Freedom

It genuinely did, and Patty could no longer tell whether it was Richard’s presence that made Walter appealing or whether he might be appealing for his own sake—for his ability to make whatever place he was in seem like a homey place to be.

The dreadful call from Eliza came on Christmas night. Patty answered it on the extension in the basement, where she was watching an NBA game by herself. Before she could even apologize, Eliza herself apologized for her silence and said that she’d been busy seeing doctors. “They say I have leukemia,” she said.

“No.”

“I’m starting treatments after New Year’s. My parents are the only other ones who know, and you can’t tell anyone. You especially can’t tell Richard. Will you swear you won’t tell anyone?”

Patty’s cloud of guilt and worry now condensed into a storm of sentiment. She wept and wept and asked Eliza if she was sure, if the doctors were sure. Eliza explained that she’d been feeling increasingly draggy as the fall went on, but she hadn’t wanted to tell anyone, because she was afraid Richard would dump her if it turned out she had mono, but finally she’d felt so crappy that she went to see a doctor, and the verdict had come back two days earlier: leukemia.

“Is it the bad kind?”

“They’re all bad.”

“But the kind you can get better from?”

“There’s a good chance the treatments will help,” Eliza said. “I’ll know more in a week.”

“I’ll come back early. I can stay with you.”

But Eliza, oddly enough, no longer wanted Patty staying with her.

Regarding the Santa Claus business: the autobiographer has no sympathy with lying parents, and yet there are degrees to this. There are lies you tell a person who’s being given a surprise party, lies told in a spirit of fun, and then there are lies you tell a person to make them look foolish for believing them. One Christmas, as a teenager, Patty became so upset about being teased for her unnaturally long-lived childhood belief in Santa (which had persisted even after two younger siblings lost it) that she refused to leave her room for Christmas dinner. Her dad, coming in to plead with her, for once stopped smiling and told her seriously that the family had preserved her illusions because her innocence was beautiful and they specially loved her for it. This was both a welcome thing to hear and obvious bullshit belied by the pleasure everybody took in teasing her. Patty believed that parents have a duty to teach their children how to recognize reality when they see it.

Suffice it to say that Patty, in her many winter weeks of playing Florence Nightingale to Eliza—trudging through a blizzard to bring her soup, cleaning her kitchen and bathroom, staying up late with her and watching TV when she should have been sleeping before games, sometimes falling asleep with her arms around her emaciated friend, submitting to extreme endearments (“You’re my darling angel,” “Seeing your face is like being in heaven,” etc., etc.), and refusing, all the while, to return Walter’s phone calls and explain why she didn’t have time to hang out with him anymore—failed to notice any number of red flags. No, Eliza said, this particular chemotherapy wasn’t the kind that made people’s hair fall out. And, no, it wasn’t possible to schedule treatments at times when Patty was available to take her home from the clinic. And, no, she didn’t want to give up her apartment and stay with her parents, and, yes, the parents came to visit all the time, it was just coincidence that Patty never saw them, and, no, it was not unusual for cancer patients to give themselves anti-emetics with a hypodermic needle such as the one Patty noticed on the floor underneath Eliza’s nightstand.

Arguably the biggest red flag was the way she, Patty, avoided Walter. She saw him at two games in January and spoke to him briefly, but he missed a bunch of games after that, and her conscious reason for not returning his many later phone messages was that she was embarrassed to admit how much of Eliza she was seeing. But why should it have been embarrassing to be caring for a friend stricken with cancer? And likewise: how hard would it have been, when she was in fifth grade, to open her ears to her schoolmates’ cynicism regarding Santa Claus, if she’d had the least bit of interest in learning the truth? She threw away the big poinsettia plant even though it still had life in it.