I turn over in the bed and listen to Houndy softly snoring beside me, his grizzled, beautiful face tipped toward mine. I lie there in the grayness of dawn and watch him breathe in and out and feel the magic of the city waking up. After a long time, the sun comes up for real, and a long time after that, the 6:43 bus comes wheeling around the corner and hits the pothole at its usual breakneck speed, causing the metal chassis to complain and screech as it always does. The windowpanes shudder. Somewhere, if I listen, there’s a siren starting up.
An early summer morning in Brooklyn. The heat is already pressing against the window. I close my eyes and stretch. Cassandra, satisfied that I’m awake, goes back to whatever she was doing before she felt the call to wake me up. Sometimes she is as silent and worn out as time, and sometimes she’s a rascally kindergartener wanting only to thump against something living.
I place my hand against her, and sing her a little song in my head.
Call me crazy, but the day I named her Cassandra, I also started giving her nice things to wear. Some days, when she is fierce and hot, I picture her in a hard hat, and other days—like maybe today—I think of her in a lacy dress and invite her for tea. I tell her to imagine she has been given the most delicate and beautiful of my china cups, the one I hang on the hook over the stove.
“I will not forsake you,” I say to Cassandra. “I know you came for a reason, even though I’ll be goddamned if I can figure out what that is.”
Last week, when I got back from the wedding, on a day when I was nearly doubled over in pain, I gave myself a huge reward for making it through and to celebrate meeting Marnie. I told Houndy and Lola that I’d found the person I’d been waiting for all my life, the someone I probably knew from many other lifetimes, and who was my spiritual daughter. And then I painted the refrigerator bright turquoise. I was so proud of myself for not letting anyone in my family know that I am dying that I had to paint the refrigerator as my own little reward.
Houndy—sweet old family-oriented Houndy—thinks I should just tell my family about the mass. “Why not?” he says. “Don’t they deserve to know? Maybe they’d want to be nicer to you.”
Ha! My family wouldn’t want to be nicer to me. They’d want me locked up in some hospital, treating Cassandra with needles and knives and making me talk to doctors, people who would speak to me in that condescending, medical way, people with clipboards and appointment books and computers. Office assistants who would speak too loudly in my presence, as if Cassandra had somehow interfered with my ability to hear.
No thank you. I went to the doctor and got my diagnosis, which I will not dignify by using its medical terminology, because to say the words makes it feel fatal and incurable, and I refuse to go with that. Except I will say this: I got up from the examination table, and put my clothes back on, thank you very much, and I tore up the pieces of paper they gave me—the treatment plan—and I walked out. And I will not go back.
If Cassandra leaves my body—and she may, it could still happen—it will be of her own volition, and this will be the reason: our work together is done. I don’t want to die, but neither am I afraid. I won’t use chemotherapy or put poison into my body. I won’t suffer. Instead, I have taken energy drinks and done chants; I have consulted a shaman in an African village online; I have buried talismans and sowed seeds and performed yoga poses at midnight under a full moon. I have danced and primal screamed and practiced laughing out loud and had massages and acupuncture. And Reiki.
And by the look of things, Cassandra is thriving. So you know what that means? It means it’s the way things are supposed to be.
So I am going to die. Most natural thing in the world to have happen. Life ends.
And I’m okay with that. It’s just a change of address, really. It doesn’t have to be awful.
I sigh, kick off the sheets because I’m suddenly hot, and then I close my eyes and tune in to the conversation the pigeons are having on the windowsill. They always sound like they’re on the verge of figuring everything out.
Later, I get up and go to what Houndy calls my crazy-ass kitchen to make tea. Funny, these old Brooklyn brownstones. This one has a parquet floor that once was probably grand but which now slopes down to the outside wall. It’s a floor with personality, all pocked and scarred from a century of footsteps and bootheels and water leaks and even worse grievances than those. And a high tin ceiling with a glaring fluorescent ring of light in its yellowed center—a light I never turn on because it’s harsh. It promotes ugliness, that light. Instead, I’ve put lamps all around. Warm, yellowish light to give softness.
Houndy says we could get the floor made level and maybe have the stairs replaced in the front of the house, get the roof fixed. He’s a do-something kind of guy, not one to sit around and watch the metal rust. Finally I had to say to him that I am all about slowing down all that striving. I just want to enjoy the sun coming through the cracks near the windows. I am tired of making so much effort.
He doesn’t take much convincing to see the point of things I say, and that’s why I let him come and live here and sleep in my bed next to me. We never got married because I’ve finally learned that if you have to bring the law into your personal relationships, then you’re doing it wrong. And both Houndy and I have done it wrong plenty of times before. So we’ve just been skating along together for twenty-plus years.
We met right after his son died, when Houndy was in such a bad way, in such grief he couldn’t even catch himself any lobsters anymore. Lobsters just walked on by his traps and got in other people’s traps, and Houndy was so battered by life he didn’t even care all that much except he was going to starve to death. So somebody told him to come see me, and I chanted some words of power summoning the forces of plenty, and put my hands on his heart—and after that lobsters started standing in line to get in his traps.
He brought me some one night to show me my spell had worked, and we stayed up late and ate lobsters and drank some homemade wine I had, and then—I don’t know how it got started—we found ourselves dancing, and of course, dancing is the gateway drug to kissing, and somehow that night Houndy brought the laughter back into my eyes. And maybe I did us a little love spell that has always stood me in good stead when I’ve needed it. So here we are, two decades later: me doing my words of power and finding love for people when I can and him bringing me his old craggy Brooklyn self and his scratchy chin and his happy snoring. And lobsters.
And in the mornings I fix him poached eggs and salmon and make him smoothies that have plenty of antioxidants, and bread that I’ve baked, filled with seeds and sprouts. And then we sit outside in the sun on the roof and listen to the city moving beneath us and feel the energy of life. Well, I do. Houndy sits next to me and smiles like he’s the Buddha or something, even though I don’t think he has a spiritual cell in his body. Maybe that’s why the universe sent him to me: we’re counterbalanced. The universe always likes things to have a balance to them.
A door slams upstairs, and the building’s day begins.
Voices on the stairs: “Did you get your lunch from the countertop . . . and did you get a pencil? And since it’s the last day of school, you won’t have aftercare, so you’ll come home on the bus, and then . . . well, you and I will call each other. Right?”
“I’ll call you every week.”
“No, every day. Sammy, promise me. Every day!”
And then, there are two sets of footsteps clomping downstairs—Jessica’s sandals carefully slapping on the wood and Sammy’s exuberant sneakers—and Sammy knocks his scooter against my door as he passes just like he always does. It’s supposedly an accident, and Jessica says she tries to get him not to do it, but I always tell her I don’t mind. It’s our ritual. Sammy is leaving for the day, and he wants me to see him out.
I jump up and go to the back door and throw it open, and there he is in the hall, the sweetest boy, ten years old with his yellow hair sticking up, and his pale, fair skin practically see-through in the light from my kitchen windows, peering at the world through those adorable giant round glasses he loves. And he’s grinning at me.
“SamMEE!” I say, and we do a fist bump, which is hard because of the scooter he’s carrying and the outsized New York Mets backpack he’s wearing. Jessica’s next to him with her harried morning face, and as usual she’s juggling her cup of coffee, her bag, the car keys, and her one thousand worries, and at any moment she could drop any of it except the worries.