I’m sorry about Bob. I thought about calling you after I got your text. I wanted to. I wasn’t ready.”
“I hadn’t spoken to him in years. Missed his service too. You think I’m a bad friend? I’m an even worse son.”
Cal shook his head. “Part of that onus was on him.” He exhaled wistfully. “Weird to think we’ll never see that fucker again, huh?”
He looked up and stared at the ceiling for a while, the way he does when he’s contemplating. Then he said, “Tell me something: If you’d known Bob was going to die, would you have reached out to him?”
I’d considered that question more than once since Bob’s death. “Yeah,” I said sadly. “I can’t tell you how many letters I wrote to him over the years. I just never sent any of them.”
“What if it was me?” Cal asked.
I rolled my eyes.
“I mean it. What if you’d found out yesterday that I had a month to live, what would you have done?”
“I assure you I would have called. I would have come to see you. Begged for your forgiveness. Sat with you while you took your dying breath. I don’t know. Something.”
Cal dipped his chin down, and it made the corners of his eyes look sharp and pointy, like little arrows going in opposite directions. “What if I said I came here today to tell you October was dying?” He must have seen the alarm on my face, because he put his hands up and said, “Calm down. She’s fine. But what if she wasn’t? What if you found out she only had a month to live? What would you do?”
The question stifled me. “I don’t know.”
There was a hard edge to Cal’s voice when he said, “You don’t know?”
I huffed. “I would obviously want to see her. I would want to talk to her. And yes, I would be drowning in regrets. That’s what you’re getting at, right? That’s what you want me to say? It’s not that simple.”
“But it really fucking is,” he said, all riled up. “You make it complicated. You’ve always made everything more complicated than it actually is. Let me spell this out for you: She is dying. I’m dying. You’re dying. We’re all dying. Every single day, each one of us is one step closer to no longer existing. Think about that. Think about how you really want to be spending your days. And with whom.”
I thought of Santiago and the note he’d written at the end of my assignment. Go back, you spineless motherfucker. The clock is ticking.
“There are no more chances once someone’s gone,” Cal said. “But until then, there’s nothing but chances. Why don’t you get that?”
“I get it. Believe me. Awareness is not my problem.”
“Then what is?”
“Paralysis? Failure to act? Or, well, how did you put it? Generally being the biggest pussy you’ve ever met?”
Blood and snot had dried on my face, and I could feel it cracking and pulling at my skin. I walked to the kitchen, splashed my face with water and washed it with hand soap and a paper towel. Then I grabbed a clean T-shirt from my bedroom and changed into it. On my way back to the couch, Cal said, “How much more of your life can you waste moping around like this?”
“Fuck you. I’m fine here.”
“Bullshit,” he said. “This isn’t where you belong, and you know it.” Cal crossed his legs and leaned back. “Earlier you said you’d do anything to make things right with me. Here’s how to do that: Go back and make things right for yourself. Make things right with her. Tell her all the things you want to tell her. At the very least, tell her you’re sorry. Because what’s at stake? Literally nothing. You’ve already lost what you were afraid of losing.”
“Why do you care if I make things right with her or not?”
“I don’t care. You care.”
“Besides, she’d just tell me to go fuck myself.”
“You’re missing the point. This isn’t about her. It’s about you. There’s got to be a reckoning, Harp. It doesn’t matter if she tells you to go jump off the top of the Salesforce Tower with your fist up your ass. That’s irrelevant. What is relevant is that you don’t die with all this stuff stuck inside of you, tearing you to pieces, making you less and less until there’s nothing left. And let me be blunt, if you think I wanna be hanging out at my big beach house when