Thirty eight

After a deep breath, Emily squared her shoulders and stepped into the room. Inside, she saw Blake and Peter, and several young, costumed rockers she thought to be the opening band. Twenty or thirty rough-looking roadies and a few inebriated and excited young women, who Emily assumed to be winners of some radio station’s backstage pass contest, also populated the room. She couldn’t see Trent. She slipped inside the door and leaned against the wall, silently watching the activity. The room teemed with adrenaline-induced excitement. Plastic cups of beer sloshed, rock music blared, and people sampled from a small buffet along the left side of the room.

Then she spotted him, thirty feet away on the other side of the room. At first, he didn’t see her enter, engaged as he was in talking to a fawning young woman. He had a cup in his hand, and he had changed out of his sweat-soaked stage clothes. He had on a dark blue button-down shirt and baggy jeans with the familiar black boots. His hair, damp with perspiration curled at his collar, and his eyes constantly scanned the large room restlessly, as if he was looking for someone. Me, she thought suddenly, he’s looking for me.

Emily’s heart leapt to her throat and again, she seriously considered going back to her hotel room. She shoved her shaking hands into her pockets to still them. I can’t do this, I won't, she thought for the millionth time that night, and she wished desperately for another glass of liquid courage.

At that moment, their eyes locked. She felt the shock of emotion she’d first felt when Trent had touched her hand outside the hospital, and this time it didn’t settle in her belly, it traveled straight down to her toes and back up again. It was a sensation that involuntarily caused her to take a step back, bumping abruptly into the wall behind her in her effort to maintain control of her balance.

Dimly, as if from a vast distance, Emily watched Trent silence the young fan with whom he was talking with a brief hand on her arm and although she could not hear him over the din of the party, she saw him ask, rhetorically, “I’m sorry, would you excuse me?” His eyes never left Emily’s and he stepped blindly around the woman without waiting for her answer. He walked toward her.

As if in slow motion, he crossed the crowded room, working his way methodically toward the door where Emily was standing. His eyes, the colour of a Caribbean sea, never left hers. She saw him brush aside well-wishers and fans. Her heart pounded in her head and her stomach flipped uncontrollably. The song he’d sung her echoed through her mind and she felt that if she moved, her legs would give out under her weight. It was an inexplicable combination of dread and desire that leadened her limbs and kept her rooted to the spot. She couldn’t have moved if she’d wanted to.

“Hey,” he said, uncertainty evident in the tilt of his head as he approached her and reached for her hands. She held them out, unthinking.

“Hey,” she replied. Her mouth was as dry as sawdust and her voice sounded funny to her own ears.

“So,” he began.

It was as if that magnetic field engaged when he moved toward her and she practically fell forward against him. He pulled her into his arms and they both laughed nervously.

“So,” she replied, and, inexplicably, tears threatened. He leaned back, still holding her, and she clung to him, arms around his waist. He touched her face with one hand and tipped her chin up so she was looking at him. She smiled, but it wavered and then she was blinded by the tears filling her eyes.

“Hey,” he said, softly, suddenly concerned. “Didn’t you like it?”

She smiled sadly, half laughing as she replied, “No… I loved it. It was beautiful.”

“So are you,” he said, and then the dam burst.

Emily cried then, uncaring who saw her. She cried for Thomas, not for the loss of him, because those tears were long gone, but for the final instant of her marriage, which had come and gone that evening. She cried sad tears because she knew that this very moment was the end of one life and the beginning of a new one. But she also cried happy tears, because at last she knew where she belonged. With her tears, she mourned the passing of a stage which had been fraught with times both better and far, far worse than she could ever have imagined; now, though, there was a new clarity, and she could see her way to the place she needed to be, and she knew that Trent wanted it too. It was a new beginning, and she felt exhilarated, on the edge of a precipice, no longer afraid to jump, because she knew he would jump too, with her. She was suddenly unafraid to tell him her story, because she knew that he already understood, and accepted, and that knowledge gave her the strength to speak words she had never before said aloud.


Afterward, she dimly remembered Trent leading her away from the noise of the party, taking her along corridors until they reached a service elevator to the hotel. His suite was on the top floor, and they went there, his arm firmly around her, literally holding her up, as, head in hands, her silent tears blinded her. He settled her into a large chair and left her side only long enough to pour her a stiff drink, and then came to sit beside her, cradling her head to him as she cried. When finally her tears subsided, she looked up at him, and felt like a landscape after a thunderstorm: scrubbed clean, fresh, prepared. He sat, silently, patiently, in a gesture of unquestioning support, as if he considered this bizarre behaviour to be perfectly reasonable. After a deep breath she spoke in a clear, strong voice.

I met him when I was twenty; we met at college. He was taking law. We clicked at a mixer and the rest was history. Dated four years, and when I was done my degree and starting my residency, we got married. His name? Oh, yes, it was Thomas. We had a cute little house here in Forest Glen and in my third year, I found out I was pregnant. Surprise is an understatement. Compounded by serious morning sickness – I lost fifteen pounds before I even figured out what was going on. I knew in my heart what the ultrasound tech was going to tell me – twins. It was the only explanation for how rotten I was feeling. Anyway, we had a healthy boy and girl, Aidan and Ava. They were gorgeous. They’re seven now, in school. Aidan is a little defiant, but Ava is a sweet girl, sometimes so sensitive that I worry for her. Anyway, it was my millionaire’s family – a doting husband, a career, a son and a daughter. Everything was so perfect. Sometimes I had a funny feeling that something was going to happen. Like everything was too good to be true, and my luck was going to run out. I kept thinking I would wake up and discover it had all been a dream, and real life was nothing like it. I lived a little scared then, somewhere deep inside. And then it happened, as somehow I knew it would. The kids were four. Thomas was feeling a little draggy, so he went in for a check-up. He’d put it off for so long, always too busy, but finally, he ran out of excuses. He never told me he felt unwell, he said it would have made me panic. And he was right. It would have. I’m a doctor, for heaven’s sake. His blood test looked funny. It turned out to be leukemia. I spent a lot of time kicking myself about it – he was so pale, and he was always bruised. We used to joke about how people would think I was beating him, he always looked so battered. And colds and sore throats – he was sick for months. Anyway, that day, July 17, in fact, he came home from the doctor and told me he had leukemia. But it was the good kind, he said. The kind eighty percent survive. And he was booked to start his chemo the next day. Wow, well, if you had to have cancer, we joked, in shock, at least we have the good kind. So I never bothered to take a leave from work – his chemo was in the hospital where I worked, so I would just go over and sit with him when I could, and he said it was fine, and we carried on as if this was a minor irritation and not a huge black cloud threatening our entire way of being. We planned our Christmas vacation, and talked about how when Ava and Aidan were just a little older, we’d take them to Disneyland. The first cycle of chemo wasn’t too bad. Thomas felt a little sick, but he kept working a few hours a day. He shaved his head the day before chemo so his hair wouldn’t plug the shower drain when it started to fall out. He said he wanted to be a "considerate invalid". One night, about a week after his first chemo, he got a fever. They told us at the clinic to watch for a fever. For God’s sake, I have treated hundreds of septic chemo patients. He felt fine, but he was flushed and warm, so we dutifully went in to Emergency, in the middle of the night. Thomas’s mother came to stay for a while to help with the kids. We checked in, got him settled on a stretcher in the hallway of the Emergency department. He insisted I go home and get some sleep. I had been on call and I was exhausted. So I went. We laughed about me getting assigned to him the next day at work. He was in good spirits. He told me to kiss the kids. I said I’d bring them by after school the next day. I felt okay leaving him. The hospital was my second home; I knew it from a different side than Thomas did. In fact I was so comfortable, so sure that he would be fine, that I was getting ready for work the next morning, thinking I would just pop in and see him before starting rounds. It was just a little fever I kept thinking. We’ve survived worse. Then the phone rang. It was the hospital. Thomas wasn’t doing well, they said. I should come. I left the twins with Thomas’s mother, who must have been frantic, and went in. They had moved him to a private room on the ward. He was unresponsive, hooked up to a drip and monitors. I sat with him all morning. He was septic, the chemo had crushed his immune system, and an overwhelming infection put him into septic shock. They couldn’t pull him back, with all the antibiotics in the world. He died about noon. He never regained consciousness. It was July 27. We had ten days.

“That was three years ago,” Emily said.

Trent sat, looking at her wordlessly, his own eyes brimming with tears, while hers were now dry.

“You are a remarkable woman, Emily,” he finally said, settling back and wrapping his arms around her once again. “How you get up in the morning and go about your day is beyond me. I am not that strong.”

“I’m not either, but my kids give me the strength. I need to do it for them. I need to give them a normal life.” So this is okay for him, she thought. Good.

“Was that them I saw tonight?”

Her heart lurched for a second and she laughed at the irrelevance of her earlier panic. She grinned ruefully. “Yes.”

“They’re gorgeous. They look like you,” he said.

“Thanks,” she laughed. Suddenly, months of anxiety had evaporated with Trent’s instant and apparently unconditional acceptance of all that was Emily’s life. “Actually, they look exactly like their father.”

“I can see you in both of them,” Trent insisted, and Emily smiled.

“I want you to meet them,” she said. It seemed the next logical thing to do. “But not right now.”

She kissed him then, knew, in that moment, that she would not let him go, ever, damn the risk.