be exact-back when he spelled “J-o-h-n” properly, with an “h,” and would never have dreamed of keeping his curly black hair long, his beard on the verge of hermitous proportions. They had met at a young adult Sunday school class, then become lovers, then man and wife. They had taught high school chemistry and biology, respectively, for several years. They had a son, a beautiful, healthy son named Zachary after John‘s grandfather. Life was perfect, but then things had happened, things she tried not to think about, and the upshot was that in the end, the good life had called, and Pam had not been invited.
Her hair was too long for a woman her age. Pam knew this, but still could not bring herself to cut it. The slap of the braid against her back was like a reassurance that she was still a person, could still be noticed if only for the faux pas of being a fifty-two year-old school teacher who kept her salt and pepper hair down to her waist. While women her age were getting pixie cuts and joining yoga classes, Pam had rebelled. For the first time in her life, she let her weight go. God, what a relief to eat dessert whenever she damn well wanted to. And buttered bread. And whole milk. How had she lived so long drinking that preposterously translucent crap they labeled skim milk? The simple act of satisfying these desires was more rewarding than any emotional joy that could be had from buttoning a pair of size six pants around your waist.
Her waist.
She made herself remember the good things and not the bad, the first few years instead of the last seventeen. The way John used to trace his hand along the cinch of her waist-rough hands, because he liked to garden then. The bristle of his whiskers as his lips brushed her neck, the gentle way he would move the braid over her shoulder so he could kiss his way down her spine.
Wending her way through various backwater towns for the third-and hopefully last-time in her life, she made her way toward the western part of the country; she forced her mind to settle on the good memories. She thought of his lips, his touch, the way he made love to her. Through Alabama, she thought of his strong, muscular legs. Mississippi and Louisiana brought to mind the copious sweating when they first joined as man and wife. Arkansas, the perfect curve of his penis, the way it felt inside her when she clenched him, her lips parting as she cried out. Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico… these were not states on a map, but states of mind for Pam. As she drove across the Arizona line, she found herself suspended between the road and the heavens, and the only thing keeping her grounded was her hands wrapped around the leather steering wheel.
The car.
All she had left of him now was the car.
Two years ago, he had called late in the evening-not late for him, but the three-hour time difference put the ringing of the phone well into that block of time when a piercing ring caused nothing but panic. She foolishly thought of Zack, then the second ring brought more reason, and she thought of her father, a physically frail man who refused to live in a nursing home despite the fact that he could no longer do much of anything but sit in his recliner all day watching the History Channel.
“Papa?” she had cried, grabbing up the phone on the third ring. A fire. A fall down the stairs. A broken hip. Her heart was in her throat. She had read that phrase in so many books, but not understood until now that it was physically possible. She felt a pounding below her trachea; her throat was full from the pressure of her beating heart moving upward, trying to force its way out.
“It’s me.”
“John?” Even as she said his name, she imagined it spelled correctly, the “h” flashing like a neon sign outside a strip club.
In keeping with his new California lifestyle, he had said it so matter- of-factly, as if he were discussing the weather: “I’m dying.”
She’d been glib, said something she had watched him say so many times on
Such an easy thing for him to say. Independently wealthy people didn’t tend to have as negative an outlook on life as those who had to get up at five every morning to get dressed so they could go out and teach drooling teenagers the periodic table.
“I’m serious,” he had said. “It’s cancer.”
Her heart was no longer in her throat, but there was something stuck there that made speaking difficult. She managed, “What about Cindy?” The petite, dark-haired Pilates instructor who had been living with him for the last year.
“I want you to be there when it happens,” he’d said. “I want that healing.”
“Come to Georgia, then.”
“I can’t fly. You’ll have to come to California.”
Pam still cursed that day when they had first flown to California for a teachers’ conference. It had been a way to get out of Atlanta; an exciting adventure, their first trip out west. Their grief counselor had suggested they do something “fun” to take their minds off what had happened and John had eagerly suggested the conference. Pam had stared out the window most of the flight, shocked at the vast and varied terrain beneath them. Dense forests with dirt roads cutting into them like lashes from a switch gave way to barren desert and nothingness. How could people live in such desolate places, she had wondered. How could people survive with nothing but cacti and tumbleweed out their windows?
“Look,” John had said, pointing out the oval plane window to the patch of red dirt that represented the state of Arizona. “That’s where Ted Williams is.”
Ted Williams, the baseball player whose decapitated head had been cryogenically frozen by his nutty children.
“Liquid nitrogen,” John had explained. “His body’s floating in a vat next to it.”
Pam looked away from the window for the first time. She allowed herself a quick glance at John, his steely blue eyes, his long eyelashes that were more like a woman’s. She loved him profoundly, but could not see her way across the chasm that had opened up between them. She wanted to touch his hand, to revel in the way his voice changed, got deeper, when he was teaching someone something new.
Instead, she asked, “Why did they have to decapitate him?”
John had shrugged, but she saw the corner of his mouth twitch into a smile.
“You know,” he began, “The only other organ in the body with similar chemistry and composition to the brain are the intestines.”
Pam should have laughed. She should have made some silly comment about how we all really
Zachary had never been on a plane. His life had revolved around the Atlanta suburb of Decatur where Pam and John had lived all of his life. This was where he played baseball, went to the mall, and, judging by the empty condom packets Pam found in his pockets when she washed his jeans, managed to screw every girl in his class.
At sixteen, he had his father’s height, his mother’s sarcasm, and his grandfather’s addiction. The autopsy report revealed an alcohol level nearly six times the legal limit. The coroner had seemed to think it would comfort Pam to know that Zack had been so intoxicated that he had probably been unaware of any pain as his car had skidded off the road, tumbled down a ravine, and wrapped itself around a tree.
“I’m dying, Pam,” John had said on the phone. “Please. I want you here with me.”
Brain cancer. No pain, because there aren’t any nerves in the brain. She wanted to make a joke, to remind him of what he had said about Ted Williams, the decapitated popsicle, but John had brought it up himself. “Remember when we first flew out to California?” As if she had ever been again after that conference. She was lucky if she could afford a vacation to Florida during the summer, and then it had to be with a couple of other teachers so she could afford to stay somewhere nicer than the roach motel eight miles from the beach.
“I want to be put into stasis,” he’d told her. “I want to be cryogenically frozen so that I can be reanimated one day.”
She had laughed so hard that her stomach had literally clenched. The tears in her eyes were from the pain, she had told herself, not from any sense of losing him.
Yet, she had not thrown away the ticket when it came, had not told him to go fuck himself with his first-class plane ride and his fucking millions the way she had so many times before.
Millions. It had to be several million by now.
