Rachael

It had been a full six months since I had last seen Rachael when I walked down my front steps to her car. Since that day, a million years had passed.

That day was a warm, sunny October day, and she’d come to one of my cross-country meets while home from college. “How are you,” she said. “How’s college,” I said.

“It’s fun, it’s fun,” she said. She seemed a little morose, despite the summery weather and the carnival atmosphere at the meet. “I’m dating Evelyn now,” I answered her question. “Yeah, I heard. How long until you’re 18?” She shouted after me as I started my warm-up run.

The first day of spring break was cold; cloudy, misting. I climbed into her car. Rachael was smiling

“How are you,” she said. “How’s college,” I said. Rachael and I had only met each other a year-and-a-half before, but we’d already developed one of those deep friendships. Every time she returned from college we made sure to hang out. Today, we were going hiking in the Gorge.

She told me all about her freshman year at the Oregon State University. She drank to blacking out a few times. Her roommate was terrible. She’d become friends with this flamboyantly gay guy named George, and he’d moved into her room when the roommate dropped out.

I told her about high school. The exploits of the cross country team that we’d met on, my swimming season, the whirlwind of girls I’d dated. We were standing at the top of Multnomah Falls, the water dropping ceaselessly away below us, and all of a sudden we were in emotional free fall.

I’d gotten to the most recent part of my story, this girl from the track team — Yeah, Birch was her real name — who I had a little crush on. I told Rachael we’d spent the first track meet cuddled under a blanket in the track house trying to stay warm. Sparks flew.

Rachael let out a sigh, it seemed to plummet over the edge of the falls, pulling us with it. “We can’t stop life,” she said, “It just keeps going on without us no matter what we do.”

“Yeah,” I said, not really sure what had happened to our celebratory mood. We sat on some rocks by the creek’s edge and ate the peanut butter and banana sandwiches that I had packed, then climbed down from the top of the falls, and slowly made our way back into town along the scenic route. “I don’t know how it happened,” she told me in between wrestling the car around switchback curves and across narrow bridges. “I took a guy I didn’t even like to prom, and…” She went on. College sounded fun, if you were Hunter S. Thompson, but it wasn’t really what she wanted. She was fighting to hold on to the good old days, and losing.

Mimi

She pulled up in front of my house and we said our goodbyes. This, I realized, was the sad part for Rachael. Now I was a little sad too.

I went inside. Dad was at work, my brother out with friends. Mom was at the kitchen table, eating tater tots and drinking a Coke. These have always been her ultimate comfort foods.

“Mimi has cancer,” she said. Mimi was my grandmother. Oh. “It started in her lungs, but it’s metastasized, it’s everywhere now. The doctor said she probably has six months to live.” I went upstairs to my room and sat down on my bed. I didn’t cry, but I couldn’t do anything else either, the world weighed too much. So I just sat.

Two weeks after the diagnosis, Mimi moved into a house a few blocks from ours that we rented it from some friends. As she was dying, spring came. The trees grew leaves, and an army of tulips sprouted their bright colors in the front of her house. She sat in a Lay-Z-Boy in her living room, an oxygen tube hanging from her nose. Birch and I were dating, birds were singing. As I spent my days pounding ever faster laps around the track, Mimi moved to the bedroom, too weak to even sit up.

In the end Mimi had six weeks, not months. The last time I saw her was a Sunday. I strolled to her house in the early afternoon, and sat in the bedroom holding her hand. It was old and wrinkled, gray, veiny. Time had taken its toll.

At a certain point, I couldn’t keep sitting there. Each breathe truly rattled, like someone was shaking a tin can with a few pebbles inside. Her eyes were half-closed, her mouth hung open, begging for water, or a little more liquid morphine to numb Death’s scythe.

I just sat there waiting, I’m not sure for what. Maybe, I think, I was waiting for time to stop. We know it’s a futile endeavor, but sometimes you can’t help but hoping that this time you’ll get lucky. Eventually I gave up.

I stood up. I walked home. I went on with life. The next day I went to school, I went to track practice, I went to my evening Arabic class. I drove home, with my car’s windows down to let in the beautiful nighttime air, and to let out the thumping and soaring sounds of my teenage pop songs. My family was sitting at the kitchen table, eating chocolate ice cream.

“Mimi died.” Oh. I put my books down, and scooped myself some ice cream.