Before I Go by Colleen Oakley

ongoing clinical trials.
    By nightfall, my back is stiff, my eyes are bleary, and I am emotionally overwhelmed. There’s so much cancer research that I could spend ten years reading it, and it would be the equivalent of taking one step in a marathon. I laugh at my arrogance. Thousands of scientistshave dedicated their lives to finding cures, saving lives. And I thought that after a little Google research, the answer to my predicament would just pop up? Oh, this is what’s going to fix you. This is the answer.
    I know Jack has been making the same futile effort. When he wasn’t on the phone with Dr. Ling or his fellow vet students, trying to vicariously catch up on what he’d missed that day, or checking in on Rocky, I heard him click-clacking away at his computer in the study.
    As I close my laptop and slide it onto the coffee table, I hear Jack coming down the hall. His footsteps stop at the door. I look up.
    “Permission to enter?”
    “Granted,” I say, stretching my arms overhead.
    He sits next to me on the couch and reaches down for my calves, swings my legs up into his lap so he can rub my sock-clad feet. I let out a little moan and lay my head on the cushion behind me, closing my eyes.
    “Have you eaten dinner?” he asks.
    I shake my head no.
    “Guess you don’t want soup.”
    I snort with laughter, open my eyes. The parentheses that bookend his mouth deepen, and all I can think is: I love his face. A study came out a few years ago citing symmetry as the defining factor in attractiveness. The researchers examined and measured the mugs of the celebrities in a magazine’s Most Beautiful People issue. The one thing they had in common? Facial symmetry. Jack doesn’t have that. His right eye is slightly bigger than his left. When he’s inquisitive, he can only cock his left eyebrow. He can’t grow a full beard. The one time he tried, patches of hair on his face just didn’t come in, making it look like he had a stroke when he was shaving. Then there’s his off-kilter bite. But all of these imperfections add up to something magnetic. Jack’s face is quietly disarming. And even though I’ve studied every inch of it over the years we’ve been together—memorizedevery line, freckle, and flaw—it still has the ability to warm me like the sun; I bask in its glow.
    “Why do you put up with me?” I ask, lifting my head off the cushion and burying it in his chest.
    “The snorting,” he says, squeezing me to him. “It’s terrifyingly sexy.”

    LATER , WHEN JACK is out walking Benny, I know that it’s time; I’ve put it off for long enough.
    I pick up my cell phone and instead of scrolling to her name, I punch out each number that I know by heart, my finger’s staccato bringing me closer to the one conversation I’ve been dreading to have.
    She picks up on the first ring.
    “Mom?” I say.
    “Daisy-bear!” she says. “The most amazing thing just happened. This hawk—huge! must have been a broad-winged or maybe a Ferruginous? I couldn’t be sure—landed on the fence post in the backyard. Looked right at me. I tried to get my camera but it flew away right as I went to snap it. Most beautiful wingspan. So I guess, yeah, probably a broad-winged.”
    I nod, even though she can’t see me, and then I take a deep breath and tell her about the cancer. How it’s back. And that it’s everywhere.
    She’s silent for so long that I wonder if I’ve lost the connection, but right when I start to take the phone away from my ear to check, I hear her demand “Where, everywhere?” as if I am somehow responsible for the cancer’s placement.
    I tell her.
    “That’s not possible!” her voice says, an octave higher and on the precipice of hysterics. I lower my tone to counterbalance. She peppers me with questions and I answer them, trying to focus on the positive.“Right now, it’s asymptomatic so at least I feel good!” and “Dr. Saunders really thinks this clinical trial might work!”
    But nothing I