Pain is nothing. If handling pain is all it takes, he will win this. He promised Freddie he would.
“I’m not going to die,” he said one night a few days ago as he lay awake an hour after they’d gone to bed. He wasn’t sure if she was still up. He said the words, and they echoed in the dark bedroom. She didn’t say anything at first, and he watched the slow movement of the ceiling fan. He saw the way their front porch light made glowing lines above their curtain. He shifted his legs, and the dog jumped off the bed. He heard the heat kick on and the rush of air to the vent on the floor. He figured she was asleep, but then he heard the small gasps, the sobbing she was trying to choke back. “Stop,” he said, nudging her leg with his knee. “I’m not.”
“Greg.” She whispered his name, and he could feel her body tremble as she tried to fight the tears. When he reached to touch her face, her pillow was damp, and he felt like a failure. For making her cry. For being this close to dying. He smoothed his thumb under her eyes, and tried to wipe her tears. He couldn’t undo what he’d started, and now that he’d said the words, the businessman in him couldn’t let them go.
“I promise I’m not.”
His pride had always done this to him. Made him grab that drunk guy at the Yankees game a few years ago who told him to hurry the fuck up at the urinal. Made him drive two and a half hours back to Boston after he’d just gotten home from a meeting there because a client had emailed him and was unhappy. His pride once had him take apart a clubhouse he’d built for Addie the day before—hours of unbuilding and rebuilding most of its parts （in the dark, so she wouldn’t see） because he didn’t like the way the floor buckled. Freddie said he was crazy, ridiculous. “Get to sleep,” she said. “Addie won’t even notice. She will love it because you made it and because you sit in it with her. She’s not putting a level on the floor!” But there he was sawing and measuring and setting it right. Where did this come from? Because he was an only child? Wanting, always, to be perfect, be a hero? His parents were lovely people. They never pushed him. But he always reached further than he should, always wanted more. Instead of running a 5K, he’d sign up for a marathon; instead of turning in a requested five-page report to Alex, he’d deliver fifteen pages with pie charts and color-coded data. Now, with cancer, one of the deadliest kinds, he can’t roll over. He can’t just try to survive. He has to promise he will. In some weird, competitive way, he is even happy his type of cancer is one of the most aggressive. When he survives, he will have survived the worst. What is that in him? Who did this to him?
He did it to himself.
And these days he couldn’t feel more imperfect, more inferior than he does now. He wants to unzip his skin and crawl out. Did that lead him to up the ante and make that promise?
Now he has made a vow he may or may not be able to keep. She squeezed his hand that night like she was going to twist it off, and he listened to her get quieter and quieter until her hand felt still, and she sighed as she went to sleep. And then he lay there for another two hours, her body silent against his. His mind raced with guilt, with worry.
Why would he say this? He heard his father’s voice. When are you going to learn enough is enough? His father had said that often—after Greg had signed up for two spring sports in high school, or after he’d stayed up all night working on his speech for student government, or even in college when Greg was doing double shifts in his bar runner job at Sidecar. He lay there that night with Freddie and wished his parents were alive again, for Freddie to forget this promise even though he suspected this had helped her fall asleep. But did she even believe him? She knows he can’t know for sure. But still. She has trusted him all these years. What hubris, what haughtiness, to say that. Everything felt unbearable, even their comfortable bed. He finally brought sleep on by trying to remember all the kids in his third-grade class; then trying to revisit every hotel room he’d ever stayed in. He finally reconciled this ridiculous promise by remembering that most of the promises he has made have been challenging, nearly impossible, mostly out of reach, too. And he has fulfilled all of them. Wasn’t this more of the same?
Now he is at the treatment center. One of those hospital satellite places with imaging and therapy and new signs with crisp logos and doctors’ names. And beyond the sliding doors, standing there in the vestibule is his cancer gang. Rosco holding on to his walker and waving; thin Imogene with her small green hat and drooping earrings, holding a bag of something she probably baked for them; and Brandon in his thrift store overcoat, black nail polish on some of his fingers.