said, “No, no. Lilly, Badger, no, not you, not ever.”
“I didn’t have … the guts.” She was shaking as if in the thrall of a
fever, words stuttering out of her, teeth chattering, clutching at me
with the desperation of a lost and terrified child.
I held her tight, unable to speak because her pain tore at me.
I remained baffled by her declaration of shame, yet, in retrospect, I
believe an understanding was beginning to come to me.
“All my big talk, ” she said, her voice becoming even less clear,
distorted by a choking remorse. “Just talk. But I wasn’t … couldn’t .
.. when it counted … couldn’t.” She gasped for breath and held me
tighter than ever. “I told you the difference didn’t matter to me, but
in the end it did.”
“Stop, ” I whispered. “It’s all right, all right.”
“Your difference, ” she said, but by now I knew what she meant.
“Your difference. In the end it mattered. And I turned away from you.
But here you are. Here you are when I need you.” Bobby moved from the
kitchen onto the back porch. He wasn’t investigating a suspicious noise,
and he wasn’t stepping outside to give us privacy. His slacker
indifference was a shell inside which was concealed a snail-soft
sentimental Bobby Halloway that he thought was unknown to everyone, even
to me.
Sasha started to follow Bobby. When she glanced at me, I shook my head,
encouraging her to stay.
Visibly discomfited, she busied herself by brewing another serving of
tea to replace the one that had cooled, untouched, in the cup on the
table.
“You never turned away from me, never, never, ” I told Lilly, holding
her, smoothing her hair with one hand, and wishing that life had never
brought us to a moment where she felt compelled to speak of this.
For four years, beginning when we were sixteen, we hoped to build a life
together, but we grew up. For one thing, we realized that any children
we conceived would be at too high a risk of XP. I’ve made peace with my
limitations, but I couldn’t justify creating a child who would be
burdened with them. And if the child was born without XP, heor she would
be fatherless at a young age, for I wasn’t likely to survive far into
his teenage years. Though I would have been content to live childless
with Lilly, she longed to have a family, which was natural and right.
She struggled, too, with the certainty of being a young widow and with
the awful prospect of the increasing physical and neurological disorders
that were likely to plague me during my final few years, slurred speech,
hearing loss, uncontrollable tremors of the head and the hands, perhaps
even mental impairment.
“We both knew it had to end, both of us, ” I told Lilly, which was true,
because belatedly I’d recognized the horrendous obligation that I would
eventually become to her, all in the name of love.
To be honest, I might selfishly have seduced her into marriage and
allowed her to suffer with me during my eventual descent into infirmity
and disability, because the comfort and companionship she could have
provided would have made my decline less frightening and more tolerable.
I might have closed my mind to the realization that I was ruining her
life in order to improve mine. I am not adequate material for sainthood,
I am not selfless. She had voiced the first doubts, tentative and
apologetic, listening to her, over a period of weeks, I’d reluctantly
arrived at the realization that although she would make any sacrifice
for meand though I wanted to let her make those sacrifices what love she
still had for me after my death would inevitably be corroded with
resentment and with a justified bitterness.
Because I am not going to have a long life, I have a deep and thoroughly
selfish need to want those who have known me to keep me alive in memory.
And I am vain enough to want those memories to be cherished, to be full
of affection and laughter.
Finally I had understood that, for my sake as much as Lilly’s, we had to