“I really like you,” I tell him. “Please don’t do this. Think about it.”
“I really like you too, and I have done nothingbutthink about it. It’s the right decision. It’s the best decision for both of us. Being in this long-distance relationship with you doesn’t work like this. It’s not fair on me. I’m too sick right now to cope with it. And it’s not fair on you, because you could be with someone else.”
“I don’t want that,” I tell him, but Davey’s quiet and I wonder if I might be turning him back toward me. “I’ll wait. Let’s pause…us—this—and then in six months when your chemo is over—”
“No,” he says with a sigh. “No. Hannah, I’m in a kind of prison and I didn’t do anything to get here. You can’t be part of this, now or later. I’ve made up my mind.”
“I know. But this…I feel like I’m in the first real relationship I’ve ever had and—”
“And it’s not real, Hannah,” he says, and if his earlier words cut me, this completely guts me. I’ve resisted falling into something that neither of us could manage while we were apart. And now that we’re not going to meet, he’s not going to let us take this further. How do I fight that?
“I’m going to let you go now,” he says.
And I can’t tell if he means conversationally, so I can sleep, which of course I won’t do, or actually let me go, let me disappear back into the world I inhabited before him? I don’t want either of those things.
“Can I…can I call you?” I ask.
“Hannah,” he says and he’s pleading, begging me not to pursue this.
“In a week or…This can’t be it? We started as friends. Can’t we still be that?”
“We never really started as friends, did we? There was always something more to this. You must have felt it too.”
He’s not helping and I tell him as much, but in doing so, it’s the death knell for our conversation, for the fledgling particles of our relationship, which are fragmenting, falling away, and it’s out of my power to reach out and put it all back together.
“I’m going to go now. I don’t mean this disrespectfully, but…Hannah, please don’t call me again.”
I suck in so much air I’m in danger of choking. What can I do to make this continue, to stop Davey from ending it, or at least to stop him from ending the call?
“Bye, Hannah.”
“Davey?”
“You have to say goodbye,” he instructs. “I can’t just hang up on you. We have to say goodbye.”
I count to three, lingering because this really isn’t how this ends. But on three, because I have nothing else to say—no fight remains within me—I whisper, “Goodbye.”
And he’s gone.
Chapter 11
February
I watch theworld go by. People laugh and smile, joke with friends, jog past me as I sit in Wanstead Flats in the fierce, cold winter near the overgrown grassland. Happy walkers, eager and pleased to be enjoying their weekend, whistle and hum to themselves, and I want to scream at them: How can you do that? Don’t you know what’s happening to the man I…don’t you know? But I don’t. I watch as fathers push buggies, as the red light of Canary Wharf in the distance flashes on…off…on…off, over and over again in the wintry sky. I’m done. Mentally, I’m done. This is a strange kind of grief, one where no one’s died. And over the past few days since Davey finished things between us, put forward the idea that we’ll never meet, I’ve fallen into a rabbit hole of self-loathing and of staring at my phone,willinghim to ring.
He’s as good as his word and he doesn’t call. But that can’t be it. For all these weeks—for all the nuanced conversation, the plans we’d made, the moments we’d shared—that cannot be it. But I fear it is.
And the hardest part is that I know he’s going to be enduring the worst thing he has ever been through and he doesn’t want me to be a part of it in any way. He doesn’t want to call me. He doesn’t want me to call him, to support him. I’ve listened to tales of woe and heartbreak when some of my girlfriends have beendumped, and I’ve always wondered—never understood—how any woman can be so into a man that she turns into a gibbering wreck the moment that man exits her life. Now I get it, and I apologize mentally to all my friends I’ve comforted while they cried heaving, racking sobs in and out of their chests after having been dumped. Because that’s what this is. I’ve been dumped, by a man going through something so terrible I can’t do anything. I just have to accept it. For him. And it’s so fucking hard.
—
I stand with Joan in the garden as the February sleet gathers in the clouds above. My phone told me it was Valentine’s Day this morning. I’m ashamed to admit I stuck my middle finger up at it. I’d been seeing red crap in the shops for weeks, so I assumed it had been and gone by now. We both look up; the hoods on our winter coats are up and our dressing gowns are underneath, layered up. We should move this chat indoors, but we’ve trained ourselves to be hardy in all these talks over the past few years and never once have we moved inside. Sure, we’ll skip some weeks, as has been the case recently, and I apologize to Joan that I’ve missed so much of her life. I’ve missed so much of my own too.
She tells me about Geoff. About their upcoming cruise. We score our coffee out of five and I stare through the tasting notes she gives me. It should feel normal, but I struggle to smile when she tells me how she’s met Geoff’s family. How they’ve planned Sunday lunches together. Joan’s a sensible woman. She won’t even consider moving in with Geoff; not this early on. But I can see it on the horizon for them, and that’s what finally makes me smile while she’s talking about something else entirely.
It’s she who mentions Davey to me—who asks me how he is, how I am. Although we’ve spent time commiserating about Davey’s situation recently, things have moved on since we last spokeand I’m forced to confess that we aren’t together. We were never together. Only now we really aren’t.
“Cancer is a bitch,” Joan says and it makes me smile, wryly.
