Wreck

by Catherine Newman

The enormity of my love for these tender, fleshly beings was twinned with a potential for loss so unimaginably deep and powerful that it was like a black hole lurking just outside our window.

I remind myself that when all the doctors are actual robots and not just humans that act like robots, I will miss him.

Maybe I’ll add, Body makes own blood! to the Other Skills section of my résumé.

He has not historically been a crier, but he is one now, because that’s how life is. You don’t yet know who you’ll become.

a duet of suffering.

We are rounding the back of the neighboring farm, turning for home, the sun setting in gold bars between the black trunks of the trees. Just this, now, I think. I seriously do not give a single flying fuck what that no-Zen editor thinks! That really is all there is—this moment, here, with my beautiful daughter in the beautiful world.

The doctor appears and looks to be about Willa’s age. I’m squinting to read her ID tag, nodding, answering her questions. She stops talking abruptly. “I saw you looking at my vag,” she says. “Oh my god,” I say. Was I? Probably! “I’m truly the most revolting person. I’m so sorry.” “No, no, it’s totally normal,” she says. Is it, though? I mean sure, I guess for, like, sex offenders, gynecologists. Frat boys. She holds up her ID tag. “I’m a second-year resident. But there will be an attending present during the procedure.” Badge! Okay. Kill me. “Oh, ha ha ha ha,” I say. I am deranged! “That’s fine. I think you guys might have slipped something into my drink!” “We’ve added midazolam to your IV,” she says. “It’s a sedative.” She’s looking at something on her tablet. “It looks like you consented to it.” “Oh, totally!” I say. “I’m just nervous and being not at all funny by accident.” “No worries,” she says. “If only!” I say, and she leaves the room.

“Just cadavers in the making,” she says, and I say, “Amen.”

Two people shared a single bottle of cough medicine for fifty-eight years, and it’s still a third full. I can’t help feeling a pang of envy. Why didn’t I inherit their old-world robustness?

“How was your date with Weird Al Yankovic’s daughter’s ex-girlfriend?” Jamie asks her, proving for the zillionth time that I know nothing about anything, and Willa sighs. “Kinda mid. If there’s no chemistry apple picking, there’s really not going to be any chemistry,” she says, and Jamie agrees, sings a few bars of “Amish Paradise,” interrupts himself to ask after their grandfather.

“Rocky, would you be so kind as to make me a cup of coffee?” “I’d be delighted to, Dad,” I say. “Wait,” he says. “I hadn’t really looked at you. You are up to your elbows in a turkey’s asshole. The coffee can wait.” Jamie, two and a half years old, once asked me to unwrap a string cheese while I was trying to fix the zipper on my jeans and then added, politely, “Whenever you’re done looking at your penis, Mama.”

She is the least meddlesome person I know. Whatever the opposite of a drama queen is, that’s what she is. A chill king.

You have to forgive everyone, whether or not they ask for forgiveness.

“You’re just at the very earliest stages of this disease. Or you have a very mild case of it. Or both. We’ll keep an eye on you. PSC increases your risk of certain cancers, so we’ll screen you every six months. There are some promising medications in the pipeline, Rachel. So even if it progresses, there might be treatment available in the future.” “Yikes,” I said, and he said, “A little bit of yikes. You can visit with the fear, but don’t hire a van and move there.”

“Are you sleeping?” she asked, and I said no, not really. I surprised myself by telling her about Miles Zapf, about Jamie, and also about my pounding fear of death—my own and everyone else’s. “But why do you feel like your life has swerved off course?” she asked, quoting myself back to me. I knew she’d been listening closely, so I didn’t repeat my story—I just shook my head. “I mean, why isn’t this just your life’s proper course?” she said.

Life is a near-death experience. And death is a real-life one.