Glenn leans her head back, lets out a long slow sigh. “I wish I’d had children. I wish I hadn’t lost two husbands. I wish . . .” Her voice trails off until it is just breath. There is a long silence when we say nothing, when the enormity of where we are and how surreal it is to know that she will soon be gone hangs in the air—taken from the world any day as if by the rapture, with those of us left behind gaping in grief. “I wish,” she whispers, reaching out for Lucy, “I could see how all of this turns out.”
Spotlight
We dress, Gary and I, in our casual best—he in the khakis and button-down chambray shirt he hates, which is what he’s forced to wear to work now after a new Dockers Dude dress code was announced—I in an obligatory black Eileen Fisher pantsuit, either from 2006 or 2016, impossible to date, since each piece is so minimal it can’t possibly ever be in style or out of style.
Teddy has stayed at school, where he’ll be forced to change into whatever costume they’ve decided to dress the kids in for whatever skits they’re putting on. I’m done asking. After last night when I shamed myself with my questions, digging around for a crime before it happened, I’m trying to go with the flow. To let go of my vine of anxiety and fear and just let things happen.
It isn’t going well. My decision to let go has not left me awash in a sense of calm. Internally I’m full of fear and dread, certain that the seeming quiet from Grace—and the fact that there has not been a third pooping incident yet—is a sense of false calm. Don’t bad things happen in threes? Aren’t we due for the Secret Pooper to make his appearance again—and, if so, what better time than tonight, when there will be a captive audience of parents to shock and repulse?
Or maybe not. Maybe the Pooper, instead of wanting attention through a big public act, is looking to continue his little campaign of terror in private, waiting to strike again while the iron is cold. Maybe, while I’ve been expecting some kind of defecatory event tonight for maximum effect, the slow reveal will continue, day after day, week after week, creating a sustained level of discomfort and unease for people worried about the situation. Which, for some reason, appears to just be us. How is it possible that we’re the only parents who’ve complained? Why haven’t other parents heard the news from their kids and demanded a meeting, a morning coffee with stale doughnuts and bloated bagels, or an early evening after-dinner meeting with boxed wine and Costco cookies, to discuss the situation?
When I share my fears about tonight with Gary, he’s certain that our meeting the other day with Grace took care of it. “We put the fear of God into her,” he says, smug in the knowledge that he has protected Teddy, and us, from harm, and wholly unconcerned that some creepy kind of unmasking is about to take place. “Plus, it’s Spotlight!” he says, as if Spotlight is the sacred ritual of an ancient religion, a magical time when nothing can go wrong and nothing bad can happen, like Christmas.
To calm my nerves after I’m dressed, I brush the dog, then brush myself with a lint brush, something I almost always forget to do. But I remind myself I’m going to be among people tonight, humans, other parents, and I need to not look crazy. Once I put the dog in the sling and we get into the car, Gary behind the wheel, I text Daisy to check in on Glenn. Something about her response—She’s sleeping deeply—or perhaps just my concern gnawing away at me since yesterday, makes me ask Gary if there’s time to stop there on our way.
“Of course there’s time,” he lies.
When we get there, a few blocks from our house, he live-parks while I run in. I smile at Daisy, who I haven’t seen for years, as she stands holding Lucy near the bed, and then bend down to get closer to Glenn.
“We’re off to Spotlight. To see the People Puppets,” I whisper. “I wish you could come. I’ll give you a full report tomorrow.” I put my hand on hers as gently as I can and feel her holding something in it: it’s the LEGO Cancer Monster. My eyes fill and my throat seizes. Her lips move and she’s smiling, but no words come out. I think she’s trying to say Teddy.
I stand there, not wanting to move. Why do life’s most terrible moments always collide with its most mundane ones? The night my mother died was one of Teddy’s first rock-school concerts; I had no choice but to miss that joyful milestone—it was my mother. Tonight I have to be there for Teddy in case the Secret Pooper shows up—even though I have a terrible feeling that I may never see Glenn, my best friend, my only friend, again.
Daisy makes a few minute adjustments of the blankets and pillows, then puts Lucy down on the bed. We both watch as the dog, slowly, gently, finds a spot somewhere off Glenn’s left knee—close but not touching it—as if knowing that the time for physical contact is past—that she is already beyond the tactile sense of the living and into another dimension, the mysterious and unknown one where transitioning, from life to death, takes place. Daisy takes my hand and leads me away from the bed and slowly to the bedroom door. If she didn’t, I don’t think I would ever leave.
“A hospice nurse is coming tonight,” she whispers. “She’s on her way.”
I nod with relief. “You’ll call me?” I beg, hugging Charlotte in the sling, slipping my arms inside of it to get a fuller embrace and thereby undoing all the work I just did with the lint brush. I know I should be trying to comfort Daisy, who looks calm but must be terrified, her long blond hair up in a neat ponytail and her impossibly young face pale without makeup, but all I can do is reassure her that I’ll be back soon, the second the show is over, which I hope is soon enough.
* * *
By the time we get to the school—the front of which is festooned with hand-painted banners promoting the night’s big event—we are almost, but not quite, late. Gary searches the parking lot, swearing under his breath, every time what looks like it could be a space is taken up by a tiny hybrid or a group of bicycles. Normally he would say “What is this, Amsterdam?” but tonight he just parks half the car up on a curb, the hood pushed under a bank of shrubs, and calls it a day. “Let’s go,” he says. And we do.
He runs, and I follow with the dog, fast-walking into the building. He glances back at me once, negotiating the girth of the sling, and I know he’s thinking he wishes just once we could go somewhere, just the two of us, without my impediment. I’m sure he’s also thinking: I wish she weren’t so weird. It’s one thing when I navigate the world on my own, making my own messes, as I did at the reservoir, and then being forced to clean them up, but when we’re together, he has to confront, yet again, the embarrassing fact that he has a wife who wears a dog in public. If we weren’t so late to the performance, I’d worry that the huge distance Gary is trying to create between us is to make it look like we’re not together—which we kind of aren’t, of course—and while most people at the school know us and know Teddy—this is our fifth year—there are enough outsiders attending that maybe he thinks he’ll be spared at least a few judgmental glances.
Finally he stops and waits for me. “Maybe you should get a therapy dog vest already and use a leash,” he says in a loud whisper, and I know now that he is embarrassed by me. “Is it too much to ask that you get rid of that thing?” He points to the sling.