A Little Hope(3)
She touches her daughter’s door and is gripped by something aching and slow. Turning the knob, she hears the sound of the humidifier. Addie is so perfect, lying there next to her worn stuffed penguin, her arm slung off the side of the mattress, her Pottery Barn Kids sheet with the parakeets. Freddie should turn off the humidifier, which usually wakes Addie. She should raise the shade. She steps closer to her beautiful girl, her eyelashes so long and still. Freddie cannot bear this, she thinks. Greg, she thinks. She bends down to kiss Addie’s head, backs up, and leaves the room.
From across the hall, Greg raises his eyebrows when she returns Addie-less. “I don’t think she needs to go,” she says.
“She has school,” he says. “She has art today. She loves art.”
“I know.” Freddie clears her throat. “But she’s sleeping so nicely… I’m not going in either.” She wiggles her toes in her slippers and looks him in the eyes. “Let’s all be together.” She wants to put her head on his shoulder and weep, but he would hate that.
Greg dries his hands on the white towel. He touches a spot of blood on his neck, a shaving nick. “I have work,” he says, and walks past her. “We didn’t plan this.”
Plan? Does he want to talk about plans, really?
She stays in the hallway and watches him walk down the stairs. She thinks of the small pajama shirt folded on the kitchen table.
She notices the clean line of his neck, how square his shoulders are. She notices his black robe, the way it bounces as he walks. He has to step over the cat, which lies on the middle step. She thinks he shakes his head briefly as he lifts his knee and clears the cat. And then she notices with the last few steps that he holds on to the railing more tightly than he ever has. As if he’s bracing himself for something. As if he looks out the window and sees rain.
2. The Best Applicant
He has come to appreciate gray. Most of the offices at Garroway & Associates are some form of gray: gray tweed chairs in the lobby, gray seagrass wallpaper, swathes of gray carpeting, men and women in gray suits, gray computer monitors, and grayish paintings with orange sunsets. Greg Tyler likes the fog-and-steel feeling the whole place gives him.
In the hallways, light jazz music plays from the satellite radio station, and once in a while, Greg thinks how lucky he is. This is the kind of place he always dreamed about working in when he took finance and marketing courses at BU, and here he is in this office with a view of downtown Wharton. It overlooks the statue with the wishing fountain, the Regent Theater, the big solid Wharton Library where his daughter, Addie, likes to take the marble stairs two at a time, and in the distance, trees and the bridge over the Naugatuck River.
When he was in college, he wore a cologne called Gray Flannel, and he almost thinks he rehearsed somehow for this. Didn’t he always know he’d end up here? Didn’t he see himself with this office bigger than most, a polished desk and a phone system that looked like it was designed by NASA? Didn’t he see himself out with clients with a company credit card, going for drinks at Hamilton’s or a long meal at The Dock, where they would pass around spreadsheets and project plans and toast a new merger? Didn’t he see this future even when he drove that Volkswagen with the bumper hanging off, even when at twenty he had to work as a bar runner at Sidecar for eighty-five dollars a week? Didn’t he raise his hand as high as he could in classes and turn in his papers early because he felt somehow he was inevitable? He believed in this future. He knew he would keep pushing, keep staying late, keep accepting projects and paperwork, always smiling, always unruffled, and saying, “You got it” to whoever handed him anything. He thinks of himself then and can’t help smiling. Nervy little shit.
He hands a file to Pamela, who has worked at the same gray desk for almost four decades, more or less. “I’ll get right on this,” she says. She wears bright lipstick and a starched blazer. He wonders if he will be able to say he did anything for forty years, have a job that long, a life that long.
He will turn forty in four months. That is, he should turn forty. Four months has turned into a century, it seems. He can’t even think about four weeks. Four months would take him to February. He hopes to be shoveling snow. He hopes to see Addie in her hat and mittens, their dog bounding in newly fallen flakes. His driver’s license has to be renewed then, too. He wants all these things. He wants February so badly.
He tries to keep his feet over the pattern divots in the carpet because every so often he feels as though he could swerve, that dim sensation gripping him. So he puts one black shoe down and then the other and tries to look like he’s calm. He is one of the VPs here, and he does not have to hurry. Perception is reality, right? No one knows anything except his boss, Alex Lionel, and Greg has barely missed a half day since the diagnosis last week.
In August, after a routine blood test, they called him in, said they were concerned, said it was in the precancer or smoldering stage, and it might not progress any further. He hated both terms: precancer reminding him of prealgebra, and smoldering reminding him of a cheap romance novel.
They told him back then a round of experimental drugs might keep it at bay, keep it from becoming anything. But last week, he and Freddie got the bad news: it wasn’t at bay, it was no longer pre-, it was more than smoldering. He will always remember that date, October 17, as the day his life was upended. The ticktock diagnosis, he calls it in his head. If he’s not lucky, it’s tick-fucking-tock.