Susan B. Townsend

Evidence of Mortality

A week after the hospital sent Jimmy home to die, I ran out of reasons to stay away. I hadn't seen him since they found the cancer. I hadn't even called.

I kept telling myself his illness didn't change anything, but then my perception of the past began to shift like clouds before a storm, and I became weary with the weight of the words I wanted to say. So, one night after supper, I phoned Jimmy's sister and got directions to his place.

I found the trailer park where he lived and drove slowly up and down the gravel roads in the fading light, peering out my window for numbers on the doors. Is this where I'd be living, I asked myself, if Jimmy and I had stayed married? He told me once that he'd live in a box as long as we could be together. Seduced by his relentless devotion and thrilled to hear words that made me feel wanted and loved, I didn't stop to wonder if I felt the same way.

I parked in front of his trailer and reminded myself that I still had a chance to change my mind. I stared at the front door and thought about the day, almost fourteen years ago, when I knocked on another door and met Jimmy for the first time. I had finally passed my driver's test that morning and decided to go over to my brother's place to show off a little.

At first, I didn't think anyone was home, but then Jimmy answered the door, pulling on a pair of blue jeans and grinning like he'd just crawled out of the bed of a beautiful woman.

"Hey," he said, still wearing that stupid smile--one that made me feel for a second as if I might be the reason. But that wasn't possible. I wasn't pretty and I had proof. Two years before, at the local military college, my date received the jackpot for bringing the ugliest girl--a blind date, bargain basement special that his friends scrounged to find at the last minute--to the spring ball.

About the time I turned seventeen, I stopped being the booby prize and started having real dates. When the boys told me I was pretty and sexy, I tossed my hair and waited for them to tell me again.

"Guys'll do anything to get laid," my brother Jack said. "They start thinking with their little head and get into all sorts of trouble."

"Their little head?"

He only laughed, not realizing his warning had just sent me reeling into last place once again.

I began to treat everything those boys said as a lie, but that day, for some reason, I decided to smile back at Jimmy and find out if he meant it or was just full of crap like his hormone heavy friends.

"Who are you?" I asked. "You don't live here."

"I do now," he said. "I got back last night from a long trip." He stood back and pulled the door wide open. "I'm a friend of Jack's. He said I could stay here until I find my own place." He cocked his head towards the living room. "Come on in while I put on a shirt." His voice grew faint as he disappeared down the hall. I walked in and shut the door. I wanted to tell him not to bother with the shirt. He looked just fine without one, and I was still enjoying the picture of him pulling on those jeans.

We spent the day together and when I dropped him off at the house that evening, he leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. "I'd like to see you again," he said. As if that was a matter for debate, I thought, wearing my own silly grin by then.

A month later, I moved to Richmond to start college, and he came, too. He was there to calm me that first nerve-wracking day, and when he said, "I'm so proud of you," I believed him. He restored my confidence in the words of men and resurrected my faith in me. I repaid him by confusing gratitude with love--a mistake that led to our wedding when I turned eighteen.

How could I go into that trailer and witness his life winding down like a forgotten watch? I knew that my denial, unshaken by what I'd been told about his illness, wouldn't survive his presence. I had watched my mother die, but she had been old, the devastation of that loss tempered by my acceptance of the inevitable. Many years from now, armed with a growing understanding of my own mortality, I'd be ready to grieve the passing of my peers. Jimmy was only thirty-six. It wasn't time.

Then, I realized nothing had changed. I certainly hadn't. Once again, I was coming to Jimmy with frayed self-confidence and tattered truths. I had come expecting a dying man to give me life.

I finally got out of the car and trudged up the four wooden steps to the porch, His wife Colleen answered the door, too torn up by Jimmy's illness to react to my presence with anything but practiced politeness. I stepped inside, and she gestured to an open door down the narrow hall. "He's in the first bedroom," she said in a cold, flat voice. "He's had quite a few visitors today."

"I understand. I won't stay long."

Her look told me I wasn't even in the neighborhood of understanding anything, much less what she or Jimmy were going through. She nodded. "Okay," she said. "Go on in."

Blinded for a moment by the near darkness of the room, I made my way to the side of his bed and pulled up a chair.

"Hi, Jimmy."

His eyes opened and widened with recognition. He reached up and pulled the oxygen mask away from his face. "Hey, Paula" he said.

"Hey, yourself." I pointed to the mask. "Don't you need that thing?"

His eyes filled with tears. "Yeah, well I can't talk worth shit with it on, but I won't have a choice in a few minutes. Can't breathe worth shit, either."

I heard no self-pity in his voice--only a pale and impotent anger that made me bite my lip so I wouldn't contribute my own miserable tears.

"Sorry," he said. "All I seem to do these days is sleep or cry. It's the drugs, I guess."

My voice faltered and fell to a whisper. "I've only seen you cry that one time. That night you asked me to give you another chance."

He smiled. "I did a lot more than ask. I seem to recall I did a pretty fair job of begging. You're not thinking I was crying over you just now, are you?" Abruptly, he began to cough. I reached over, pulled the mask back up over his face and waited while his body shuddered and pulled the oxygen into his lungs.

After a few minutes, he took the mask off and continued to speak, his voice fading in and out like someone messing with the tuner on an old radio. "I've cried over a few things besides you, you know. Like when my baby girl was born and when I realized I'd never see her grow up."

"I'm sorry," I said and, at first, I meant his illness, his little girl, and the whole sorry state of affairs. Then I remembered why I came. "I'm sorry I hurt you."

"Hey, I know that. Is that the only reason you came to see me? To clear your conscience?"

"No," I lied. He didn't need my apology, but suddenly I knew what he wanted to hear. "I came to say good-bye."

"Oh, God," he said. "I can't believe someone finally had the guts. No one wants to say good-bye. Like if they don't say it, I won't die."

"Nobody wants to say it because they don't want you to go. They don't want to think about life without you."

He swallowed hard and stared right into my eyes. "Even you?"

"Yeah. Even me."

He sighed and drew a deep, ragged breath. "I've had quite a time with Colleen over the years," he said. "Her hating you for being first and hating me a little bit, too, because she figured I still carried you around in my heart."

"But that's not true."

"That's exactly what I told her--I don't know how many times-- but she always said I wasn't being straight with her. Guess that's why she kept after me about it. I didn't know how to tell her that you can't turn love off like some television show. It can change into something else--regret, maybe, or a faint longing--but it's still there." He paused. "Does that make any sense?"

"Yeah, it does. Maybe that's why I'm here. Maybe I needed to find out that you're still a part of me."

He shook his head. "But you never felt the same way I did. I had that figured out, almost from the beginning, but I kept telling myself that you needed more time."

"Then why did you marry me?"

"Because I didn't want to say good-bye. Because I couldn't imagine life without you."

"Kind of like dying, huh?"

"Yeah."

His voice came at me out of complete darkness now, and I reached for the dangling chain on the small lamp beside his bed.

"No," he said. "Don't turn on the light."

"But I can hardly see you."

"It's best that way," he said, and I realized he was crying again. "I can't stop thinking. The drugs make me foggy, but they don't shut off my damn brain. What's going to happen to Colleen? I love her so much and that baby she gave me. One minute I can't bear to look at them, and the next minute I'm in a panic if they leave the room."

He wanted me to say something to take the pain away. He needed morphine and I gave him Tylenol. "They won't be alone. You have a bunch of family and friends. They'll step in to help. I know they will." I released my own tears then, held prisoner up to that moment by a pointless promise to myself not to cry. I clasped my hands in my lap as if in prayer and began to rock myself ever so slowly. "I don't know what to say, Jimmy. God help me, I can't think of one thing that isn't trite or stupid."

I felt his hand on my thigh. "Don't worry about it, okay? Listen, I'm getting kind of tired, and I'm more than ready for another shot. Probably sleep for awhile after that."

"I should probably get going," I said and stood up.

"Wait," he said, and for the first time that evening, he sounded afraid. "That doesn't mean you can't come back to see me. You will come back, won't you?"

The pleading note in his voice made the next lie easy. "Yeah," I said. "Of course I'll come back."