A PLACE LIKE YOU

It all started with you. Not a day, not an hour goes by that I don’t think, “What would Brendan have to say about this?” Or, “Would Bren like this skirt or the blue one better?” Or I’ll hear something on the news and make a mental note to tell you about it later.

I like to pretend you’re watching me as I file paperwork at the office or eat my dinner or crawl into bed every night at nine-thirty. I remember how you’d always say, “G’night honey, love you, see you tomorrow,” your voice heavy with exhaustion as you switched off the bedside lamp and flipped onto your left side. I remember that you did love me and you did see me tomorrow, every day for sixteen years, until one day you didn’t.

Depression isn’t quite the right word although I see why people use it. All your emotions—the good ones, anyway—are stomped and compressed into cardboard cutouts of themselves, two-dimensional. The fake smile for the store clerk, the insistence you’re feeling so much better these days when a coworker or a neighbor asks. The bad feelings just kind of grow unchecked—sort of like that documentary we saw on unbalanced microbiomes all out of whack with the icky bacteria taking over and pretty soon they’re running the show.

But then after a while, everything settles into a dull flatline with hardly any little blips or spikes, up or down. It’s a kind of heaviness, you know? Like all the weight of going to work and paying the bills and getting a haircut and making nice and making dinner and watching TV and just living is sitting on top of you making your breath go all shallow and there’s no one there to help carry the load, or even just give you a break now and then. And all the knowing looks, the inside jokes, the habits and the rituals and the shared traditions and the grand plans and the hugs and the kisses are vanished. The worst though, are the bad memories. Like that night we both drank too much wine with dinner and I was so mad about the thing with the crock pot and I said to you—but no, I’m not going to think about that right now.

The next thing that happened is I got laid off. I mean, you already know all this if there’s an afterlife but I’ll tell you anyway in case you missed that day—maybe you were busy golfing or visiting with your granddad or meeting God or something. What happened is our new online system went live and three months later, Terry called everybody into the conference room and told us he was letting half the admin team go in order to hire more tech support. Who wants to talk to a live person when they can just click their mouse?

I found another job but it took a few months and I blew through a good chunk of our savings. Nobody wants to hire an over-fifty-year-old without a college degree and no experience with Microsoft office suite. I tried explaining I’m a fast learner and have the memory of an elephant, but it took until the end of May before a nice woman named Janelle finally hired me to work in the shipping and receiving department of her hearing aid company. I started out opening incoming packages and logging the contents—hearing aid style and manufacturer, left or right ear, patient’s name and complaint—and taping up outgoing boxes for the FedEx and the UPS drivers and covering the phones when the front office gals were on break.

The next bad thing that happened was Simon. Now Bren, I don’t want you to get mad at me if I tell you this part—you had been gone by this point for coming up on four years and Kimberly kept telling me I needed to be open to the possibility of moving on, that life is for the living, blah blah blah. Simon was one of those almost-relationships. You know the kind I mean—where you’re both interested in each other and you have tons of stuff in common and you would probably have good chemistry but the timing never quite lines up. I met him when he dropped off a hearing aid one afternoon; Simon’s an audiologist—him and his partner have their own practice over in Wenton Heights, near that strip mall with that bagel shop you liked.

Well, Simon kept stopping by with some question or request or calling the office (by this time Ashley had quit to go have her baby and Janelle moved me up front to take orders on the computer and type out invoices and answer phones full-time). Simon would always keep me on the line forever and I could tell he liked me and Bren, even though you’re the only one I’ll ever love, I liked him back, just a little. He wasn’t as cute as you—he was only a couple of inches taller than me (shorter when I wore pumps to the office) and he had this real ugly mustache but his brown eyes were just so kind and he had a nice steady voice that I could listen to for hours.

After a couple of months of him telling me what a fast typer I was and how knowledgeable I was about the different types of hearing aids and confiding in me about his problems with his business partner and about the gout that swelled up his right foot whenever he ate red meat, I thought for sure he was going to ask me out to dinner. I decided I would wear the dark pink dress with the—oh wait, you haven’t seen that one, I got it on sale at Jensen’s last spring after Kimberly talked me into doing the paleo diet with her and she lost eleven pounds and I lost four (I gained all mine back, plus some—you know me, pasta is my downfall).

Anyway, I pictured Simon sitting across the table from me at Richie’s, the room dim and flickering with candlelight and the good smells of roasted garlic and tomato sauce floating out of the kitchen, me wearing the pink dress (it’s knee-length with a scoop neckline and ruching at the sides) and Bren, let me tell you, I felt happy. Not heart-soaring to the moon ecstatic, like when you and I were first dating, or even satisfied contentment, like on our wedding day, but just kind of fortunate, you know? Like I’d been through hell and came out the other side and had sort of been figuring I’d be alone until I died and then all of a sudden I wasn’t going to be alone, after all. Simon didn’t exactly give me butterflies but I admit I looked forward to his calls.

Well, you can certainly imagine my surprise when I heard he was engaged to be married! I only found out because Janelle mentioned his fiancée to me one day, after Simon dropped off a customer’s hearing aid. Janelle was saying how Simon’s fiancée worked at the First Choice Bank, the branch over on Grove and Thirty-fourth, where Janelle kept all her company accounts and lines of credits. The fiancée’s name was Corrine, and it was true, all of it—Simon was engaged to be married to a gal who worked at First Choice and it was all right there on social media, once I bothered to look.

Now, believe you me, I did wonder if maybe this wasn’t karma coming to bite me on the behind, all these years later. As soon as I saw the pictures of Simon and Corrine together—at a barbecue with friends, on a pontoon at Running Wolf Lake, dressed up and clinking glasses for a toast at somebody’s wedding, smiling beside their Golden Retriever—my mind just went kind of blank for a little while, and then of course I thought about Teddy and Meg, neither of which had crossed my mind in, well, a long time, I guess. I thought about how Meg used to call us up at all hours of the night for months after you left her for me, crying and carrying on, and I remembered the look of total surprise on Teddy’s face when I told him I was leaving, that I had met someone else.

Of course, I knew it wasn’t really karma—it was just Simon enjoying the attention of a friendly woman he knew had a crush on him (what a dumb word, crush!), or maybe having a little bit of cold feet about his upcoming wedding and having a final flirt before the big day (March twenty-third of this year, according to Corrine’s social media pages).

Well, two days after I found out about Corrine (I was still in a bit of shock, to be honest with you—I’d been so sure of Simon), my car finally conked out on me, right there on the northbound shoulder of Highway Seventy-Two on my way home from the grocery store, the raspberry-swirl ice cream and frozen cheese pizzas and single-serve lasagnas melting while I sat there waiting for the tow truck to show up.

And then three weeks after that, Ziggy died and even though I was pretty much expecting it because seventeen is old for a cat and he’d been deaf and half-blind and missing the litter box for the past six months, it was all just too much, you know? That suffocating feeling and the self-pity and the dread of the empty future all came flooding back in.

I stopped wearing makeup and curling my hair and I didn’t meet Kimberly for lunch on Saturdays anymore. I avoided Simon when he stopped in at the office and I rushed to get off the phone whenever he called to check the status of an order. I’m sure he would have said I’d misunderstood his interest and that he hadn’t technically done anything wrong but let me tell you, if I’d been Corrine, I’d have been mighty unhappy to know my soon-to-be husband had been hanging around chatting up some other woman and asking her advice about his patients and business partner and telling her how nice her favorite purple blouse looked with her eyes.

Anyway, everything just felt very flat again and I didn’t like that feeling. I didn’t like how it colored everything I did and thought and felt. I hated how it wormed its way inside of me and acted like it was there for good, settling in for the long haul, sidling up close and getting all comfy and chummy like we were old friends.

I was lying in the bathtub one night thinking about Simon (Bren, don’t be mad, I only liked him because you were gone and because I was so lonely), and I lay there picturing him and Corrine together until the water went lukewarm. When I wiped the steam from the mirror, I looked the same as I always had but inside I was completely numb. Every which way my mind went was bad—Simon, Ziggy, you. I decided if the numb feeling hadn’t gone away in two months (this was in late October, so I was giving myself until New Years’) then I would swallow the sleeping pills Doctor Rivas had prescribed me after your funeral. I’d be able to fill a brand new bottle at the pharmacy on November twentieth, and I was going to stop taking them at bedtime until then, so I’d have fifty-eight of those little blue pills, plus that bottle of good brandy Kimberly gave us for our tenth wedding anniversary.

And then, the first week of November, I found out Janelle was filing for bankruptcy. Kristine told me, on account of her doing Janelle’s books for her. I wondered if Corrine knew, being she worked at the bank and could see Janelle’s account balances and late payment history. By this time Simon had stopped calling and coming in; maybe Corrine told him about the bankruptcy and he found another vendor to use.

I stayed on even after Kristine and most of the others had left for other jobs, partly out of loyalty to Janelle for hiring me when nobody else would and partly because I’d applied at three other places around town and never heard back. I like to think Simon had nothing to do with it. Maybe a teensy part of me was hoping he and Corrine would break up and he’d coming swooping through the front entrance one afternoon before Janelle closed the doors for good, wearing that gray wool coat he always had on ever since it got cold out. I’d put the caller I was talking to on hold and Simon would ask me out and I’d say yes.

Well, by Thanksgiving I still wasn’t feeling any better—in fact things had been worse since Ziggy went. My colitis had come back too, in early September, and had been flaring up something fierce ever since I’d learned about the bankruptcy. I sometimes couldn’t drag myself out of bed until three in the afternoon on the weekends and didn’t brush my teeth or change my clothes until Monday morning. I’d lie there, staring at the water stains on the ceiling and listening to the Jacobson’s baby scream in the next apartment while my stomach bubbled and cramped up.

Janelle told me the people taking over the business were bringing in their own employees so there wouldn’t be a job for me after the fifteenth and that she couldn’t offer me any severance but that she’d pay out my remaining vacation days (thirty-two hours) and give me a reference.

Bren, I decided right then, standing in the doorway of Janelle’s office, her sitting behind the desk scattered with papers and ball point pens and sticky notes and wearing her navy blazer-set and smelling of those disgusting garlic tablets she was always popping, and me staring out the window at the cars sitting like dormant beetles in the tire repair shop parking lot across the street, that I was going to do it. I was going to spend my vacation pay on a three-course dinner at Lila’s steakhouse and on a sheet cake—a chocolate one—and eat the whole thing by myself while binge watching old episodes of Saturday Night Crime Scene. I’d buy a bouquet of red roses and scatter the petals in the bath water. I’d write a lovely letter to Kimberly, telling her not to cry, that I was finally going to be where I belonged—with Brendan. I was going to lie in a steaming hot tub filled with lavender-vanilla scented bubble bath and slug that brandy and eat those two bottles of pills.

I guess I figured Kimberly or maybe Pastor Roland would go through my personal stuff after I was gone, donate my clothes and books and furniture to charity and clean the apartment and throw out my photo albums and the two love letters I’d saved that you’d written me way back when.

Janelle kept me on until the day the sale went through and that afternoon both of us packed up our desks and then we hugged and wished each other good luck and promised to keep in touch. I went home and counted out my pills. Now that I’d made up my mind, I felt a little spark of excitement—I was going to see you again.

Without a job to go to, I spent the next two weeks crying on the sofa, curled up beneath that ugly knitted blanket your sister gave us the Christmas before she moved to Toronto. Nothing held my attention—not the sitcoms you and I used to watch together, holding hands under the quilt and taking turns dipping into a bowl of salty buttered popcorn. Not the paperback thrillers we both loved so much and would devour and then swap and then discuss what we had or hadn’t liked about each one. You used to grade them, with a red pen on the inside front cover, A- or C+ or F.

Only the pills held my interest. I started laying them out in neat rows every morning and again before bed to count them. One morning one of them fell off the kitchen table and rolled down the heating vent and so then I only had fifty-seven.

I have to admit the whole thing was very freeing in a way I hadn’t expected. I’d get that drop in my stomach whenever I glanced at the calendar and wonder how I was going to make the rent that month, or start to plan out my bus route to go downtown to fill out job applications and then I’d remember none of that mattered anymore. I’d never have to worry that I was overdue for an oil change or a dental cleaning or work at a job I hated or scope out every store and restaurant I went into for the nearest restroom in case of a sudden flare up. I wouldn’t have to feel that punch to the gut whenever I thought about how you and I had planned to travel to all fifty states after we retired and how excited you were to see the Grand Canyon and Yosemite, and how we used to make lists of which states we’d start and end with. I didn’t have to feel sick with anxiety that I might never find another job and get evicted and end up living under the Riverton Street Bridge.

And then, on December twenty-eighth, Bren, I found a lump. Not in my breast like I always worried about but on my upper left thigh, almost my backside but not quite. I don’t actually remember how I realized it was there—if I saw it in the mirror or felt it or what. Had it always been there or was it new? I wasn’t sure and you weren’t here to ask. It looked like a mole, similar to the ones I have on my arms and the side of my neck and beneath my belly button, except . . . it didn’t. It was very dark in some places and kind of tan and red in others and a little bit scaly looking. It was shaped like a map of Illinois turned sideways when I twisted my torso to look down at it.

Dr. Grossman’s nice secretary, Natalie, was able to squeeze me in on the thirtieth (which was this Monday—were you watching all this from up there, Bren?) and they said they should have the lab work back by Friday, which is today. It would normally only take two days, but the holiday. So, I missed my deadline and you’re probably thinking, “What’s the point of going to all the trouble of a biopsy when you’re planning to—well, you know—in a few days?” But I figured I still had my health insurance coverage until the end of the month and it’s not like I’ll be stuck with the bill anyway, right?

But here’s the kicker, Bren . . . ever since I first got a good look in the bathroom mirror at that little spot I feel different about the whole thing. The thing is, from the very first second I ran my finger over that ridged scabby bump, I wanted to live. I really did. It was like all the good times just came surging back and they filled me up: how you and I used to pack a picnic lunch with peanut butter sandwiches and purple grapes and chocolate-chip cookies and bottled water and go hiking on Saturdays in September and October and how you’d name all the different trees and flowers for me and how Zig would be waiting for us when we got back home and we’d curl up, all three of us on the couch, and watch a movie or maybe a documentary. Or that time General Repair promoted you to Floor Manager and you came through the front door at five-twenty shouting and laughing and you swept me up and spun me around and tipped me backwards to give me a movie star kiss.

My very favorite memory, my very best memory was our fourth date—we were headed to Yang’s Thai Cuisine and you swerved the car up onto the shoulder on Highway Twelve just past the Hollow Brook Avenue exit and yanked off your seatbelt and reached into the backseat for a bungee cord and that’s when I saw the dog running loose along the grassy strip of median, a gray and white husky. Cars were whizzing by so fast they shook ours and you couldn’t open your door without it getting torn off and so you climbed out the window Dukes of Hazzard style and stayed pressed up alongside your Toyota until there was a break in traffic and then you booked it for the divider. You lured the dog to you with a breath mint you dug out of your pocket. I leaned over the center console to watch, just positive that dog was going to dart away and get creamed. A minivan slowed down to let you cross—the husky trotting along beside you with the bungee cord looped over its neck as if it were a real leash. You threw the minivan driver a wave and a wide thank-you smile. I opened my door and the dog hopped right onto my lap and licked my face and you said, all sweaty and out of breath, “I got him!”

It was when you smiled at that minivan driver that I thought, Well, I guess I’m in love with Brendan.

I could tell you were secretly pleased the husky wasn’t wearing tags. We named her Rush Hour and we called her Ru for short and when she died seven years later, I know you used to go in the bathroom and run the shower or the exhaust fan so I wouldn’t hear you crying.

And then, after I left Dr. Grossman’s office after my biopsy on Monday, I started to think that maybe things weren’t as bad I’d thought they were. And that maybe I didn’t want to never be able to see the snow coating the pine trees at Christmastime again, or a really beautiful sunset, the sky all molten-orange and streaky pink and gold, or eat a bowl of ripe strawberries, or hear a really good song on the radio, or have all the memories of you and me wiped clean from my brain. I started to wonder if maybe I should get another cat.

I got the crazy idea that I’d travel the country all by myself, taking odd jobs here and there—cashiering or waiting tables or cleaning motel rooms—until I found a place I really liked, a place that felt like home. A place that felt like you.

And Bren, I just hope you can be patient—I know you’ve probably been watching from up there and feeling kind of lonely and remembering the good times too and feeling excited to finally see me again. A week ago I would have said what I want most in the whole wide world is to hug you again and I still want that . . . just, maybe not like this. So, like I was saying, I’m really hoping you’ll forgive me for getting your hopes up and maybe—

Oh, hold on a minute, Bren—that’s the phone.