For me and Suzanne, it was supposed to go like this: We’d be the maids of honor at each other’s weddings. Our husbands would be really different, of course, but they’d like each other a lot anyway. We’d have babies at the same time, take family beach trips to Jamaica, remain mildly critical of each other’s parenting techniques, and be favorite fun aunties to each other’s kids as they grew. I’d get her kids books for their birthdays; she’d get mine pogo sticks. We’d laugh and share secrets and roll our eyes at what we perceived as the other person’s ridiculous idiosyncrasies, until one day we’d realize we were two old ladies who’d been best friends forever, flummoxed suddenly by where the time had gone.
That, for me, was the world as it should be.
* * *
What I find remarkable in hindsight is how, over the course of that winter and spring, I just did my job. I was a lawyer, and lawyers worked. We worked all the time. We were only as good as the hours we billed. There was no choice, I told myself. The work was important, I told myself. And so I kept showing up every morning in downtown Chicago, at the corporate ant mound known as One First National Plaza. I put my head down and billed my hours.
Back in Maryland, Suzanne was living with her disease. She was coping with medical appointments and surgeries and at the same time trying to care for her mother, who was also fighting an aggressive cancer that was, the doctors insisted, completely unrelated to Suzanne’s. It was bad luck, bad fortune, freakish to the point of being too scary to contemplate. The rest of Suzanne’s family was not particularly close-knit, except for two of her favorite female cousins who helped her out as much as they could. Angela drove down from New Jersey to visit sometimes, but she was juggling both a toddler and a job. I enlisted Verna, my law school friend, to go by when she could, as a sort of proxy for me. Verna had met Suzanne a couple of times while we were at Harvard and by sheer coincidence was now living in Silver Spring, in a building just across the parking lot from Suzanne’s.
It was a lot to ask of Verna, who’d recently lost her father and was wrestling with her own grief. But she was a true friend, a compassionate person. She phoned my office one day in May to relay the details of a visit.
“I combed her hair,” she said.
That Suzanne needed to have her hair combed should have told me everything, but I’d walled myself off from the truth. Some part of me still insisted this wasn’t happening. I held on to the idea that Suzanne’s health would turn around, even as the evidence against it stacked up.
It was Angela, finally, who called me in June and got right to the point. “If you’re going to come, Miche,” she said, “you’d better get to it.”
By then, Suzanne had been moved to a hospital. She was too weak to talk, slipping in and out of consciousness. There was nothing left to feed my denial. I hung up the phone and bought a plane ticket. I flew east, caught a taxi to the hospital, took the elevator to the right floor, walked the hallway to her room, and found her there, lying in bed as Angela and her cousin watched over her, everyone silent. Suzanne’s mother, it turned out, had died just a few days earlier, and now Suzanne was in a coma. Angela made room for me to perch on the side of her bed.
I stared hard at Suzanne, at her perfect heart-shaped face and reddish-brown skin, feeling comforted somehow by the youthful smoothness of her cheeks and the girlish curve in her lips. She seemed oddly undiminished by the illness. Her dark hair was still lustrous and long; someone had put it in two ropy braids that reached almost to her waist. Her track runner’s legs lay hidden beneath the blankets. She looked young, like a sweet, beautiful twenty-six-year-old who was maybe in the middle of a nap.
I regretted not coming earlier. I regretted the many times, over the course of our seesawing friendship, that I’d insisted she was making a wrong move, when possibly she’d been doing it right. I was suddenly glad for