Bubble Universe

Melissa bought a straw hat to wear in the garden she didn’t have yet. It was the first time in months she had allowed herself to hope. Later she would buy gloves and seeds and painted flower boxes, but for now, the hat was enough. She showed it to Joe when she got to the hospital.

“See? The wide brim will shade me from the sun, and the straw’ll keep me cool,” she told him.

Joe laid one bony hand on top of hers. “I’ll get you your garden, Melissa,” he promised her through the rasp of his breathing tube. “Soon as they let me out of here, I’ll get started.”

“I know.” Melissa blinked eyes that didn’t have any tears left. Dr. Weinberg had told her he was “cautiously optimistic” that Joe would be released later that week, and Melissa could finally breathe without choking. “I’ll plant a flower garden, with lilies and daisies and those little marigolds like your mother used to have. We’ll put a bench there for you to sit on. And I’ll grow vegetables. Beans, maybe, or carrots.”

“Farmer Melissa,” Joe tried to say, and Melissa laughed with him.

Soon he was asleep, and she sat in the vinyl recliner that smelled of disinfectant. She had always hated hospitals, but now she realized how beautiful they could be. The metal-framed bed that cradled Joe’s wasted body, the bottle that fed him in a faithful drip, the tube that caught his breath and gave it back to him, the blip on a screen that beat a precious rhythm. Melissa reached out to stroke Joe’s thin arm, and the skin that sagged in folds felt softer than the underside of a flower petal. The hospital room was a bubble of quiet, and Melissa hardly dared to move.

When they married, they promised each other forever. Melissa had not understood how arrogant that promise was. They moved into a cinder-block duplex on the army base where Joe was stationed, and Melissa planted a garden in their half of the back yard. Joe was transferred before her tomatoes ripened, and Melissa always wondered if anyone picked them or if they’d been left to rot on the vine. Joe promised her another garden, but the base housing had no yard. Then Joe was off to Vietnam, and Melissa was struggling to cope with a new baby and an unfamiliar city.

She had half-forgotten the promise until downsizing forced Joe to take early retirement from the plant where he worked after the Army. They looked at the bedrooms they no longer needed and at the cost of living in Chicago. David, their oldest son, persuaded them to try Nashville, and now they had a small rancher a few blocks from the trendy Brentwood neighborhood where David and his wife Cassie lived.

Circles, Melissa thought. They’d spent most of their married life acquiring more things, needing more space, and now their home had shrunk back to just the two of them. The yard was large, but it was patchy and neglected, with a bare spot under the basketball goal in one corner of the back yard. Melissa had planned to tackle the yard and transform it into the cottage garden she had seen in Cassie’s Southern Living. Before she could start, Joe began complaining of pain in his chest and coughing when they took their daily walks. Lung cancer, the doctors said, in a man who hadn’t smoked in twenty years. Small-cell carcinoma. Stage 3.

Melissa’s chest still hurt when she thought about the day they had gotten the diagnosis. David drove them to see his doctor, a golfing buddy with a joking manner that suddenly turned serious when he looked at the chest x-rays he had ordered to rule out pneumonia. He frowned at the image and said he needed further tests. Melissa asked why.

“I’d rather not speculate,” he told them. He handed David a list of lab orders, and as Melissa and Joe headed for the waiting room, David turned back for a whispered exchange with the doctor.

When he rejoined them, his face was set. Melissa took one look at him and knew not to ask questions in front of Joe. That evening, after she settled Joe in the recliner with a cup of decaf and the remote control, she first heard the words.

“Lung cancer,” David said when Melissa demanded to know what the doctor thought. “Probably not,” he added hastily. “Just a worst-case scenario he wants to rule out.”

Now Melissa wished she had not asked, that she had allowed herself a few more days of ignorance, without the words that never seemed to leave her mind. She and David had not told Joe until the doctor confirmed the diagnosis. Joe took the news without complaint. Like a soldier. He looked at Melissa. “It took two decades, but you can finally say ‘I told you so,’” he said. She had always urged him to quit smoking before it damaged his lungs. She tried to smile, but her own breathing choked as if she were the one whose lungs were infested with cancer cells.

Two surgeries, countless tests, and several cycles of chemo later, Joe still smiled when he saw her and never complained about the pain. Melissa’s greatest fear was that he would look at her for her permission to let go and that she would be unable to give it. More time, she begged God, the doctors, the universe, just as she had begged for his safe return from Vietnam. One more season of sitting among the flowers, holding Joe’s hand, and she thought she could do it.

Time used to sprawl in front of them in a sweep of years filled with possibilities. Once the kids came, it accelerated into a blur of Little League, PTA, Scouts, and home-made chocolate cakes. Now it stretched into a series of moments, each measured by a breath, as she watched Joe and tried to absorb enough of him to last a lifetime.

“Mom.” A hand rested on her shoulder, and she hadn’t even heard footsteps.

She turned to see David and Sam. Sam was David’s only child and her oldest granddaughter. More earnest even than her father, Sam attended a private downtown school and planned on a career in marine biology. “Hi, Grandma.”

Melissa hugged Sam. She felt the sharp angles of her shoulders and thought, as she always did, that the girl needed to eat more.

“Sam’s going to sit with Dad this evening,” David said.

Melissa glared at him over Sam’s shoulder. She hated the way David tried to ration her time with Joe, forcing her to family meals at his house or pointless shopping trips with Cassie. She knew he was counting on her not making a fuss in front of Sam.

“Mom, you need to rest. Who’s going to take care of Dad if you collapse from exhaustion?”

It was a familiar argument but one for which she had no response. Melissa bent to press a kiss on the patch of skin on Joe’s cheek not covered by medical paraphernalia. “Call me if there’s any change.”

“I will,” Sam promised. She settled into the recliner and pulled her iPod out of her backpack.

Melissa stopped. Sam reached for a book at the bottom of her bag and tucked the iPod back inside. “See?” David said. “She’s very responsible.”

Melissa let him lead her away. She knew she needed a break, but she had a superstitious fear that if she let Joe out of her sight, if she so much as closed her eyes, he would slip away. This latest surgery had been the most difficult, and although they never said, Melissa knew Joe’s doctors worried he was too weak to withstand the surgery.

“This way.” David nudged towards the elevator.

He seemed calm, as always. His work as an accountant had trained him to think of the world in terms of numbers. Everything was percentages, calculations. Even his father’s life. He had looked at the statistics, studied the risks, and concluded that Joe might be better off without these desperate attempts to stop the cancer. Better off without the painful chemotherapy and surgeries. Better to slip into a dignified eternal rest without draining his savings and using up his insurance policies. He even said so, once.

Melissa hated his cold composure and the way he could look at his father still sedated from the last surgery and then turn to the doctor and joke about his golf scores. She detested his insistence on doing what was practical-her staying with him instead of at the house she and Joe had bought, his going back to work, back to making money, since there was nothing he could do to help, keeping things normal for Sam’s sake.

Things weren’t normal. Melissa didn’t want them to be normal. She wanted the whole world to stop and see there was something wrong with her Joe and that things could never be normal again until it was fixed.

“I want to stop by the house,” Melissa told David as he edged out into traffic.

“Now?” David glanced at his watch. “Cassie’ll have dinner ready. We’ll be late.”

“I want to check on things.”

“Maybe tomorrow.”

Melissa took a breath. “If it’s too much trouble, let me out here. I’ll get a cab.” She pulled on the door handle.

David jerked the steering wheel as if to stop her. “Don’t be ridiculous. If you want to go, I’ll take you.” He cut across two lanes of traffic and made a sharp turn that threw Melissa sideways. “Sorry.”

Just like that, he was calm again. Melissa wished she knew how he did it, but she didn’t want to be calm now. The fear that constantly churned her stomach reminded her that she still had something to lose. She would be calm later.

Without another word, David turned the car onto the narrow street where Joe and Melissa lived. The piles of leaves leftover from fall had all been cleared away, and the grass was neatly trimmed. Still, somehow the house looked neglected, as if it missed the owners it had just begun to know. Melissa unlocked the front door. Inside, the neglect was more obvious. A fine film of dust overlay the living room furniture. In the dining room, the china cabinet stood empty, Melissa’s wedding china still packed in boxes stacked beside the table. A musty smell mingled with the air freshener she had left in the kitchen.

As she walked through the house, its emptiness eroded the energy she had left. They had sold their house full of memories, and here she had only a handful of pre-cancer moments. Joe, climbing on a precarious stack of boxes to install a brighter bulb when she complained the light in the kitchen was too dim. Spending half a day arranging his favorite books in an order only he understood. Walking around the house, synchronizing every clock to the trusted Bulova he had received as a high school graduation gift.

The memories were thin wisps that scattered as Melissa moved. She needed more. When Joe came home, she would impress every little moment on her mind. What he did there. How he stood here. The way he ate his breakfast oatmeal and squinted in the mirror as he combed his hair. She wanted to pack every corner of the house with memories, no matter how trivial, so she would have them with her, whatever happened.

“Ready to go?” David jingled his keys in one hand.

“Just let me peek in the study.”

“Is that really necessary? It’s getting late.”

“Leave me here then.” Melissa stopped in the hallway with her arms folded in front of her. “Go on, keep to your precious schedule, and leave me here. I can drive myself back to the hospital.”

“Mom, don’t be ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous? What’s ridiculous is worrying about dinner and shopping and going to work, when your father is in the hospital fighting for his life. I should be there with him, and all you do is try to pull me away. Moving here was the biggest mistake we ever made, since you don’t care what happens to your father!” She was yelling now, and her hands had begun to tremble.

“That’s not true.”

David reached for her, but Melissa pushed him away. “The only way you can be so calm is if you just don’t care!” she accused him. “You’re back at work, back to making money, while your father’s dying!”

The word exploded between them, a word Melissa had never allowed herself to say during all the weeks of doctor’s visits and hospital stays. David stepped back from it.

“You can ask your doctor friend to schedule it on a weekend, so it won’t disrupt your work schedule. You can pencil it in right after your golf game: tee-off at nine, watch Dad die at noon!”

Tears had begun to run down David’s face, and Melissa could not believe the words that were coming out of her own mouth.

“You never thought he was good enough. He didn’t make enough money or work in a fancy office, and now he won’t be around to embarrass you in front of your fancy Brentwood friends.”

Melissa gulped in air to continue, but David grabbed her shoulders. He was shaking his head. “No, Mom, no. Stop it, please.”

She had more to say, but David’s tears triggered her own. She had not allowed herself to cry after the first few days when she and Joe had wandered the house in numb disbelief, and she had cried into her pillow at night while Joe slept. David pulled her into his arms, and since there was no one else, she let him. She cried until she was out of breath, and she felt David’s tears wetting the shoulder of her old gray cardigan.

“I want to show you something,” David said when she finally dried her eyes and moved away.

He took her hand and led her into the study. Empty book boxes were strewn around the room. Joe’s books lined the lower shelves of two bookcases beside the oak desk. The model aircraft Joe had begun making when the boys were small were arranged on the upper shelf. Melissa had not realized Joe had unpacked them.

The top of the desk was lined with newspaper, and bits of another model lay across it. Melissa frowned at it. David waited.

“I didn’t know Joe was working on a new model,” she said.

“He isn’t.”

Melissa fingered one of the aircraft wings.

“It’s a Cessna A-37 Dragonfly,” David explained.

Joe had spent his first two years in Vietnam maintaining the Super Tweets, as he called them, and he always kept the model on the chest beside his bed. Somehow the model had gotten lost during one of their moves, and, although he had visited toy and hobby shops all over Chicago, he had never found another one like the one he’d lost.

“Where’d you find it?” Melissa whispered.

“On eBay.”

“Joe’ll be so happy.” Tears welled up again, and Melissa blinked. “I’m sorry, David. I didn’t mean what I said. I just don’t see how you can stay so calm through all of this.”

David turned away from Melissa. “There’s some truth in what you said. I haven’t always liked Dad. I always loved him, but I haven’t always liked him. I was never tough enough for him. I was the oldest, and I was supposed to be a good soldier. One time he caught me crying, because I didn’t want to start over again at a new school. He explained to me about how he got through the war.”

“Really? He told me about the camp and the planes, but he’d never talk about how he coped,” Melissa said.

“He said he would create a bubble, in his mind. He’d surround himself with it, and if everything was okay inside that bubble, if he had food to eat and a dry place to sleep, and if no one was shooting at him, then he was okay. Then he’d wake up the next morning and create another bubble. Years later, I read about the bubble universe theory, where separate universes with different laws of physics are created, and I liked the idea. So when I’m worried or scared about something, I just create a bubble universe where nothing bad ever happens.” He scuffed one wing-tip shoe against the carpet. “Sounds pretty childish, huh? Like an imaginary friend?”

“Not at all,” Melissa said. “How does it work?”

“Close your eyes. Picture your bubble. I have three-one for work, one for home, and one for the hospital, and they’re all connected. I can go through a wormhole, like a narrow tunnel, from one bubble to the next, without disrupting the physics in that bubble. At home, the rules are no divorce and no harm to Cassie or Sam. At the hospital, the rule is…” He choked for a second.

“That Joe gets better,” Melissa said quietly.

David nodded.

Melissa looked at him for a long time. He was more like Joe than she had ever realized, keeping everything locked up behind a strong façade. The perfect soldier, for Joe. The perfect businessman, for David. She touched his arm. “I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

David’s cell phone beeped, and Melissa stepped back so he could reach it. As he tucked it back in his pocket, the smooth composure slid back across his face. “It’s Cassie, probably wondering if we’ve gotten lost.”

“We’d better go, then.”

David held out his arm, and Melissa took it. As she walked, she thought that although his shoulder was not as broad as Joe’s, it was very steady and one she could get used to leaning on. On the way home, as David called Cassie, Melissa closed her eyes. She thought of Joe, sleeping in his hospital bed, and began building her own bubble universe.


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