Page 19 of When I'm Gone
“Really?” Will looked at him suspiciously. “You’d do that? Even though you’re so sure?”
“Hey, if you tell Ms. Mason that story one more time, she’s going to lose it. If this will put your mind at rest, I’m happy to.”
Will seemed to consider the idea carefully, like he was trying to balance two sides of a scale. “Yeah, I think that’d help.”
“Okay. I’ll do some research and make some phone calls. In the meantime, Ms. Mason said we need to take you to a therapist.”
“No way.” Will rolled his eyes and leaned away from Luke. “I do not want to talk to some stranger about Mom.”
Luke wasn’t ready for another fight so he settled for a few firm pats on Will’s back.
“I know, but when you start making up stories about your life, there are consequences. You go to this doctor for six weeks, you start turning in all your homework, and if your grades are okay and you want to stop, you can. Deal?”
Will grunted but couldn’t seem to figure out a rebuttal. Instead, he said, “Deal.” They shared a quick hug.
“Oh, and all these dishes need to make their way downstairs and into the dishwasher. No more eating in your room. Meals with us every night. Homework turned in. Got it?”
“Fine. I got it. I got it.” Will rolled his eyes and grabbed a plate coated in some kind of dried-on film.
Luke left Will’s room feeling like a qualified parent for the first time in a while. He glanced at his watch. He was already half an hour late relieving Jessie. Picking up the pace, he took the stairs two at a time. Jumping off the last step, something fell out of his pocket. He half expected to see one of Natalie’s letters, but they were still in his coat pocket. No, this was the mystery envelope from Will’s room.
He examined it one more time. Nothing new on the front—adoption agency, Chicago, postmarked near Will’s birthday. Knowing Natalie, she was trying to help a friend or a student, right? After a little research and a few phone calls, he’d have a simple explanation to bring to his son and settle the anxious thoughts that kept creeping to the fore.
Luke shook his head. Will was too young to understand—Luke and Natalie were best friends. Over their life together, they’d always told each other everything. Natalie knew his secrets and he knew hers. All of them. Well, except for whatever was in the box ... and the letters and ...
He turned the paper over to look at the list of hospitals and names. Something caught his eye. One name in particular stood out to him. He’d seen it before: Dr. Neal. He’d seen that name before on the contact list on Natalie’s phone. At the time he’d assumed it was one of Natalie’s doctors. Now he wasn’t so sure. He ran his finger over the name again.
“Dr. Neal,” Luke whispered. “Who are you?”
MARCH
CHAPTER 7
Luke closed the door to Clayton’s bedroom with a cautious click. Over the past two months it had become a habit to check on the kids before turning in for the night. A new part of his routine was prying Natalie’s iPhone from Clayton’s grubby little fingers to charge it.
Every night since Luke had found Natalie’s phone tangled in the bedding from her abandoned hospital bed, Clayton had fallen asleep listening to his mom reading one of the six picture books she’d recorded on the phone. She’d also recorded a few songs and favorite memories from when they were little. Luke tried to avoid those videos. Natalie made them when she was in the front room, having hospice visit her, making plans for her funeral. She was a shell of the woman who’d walked into the oncologist’s office a year earlier. But the kids didn’t seem to mind. Especially Clayton.
Some nights Luke left the phone in Clayton’s bed, knowing when he woke in the middle of the night he could tap a button and hear his mother’s voice. But tonight, Luke needed the phone more than his son did. Luke tiptoed into the master bedroom, closed the door carefully, and tossed the phone on his rumpled bed.
Right after his discovery of the phone, it was too painful to look through the device. Avoidance had always been Luke’s greatest defense against pain. From his brief look through the phone, he found tons of pictures and videos, e-mails with friends and family, and casually noted Dr. Neal’s name in her contact list along with about fifty others. That’s when he handed the phone over to Clayton’s perpetually sticky care.
Then, her two-month death-anniversary came, and along with it, a new letter. Day 60. It was so different than the rest of the notes, less lighthearted, more narrative. There was a man in the letter—the elusive Dr. Neal, the stranger whose name continued to show up. First, as a random contact on her phone, next on the mysterious envelope, and now a real live person in one of her letters. To make matters worse, there was something about the way she talked about him that made Luke bristle.
DAY 60
Dear Luke,
Today was a horrible day. I know it seems like every day of a cancer patient’s life during treatment could be described as less than stellar, but that’s not entirely true. At least not for me. Most days I only think about cancer for maybe 10 percent of my day. Honestly. Between the kids and you and school and Annie and everything else, I’m usually on an even keel. But not today.
It happened on campus. I like getting to school early to study; we’re already paying for childcare so I might as well get some non-kid-interrupted study time in. There’s this group of girls, and when I say girls, I mean young female children, who “hang out” in the stairwell by the vestibule where I sit till class starts. They’re generally annoying, laughing and swearing like your Uncle Stan. But the other day I smelled something, uh, strange coming from their general direction. Luke, they were smoking pot, right on campus, in the building. I couldn’t believe it.
Of course, being a teacher and a bit of a natural-born tattletale, I wanted to report them to someone. But I didn’t. They’d be kicked out of school, maybe arrested, and I didn’t want to be responsible for all that. Instead, I packed up and poked my head in the smoky stairwell. There were three of them: two average-looking brunettes and one tiny blonde. The short blonde one seemed to be the ringleader. She wore this insanely small pair of shorts over hot pink tights. They were pretty much underwear. It’s February. How desperate for attention do you have to be to wear underwear shorts outside in the snow?
I’m getting distracted. So the underwear-shorts girl didn’t even try to hide the joint. She gaped at me like I’d walked into her living room after breaking down the front door. She looked me over, eyes lingering on my headscarf. I can’t remember exactly what they said, but it went something like this:
The underwear-shorts girl demanded to know what I wanted, the hand holding the joint frozen midpuff.
I gave her the nicest smile I could muster and closed the swinging door behind me.
