The Art of Saying Goodbye - Ellyn Bache [31]
All the same, everything has changed. Twenty minutes ago Andrea didn’t know this was there, ripe fruit waiting to be plucked. No matter what happens, for now, for this instant, the air vibrates with possibility.
Andrea rinses the dishes; John loads the dishwasher. “I guess you went to Paisley’s,” he says after a time—an offering, not just because it changes the subject that now seems too tender to touch for a while, but also because John knows Andrea visits every day and rarely mentions it. “How’s she doing?”
“Pretty jaundiced. Pretty tired. Otherwise, she seems okay.”
John rolls up the sleeve of his shirt. “Treatments make you tired.”
“Yes, but what seems to bother her most is people not coming to see her.” This is the gist of it, isn’t it? It keeps nickering at the edge of her mind. “She was so understanding about all that when Courtney was sick. About people not coming to visit and not looking you in the eye. Now she doesn’t seem to remember.”
“She wasn’t the one it was happening to, back then. It’s easy to forget, if you’re not the one.”
Andrea regards him sidelong. How does he know this? She recalls only his absence during Courtney’s illness . . . his analytical coolness, the distance that opened between them and persists to this day. Eleven years after the crisis, they still live in separate limbos, suspended between hope that Courtney’s health will last and fear that it won’t. They haven’t leaned on each other in all that time.
“I remember the averted eyes well,” John says, as if trying to convince her. He pauses with a slippery plate in his hand, then puts it into the dishwasher, wipes his hand on his trousers, and touches the back of Andrea’s neck. “I remember very well.” His fingers are still slightly damp from the dishes, but they sit so tenderly against her skin that tears spring to her eyes, which she has to blink away. All at once, after all these years, she believes him.
They’re awkward again when he drops his hand. He makes a great show of finding room for a glass on the already-full upper bin. After a while he says, “If we can come to terms, what do you think? Could you do it? I mean, after Paisley is better? After we sell the house?”
Andrea turns off the water and faces him. He looks so—well, hopeful.
Superstitiously, she’s half-afraid to say what’s on her mind, so close to Courtney’s annual screening. She says it anyway. “It might not hurt for Courtney to go to a school where nobody knows about her medical history and thinks they need to feel sorry for her.”
“Where she can learn to attract flies with honey instead of vinegar?”
She nods but keeps her eyes on the sink.
“It might be good for all of us,” he ventures.
She doesn’t answer that. She doesn’t know.
Julianne can’t bring herself to stop by the Lamm house every day, but she tries to go two or three times a week. She stops in right after work when she can stay for a few minutes and then say, truthfully, that she needs to get home to make dinner for Toby, or that Doug is taking her out to eat. At work, when she asked Peter if he knew what had been decided about Paisley’s treatment, Peter held out his hands in a gesture of helplessness, which meant that no one in his network of doctor friends had told him, or that they’d told him and he didn’t want to discuss it, or that he felt the case was hopeless. She hasn’t asked again. Chemo, she supposes, though she’s not sure what it will accomplish.
The family has done a good job of making Paisley comfortable, setting her up in the big recliner in the den, surrounded by sound equipment and CDs, with the television right across from her, the remote at hand, and the bathroom just across the hall. The jaundice Julianne didn’t see in the office two weeks ago is very much in evidence now. And there’s enough weakness that it keeps Paisley in her chair. What heartens