10
Sienna
I do my best to minimize the situation as I tell him about the lump and going to Cheyenne and the diagnosis as though I’m updating him about beef prices as of last month. It’s the first time I’ve put words to everything that’s happened, but I can’t tell if I’m relieved or made more anxious by hearing it all out loud. His listening is interspersed with “Oh, Sienna,” and “Wow” and what could be called gasps, but that’s not very masculine so I don’t categorize them that way. I’m tempted to give in to the obvious emotion of what I’m saying, but I don’t. That would be inviting him in, and even amid all this I can’t do that. It wouldn’t be fair.
“How is your dad handling this?”
I’m quiet long enough that I hear him let out a breath—definitely an exasperated sigh rather than a gasp.
“You haven’t told him?”
“I can’t,” I say, and explain how Dad’s still recovering and it’ll be too much and he’ll want to come with me and we need him at the ranch. The coincidence of having committed to the lumpectomy right before Ty’s call is uncanny. That I can talk to him as easily as this is equally strange. I guess his having been my confidant for so many years is a hard habit to break.
“Isn’t hiding all this a whole lot harder than telling him? I mean, he’s gonna know eventually and then he’ll know you didn’t tell him.”
I must be feeling brave today. “There are other reasons I don’t want to tell Dad—stuff I’m trying to make sense of.” I pause like a golfer watching in absolute stillness as her ball rolls across the green.
“Stuff?”
I haven’t talked to Ty in three months and haven’t shared details of my life in longer than that. It’s his distance from all of this that makes him a good confidant. So I tell him about the pictures, the files, Dad evading my questions. I realize how very conspiracy theory it all sounds and expect Tyson to try to convince me to tell Dad. He doesn’t. “So, anyway, it’s all twisted up together. I can’t bring Dad into this when there are these unanswered questions but I can’t put off this lumpectomy any longer either.”
I wait for him to tell me that it will be impossible to keep this from my dad and I’m going to have to find some way to tell him. “What about Beck? Can you talk to her?”
“If I tell Beck she’ll tell her mom, and Dad will find out and . . . I’m just not ready to lose control of it that way.”
“She might not tell.”
“But she probably will, and Clint’s been down with his ankle, and there’s just so much on her plate already.”
“You really think you can go have surgery without help?’
I tell him about the hotel room the nonprofit pays for and Uber and . . . boy, does it sound stupid. But it’s all I’ve got. I brace to defend myself against whatever he says next.
“I could come help out.”
For a few seconds I’m confused, thinking he means that he can come out and help with the ranch. Then I realize he’s not talking about calving, he’s talking about the procedure. It confuses me. I’m tempted to explain that this whole cancer thing is going to pass—98 percent of women survive it—but surviving this won’t fix him and me. In fact, it will make the hard things harder between us because who knows where I’ll be in the whole infertility continuum when all of this is done. “You’re in London, Tyson.”
“I can get a week off.”
I laugh because this has to be a joke. “Take a week off just like that and fly to the other side of the world?” I couldn’t get him to take an afternoon off back in Chicago—even after work at home he was taking calls and sending documents. That was before he’d said he wanted to take this London job and have us put the baby-making on hold.
“They’ve offered me an extension of my contract,” Tyson says. “If I accept the extension, I’m sure I can put a week off into the deal. They really like me here.”
The initial offer to go to London had come last summer. The implantation had failed two weeks earlier. I was back at work but went to bed as soon as I got home each day. “They’ve asked me to transfer to London for a year, and I’m thinking it might be exactly what we need. You can get stable, we can have some adventures, and I can add a nice credential to my résumé.” I didn’t want adventures, and I didn’t care about credentials. I wanted a baby, and the last two years of my life had been so devoted to that goal that nothing else mattered. I didn’t like city living, never mind a cosmopolitan city like London. Tyson had assured me it would be one year—just one.
“When were you going to tell me?” I say this as though he owes me personal updates, which he doesn’t. He’s been wanting me to come to London from the start, almost didn’t go when Dad got sick and I ran back to the ranch last October, a month before he was supposed to leave. I assured him I’d join him after Christmas and that he might as well be in London if I would be in Wyoming during that time anyway. But I didn’t go to London after Christmas, and he was mad—accused me of planning it from the start. Of giving up on us. I texted him that I was sorry he felt that way. Then didn’t respond to his follow-up texts for almost a week.
“The offer came on your birthday, and ever since then I’ve been trying to figure out how to get us to a place where we can talk about it.”
I guess this was that place.
“And I guess you want to take the extension,” I say, my tone flat. Am I disappointed? Relieved? Both? Neither?
“Can you think of any reason why I shouldn’t?”
“Would you be coming back here because you think we can fix us?”
“No, it’s so that when we look back on this time, neither of us can hate me.”
We’re both quiet, but I feel something let go inside me. When we look back. But not together. This is his peace offering, and it’s all I can do not to accept it too enthusiastically.
“So, I guess my cancer showed up just in time, then. You get to swoop in and be the hero and kick the dust off your shoes when you finish up.”
I expect him to be offended, but he’s very calm when he speaks next. “Do you want me to come or don’t you? I’m not trying to be a hero. I haven’t been able to save you for a really long time. But I can help if you need it, and it sounds like you need it. I want more than this, Sienna. I want to meet new people with different stories and work toward a future I can be excited about. I don’t see how you and I are going to build that when you’re never going to come to London and I’m never going back to Lusk.”
A wave of envy takes me off guard. A future to be excited about. New people. Different stories. I wonder if new people includes a new woman—someone whom he walks through Hyde Park with and reads Harry Potter out loud to. I take a few beats to poke around in my heart and head to see how I feel. I should be angry and grieving and maybe even beg him to give me another chance, but what I feel instead is relief. Not a waterfall of it. Not a fall-onto-my-knees-and-kiss-the-floor kind of relief, just the gentle “it is what it is” sort of feeling that I used to feel after getting a bad hook in a roping competition. The way I felt when I stopped doing rodeo because I knew I had no future in it. Without Tyson’s wagon hitched to mine, there will be one less person to feel responsible for failing.
I lean my head back against the tub and close my eyes. “You want a divorce?”
He pauses, lets out a breath. I imagine him sitting on the window seat of the London flat that came with the job—he’d sent me pictures after he first arrived. The window looks over the financial district, and at night the view is beautiful. He’ll be dressed in tailored trousers and a button-up shirt with the top few buttons undone. He’s probably bought half a dozen new pairs of shoes since arriving there—he loves nice shoes. That image is the Tyson I have watched him moving toward for years without realizing it was happening. Through all the hard stuff, I turned inside myself and he reached outside, grabbing ideas and experiences, and now he was on his way to finding a different happiness. “We’ll get your stuff out of the way first, but I think we’re both worn out. These last months have been hell, Sienna.”
“These last years have been hell,” I say, and open my eyes. Things were good until we started trying to have a baby, but it’s been downhill since then. It’s not hard to see that what we loved most about each other is what the other person could give us. When we couldn’t give each other those things, the foundation rotted out. He needed to succeed with something, and I didn’t care. About anything. Do I even love him anymore? Maybe the fact that I want him to be happy even if it’s without me means that I do love him. Or maybe the fact that I can so easily see the end of our road means that I don’t.
“We could meet with a divorce lawyer while you’re here,” I say.
“Uh, let’s just deal with your stuff. We can do the rest of it later.”
“But you’ll be here. We could get a lot done and save—” I feel an eagerness to do something. Anything.
“Stop it, Sienna,” Tyson says. “I hadn’t planned on saying anything about that stuff. I just didn’t want you to think I was coming for some kind of reconciliation, that’s all. I need to talk to my office and make sure this will work, but I’ll let you know as soon as I have things in place, okay? When is the procedure—next Friday?”
“Yeah, they want me to confirm on Monday that I’ll be there.” I pause and take a breath. “You’ll really come out here to help me with this?”
“I still care about you, Sienna, and this . . . this is shitty. I want to help, and I’m pretty sure I can pull it off.”
“Okay,” I say, staring at the tile floor again. It’s almost romantic, his running to my aid, but romance isn’t enough. Heroics aren’t enough. Wanting something different isn’t enough. Like he said, we’re both worn out. I need to get this surgery and work out the stuff about Dad and Mom. He needs to work toward an exciting future in London. “Thanks for doing this, Tyson.”
He pauses, lets out a breath. “You’re welcome.”