Page 99 of Just Ten Seconds

She grins and places the other one on my head. “Come on, Louise. Let’s get you home.”

I pull up to Dean’s house. The front porch light is off, and there’s no sign of life in the house. I ring the bell anyway.

He’s not home.

I guess talking to Dean tonight is out of the question. It’s only seven forty-five. He said we’d talk after the meeting, which I wasn’t planning on going to. I could sit on the steps and wait for him or—

I hop in my car and head to Zion Episcopal Church. If I’m going to make things right, I might as well start by coming clean to the people I lied to. I’m twenty-nine years old and still need to be rescued? I can’t. Not anymore.

I’m not a princess in a tower, waiting for her white knight. I sat in that tower on Park Avenue and nearly perished. I’ve spent years waiting for someone to climb the walls when I should have jumped. I’m going to jump.

It’s a bad idea. The worst ideas are always rash. But I’ll go to the meeting tonight and do what needs to be accomplished.

The lot is full, so I park toward the back. As I walk through, I’m taken aback by the sight of Dean’s truck.

Fuck. I wasn’t expecting that.

I assumed he wasn’t coming. He was staying away because of me. I hit myself in the forehead for being so blind. He had known something was brewing between us from the beginning. He wanted me to have the space to navigate this new side of my grief without his prying eyes. He was wiser than me from the start.

God, I love that man.

This is not the time to be falling in love. Not when we’re on the cusp of the unknown. See? Bad ideas are always made in haste. I need to stop and think and—

I turn around and start back toward my car.

No, Mara. You came here to be honest. You can’t back out now.

Something must have happened. Something changed to force Dean to be here.

I’m twenty minutes late, so I go in through the side door and walk through the cinder-block-lined hallway with quick steps. The meeting is already in session, so I am as quiet as a mouse as I approach.

Dean is standing in the center of the semicircle. His sweater is taut as it stretches across his shoulders. He looks larger than life in here, in this small room. I haven’t seen him in here since that first meeting when he followed me to the parking lot.

I know I just saw his truck outside, yet I’m surprised by his presence. I feel intrusive. Like I shouldn’t be here. I move to go, and then he speaks. It’s as if my feet were cement, and I can’t budge from this spot.

“I remember when Nicole came home and told me what the doctors had said. Advanced breast cancer. She was in shock. I mean, she’d had breast cancer as a teenager and beat it. She never dreamed it would come back with a vengeance.”

His words are softer than any others I’ve heard him speak. Yet they’re deafening at the same time. I tuck myself back into the hallway, glancing in just enough to watch him as he continues to share his story.

“My mother insisted it was going to be okay. ‘People beat breast cancer every day,’ she said. Nicole agreed. She had done it once; she was going to do it again. She joked she was gonna have a mastectomy and get implants when it was over. ‘New boobs!’ she yelled. She showed me pictures of Sports Illustrated models, asking me whose I liked best for when she got her new chest.” The smile he had for a moment as he relived that memory falls. “She wasn’t being serious. I knew that. She was trying to make light of the situation for me. She was trying to cheer me up when it should’ve been the other way around.”

Dean runs his hand along the back of his neck. It’s what he does when he’s nervous.

“Nicole was scared. I could see it in the way she paused in the middle of singing Amanda her bedtime song or when she got choked up as we watched a Disney movie and the mother died. The mother always dies. Have you noticed that? I would catch her just staring at Amanda as she played with her hair. She did that a lot. Stared at Amanda as if it were the last time she’d ever see her baby girl.”

He slides his hands into his pockets and looks at the floor. His chest puffs out with a deep breath that he blows out, as if trying to regain his composure.

“One day, I found her in the garage, hysterically crying in the corner. She hadn’t just come home. She had gone in there, so no one would see her hurting. I decided that day that it was my turn to start cheering her up. We started with matching buzz cuts. I know it’s not a big deal for a guy to shave his head, so I had the barber shave her name into the back of my head. Figured it took the cool factor out of it a little.

“Her chemo treatments started easier than I’d expected. For a few weeks, it seemed like it was going to be okay. It was overnight when she started to get sick from the poison. She hated going, but she went to every session. I took videos of Amanda singing, so Nicole could watch as she sat for her chemo. When the treatments were over, we thought it was over. The cancer would be gone, and we could go back to living our life. We were wrong.”

Dean looks to the side as he takes a shaky breath, holding back the emotion. His eyes are glassy as he continues, “The doctor gave her six months to live. When you plan the rest of your life with someone, you assume it’s going to be fifty years, not five. The dreams we had were cut short by a cancer that had moved from her breast tissue to her lymph nodes and began attacking her lungs. The healthy woman who loved to run and do yoga was deteriorating before my eyes. The doctor suggested a trial for a new treatment that had just started. It wouldn’t cure her, but it would give her more time. Time to watch Amanda go to kindergarten. Time to see her in her first play. Time to live. It wasn’t covered by insurance, but I didn’t care. I would have sold my soul for it. Problem is, my soul wasn’t worth enough.”

I grip the door and swing around fully into the hallway. My back is to the room, but my ears can hear everything loud and clear. That line that connects us, that rope tethered to us, is starting to tear against my body. He’s pulling on it. He’s telling me why.

“We started applying for grants to any charity that would supply one. By the grace of God, Nicole was selected. I was so ecstatic. It wasn’t a cure, but it was a miracle. Until you’re given a finite amount of time, you realize you’ll grasp for anything.”

I raise my hand to my throat and will it to open. To breathe.