When Veronica tells me she’s leaving, as she’s saying the words, I begin to imagine all the ways she might die before I get up the nerve to tell her I love her.
At first, they’re your average, run-of-the-mill death-scenarios. Appendicitis. Meningitis. Brain Aneurism. But then they become more specific, more uncommon. Black Widow Spider. Anthrax Exposure. Freak Nuclear Explosion. There are so many possibilities. I know them all by heart, every last one of them. These facts and statistics used to give me a certain sense of control, but now they’re turning against me. They’re making me feel helpless again.
“Michael, you seem pale,” Veronica says.
“I think that’s just the way my skin looks,” I tell her. “I try to avoid UV rays as much as possible. Someone dies of melanoma practically every hour.”
It’s Sunday morning. We’re at Arnold’s, a small diner a block away from the hospital where she works, sitting across from one another in a corner booth, the bench seats far too low and the table far too high, creating an odd distance between us already. The sun shines through the front window like a spotlight, warming the right half of my face. I tug on the string to lower the blinds, but instead they rise even higher, making everything much, much worse.
Fever. Bubonic Plague. Spontaneous Combustion.
Margery, the sole waitress on duty, knocks on the window from outside where she’s been chain smoking Virginia Slim Ultra Lights since seating us. She lowers her black-rimmed glasses, points at me, and shakes her head, yelling through the smudged glass, “Sir, don’t touch that!”
Lung Cancer. Chronic Airway Obstruction. Influenza.
I drop the string, holding my hands up in surrender. “Sorry,” I say, my breath fogging up the window pane. I lean back in my seat, wiping the beads of sweat building across my forehead with a paper napkin, wishing I appeared calm and cool instead of crushed and panicked.
On her side of the booth, Veronica shivers and rubs her bare arms, explaining, “I gave my jacket to a homeless man on the way here. It’s colder than it looks outside.”
I brush off some of the dog hair on my green hoodie and pass it to her, a little relieved to be rid of it. She zips it up over her blue nurse’s scrubs, resting two low ponytails of wavy red hair on each shoulder.
Pneumonia. Hypothermia. Avalanche.
There’s a small pet carrier beside her on the booth containing a mangy black cat that she rescued from an alleyway a few months back. Veronica wants me to watch it while she’s away. Although I don’t tell her I’m allergic to cats, I am very allergic to cats. The mere sight of it makes my eyes water, my nasal cavity congest, my skin itch.
“When are you leaving?” I ask, blinking quickly to hide the dander-induced tears.
“I just finished my last shift.” She takes a deep breath, exhaling. “The car’s all packed.”
“I don’t think you should drive by yourself, Veronica.” I grab another napkin from the dispenser, dabbing my forehead. “Car crashes are the leading cause of death in people ages three to thirty-four.”
She smiles. “I’ll be careful, Michael.”
Hit-and-Run. Carjacking. Sinkhole.
“It’s not that I want to go to Arizona. It’s just something I need to do.” She shrugs. “Maybe having me there will help him. I don’t want him to die alone, Michael.”
Veronica hasn’t seen her father since she was eleven. Then, a couple months ago, she decided to hire a private investigator to track him down. It turns out that he’s been staying at an assisted living home in Arizona. He has Alzheimer’s, the nation’s number seven killer.
“It’s possible he won’t remember you,” I say, immediately wishing I hadn’t. I can tell by the look on her face that she’s already thought about this. She hasn’t stopped thinking about this.
“I don’t remember him real well either.” She reaches into her pocket and slides the spare key to my apartment across the table. “You should give this to someone else while I’m away.”
Veronica had urged me to give her the key in case of an emergency. She hated the idea of locked doors she can’t get behind. She never used the key, not once, but I liked knowing that she had it, that at any minute she might come walking through the door to my apartment.
“How long will you be gone?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” she says. “As long as it takes, I guess.”
A person with Alzheimer’s can live anywhere from eight to twenty years after being diagnosed. I could wait for her, I think. If I had to, I could make it that long without Veronica. I mean, statistically, it’s possible I could survive. But Veronica’s far too gentle, too trusting, too self-sacrificing. Her chances for survival are not nearly as strong.
Peptic Ulcer. Arsenic Poisoning. Ebola Virus.
The only other person in the diner—a lumberjack, a pro whittler, a ruthless assassin, maybe—sits by himself in the booth next to us and starts playing 5-finger fillet with a Swiss Army pocket knife, stabbing the blade between his fingers and then returning to the same starting point, the tip hitting the table harder and gaining speed with each rotation. The silverware, the napkin dispenser, the salt-and-pepper shakers all rattle on the surface of the table, trembling in fear. My heartbeat quickens, falling in rhythm with the stabbing blade, mimicking the sound of a ticking clock, counting down the seconds until Veronica will leave me.
His table is so close to ours. I could reach over and grab the ketchup bottle. I could borrow some napkins from the dispenser. I could grab the knife from him without even trying. I could stop what I know will statistically happen next. But I don’t. I am temporarily mesmerized by his bravery, his reckless abandon, his utter disregard for personal safety. Despite how idiotic his behavior may be, I cannot divert my attention.
His eyes are all glazed over, the smell of booze emanating from his pores, and he keeps glancing over in Veronica’s direction, like he’s trying to impress her or something.
“You’ll be okay without me, right, Michael?” Veronica asks, her hand slowly reaching forward towards mine.
Before I can answer her, before her fingertips reach my own, the blade slices through the lumberjack’s hand with ease, stopping only once it hits the surface of the table. Blood rushes from the cut, so quickly, quicker than I would’ve expected. And then he does what you should never do. He pulls the blade out, causing the blood to stream out even faster. The lumberjack does not react. He just stares at his hand like he’s trying to look through it, and then finally says, “Goddamn, that’s a lot of blood.”
Knife Wound. Serial Killer. Sniper Rifle.
I knock on the window to get Margery’s attention, but she doesn’t turn around, continuing to chain smoke and talk on her cell phone. With her back to me, she holds up an index finger, indicating she’ll be inside in just another minute.
Veronica hops across the aisle from our booth to his, sitting there beside the lumberjack, holding his hand in hers, and right away I’m a little jealous of him. It should be my hand.
“Sir, what’s your name, sir?” Veronica asks, taking off my hoodie and wrapping it around his wound like a bandage, the blood soaking into the fabric.
“Never mind my name,” the lumberjack says. “What’s your name, gorgeous?”
Veronica actually blushes. “Sir, this cut looks bad.”
I can’t believe this oaf is getting all of her attention. He’s ruining our last few minutes together. I hop over the aisle and sit across from them in the booth, feeling oddly like a third wheel. “I don’t think it’s that bad,” I tell her. “No major arteries were hit. It’s just a flesh wound.”
“I should go with him to the hospital,” she says, glancing back and forth between me and the lumberjack’s bleeding hand.
“Veronica, don’t go,” I say, allowing the words to linger uncomfortably in the air. “I mean, it’s really not that far to the hospital. He can make it alone.”
“He’s losing a lot of blood, Michael.”
“It’s really not that much. He’ll live. Trust me.”
She helps the lumberjack to his feet and walks with him to the exit. He stumbles a few times along the way, nearly knocking her over. Veronica shouldn’t be left alone with this lunatic, only I’m not sure what I would do if he tried anything. He’s twice my size. I scan the restaurant for something to use as a weapon. In a panic, I slide a set of silverware wrapped in a napkin into my pants pocket and then grab the pet carrier from the corner of the booth, struggling to keep it level as the cat slides from one side to the other, meowing and growling, hissing and spinning in circles.
When I step outside, Veronica and the lumberjack have already crossed the intersection and are almost to the front entrance of the hospital. I jog to catch up to them, wheezing and sneezing and coughing along the way. She’s still holding my hoodie around his bleeding hand. From a distance, they almost look like a couple, walking arm in arm.
As the automatic doors to the emergency room open, I reach out to grab Veronica’s elbow with my free hand. “Should I wait for you?” I ask. It’s unclear to even me whether I’m asking her if I should wait for her to come back from caring for the lumberjack or wait for her to come back from Arizona.
She turns to face me. “I don’t know how long it will take,” she says, not helping to clear anything up.
The lumberjack stands in the space between us. He’s an oak tree, unwavering, his mere presence casting a shadow on our goodbye.
Tell her you love her.
“It’ll be weird not seeing you around the building.”
Ask her not to go.
“Call me when you get there, okay? So I know you made it.”
Kiss her on the lips.
“Put her there,” I say, extending my hand.
The lumberjack smirks.
Veronica, not removing her grip on the lumberjack, leans forward and kisses me on the cheek, whispering, “Good-bye, Michael. Take care of yourself.”
Earthquake. Volcanic Eruption. Meteor Shower.
The automatic doors close behind her, and as I watch Veronica walk away, I begin to imagine my own death. There have been numerous studies done where these long-term couples, anywhere from twenty to fifty years together, have their heart-rates monitored while sleeping beside each other in bed. The next morning, the EKG shows their heart rhythms as being basically identical, rising and falling at the same times, almost as though they’re one person, sharing one heart. When one of them isn’t there any longer, the other person’s heart becomes stressed out, weaker, forgetting how to beat on its own again.
I’ve only known Veronica for two months now, but I can already feel my heart not knowing what to do without her. I can feel the walls begin to harden and then crack like glass, spider-webbing, a slow and gradual break. Maybe this is what it feels like to die of a broken heart. I imagine it’s a slow death, the slowest of all the deaths maybe, and the most painful.
Noelle Aleksandra Hufnagel received a BA in Creative Writing from Western Michigan University and an MFA in Fiction Writing from Columbia College Chicago. Her writing has appeared in The Allegheny Review, Knee Jerk Magazine, Hair Trigger, Story Week Reader, Zine Columbia, and Fictionary.