what had happened, but I could not stop myself from desperately wishing I could rewind my life and do it all over in a way that was the exact opposite of my past.



Although I was exhausted—the crying, no doubt, and probably the cancer, too, making my white blood cells run laps around my body—I forced myself to go out for lunch. I wandered down Damen and stopped at my usual coffee-and-pastry place.

Jeanette, the regular barista, greeted me from behind the espresso machine. “Hey, Libby. Don’t usually see you here during the day.”

“I’m taking a personal day,” I said.

With her long dreads and various facial piercings, Jeanette was a relic of Bucktown circa pre-yuppification. “Fun!” she said, thwacking the espresso pod against a bucket filled with old grindings. “How’s Tom?” she added. (He and I went there a lot.)

“Oh, Tom?” I said, fingering one of the shrink-wrapped cookies on the counter. “He’s dead.”

Jeanette spun around. “Oh my God!”

“Not literally,” I said, and reminded myself to lay off the hyperbole. “Just to me.”

“Ohhh,” she said. I saw her mental wheels turning: Libby’s clearly traumatized. So sad—they were cute, reading the Sunday paper over lattes and strudel. Although he was better-looking than her, and that never works. “I’m sorry.”

“Eh,” I said with a wave of my hand, “don’t be. My two-year-old nephews have bigger penises than Tom.” This, too, was hyperbole, and I was aware that it was odd to say such a terrible thing to a woman who, aside from my preference for whole milk in my coffee, knew next to nothing about me. I had always held my tongue and tried to think the best about people, but something strange had happened. I would soon be nothing but a memory to others, and for reasons I couldn’t quite understand myself, I didn’t want anyone—not my brother, not my ex-boss, not this barista—to remember me as lie-down-and-take-it Libby.

Jeanette laughed. “Good for you, then! Life’s too short.”

“Isn’t it?” I said, and slipped a ten in her tip jar.

On the way back to my apartment, I fell into step behind two women speaking to each other in Spanish. For all I knew, they were discussing industrial waste, but the florid words fell off their tongues in a way that made me envious. I’d studied German in school, and although it had been billed as a practical business language, I had yet to find myself in a situation in which there was an opportunity to sprechen Deutsch. Meanwhile, I’d traveled to three Spanish-speaking countries and had fallen more in love with the language on each trip. Obviously there wasn’t time to master it, but I had an idea about how to capture a pinch of Latin magic before I died.

First, though, I wanted to verify that this wasn’t all an overreaction on my part. I went home and called Dr. Sanders’s office. “Hi, this is Libby, er, Elizabeth Miller. I was in yesterday and Dr. Sanders said I had cancer. I’m just calling to find out what type of cancer, exactly, I have. I know it was lymphoma, but I can’t remember the rest. Can you check my chart?”