Marlene

Right Now

Because there’s only right now, forever.

Trust me, I’ve got no reason to lie. When you hear people say they’ve got nothing left to lose, that’s the big lie, right there. As long as you’re alive, you’ve got a life to lose. As for me, I’m no longer hamstrung by mortality.

But even the dead have regrets. I’ve made mistakes. Countless, untold numbers of mistakes. I’ve hurt my children, damaged them, and how can that not haunt me?

I never knew that ghosts could be haunted.

I’m in a sort of exile—purgatory, perhaps?—and I can’t see or hear anything going on. I can’t haunt those I’ve left behind, I can only imagine what’s happening in my wake. I have to hope that things played out as I intended, as I did my best to orchestrate.

At times, I’m consumed by thoughts of the past, and memories of all I’ve done wrong. There’s a lot of time, here in my eternal present, since I don’t have a body, or anyone to interact with. I’m a floating head, but not even a head. I’m a wisp, with consciousness.

It’s not as bad as it sounds. Well, sometimes it’s as bad as it sounds—here in my present, reliving my past, imagining other people’s futures.

Sometimes I can enjoy the reliving, and the imagining. I’ve known joy, and can visualize it for my children. Other times, I get stuck in a loop, like a marathon of reruns of all my mistakes.

None were intentional, or at least, none were conscious. I only learned they were mistakes through the outcome, and the aftermath. I thought I was making the best choices as it was all going on, and even now, in hindsight, I don’t know what the right choices would have been, what would have guaranteed that I’d have happy, well-adjusted, successful children who actually love one another, and love themselves, and love me. Parenting is trial and error, unfortunately.

In my defense, I did have exceedingly hard choices to make.

If I’m honest, Thomas was the great love of my life. I don’t mean that in any perverse sense. I mean that he was the male who made me feel special, and loved. Intellectually, I knew Alfred loved me very much, but so often, it could only be intellectual; he couldn’t do much to show me. He didn’t do much, period, outside of work, which, I suppose, was a way he showed me. He left me incredibly well-off.

Did I rely on Thomas too much? Maybe. Did he manipulate me? Probably. But did he love me? Absolutely. Of that I have no doubt.

So when he expressed remorse for leaving like he did and said that he wanted to take care of me, I didn’t hesitate. I knew my boy. I knew when he was sincere, and when he wasn’t. And that was a giant load of shit.

So why did I say yes to him becoming my caregiver? Because I wanted to see how it would play out. Because I wanted him to live in our home again, and have a chance to experience true remorse. I wanted him to watch me die, and regret what he’d done.

I don’t mean that cruelly. It’s not that I wanted regret to eat at him forever. Really, I was trying to facilitate the opposite. By taking care of me in my final days, by creating the conditions for a come-to-Jesus moment and a genuine reconciliation, he’d be spared a much more terrible regret later. I fully believed that would happen, that our bond was too strong for any other outcome.

Was it a mistake? Possibly. But if you don’t make mistakes in life, you’re not trying hard enough.

It was a very peculiar night, with Thomas’s faux-penance and Rae and Simon showing up and her claiming that she’d known about Simon’s other children and Thomas going on about how Simon was innocent until proven guilty. (Hadn’t he just been proven guilty? There were court documents from two different women. One, I could understand, maybe, but two?) Rae was so upset about the plan for me to stop treatment, and I was moved, I truly was. She wasn’t ready to let me go. But I couldn’t help thinking that she was actually more upset by the idea that Thomas would be the one taking care of me, that he’d usurped the role she didn’t even want.

Oh, sure, she made me soups. She came over every day. But she didn’t enjoy my company, and I didn’t enjoy hers. I’d always wanted it to be different, assumed that I’d be closer with my daughter than my son, because I’d have so much to teach her about womanhood. Only it wasn’t different. It was precisely the same: We were a million missed connections. Illness doesn’t change the essential dynamics of a family (I think a social worker on the oncology unit shared that profundity). What finally changed for me was that I accepted this was the relationship we had.

I was never at my best in her presence. I complained and I kvetched in a way that I never did with Thomas. He wouldn’t have put up with it, for one thing, and for another, he would have gotten me to laugh, even at myself. I like to think that Rae wasn’t at her best, either, that alone with Simon or with a friend she could be relaxed and talkative. Funny? It was hard to imagine. But happy. I like to imagine that.

So there we all were, sitting at the table and eating delivered Chinese food—I picked at the rice—and Thomas told Rae more about his plan. “We need to stop feeding the cancer,” he said. “So no more milk. No meat. A plant-based diet is the way to go. I’m going to make her lots of shakes, with different nutrients and supplements.”

He sounded so enthusiastic that I started to doubt what I’d heard earlier. Maybe his remorse was genuine. He was sorry we’d missed those years, and he wanted to make it up to me. He wanted me to live.

Rae was eating little and saying even less. Simon, on the other hand, had a voracious appetite and was correspondingly gung-ho about Thomas’s plan. He asked Thomas a bunch of questions, and said things like, “That’s really cool, man. You really know what you’re talking about.”

Their mutual support and admiration society was so transparent that I could only smile. Thomas had let Simon off the hook, and now Simon was repaying the favor. Rae and I watched the two of them carry the dinner, though our moods were wildly divergent. Rae was glum, while I felt buoyant. Thomas was going to live with me. If he hadn’t truly forgiven me yet, he would. He wouldn’t be able to resist. I’d have my son back, fully, and if it was only for a short time before I left the earth, that was fine; if his cockamamie supplements actually worked, so much the better.

The next day, Thomas’s friend Ben came over to the house with a trunk full of groceries. Powders, and pills, and supplements, oh my!

“It’s so good to meet you,” Ben said. He had a shy smile and seemed very deferential to Thomas.

“Likewise,” I told him. I wanted to say I’d heard so much about him, but it wasn’t exactly true. All I’d gathered was that Thomas trusted Ben implicitly, and that Ben was the one minding the store while Thomas looked after me.

I was installed on the fainting couch, which had become my default home. My strength really was waning by this point. I hoped that whatever was in those bags could help restore it, even temporarily, so that I could be up for a full game of pinochle. I squinted at Ben. My memory had always been excellent, and I felt sure I’d seen him before. “What’s your last name again?”

“It’s Hwang.” Pronounced “Wang.” That was a pretty unforgettable name, especially for someone who looked like him—with features that were almost entirely white, with a splash of Asian.

“You grew up around here, right?” I asked him. It was one of the few morsels Thomas had dropped.

“In Medford,” Thomas called from the kitchen where he putting away the food. “Small world, huh?”

“We knew some of the same people. We even went to the same chat rooms,” Ben said. He laughed. “Seems so retro, huh? Chat rooms. But they were the precursors to social media. People need to gather. If they can’t do it in person, they find a way.”

I smiled at Ben. I wanted to like him. From reading between the lines, I understood that Ben helped Thomas when Thomas had nothing. Now Thomas had his own company and a beautiful penthouse in Nob Hill. Given that Thomas had zero business experience and had never exhibited much of a work ethic, I had to believe that was largely due to Ben.

As I forced myself to drink a strange but not entirely unpleasant green concoction that Thomas had made in the Vitamix, I got to observe the two of them. Thomas was just so loose, so comfortable, in the light of Ben’s obvious admiration. It was quickly apparent that Thomas had never done any research into homeopathic remedies for cancer; Ben had done it all, right down to the shopping. Ben laughed too loud and too hard at Thomas’s every joke; Ben’s eyes were trained on Thomas with an avidity that I found startling but Thomas obviously felt at home with it. That was the thing: These two men were utterly at home with one another. They were the ones with private jokes, and I was a spectator. I suddenly, viscerally, knew how Rae must have felt all those years, watching me with Thomas.

I’d never intentionally excluded her. But you know how there are just certain people in the world that you truly get, and others where it always feels like work? Well, Thomas was the former, and Rae the latter, and those differences only grew more pronounced after Alfred’s death.

I tried to give both of the children emotional support, which was much easier with Thomas than Rae. She was just so unreachable and yet so breakable, like a piece of china that you only take out of the cabinet on special occasions. She’d never been much for physical affection or for talking, and what other language can you speak to a child in, other than verbal and nonverbal? Sonar?

I’d always been able to communicate with Thomas. He was a rascal, of course—mischievous until his father died, and incorrigible after. Twelve is a terrible age to lose a parent. He was flooded with hormones and grief at the same time. He went a little crazy, and I understood. So I bailed him out of some messes. It wasn’t his fault. He was very bright, and had poor impulse control, and no father.

But he had me, completely. I doted on him. We played pinochle and talked for hours. He was a good boy with a penchant for drugs and sex. But don’t all teenage boys share those?

Rae was an unhappy child, and she became an unhappy teenager. When I tried to invite her into the circle, to do things with her and Thomas, she either said no or glowered silently. Here’s how it seemed: She didn’t really want me; she just didn’t want Thomas to have me. Because when I did try to connect with just her, to have mother-daughter days, she barely spoke, she almost never smiled. It was like she was merely enduring. We’d go home and Thomas would chatter and she’d stay nearby with a hurt look on her face. Then she cloistered in her room. I probably should have tried harder and paid her more individual attention, and God forgive me for saying it, but she was just so boring. I worked so hard for every crumb out of her mouth, and they were all stale.

Yet there I was, what felt like a hundred years later, excluded from Thomas and Ben’s private world, without any clear way in, and I became tongue-tied, unsure of myself. I began to feel resentment, to shut down, to withdraw into myself. And all within the span of an hour! A radical clarity overtook me: This was what Thomas and I had done to Rae.

I’d always assumed Rae was just an inaccessible person; it never occurred to me that I’d molded her into one. My understanding of her magnified tenfold in that instant, and my compassion surged. I would need to make amends.

In the meantime, though, I was on the outs, seeing Thomas and Ben interacting like brothers, except that one was clearly bent on incest. Thomas seemed oblivious to Ben’s feelings, but I knew he couldn’t have been. It was too apparent, and Thomas had always been very aware of everyone’s desires and intentions and how to use those to his best interest. That was Thomas’s true genius, and it was at work in front of me. Otherwise, how could Ben be holding down the fort every day at Piping Hot (oh, that name) and still be the one toting groceries to my house and seem grateful for the privilege?

Thomas and Ben went into the sunroom, ostensibly to talk business, and the easy camaraderie fell away quickly. I could hear their raised voices but not the words. Actually, it was only Ben’s voice I heard, the agitation unmistakable. When Ben left, he said good-bye without looking at me. He was clearly upset, but Thomas gave no outward sign of having been engaged in a confrontation. He always had a high tolerance for conflict.

If I were Thomas, I would have proceeded with extreme caution when it came to Ben, since Ben seemed to have the business in his hand like a snow globe, but cautious wasn’t really Thomas’s style. Since Thomas didn’t seem to want to talk to me about anything to do with Ben or the business, I kept my advice to myself.

For the next week, Thomas was extremely solicitous in a way that reeked of either manipulation or remorse. It was hard for me to decipher. I was feeling weaker, and my bone pain was getting worse. Advil wasn’t enough anymore, and the hospice nurses were pushing codeine now. I thought about resisting, as I had my whole life when it came to medication, but what was the point really?

Even with Thomas around all the time (especially because Thomas was around), I found myself yearning for Rae. It was a comfort to sit in straightforward silence, not to have to question her motives. She was my child, and she wanted me to live. How very refreshing!

Since being the third wheel to Thomas and Ben, I also felt a greater identification than ever before. I wanted to express my sympathy and my sorrow for her, and to apologize for having played such a key role in her torment. But it was so very hard to find the words. How do you begin to express that kind of regret? I wanted to grow closer to her, though I had no idea how to make that happen. Additionally, she’d started bringing Simon with her frequently, like some sort of buffer. Against me, or Thomas, or both?

Maybe she thought that if I spent more time with Simon, I’d begin to like him, or at least grow used to him, like a weed that you start to mistake for grass. Fat chance. Rae had had a hard life, and she deserved better than this man who ran around knocking up women, plural. I hadn’t protected her well enough when she was younger, and I intended to find some way to rectify that now.

When Rae was younger, our neighborhood bordered some woods (since eradicated to make room for further development, and local parents were thrilled that their teenagers could no longer party under the tree cover). Rae liked to take walks through those woods by herself. I never worried. It was daylight, and our neighborhood was a safe one.

One Saturday afternoon in March when she was newly fourteen, Rae took off walking, and an hour later, I received the call every parent dreads. There was a four-lane boulevard on the other side of the woods and Rae had run into traffic and been struck by a car. She was in surgery to repair the internal bleeding in her abdomen.

Thomas was just as panicked as I was. I would have expected concern, but this was utter terror. We rushed to the hospital, where the wait seemed interminable to us both. When we were finally able to see Rae in the recovery room, Thomas and I clutched each other in relief. He came through the door with me and Rae began screaming: “He did this, he did this, get him out of here!” I couldn’t recall when, if ever, I’d heard her raise her voice.

I didn’t know what to do. I wound up hustling Thomas out because obviously, Rae was in no condition to handle that type of upset. She wasn’t in her right mind, and it was no time to challenge her fallacies. “I’m just so glad you’re alive,” I told her. “The surgery was a success, but it’s important to stay calm.”

She didn’t want to stay calm. She wanted to talk to me and to the police. I’d never seen her in such a voluble state. I’d heard head traumas could cause personality changes, but the doctors said that her injuries were concentrated in her abdomen and pelvis, and had been repaired fully. There would be no lasting injuries, no permanent damage. Rae was a tremendously lucky girl.

“I didn’t just run out into traffic,” Rae said. “I was chased.”

She said that she’d been on the main trail so she was relatively easy to find. It was unmarked but she knew the path well, as did anyone who lived as close as we did. And by anyone, she meant Thomas.

She heard rapidly approaching footsteps behind her and when she glanced back, she knew, instantly, that the figure in the ski mask, wielding a large knife—a cleaver, to be more precise—was Thomas.

“It wasn’t Thomas,” I told her. “He was with me.”

Rae gave me a look so scathing, so seething with hatred, that I once again had to doubt the doctors’ conclusion that there had been no head injury. This wasn’t my daughter. “You’re lying for him.”

There was nothing I could say. It was the truth.

The police thought Rae’s version of events was preposterous. I tried to fight for her, insisting that there had to have been a man, a stranger, who had been similar in appearance to Thomas. I told them about the peeping Tom a few months before, but they didn’t believe me. They thought I was just trying to help Rae save face. “A guy was looking in your daughter’s window, and you never called the police?” I was so embarrassed. Why hadn’t I done more? I’d been derelict of duty, but I wasn’t lying. Yet the police wouldn’t hear it.

They pointed out that it had been broad daylight and none of the other drivers had seen anyone in a ski mask wielding a knife. If they had, there would obviously have been 911 calls, in a neighborhood like ours. The police had found no supporting evidence in the woods, either. So with no witnesses or forensics to back up her story, it seemed to them to be just that: a story. “I’d keep her away from horror movies,” one of the officers told me with a nasty smile. I wanted to smack the grin off his face.

One of the things that made the officers most suspicious was that Rae kept insisting it wasn’t a stranger, that it had to be her brother. “I know what I saw,” she said over and over. But Thomas had been with me during that time period. We’d been playing pinochle.

Under the strain of police questioning, I admitted that yes, Rae wasn’t the most stable. She had been in therapy for years; she was bullied at school; she was a deeply unhappy girl with a lot of resentment toward her brother (whatever the sibling version of an Oedipal complex was, she had it). The more I talked, the more convinced I became of the police’s theory—that it had all been a figment of Rae’s imagination. Yes, there had been a peeping Tom, but would a boy with a crush chase Rae into traffic while wearing a ski mask and brandishing a knife? It was absurd. It was, in a word, delusional.

Now I saw that was the most convenient belief for me to adopt, since it let me off the hook for not calling the police about the peeping Tom. Rae had never known about the boy. I hadn’t wanted to frighten her unnecessarily, when she was already so prone to frights. I felt that I’d taken care of the problem by locking the shed and upgrading the locks on our windows and doors. When I’d confronted the boy that night, he’d been more scared than I was. I was confident that we’d never hear from him again.

After she was discharged from the hospital a week later, she started an intensive outpatient psychiatric program. That meant that she spent five days a week, six hours a day, in a psych ward.

I never told Thomas about her accusations, and I think Rae was afraid to tell him. She was afraid to go home and live with him. No matter how much I tried to reassure her, even when I described just how upset he’d been to learn she was in the hospital, she insisted that she knew the truth.

“He did it, Mom,” she wept. “I know he did. Stop protecting him.”

“I’m not protecting him,” I said.

“The day before,” she said, “I told him that I was going to expose him. I was going to tell you about all the things he was doing.”

“So tell me now.”

What Rae told me was nothing new, just the usual. Sex and drugs and skipping school and a little bit of larceny. When money went missing, I always knew it was Thomas. It was never large sums.

Rae didn’t really have anything on her brother, and Thomas would have known that. He wouldn’t have had a motive, and he didn’t have the opportunity. I knew he wouldn’t have had the stomach for it, either. Thomas got in fistfights occasionally, but nothing like this.

I didn’t think Rae was crying wolf or framing her brother, though the police thought that those were real possibilities. “We see a lot of manipulation in girls this age,” one said—the same one who made that crack about horror movies. What could I do? Knowing that Thomas had been with me the whole time, and that there’d been no evidence of a pursuit through the woods, I had two options. I could see Rae as sick, or as a manipulative liar. I chose the former.

I told Rae, “I believe that you believe it.” After that, Rae clammed up. For years, actually, and she hadn’t been a real chatterbox to begin with. She never said it directly, but I see now that she felt betrayed by me, and when I think of it from her perspective, I get it: Instead of Thomas being punished, she was the one labeled as crazy.

She believed that I was lying for Thomas, that I’d invented an alibi for him. What I believed was this: that something had happened to Rae, but that it had happened in her own mind. The internal can be as real as the external, and just as destructive.

Maybe it was because I’d been thinking about the accident, and about the peeping Tom. Maybe that’s why everything slipped into place in the most awful way when Ben came to my house for the second time, and I knew where I’d seen Ben before.

He was bearing still more bags (why couldn’t Thomas at least buy his own groceries?), and I noticed something strange: He had an identical build to Thomas, and they not only dressed alike in their jeans and T-shirts, but they shared the same low-center-of-gravity walk. Ben was patterning himself on Thomas, which was creepy enough, but that wasn’t what made my blood run cold.

With a ski mask on, Ben could have been Thomas’s doppelganger.

From there, it just seemed so obvious. The chat room. Living one town over. So Thomas had known Ben all those years ago. When Ben was peeping on Rae, it was deviant all right, but not in the way I’d assumed. Rae hadn’t had an admirer; she’d had an enemy.

Was Thomas really behind Rae’s “accident” after all? Had he put Ben up to it?

I didn’t want to believe that. Yet it was hard to imagine that nebbishy Ben had taken it upon himself to dress up in a ski mask and chase Thomas’s sister into traffic.

But Ben looked like Thomas. Why would Thomas frame himself?

I remembered how upset Thomas had been when he found out Rae was in the hospital. Was that because the prank had gone wrong and Rae wasn’t supposed to get hurt, or because she was supposed to get hurt but he was suddenly sick with guilt? Or was it possible Thomas had nothing to do with it at all?

I couldn’t fathom what Ben’s motive would be, without Thomas’s involvement, and yet I couldn’t come up with any sort of motive for Thomas at all.

My head was throbbing. I couldn’t begin to contend with these questions. My pain had been spreading along with the sites of the cancer, and I’d been getting headaches as well as bone pain. But this was something different. I felt like my skull was trying to expand outward to twice its size, like it couldn’t contain the information my brain was trying to absorb.

If Thomas had really been guilty all these years, then Rae had been telling the truth, and I’d treated her like she was crazy.

And here he was, feeding me protein shakes and God only knew what else. Was I being watched over by an attempted murderer, and his accomplice?

I groped for the codeine pills on the TV tray next to the couch and gulped them down dry. I didn’t want to ask Thomas to bring me some water. Who knew what he’d put in the water?

Ben made another grocery delivery, and something was obviously wrong between him and Thomas that day. There was no lighthearted banter. Or rather, Ben was brooding, and Thomas was ignoring it, acting like his usual self. Steam would soon be coming out of Ben’s ears. I could see that whatever was going on between them was reaching a boiling point, yet Thomas wasn’t dignifying it, and maybe that was part of what was angering Ben. His feelings seemed entirely irrelevant to Thomas, and even if the root was business, isn’t money the number one thing that couples fight about, what ultimately leads to divorce? Money is about the balance of power, and maybe Ben was tired of theirs.

When I’d confronted Ben all those years ago outside Rae’s window, I’d been wrong in my assessment. He truly was dangerous. And so was Thomas.

I had nearly gotten my little girl killed because I’d been so determined to believe the best about Thomas. I couldn’t make that mistake anymore.

I wouldn’t eat or drink anything that came from Ben’s grocery bags. I told Thomas that I had very little appetite, which was true, and that all I wanted was to eat processed foods. As in, things right out of packages like Hostess cupcakes, or right out of cans and bottles, like soda or sparkling water. Thomas chastised me for eating so many simple carbs; he said that wasn’t the anti-cancer diet at all. I told him that I was sorry to disappoint him, I just couldn’t do the diet. His disappointment seemed genuine but I didn’t know how interpret that. Was he disappointed that he wasn’t nursing me back to health, or disappointed that he couldn’t poison me into an even earlier grave?

As much as I’d resisted medication my whole life, I also hadn’t experienced this kind of escalation of physical pain. There was talk about oxycodone, but I was afraid. I needed to keep my wits about me. I worried about “accidental” overdose at Thomas’s hands, so I kept all my pill bottles under my blanket to reduce the possibility of tampering. Those were not comfortable days, I’ll tell you that. It was not shaping up to be a good death.

I was more tired all the time, and it took greater energy to speak, but my eyes still worked fine. I could watch. And what I observed were whispered, fevered conversations between Thomas and Ben, and furtive glances between Rae and Simon. They were each in their own little clubs, and I was the odd woman out. It made me, honestly, more ready to go. I didn’t feel like I had much to cling to anymore. But before I went, I would find out the truth about Thomas. I had to know if I’d turned a blind eye to a monster. And if he was a monster, I had to take care of him. I owed that to Rae.

“You really should eat, Mom,” Thomas told me. I was on the fainting couch, as always. How I had grown to despise that couch, but there was no time for one last remodel. “How else are you going to get your strength back?”

“Maybe I’m not.”

“I have some stuff I need to take care of today. Ben’s going to come out and stay with you, okay?”

Was Ben coming to do Thomas’s dirty work? To finish me off? “No, it’s not okay.”

“What do you mean?” He was still standing, and he had his jacket on. That meant Ben would be here imminently.

“This is my house, and I decide who comes and who goes.” I stared him down. I needed to look formidable, at least. “What’s going on, Thomas? Why are you really here?”

“To take care of you. We’ve gone over this.” He said it patiently, like he was dealing with a child. Or a crazy person. Maybe I was going crazy. I was certainly paranoid.

“What do you really want from me? Just go on and ask. I can’t stand the suspense any longer.”

The only thing I could think of was, he’d come back to avenge his father. But real life wasn’t some Shakespearean tragedy. Killing me wouldn’t bring back his father.

Besides, he had it all wrong. Alfred had wanted me to kill him for years before I was willing to do it. He gave me that awful notebook well before his cancer diagnosis.

Alfred was a good man, but a disturbed one. I didn’t find that out until after our wedding—no, it was later than that. It was after I’d gotten pregnant with Thomas. I’d always thought Alfred was reserved, courtly, a true gentleman; I never suspected depression. He apologized profusely over the years, and urged me to leave him. But the pregnancy had happened quickly, and with kids involved, I didn’t want to be on my own, disgraced. What would my family have said? It would have confirmed that I was just as worthless as they’d always thought, not even able to marry well, or to persevere. They had plenty of money, but love? None to spare.

I believe Alfred’s chain-smoking was a slow suicide attempt. When he was diagnosed with lung cancer, he was actually happy. He’d finally find relief. He convinced me to do what I wouldn’t have under other circumstances. The irony was how convoluted many of the plans in his notebook were, and how simple it wound up being. I helped him overdose on his prescribed medication, and no one asked any questions. Assisted suicide wasn’t legal, but I’m sure it happened all the time, and people turned a blind eye.

Thomas and Rae never suspected, same as neither of them seemed to suspect that their father wasn’t merely a taciturn workaholic but profoundly depressed. It’s amazing, what we can overlook.

I thought that Thomas had put the pieces together over the years, smart as he is, and then one day, a newsmagazine was doing a piece on assisted suicide. I mentioned something about Alfred, as casually as if Thomas already knew. Boy, had I been wrong.

I watched it dawn on him; I watched him rewrite his family history; I watched him begin to hate me.

He left in the night, with only a bag full of clothes. He didn’t take the car I’d bought him, or the cell phone. I had no way to reach him, and no leads on where he’d gone. He was a grown man so I didn’t have his friends’ last names or phone numbers. There was no one to call.

If I’d been able to reach him, I’m not sure what I would have told him, how far I would have been willing to go. Would I have shown him Alfred’s suicide book? I’d made the decision years before not to sully his and Rae’s opinion of their father by divulging the depression. But suddenly, that information was currency. If Thomas had known that his father had wanted to die for years, that I had made sure he had Alfred as long as he did, and I had only succumbed to Alfred’s wishes when he would have been taken from us within a year anyway, that might have made the difference. But it would have been a last resort.

I had my chance now. The notebook was in the safe, with my will and other important papers. Should I take it?

Thomas’s memory of his father meant so much to him. I didn’t want to destroy it, not unless I absolutely had to.

If Thomas had really been involved in Rae’s accident—no, it wasn’t an accident at all, I had to stop calling it that—then he would deserve the most severe punishment. But it hadn’t come to that yet. There was still a chance my boy was innocent.

“What do you really want from me?” I asked Thomas again.

He remained silent for a long minute. He was actually considering telling the truth. Then the doorbell rang. “I want you to feel better, Mom,” he said quietly, and he went to let Ben in.

As much as I disliked the idea of being alone with Ben, as helpless as I knew I was, I thought that both Ben and Thomas were too stupid to do anything as obvious as putting a pillow over my face. If they were going to take me out, they’d cover their tracks better than that. I was going to die, but my gut said that it wouldn’t be today, and this was my golden opportunity. I didn’t think Ben was nearly as smooth as Thomas. No one could lie like my son.

Thomas ushered Ben into the living room. “Ben’s going to stay with you, okay?” he said, walking toward the door. Over his shoulder, he called out, “Love you, Mom!”

Ben made a big show of greeting me, but once the front door had slammed shut behind Thomas, Ben pulled out his phone. He sprawled in the large upholstered chair opposite me, scrolling and texting. I might as well not even have been there. He didn’t even ask if I needed anything.

I felt what I’d felt all those years ago, when I found him on that ladder: This little twerp was no match for me.

“I know who you are,” I said. I didn’t even feel afraid. After all, what did I really have to lose? My days were just about numbered.

He looked up.

“You knew Thomas in high school. You knew Rae, too, didn’t you? I caught you climbing up a ladder on the side of our house.”

“You’re confusing me with someone else.” He was not half the liar Thomas was. Not even an eighth.

“I thought you were interested in Rae, but it was Thomas, wasn’t it? Or were you interested in Rae, too? I know young people can swing all different ways. Bisexual, pansexual, trisexual. You do it all, don’t you?” I smiled at him, like we were having a friendly chat.

“Thomas told me you get confused, since your illness. That there are spots on your brain, and they give you headaches. Is your head hurting? Can I get you medication or anything?”

He was the one trying to confuse me. Playing mind games with the dying? Tsk-tsk, Ben. It was on now. I’d just had a nap, and I was the feistiest stage IV he’d ever meet. “Where did Thomas go?” I asked.

“To take care of some business.” It was the very same wording Thomas had used.

“Don’t you take care of all his business?”

“He’s the CEO. Some responsibilities are his alone.” He returned to his phone.

“Even as a teenager, you were taking care of his business, weren’t you? You chased Rae that day.”

His eyes stilled on the phone but he didn’t look up. He was afraid to, same as he’d been that night I found him on the ladder. I thought at the time that it was because he was ashamed of what he’d done, but now I realized he just feared the consequences of his actions. “Again,” he said, “you’re confusing me with someone else.”

“You probably just wanted to scare her. You were trying to help Thomas deal with his problem sister. You didn’t know she’d run into the street like that. Or did you?”

I could see his whole body had frozen up.

“Did you want her to run into the street, Ben?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Did you want her to get hurt, or didn’t you? Did Thomas?”

I could see he was practically quaking, just as he’d had trouble climbing down the ladder on his trembling legs all those years ago, and that only emboldened me. I decided to press my advantage. It was time to find out what Thomas really knew, since that was all that really mattered. This was the most alive I’d felt in I didn’t know how long.

“You know,” I said, conspiratorially, “he’s never going to love you. Not the way you love him. It doesn’t matter what you do for him, or what you risk. That was true then, and it’s true now.”

Ben didn’t answer, but the tendons in his neck tightened visibly. He was listening.

“Rae didn’t really have anything on Thomas. She couldn’t expose him, because I knew everything. And Thomas knew that.” I was advancing the theory I liked best: that Thomas had no motive, that somehow Ben had taken all this upon himself, that my son was innocent. “When you chased Rae, you weren’t really helping him. You weren’t doing anything at all, except hurting an innocent young girl.”

He looked physically incapable of speech. He looked sick.

“I’m not going to tell the police. There was no proof then so there won’t be any proof now. You covered your tracks amazingly well, for someone so young.” I feigned admiration. “How did you do that? Did you read a lot of police procedurals, watch a lot of crime movies? Or were you just a prodigy in that as well as computers?” Or he’d just watched too many horror movies, like the detective said. A cleaver and a ski mask? It would have been laughable, if it hadn’t nearly killed Rae. My poor girl.

“You’ve got it all wrong.” It came out in a whisper.

“So you didn’t try to kill Rae?”

“Of course not.” I practically had to read his lips.

“You meant to scare her, to tell her not to mess with Thomas. That’s why you were dressed like him. Though he’d never wear a ski mask, not even when he’s skiing. He doesn’t like to cover that pretty face. It’s his moneymaker.” It was humor, yes, but it was true. I wanted Ben comfortable. I wanted a full confession, because I wasn’t sure I could entirely trust my read on the situation. After all, what I still wanted was for Thomas to be innocent, and my instincts had always pointed me in that direction. I was also growing more tired by the second. This had to go quickly. “You didn’t mean for her to get hurt, did you?”

“Of course not,” he said again, and I saw that he really wanted me to know that. Then he added quickly, “Because I wasn’t there. I had nothing to do with whatever happened to Rae.”

I pretended I hadn’t heard his addendum. “And Thomas thought he was meeting you for the first time at that self-help meeting.” Please, let it be so. Thomas was a manipulator, an opportunist, but he wasn’t evil. From Ben’s pause, I understood. “Thomas didn’t remember you, but you remembered him. You followed him around when he was a teenager. You meant to look into Thomas’s room that night, didn’t you? You wanted to watch him sleep.”

“It wasn’t like that. I wasn’t some stalker.”

“How was it?”

“We hooked up sometimes. He was just too fucked up to remember, and he didn’t want to think of himself that way.”

“Think of himself how?”

“As gay. Not that I’m gay.”

Oh, right. The fluid sexuality of his generation—he’s not gay, he’s just gay for Thomas. “So you weren’t memorable enough for Thomas, and he didn’t want to be seen with you in daylight?”

“I didn’t approach him in daylight. It would only happen at parties.”

“Were you in love with him?”

Ben went silent.

“What I don’t understand,” I said, “is your endgame. You didn’t approach Thomas in daylight because he was only interested in you while he was ‘fucked up’ at parties, so instead you connected with him in some chat room, and then you decided somehow it would help your cause to chase his sister into traffic?”

“I was a teenager.” He looked at me as if appealing for sympathy. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I realize now that it doesn’t make any sense at all, and if I could, I’d take it all back. I’d undo what happened.” I was watching him impassively. Forgiveness would not be forthcoming. “I guess I thought somehow if I scared Rae, she wouldn’t tell on him, and his life would be easier, and he’d be grateful . . . But she didn’t have anything to tell, and she wasn’t supposed to get hurt. Once she did, I could never let him know it was me.”

“You were a lovesick teenager then, I get it. But what’s your endgame now, Ben?” I left the rest unsaid: You’re going to help Thomas kill his dying mother and then he’ll love you? You’re going to run his company for him and then he’ll love you?

I could feel bad for this idiot in front of me except that Rae nearly died, and she’d been tortured for years, thinking her brother was the culprit and her mother was colluding with him.

“Are you going to tell Thomas or should I?” I asked.

“He wouldn’t believe you,” Ben finally said. “We’re too tight.”

“Thomas uses people. He turned his back on his own mother, so what makes you think you’re so special?” I was getting to him, that was apparent, but my voice was taking on a drowsy quality. I was fading fast. There wasn’t much more to say, really, but I wanted to inflict maximum damage. For Rae. It was too little, too late, I knew that, but I’d take my stab. “He can just hire someone to do what you do. Silicon Valley is a half hour away.”

Scorn and rage battled for dominance on Ben’s face. “No one would do what I do.”

“That’s just it, Ben. You need to have some boundaries, some pride. There have to be lines you won’t cross. He knows you’d do anything for him, and that’s why he’ll never, ever be with you. Not in the way you want. Because he doesn’t respect you.

“Or maybe,” I said, and now I was the one almost whispering, I was just so bloody tired, “you like it this way. It must be an exquisite form of torture, very Fifty Shades of Grey, and Thomas doesn’t even know he’s playing.” Or he does, all too well. “Stop doing his dirty work, starting now.”

“You’ve got it all wrong,” he said again, his voice choked. It sure didn’t look like much fun, this arrangement he was locked into with Thomas. But he deserved far worse after what he’d done.

I forced my eyes to stay open, fixed on his. “Don’t ever come back to my house again. And while you’re at it, get the hell out of my son’s life.”

For a boy wonder, he wasn’t thinking so fast on his feet. He sat there, mute, outfoxed by a woman who was close to dead.

“I can’t leave you alone,” he finally managed. “Thomas said—”

“Go now,” I clarified.

And he did.

The confrontation with Ben exhausted me beyond measure. When I next opened my eyes, it was dark. I could hear voices being raised and lowered in the kitchen. I followed the sounds, groping and gripping my way along the wall like an invalid, and then I slid downward when I was close enough to hear more distinctly.

“You need to tell her to start treatment again,” Rae was saying. “You’re the only one she’ll listen to.”

Oh, Rae. Didn’t she see? I was too weak for more chemo. I ached for my sweet, naïve girl, the one I’d so stupidly spurned all these years, the one fighting for my life. I’d chosen Thomas over her. I’d bet on the wrong horse, and I was paying the price now, but Rae had been paying for years.

“She doesn’t want more treatment,” Thomas answered. “This is about respecting her wishes.”

“Bullshit,” Rae said. You tell him! “You’re working an angle. I don’t know what it is, but I’m not scared of you anymore.”

“Why would you ever have been scared of me?”

“You know why.”

“I really don’t.”

“You want me to say it right to your face?” A pause. “Fine. I will. You chased me through the woods, into oncoming traffic. You tried to kill me. I let Mom call it an accident, but you know what it really was, and I know what it really was, and Simon’s got my back. He’s not going to let anything happen to me.”

I pictured Thomas’s face, too shocked to respond. Was he shocked because he really had no idea she felt that way, or shocked that she found the courage to come right at him?

That’s the moment when I knew I had truly hardened my heart to my own child. Because I didn’t care about his answer.

All I cared about was Rae. I was so proud of her. After all these years, she’d finally found her voice.

“That’s what you think?” Thomas sputtered.

“It’s what I know.”

“Someone chased you through the woods and you thought it was me?”

“I know it was you.” She sounded triumphant. She had him on the ropes.

“You were different after the acc— after that happened. You wouldn’t even look at me. I just never got it. I didn’t understand.” Another pause. “She should have told me.”

“What?” Rae was less certain now.

“Mom. She should have told me what you thought. Why didn’t she tell me? Then you and I could have talked. I could have tried to fix things.”

He was blaming me? Blame Ben. Blame yourself, Thomas. If Thomas hadn’t led Ben on all those years ago, Ben would never have gone after Rae. Thomas had used people his whole life and gotten away with it. It came to me that he was the only one of us who hadn’t yet paid. He made millions without seeming to lift a finger because of his henchman Ben. He never got his hands dirty.

“I didn’t want Mom to tell you.” But Rae was starting to sound like her old equivocating self.

“You were fourteen. What the hell did you know?”

“I knew I’d been attacked. And I knew who did it.” There was doubt in her voice now.

“All these years, we could have fixed things. We could have talked. Like we are right now. Like two adults. But she didn’t want that. She wanted to keep you down, don’t you get it? She wanted you to need her.:

Was he right? My conscious intent was to keep things from getting even worse, for everyone, but somewhere inside, had I been trying to prevent them from reconciling? All along, had my truest motive been to keep them apart, keep Thomas all for myself, keep Rae down?

No, none of that was true. Thomas was sabotaging me. He was taking away my one good child. Perhaps that had been his intention all along in coming back: to make sure that I died all alone as a way to punish me for killing his father.

“Just tell her I stopped by, okay?” I could hear Rae’s disorientation. He was getting to her, and she didn’t want to be forced to revise her history. She had reached a conclusion that worked for her; she’d screwed up her courage, found her voice, and now, she was left wondering.

“No,” he told her, and even I could make out the urgency, the sincerity. “Stay.”

“Let go of my arm.”

“Sorry. I just . . . I want us to talk more. Let’s get out of here. Let’s go somewhere.”

“And leave her by herself? She’s dying, Thomas. See, it’s always about you.”

“This is about us. She’s going to die, Rae, and we’re still going to be here. Let’s not fuck up our chance, okay?”

“She’s going to die because you’re making her whey protein with spirulina—which she doesn’t drink anyway—when she should be doing more chemo.”

She was crying. Oh, Rae. She still didn’t want to let me go, after everything, after I’d been so awful to her.

Somehow, I found my way to my feet, and into the kitchen. I clutched for Rae, and she grabbed me, holding me up. “Let’s get you to bed,” she told me.

“I’m proud of you,” I said. “Telling him your truth.”

“Mom! What the fuck!” It was an anguished yelp. “You know I was with you!”

I paid him no mind. “I’m so tired,” I murmured. “Thank you, Rae. Thank you, sweetheart.”

She helped me to my bedroom. I knew that what would help Rae the most was to be believed, once and for all. No qualifications, no alibis. After all, Thomas had been behind it all. She wouldn’t have been hit by that car without him.

Rae tucked me in carefully. She’d make an excellent mother someday. I was sorry that I wouldn’t be around to see it. I looked deeply in her eyes and told her, “I believe you.”

Thomas left my house that night, never to return. Or so he thought.

It was time. I would die within a few days, a week, at most.

I’d been arranging my own death for a while, in my mind. I always knew I wouldn’t just let cancer win, the same as with Alfred. It was always a question of which person would do the honors, what would be the most advantageous end.

For a while, I’d thought that it would be Thomas administering the overdose. That would be poetic justice, the closing of the circle. He tore out of the house after learning that I’d done it for his father, too full of judgment to allow me any explanation. It seemed fitting that he should be forced to live with his own hypocrisy. But he’d slipped out of my grasp again, and this time, I was ready to let him go.

I learned from my Twitter feed that Thomas had been served legal papers by Ben. The company basically wasn’t his anymore; now it was Ben’s.

I’m sure Thomas hadn’t seen that coup d’état coming. He’d believed in his absolute power over Ben, had assumed that Ben’s love would be bigger than greed. Ben had most likely been marshalling his forces for a while, gearing up for a takeover, waiting for his moment. Maybe that moment would never have come if it hadn’t been for our little conversation; I’d pushed him over the edge. Or maybe this whole time, Ben had just been getting Thomas out of the way, encouraging Thomas to take care of his dying mother, so that Ben would be able to enact the final phase of his operation. Unrequited love gets tiresome after a while. So does exploitation.

Thomas probably never even knew it was exploitation. Sometimes manipulation just came so naturally to him, and his justifications were so automatic, that he thought of every arrangement as mutually beneficial.

I hadn’t meant for Thomas to lose everything. In my ideal scenario, Ben would have quit and Thomas would have learned to clean up his own messes. He’d have to grow up and stop using people. I didn’t think his comeuppance would be so severe, but perhaps it was a lifetime’s worth in one fell swoop. Thomas had always been so insulated from consequences before, I’d seen to that—just one of my many mistakes.

So he was out of the running for killing me.

I wanted my death to benefit Rae the most. She’d endured so much, I’d wronged her profoundly, and yet she’d remained loyal to the bitter end. She deserved a generous inheritance, though she needed to break free of that Simon.

It had always been obvious that Simon was an operator, and I certainly didn’t change my opinion the more Rae brought him around. Quite the contrary—I detested him more when I saw his chameleon tendencies. He was one way with her, another with Thomas, and a third way with me. It was like he thought I was some sort of grande dame, a figure from Downton Abbey.

But Rae was determined to marry him, despite him being a deadbeat dad. So how about making him a murderer?

Once Thomas stopped being my full-time caregiver, Rae said that she’d take a leave from work and do it. I told her not to be silly, that hospice was sufficient, but really, what I was thinking was, it won’t be long now. So I made sure to text Simon and ask him to come over at a time when Rae wouldn’t be here.

He was between jobs so he was extremely available. That was another thing that bothered me: how little it bothered him to simply not work. He would be all over that inheritance if he had the chance.

I made sure that I was propped up on the fainting couch instead of reclining. Recumbence was just too vulnerable. Once Thomas had disappeared (again), I’d felt safe enough to start taking the oxycodone. But not that day. I needed to stay sharp. That meant I was trying not to grimace through the entire conversation.

Simon kissed me on the cheek and then took both my hands in his, the way he’d seen me do with Rae. What a phony. “How are you feeling, Marlene?”

“Go on, sit down.” I meant that he should take the other couch or at least the chair, but no, he had to scooch in beside me, invading my personal space. Every fiber of my being protested. This was not a trustworthy man.

“I did what you asked. I didn’t tell Rae about this.” Suck-up.

“Thank you. This conversation would just be too hard for her. She needs you to be strong.” He nodded solemnly. “I’m in pain all the time. I don’t feel like I can continue this way. I don’t want to.”

His brow furrowed. “And Rae . . . ?”

“I don’t tell her about the pain. You know how sensitive she is. And I can’t tell her that I’m ready to go, or that I need someone’s help to do it. Now that Thomas isn’t around . . .” He just stared at me. “. . . everything I have is going to Rae. To you and Rae, since you’ll be spending your lives together.”

“Marlene, I don’t feel right having this conversation without Rae here.”

“I understand. You share everything, don’t you?”

“We try to.”

“Then you know that this is tearing Rae up, and that it could drag on for months, with me in pain and your lives on hold.”

“We’ve been talking about moving the wedding up. So you can be there.”

No, no, no! “I can’t hang on, Simon, much as I wish I could. I want to be set free from the pain, and I want Rae to be set free from the uncertainty, from spending her time waiting for her mother to die. I want her to get on with her life, with you. If you can help me, I’ll give you my full blessing.”

“What is it you want me to do?”

“Get Seconal. It’s easy. You can do it on the Internet. Then administer it and make sure that I’m not suffering. Make sure it goes off okay. And afterward, take care of my daughter.”

I could see he was considering. “I don’t think I can do that,” he said finally. “I don’t want to lie to her.”

“Do you want to see the will? Rae gets everything. And she’s marrying you—as long as you have my blessing.” I was pretty sure Rae intended to marry him regardless but I had him thinking. Doubting.

“She wants you to be there. Why don’t I see if we can get a wedding together ASAP?”

He wanted to make sure he and Rae were married before he would kill me. Some people are so selfish.

“The longer you wait,” I said, “the greater the chance that Thomas and I will reconcile. He lost his business, did you know that?”

So it was decided.

I said my good-byes without anyone knowing that’s what I was doing, and I have to admit, it was hard not to tell Rae. It was hard to accept that I wouldn’t be around to protect her any longer. But she’s not quite a damsel in distress anymore. She found her strength when it came to Thomas, and I have to believe she’ll continue to possess it after Simon’s gone.

I left a note among my effects—how strange, to have effects—that I knew Rae would find. Across the envelope it said, “Open in the event of my death,” and it talked about Simon’s rapacious behavior, his untoward interest in my will, and my fear that he wouldn’t be able to wait for cancer to claim me. I said that I’d seen a suspicious package from a pharmacy in Nottingham, England; he’d gotten a strange look on his face and claimed he was having trouble sleeping.

Rae will be okay, Rae is okay. I tell myself that all the time. Because what no one tells you about death is that it’s like a big screening room. All you can do is replay your life. You don’t get to look down on your loved ones and see what they’re doing; you just have to hope that they’re carrying on. You have to hope that you set them up to have the best lives possible.

I think I did that.

Rae has her happy ending, of sorts: She’ll get millions of dollars, and she’ll be free of all of us—of me, her ne’er-do-well brother, and the scoundrel who would have eventually broken her heart anyway and stolen all her money.

I left the house to Thomas, in a manner of speaking. I didn’t want him to be homeless, so I set it up that he can’t sell it but he can live there for the rest of his life.

I burned Alfred’s notebook, just as he’d requested. It wouldn’t do anyone any good now. But I think it had served its purpose for Alfred. Fantasizing about suicide plans, researching and jotting down ideas and turning them into meticulous blueprints, believing he might have an early exit—it had made him happy, in his way. But I was happy to see it go up in smoke.

All I’ve ever wanted is to take care of my family, and now I have. It wasn’t such a good life, all told, but it was a reasonably good death.

May I rest in peace.