Damn Love. Jasmine Beach-Ferrara

up and clearing her tray. She knew now that she was meant to go to San Francisco. She wouldn’t give up on Peter, but nor would she try to talk him out of the wedding. There was no need to. That was the great joke of it all, and she only wished she’d seen it earlier. The wedding wouldn’t be legal or real and neither would the marriage. They were play-acting. It’s about performance. Isn’t that what Peter had said? Let them go through with it. Fine. It could be undone, like so much else. She would once again be by Peter’s side, and from that position she could whisper to him that there was another way. It was all so clear. She felt a surge of energy and promise. As Janet rushed to catch up with her, Ruth laughed. The sun shone brightly and they had plenty of time to get to the airport. She was going to be with her son, like any mother would.

      They pulled out of the parking lot and headed east on I-40. Ruth didn’t tell Janet what had changed her mind. She didn’t want anything to ruin this and knew the many ways that Janet could, with her bawdy humor or her occasional bursts of chilly, irrefutable logic.

      They were two miles from the airport when they hit traffic. Above them, the silver bellies of planes angled towards the runway and the blue sky seemed endless. From behind, they heard an ambulance and fire trucks approaching. All the traffic inched left and Ruth watched as the emergency vehicles sped by. “Must be bad,” Janet murmured, checking her watch. “But we’ve got lots of time.”

      The mid-day sun was blistering. It soaked Ruth through the windows of the SUV. The relief that she had felt was being replaced by a crawling anxiety. The seat belt was too tight against her chest, but she couldn’t loosen it. Sweat gathered along her spine and her mouth dried out as suddenly as if it had been suctioned at the dentist ’s. She gripped the handle on the side door and tried to swallow the hot bile gathering in her throat.

      “Pull over,” she managed.

      They’d been through this drill before. But this time they were in the center lane, boxed in by traffic on both sides with a mile to go until the next exit. Janet put on her blinker and cut toward the shoulder, but the driver of the semi on their right gave them the finger and inched up to block their path. Ruth tried to open the door, but couldn’t manage the automatic lock button. She vomited, a burning liquid with clumps of undigested toast and streaks of bright red blood. The vomit splashed onto the dash and all over the front seat. She couldn’t stop.

      “Shit, shit, shit,” Janet said, blasting on the horn and reaching into the backseat for her workout bag. She yanked out a towel and placed it on Ruth’s lap, and then took hold of her friend’s clammy hand. Ruth’s face was the gray of wet concrete. Janet rolled down the windows. “We’re going to the ER, asshole,” she yelled. The semi’s driver finally understood what was happening and cleared a path for them to the shoulder. Janet gunned the car. Ruth kept vomiting until only blood was coming up.

      As soon as the triage nurse saw her, Ruth was rushed off for a CT scan and x-rays. Janet ran alongside her stretcher and when Ruth’s wig slipped out of place, Janet gently took it off, stuffing it into her purse. They took her to an exam room next and a nurse, intern, resident, attending, and oncology fellow streamed in and out, conferring in loud voices outside the curtain.

      It was almost noon when Dr. Patel arrived, wearing a pink golf shirt and jeans and slightly out of breath. Ruth began to cry then. She was on an IV and had an oxygen canula in her nose. The soft whirr of the gas entering her body and the beeping of the monitors filled her ears. Dr. Patel took her hand. “It’s scary, I know. But you’re OK, Ruth. You’re OK. All that Advil you were taking for the stress headaches got to your stomach, that’s all.” His lilting accent always distracted Ruth a little from the news he was delivering.

      “Where’s Ronny?” he asked.

      Janet held up her cell phone. “Hunting,” she said tensely.

      Dr. Patel frowned slightly. “We need to admit you for observation tonight, Ruth. But this doesn’t change anything. The chemo’s working. We’re going to beat this.” Ruth nodded, too tired to ask any questions. Janet stared at her phone, as if sheer will might summon Ronny back to civilization.

      Hours later, Ruth lay in a bed on the 8th floor of the hospital. The Durham sky was dark outside her window. The unit was chaotic with the sounds of the night shift. Nurses’ voices drifted in from the hall. A patient called out that she had to pee. A local anchorman narrated the day’s news on her sleeping roommate’s TV. Janet was in a chair next to the bed, wearing scrubs that a nurse had loaned her to replace her bloody clothes.

      Ronny was finally on his way, tearing down I-40 with a dead buck tied into the back of his truck, calling Janet every five minutes for updates. The plane she might have taken would have landed in San Francisco already. Three thousand miles away, Peter would be getting ready for the ceremony. Any last bit of hope he’d been holding onto would have been extinguished by now. She could see him blinking a few times and shaking his head, as if adjusting to the concept that he was now fully severed from his family. This was not true, but she knew he would see it that way.

      She had been certain they would be a different kind of family. The kind that lives a few miles apart and celebrates every holiday, birthday and graduation together. But they weren’t.

      After almost forty years of marriage, even Ronny could still surprise her. There were places in him that she’d never find her way to. Peter had been born three months before Ronny got home from his final tour. Janet and her mother had coached her through labor and Janet had moved in with her for those first few months. They’d all driven down to Fort Bragg to meet Ronny’s flight from Dover. He’d kissed her first, and had later told her that they’d reminded his platoon to greet their wives before their kids, not to screw up this one simple thing. They—Ruth, her parents, Janet, Ronny’s father—had stood in a circle around him on the steamy black tarmac, forming a shield as he knelt down on his knees and cradled Peter to his chest for the first time. It was only when he’d taken Peter into his arms that he had started to cry.