Buried.

“I’m calling ‘Cut’." He whispered so quietly that I wasn’t sure I heard him.

“What did you say?”

“Liv, I wish I could’ve given you more.”

I laughed right out loud. “More of what?”’

“To start, a new car. A bank account with more than $32.00 in it. An apartment with two bathrooms.” He chuckled. “A husband without cancer.”

“Are you dissing on my car?” I reached for his hand. “$32.00 is extra. The rent is paid, we have ramen in the cupboard, and we paid the electric bill last month. What else do we need? And I wouldn’t trade the husband in for anything!”

“You may have to. I think I’m ready to cut.”

My HR-brain kicked in and I took a deep breath and ten seconds to formulate my response. I didn’t typically have to use my Human-Resources-brain with my husband, but I was still glad for the practiced wait-to-respond methodology that I’d learned at the office, so I didn’t throw out the first thing that came to my mind. Which this time, was the crashing of my heart to my toenails. I wanted to fall to my knees after throwing things, like a big tantrum. I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t ready. I wanted to curse things like doctors, hospitals, and machines that count everything. I was really pissed at broken cells that grew too fast, chemo that didn’t work and tumors that dotted each scan like stars in a black sky. All the stupid tumors. But how could I be mad at the things that were growing in this man whom I loved even though he could never remember my birthday? We just hadn’t had long enough. It had only been 19 months since our wedding day. I had only been a wife for 567 days….if you counted today.

“Are you sure?” I curled in closer beside his bedside. It was second nature for me to take regular glances at his stats. They were falling. I wasn’t actually surprised. I didn’t want to believe it, but I have always been good at pretending to ignore the little things. Little things like his jotting notes about his funeral on the back of get-well-card envelopes. I promised him this would be his decision. I promised, no matter how brutal, that the decision was his to make and I would back him up. And then I would fall apart.

“I’m not at ‘check the gate.’ But I’m ready to cut this take.”

Cut was the code word. We talked about it in the beginning. At the diagnosis. It was his little joke. He had worked for a filmmaker in his mid-twenties, and he never tired of using the lingo even when it didn’t exactly fit. We added to the film talk on a regular basis as our cancer journey lengthened into a cancer marathon and then into a cancer lifestyle. Cut was always going to mean that it was time to go home. Cut meant no more hospitals, no more emergent care; cut meant it was time to begin palliative care or maybe even hospice. It was time to go home and use the ugly words: end-of-life care. The race was run, and it was now time to push through to the finish line.

‘Check the gate’ was one step past ‘cut’ and the beginning of the last stretch. Check the gate was the last look to make sure nothing stood between him and the finish line. Check the gate was what he promised to say to me when he thought he was in the home stretch. I made him promise. Son-of-a-bitch. Check the gate was all that I had left before I was the only one left in this marriage. I just hadn’t had long enough to get to know everything about him. I had only just barely scratched the surface. I was expecting to have the better part of a lifetime. But no one gets promised a lifetime, do they?

Ugh. I tried to pull myself back to the present. To the finite number of minutes until one of us said goodbye and the other said nothing.

“And miss all of this….” I swept my arm around the room. I thought I was going to be relieved to see the last of this stupid beige-speckled room. The beige recliner chair for the loved one to sleep in. I wanted to scratch my initials into the damn thing as proof of how many hours I had spent in the unyielding monster watching my husband come and go from scans, surgeries, and blood tests. The C shaped vomit bowls. The incessant beeping of machines. The sounds of carts rolling past in the hallway with food trays, plastic medicine cups and bandages. An unwashed window spattered with raindrops that overlooks the parking lot where other loved ones are coming and going. People who are coming to see strangers. Children running with a stuffed animal for a friend. Little curved ladies who will outlive their husbands and go home to a too-quiet house. Fathers who will have to bury their only son in three days. A thirty-seven-year-old daughter who brought her mom in for x-rays after her fall. A ten-year-old leaving the emergency room with a brand-new cast and blood-stained shorts smiling because they let him have a purple cast. This room held an innumerable number of memories strung together between visits, sleepless nights, and unbelievably hard decisions. In a strange way it felt safe here. Here where a nurse was a button-push away. Now we were headed home where I would be bedside for the last time he took breath.

He chuckled a weary chuckle. “Let’s take this gig to another set. This scene is all played out.”

“I’ll go tell the nurse to begin the paperwork and to notify Dr. Hansen.”

He reached for my arm before I could leave the bedside. “Olivia. Wait. Can we wait for just a few more minutes?” He grasped the side rails of his bed as he took in a pain-filled draw on his oxygen.

“Do you need more morphine?”

He shook his head and went on: “thanks. I want to be clear for this. Maybe in a few minutes.” He became still as he did when the pain was escalating, and motionlessness felt like it would keep the tide at bay. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

I leaned in. “I’m listening.” I pulled the bedside chair back under me and snuggled into the closest thing to comfortable I could manage. “Is this your confession that you have another wife somewhere?” I giggled trying to lighten the mood.

One side of his mouth lifted in his famous half smile. “If only it were that simple…do you mind closing the door?”

Now the fear was creeping in. Okay – not creeping in. It was crashing over my mind and body with the ferocity of a tornado. We both knew that in this room, anyone could walk in at any time and at least the opening of the door would give us both an alert of another’s presence.

“You are freaking me out now. Talk fast.” My voice was low and barely audible. “What did you do?”

“I made a decision that meant I had to begin again. So I called a guy. And he gave me a new identity. I’ve drawn you a map. There is something I want you to unbury for me.”

***

I dug with the ferocity of a mad woman. There was a crumpled map, drawn on a get-well-card envelope shoved in my pocket with a tiny flashlight and the keys to my breaking down car. Once I hit the container, I started digging with my bare hands. Each handful felt like I was unburying the life I thought I had and the man I thought I had married a brief twenty-two months ago. How could I have been so stupid? What fool marries a man that quickly? Why didn’t I ask more questions when he said he didn’t really talk to his family, when he dodged questions about his childhood, when he was so good about making every conversation about me.

The tiny light that I had at twilight was escaping like water leaking from a bucket with a hole in it and darkness was coming on. Somehow the cold, hard container was both bigger and smaller than I had imagined. I looked around me like a guilty child before I pulled it from the damp earth that was now under my fingernails the same way that man, my enigma of a husband, had gotten under my skin. I don’t know if I would have seen someone in those dark woods of the park even if they had been standing right next to me. My mind couldn’t hold a thought and my hands were barely functioning as I neared my goal.

The combination he’d given me was burned into my brain. I swiveled the numbers on the lock into place. And pulled. The lock gave way with a muffled knock. I pulled open the lid. There it was. His secret. Now my secret. A secret that would never be buried for me again.

***

He waited until the hospice nurse had loaded her laptop and overflowing bag of supplies and closed the front door behind her before he said, “did you find it?” He didn’t even open his eyes.

“Mmmm. Hmmm.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

I was distracted by the mud on my hands and clothes. “What were you going to do with it?”

His voice was raspy and course. He was nearing the end. We were at ‘check the gate.’ “It didn’t matter anymore when I met you.”

I wanted so much to believe him. But do you believe the lie, or do you believe the truth? And how do you know which is which? “What do you want me to do with it?”

The morphine that the nurse had given him was kicking in. He didn’t answer.

The color was draining from his skin the way his presence was slowly draining from my life. And the end I had imagined was now clogged like a shower drain with all the things we had never talked about.

***

I opened the box and closed it again. It was sitting where he used to sit in my falling-apart car in the passenger’s seat. The night he died I counted it. It was $216,492.00. He tried to tell me how he had just walked out of the bank with it one night in a paper bag. He was twenty-one and full of young bravado. They didn’t know until Monday that the cash was missing and by then he had disappeared into the night leaving his entire life behind him. He had never gone back to the woods for it because as he left the park that day, he met me. He didn’t even unbury the money to pay for the little things that would have made his life better in the end.

I was parked outside the police station. I would turn it in and put him and all of it behind me.

I opened the driver’s side door grabbing the box. He just wanted to give me more. And this was all I had left of him.

I pulled his phone from my purse and flipped it open. I went to one of the contacts on the list and hit dial. The ringing stopped and I heard, “Yep.”

“My name is Olivia. Liv. I think you knew my husband. He said you might know someone who could help me. I’m going to need to start over.”

I put the box back on the passenger’s seat and backed out of the parking lot. Scene ended. That's a wrap.