What You Wish For Read online

  “—and I am their biological child who’s known them since before I was born. Are you trying to compete with me? Do you really think you could ever even come close to winning?”

  “I’m not trying to—”

  “Because I’ll tell you something else: My family is not your place, and it’s not your business, and it’s not where you belong—and it never, ever will be.”

  Sheesh.

  She knew how to land a punch.

  It wasn’t just the words—it was the tone of voice. It had a physical force—so sharp, I felt cut. I turned away as my throat got thick and my eyes stung.

  I blinked and tried to focus on the dance floor.

  An old man in a bolo tie had cut in on Babette and Max. Now Max turned his attention back toward Tina and swung an imaginary lasso above his head before tossing it over at her to rope her in. As he pulled on the rope, she walked toward him and smiled. A real smile. A genuine smile.

  And I—resident of the family garage—was forgotten.

  Appropriately.

  It was fine. I never danced in public, anyway.

  That night, Max mostly danced with Babette. It was clear the two of them had done a lot of dancing in their almost four decades together. They knew each other’s moves without even thinking. I felt mesmerized, watching them, and I bet a lot of other people did, too.

  They were the kind of couple that made you believe in couples.

  Max lassoed a lot of people that night, and one of them, eventually, was me. I was surprised when it happened—almost like I’d forgotten I was there. I’d been watching from the sidelines for so long, I’d started to think I was safe—that I could just enjoy the view and the music without having to join in.

  Wrong.

  As Max pulled me onto the dance floor, I said, “I don’t dance in public.”

  Max frowned. “Why not?”

  I shook my head. “Too much humiliation as a child.”

  And that was true. I loved to dance. And I was actually pretty good, probably. I had good rhythm, at least. I danced around my own house constantly—while cleaning, and doing laundry, and cooking, and doing dishes. I’d crank up pop music, and boogie around, and cut the drudgery in half. Dancing was joyful, and mood elevating, and absolutely one of my very favorite things to do.

  But only by myself.

  I couldn’t dance if anyone was looking. When anyone at all was looking, the agony of my self-consciousness made me freeze. I couldn’t bear to be looked at—especially in a crowd—and so at any party where dancing happened, I just froze. You’d have thought I’d never done it before in my life.

  And Max knew enough about me to understand why. “Fair enough,” he said, not pushing—but not releasing me, either. “You just stand there, and I’ll do the rest.”

  And so I stood there, laughing, while the band played a Bee Gees cover and Max danced around me in a circle, wild and goofy and silly—and it was perfect, because anybody who was looking was looking at him, and that meant we could all relax and have fun.

  At one point, Max did a “King Tut” move that was so cringingly funny, I put my hand over my eyes. But when I took my hand away, I found Max suddenly, unexpectedly, standing very still—pressing his fingers to his forehead.

  “Hey,” I said, stepping closer. “Are you okay?”

  Max took his hand away, like he was about to lift his head to respond. But then, instead, his knees buckled, and he fell to the floor.

  * * *

  The music stopped. The crowd gasped. I knelt down next to Max, then looked up and called around frantically for Babette.

  By the time I looked down again, Max’s eyes were open.

  He blinked a couple of times, then smiled. “Don’t worry, Sam. I’m fine.”

  Babette arrived on his other side and knelt beside him.

  “Max!” Babette said.

  “Hey, Babs,” he said. “Did I tell you how beautiful you are?”

  “What happened?” she said.

  “Just got a little dizzy there for a second.”

  “Can somebody get Max some water?” I shouted, and then I leaned in with Babette to help him work his way up into a sitting position.

  Babette’s face was tight with worry.

  Max noticed. “I’m fine, sweetheart.”

  But Max was not the kind of guy to go around collapsing. He was one of those sturdy-as-an-ox guys. I tried to remember if I’d ever seen him take a sick day.

  Now Max was rubbing Babette’s shoulder. “It was just the long flight. I got dehydrated.”

  Just as he said it, a cup of ice water arrived.

  Max took a long drink. “Ah,” he said. “See that? All better.”

  His color was coming back.

  A crowd had formed around us. Someone handed Max another cup of water, and I looked up to realize at least ten people were standing at the ready with liquid.

  He drank the next cup. “Much better,” he said, smiling up at us, looking, in fact, much better. Then he lifted his arms to wave some of the men over. “Who’s helping me back to my feet?”

  “Maybe you should wait for the paramedics, Max,” one of the guys said.

  “You hit the floor pretty hard there, boss,” another guy offered, as an answer.

  “Aw, hell. I don’t need paramedics.”

  The fire department was maybe four blocks away—and just as he said it, two paramedics strode in, bags of gear over their shoulders.

  “Are you partying too hard, Max?” one of them said with a big grin when he saw Max sitting on the floor.

  “Kenny,” Max said, smiling back. “Will you tell this batch of worriers I’m fine?”

  Just then, a man pushed through the crowd. “Can I help? I’m a doctor.”

  Very gently, Max said, “You’re a psychiatrist, Phil.”

  Kenny shook his head. “If he needs to talk about his feelings, we’ll call you.”

  Next, Babette and I stepped back, and the paramedics knelt all around Max to do an assessment—Max protesting the whole time. “I just got dehydrated, that’s all. I feel completely fine now.”

  Another medic, checking his pulse, looked at Kenny and said, “He’s tachycardic. Blood pressure’s high.”

  But Max just smacked him on the head. “Of course it is, Josh. I’ve been dancing all night.”

  It turned out, Max had taught both of the paramedics who showed up that night, and even though they were overly thorough, everything else seemed to check out on Max. They wanted to take him to the ER right then, but Max managed to talk them out of it. “Nobody’s ever thrown me a sixtieth birthday party before,” he told them, “and I really don’t want to miss it.”

  Somehow, after they helped him up, he charmed them into having some snacks, and they agreed to give him a few minutes to drink some water and then reevaluate.

  They took a few cookies, but even as they were eating, they were watching him. Babette and I were watching him, too.

  But he seemed totally back to his old self. Laughing. Joking around. When the band finally started up again, it was one of Max’s favorites: ABBA’s “Dancing Queen.”

  As soon as he heard it, Max was looking around for Babette. When he caught her eye about ten feet away, he pointed at her, then at himself, then at the dance floor.

  “No,” Babette called. “You need to rest and hydrate!”

  “Wife,” Max growled. “They are literally playing our song.”

  Babette walked over to scold him—and maybe flirt with him a little, too. “Behave yourself,” she said.

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  “You just—”

  But before she could finish, he pulled her into his arms and pressed his hand against the small of her back.

  I saw her give in. I felt it.

  I gave in, too. This wasn’t a mosh pit, after all. They were just swaying, for Pete’s sake. He’d had at least six glasses of water by now. He looked fine. Let the man have his birthday dance. It wasn’t like they were
doing the worm.

  Max spun Babette out, but gently.

  He dipped her next, but carefully.

  He was fine. He was fine. He was absolutely fine.

  But then he started coughing.

  Coughing a lot.

  Coughing so hard, he let Babette go, and he stepped back and bent over.

  Next, he looked up to meet Babette’s eyes, and that’s when we saw he was coughing up blood—bright red, and lots of it—all over his hand and down his chin, drenching his bow tie and his shirt.

  He coughed again, and then he hit the floor.

  The paramedics were back over to him in less than a second, ripping his shirt open, cutting off the bow tie, intubating him and squeezing air in with a bag, performing CPR compressions. I don’t really know what else was going on in the room then. Later, I heard that Alice rounded up all the kids and herded them right outside to the garden. I heard the school nurse dropped to her knees and started praying. Mrs. Kline, Max’s secretary for thirty years, tried helplessly to wipe up a splatter of blood with cocktail napkins.

  For my part, all I could do was stare.

  Babette was standing next to me, and at some point, our hands found each other’s, and we wound up squeezing so tight that I’d have a bruise for a week.

  The paramedics worked on Max for what seemed like a million years—but was maybe only five minutes: intensely, bent over him, performing the same insistent, forceful movements over his chest. When they couldn’t get him back, I heard one of them say, “We need to transport him. This isn’t working.”

  Transport him to the hospital, I guessed.

  They stopped to check for a rhythm, but as they pulled back a little, my breath caught in my throat, and Babette made a noise that was half-gasp, half-scream.

  Max, lying there on the floor, was blue.

  “Oh, shit,” Kenny said. “It’s a PE.”

  I glanced at Babette. What was a PE?

  “Oh, God,” Josh said, “look at that demarcation line.”

  Sure enough, there was a straight line across Max’s rib cage, where the color of his skin changed from healthy and pink to blue. “Get the gurney,” Kenny barked, but as he did his voice cracked.

  That’s when I saw there were tears on Kenny’s face.

  Then I looked over at Josh: his, too.

  And then I just knew exactly what they knew. They would wipe their faces on their sleeves, and keep doing compressions on Max, and keep working him, and transport him to the hospital, but it wouldn’t do any good. Even though he was Max—our principal, our hero, our living legend.

  All the love in the world wouldn’t be enough to keep him with us.

  And as wrong as it was, eventually it would become the only true thing left: We would never get him back.

  * * *

  A PE turned out to be a pulmonary embolism. He’d developed a blood clot sometime during the flight home from Italy, apparently—and it had made its way to his lungs and blocked an artery. Deep vein thrombosis.

  “He didn’t walk around during the flight?” I asked Babette. “Doesn’t everybody know to do that?”

  “I thought he did,” Babette said, dazed. “But I guess he didn’t.”

  It didn’t matter what he had or hadn’t done, of course. There would be no do-over. No chance to try again and get it right.

  It just was what it was.

  But what was it? An accident? A fluke? A bad set of circumstances? I found myself Googling “deep vein thrombosis” in the middle of the night, scrolling and reading in bed in the blue light of my laptop, trying to understand what had happened. The sites I found listed risk factors for getting it, and there were plenty, including recent surgery, birth control pills, smoking, cancer, heart failure—none of which applied to Max. And then, last on the list, on every site I went to, was the weirdest possible one: “sitting for long periods of time, such as when driving or flying.” And that was it. That was Max’s risk factor. He’d sat still for too long. He’d forgotten to get up and walk around during the flight—and that one totally innocuous thing had killed him.

  I couldn’t wrap my head around it.

  An entire lifetime of growing up, learning to crawl, and then to toddle, and then to walk, and then run. Years of learning table manners, and multiplication tables, and how to shave, and how to tie a bow tie. Striving and going to college and grad school and marrying Babette and raising a daughter—and a son, too, who had joined the Marines and then died in Afghanistan—and this was how it all ended.

  Sitting too long on a plane.

  It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t acceptable.

  But it didn’t matter if I accepted it or not.

  People talk about shock all the time, but you don’t know how physical it is until you’re in it. For days after it happened, my chest felt tight, like my lungs had shrunk and I couldn’t get enough oxygen into them. I’d find myself panting, even when I was just making a pot of coffee. I’d surface from deep sleep gasping for breath like I was suffocating. It left me feeling panicked, like I was in danger, even though the person who had been in danger wasn’t me.

  It was physical for Babette, too.

  When the two of us got home from the hospital, she lay down on the sofa in the living room and slept for twelve hours. When she was awake, she had migraines and nausea. But she was almost never awake. We closed the curtains in the living room. I brought in blankets, and a bottle of water, and a box of tissues for the coffee table. I fetched her pillow off the bed upstairs, and some soft pajamas and her chenille robe.

  She would sleep downstairs on that sofa for months.

  She would send me to get anything she needed from their bedroom.

  She would shower in her kids’ old bathroom down the hall.

  I mean, she was Max’s high school sweetheart. Can you imagine? They’d started dating in ninth grade, when their math teacher asked her to tutor him after school, and Max had been right there by her side ever since. She hadn’t been without him since she was fourteen. Now she was almost sixty. They had grown up together, almost like two trees growing side by side with their trunks and branches entangled.

  Suddenly, he was gone, and she was entangled around nothing but air.

  We needed time. All of us did. But there wasn’t any.

  Summer was ending soon, school was starting soon, and life would have to go on.

  Three days later, we held Max’s memorial service at the shore, on the sand, in the early morning—before the Texas summer heat really kicked in. The guys from maintenance built a little temporary stage in front of the waves, and in a strange mirroring that just about shredded my heart, Max got a whole new set of offerings from all those people who loved him: The florist on Winnie Street offered funeral wreaths and greenery. The photographer from the party gave Babette a great photo of Max to feature in the program. A harpist, who had gotten a D in his civics class but had loved him anyway, offered to play at the service.

  There were no balloons this time, no fire-eater, no fifth-grade jazz band.

  But it was packed. People brought beach towels to sit on, I remember that—and there was not an open inch of sand anywhere.

  It’s amazing how funerals even happen.

  The party had taken so much work and planning and forward momentum, but the funeral just … happened.

  I showed up. I read a poem that Babette gave me—one of Max’s favorites—but I couldn’t even tell you which one. It’s crumpled in my dresser drawer now along with the program because I couldn’t bear to throw either of them away.

  I remember that the water in the Gulf—which is usually kind of brown on our stretch of beach from all the mud at the mouth of the Mississippi—was particularly blue that day. I remember seeing a pod of dolphins go by in the water, just past the line where the waves started. I remember sitting down next to Alice on her beach towel after I tried, and failed, to give Tina a hug.

  “She really doesn’t like you,” Alice said, almost impre
ssed.

  “You’d think grief would make us all friends,” I said, dragging my soggy Kleenex across my cheeks again.

  After the service, we watched Tina walk away, pulling little Clay behind her in his suit and clip-on tie, Kent Buckley nowhere to be found.

  Once we were back at the reception in the courtyard at school, Alice kept busy helping the caterers. I’m not sure the caterers needed help, but Alice liked to be busy even on good days, so I just let her do her thing.

  I was the opposite of Alice that day. I couldn’t focus my mind enough to do anything except stare at Babette in astonishment at how graciously she received every single hug from every single well-wisher who lined up to see her. She nodded, and smiled, and agreed with every kind thing anybody said.

  He had been a wonderful man.

  We would all miss him.

  His memory would definitely, without question, be a blessing.

  But how on earth was Babette doing it? Staying upright? Smiling? Facing the rest of her life without him?

  Tina had her own receiving line, just as long, and Kent Buckley was supposed to be in charge of Clay … but Kent Buckley—I swear, this is true—was wearing his Bluetooth headset. And every time a call came in, he took it.

  Little Clay, for his part, would watch his dad step off into a cloistered hallway, and then stand there, blinking around at the crowd, looking lost.

  I got it.

  I didn’t have a receiving line, of course. I was nobody in particular. Looking around, everybody was busy comforting everybody else. Which freed me up, actually. Right then, surveying the crowd, I had a what-would-Max-do moment.

  What would Max do?

  He would try to help Clay feel better.

  I walked over. “Hi, Clay.”

  Clay looked up. “Hi, Mrs. Casey.” They all called me “Mrs.”

  He knew me well from the library. He was one of my big readers. “Tough day, huh?” I said.

  Clay nodded.

  I looked over at Kent Buckley, off by a cloister, doing his best to whisper-yell at his employees. “Wanna take a walk?” I asked Clay then.

  Clay nodded, and when we started walking, he put his soft little hand in mine.