The Office of Historical Corrections(3)
“I don’t have any children,” she told the doctor.
“Were you planning on them?” he asked.
“I wasn’t not planning on them.”
The doctor sighed. He leaned forward and made a facial expression somewhere between a smile and a grimace, a face that looked like he’d practiced it in the mirror after being lectured about his bedside manner.
“Look, if you were going to try to have a baby tomorrow, I’d say perhaps that was your risk to take. But if you’re not planning on starting a family anytime soon, well, you’re not getting any younger, and I’d do this sooner rather than later. Take care of your real future, not your imaginary one.”
Lyssa tried to imagine her real future. She had lived with her mother until her mother wasn’t living. She had inherited the house, or whatever of the house she could get out from underneath the second mortgage, which locked her here for now if nothing else did. She could not imagine choosing the way her mother died, given a choice. But her mother had chosen it, had chosen, with her little bit of time left, every painful intervention, every last-chance effort, every surgical and injected and intravenous possibility of survival over comfort. When her mother asked and Lyssa said this is not what I would do if it were me, sometimes she meant you are brave, and sometimes she meant you are reckless and foolish, and sometimes she meant I can’t imagine what would be worth trying this hard to live for. The first time she thought about dying, Lyssa was fourteen. She told her mother about the feeling and her mother said, “You’d have to shoot me first.”
* * *
—
While her mother was dying, Lyssa was dating a bartender named Travis. She had been dating Travis before her mother got sick, though not for very long before. They met on Halloween, he liked to say, though it didn’t really count as meeting in her mind—he had waved at her while she looked at him over the shoulder of a man in a pirate costume who was groping her and nibbling at her neck. Lyssa was trying to decide whether the pirate’s gold tooth was part of the costume or part of his mouth when she looked up and saw Travis watching. Her costume had involved fishnets and a dress that wouldn’t have made it out of her closet any other night, but she couldn’t remember now what cheap last-minute addition had made it a costume—cat ears or vampire teeth or some kind of ominous hat. It was almost the end of slutty Halloween; last year, even the local college kids had been bundled into cartoon character onesies or dressed as clever puns, covered up like nuns, the real kind. But this was two Halloweens ago, and Lyssa hadn’t known where things were headed, and wouldn’t have known what else to wear even if she had. Mackenzie had insisted she come out, and then she and her friends had promptly disappeared into the bar’s drunken throng, leaving Lyssa to her own devices. When Travis saw her with the pirate draped around her neck, her dress half off her shoulder and whatever costume accessory she’d been wearing long gone, he raised an eyebrow, more a question than a judgment, and when he waved, it felt like Lyssa was snapped back into herself and had the answer. She extricated herself. The pirate pled with her as far as the bar door, but when he realized that following her out would mean he’d have to wait in a line to get back in, he let her go.
She drove home to her mother, who had been waiting at the house all night with a bowl of candy that remained mostly uneaten. There used to be trick-or-treaters in their neighborhood, but since a few years back they had gotten only the few stray kids who didn’t have a ride to the part of town with more expensive houses. Lyssa’s mother insisted on overbuying anyway. The two of them sat at the table and split the leftover candy, sorted it into piles, sweet things from sweet-and-sour things, while Lyssa made fun of the party, the Halloween crowd, her own lackluster costume effort.
When she saw Travis again, back at his bar, it was almost a month later. She recognized his face but couldn’t place it.
“How’s your pirate?” he asked, and the night came back to her.
“Out to sea,” she said.
Travis poured her a free beer. It was Thursday, and football season, so she had to compete for his attention with the television behind him. Lyssa had grown up without a team—her mother didn’t believe in televised sports and there was no one else in the house to put them on, so Lyssa’s one allegiance was to a college basketball team an ex had played for—but Travis’s loyalties were evident from the jersey he wore. She adopted his team for the game, shouted at the screen at the appropriate times, marveled at the magic of sports: how easy it was to become invested, how picking one team over the other was enough to make things interesting, just a matter of making a choice. When Lyssa showed up for Travis’s Super Bowl party a few months later, she was wearing a team shirt she’d ordered online toward the end of playoffs and had owned for only weeks, but both her fandom and their relationship felt true and legitimate, rich, even after their team lost, with the discovery that sometimes all it took to become something was to want it. The wanting felt like joy, but the joy was there because she’d assigned it to herself, and she didn’t fully trust it. Certainly, the trick to everything couldn’t be that cheap.
By the time her mother was first admitted to the hospital, the joy had started to feel like effort and Lyssa was working up the nerve to break things off, but Travis showed up in the lobby with flowers and a teddy bear, so it was too late then. Closer to the end, her mother ran out of the only painkiller that worked and Lyssa had to go to work. Travis offered to pick up the medicine and bring it by the house. Lyssa picked her mother’s medicine up from the pharmacy all the time, and she never showed her mother’s ID and rarely got asked for her own, but Travis was a man and a good three shades darker than she was. The pharmacist accused him of having a fake ID and asked him to come back with two other forms of ID and the patient. The patient was recovering from surgery. The patient could not get out of bed. The pharmacist said the patient’s ID would not suffice. Travis argued, then he tried to call the doctor, then he cried. He was not a man who cried, but he had seen the condition he’d left her mother in.