He put his hand on my back and nodded—he understood. So did the control room, which instructed the cameraman to get a two-shot of Tom and Tina while I wiped my face and tried to pull myself together. Diana and Jay—I was mourning them both.
36
A Pony for Ellie
THE QUOTIDIAN RITUALS of a new school year came without the usual excitement. Ellie returned to Spence in her plaid jumper, a sweater-clad Carrie watched the leaves go from green to orange from the comfort of her stroller. We went through the motions of being a happy young family, but sadness gripped me like tentacles I couldn’t pry off. Jay insisted on going to a reenactment of the Battle of Antietam, near Hagerstown, Maryland. I was worried yet grateful he was doing what he loved.
One weekend in Millbrook, Liam and Natasha stopped by and took us to a farm in Red Hook for a hayride and pumpkin-picking, Jay doing his best as the bumpy tractor jostled his thin frame. There is a photo of us from that day: him in a bomber jacket, me in his denim jacket, holding Carrie under a canopy of leaves; she’s leaning over and cradling Ellie’s smiling face in her dimpled hands. I look at that picture now and wonder what Jay was thinking.
We had late, lazy breakfasts of omelets and french fries at the Millbrook Diner. One Sunday, Carrie was sitting in a baby seat clipped to the linoleum tabletop when she barked at the waitress, “More bacon, lady!” We couldn’t stop laughing （to this day, when my girls and I have bacon, one of us is guaranteed to call out, “More bacon, lady!”）。 When Jay and I went to see Titanic at the Ziegfeld, he had grown weaker, although not too weak to point out that the saga of Rose and Jack paled in comparison to the stories of the real-life passengers on board the doomed ship. He was weaker still when he walked into Spence for Ellie’s holiday concert wearing a big, furry trapper hat to ward off the cold—by now Jay had no body fat. I still remember the uncomfortable feeling of people trying not to stare but staring anyway.
“Cancer,” Jay told me one night, “is the loneliest experience in the world.”
I understood. As much as I loved him, took him to doctor appointments, urged him to eat, ran to the grocery store to replenish the Ensure, was by his side for every relentless piece of bad news, if—when—he lost this fight, I’d still be here. With the living.
In late fall, Jay’s closest friend from Williams & Connolly, David Kiernan, spent the weekend with us to take some pressure off me and be with Jay. On Saturday morning, they headed to the barn, where Jay kept the remnants of his life as a young lawyer. They sorted through boxes of his work stuff—a stapler, his nameplate, a framed photo of him holding a squirming, laughing Ellie at the Boar’s Head in Charlottesville, no doubt for a UVA football game. They found the Spuds MacKenzie mug I’d given him when we first started dating, a nickname bestowed by some of his fellow associates for being such a “party animal.” There were stacks of notebooks, briefs, and manila folders related to Williams & Connolly cases from years back. Then they discovered a box of VHS tapes—hard-core pornography from a case Jay had worked on in, of all places, Salt Lake City.
“Oh my God,” he said to David, “if anyone finds these after I’m gone, they’re going to think I was some kind of pervert.”
After I’m gone…a rare acknowledgment that time might be running out. David joked that he’d be happy to take them off his hands, but they ended up throwing them in a dumpster.
After a few hours going down memory lane, they walked back to the house.
“In the spring,” Jay told David, “I’m going to buy Ellie a pony.”
His words hung in the air.
They jumped in the Jeep and started down one of the winding roads that fanned out like tributaries from our house, the roads Jay loved exploring that always seemed to offer up something new for him to marvel at—a quaint church, a sunlit field, a picturesque barn. These two friends, now older, perhaps wiser, who should have been sliding into middle age, with the graying temples and softer bellies that come with it, were dealing with something else altogether. On a stretch of road with few houses, Jay pulled over and turned off the ignition.
He looked at David. “I’m not going to make it, am I?”
“You have to make it,” David said. “You have a wife and two beautiful little girls. You have to make it.”
“I’m not going to, though, am I?”
“You have to make it,” David repeated.
Jay looked out the window, frustrated. “Well, I guess that’s my answer.”