How Lucky: A Novel Page 18

  flagpolesitta1993

  23:26 what did you do?

  aichinisnear2011

  23:31 That is why we are here, no? It is why you responded to my email, why you are chatting with me now. You want to know what I could do that you could not, what no one else could even imagine. You want to know what they all want to know, the cool guys and talking heads on the television, titillated beyond their greatest hopes, elated that they at last have a missing girl, they need a missing girl, if only they could have a missing girl every day of the week and perhaps twice on Sunday when it’s Sweeps Week. They live for the missing girls. I gave them a missing girl.

  23:35 But that is not why I gave them a missing girl, Daniel. I just wanted someone who would listen. I knew she would eventually come walking down Agriculture Drive, and I knew, if I arrived early enough, I would be able to find a time with no one awake and walking around.

  23:35 Well. Almost no one, I suppose.

  23:41 I needed the right person to come along at the right time. But I needed more than that.

  23:42 I needed someone who was innocent. I needed someone who was isolated, alone, lost, confused and—and this is what was most important, Daniel—hopeful. I did not pull a gun on her. I did not threaten her. I saw her, I pulled along beside her, I opened the car door, I offered her a ride and . . . she just got in.

  23:43 Because she believes. She believes that there are good people out there. That’s what she was searching for, even if she didn’t realize it. That’s what was so great about her then, what’s honestly so wonderful about her now: She listens. We just want someone to listen.

  23:44 So now I’m listening to you. And you’re listening to me. You are listening to me, yes?

  flagpolesitta1993

  23:45 yes

  23:45 i get it

  23:45 but i still dont understand your game.

  23:46 i talked to the cop.

  23:46 he says you are full of shit.

  23:46 he says you call them all the time saying you did things you didnt.

  aichinisnear2011

  23:47 I was wondering when your tone began to change. It was when you talked to the cop.

  23:47 I had been thinking that you got it.

  23:47 But you don’t. You don’t get anything.

  23:47 That guy didn’t take a second to learn anything about me. He’s just an oaf.

  23:48 He was an oaf again tonight, you know.

  23:48 He came by.

  23:48 Just a couple of hours ago.

  23:48 It could have taken me off guard, him and his partner, in the midst of The Great Ai-Chin Search, showing up at my house out of nowhere.

  23:48 But it wasn’t out of nowhere. You warned me. In your last email. You warned me that you’d talked to them. And it looks like you sent them my way again. But I was ready.

  23:48 Ai-Chin was safely out of sight. I told them I was just messing with some kid on the internet and that I was sorry. They told me to knock it off and that next time I pulled this stunt they’d bring me in.

  23:48 They know nothing. They never do. What oafs.

  23:48 He’s the problem, Daniel. Guys like him. Because he’s big and has a uniform, he gets to do whatever he wants.

  23:48 But he doesn’t know anything.

  23:49 Honestly, I’m disappointed in you.

  23:49 I think that maybe you don’t get it at all.

  That email in Chinese sure isn’t sounding like a joke right now. This is all sounding pretty fucking real.

  flagpolesitta1993

  23:50 so what do you want?

  23:50 whether you did take her or you didnt what do you want from me?

  aichinisnear2011

  23:50 I thought you were listening.

  23:50 I THOUGHT YOU WERE MY FRIEND.

  23:50 But you don’t listen to me any more than anyone else does.

  23:50 Not like her.

  23:50 She listens. You’re just another one of them. You only think about yourself.

  Sweat drips down my neck. I’ve started to slink slowly down in my chair to the point that I can barely see the screen.

  flagpolesitta1993

  23:52 is she OK?

  aichinisnear2011

  23:52 Oh, she is right here. Hello, Ai-Chin. Say hello.

  23:52 She might not understand all this just yet. It’s been quite a lot to take in, for both of us. Frankly, we had to have a very serious talk when I discovered her little email to you.

  23:52 That is what I get for leaving my laptop open when I go to the bathroom. She is resourceful.

  23:52 We have that resolved now.

  23:52 We are now back on the same page.

  23:52 They’re all going to feel very silly when she comes around, fully, when she tells all these people that she wants to be with me, that while what initially happened might be technically thought of as “kidnapping,” it was more like a charming introduction. It’ll be our story! She’ll tell them she’s where she needed to be all along.

  23:52 That she found her place. And I found mine.

  flagpolesitta1993

  23:52 if she really wants to stay, then you should tell her she can leave.

  23:53 can she leave?

  23:53 she cant.

  aichinisnear2011

  23:56 The thing that you’re missing here, Daniel. You’re the one who got me to this place.

  23:56 I wasn’t sure what the purpose of this was at first. I enjoyed talking to her, but then she got in the car, and then she was at my place, and then I asked her to stay, and then she wanted to leave, but I wasn’t ready for her to leave yet. What if she never came back? What if she was lying like the rest of them?

  23:57 But the thing is now that I realize, thanks to you, that this is all part of a larger story. Her getting in my car. Her in my basement. Me meeting you, my fellow outcast, my fellow traveler. You’re the one who helped me understand that I wasn’t alone here. That there are people who feel like I do, who are lost just like I am. I think you are confused. I think the cop has confused you. This is still something we can share.

  23:58 And that there is hope. And that this is going to end well.

  23:58 I just need some time. And I need you not to stand in my way.

  23:58 You’re just a guy who sits on your porch and does nothing.

  23:58 Yes. I’ve seen you. I know who you are now. You were paying too close attention to yourself, and you didn’t notice that I’ve been watching you the whole time. You are very easy to find. Did you think I wouldn’t be able to find you? There are not very many houses in your neighborhood. And definitely not very many with people living in them who stay inside all day.

  With most of the energy I have left, I pull myself back up in my chair.

  flagpolesitta1993

  23:58 what

  23:58 what

  23:58 youre crazy.

  23:58 youre just a creep.

  23:58 i dont want to be a part of your sickness dude.

  23:58 i just want to see you in jail.

  23:58 but first i want to kick your ass.

  aichinisnear2011

  23:58 No you don’t. You’re not going to kick anyone’s ass.

  23:59 Because you can’t even get out of that chair.

  There is a loud crack, a brief flicker of intense light, and then I fall.

  Monday

  49.

  My dad left before I knew him. I’m not even mad about it. I didn’t know him enough to miss him, or even know what I was supposed to be missing. I do not think about him.

  Mom never said a bad word about him because she never said any word about him. Her strategy was to hide him from me, not to even mention him, the way you wouldn’t mention a random schoolteacher in South Dakota you’d never heard of, or an extra in a Norwegian kids’ TV show that you couldn’t watch even if you wanted to. To discuss him would be to give him a power that he didn’t deserve. He was just a guy. She didn’t seem curious about him, so I wasn’t either.

&nbs
p; I finally asked her about him a few years ago, once it was safe, once it was clear that I had turned out just fine after all and that I wasn’t going to start searching for him or anything. I was just sort of curious, the way you wonder what your parents were like before you were born—I kind of cared, but it wasn’t urgent or anything. She said she had no idea where he was, that the last she heard he was selling cell phones somewhere in Northern California, but that was twenty years ago, he could be on the moon by now.

  “I didn’t really have time to worry about your father,” she told me. “I was too busy grieving my mom.”

  About six months after my diagnosis and about three years after my father left, my grandmother, Rosemary Whightsel Lamm, was plucking flowers with her best friend, Elizabeth. Rosemary was recently widowed: Otis, her second husband, had died of prostate cancer after a long, grueling illness, one that required Rosemary to quit her job and tend to him for the final ten years of his life. She had been a semi-successful real estate agent in Ohio, but when Otis got too sick to work, and then too sick to leave the house, she quit to be his full-time caretaker. It was brutal, Mom says, just a sad empty house where nothing was happening but a man’s slow, painful death, waited on solemnly by the woman who loved him but didn’t necessarily sign up for a decade spent cleaning his bedpan, draining boils, and listening to him groan in pain. Mom said it was too much for her to handle—she went three full years without visiting. “I feel so ashamed,” she told me, starting to cry. “I didn’t even take you to see her when you were born. It was too horrible in there.”

  Just after my diagnosis Otis at last died. Mom said that after the funeral, Rosemary immediately blossomed into the woman Mom remembered: fanciful and goofy and voraciously curious about the world. Freed of having to tend to her dying husband, she returned to life. She made plans to sell her house, to take a cruise to Alaska, to maybe see London; she’d always wanted to see London, but she’d never even left the United States. She came to Illinois and she spent a month with us, enjoying her grandson and her daughter, planning all her trips and what she was going to do with her life now that she at last would be allowed to enjoy it. “I miss Otis,” Mom said she’d told her. “But I’m glad it’s over.” She returned to Ohio. We were all going to visit that summer.

  It was a brisk, comfortable April late afternoon when Rosemary and Elizabeth took their weekly visit to their friend’s garden, across the bridge in Kentucky, about twenty minutes outside Cincinnati, where you left suburbia and hit the long, flat, empty lands of rural Kentucky, where there is one stop sign to be seen for miles on end, where there are 55 mph two-lane roads with names like 44 RR 2 E. They had an isolated spot at the end of a long blind curve but miles and miles from the nearest freeway, a place you could just wander around, looking at flowers, listening to birds, finding some peace away from the madness.

  Elizabeth told Mom later that Rosemary was just lost in thought, walking across the road toward a new garden where some lilies had blossomed suddenly, unexpectedly, off in her own little world, a space that was just hers, at last. She didn’t see the truck barreling around the curve, and he didn’t see her until it was too late for either of them. He was speeding. She was in the middle of the road. There usually weren’t any other people for miles. Elizabeth said Rosemary was facing away from her when she was hit. She didn’t know if Rosemary was smiling, or sad, or wistful, or just walking blankly along the way we all walk blankly along every day, just going where we want to go.

  Elizabeth said she watched Rosemary fly through the air. That’s when Mom asked her to stop talking.

  Rosemary Whightsel Lamm, aged fifty-six, after a life spent caring for others and cut short right at the moment she no longer was required to, was buried in Illinois even though that month she spent with us was the longest she’d ever set foot in the state. Mom just said she needed her close by.

  My mother, a young mom who had lost her husband, then her mother, mere months after learning that her only son would spend his entire short life, as far as she knew, crumbling and decaying in front of her, felt as if several airplanes had landed on her at once. “I’d lived such a lucky life,” she told me. “I realized right then just how fortunate I had been. I mean, nothing all that bad had ever happened to me. Dad died before I ever got to know him. I didn’t have any close friends die, I was never assaulted or raped, people had always been nice to me. I had no real complaints about the world.

  “You don’t really know anything about yourself until you’ve been forced to deal with pain, real pain. My life before all that happened feels now like a hazy, vague summer where I was protected and sheltered and completely lacking in understanding about how the world worked. I’m better because of it. I learned I wasn’t exempt from suffering, because no one is. There was nothing special about me. I had to go through it like everyone else.”

  It was losing her mother that almost broke her. My father, well, she’d always suspected he was a bit of a shithead. And as sad as she was about my diagnosis, that mostly made her dig in her heels. I was someone who needed help. What mother doesn’t want to help her child? I gave her focus and purpose and determination. I required effort and grit and fight, I required fortitude and strength she didn’t know she had. SMA and what it took from me gave her an enemy to tussle with, a target at which to launch all her energy and focus. I gave her a cause.

  But losing Rosemary, there was no target to aim at there. It was just loss, pure loss, someone she loved and needed, someone she regretted not being a better daughter to, someone she wished had been given a better life, someone who was just about to become the person she was always supposed to be before it was taken away from her . . . someone who was there one day, and then the next day was not.

  Grief, Mom discovered, was not a problem you could fix, a loose screw you could tighten, a math problem you could solve, a child whose pain you could comfort. It just sat there in your stomach and didn’t move. Sometimes it grew, sometimes it shrank, but it was always, always there.

  That was the hardest part, she said, harder than anything else, before or after. The grief doesn’t leave. It becomes a part of you. Either you learn to live with it or you die.

  You can deal with a disease you can research and attack. You can deal with an ex-husband you can pretend never existed. These are problems with clear forms, straightforward parameters, problems you can whittle away at until they are more manageable, small enough to get your arms around.

  But grief just sits there.

  The part I always go back to is that Mom felt lucky until her mother died.

  She was just wandering through the world, lah-dee-dah, thinking life was just this happy sandbox she got to play around in, and then the reality hit her, and her life was just not the same again. She could experience joy, and she could embrace life. All the travel she does now, the exotic trips with various companions lingering in the background of the Skype shots, that’s a direct response to Rosemary: she’s living the way she wishes her mother could have had the opportunity to live, a way of honoring her. (I bet the hotel massages aren’t bad either.)

  But this new life came after. It was all in the wake of that realization that life is pain, that everything you love can and will be taken away from you, that the only way to keep going is to accept that that big black grief is going to fester there in your stomach forever—that it’s never going to get better.

  This is what made me realize that I am lucky. Right now.

  My whole life up to this point, I’ve never lost anyone. Not Mom. Not Travis. Not Kim, really. Not Marjani. And I am blessed. I am blessed because I am going to go long before any of them do. I am not going to have to grieve for them, because they are going to have to grieve for me.

  I know that this is selfish, this solace in the fact that my loved ones will miss me and thus have to experience pain that I never will. But I cannot deny that it is true.

  I am the lucky one in this regard. I get to go first. I get to leave before grief e
ver becomes the house guest that never leaves. I get to prance around this world, how lucky, not having to live with the ache of saying goodbye. That’s for them. I’m sad for them that they’ll grieve when I die. But I’m glad I won’t. I’m lucky. I’m lucky I’ll leave before the grief gets here. I’m lucky to get to go alone. I’m lucky, I’m lucky, I’m so, so lucky.

  50.

  I force my eyes open. I’m on the floor, out of my chair. My shirt is ripped and wet. I see a pair of chrome-tipped boots. They look sharper up close. I lift my head up.

  Jonathan is dressed all in black. There is no Atlanta Thrashers hat. He is clean-shaven, and it is not a good look for him; he should definitely grow a beard to hide that weak chin. He is holding a small flashlight. He leans down and shines it in my face.

  He laughs. “You are a more formidable opponent online than in all three dimensions. Your house was easy to find, but I hadn’t known until yesterday that you were . . . this. The world is just a cavalcade of surprises.” He flicks the light off, and I nod back out.

  51.

  I don’t know how long it has been, but I’m still on the floor. All the lights are on in my room, and now the kitchen light is on too. I think I can smell bacon cooking in there? Maybe I’m having a heart attack. They say you experience all sorts of weird smells when you’re having a heart attack. Or is that a stroke? I can’t remember.

  I must look like someone shuffled all my body parts like a deck of cards and then just randomly splayed them across the floor. It takes me a second to realize that the chewed-up wad of gum on the floor a few feet in front of my face is, in fact, my left foot. My hair is sopping wet, and it could be from any number of things, none of them good. I can’t open my left eye, I can see dust bunnies kick up around my nose every time I breathe, and I honestly have no idea where my left arm is.