What We Leave Behind Read online

  I hadn’t a clue. I was busy rifling through my brain, Aries, Aquarius, Sagittarius.

  “You’re weird,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I smiled.

  “Jessie Parker,” I watched his generous lips say. “One weird chick. Do you go to school around here?”

  “You should know, you seem to have all the answers.”

  “I’m just playing with you. It’s called friendly conversation. You should try it sometime.”

  We turned to the door to his father’s room. The nurse was going in with what looked like an excess of medications. This distraction stopped me from my next thoughtless and facetious remark. I observed a tightness spread over his face. His eyes became sad, his mood morose. I could tell this by the way his eyebrows burrowed and his lips closed shut. Through the crack in the door, I saw his father lying there. He was still, calm as death, and it was probable that this boy knew the end was near. Empathy cast over me, an emotion I typically stayed away from. I didn’t know where it was coming from, but it was there, and I wanted to take back all those ugly things I had said. I had to do something. The urge was overwhelming, but I didn’t know what to do about it.

  I think he might have said he was going to get some air. When I turned around, he was walking toward the elevator. Hesitating for a minute, I walked into his father’s room, not having a clue what I was about to do. The nurse, Maria, recognized me and said, “He’s only allowed to see family members,” and then, winking her approval, she added, “but I won’t tell anyone.” I moved in closer to get a better look. She was administering his medication while I found his chart there beside the bed.

  His name was Adam. Adam Levy. Diagnosis, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. It was his lungs. That much I knew. The rest was foreign and filled me with dread.

  “We have the same birthday,” I whispered, surprising myself both with that fact and that I said it out loud. The nurse continued with her dosages, drugs I knew by first name from times spent in the ER. She acknowledged my announcement with a friendly nod, while I calculated the years in my head. He’d be fifty next month.

  I studied him closely. From what I could see, he was an impressive man, standing probably as tall, if not taller, than his son. That is, when he stood. He was the kind of man you could feel in the air around you. He once probably filled up a room, but now the broad shoulders were weakened bones protruding beneath layers of skin that had no life to cling on to. His hair was gray, capping his head, and his eyes were closed so I couldn’t tell their color. They could have been the reason his son’s eyes were such an astonishing shade.

  If it were summer and he were tanned and if, well, if he were healthy, I’m sure he would have been handsome, with a rugged face and a jovial grin, but what I saw were dry, cracked lips, an inverted smile, life lines incising the exterior of his face. The monitors hummed around me, beeping with each breath he took.

  The nurse left me alone in the room. I took the vacant seat beside him and watched.

  I tried to imagine how it would feel if he were my dad.

  I squeezed my eyes shut, willing myself to feel the feelings, wanting to form the connection, but I couldn’t do it. I understood that if that boy were in this chair, or his mother, they would undeniably be able to feel. They would have memories and emotions and a bond with this man from sharing years of his life. There would be words for their pain and anguish. They would know what they were losing because they were experiencing a life with him.

  I had never learned to feel these things. Even when I closed my eyes and pretended this man was my father, something inhibited me from making a deeper connection, the kind I never experienced that is formed through the bond of touch and the passage of years.

  “Who are you?” he asked in a barely audible voice.

  “I’m sorry,” I answered, composing myself from the thickness of my thoughts and abruptly getting to my feet. “I shouldn’t be in here.”

  “Why are you?” Each word was a struggle, I could tell, but was that a smile on his face? And yes, those eyes, he definitely passed them down to his son.

  “I’m Jessica Parker.” I hesitated. “My mom works in the hospital. Your son puked on my shoe.” Where did that come from?

  He responded with something that resembled a laugh.

  “Have I gone?” he asked. “Is this heaven?”

  “No, no,” I said, repeating the word, stopping it from happening. “You’re not dead yet. I mean, you’re not dead. You’re just in the hospital.”

  “I thought you were one of those beautiful little angels.”

  “Angel?” I responded with a laugh. “Hardly.”

  “Then what happened to Jonas?”

  “Jonas? You mean your son?”

  He nodded.

  “Well, I think he doesn’t take to hospitals very well.”

  “Like his father.”

  I figured some manners would suit me right about now. “I didn’t mean to disturb you, sir. I don’t really know why I came in here. Your son, I mean, Jonas, was out there talking with me, and I, I was just curious.”

  “Jessica Parker, can you get me some water, please?”

  “Sure,” I said, a little too excitedly. I took the pitcher from the tray beside him, filled one of the empty plastic cups, and handed it to him, but he didn’t move.

  “You’ll have to help me.”

  I looked around, hoping he was talking to someone else in the room. When I saw that he wasn’t, I shrugged a little, remembering yarmulke boy from school who was always talking about doing mitzvahs. I decided this was a mitzvah and helped a dying man drink a glass of water.

  I held the cup up to his lips as he took a few sips. We were in close proximity to one another.

  “Are you sure you’re not an angel?” he asked.

  I laughed. Then a thought crossed my mind. Maybe it was the drugs; he was a little loopy and out of sorts.

  The laughter caused the cup I was holding to spill water down the front of his gown.

  “I’m so sorry, sir, really,” I said. “Here, I’ll get a towel.”

  This was all too much for me. All this touching and being close to an older man who wasn’t my father, or even an uncle or big brother, was weird, weird, weird. Maybe he was a pedophile, I thought, but that didn’t even make me want to laugh. I knew that was impossible. I was torn. My body told me to walk out of the room, but my head told me to stay put. The inner battle didn’t last long.

  I said, “You have the same birthday as I do.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Maybe it’s some destiny, fate thing,” I added.

  “Serendipitous?”

  “Yes, serendipitous.”

  “How old are you?” he asked. I wasn’t sure if this was his way of implying I had childish notions or if it was something he wanted to know.

  “Fifteen. Actually, I already feel sixteen. I’ve been practicing it for months.”

  “You have? You must be very good at it by now.”

  “Your son doesn’t seem to agree.”

  “What does he know?” he laughed, while I shrugged my shoulders. “I remember fifteen,” he said.

  “You do?”

  “Yes, I do, Jessie.” I decided it was fine for him to call me Jessie.

  “Fifteen was a good year,” he continued, as I watched him speak, traveling back through his memories. “I shared my first real kiss with Rachel Kaplan.”

  “Who was she?”

  “Only the most beautiful girl in the eleventh grade. I thought about her every day and every night, and the more I thought about her, the meaner I’d be to her.”

  “How’d you end up kissing her?” Spoken by a true novice, one that personified sweet sixteen and never been kissed.

  “We took turns torturing each other for awhile and then we became really good friends. We were invited to all these, what do you call them, those boy-girl mixers.”

  “Kissing parties?” I interrupted.

  “Yes, kissing part
ies, and we realized we were both pretty apprehensive about kissing for the first time, so we decided to help each other, be each other’s first kiss, to practice, so to speak.”

  I visualized their practice session, wondering if there were any boys at Tremont I could bully into being my test model.

  “Then it was all over for me. I was smitten. That kiss changed everything. When I next saw her, gone was the girl who tutored me in math. She was a woman now, and growing more beautiful with each passing day. I was the one being tortured, all nervous and tongue-tied around her, something I’d never experienced before. When I finally had the nerve to invite her to my senior prom, she’d already been asked by some tennis player, Rory Seligman. And then the worst happened. Her father got a job in Washington, DC, and they were moving east.”

  “And she moved? Just like that? Were you devastated?”

  “I was very sad. Particularly because I never got to tell her I was madly in love with her.” He had to stop and take a breath because I think all the talking had exhausted him. The lids of his eyes fell forward, his breathing following in a rapid succession of inhaling and exhaling. Shoot, I hoped I hadn’t killed him, but the monitor was blipping, indicating his heart was in motion.

  “Did you ever see her again?” I asked with anticipation. It didn’t matter that Adam Levy looked spent and about to collapse before my eyes, I had to hear the rest. “What happened to her?”

  A voice from behind me resounded, “He married her,” and I turned to see Jonas Levy standing there in the doorway. I wasn’t sure how long he had been there or how much of our conversation he had heard, but he brought his finger to his lips, telling me without words that his father was falling asleep.

  “He married her?” I whispered, enjoying the intimacy of the tale, the peek into his family’s history.

  “Rachel Kaplan is my mother,” he said, entering the room, closing the space between us. Then he asked, “Why are you in here?”

  “I don’t know. Friendly conversation, didn’t you tell me I should try it sometime?”

  When I saw that he didn’t find that funny, we retreated into our individual corners and watched as his father fell into a comfortable snooze.

  “My father loved her a lot. I mean, he still does. I don’t know how she’s going to live without him.” His tone was hushed and sad, and I had to move in closer to hear his whispers.

  “They must really be in love,” I said aloud.

  “Yeah, they are. It’s pretty cool to see your parents like that.”

  I said, “Are you going to tell me what happened? If she moved back east, how did they end up together?”

  Maybe it was the man on a train syndrome, how when you’re sitting next to someone you don’t know, you spill your truths in a safe, finite passage of time, knowing you will never see the person again. Whatever it was, it didn’t take Jonas long to tell me what I wanted to hear.

  “She left for DC and he was devastated. They wrote each other every week, and then one day the letters stopped. Dad became frantic and called her parents, and they assured him everything was okay, that Mom had met someone and was consumed by her new friend.”

  Dad was miserable and depressed, berating himself for never telling her how he felt and hating Mom for ignoring him, when a letter came. It was her handwriting, he knew. He said he could recognize that scrawl anywhere, but the letter this time was different. He said he was too afraid to read it, didn’t want to hear about her latest love, so he stuck it in a drawer while he prepared himself.”

  I was riveted, caught up in the details, the strife, the heartache, and the impatience of uncertainty. “When he finally read it, he thought he was ready for what she had to say. Mom had written to tell him that she’d fallen in love with a boy with hair the color of night and eyes the color of the sea. She couldn’t live without him; her life wasn’t complete without him in it.”

  “You know this by heart,” I interrupted. “Are we just a wee bit romantic?”

  His eyes searched the ceiling in annoyance, tossing away that description of himself like one might a Frisbee. “Do you want me to finish?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, knowing it was more my obsession than his.

  “Dad’s heart was broken, but at the same time, he didn’t want to be angry when his best friend sounded so happy.”

  “That’s a mensch, right?” I asked. “I’ve heard about people like that.”

  He was getting really annoyed.

  “I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “Finish.”

  “She said she wasn’t sure when it happened. It felt as though she’d loved him her whole life, that he made her laugh and feel special when they were around each other. And one thing she realized in particular was how much she hated to be away from him, even for one night.”

  “My God, your dad must’ve blown a gasket,” I interrupted again.

  “He was pretty roughed up. I remember him telling this story at their anniversary party; the news of Mom’s new boyfriend, how his heart hurt, how he could barely speak.”

  And as if to let us know he remembered also, Adam Levy shifted in the bed and a loud gasp escaped his chest.

  “What else did the letter say?” I whispered.

  “This is the best part. She said that she couldn’t be without him anymore.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “See, you’re not as smart as you think you are. She said she was coming back to California to see him, to see my dad, that it was no life without him in it, and he was the boy she’d always loved, always had. She was coming home for him.”

  “It was him all along?” I asked, images of the two of them swirling through my head. “There was never someone else in Washington?”

  “Nope.”

  “Really?”

  “You sound disappointed,” he said. “Are you disappointed?”

  I wasn’t sure of my answer. “I’m just surprised. I guess I really thought she loved somebody else.”

  Maybe I was a little letdown by Rachel’s pronouncement. I never thought love could be that simple.

  I spent the next few days dutifully going to school and then sneaking off to the hospital. Beth kept asking to come along, but I told her she wasn’t allowed. I’d watch her walk toward the direction of her house, knowing I was hurting her, but not willing to share Jonas and his father. Sometimes I wouldn’t even tell Mom I was there.

  When Jonas Levy asked me why I was there every day, I lied and said that it was part of the internship program at our school. I explained how the gifted students were required to do internships in their field of interest. “I’m studying to be a doctor,” I told him.

  “Really? That’s funny. So am I. I just finished my second year at Harvard,” he added.

  I didn’t let the prestigious name throw me or the shameless lie I’d constructed. “How are you going to stomach being a doctor with your track record and all?”

  “You’re never going to let me live that down, are you?”

  “Not likely.”

  “Then maybe you should know that I only got sick because I looked through the door and saw you standing there, such a ghastly sight I couldn’t contain myself.”

  Instead of cringing at those words, I smiled. Maybe Adam Levy had something there with that “being mean” theory.

  And speaking of Adam Levy, the man was not doing particularly well. Although he was alert and talking to his family, the life inside of him had begun to deteriorate. By then I was schooled on idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, and it was, quite frankly, a big fart of a disease. Jonas, who was a lot more advanced in his pre-med studies than I was, explained that “pulmonary fibrosis is a disease of the lower respiratory tract that damages the air sacs in the lungs, prohibiting the proper transfer of oxygen to the blood. Idiopathic,” he added, “means no cause can be found.”

  I loved when Jonas talked like that. He sounded so smart. He was probably the smartest person I ever engaged in verbal banter with, precluding myself. Every after
noon, when the doctor visited Mr. Levy’s room—Dr. Missed Opportunity, I now liked to call him—Jonas would request a debriefing, asking only the most important questions and expecting the most detailed responses. You could see on Jonas’s face how important it was to be included in the updates. When his father’s breathing became more erratic—“Velcro-like” he’d call it—I’d find him knee-deep in his textbooks on the couches in the waiting area. When cyanosis occurred, the blueness around his mouth and fingernails that marked a diminished oxygen supply, Jonas urged the doctors to attempt a more aggressive form of treatment, but the doctors felt that Adam’s health was too fragile to bear it. Obviously, this was difficult for Jonas to hear. Still, he managed to use his keen understanding of medicine to face a devastating prognosis with learned optimism. Jonas would make an excellent physician. I knew that for sure.

  Observing him reminded me of Mrs. Danziger, our English teacher. She was bright, sophisticated, degreed, and had a vocabulary that had us flipping through the dictionary regularly to keep up. Then there was Mr. Lipton, our history teacher. Average in intelligence—no use for Webster’s when he spoke—Mr. Lipton knew how to teach, which embodied a lot more than spoon-feeding us the War of 1812. That element that differentiates the good teachers from the great teachers is the same that separates the good doctors from the great doctors. In hospitals and doctors’ offices, they call it good bedside manner, and I suppose it can be indicative of teachers’ strengths as well. Jonas had those added ingredients: the patient, selfless manner, the caring look in his eye, the understanding to be a fantastic doctor. Jonas had great bedside manner. How did I know this for sure? I knew. I watched this guy more closely than I inspected myself in the mirror every morning.

  CHAPTER 3

  School was out, and by then I had cajoled my mother into getting me a job as one of those cheery candy stripers. I would have much preferred a job at the local music store or even the video store so I could get discounts on my favorite items (not the five-fingered kind), but I astounded myself with my enthusiasm toward my new line of work.

  I was pretty much there every day, all day, from the time I finished my shifts, up until dinner. He was there too, and on the days he wasn’t, I felt incomplete. I’d watch for his white Jeep Cherokee every afternoon and hide my disappointment if he didn’t show up.