Gone, Gone, Gone(14)

“Way to go, kid.” He puts his hand on top of my hat. His hand is so big that he could palm my skull like a basketball and lift it right off my shoulders. He could tuck it under his arm and bring me with him everywhere.

“I miss New York,” I say. The moment felt right somehow.

He looks at me, his eyes suddenly soft. These are the moments I love best with my dad. When I stop being his boy and I can just be his kid. We stop acting like men. That’s the special part. I think the girls are always his girls.

He says, “You do?”

I nod.

I miss feeling strong and defiant. There’s something about being a NYC native that means you have a lot less to prove.

Dad says, “Was the anniversary hard for you?”

There are a lot of anniversaries he could mean. His and Mom’s, their third since they separated, was last week. My sisters and I took him out for dinner but didn’t talk about it. I think that was exactly what he wanted.

My no-more-chemo thing was actually yesterday, but I think Dad probably forgot about that. It’s a stupid thing to celebrate. My brother died on March 8th, and we always visit his grave and the children’s hospital, and that serves as the day we think about how glad we are that the cancer’s gone.

So I know what anniversary he means.

“No one here understands,” I say.

Dad says, “They had the Pentagon.”

I shrug. It’s not the same.

It’s numbers. Just like chances are Craig isn’t going to get shot, the chances are that if someone died in September 11th, they died in New York, not in Washington, D.C. It’s just numbers.

It makes sense, then, that the way they memorialized it at school wasn’t nearly the production I was expecting. We had a candle-lighting ceremony. The chorus sang a few songs. We missed one period for the assembly, then we trotted on back to class. All I really felt was a nagging feeling I should have signed up for chorus.

I wanted to email a friend back home and ask what it was like at my old school, but I didn’t know how to ask in a way that wouldn’t seem . . . vulgar. So, how was your September 11th?

Jasper calls, “Dad?” from the kitchen, so he smiles at me and gets up. “We’ll talk more later,” he says. “I’m glad you’re doing okay, Li.”

I wonder where he got the impression that I’m doing okay, but actually, I am.

Well, I’m not great or anything, but I’m probably not getting any worse.

Craigy—

Dad and I just had a nice talk about STATISTICS. Facts and figures and such. You know how fathers are. Did yours make you memorize baseball cards?

Washington DC didn’t come off looking so hot.

But you always do.



I can’t send that.

He’d probably be offended.

Or aroused.

And neither of those is really my intention.

Probably.

I hold down backspace.

I should probably make some cancer-kid joke. Those always go over well with Craig. I can’t decide if this is a horrible idea, since I snarked at him for making fun of dead people earlier today.

Generally, I can’t decide if I should feel ashamed about the cancer jokes.

Leukemia, after all the Lifetime movies, begs to be made fun of. It’s so overinflated. Plus it’s been seven years, so at this point, it really does feel like a joke. Like a gross-out story someone told me when I was a kid.

I could say that with full confidence if I didn’t still sometimes wake up from nightmares that make me breathe so hard I throw up. But they are less and less frequent every year.

Cancer is just a way to be sick in real life, but in movies and stuff it’s shorthand for he was young and beautiful and pure and then he got sick and he suffered and he had poignant last words and he died. And I can tell myself that’s what happened with Theodore, though it’s not entirely accurate. His last word was “water” and he died before he could drink it. You can make that beautiful, if you want. But the reality is, he was a thirsty forty-pound boy, and he died whining.

And the beautiful tragic death is obviously not how it worked out for me. So, way to f*ck up, leukemia.

But the idea that this shitty disease sanctified our lives really bothers me. I wasn’t brave. I wasn’t a fighter. I was the one who responded to Jasper’s marrow transplant. I was a statistic. And so was Theo.

The bottom line is, cancer happens the exact same way other things happen: It does, or it doesn’t. But it never means anything.

Okay, cool, but this isn’t writing my email to Craig. And, hey, guess what? This isn’t about Theo.

Craigy—

Sorry about all the bad stuff.

Be well.

Lio

PS Your animals are safe. Promise.

I hit send before I can stop myself.





CRAIG

I CAN’T SLEEP. I WRITE EMAILS.

I can’t believe I’m writing to Cody. That after all of that bullshit and mindf*cking I put myself through about not writing to Cody before he emailed me, now I’m doing it. It’s his turn. The way I was supposed to keep from going crazy was I was going to only email when it was my turn, because then I wasn’t crazy, then I wasn’t needy, I was just being polite, I was just being fair, it was my choice whether or not to respond, mine. And here I am writing back to an email he never sent. I’m writing to him because he’s ignoring me.