Em found white wine and poured it into emptied soda cans, which I thought was kind of ingenious except it made the wine taste a little bit like cola. I drank mine slowly, moving aimlessly from the inside to the outside, trying some of all the food Aunt Helen had picked out.
I used to ask her if it hurt.
Every day I’d call her or go to see her and watch her shrink away a little bit at a time. It terrified me, but I couldn’t stay away. I had to see the cancer’s progress. I kept notes in my head: dramatic notes filled with terrible similes: Day thirty-two. Pale and listless. Like a sailboat with no wind. Spirits seem dampened. Eyes are dull.
“Lottie,” she said one day, a bad day, a day she had no energy and lay on her couch for too long, wrapped in a thick blanket and sipping cold tea. “You can’t keep thinking about things like this. You can’t dwell on it.”
“What, am I supposed to pretend this isn’t happening?” I asked.
“No. But you can’t obsess over it. You can’t let it consume you.”
But it was impossible to watch someone you love die and not let it consume you. It was impossible not to go home from the hospital and look into my own face and wonder if my own body held the same secret disease that Aunt Helen’s had. There were countless types of cancer. There were countless ways your body could go wrong and turn against you and eat itself up from the inside.
I’d been thinking about that a lot lately.
My brain did that: it found things to obsess over, things to panic about. I’d had my first anxiety attack when I was only eleven, and it was Aunt Helen who knew what it was, who knew I wasn’t having a heart attack, who sat me down on her couch and explained to me that she had those feelings as well, those feelings of being overwhelmed, those feelings of being paralyzed.
In her first letter she’d written that she wasn’t worried about Abe and my parents, that she knew things came a little harder for me. She’d written that’s one of the reasons I hate to leave you the most—because I would have loved to stay and try to help you a little more. Help you overcome those old anxieties, those old nervous tics (that we both share, by the way).
They came and went. They had gotten better for a while. But now, right now, I could feel them tugging at the corners of my brain again.
“Are you okay?” someone asked. Abe, I thought, but I couldn’t turn around to look at him, I couldn’t make my feet work. I held the white wine soda can in one hand and the railing with my other. I didn’t know what time it was, but someone had turned the music up, and people were dancing and laughing inside, but out here it was just me and—turning, finally, jerkily—not Abe.
“I’m fine,” I said quickly, because we are taught as children that automatic response: I’m fine, when we are not. I’m fine, when we are anything but. I’m fine, when we can’t stop thinking about death, about dying, about ceasing to be.
The boy standing next to me was about my age, about my height, and nondescript but somehow familiar. Brown-black hair that fell in waves to just above his shoulders. Brown eyes. A very well-fitting suit (I didn’t think I’d ever noticed something like that about someone before, but it did—it fit him particularly well). He held a glass of something sparkling. Water, I thought.
There was something weird about the air around him, like it was darker. A shade of blue that was almost black. I blinked, and it was gone.
The soda wine was going to my head.
“You sure?” he asked. “You look a little shaken.”
“Oh, it comes with the territory,” I said and gestured to the party, a big sweeping motion that hopefully meant something to him.
“Ah,” he said sadly. “Did you know Helen?”
“I’m her niece,” I said, and then wondered, should I have said I was her niece? But I didn’t stop being her niece just because she wasn’t here anymore, did I?
“I’m Sam,” he said, and held out his hand. “I knew your aunt. She’s mentioned you, but I don’t remember . . .”
“Lottie,” I said, and we shook.
“You’re still a little pale. Do you want some of this? I haven’t had any.”
He handed me the glass of water, and I took a long sip, then another, then finished it. I handed it back to him, and he laughed.
“Sorry,” I said. “How did you know her?”
“I took her class at the university. A while ago.”
Did he have an accent? A slight one, maybe. One that was hard to place.
My aunt taught one class a year at the state university. “Something to do,” she always said. “Gotta keep the ticker sharp. Stay relevant with the youths, you know.” Like she was eighty and not forty. (Only forty, the newspapers had said. Such a tragic ending to a beautifully written story.) “You’re in college?” I asked. He didn’t look like it.
“Not exactly,” he said. “I didn’t take it for credit. I just audited.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I squatted. I wanted to hear what she had to say. Your aunt was . . . well, you know.”
I did know, and it made me happy that my aunt had touched so many people. Sometimes it was weird, sharing her with the public, seeing people who thought they knew her, having strangers confess their love to her, but it was all part of the bigger package. Aunt Helen was mine, but she also belonged to so many others. She could be both.
“I know,” I said.
“Can I get you some more water?”
“Sure. Thanks.”
“We could go somewhere a little quieter? I’d love to talk with you more.”
I was about to answer when Em burst through the nearest door and launched herself at me. Jackie followed her, much more calmly and supremely amused. She caught my eye and mimicked drinking.
“So I’m guessing you like that soda wine, Em?” I asked, detaching her from my hair.
“It tastes like bubbles,” she said, giggling. She saw Sam and stuck her hand out, jabbing him in the stomach. “Oops! Sorry!”
“It’s okay. I’m Sam.”
“I’m Em! Our names are both one syllable, and they both end in m. End in m! That sounds funny. End in m. Jackie, say it.”
“I think it will be a little less funny when I say it,” Jackie said, stroking Em’s hair.
“Wait—does every name end with an m? I can’t think of a single name that doesn’t end with an m,” Em said seriously, frowning.
“Lottie. Jackie. Abe. Amy. Helen. Marisol. Sal,” I said.
“Crap. I thought I just figured out some big secret.” Em looked crestfallen but quickly recovered, turning her attention back to Sam. “Who are you again?”
“I’m Sam.”
“No, I know. I mean, who are you? Like, in life. Who are you in life?”
Em was a completely hysterical lightweight. I doubt she’d had more than two gross soda can wines, and she was sure to be this entertaining for hours.
“Oh! In life. Well, my name is Sam—”
“You already said that,” Em interrupted.
“I’m a senior in high school,” he continued.
“Not our school, right?” Jackie asked.
“No, no. I live in Mystic,” Sam said.